The Progressive Leadership Of Teddy & Franklin Roosevelt & Lyndon Johnson Is NOT Communism

After tariffs, inflation, a cruel immigration policy, and another forever war, the Republicans are left with nothing to run on in the 2026 campaign, so following Trump's lead they are now trying to label the Democrats as communists. Thom Hartmann (The Hartmann Report) exposes the ridiculousness of that. Here is part of what he wrote:

So, let’s set the record straight. There’s not a single “far left” progressive position held by actual elected progressive Democratic politicians that has less than 50% support among the Democratic base, most have well over 80% support, and virtually all are supported above 50% by the majority of Americans of all political stripes.

This isn’t “far left”: it’s the radical middle! We’ve been “radicalized” by 45 years of neoliberal policies by both parties that have gutted the American middle class and the American Dream, and want actual fighters who’ll make our country safe for working people again.

We want politicians who’ll return us to the ideal of a single full-time paycheck, regardless of educational attainment, paying enough to buy a house, a car every few years, take an annual vacation, put our kids through college, and have a comfortable retirement.

Two-thirds of us had that when Reagan was sworn into office in 1981 and launched the Republican War on Working People™. Hell, that’s the “Square Deal” that Teddy Roosevelt campaigned on over 100 years ago, and the vast majority of Americans still want it!

While corporate-money-dependent Democrats may oppose Medicare for All or ending student debt or taxing the rich in a meaningful way, progressive Democrats — the ones being vilified right now by Trump, the GOP, the media, and their own on-the-take peers — are clear about most all of their positions. They are that:

— Every worker should have the right to democracy in their workplace (a union), and that nobody who works full time should have to live in poverty because the minimum wage hasn’t gone up in a stupid amount of time.

— Retired people shouldn’t have to pay income taxes on their Social Security (the way it was before Reagan and, no, Trump did not fix that), that morbidly rich people should pay into the system like the rest of us, that Social Security should pay enough to live modestly on, and that Medicare should cover all our expenses with minimum hassle.

— Every American citizen should be able to vote without a hassle, and taking away your vote should require a judge’s action to prove why, just like the Supreme Court has ruled it now works if a state wants to take away your gun.

— Speaking of guns, it’s obscene that the leading cause of death for our children is bullets, and we shouldn’t have to regularly terrorize our children with active shooter drills. We need rational gun control laws, like every other developed country in the world has.

— It’s crazy that one man owns more wealth than the bottom half of America (165 million of us) and he and his peers typically pay less of their income in taxes than your average teenager. If we want the general prosperity of the 1950s, we should have the same tax rate that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower so loved: 90% on the morbidly rich after they’ve made their first few million dollars a year.

— Our children and grandchildren deserve a world where they needn’t fear being killed by climate-change-driven wild weather, drought, or wildfires, and the air and water are clean. And it’s nuts that we’re subsidizing the fossil fuel industry that’s preventing this.

— Every other country in the world helps their young people go to college; in most it’s as cheap as it was here in the 1960s when you could put yourself through school with a weekend job. Some countries even pay people to go to college, like the $100/month stipend my dad had with the GI Bill after WWII that built our 20th century scientific and business prowess. And it’s morally and politically wrong to cripple entire generations with trillions in student debt.

— Across the 34 richest (OECD) countries in the world, over a half-million families are wiped out every year because somebody got sick. All of those families are here in America. Healthcare should be a right, like in every other developed country in the world, instead of a privilege that depends on how much money you make.

— Starting a small family business, once the backbone of every American town and city, should once again be possible; we need to break up the massive monopolies that have come to dominate every single industry. See: Republican Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

— Every person in America should be free to practice their own religion (or, like Thomas Paine, no religion) and raise their kids that way without government interference, government promotion, or their tax dollars subsidizing local megachurches’ religious schools. Like the Constitution says.

— People should be judged, hired, and promoted based on the quality of their minds, their work, and their integrity, not the color of their skin, their ethnicity, or their religion.

— Women should have the same rights and privileges as men, from the workplace to the boardroom to the doctor’s office to the voting booth.

— Our queer brothers and sisters should have the same rights and privileges as everybody else and be free to live their lives without discrimination or harassment. 

— America is a nation of immigrants, and we have been strengthened in every generation by the diversity of talent and humanity that have come here to participate in the American dream. We need comprehensive immigration reform to clean up our system, not a brutal regime that’s literally killing people while it tears our nation apart.

— And it’s completely insane that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court would say that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as free speech, which is why most Democrats think Citizens United needs to be overturned.

Sadly, many of the corporate-dependent Democrats oppose many of these positions because they’d conflict with the interests of their donors. This is something the Party needs to work out, particularly as voters increasingly make their desires known in primary elections. But few of these positions would have been alien to FDR or LBJ; most are simply a call for a return to the middle.

Unable To Defend His Abysmal Record, Trump Tries To Start Another "Red Scare"

The following is by Michael Steele at MS NOW: 

It should have been an occasion for a great patriotic speech.

Instead, the short address said America faced “enemies from within,” casting routine political disagreements as an existential crisis of Christianity against communism and calling for the “twisted warped thinkers” of the opposition to be swept from the national scene.

The year was 1950. The politician was Sen. Joe McCarthy. And the occasion was a dinner marking Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.

That speech has become infamous for helping launch the Red Scare, long considered a stain on American history. But as President Donald Trump stood at Mount Rushmore on the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary, he matched it beat for beat in remarks that preyed on his base’s religious devotion to falsely paint Democrats as communists:

These are not mere political disagreements, like differences over taxes or regulations. Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. … The godless communist morality states that anything is justified to bring about inhuman visions. … They don’t want good, they don’t love God, and they don’t want God.

Trump’s speech comes at a very different time than McCarthy’s, however. The West won the Cold War decades ago; the remaining communist countries, such as China and Vietnam, have mixed economies, and even Cuba has adopted some market reforms. The “communists” Trump is attacking are democratic socialists who want to do things like expand Medicare and start city-run grocery stores in needy areas, not seize the means of production.

The times are also different. The month before McCarthy delivered that 1950 speech, personal income was $6.5 billion higher than the year before. The prior decade saw homeownership grow by a staggering 55%, according to the 1950 Census. The ensuing decade would see the median wage grow by 62%.

Americans within the sound of McCarthy’s voice that night in Wheeling had a reason to be optimistic about their economic futures and to see capitalism as a system worth protecting. The senator preyed on that vigilance.

Trump doesn’t have that luxury of optimism. A YouGov poll from late last month found that 71% of Americans rate the economy as “fair” or “poor.” A Gallup poll from this past April found only that 25% of non-homeowners expect to buy a home in the next five years, and 67% said it was a bad time to buy a home — even as Trump still hasn’t signed a bipartisan housing reform bill overwhelmingly passed by Congress.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise, because time and time again, Trump has blocked Congress from making Americans’ lives easier. Instead, he’s attempted to strong-arm the economy like it’s a Republican incumbent seeking his endorsement, using the same government intervention that his party — my party — once stood against.

In fact, if anyone is trying to create a government-run economy, it’s not the democratic socialists; it’s Trump himself.

The president has imposed illegal tariffs and is now subsidizing farmers suffering under those tariffs to the tune of $44 billion by the end of this year. He spearheaded partial state ownership of private companies. As recently as this week, the administration even announced so-called “Freedom Fuel” centers to offset uncertainty at the pump caused by Trump’s war with Iran, which he entered without congressional approval.

All the while, Trump has not only insulated his own riches from the disastrous economic policies he’s implemented, but he’s multiplied them.

Even more sinister, the president has embraced the same authoritarian tactics associated with actual communist leaders. Since Day One of his second term, his administration has worked overtime to purge the federal workforce of anyone he suspects of disloyalty.  His Homeland Security Department has detained people for writing op-eds and flooded cities with masked federal agents. His Justice Department has targeted perceived enemies with the full might of the U.S. criminal justice system.

The communists didn’t do it. He did; and that’s exactly why Trump won’t be able to sell a new Red Scare any better than he was able to sell red meat.

It’s not just because fearmongering about communism only reminds Americans that the man is 80 years old and mentored by the biggest architect of McCarthyism, Roy Cohn.

It’s not just because half of Americans weren’t even alive when the Soviet Union was still an existential threat to the United States.

It’s because they’re fed up with politicians performing one moral code in public while living a diametrically opposite one in private. They’re tired of a politics that says it’s communist to feed the poor and Christian to starve them. They’re sick of confronting a real red scareevery time they check their bank balance while an octogenarian yelling about communism gets billions of dollars richer.

America deserves a debate about the proper role of government in a free society. We deserve an honest discussion about capitalism, markets, regulation, public investment and individual liberty. Those conversations become impossible when every dissenting voice is derided as a communist.

History is complicated. Political philosophy is nuanced. Reasonable people can and likely will disagree. But democracy is strengthened when our leaders negotiate those differences rather than exploiting them.

That night in Wheeling, McCarthy did say one thing that holds up now, though probably not the way he intended:

It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling this Nation out, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer — the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in Government we can give.

For a living example of that, stop by 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Look for the man in the red hat.

Capitalism Needs A Social Democracy To Benefit All Citizens

Donald Trump has been unable, so far, to find any charge that works against Kamala Harris. He's tried crazy nicknames. He's tried intentionally mispronouncing her name. Nothing has worked. Now he's going for the ridiculous - calling her a "communist".

It isn't even remotely true, but that has never bothered Trump in the past. He will say anything, even an outrageous lie, to get what he wants.

The truth is that Harris is a social democrat. She believes that capitalism must be tempered with regulations and social programs to benefit all citizens.

An unregulated capitalism with government social programs will not work. It will eventually results in a few rich people, a tiny management middle class, and the huge majority of citizens stuck in poverty.

Republicans want you to believe that freeing the rich capitalists from government regulation will allow them to "trickle down" much of their wealth to the rest of the population, thus eliminating the need for any social programs. It's a crazy idea, and it's never worked.

The rich don't want to share their wealth, even though they gained it on the backs of working people. They will always (as we have seen in the past) pay as little as possible to the workers creating their wealth - even if it leaves those workers in poverty.

To prevent this, there are three things needed - regulations, government social programs, and labor unions. These three entities assure that production is shared with everyone and not just hogged by those at the top.

That is not communism. It's not even socialism. It's just common sense capitalism. It allows the rich to get and remain rich, while ensuring that others have what they need to survive in the economy.