Robert Creamer Archive

• Grievance-Driven Nationalism.
• The narrative that the majority of people have been victimized by enemies - foreign and domestic.
• The legitimation of conspiratorial thinking.
• The argument that only the one strong man can come to the people’s rescue.

These things are true whether they describe the authoritarian regimes of history like Mussolini and Stalin, or those of the current period, like Kim Jong-un in North Korea, or Putin in Russia - both of which Donald Trump apparently admires.

If you're like most ordinary Americans, you're not thrilled that ever since George W. Bush came into office 15 years ago your income has flat lined.

It probably doesn't make much sense to you that CEO pay and Wall Street bonuses have exploded while most Americans can't keep up with the rising cost of living.

Bush came into office with a mandate from the CEO class to change the rules of the economic game, and ever since ordinary people have paid the price while Wall Street banks, big corporations, CEOs and billionaires have wallowed in their increasing wealth.

Well if you didn't like the way the CEO class used their huge political donations and fleet of lobbyists to manipulate the economic rules last time, wait until you see what they've cooked up now.

An outfit called the "Center for Individual Rights" -- which is a front group for the notorious Koch Brothers financial network and other mega-wealthy right wing CEOs -- has filed a lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to substantially weaken the ability of working people to negotiate together for better wages and working conditions.

Last month the House Republicans took an amazing vote. They literally voted to take food from the mouths of hungry children in order to give a huge tax break to children who were born with a silver spoon in theirs -- the sons and daughters of multi-millionaires.

I am not exaggerating. The GOP voted to eliminate the estate tax. But the estate tax only applies to estates larger than $5.4 million for an individual and $10.9 million for couples. Eliminating the estate tax would benefit only 5,500 families in America (.02 percent of the population). And 75 percent of the benefits would flow to children who inherit estates of $20 million or more.

And some of those are huge fortunes. Eight Americans earned $10 billion in income in 2013 alone. That's enough income to pay 200,000 average American workers.

Last fall, Illinois GOP candidate Bruce Rauner spent $63.9 million -- $27.3 million of his own money -- to buy the right to occupy the Illinois Governor's mansion.

Now that he's in office his first moves have confirmed that he is the poster boy for the War on the Middle Class.

Rauner is a hybrid of the worst traits of Mitt Romney and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. In fact, you could say he personally embodies the reason why -- even though our economy has grown 77% in the last 35 years -- the wages of ordinary Americans have been stagnant or actually declined.

The New York Times reported last week that in the closed-door Republican Senate Caucus retreat, Republican Leader Senator Mitch McConnell "encouraged the Republican troops to refocus policy on the stagnant middle class."

That would be like asking the wolves of the world to stop hunting and refocus on cultivating asparagus.

But, of course, McConnell didn't really mean he wanted his fellow Republicans to do something about the wealth gap. He wanted them to look like they were doing something about the wealth gap while they actually deliver the goods for the owners of the Republican Party.

The Republican Party, after all, is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the .01% and doing something meaningful about the gap in wealth and income in America -- revitalizing the middle class -- requires taking wealth and income that is now being siphoned off by the .01% and giving it to the people who earned and created it -- the vast majority of ordinary Americans.

They're back. Like the fourth sequel to a bad horror movie, the Republican Right has once again chosen to embrace its long ignoble, hypocritical tradition of pandering to -- and stoking -- fear.

As the election nears, their ads are filled with images of ISIL terrorists, Ebola viruses, Secret Service breaches, and "porous" borders through which knife-wielding Muslim extremists are surely infiltrating every corner of our society.

It's not just disgusting. It's also hypocritical. The fact is that the Republicans have an abysmal record when it comes to defending the security of ordinary Americans.

Within the next several weeks Illinois-based Walgreens drug store chain is set to decide if it will become what President Obama referred to last week as a "corporate deserter" by - in essence - tearing up its U.S. Citizenship in order to cut its corporate taxes.

Walgreens recently bought a 45 percent stake in the Swiss drug chain, Alliance-Boots. It is now considering whether to complete a merger with the Swiss firm, so it can move its official corporate headquarters to lower-tax Switzerland, while maintaining most of its operations in the United States.

Forty-seven American corporations have used this this tax trick - known as an "inversion" -- over the last decade and the maneuver is increasingly favored by corporations that apparently have no loyalty to the United States - and instead have pledged allegiance entirely to their own bottom lines.

The ability for ordinary working people to organize and collectively bargain over their wages and working conditions is a fundamental human right. It is a right just as critical to a democratic society as the right to free speech and the right to vote.

Over the last 30 years many in corporate America and the big Wall Street banks have conducted a sustained attack on that human right. Unionization dropped from 20.1 percent of the workforce in 1983 to 11. 3 percent in 2013 -- and the results are there for everyone to see.

During that period productivity and Gross Domestic Product per capita both increased by roughly 80 percent in America. But the wages of ordinary Americans have remained stagnant. Virtually all of the fruits of that increased productivity have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.

Three days after Christmas, unemployment benefits end for 1.3 million people who have exhausted their state unemployment benefits, but still can't find a job.

To be eligible for unemployment benefits, you have to be actively looking for a job. Virtually all of these people would rather work, but can't find a job in today's economy where there are three applicants for every job available.

But when the budget deal was negotiated in Congress over the last several weeks, Republican negotiators refused to agree to continue those unemployment benefits. And at the same time, they demanded the continuation of tax breaks for big oil companies and loopholes for Wall Street billionaires who get their income from hedge funds.

Merry Christmas from the GOP.

Of course this kind of Christmas cheer comes from the same gang that routinely drags out the well-worn charge that progressives and Democrats are engaging in a "war on Christmas." Maybe someone should force Republican Members of Congress to sit through a showing of "A Christmas Carol" and then explain why they think Ebenezer Scrooge is the hero.