Jim Hightower – The New Founder, Brought to You by the Koch Brothers

When you think of America’s great Constitutional originators, names like Madison, Adams, Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton and Franklin come to mind. And, of course, Abbott. This past January, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the multimillionaire protege of the Koch brother’s Plutocratic Kingdom and American Legislative Exchange Council darling, revealed to a startled nation that he has penned not one but NINE new …

Robert Weissman – What Populism? Trump’s America Is Party Time for the Corporate Elite

“Trump has converted the GOP into a populist working-class party,” Trump advisor and far-right economist Stephen Moore told Republican members of Congress at a caucus meeting. Well, advisor Moore, meet the Trump transition team. The leader of the would-be populist working-class party has invited rogues’ gallery of insiders—corporate lawyers, investment fund managers, corporate executives and wonks hailing from corporate-backed think …

Marty Kaplan – Trump’s Quiet Pick for Legal Adviser Shows He’s Dead Set on Nuking Our Democracy

When Hillary Clinton lost the Electoral College, most post-mortems faulted Democrats for failing to empathize with the anger and abandonment non-coastal Americans are feeling. But last week, when Donald Trump sucked up to the (previously dishonest, subsequently gem-like) New York Times, flip-flopping six times in an hour-long interview, I wondered whether his backtracking might be causing some of his supporters to feel abandoned. …

Pam Martens and Russ Martens – What’s Ahead in the Trump Hate Wars? Watch this Movie from His Chief Strategist

On Sunday, November 13, 2016, President-elect Donald Trump named Stephen K. Bannon as his Senior Counselor and Chief Strategist in the White House. Newspapers across America focused on Bannon’s background as an executive at the right-wing Breitbart News. But Bannon’s more revealing role is that of a seasoned propaganda filmmaker, churning out documentaries that target liberals as haters of America …

Security experts join Jill Stein’s ‘election changing’ recount campaign

More election security experts have joined Jill Stein’s campaign to review the presidential vote in battleground states won by Donald Trump, as she sues Wisconsin to secure a full recount by hand of all its 3m ballots. Half a dozen academics and other specialists on Monday submitted new testimony supporting a lawsuit from Stein against Wisconsin authorities, in which she …

DAVID ROSEN – Perversions of Power: Trump’s Hedonism vs Pence’s Puritanism

Since the nation’s founding there’s been a peculiar tension between the president and the vice president.  This tension was first established in 1796 when John Adams became president and Thomas Jefferson the vp.  The two men could not have been more different.  Adams was a Northern Federalist, pro-British and morally upright, puritanically married to Abagail; Jefferson was a Southern Democratic-Republican, …

Frank Clemente – 6 Worst Things About Trump Tax Plan

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump promised the biggest tax cuts since the Reagan era and proposed reforms that would drastically increase our country’s already extreme levels of inequality. Now theRepublican-controlled Congress is considering ramming through tax reforms in the first half of 2017, using a “fast-pass” process called reconciliation that requires just 51 votes in the senate. If Trump’s plan becomes the blueprint for …

Alexandra Rosenmann – Anthropologist: Why the Collapse of Mayan Civilization Could Resemble What We Are in for as Donald Trump Takes Office

The Mayan civilization is famous for its collapse, but could something similar happen in the near future? At least one expert on the region says yes. American anthropologist and archeologist Arthur Andrew Demarest has studied Mesopotamia for nearly four decades. And while pundits ponder the collapse of the two-party system, Demarest insists Americans should think bigger. “Almost all civilizations collapse, especially complex …