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Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 14, 2026

Is America About to Get the Biggest “Special Assessment” in History?

The bond market is warning that 45 years of Republican tax cuts and exploding debt may finally force ordinary Americans to pay for a party the wealthy already enjoyed... Get ready to get your financial ass kicked. That’s the message the bond market sent last week, although almost nobody in the corporate press bothered to translate it into English. If you’ve ever lived in a condo or home with an HOA, though, you may understand what’s happening better than you realize.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 13, 2026

Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887. The Book That Launched a Movement (Chapters 8 through 14)

September’s book for Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers’ Book Club PART TWO. His Title Is His Humanity (Chapters 8 through 14) Last week we left Julian West on Dr. Leete’s rooftop, demanding to know how a nation that employs everybody decides what and how to pay them. This week Bellamy answers with the most radical idea in the book. First, though, West has to get out of the house.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 12, 2026

Saturday Report 9/12/26 — Trump Snaps at Black Female Reporter as Questions Grow About His Combative Behavior

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — The for-profit Medicare Advantage giants are doing exactly what for-profit companies do, and a million or so seniors are about to find out what “advantage” actually means. — Diesel hit a record $6.05 a gallon Friday, and Trump’s insane war with Iran is entirely responsible for it. — Trump closed his midterm convention in Dallas by making the crowd raise their right hands and pledge they would cheat for him, then told them they’ll go to Hell if they don’t vote the way he wants. — A right-wing think tank has spent twenty years secretly building a database on thousands of Muslim Americans, and only admitted it when HuffPost started asking questions. — Trump got asked a simple question by a Black woman reporter on the tarmac in Dallas and responded by lunging and screaming at her. — An active-duty Navy sailor was trotted out on stage at the Republican convention as a prop, which is against Pentagon rules, and the Pentagon so far has nothing to say about it — The people building artificial intelligence spent the week telling Congress it might kill everybody, so Mikey Johnson decided the House should leave town for six weeks and avoid the topic. — Crazy Alert! Apparently Donald Trump isn’t the only one who can rename things.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Sep. 11, 2026

9/11: America Can’t Let the War Lies Go Down the Memory Hole Again

America has been lied into too many wars. It's cost us too much in money, credibility, and blood. We must remember the lies, and tell our children about them so that memory isn't lost... Twenty-five years and the smoke still rises In photographs, in names, in empty chairs We remember the morning We remember the falling But who remembers what they told us after that? Don't let the lies die Say their names, remember why For every empty chair For every mother who still cries Twenty-five years And this much remains A country that forgets the lies Can be lied into war again

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?