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Posted at Hartmann Report on Jul. 7, 2026

The Lie That Changed America

From corporate personhood to Citizens United, the hidden story behind today's billionaire political power - and what we can do about it… My new book, Who Killed the American Dream? The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told, is out today, and it plainly lays out why so much has gone wrong in this country since the Reagan Revolution and how the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision came about. The timing turns out to be almost eerie. Just this week, in a Common Dreams op-ed about California’s Proposition 40, Congressman Ro Khanna posed the question that has become both urgent and existential for America: Are we actually willing to tax billionaire oligarchs, or are we only willing to talk about it? Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once tried to warn us about this very moment, a warning which has echoes throughout history and in dozens of nations: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jul. 6, 2026

They're Shocked We Won't Pretend Anymore

The real divide isn't political:?it's between those willing to normalize modern fascism's cruelty and those who refuse… The “partisan split” of Americans showed up in a big way at Fourth of July celebrations and backyard barbecues last week, but the media, while noting or even complaining about it, rarely mentions exactly why it’s happening. A few weeks ago Louise and I were having coffee with an old friend who’s known us since the early days of the radio show, and somewhere between the second cup and the muffins she said something that’s been rattling around in my head ever since. Her sister, a three-time Trump voter, had finally called — after months of silence — and demanded to know why our friend had stopped returning her calls. “It’s just politics,” the sister said. “Why are you taking this so personally?” Our friend, who is queer and married, listened for about thirty seconds and then said, very quietly, “Because you voted for the people who want me to disappear, and you knew that when you did it.” Then she hung up. She told us she felt awful about it for about an hour, and then she felt nothing at all, and the nothing was almost worse than the guilt would’ve been.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jul. 5, 2026

Chapter 5: The Seventy-Year Legal War: Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told

The story of the battles both for and against corporate constitutional rights didn’t begin in 1886. For seventy years before the Santa Clara non-decision, corporations fought a relentless legal war to gain access to the same constitutional rights the Founders and Framers intended exclusively for humans. They lost battle after battle until, with Davis and Field, the railroad oligarchs finally found a way to win by fraud. Once we understand this, it’s easy to see that corporate constitutional rights were never an accident or a misunderstanding: the doctrine was, instead, the result of a sustained, deliberate campaign by morbidly rich interests to acquire constitutional weapons they could use against the “mob rule” of democratic governance. The railroad and other American oligarchs tried honest arguments for seven decades, but, when that failed, they turned to fraud. This history also shows exactly what the oligarchs were fighting against: virtually every reform that would later build—and today sustains—the American Dream and the social democracy that made it possible.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jul. 4, 2026

Saturday Report 7/4/26 — On America’s 250th birthday the billionaires got 11% richer, the Court crowned a king, and ICE handcuffed a nun on her way to Mass...

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — Two hundred and fifty years on, the real fight over the Declaration of Independence isn’t about fireworks: it’s about who gets to own it — Nothing says “Happy Birthday, America” quite like a heat dome trying to kill a hundred million of us. — And right on cue, a federal appeals court ruled that the Trump administration can keep throwing the signs explaining all of that down the memory hole. — Good news! The world got nearly 11% richer last year. The bad news is you can probably guess who’s holding it. — Speaking of the folks who did get richer: the President bought 327 stocks the day before he personally moved the entire market. — The headlines insisted Trump “lost” at the Supreme Court this term. Down in the fine print, though, King Trump is doing just fine — Meanwhile, the agency Trump just funded to the eyeballs handcuffed a 56-year-old nun on her way to Mass. — Geeky Science Alert! Want to outlive the billionaires? Turns out you should eat like a peasant.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jul. 3, 2026

Is America Celebrating 250 Years on the Wrong Side of the Revolution?

The founders threw out the Redcoats. So why does America's 250th birthday feel like they're back in charge? Tomorrow America turns 250 years old, and instead of a celebration of the republic those 56 men who signed the Declaration risked the hangman’s noose to create, we’re getting a MAGA rally. Donald Trump has taken the nation’s 250th birthday, the once-in-a-lifetime anniversary that belongs to all of us, and rebranded it as a tribute to himself. He shoved aside the bipartisan “America 250” commission that Congress created a decade ago, stood up his own White House-controlled operation ironically called “Freedom 250,” and steered our taxpayer money toward his own vanity celebration while the congressional commission was left begging for the funds it was promised.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jul. 2, 2026

Every Republic in History Has Feared the Man Who Put His Face on Their Money

From Caesar's denarius to Trump's meme coin, the message is always the same: "I am the state and you damn well better both fear me and pay me tribute!" On Tuesday the Office of Government Ethics released Donald Trump’s annual financial disclosure, and the astonishingly corrupt number that jumps off its 927 pages — a length his team laughingly insists proves his “commitment to transparency” — is $1.4 billion. That’s what he personally reported earning from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures in the single year of 2025 when he was president for roughly 11 months, dwarfing everything he took in from real estate, hotels, and golf courses combined. The largest slice, roughly $635 million, were royalties on the $TRUMP meme coin, a “collectible” digital token — basically, a little JPG-style image he sold to the rubes — whose entire “collectible” value rests on one thing, which is his name and face stamped onto what he’s hustling as internet money. This is one of the oldest cons in the long history of men who decided that the state and its treasury were, first and foremost, there for themselves to loot.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jul. 1, 2026

I Saw This Happen Behind the Iron Curtain. I Never Expected to See It Here...

An afternoon in East Berlin became the lens through which today's America suddenly makes terrifying sense... In the winter of 1986 while living in West Germany I visited East Berlin with my oldest daughter, who was still a teenager, and on the far side of Checkpoint Charlie we were picked up by a young man named Torsten who ran a gypsy cab. Before we’d gone more than a block he had the two of us rehearsing a story, that we were his long-lost cousins over from the West, so we’d all say the same thing if the Volkspolizei or Stasi stopped the car. He couldn’t have been much past twenty, and he was kind to two strangers all afternoon (and grateful for the 20 Deutschmarks I gave him), but under all of it he was afraid the entire day, because in the country he lived in a man could be hauled in for the crime of driving people around and not being able to account for himself. That fear, the quiet hum of it running beneath an ordinary afternoon, is exactly what a “papers, please” society feels like from the inside.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jun. 30, 2026

Warning: The Supreme Court Just Revived a System America Buried in 1883

Critics argue the decision resurrects the patronage politics the Pendleton Civil Service Act was designed to end… The six unscrupulous Republicans on the Supreme Court — over the loud objections of the three true constitutionalists on the Court — are aggressively dragging America back not just to the 1950s but, as of yesterday, to the 1830s. Arguably the most depraved president in American history, Andrew Jackson (aka “The Indian Killer” a title he gave himself), Trump’s favorite, whose picture he hung in the Oval Office, invented what came to be called the “Spoils System.” If you wanted a job in the federal government, or a favorable ruling from one of the then-few federal agencies, all you had to do was give a big enough gift to President Jackson, or pledge your loyalty to him instead of the Constitution and the people, and your wish would be granted. Prior presidents, particularly among the Founding generation, were generally strongly opposed to such a corrupt system.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jun. 29, 2026

Predators Always Need Prey. Now They're Running America.

Hundreds died in this week's heat wave. But the real killer is a political & economic system that rewards predators, turns citizens into prey, & leaves governments protecting power instead of people… Hundreds of people died yesterday across Europe from the heat; they’re a symptom of a larger problem that governments around the world have failed to address — that goes far beyond simply global warming — and that the Trump regime is making far worse. Its foundation is one of the most troubling aspects of human nature called predation: while most people just want to live their lives, raise their kids, and have a comfortable old age, some small percentage of those among us have simply become, for lack of a better word, predators.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Jun. 28, 2026

Chapter 4 The Mastermind: Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field: Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told

If J.C. Bancroft Davis was the triggerman, then Justice -Stephen Johnson Field was the mastermind behind the corporate theft of constitutional rights. He’d spent three decades on the Supreme Court, building the intellectual infrastructure that would transform corporations into constitutional persons. We must understand Justice Field to clearly see how democracy was hijacked by the oligarchs of that era. But more than just that, understanding Field also reveals the ideology behind the hijacking. This wasn’t just a case of corruption or greed, although there was plenty of both. This was, instead, a vision of America fundamentally opposed to the Founders’ and Framers’ vision of America and explicitly at odds with the possibility of creating a thriving middle class.