Finally, the truth about the GOP. This is a 'must read' people... [View all]

[Joinfortmill]

https://www.rawstory.com/ivanka-trump-and-jared-kushner-2659707969/

My summary doesn't do it justice. Please read the entire article. (my words).

'Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and the core of the GOP's existence' Thom Hartmann Commentary

'Nobody ever accused Republicans of not knowing how to make a buck or BS-ing somebody into voting for them. Lying to people for economic or political gain is the very definition of a grift. Whenever there’s another mass- or school-shooting, Republican politicians hustle out fundraising emails about how “Democrats are coming to take your guns!” The result is a measurable and profitable spike in gun sales after every new slaughter of our families and children, followed by a fresh burst of campaign cash to GOP lawmakers...

When Jared Kushner was underwater and nearly bankrupt because he overpaid for 666 Fifth Avenue and needed a billion-dollar bailout to cover his mortgage, his buddies in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and the UAE) blockaded American ally (and host to the Fifth Fleet) Qatar until that country relented and laundered the money to Jared through a Canadian investment company.

Just this year, after Trump deregulated toxic trains leading to a horrible crash and the contamination of East Palestine, Ohio, Steve Bannon — already charged with multiple fraud-related crimes and then pardoned by Trump — showed up to hustle $300+ water filters to the people of that town...The grift is a recurrent theme through Republican presidencies in the modern era.

Ronald Reagan told us if we just destroyed America’s unions and moved our manufacturing to China and Mexico, great job opportunities would fill the nation. He followed that up by promising if we just cut taxes on the morbidly rich, prosperity would trickle-down to the rest of us. Reagan even assured us that raising the Social Security retirement age to 67 and taxing Social Security benefits would mean seniors could retire with greater ease. All, of course, were grifter’s lies. Republican presidents since Reagan have continued the tradition....

Donald Trump told Americans he had the coronavirus pandemic under control while he was actually making the situation far worse: America had more deaths per capita from the disease than any other developed country in the world, with The Lancet estimating a half-million Americans died needlessly because of Trump’s grift.

Jared and Ivanka cashed in on their time in the White House to the tune of billions, while Trump squeezed hundreds of millions out of foreign governments, encouraging them to illegally pay him through rentals in his properties around the world....

While Nixon was simply corrupt — a crook, to use his own term — in 1978 when five Republicans on the Supreme Court signed off on the Bellotti decision authored by Lewis Powell himself, giving corporations the legal right to bribe American politicians, the GOP went all in.Ever since then, the GOP has purely been the party of billionaires and giant corporations, although their most successful political grift has been to throw an occasional bone to racists, gun-nuts, fascists, homophobes, and woman-haters to get votes.

Democrats at that time were largely funded by the unions, so it wasn’t until the 1990s, after Reagan had destroyed about half of America’s union jobs and gutted the unions’ ability to fund campaigns, that the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton was forced to make a big turn toward taking corporate cash.

Since Barack Obama showed how online fundraising could replace corporate cash, however, about half of the nation’s Democratic politicians have aligned with the Progressive Caucus and eschewed corporate money, returning much of the Party to its FDR and Great Society base.The GOP, in contrast, has never wavered from lapping up corporate money in exchange for tax cuts, deregulation, and corporate socialism.

Their most dangerous grift today, though, has been their embrace of the lie that America is not a democracy but instead is a theocratic republic that should be ruled exclusively by armed Christian white men. It’s leading us straight into the jaws of fascism...'