The Too Dumb to Fail Party

 Financial FAQs

“In November 2021, (President Biden) signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. Then, in August 2022, he signed the CHIPS bill, which invests $280 billion in semiconductor manufacturing. Days later, he signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which invests $370 billion in clean energy and related infrastructure, along with provisions designed to reduce health care costs.” Washington Monthly

perseusbooks.com

How sad it is that the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation that abolished slavery, has become the party of a wannabe dictator Too Dumb to Fail in the words of author and journalist Matt Lewis, that imprisons immigrants of the wrong race and color.

It is a party that has enabled Donald Trump to rely on mostly illegal executive orders, including the tariffs, instead of working with congress as did President Biden to pass his very successful ‘New, New Deal’ legislation that is modernizing the American economy for many years to come.

Trump’s inability to negotiate with congress had as much to do with the Republican Party that had already become the party of the wealthy who owned or stewarded America’s biggest businesses.

“In the run-up to the 2016 election, Trump listed his top 10 legislative priorities as part of his “Contract with the American Voter”, continued the Washington Monthly, which included repeal of the Affordable Care Act, infrastructure investment, harsher prison sentences for immigration violations, and full funding of a border wall to be reimbursed by Mexico. None of that reached his desk.”

That is because the Republican Party learned early they could only hold power if they succeeded in dumbing down their electorate; even before Ronald Reagan’s ‘trickle-down” economic schemes in 1980 that cut the taxes of the wealthiest and social benefits for the rest of Americans to pay for the budget deficits incurred by his tax cuts.

Journalist Matt Lewis said it in his 2016 best-seller, Too Dumb to Fail: “Somewhere between Ronald Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech in support of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the most recent government shutdown, the conservative movement became neither conservative nor a movement. Hijacked by the divisive and the dumb, it now finds itself hostage to emotions and irrational thinking.

“It became more personal and less principled — more flippant and less thoughtful. It became mean. It became lazy. It became its own worst enemy. Where once the movement drew strength from its desire to win the philosophical argument over its adversaries, it now wears its lost causes as badges of honor — expected, like Coriolanus, to show these battle scars as a means of vote mongering.”

I said in a 2015 Huffington Post blog that the result of one political party’s choice to replace scientific facts with conspiracy theories had begun to permeate the American educational system as well.

According to the National Research Council, only 28 percent of high school science teachers consistently follow the National Research Council guidelines on teaching evolution, and 13 percent of those teachers explicitly advocate creationism or “intelligent design,” said Psychology Today in a very damning 2014 article entitled, Anti-Intellectualism and the Dumbing Down of America:

“After leading the world for decades in 25-34 year olds with university degrees, the U.S. is now in 12th place,” said Psychology Today. “The World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. at 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly 50 percent of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are foreigners, most of whom are returning to their home countries.”

Even in 2015 Republican candidates were echoing the Republican platform that advocated the deportation of all illegal aliens, would abolish or cripple whole government agencies (including the Environmental Protection Agency and CDC), shut down the federal government over Planned Parenthood funding, and maintain that a fertilized egg is a viable human being that can’t be aborted.

Nothing has changed, in other words, except Republicans elected Donald Trump, a man who would be a king, who has suffered from what psychologists and psychiatrists have called a Narcissistic Personality Disorder his whole life, whose father had given him more than $400 million over the years to support his various business ventures, according to the NYTimes.

The results of his father’s wealth are well documented in the book titled, “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success,” written by NYTimes reporters Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner. Such largesse resulted in a string of business failures and seven bankruptcies.

Now Donald Trump and the Republican Party that supports him have taken the dumbing down of Americans to a whole new level by firing the best and brightest public officials and cutting their research budgets that protect Americans from future pestilences and environmental disasters.

History says the truth will out, eventually. A man and party that is too dumb to fail, that can only rule with lies and deception, must eventually fail. But when, and at what cost to Americans’ health and safety?

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Who Won the Civil War?

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“Just more than one week after President Donald Trump unveiled plans to deploy troops from the D.C. National Guard and to federalize the Metropolitan Police Department to tackle crime in Washington, six states have pledged to send in their own National Guard troops to pitch in with the effort.” Fox News

NYTimes

The civil war isn’t over? The Republican Party, envious of the blue states and a federal government that protect the rights of all Americans, has been attempting to take away as many of those protections as possible since Donald Trump returned to power.

Republicans have attacked such basic freedoms as women’s rights (abortion), immigrants’ rights (birth right citizenship), minorities and the poorest (loss of Medicare, Obamacare benefits) and seniors with cutbacks in social security services.

Trump added fuel to the fire when he said the Charlottesville torch carrying parade in 2017 that chanted racist, Nazi and antisemitic slogans had “very fine people on both sides.”

And since the big ugly tax cut bill was passed, Trump has sent National Guard Troops to Los Angeles and the District of Columbia, cities with black mayors (Chicago and Philadelphia may be next). It’s now obvious the Trump’s Republican Party has become the party of White Nationalist Christians, as if Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was a mere blip on the screen of history that Republicans since the Jim Crow era have attempted to erase.

Six red (formerly confederate) states; Ohio, West Virginia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee; have also sent a contingent of their National Guard to “police” DC with the mission to aid in fighting crime.

Yet three of those red states—South Carolina, Louisiana, and Tennessee, rank in the top ten states with the highest rates of violent crime. Why aren’t they policing their own cities, such as Memphis, Tennessee that has the highest violent crime rate in the country?

Red States don’t have those services for a reason. Generations of control by Republicans haven’t raised minimum wages, have weakened unions’ right to collective bargaining with right to work laws, and provided fewer health care services or environmental protection.

That’s why the minimum wage in Blue states can be more than twice that of Red states (Washington State is $17/hr versus Texas’ $7.25/hr, the national minimum age). When most families are barely earning enough to get by, employers have their pick of distraught, panicked workers willing to work for subsistence wages.

It’s become increasingly clear that Trump’s Republican Party doesn’t want to believe that it lost the civil war.

They have instead chosen to make it a cultural war between the Haves (blue states) and Have-nots (red states) by attacking the human rights and climate protections in blue states that far outclass those in red states and has resulted in the huge economic and cultural divide between them.

Blue states account for about 71 percent of America’s GDP, whereas Red states produce just 29 percent of our income and wealth, according to the Hartman Report, a progressive podcast. The median family income in Blue states is $74,243 vs. $63,553 in the red states. Individual states highlight the disparity: New Jersey’s median income is $89,703, while Mississippi’s is $49,111.

Donald Trump and his Republican-led red states should be wanting to emulate the best parts of blue states, instead of invading them: such as with better environmental protections, higher incomes, lower poverty rates, crime rates, and better health care above all.

But it might result in citizens of the red states wanting those protections as well, and Republicans losing their hold on power over them.

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

White Patriarchy In Decline

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“Born to a rich father who made him the beneficiary of his own highly lucrative investments, Trump received the equivalent of more than $500 million today via means that required no business expertise whatsoever.”

Random House

It may now seem hard to wrap our heads around what the future might be, but Donald Trump’s own history and as leader of the white Patriarchy’s attempts to hold onto power, is actually proof of its imminent decline

Those that support Patriarchic policies—white supremacists in the main—have picked Donald Trump, a Lucky Loser as described in Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig’s book, to weaken the federal government and pass more tax cuts for the wealthiest to consolidate their power. This is Donald Trump’s second attempt as President who has never really succeeded in anything he has done, if one looks behind the curtain.

Trump’s history includes three marriages, many adulteries, sexual assaults, and failed businesses well documented in Lucky Loser that has been mostly hidden from public view by his many bankruptcies (6) and lawsuits (4,000).

This president, who is attempting to strip the federal government of anything that protects Americans to protect himself, in a vain attempt to keep the Patriarchy in power a bit longer, found unqualified loyalists to fill most of his administration, such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary JFK, Jr., and FBI Director Kash Patel (who wants to weaken the FBI at a time of growing terrorist threats).

Women, above all, (but other minorities as well), have filled the gap of incompetence left by relying on the patriarchy to rule in our modern society and economy. The Patriarchy’s cult of white male superiority hasn’t benefited most Americans since at least the 1980s by increasing the federal debt to an unsustainable level as well as limiting workers’ right to collective bargain.

Hanna Rosin's The End of Men? perhaps said it best for the female minority. Fortune Magazine’s review of it wrote: “Men are losing their grip, patriarchy is crumbling and we are reaching “the end of 200,000 years of human history and the beginning of a new era” in which women — and womanly skills and traits — are on the rise.”

That is why Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs were developed to bring the best and the brightest women and minorities forward to fill the competence void—whether blacks, women, or Asians—that had been held back from competing fairly until then.

Vice President Vance evenIn  admitted in his semi-autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, that at least 20 percent of the young white men he knew growing up in Appalachia (W. Virginia, Ohio) were lazy and not interested in working.

But the rationale Trump/Musk is using to eliminate DEI policies from government and the private sector is a huge lie. It’s policies that have actually improved the productivity and profits of U.S. companies.

McKinsey & Company in the fourth edition of Diversity Matters, drawing on the largest dataset yet—spanning 1,265 companies, 23 countries, and six global regions, plus multiple company interviews reported that DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies can positively impact productivity and profits in the workplace “by fostering a more inclusive environment that leads to better decision-making, increased innovation, and improved employee morale, thereby attracting top talent and boosting overall performance.”

“Companies in the top quartile for both gender and ethnic diversity in executive teams are on average 9 percent more likely to outperform their peers. (This gap has closed slightly since our previous report.) Meanwhile, those in the bottom quartile for both are 66 percent less likely to outperform financially on average, up from 27 percent in 2020, indicating that lack of diversity may be getting more expensive”.

The attempt to paste non-whites and immigrants as somehow inferior to native-born Americans is another huge lie.

Scientific studies have shown there is no inherent difference in the intelligence or abilities of different races and ethnicities, only from environmental differences—i.e., where they were raised, which refutes the central reason that Trump claims to want to eliminate DEI programs from the government—better efficiency?

Why would there be such differences, as anthropologists have proven we all came from the same Homo Sapiens stock in Africa that migrated to succeed Neanderthals approximately 70,000 years ago.

Looking at IQ studies also refutes the falsity that women and minorities have less inherent abilities. Wikipedia gives a summary of the IQ research.

A 1995 report from the American Psychological Association responded to the controversy, finding no conclusive explanation for the observed differences between average IQ scores of racial groups. More recent work by James Flynn, William Dickens and Richard Nisbett has highlighted the narrowing gap between racial groups in IQ test performance, along with other corroborating evidence that environmental rather than genetic factors are the cause of these differences.

Flynn also notes that "Our ancestors in 1900 were not mentally retarded. Their intelligence was anchored in everyday reality. We differ from them in that we can use abstractions and logic and the hypothetical to attack the formal problems that arise when science liberates thought from concrete situations. Since 1950, we have become more ingenious in going beyond previously learned rules to solve problems on the spot."

The knowledge imbedded in our constitution and laws that we are all inherently equal, is our hope for a future that will take us out of the class warfare in which racists and nationalists want to keep American citizens encased—the suspicion and paranoia of the ‘other’ that the Patriarchy promotes to keep it in power.

We must 'fight like hell’ to expose their lies and incompetence so that a government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Abraham Lincoln

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

America's Ongoing Civil War

 Popular Economics Weekly

Alex Garland’s just released movie, Civil War, about a modern American civil war to unseat a Trump-like authoritarian president in the name of restoring democracy, is portraying an armed uprising that won’t happen today. The possibility of such a military rebellion ended 159 years ago when General Lee surrendered the Confederate Army at the Appomattox Court House in 1865.

Garland misses the point that Americans are fighting a different kind of civil war today as ugly and brutal in many ways but has morphed into an ongoing political and economic competition waged between red and blue states. There are still many casualties, however.

I had been writing about an ongoing civil war since 2013 when a contributing writer for Huffington Post. It caught the attention of Al-Jazeera-America, who interviewed me at the time for an article on the ideological war between Democrats and Republicans during the Obama Presidency.

I said then “…It (the Civil War) was about such men attempting to preserve slavery and state rights. Today, it is about not giving more rights to minorities and the poor.”

The ruling elites of the red states are mostly Republicans wanting to preserve their wealth with lower taxes and less federal government intervention. They want little or nothing to do with expanding such government programs as Obamacare. And the ultra-conservative Tea Party was formed to lead their movement.

A NYTimes 2010 poll had found18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.

It was easy to see why the Tea Party was powerful at the time. Obama’s election in 2008 had reawakened the racism of the old south that was part of an economic apartheid system between the Haves and Have-nots remaining after the abolishment of slavery.

"You're here because now is the single best time we have to defund Obamacare," declared Senator Cruz, one of the Tea Party leaders in 2013. "This is a fight we can win." It didn’t happen, of course, because of a Republican Senator from Arizona after more than 30 attempts by Republicans to defund it.

But it has been conservatives’ battle cry ever since that has caused a tremendous economic toll on the red states, whose poverty levels remain much higher than in the coastal blue states; a distant echo of the carnage that ended 159 years ago.

Why is there another movie about an actual civil war? Maybe it’s because a former president and his supporters keep threatening to wage a new civil war, which might have happened if said former president had succeeded in stopping the Electoral College vote on January 6, 2021.

A better take on today’s uncivil, civil war are films about protests happening today, like an antiwar movie by docu-drama filmmaker Peter Watkins. It was a 1971 movie made during the Vietnam War I happened to be involved in called Punishment Park.

Peter Watkins, an English film director already acclaimed for The War Game, a movie about the devastating effect of a nuclear bomb attack on London, used a dry lake in California as the movie setting for a concentration camp to house those arrested for protesting the Vietnam War, because regular prisons were already overflowing with anti-war protestors.

The movie posited that President Nixon had decreed a State of Emergency under a little-known internal security act from the 1950s to tamp down opposition to the Vietnam War.

A kangaroo court made up of local citizens was set up to try those arrested. The convicted are then given the choice—a chance to escape across the desert without being recaptured for three days without food and water while being pursued by the National Guard, after which they would be released if they survived.

And Watkins added a European news crew in the mix to film the events within the film, highlighting the hostilities and brutality on both sides of the protests.

It bombed at the box office. But I heard it was more popular in Europe, where Peter Watkins was better known.

Why the continuing civil war between red and blue states? There are so many reasons. One can start with the innate tension between states’ rights and the federal government’s role in preserving universal rights that was baked into the constitution.

The constitutional debate then was between northern Federalists led by John Adams that wanted a strong central government, and southern states righters led by Thomas Jefferson, who by some miracle were able to agree on our constitution.

The only casualty at the time was the death of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton from a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr.

In the name of lower taxes for the wealthiest and fewer government benefits for the less wealthy, red states have the same issues today, including the racial apartheid of blacks and minorities who receive much less of the economic pie in those states.

What happened on January 6 was a close call, of course, and maybe Garland was right to visualize a possible military outcome had the former president succeeded in stopping the Electoral College vote.

But the center held, as the saying goes, there has not been another civil war, because of our legal system, the third leg of government that provided the needed checks and balances.

Maybe the best description of what has preserved our democracy was President Lincoln’s reputed quote in the Lincoln Douglas debates of 1858: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

It is the best description of why citizens of democratic countries have a voice. The upcoming presidential election will be a test of how many citizens can be fooled, and whether we remain a democracy.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

What Happened to Honest Abe?

Popular Economics Weekly

Wikipedia

What happened to honesty in personal behavior and in politics is a good theme to discuss on this Presidents Day that commemorates our two Presidents most touted for their honesty—Washington and Lincoln? They were celebrated for their honesty, whereas today we have a President and his subservient political party that not only tolerates, but enables the most dishonest president in history.

We are not just talking about President Trump’s 16,000 plus documented lies—many of them done for mostly propaganda purposes; but the dishonesty manifested during the impeachment hearings and trial, when Republicans parroted Russian propaganda tropes that Ukraine opposed the Trump election, and was behind the Democratic Party hackings rather than Putin’s Russia.

Why didn’t Republicans question whether Trump’s call for Ukraine and China to aid in his reelection by digging up dirt on his political opponents was somehow ethical and allowable for a President seeking reelection?

What has happened to Republicans that abet Trump’s propaganda machine which is based on outright lies, when young American children were brought up on stories of Presidential honesty; whether it was Abraham Lincoln the honest politician, or George Washington’s honesty in confessing to cut down the cherry tree as a six-year old child?

“Honest Abe’ was a nickname Lincoln adopted early in his career as a lawyer. In his “Notes for a Law Lecture” his entire series of notes speaks to honesty, integrity, and to do what is right.  Lincoln wrote, “resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer.”

The honesty of George Washington has become almost mythical, and a beacon that we all learned as young school children.  The cherry tree tale was probably a children’s tale, but Thomas Jefferson once said of Washington, "his integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest or consanguinity or friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was indeed in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man."

Why wouldn’t Republicans want to live up to their standards? It is in essence an admittance that Republicans cannot maintain their power and privileges without the aid of outright lies that other authoritarian regimes use to maintain their power with propaganda machines that also suppress truth and promote ‘alternate facts’—because their power and privileges were not always honestly acquired.

It only took America 244 years to go from "Honest Abe" and “I cannot tell a lie” to 16,241 false or misleading claims, said USA Today recently. How can we recover from such blatant dishonesty, unless we keep telling our children at the earliest age that “honesty is the best policy,” and building character the only road to a truly successful life?

Harlan Green © 2020

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen