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Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 10, 2026

The Old America Is Dying. Who Will Build the New One?

Economic desperation opened the door to both FDR and Hitler. Nearly a century later, America again faces competing visions of who should rule and whom government should serve… “The old order is dying and the new cannot yet be born; in this interregnum, monsters appear.” —paraphrase of Italian anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci. While Hakeem Jeffries revealed, as he trash-talked Medicare for All, that he doesn’t believe we’re in a full-blown populist moment in America, Trump, Bannon, and the neofascist tech bros and billionaires fully realize what’s going on — and are committed to making the most of it. As are Bernie Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, El-Sayed and hundreds of other Democratic candidates this year. At its core, populism is a way of understanding politics as a struggle between ordinary people and a powerful elite that has stopped serving them. It’s not inherently left- or right-wing; it’s really a way political scientists describe a moment when the majority of a population has lost faith in the existing system and is looking for alternatives to it.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 9, 2026

A Brazilian Meat Billionaire Walked Into Trump’s Oval Office. What Happened Next Should Terrify Us All…

The mystery surrounding 660 million pounds of imported beef exposes a much larger story about money, deregulation, food safety, and who Trump’s billionaire-run government really serves... In Monday’s New York Times, Eric Schlosser — the guy who freaked out a nation with his book Fast Food Nation a quarter century ago — published an article that kicks off with a simple observation: if you buy a T-shirt at the Gap, federal law requires a label that tells you where it was made and what it’s made of. While the same is true for your car, your refrigerator, your television, and every apple and bag of frozen peas in the supermarket, as a result of lobbyists being able to openly buy politicians in America since 2010, beef and pork are the exceptions. Which is why, Schlosser argues, Donald Trump could sign a one-man presidential proclamation allowing roughly 660 million pounds of foreign beef to enter America with neither inspection nor the usual 26.4 percent out-of-quota tariff. If Americans knew where this mystery meat was coming from, they might not want to eat it, Schlosser notes, but Trump is apparently making sure we’ll never know.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 8, 2026

Germany’s Far-Right and Trump’s Billionaires Are Proving FDR’s Darkest Warning Was Right

For forty years America restrained concentrated wealth and built the largest middle class in history. Then billionaires rewrote the rules, bought political power, and began taking democracy apart… While Americans were celebrating this Labor Day weekend, in Magdeburg, Germany a 35-year-old neofascist, Ulrich Siegmund, told a cheering crowd that his rightwing Alternative für Deutschland party was “taking our country back.” They’d just pulled 44 percent of the vote in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, double what it’d been just five years ago. Their platform was simple: expel brown-skinned immigrants, dump the EU and NATO to instead build an alliance with Russia, and tear up the tech, climate, and energy rules so the fossil fuel and tech billionaires could take over Germany’s government like they are America’s under Trump.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 7, 2026

Has the Media Normalized the GOP’s Voter Suppression Right Before Our Very Eyes?

For decades, reporters have treated hours-long voting lines as a “normal” feature of Election Day instead of investigating why some Americans consistently face greater barriers to the ballot… For over 50 years, our media has been covering up Republican voter suppression efforts. This year, though, they’re getting so obvious that it’ll be interesting to see if they continue to whitewash the practice. Remember all those reports you’ve seen on TV during previous elections, where the reporter is outside a polling place with a line stretching around the block?

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 6, 2026

Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887. The Book That Launched a Movement (Chapters 1 through 7)

September’s book for Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers’ Book Club Part One/Week One. The Book That Launched a Movement (Chapters 1 through 7) When Edward Bellamy’s "Looking Backward" came out in 1888, nobody expected much of it. Bellamy was a mild, sickly newspaperman from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, and he’d written an utopian romance about a Bostonian who sleeps for a century. But Jules Verne had been writing futuristic fiction for most of the 19th century, and the public more than warmed up to Bellamy’s book. Within a decade after its first publication (it’s still in print) it had sold nearly a million copies in the United States and England, been translated into German, French, Russian, Italian, Arabic, and Bulgarian among other languages, and become the third best-selling American book of the entire nineteenth century, trailing only "Uncle Tom’s Cabin" and "Ben-Hur". It also inspired the modern progressive movement.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 5, 2026

Saturday Report 9/5/26 — Putin tests NATO’s patience, Milei tests Britain’s, and John Fetterman tests whether there’s a floor beneath which a Democratic senator can sink…

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — Vladimir Putin has spent the past year turning “plausible deniability” into a full-time European hobby, and this week Germany finally pushed back sorta, kinda, maybe hard. — Javier Milei has apparently decided that if you can’t win an economy, you can always win back a windswept archipelago full of penguins with 3,000 sheep-farmers. — ICE has found a new frontier for cruelty at California’s largest immigration lockup: outlawing the hug. — Missouri’s Supreme Court just handed Trump’s national gerrymandering crusade its first real faceplant. — Speaking of senators who’ve forgotten what their job is, John Fetterman’s transformation from Bernie-backing mayor of Braddock to Fox News’ favorite Democrat cleared its final decency checkpoint this week. — Trump has apparently spent so much time threatening to weaponize the Federal Reserve, sanction foreign assets, and personally inspect Fort Knox that America’s oldest allies have started quietly walking their gold out the door. — Elon Musk, a man who spent a quarter-billion dollars to buy the last election for Trump and got access to Americans’ private data with it (along with stopping dozens of investigations into him and his companies), is reportedly in a full panic over a documentary he can’t buy his way out of. — Crazy Alert! Do you like to play online games where you can chase brown-skinned people around and hurt them?

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 4, 2026

The Men Who Want to Sign for You Are Coming for Your Rights

Fifty years after women escaped a system that put husbands and fathers in charge of their economic lives, Republicans are resurrecting the ideology that could put men back in control. Whenever I spoke with Gloria Steinem on my program over the years, I always got a sense of a person with both incredible charisma, intellect, and a real grasp of what power was and how to use it. She was a force of nature. When the announcement that she’d passed away at 92 hit the news yesterday morning, it perfectly juxtaposed against the story the major “conservative” site Townhall had published titled, “No, the World Would Not Be a Better Place If Women Ran It.” Their point was: “Anyone who went through middle school, junior high or high school knows full well the kind of nasty behavior that females are capable of.” Nobody planned that coincidence; there’s so much hate against women floating around in Republican circles these days that if it wasn’t that piece it’d be something else, but it highlights a worrying trend in American culture and politics, one with echoes of a troubling past.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 3, 2026

What Would Trump Be Doing Differently If Putin Were Giving the Orders?

America’s defenses are being drained, Ukraine is being abandoned, and Russia and Iran are growing stronger. At what point does incompetence stop being an explanation? In one of the most obscene segments ever aired on Fox “News,” yesterday morning our billionaire Treasury Secretary said the inflation Americans are suffering from is Ukraine’s fault because, in response to Putin’s criminal regime daily murdering Ukrainian civilians (a war crime), Zelenskyy has been blowing up Russia’s energy assets. Stupidity? Hypocrisy? Owned by Putin? Or is something even more sinister at work here?

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 2, 2026

Trump Brags About His “Brilliant” Venezuela Scheme While History Screams a Warning

America has spent decades paying for earlier interventions in oil-rich nations. Trump is now risking another cycle of rebellion, bloodshed, and blowback... Here we go again with American colonialism, this time with a crazy scheme Trump thinks is “brilliant.” You’d have thought we’d have learned our lesson with our stupid intervention in Iran in 1953, which led us straight to America’s humiliation in 1980 and today’s war with the Mullahs. This is going to be an epic disaster, one that will most likely cost us dearly in both American blood and treasure. Back in February of 1989 I arrived in Caracas, Venezuela for a brief visit. Just a few hundred yards onto Venezuelan soil, I was stopped by a group of soldiers who told me I had to turn back and leave the country. My main memory is how young they were and how they seemed apologetic. What I’d stumbled into was an uprising called the Caracazo.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 1, 2026

What Happens When America’s “Secretary of War” Starts Committing Crimes in Plain Sight?

The alleged crimes are piling up, the evidence is hiding in plain sight, and Trump’s Pentagon is betting that nobody in Washington will dare hold Whiskey Pete accountable… What should we Americans do when it comes out that our Secretary of Defense has been committing crimes in plain sight and nobody in the administration seems concerned about it? Back in 2008, New York Times reporter David Barstow revealed that the Pentagon under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, starting in the fall of 2002, had recruited dozens of retired military officers to go on TV as if they were independent military analysts.