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Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 15, 2025

Red State Hell: The GOP Plan to Keep You Desperate, Sick, and Too Damn Tired to Fight Back

Republicans in the House of Representatives voted out of committee early yesterday morning legislation that would strip as many as 14 million Americans of their Medicaid-based healthcare, including millions of seniors in nursing homes and children living in poverty. Ironically, Red states will be hit harder by this than Blue states, as they’re generally less capable of making up the loss of federal funds (Medicaid is administered at the state level with block grants from the feds). Which provokes some serious head-scratching among the pundit class; why would Republicans kneecap their own people? Do they really think they can get away with it, just to fund tax breaks for Elon, Mark, Jeff, and Donald? And, for that matter, why is it that Red states are so vulnerable to this GOP perfidy?

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 14, 2025

Are We Still a Nation That Takes Care of Its Own—Or Just a Playground for Billionaires?

As Republicans slash Medicaid to fund tax breaks for the morbidly rich, America must decide: Do we honor our social contract or abandon it to greed? Here we are again, my friend, watching the age-old story play out before our eyes. The Republicans are preparing to hand out trillions in tax cuts to their billionaire benefactors, and how do they plan to pay for this latest giveaway to the oligarchy? By ripping healthcare away from 13.7 million Americans, including millions of our most vulnerable seniors who depend on Medicaid for their very survival. But this isn't just about healthcare policy. This is about the fundamental question that's defined America since the New Deal: Are we a society that believes in the common good, or are we returning to the brutal Social Darwinism of the Gilded Age?

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 13, 2025

America’s Long Coup: How the GOP Rigged, Lied, and Stole Its Way Into the White House for Over 50 Years

The numbers are in. The evidence is overwhelming. And the silence is deadly. It’s time Democrats started calling this what it is: a decades-long criminal conspiracy to seize power by any means… Trump is an illegitimate president, but he’s not the first. The last Republican who was elected president without fraud or naked treason was Dwight D. Eisenhower. And it’s damn well past time that Democrats started telling the story. But let’s start with Trump, and then go to Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 12, 2025

The Machines Are Learning — and They’re Learning to Be Fascists

AI is not just another tech revolution. It's the perfect storm of surveillance, manipulation, and digital obedience — and the far right already has a head start… Pope Leo XIV just labeled AI one of the main threats facing humanity, saying it poses challenges to "human dignity, justice and labor." He's right, but it's even worse than that: it represents, unless it's rigorously regulated, a threat to democracy itself. In every generation, the enemies of democracy change costumes, but their playbook remains eerily familiar. They lie, divide, intimidate, and exploit every available tool to consolidate power. In the 1930s it was radio, in the 2010s it was social media, and now, in 2025, the newest and most dangerous weapon in the authoritarian arsenal is artificial intelligence. Make no mistake: AI is not just another technology. It is power, scaled. And in the hands of the far right, it becomes the most effective tool for dismantling democracy ever invented.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 11, 2025

Expanding the base of the middle class: The Hidden History of the American Dream

The middle class was, until the 1970s, largely the province of single-wage-earning married white men and their families. Through the 1960s, following passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, African Americans and other minorities who had previously been shut out of the professions and management positions, and even excluded from most unions, began to find new opportunities as the result of anti-discrimination legislation. The legalization of the birth control pill in 1961, and the nationwide legalization of birth control in 1965 with the Supreme Court’s Griswold decision, similarly brought a wave of women into the workforce. Women could now delay childbearing and plan for their futures, giving them access to more educational and economic opportunities.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 10, 2025

Saturday Report 5/10/25 — Is the Trump administration “looking into” suspending habeas corpus for you & me the same way they did for Kilmar Garcia?

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Stephen Miller says the Trump administration is "looking into" being able to suspend habeas corpus for you and me the same way they did to Kilmar Garcia. — Bernie Sanders says Republicans in Congress want to help Trump make more billions off his crypto grift. — Justice Sonia Sotomayor says lawyers should stand up and fight for our legal system and our rights rather than roll over for the Trump administration. — Trump's new attack on the law could mean billions for Elon. — Ever since Trump fired hundreds of FAA workers who maintain radar and communications systems, those systems have begun to fail in Newark. — Refugees are shut out of America. Except for white South Africans. — France and Sweden tell Trump to stuff his racism.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 9, 2025

How the Republican Party Became America’s Ministry of Propaganda

FDR warned us 80 years ago about the rise of political lies. Today, the GOP has turned that warning into a roadmap... Donald Trump has been lying to us ever since he came down that escalator. He just never stops lying because, as a lifelong con man, it's all he knows how to do. He's still insisting he won the 2020 election, despite having lost by about 7 million votes and being wiped out in the Electoral College. He lied at the State of the Union about having a mandate to cut Medicaid, as congressman Al Green pointed out. Along with over 100 other lies he told that day. And now he's lying about his trade deals with the UK and other governments. Every single day he adds to the pile of lies he's inflicting on the American people and the world. Science, it turns out, explains why this works for him.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 8, 2025

America’s Moral Collapse Is Not Hypothetical — It’s on a Plane to Libya

Good God. America stands at a moral precipice, and we’re about to tumble over the edge. The Trump administration is now planning to transport immigrants on U.S. military planes to detention centers in a warlord-controlled part of Libya, a decision that reveals how far we’ve strayed from our foundational values and basic human decency. If this shocks you, it sure as hell should. The news broke this week that the administration is preparing to send migrants to Libya on military flights as early as tomorrow. And this isn’t just another policy announcement from the daily outrage factory; it’s the latest escalation in a deliberate strategy of cruelty that began during Trump’s first term.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 7, 2025

The Republic or the Tyrants? The Choice Jefferson Faced in 1776 Is Now Ours in 2025

Will we defend the dream of self-rule, or surrender to the very powers our ancestors bled to escape? The American Revolution wasn't just a break from Britain — it was an uprising against three ancient tyrannies: warlord kings, the morbidly rich, and theocrats. Today, those same forces are clawing their way back into power, and if we don't fight them now, everything the Founders built could collapse. In the Declaration of Independence and throughout his years of personal correspondence, Thomas Jefferson (and multiple others among the Founders) identified three historic tyrannies that he and his colleagues fought the Revolutionary War to overthrow and replace with a democratic republic. The first were the warlord kings, who'd been conquering nations and peoples for millennia and, by 1776, were considered "normal" by most citizens of the world. These were families who, in the earlier years of their countries, had acquired power by conquest: war, pillage, rape, and the subjugation of the people they'd vanquished.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 6, 2025

A Nation Without Empathy Is Just a Crime Syndicate With a Flag

While billionaires warm their hands over tax breaks, Dwayne LaBrecque — a diabetic father of five in Maine — wonders how he'll survive the winter without toes, heat, or help… Dwayne LaBrecque, a diabetic who lost several toes and part of his foot to infection, will be severely impacted by cuts to LIHEAP, the low income fuel oil heating program that Congress started in 1981 and Trump and Musk put on the chopping block. After losing his job as a shipping manager, Dwayne's income plummeted, making it difficult to support his fiancée and five children in rural Maine. He expressed grave concern about making it through next winter without this assistance, stating: "If the president turned around and did away with that funding, I have no idea how we'd survive in the winter." But Donald Trump and congressional Republicans don't care: the budget Trump just released and they're endorsing kills off LIHEAP. Empathy is the ability to experience what another person is going through as a real sensation, a genuine emotion or even physical reaction, in body and mind. It's what causes us to flinch or look away when we see a dog getting hit by a car or a fellow human experiencing real trauma.