Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
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On Christmas Eve, Louise and I watched on Netflix the brilliant Don’t Look Up! starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, written and produced by Adam McKay and David Sirota.
It’s being lauded as a metaphor for how we’re dealing with climate change in the face of petrobillionaire- and corporate-funded disinformation campaigns, but it’s so much more than that:
“Conservatives” on the Supreme Court don’t want Americans to look up at how they legalized political bribery with their 1970s Buckley and Bellotti and 2010 Citizens United decisions that have turned politicians into shills for the same billionaires and giant industries that spent millions putting them on the Court.
“Small government” freaks don’t want you to look up at how trust in our government has fallen from over 80% in the 1960s to fewer than 30% today, or how that’s the direct result of Reagan’s “government is not the solution to your problems, it is the problem” hustle that led to Trumpism and is today tearing America apart.
Republican governors don’t want their citizens to look up at how they continue to use racist tropes and dog-whistle appeals to frighten and thus hang onto a majority of the white vote.
Those governors and legislators don’t want you to look up at how they’re rewriting history and threatening teachers, passing laws that either outright ban teaching the actual history of race relations, slavery, and the Civil War, or, as in Florida, empower parents to sue teachers who mention a word about race.
Giant monopolistic corporations don’t want you to look up and realize the average American family pays $5000 a year, on average, more than Canadians or Europeans for everything from cell phone and internet service to airfare and drugs – all because Reagan stopped enforcing the anti-trust laws in 1983 and no president since has brought them back.
Big Ag doesn’t want you to look up and see that you and your children are being poisoned by chemicals ranging from pesticides and herbicides to hormone-bending plasticizers used in food packaging, thousands of them outlawed in Europe.
Republicans don’t want Americans to look up at how they gifted a handful of billionaires and GOP-donor corporations $2 trillion in tax cuts in 2017 at the same time that America is the only country in the developed world where young people carry almost $2 trillion in student debt.
The NRA doesn’t want you to look up at how, over just the past two years, 17 million more people – including 5 more million children – now have easy access to guns in their own homes as the result of a Trump-driven explosion of weapons purchases.
They don’t want you to look up at how, as a consequence, our US homicide rate went from 6 per 100,000 to 7.8 per 100K during that same short period of time, what CNN labeled “the highest increase recorded in modern history” beating records going all the way back to 1904 when we started keeping them.
Coal baron legislators don’t want us to look up at the poverty across America as they drive their Maseratis and tell us that young West Virginia families will use the child tax credit to “buy crack.”
Big pharma executives don’t want us to look up at how they rip us off, as Americans struggle to pay $500 for the same insulin that Canadians can buy for $25
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