Why? Because their psychopathic personalities traits enable them to stomp out competitors and succeed in the dog-eat-dog corporate environment.
Plus, psychopathy is indispensable when it come to ruthlessly tossing way anyone no longer considered useful or for working a scam, or for selling poison to the public.
For their psychopathy and for winning at any cost, the CEOs and their enablers are outrageously rewarded while the rest of us get zero, or more likely, lose what little we do have.
Anyway, for the world to stave off the next “rebellion of the paupers” due to our currently outrageously out of balance wealth distribution, it is obvious to me that we need some inventive method to ensure that our “powers that be”, the corporations (and politicians), are brought back under lawful restraint.
We need some sort of moment-by-moment way to ensure that the top dogs are not stealing us blind, feeding our babies arsenic, or creating the next false flag operation to kill our children so they can make a few more silver coins.
Another man, in addition to Mr. Trump, has the power to end the federal government Trump-shutdown-lockout this very moment.
He is Mr. McConnell (R-KY), the Republican Senate Majority Leader, who for the second time, has refused to allow a vote on the Senate bill which has been approved by the U.S. House.
It is likely that the measure will pass with enough votes to make it veto proof and thus allow federal workers to go back to work and receive their paychecks. Our government would be functioning once again to the dismay of Mr. Trump.
Mr. McConnell's cowardice is simply enabling our psychopath-in-chief to continue to hurt all Americans.
Senate Republicans blocked a House-passed package to reopen the federal government for a second time in as many weeks on Tuesday.
Democratic Sens. Chris Van Hollen (Md.) and Ben Cardin (Md.) asked for consent to take up a package of bills that would reopen the federal government.
One bill would fund the Department of Homeland Security through Feb. 8, while the other would fund the rest of the impacted departments and agencies through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.
Under Senate rules, any senator can ask for consent to vote on or pass a bill, but any senator can object. McConnell blocked the two bills, saying the Senate wouldn't "participate in something that doesn't lead to an outcome."
McConnell for weeks has said he would not bring legislation to the floor on the shutdown unless there was a deal between President Trump and Democrats on border security, the issue that has triggered the shutdown. McConnell has described other votes as "show votes."
"The solution to this is a negotiation between the one person in the country who can sign something into law, the president of the United States, and our Democratic colleagues," McConnell said Tuesday.
Roughly a quarter of the government has been shut down since Dec. 22 over an entrenched fight on funding for Trump’s proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
The Senate passed a stopgap bill late last year by a voice vote, but it was rejected by the White House because it didn’t include extra border money.
Trump is demanding more than $5 billion for his signature wall. Democratic leadership has pointed to $1.3 billion as their cap and argued that it must go to fencing.
House Democrats passed their package to fully reopen the government earlier this month and have begun passing individual appropriations bills as they try to ratchet up pressure on Republicans to break with the president and support the legislation. But those bills are expected to go nowhere in the GOP-led Senate.
McConnell sought to drive a wedge between Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Democrats earlier Tuesday, characterizing the newly minted House leader as making border security “take a back seat to the political whims of the far left.”
“Here in the Senate my Democratic colleagues have an important choice to make. They could stand with common sense border experts, with federal workers and with their own past voting records, by the way, or they could continue to remain passive spectators complaining from the sidelines, as the Speaker refuses to negotiate with the White House,” McConnell said from the Senate floor.
Talks between Trump and congressional leadership are at a standstill after the president walked out of a White House meeting last week when Pelosi told him that Democrats would not consider border wall funding even if he fully reopened the government.
Democrats are trying to build pressure on McConnell to break with Trump and move legislation, something Senate GOP leadership say the careful Republican leader will not do.
Though several senators are publicly picking their own ideas, Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican, said on Tuesday that hasn’t resulted in much pressure from within the caucus for McConnell to change his strategy.
History does not favor jailing poor people because they cannot pay debts or unjust court fines. These are fees that by their very nature preclude one’s ability to pay. In fact, the French people fought a righteous and fearsome revolution over that issue and others, from the 1790s through 1850.
While historians agree that the June revolution of 1832 depicted in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables accomplished little, progressive reforms which were an outgrowth of the French Revolution as a whole did, living to this day as part of the foundation of modern France and Western Democracy.
Yet, today, in Michigan alone, more than 100,000 of our citizens are already condemned to a lifetime of underclass servitude because they are denied driver’s licenses. In Metro Detroit, where public transportation to jobs in distant suburbia is nonexistent, these people have no way to get to a workplace, in most cases located miles away, that could pay a decent wage.
“Since 2009, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and ACLU affiliates across the country have been exposing and challenging modern-day debtors' prisons, and urging governments and courts to pursue more rational and equitable approaches to criminal justice debt.”
“State and local courts have increasingly attempted to supplement their funding by charging fees to people convicted of crimes, including fees for public defenders, prosecutors, court administration, jail operation, and probation supervision. And in the face of mounting budget deficits at the state and local level, courts across the country have used aggressive tactics to collect these unpaid fines and fees, including for traffic offenses and other low-level offenses. These courts have ordered the arrest and jailing of people who fall behind on their payments, without affording any hearings to determine an individual's ability to pay or offering alternatives to payment such as community service.”
No doubt, history will not be kind to Mr. Trump and his would-be slaver, Mr. Sessions. Not only for this despicable modern-slavery action, but also for much more, including as Lucian K. Truscott, IV enumerates, the Trumpian Republicans’ accomplishments:
“Suppress the votes of fellow citizens who are black, latino, and poor? Check. Keep them in poverty by refusing to raise the $7.25 minimum wage? Check. Allow owners of restaurants to collect tips and dole them out any goddamn way they want? Check. Take away the ability of teachers to deduct money they spend out of their own pocket to help educate their students? Check. Tax contract workers’ income at regular rates while taxing owners’ pass-through income at lower rates? Check. Lower corporate tax rates while raising workers’ taxes? Check. Repeal the Johnson Amendment so billionaires could make tax-deductible “donations” to churches which could turn around and spend the same money on political campaigns? Check. Make it harder for workers to file discrimination suits? Check. Make it easier for polluters to foul the air and water? Check. Appoint a Secretary of Education who wants to privatize public education? Check. Allow billionaires to deduct certain expenses for their Gulfstreams? Check. Leave in place laws that allow offshore trusts and other tax avoidance schemes used by millionaires and billionaires? Check. Prepare the upcoming 2020 Census so it will provide a population count ripe for corrupt gerrymandering? Check. Pass an insane law that will enable lunatics to carry concealed guns across state lines into places where concealed-carry is illegal? Check.”
The paramount question we face in 2018 is: Must Mr. Trump’s mental deficiencies; his psychopathy; his racism; his bigotry and his failures, plus those of his acolytes, whom he has empowered, condemn the rest of us to poverty and modern-day slavery in 2018?
I’m betting that sooner rather than later, world-wide, we will not be slaves again. Les Misérables: Do you hear the people sing: Sung by 17 Valjeans from around the world
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!
Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Somewhere beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Then join in the fight
That will give you the right to be free!!
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!
Will you give all you can give
So that our banner may advance
Some will fall and some will live
Will you stand up and take your chance?
The blood of the martyrs
Will water the meadows of France!
