THE POLITICS BEHIND RELIGION IN AMERICA

 

RIGHT WING RELIGIOUS NUTTERY

Thom Hartmann, writing in SALON puts forward an interesting insight into the background to American right-wing politics and how its proponents control the American citizens' lives. The article in the link above is well worth a read.

"And what's so astonishing about the entire situation is that we have reached this point not because the American public wants religious doctrine running our law, and not because most religious people agree with an arrogant prick working at Walgreens.
Instead, it's because a small group of right-wing billionaires didn't want to pay their taxes, wanted to get rid of their unions and didn't want regulation of the pollution from their refineries and other operations.
Seriously.
They put billions of dollars over five decades into a project to seize control of the legislatures of a majority of the states, jam up the U.S. Congress and pack the Supreme Court — and it was all about taxes, unions and regulation.
So where did the religious nuttery come from?"  -Thom Hartmann.

Here are some outtakes for readers who have toilets to clean and invasive kikuyu grass to cut or are just too lazy to read:

• Right-wing billionaires didn't want to pay taxes and wanted to ditch their unions and pollute as much as they liked.
• The right-wing billionaires and the corporations and foundations aligned with them knew that most Americans wouldn't happily vote to lower billionaires' taxes, end unions and regulate gun manufacturers, and polluters so the strategy they came up with was to convince Americans that taxes aren't "the cost of a civil society" but, instead, a "burden" that they were unfairly bearing.
• Once Republicans were elected on that tax-cut platform, they'd massively cut the taxes of the morbidly rich while throwing a small bone to the average person.
• They convinced  voters that regulations that protect consumers and the environment are also "burdens" from an out-of-control "nanny state," even though such regulations save lives and benefit Americans far more than they cost.
• They convinced voters that unions aren't "democracy in the workplace" that protect workers' rights but, instead, an elaborate scam by corrupt union bosses to steal the workers' money.
  
• They spent five decades and billions of dollars to subsidise think tanks and policy groups at both the federal and state level, all turning out policy papers and press releases to further their agendas. 
• They sponsored right-wing talk radio and allowed billionaire Rupert Murdoch's Fox News to complement the propaganda campaign. 
• They hooked up with the National Rifle Association (NRA), which helped sponsor the 'Reagan Revolution' and were given laws that forbade the federal government from compiling gun death statistics and gave complete immunity from lawsuits to weapons manufacturers and sellers for the damage their products cause. 
• Reagan cut union membership in America almost in half, dropped the taxes on billionaires from a top 74% bracket down to 27%, and slashed thousands of protective regulations, particularly around guns and the environment.
• Over the 40 years of the 'Reagan revolution', America went from having about the same gun-ownership density as Canada (around 15 guns per 100 people) to the most in the world (over 120 guns per 100 people). 
• The rich Right supported religion and religious nutters to push their agendas of more wealth for the rich. They used arseholes like Jerry Falwell and the televangelists who built  multimillion-dollar empires while taking money via tithing from working class Americans. The message was that Jesus wanted you to get rich — riches, they said, are a sign of God's blessing. The televangelists openly defied Inland Revenue Service (IRS) regulations and preached politics from the pulpit, and millions of mostly non-political churchgoers were suddenly evangelists not just for Jesus but also for the Republican Party.
  
• Now that the Supreme Court has struck down Roe v. Wade, however, people are waking up to this unholy alliance between religious grifters in the white evangelical movement, the Supreme Court and the GOP. America is seeing clearly what the Republican coalition has brought it, from mass shootings to medical bankruptcies to student debt to homelessness.

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