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Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 27, 2026

Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887. The Book That Launched a Movement (Chapters 22 through 28)

September’s book for Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers’ Book Club PART FOUR. Stood Up Straight Before God (Chapters 22 through 28) The final quarter of Looking Backward is where Bellamy makes his economic case, preaches his sermon, and lays out his ending and its suggestions for the future. Keep in mind, the book begins — and was written — in 1887, and is entirely speculating about what life in our country will be like in the year 2000. It became the foundation and inspiration for most of the progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If you only read one section closely before we meet, make it this one. Chapter 22 answers the question “Where does all the money come from to run the 2020 American economy?” Leete notes that there’s no longer any national debt, no “idle rich” people, no “army of men employed in finance,” and thus no meaningful criminal class.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 26, 2026

Saturday Report 9/26/26 — Crazy Alert. Trump Rewrites His Own Presidential Moment, Melania Vanishes and Natalie Harp Takes Center Stage?

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — Six Justices Just Handed Trump a Voter-Purge Machine, but Told Him to Wait Until the Next Election to Use It. — Money In, Regulation Out: How $50 Million Bought the AI Industry a Get-Out-of-Oversight-Free Card — Americans Feel Worse About the Economy Than at Almost Any Time Since Harry Truman, and Trump Wants to Know Why Nobody’s Grateful — JD Vance Found 760,000 “Phantoms” on Obamacare. Funny How Many of Them Are Just Poor People. — Test Scores Hit a 25-Year Low. Trump’s Answer — Just Like With His Economic Numbers — Was to Fire the People Who Count Them. — Trump’s FDA Pick Can’t Say Whether an IUD Is an Abortion. That’s Not a Slip, It’s the Plan. — Geeky Science! Your Aging Brain Isn’t Failing, It’s Being Promoted. — Crazy Alert! Trump Posted an AI Picture of Xi’s Arrival and Somehow Lost His Own Wife.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 25, 2026

Trump Orders America to “Love Me” and Sends Us Taxpayers the Bill

Taxpayers are footing the bill for a Fox “News” ad glorifying the president, as lawmakers question whether federal law has been crossed… Turn on Fox “News” at night this week and you’ll see something no American has ever seen before but Russians would immediately recognize. Images of the American president flash across the screen while a singer repeats the words “love me” over and over, Trump’s voice promises to defeat “communism, socialism and Marxism,” UFC boss Dana White calls him “the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met,” and then, at the bottom of the screen, six words appear: “Paid for by the U.S. government.“

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 24, 2026

The Biggest Lie About America’s Affordability Crisis Is Hiding in Your Paycheck

Prices didn’t leave working Americans behind all by themselves. Decades of weakened unions, stagnant wages, billionaire tax cuts, and policies favoring capital changed who gets the money… The “affordability crisis” that Democrats are running on and Trump calls a “scam” is almost always framed as being about prices being too high. But that’s only half of the equation, and the other half — income being too low — is almost never discussed outside of Bernie Sanders’ circles. There’s an insidious reason for that, which I’ll lay out in just a moment. Politicians promise to “bring prices down” as if prices exist in some sort of economic or political vacuum. But prices are set in dollars, and the true definition of inflation isn’t that prices go up (that’s a consequence of inflation) but that the value of the dollar goes down. Inflation, in other words, doesn’t quantify the rising cost of living so much as it measures the declining purchasing power of the dollar. And inflation never reverses (except in true depressions).

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 23, 2026

Rightwing Billionaires Aren’t Just Buying CNN and CBS: They’re Seizing the Power to Shape Reality

When Trump-aligned billionaires control the networks Americans trust for news, they don’t just own the cameras. They gain the power to decide what the entire country sees, hears, and never learns… “The Freedom of the Press is one of the great Bulwarks of Liberty, and can never be restrained...” — Founder George Mason, 1776 A CNN insider told Variety magazine yesterday that the mood inside CNN right now is “like a funeral.” Nepo-baby David Ellison, bankrolled by his father who’s one of the richest men in the world and a major Trump suck-up and donor, is on the verge of taking over the company that owns the news network. The day-before-yesterday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a group of Democratic state attorneys general rolled over and agreed to stop trying to block the $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, now to be almost 50% funded by rightwing dictatorships in the Middle East who’ve given billions in gifts, loans, and investments to Trump and his family. California Governor and presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom hailed the agreement, saying it would both protect California jobs and preserve CNN’s “editorial independence.” If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge for you in Brooklyn.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 22, 2026

The Insurance Industry Built a Tollbooth Between You and Your Doctor. Who Will Tear It Down?

Americans pay extraordinary sums for a system that can still deny doctor-recommended care, while Canada’s Medicare fight shows another path… Tayler Gonzalez is 32 years old, athletic, and engaged to be married; earlier this year, he suffered a stroke and needed extended rehab to recover. His insurance company, UnitedHealthcare, inserted themselves between Tayler and his doctor, saying that they wouldn’t pay for it, so Tayler and his fiancée just put up a GoFundMe page to cover the cost. Welcome to America, where six Republicans on the Supreme Court say that it’s totally legal for massive corporations to pay off judges and politicians to keep their profits up. Even politicians slated to possibly become the Speaker of the House.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 21, 2026

Did Ayn Rand Plant the Ideological Seed That Trumpism Is Harvesting Today?

From a killer she once called an “ideal man” to a political movement built around radical self-interest, the roots of today’s assault on government run deeper and darker than most Americans realize. Ka$h Patel’s (his preferred spelling) pathetic performance before Congress last week has left many Americans wondering what’s going on with our federal government.... The model here is straightforward: government is something to be exploited for personal gain not public service, because government is essentially an evil thing. So, load it up with incompetents, suck up as much money as you can, and leave the mess to the Democrats.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 20, 2026

Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887. The Book That Launched a Movement (Chapters 15 through 21)

September’s book for Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers’ Book Club PART THREE. A Society That Rests on Its Base (Chapters 15 through 21) This is the part of the book where Bellamy stops dazzling Julian West with inventions and gadgets and starts filling in the civic machinery of America in the year 2000. Keep in mind, the book begins — and was written — in 1887, and is entirely speculating what life in our country will be like in the year 2000. It became the foundation and inspiration for most of the progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Chapter 15, Leete takes West into his library and shows him that Dickens is the country’s favorite author, even years after his death, because he always cared about the fate of the poor. He lays out the economics of publishing books and newspapers (subscribers elect their editors!), and most of the system is what today we’d call reader-supported media.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 19, 2026

Saturday Report 9/19/26 — Who Stole the American Dream...

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — Trump just banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, because apparently the First Amendment now needs his signature to be valid. — More American soldiers have died in Trump’s Iran war than Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is willing to admit. — Armed federal agents at polling places is a felony crime and has been for more than a century, but Trump’s people keep floating it — Senators Markey, Merkley, and Sanders are trying to stop Trump from shipping 5,000 one-ton bombs to the Saudi crown prince who had a Washington Post columnist dismembered. — Trump’s war of choice is about to come home to every oil tank in New England, so of course he spent last weekend at his shabby golf motel in Ireland — Saudi Arabia just told Europe there’s no oil for them next month. — Poland’s prime minister says Putin is planning rocket and drone strikes on NATO countries, so Trump wrote Putin’s alibi for him — Crazy Alert! A chatbot made up a nuclear smuggling plot, and Pete Hegseth’s military scrambled planes to board a Chinese ship over it. — Medicare for All isn’t dead, it’s waiting for us to do our part.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 18, 2026

Did Trump Just Make an Offer That Could Land His Lickspittles in Prison?

Give Republicans Congress and Trump promises you $5,000. That extraordinary bargain raises a question America confronted nearly 90 years ago: how far can government power reach into the voting booth? Trump has now repeatedly offered his voters $5,000 checks if Republicans hold onto the House and Senate this fall, calling it the “Trump dividend.” On Sunday he told a rally that it’ll “happen 100 percent” if enough people turn out to vote GOP. Since his own party controls both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, he could now get an appropriation passed for the ~$1.2 trillion this will add to the national debt; the fact that he’s not doing this is pretty much proof that what’s really going on here is a good old fashioned vote-buying scheme dressed up with some fancy language to make it seem less like the crime it is. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that “if the Republicans win” is quite simply a way of telling millions of Americans that there’s five grand riding on how they vote.