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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.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Aug. 31, 2026

Two Possible Futures

Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club In a few hours we’ll meet here on Hartmann Report to discuss this book; next month there will be a new book, Looking Forward by Edward Bellamy. Here’s the final part of the last chapter of Who Stole the American Dream? The Greatest Crime Ever Told. Two Possible Futures The two possible futures we face today aren’t just about democracy or corporate power in the abstract. They represent starkly different visions of America: will we become more like FDR’s ideal, or will we continue down today’s road to oligarchic neo-feudalism like Russia and Hungary did? Future One: Oligarchy Triumphant... Future Two: Democracy Restored

Posted at Hartmann Report on Aug. 31, 2026

Saturday Report 8/29/26 — Your Family Is Out $3,800, the Navy Is Out of Money, and Yosemite Is Apparently for Sale

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — Nineteen months into the term that was supposed to end inflation on day one, the bill has come due — The United States Navy is now raiding its own payroll accounts to keep Trump’s war going. — Senator Ron Wyden wants a criminal investigation of Bob Kennedy. — The “Godzilla” El Niño building in the Pacific right now is not a run of bad luck. — Arizona’s attorney general has a blunt message for the United States Postal Service. — The National Park Service has spent over a year quietly detailing how to hand a slice of Yosemite National Park to a Republican-donating Nevada real estate firm. — Trump also wants to run roads through 45 million acres of untouched national forest to help out his logging, mining, and drilling donors. — Crazy Alert! Diesel hit $5.50 a gallon and billionaire-owned Fox “News” finally found sixty seconds for it.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Aug. 28, 2026

Put the CEOs in Handcuffs: Trump’s ICE Is Arresting the Wrong People

If illegal employment is the magnet, stop terrorizing workers and start prosecuting the powerful people offering the jobs… There’s a simple solution to our “illegal immigration” crisis: put some wealthy white CEOs — who are inviting these often desperate people into the country and hiring them — into prison. Ronald Reagan came up with the idea and put it into law, but no president since him has been willing to enforce it. As a result, there’s a growing movement in America to defund and close down ICE, fire and prosecute their brutal and murderous thugs, and close their concentration camps. Fox News found 59 percent of voters across the political spectrum say ICE is “too aggressive,” and nearly two-thirds of voters told Marist the agency “has gone too far.” Support for abolishing ICE outright has doubled since 2018. While most people in the movement point to the barbarity of their tactics and how they’re now spying on protesters, an even stronger argument for ending the agency is that they’re simply not needed. There’s an alternative, which will largely stop the flow of undocumented people coming into America in search of economic opportunity, and its already part of American law. It’s just that our politicians refuse to enforce it.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Aug. 27, 2026

Big Tech Is Coming For Your Water, Your Land, Your Lungs, and Your Electric Bill

AI billionaires are swallowing America’s resources, polluting communities, and trying to stick working families with the bill… There’s a growing movement across America that’s turning conventional politics on its head. For example: — Mostly-Republican farmers in Nebraska are joining up with mostly-Democratic environmentalist to fight a proposed 1,300-acre data center complex. — Conservative ranchers and rural residents in New Mexico are challenging billionaire Larry Ellison’s Oracle over a massive water-consuming data center project. — Communities in Texas that voted overwhelmingly for Trump are demanding moratoriums on the computer-rack warehouses that are increasingly pockmarking rural America. This is the 2026 wave of a new populism, and Democrats are jumping on it.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Aug. 26, 2026

RFK Jr. Gets Busted as America’s Vaccine Defenses Collapse

Covid is surging, measles is killing again, and the man running America’s health system spent years attacking the very vaccines that could save lives… Louise went to the local pharmacy yesterday to get her Covid shot because Covid is climbing in all fifty states right now. She was turned away, because there’s apparently no current Covid vaccine available anywhere in America. This isn’t a minor risk to us all, and should be a national scandal. It’s baffling that the media is ignoring it, particularly given the consequences.