Hartmann Report

A 50-year project to turn the world’s strongest democracy into a playground for the rich... It’s election day in much of America, although the biggest races are in California, Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maine, and New York City. As a bellwether for next year’s midterms that could define the fate and future of Trumpism, the stakes are enormous, and are bleeding through into social media. One of the most viral Facebook posts yesterday was from a MAGA mom complaining that her Democratic mother-in-law won’t loan her grocery money. She explains that she can’t feed her family because Trump’s government shutdown has frozen her SNAP (Food Stamps) and WIC benefits, and, she wrote: “He asked his mother to buy a can [of baby formula] until our WIC comes in. Her response was, ‘We voted for this.’” The largest percentage of comments were variations on, “That’s what you wanted when you voted for that orange asshole, but you must have thought he’d only do it to Black and Hispanic people. FAFO!” Along those same lines, Trump went on 60 Minutes this weekend and lied to Leslie Stahl’s face multiple times, including a whopper about grocery prices when she pointed out that they’re going up, up, and up.

When politics becomes personal, policy becomes powerful, and there's nothing more personal than survival… When politics becomes personal, policy becomes powerful. And there's nothing more personal than survival. Every election cycle, candidates talk about "freedom," "security," and "opportunity," yet ignore the most basic measure of all three: whether ordinary Americans can afford to stay alive. In the richest nation in the history of planet Earth, millions of Americans are dying from treatable illnesses, rationing insulin, and running GoFundMe campaigns for chemotherapy. This isn't just a policy failure, it's a moral collapse. And it's the one issue that could unite the country, reshape the Democratic Party, and finally prove that compassion is not weakness, but strength.

The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all. —John F. Kennedy It didn’t look like the end of democracy. It looked like a Tuesday. I remember watching the television that day, January 6, 2021, as a man stood on the Capitol lawn. Red hat, blank expression, that thousand-yard stare people get when something fundamental breaks inside them. His face was flushed crimson against the winter cold, fists clenched like he was holding onto the last threads of a reality rapidly unraveling, and his voice—already sandpaper-rough from hours of shouting—cracked as he howled into the January wind: “They’re stealing my country!” Inside those historic halls, American police officers were being beaten with the very flagpoles that once carried our stars and stripes.

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion… — The GOP's dirty little secret exposed, courtesy of Donald Trump: Republicans in the Senate could have ended the shutdown anytime they wanted. — Epstein, Rubio, or ego? What's really behind Trump's Venezuela madness? — Trump's new refugee policy: white, wealthy, and welcome. — Hispanics not welcome either, unless they worked for one of Trump's shabby golf motels. — "Judge Boxwine" Pirro, recently recruited from Fox "News" for a federal judgeship, apparently demanded prosecutors delete the word "mob" to describe a member of the mob that attacked the US Capitol on January 6th. — Tear gassing trick-or-treaters: Noem's new definition of American values. — From firebrand to outcast: Marjorie Taylor Greene's midlife MAGA crisis. What's happening with MTG? — Hunter in a Farmer's World: Rethinking ADHD: It's Not Forgetfulness, It's a Different Kind of Seeing — Wisdom School: The Silent Conversation Between You and Your Bones

From John Adams to Kent State to the Insurrection Act, history warns us what happens when power fears the people more than the enemy… Will the 2028 election even happen, or are we watching the slow-motion rehearsal for its cancellation? Every signal from Trump's orbit points to a deliberate strategy to turn fear, chaos, and manufactured crisis into political weapons. History tells us how these stories end. From John Adams jailing his critics under the Alien and Sedition Acts to Nixon's troops gunning down students at Kent State to crackdowns by Orbán and Putin, authoritarians have always wrapped repression in the language of patriotism. Today, with talk of "domestic enemies," "rapid reaction forces," and "nuclear demonstrations," the groundwork is being laid again, not to protect America, but to control it. Why is it that dictators and wannabe dictators — both historic and now Trump — always attack their own countries' people while saber-rattling about war against other countries?

Algorithms are not tuned for what is best for society. They don't follow the rules that hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution have built into our cultures, religions & political systems… Some data points for your consideration: — On Saturday in Chicago's affluent Old Irving Park neighborhood, Trump's secret, masked police violently pulled a 67 year old U.S. citizen — a member of a local running club returning to his home from a run — out of his car and threw him to the street, where they assaulted him with such force that they broke six ribs and left him with internal bleeding. — Donald Trump is openly taking bribes, publicly ordering political prosecutions, murdering people in naked violation of both US and international law, all while claiming the Supreme Court gave him absolute immunity from prosecution for any crime. — An MIT study finds that lies presented as news travel six times faster across social media than truths. — While over 75% of Americans trusted the news fifty years ago, today that number is a mere 28%, with only 8% of Republicans believing what they see or read in mainstream outlets. These are all the same story, and they all largely derive from a single source, a mind poison that was introduced into the American (and world) mindstream in a big way about two decades ago.

The strongman act is cracking, but as the cops, the crowds, and even the cult start to walk away, is this finally the moment his empire begins to fall? “No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.” —Edward R. Murrow Kids and cops got tear-gassed in Chicago, a judge is holding ICE/CPB officials to account, Americans are horrified by the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, and even UFC fighters are starting to turn away from Trump. What’s going on? Is he really as strong as he appears to think?

Dark money, captured courts, and media empires are quietly doing what dictators once could only dream of... Trump and the billionaires and foreign fascists he's aligned with are both stronger than most think and weaker. Today I'll deal with the stronger part; tomorrow, the weaker. We're living in a moment when the line between democracy and dictatorship is far less clear than we like to believe. As a recent analysis by Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die, puts it, we've already moved onto the midpoint along the spectrum between democracy and dictatorship where "competitive authoritarianism" lives. That's the world of regimes that hold elections but use their control over the nation's systems to skew the rules, restrict opposition, weaponize institutions, vandalize the truth, and destroy/ignore democratic norms. We're more than halfway down that road in just ten short months.

Where honesty is punished, power is bought, and every rule has a price, Trump's turned the dream of opportunity into an industry of deception… When corruption becomes endemic, democracy dies from the inside out. Trump's family's grift is teaching America's elites that power can be bought, just as it is in Putin's Russia and Orbán's Hungary, and it's already distorting our economy.

The American among the Three Musketeers of neoliberalism was Milton Friedman, who taught for years at the Chicago School of Economics and has become a figure of cult worship on the economic and political right in America. He was a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater’s 1960 campaign for president, and a formal advisor to, among others, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Donald Rumsfeld (who he pushed Reagan to take on as his VP instead of GHW Bush in 1980). Friedman was the functional theologian among the three; he absolutely believed that there was a near-mystical power to unregulated markets and that virtually any sort of governmental intervention in or regulation of the marketplace produced economic distortions that prevented capitalism from working its magic.