July 8th 2020

By Thom Hartmann

Jim Jones, who only killed 900+ people, was a piker, perhaps because he just wasn’t rich enough to be truly effective. Billionaire Donald Trump has beat him more than 130 times over, with far more to come.

Canada, a country run by competent leaders and actual civil servants at the provincial and federal level, largely has the coronavirus under control and have largely closed their border to Americans.

The Guardian is reporting how Mexican border towns are asking Americans not to come, for fear of further spread of the virus there.

Parts of California are experiencing a surge in coronavirus infections, but can’t perform tests on people because they have run out of reagents. Our billionaire-led federal government, of course, has refused to invoke the Defense Production Act to make more reagent and testing kits.

The billionaire running our education department, Betsy DeVoss, is trying to force teachers back into the classroom nationwide regardless of their age or health, and regardless of the consequences of school children bringing the coronavirus home with them.

The billionaire Trump chose to run our commerce department, Wilbur Ross, says that the coronavirus spreading in China will be good for the American economy.

Over at www.popular.info, Judd Legum is reporting that billionaire-led Facebook is spreading far and wide the nonsense story that if you wear masks you could suffer from an oxygen deficiency.

Billionaire Rupert Murdoch‘s Fox News is relentlessly promoting defiance of reasonable public health measures, leading to an explosion of hospitalizations and deaths in those states were Fox News is popular.

Arizona, where the governor is deeply in the pocket of billionaire interests, has now declared that some people are going to get treatment and others won’t, based on a complicated formula about who is most likely to live the most years after they leave the hospital.

Multiple billionaires and their companies, it turns out, have received piles of cash from the monies Congress appropriated to help small businesses andaverage working people through this economic crisis.

Back in 2000, when George W. Bush lost the election by a half-million votes but the Supreme Court put him in the White House anyway, the media was celebrating the fact that he and Dick Cheney were both oil industry executives. They talked about how a “CEO presidency“ would be a good thing for America. It didn’t work out that way: instead, they lied us into two wars, gave away trillions of dollars to billionaires, and destroyed our reputation and credibility around the world.

Billionaires and the super rich have spent 40 years, since the beginning of the Reagan Revolution, telling us how wonderful America would be if only rich people ran the show.

That’s called oligarchy, not democracy. Now that we have seen their vision put into affect, it’s time to reconsider.

Until we get money out of politics and and return competent leadership to all levels of government, Americans will continue to die in numbers even greater than we’ve seen in all the wars we’ve fought since 1945.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.