They don't want you to look down either to see the dirty money trail
By Thom Hartmann for the Independent Media Institute
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.
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
The Sackler family of drug pushers don’t want us to look up
at how they just walked away with billions and not a
single person in the family went to jail over the death of 600,000 Americans
from opioids.
Republican secretaries of state don’t want us to look up at
how they’ve purged over 17 million people, more than
10 percent of all of America’s active voters, off the voting rolls just between
2016 and 2018.
North Carolina’s GOP doesn’t want you looking up at how,
immediately after five “conservatives” on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting
Rights Act, they permanently closed 158 polling places in
the 40 counties with the most African American voters just before the 2016
election, producing a 16 percent drop in the Black vote in that state.
Trump and his Trump-humping toadies in Congress don’t want
America to look up at the treason they incited their followers to
commit on January 6th, invading the Capitol with Confederate flags and
Christian fascist crosses while trying to assassinate Vice President Pence and
Speaker Pelosi.
Giant “health insurance” banksters don’t want seniors to
look up at how they’ve already privatized over 40% of Medicare through the “Medicare Advantage” scam George W. Bush
gifted them, increasing their profits by tens of billions.
Billionaires don’t want Americans to look up at how they’re
paying less than 3% in income taxes while the rest of us foot the bill for the
country.
Religious hustlers don’t want us to look up at their
mansions and private jets as they run ads for “prayer lines” on TV and push
parishioners to vote for politicians who will help them keep their rich
lifestyles going as they break the law with no taxes or oversight.
And, of course, the fossil fuel industry doesn’t want us to
look up at the remote but very real possibility that the global warming they
are causing could free ancient methane trapped in permafrost and undersea
clathrate beds and trigger a mass extinction event (as DiCaprio and I pointed
out in this short video):
DiCaprio, Lawrence, McKay and Sirota’s new Don’t Look Up!
movie is funny, entertaining, and sure to provoke useful
conversations with friends and family.
It accomplishes this by cleverly satirizing a crisis turned
into a disaster by the corrupt power of big money bribing government, amplified
by the banality of the infotainment “news” culture Reagan gifted us when he
destroyed the Fairness Doctrine as the Murdoch clan came to town.
If ever there was a time when we all need to look up,
it’s now!
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The
Hidden History of American Healthcare and more than 30+ other books in print. He is a writing
fellow at the Independent Media
Institute and his writings are archived at hartmannreport.com.
This article was produced by Economy
for All, a project of the
Independent Media Institute.