Republicans: Millionaires Working For Billionaires to Take Away Healthcare and Homes for everyone else.
Senate Republicans just voted to let an AI algorithm with a financial stake in saying “no” decide whether your mother gets her knee fixed. On Thursday, a Democratic resolution to kill the Trump administration’s WISeR program went down 46-50, every no vote a Republican.
WISeR — “Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction” — a name a Bond villain would reject as too on-the-nose — went live January 1st and imports the single most hated feature of the Medicare “Advantage” scam, prior authorization, into traditional Medicare, with AI making the call on things like knee arthroscopy and nerve stimulator implants. As the Medicare Rights Center notes, the private contractors running the algorithm share in the savings generated by the care they deny. They get paid to say no.
Sen. Cantwell’s office found Washington seniors waiting two to four times longer for doctor-ordered care since the program started there, from about two weeks to as long as eight. The GAO ruled the whole thing should have come to Congress first; the administration shrugged.
Rep. Suzan DelBene, who’s been chasing this thing for a year, called it what it is: “a back door to privatizing Medicare.” Republicans have loathed Medicare since LBJ signed it in 1965, when Reagan himself cut a record warning it would end American freedom. They can’t repeal it — the voters would burn Washington down — so they’re doing it the modern way: outsource the killing to a machine, take a cut of every denial, and call it efficiency. One campaigner summed the Republican Party up as “a group of millionaires working for billionaires who will rip healthcare away.” Sixty years of trying, and they finally found a hit man who doesn’t leave fingerprints...
America was built to reject kings, theocrats, and the morbidly rich — It’s the same playbook, different century…
Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:
The author of the Declaration of Independence went to great lengths, on numerous occasions (as I detail in What Would Jefferson Do?), to point out that when he and his colleagues started the United States of America they were explicitly rejecting — in favor of democracy — the men (they were all men back then) who drove the “three historic tyrannies”: kings/autocrats, theocrats/popes, and morbidly rich oligarchs.
For two thousand years before Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Paine, Adams, Revere, and their colleagues created our checks-and-balances system of republican democracy, every country in the world was ruled by one of those three. Today, of the 167 countries on Earth, only 74 are democracies, and only 24 of those are “fully democratic.”
And now, because of the GOP, America stands on the verge of losing that status.
— Theocrats have seized control of our Supreme Court, gutting the rights of women and religious/racial/gender minorities.
— Members of the House and Senate are so terrified of oligarchs funding primary challenges against them that it’s been over 40 years since any major legislation has passed fulfilling the wishes of the majority of Americans. (And now, many say they are worried about physical violence against themselves and their families if they fight Trump.)
— And our White House is today occupied by a billionaire who believes himself to be a king.
Trump’s attack on our democracy is an old story, played out repeatedly in various countries by every generation during the past two centuries. It follows an absolutely predictable pattern: You could call it a playbook.
In a democracy, there are four main elements involved in governance: Legislative, Executive, Judicial, and the Press (the Fourth Estate).
While Democrats over the past 50 years or so have focused their efforts on winning elections (Legislative and Executive), the billionaires who own the GOP have directed their attention to using massive amounts of cash to seize control of the unelected branches (Judiciary and Press), a job that can be done with money but doesn’t always require winning elections.
This is a pattern that’s been duplicated in multiple nations that have lost their democracies. Trump and Musk are simply following their instruction manual.
When Viktor Orbán took over Hungary in 2010, he first set out to seize control of the judiciary and the media. He lowered the retirement age for judges, immediately forcing out 57 justices who he replaced with loyalists (an echo of Mitch McConnell’s stealing two Supreme Court seats for Trump).
Then, following the strategy announced last week by Trump and FCC Chair Carr, he sued multiple independent media outlets and attacked the funding of Hungary’s public broadcasting system, shifting control over both into the hands of friendly oligarchs.
With dissenting voices silenced in the media and judges willing to overlook his blatant violations of Hungarian election laws (purging voters, gerrymandering, challenging the votes in opposition-friendly districts), Orbán was able to win every election since.
Vladimir Putin followed a similar script a few years earlier; once he had control of the judiciary and Russia’s media, he was able to stomp all over that country’s new and fragile democratic institutions and intimidate the Russian parliament (the Duma).
[...]
However, there are two countries of note — and possible examples for America — that tried to go down this path but had it interrupted, throwing them back into democracy: Poland and South Korea.
In Poland, Andrzej Duda’s Law and Justice Party failed to destroy the independent media, even though they’d succeeded in seizing the judiciary and rigged election rules to their favor. Because roughly 70% of Poland’s media stayed in independent hands, his party lost power in the 2023 elections and Poland is now returning to democracy.
Similarly, in South Korea their President Yoon Suk Yeol tried to declare a state of emergency and outlaw his opposition Democratic Party. He’d failed, however, to first seize control of South Korea’s independent media, so people showed up in the streets demanding his arrest; he sits in prison today.
« The simple reality is that Trump has entered the Fat Elvis phase of his career.
He hasn’t grown or developed new routines; he’s just reliving his old hits every day, playing to a nostalgic and mostly elderly audience who fondly remember his glory days. »
— Progressive radio host Thom Hartmann commenting at Daily Kos about the latest stage of Donald Trump's political career.
Scientists discovered a fascinating reason why Republicans can’t accept criticism of Donald Trump. Thom explains.
In the above video, Thom Hartmann refers to a Raw Story column by cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian, PhD (shown below):
Yes, there's a scientific reason for them not believing overwhelming evidence.
Here are some excerpts from Azarian's column:
In 2009, a study published in PLOS ONE challenged our understanding of belief systems.
Researchers placed participants into the confines of an fMRI scanner and presented them with a mixture of factual and abstract statements. The results were illuminating. Disbelief, it turns out, is cognitively demanding. It requires more mental effort than simply accepting a statement as true. From an evolutionary perspective, this preference for easy belief makes sense; a perpetually skeptical individual questioning every piece of information would struggle to adapt in a fast-paced world.
What does all this have to do with Trump supporters? Well, it’s far less cognitively demanding for them to believe anything their leader tells them. Any challenge to what Trump tells them is true takes mental work. This means there is a psychological incentive for Trump loyalists to maintain their loyalty. (I wrote about this phenomenon in a slightly different context in the Daily Beast article "Religious Fundamentalism: A Side Effect of Lazy Brains?")
Molding of belief: neuroplasticity at play
Now, let's consider the unique predicament faced by individuals who staunchly support Trump and want him to again become president. From the moment Trump began his political career and his social engineering career, his supporters have been exposed to narratives — Trump doesn't lie, Democrats are communists, the media is an enemy of the people — that emphasize loyalty and trust in their political idol. These narratives often steer away from critical examination and instead encourage blind faith. When coupled with the brain's inherent tendency to accept rather than question, it creates an ideal environment for unwavering allegiance. No matter that Trump, time and again, has been revealed to be a serial liar, habitually misrepresenting matters of great consequence, from elections to economics to public health.
For example, in the Psychology Today article "Why Evangelicals are Wired to Believe Trump’s Falsehoods," I explain that the children of Christian fundamentalists typically begin to suppress critical thinking at an early age. This is required if one is to accept Biblical stories as literal truth, rather than metaphors for how to live life practically and with purpose. Attributing natural occurrences to mystical causes discourages youth from seeking evidence to back their beliefs.
Consequently, the brain structures that support critical thinking and logical reasoning don't fully mature. This paves the way for heightened vulnerability to deceit and manipulative narratives, especially from cunning political figures. Such increased suggestibility arises from a mix of the brain's propensity to accept unverified claims and intense indoctrination. Given the brain's neuroplastic nature, which allows it to shape according to experiences, some religious followers are more predisposed to accept improbable assertions.
In other words, our brains are remarkably adaptable and continuously evolving landscapes. For ardent Trump supporters, residing in an environment that prioritizes faith over empirical evidence can reshape the neural circuits within their brains.
[color emphasis added]
Why Haven’t Republicans Done Anything to Help Working People in Over 40 Years?
Gallup just found that only 10% of Americans approve of the job Republicans in Congress are doing, with 86% actively disapproving of the GOP
Thom Hartmann explains the long history of massive corruption at the heart of the GOP, which actively works against the interests of the working class.
What are the commons? Thom Hartmann describes the commons as the idea that certain assets should be in public ownership. Services vital to our collective survival, like water, must remain in the public sector and not be privatized.
