Hartmann Report

Tracking and lying to pregnant people should not be an Industry. When the Dobbs decision came down from six Republicans on the Supreme Court, many folks were wondering how long it would take before vigilantes and GOP-controlled states might start tracking women seeking abortion services. After all, pregnant women in Republican-controlled states didn’t just lose the right to an abortion with that decision. They can now legally be the victims of any man — be he a nosy neighbor, bounty hunter, or police authority —who wants to harass or control them. And there is no shortage of such men. We’re there. It’s now. Between corporate data brokers and religiously affiliated Crisis Pregnancy Centers, women are under surveillance in ways never before seen. And soon we will be seeing that surveillance turned into actual prosecutorial action.

Was there a high-level conspiracy in the Trump administration, done with one or more foreign countries, to end democracy in America? Was their next plan to realign us with Russia & autocratic nations? There was, it increasingly appears, a conspiracy involving some in the most senior levels of the Trump administration to end American representative democracy and replace it with a strongman oligarchy along the lines of Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary. This would be followed, after the January 20th swearing-in of Trump for a second term, by a complete realignment of US foreign policy away from NATO and the EU and toward oligarchic, autocratic nations like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary. As the possibility of this traitorous plan becomes increasingly visible, the GOP, after a frantic two weeks of not knowing what to say or do, has finally settled on a response to Trump’s theft of classified information: “Hillary did the same thing, and she didn’t go to jail!”

In researching this book, I ran across an astonishing piece of writing from our nation’s early years. It’s a fitting prologue for this chapter. In May 1831, a young French aristocrat named Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the young nation of the United States of America. He was here at a pivotal time in American history. In the “Revolution of 1800,” Thomas Jefferson had ousted John Adams’s minority Federalist Party (largely made up of what Jefferson called “the rich and the well born”) and shifted control of the government to the Jeffersonian Democrats. To de Tocqueville (and most Europeans), American democracy was still very much an unproven experiment. De Tocqueville himself was skeptical that the American Experiment would last, as he thought that the “natural” state of man was to live in an aristocracy, but he was fascinated by the idea of an aristocracy made up of the workers. He was both skeptical and hopeful. In 1835, just fifty-two years after the end of the American Revolution and forty-six years after the French Revolution, de Tocqueville closed his book Democracy in America* with a chapter titled “What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear.”

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Why did he do it? That’s the big question about Trump’s squirreling away super-top-secret documents that could have included payroll records for our spies in Russia, details on our first-strike and response-strike options for a nuclear war with Russia, and details on Russian involvement with the 2016 election. — The Republican war on women rolls on. In Louisiana a woman with a nonviable fetus was denied an abortion, putting her life at risk, a story that’s now been repeated in multiple states — After spending almost two years lying about the outcome of the 2020 election, Republicans have settled on a new big lie to campaign on. — After Mitch McConnell started whining about the student debt relief granted this week by President Biden, Senator Elizabeth Warren pointed out that McConnell’s tuition, when he went to college before the Reagan Revolution, was $330 a year. — Investigative reporter Vicky Ward, at her Vicky Ward Reports Substack newsletter, has a slashing new analysis of Jared Kushner’s new book. — Geeky Science: Did California again rescue America from auto exhaust and this time help the planet with climate change? — In Very Good News: President Biden finally uses the F-Word. While Democrats across the nation have been calling Republican policies fascist for years... President Biden has been more rhetorically restrained. No more.

In some distant place, Hitler must be smiling at the 6 Republicans on the Court’s growing conflation of church & state in America - because it's what helped make his horrors possible. Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio finally made public his position on what should happen when a 10-year-old girl is raped and impregnated by a relative. His message, in summary: Tough luck. Women and girls across America are living in terror because the US Supreme Court has decided that religion — and witch-burning 15th century religious authorities — should have a significant say in the governance of our 21st century nation. With the trigger laws going into affect this week, fully a third of American women no longer have the right to an abortion; Republican legislators in multiple states are discussing ways to keep women from leaving those states or to track and prosecute them if they go out-of-state.

Since the Reagan Revolution, student debt has crippled three generations of young Americans, totaling a $1.8 trillion drag on our economy that benefits nobody except GOP-supporting banksters. President Joe Biden just made good on his campaign promise to forgive billions in student debt. Republicans, predictably, have gone nuts. When you search on the phrase “student debt forgiveness” one of the top hits that comes up is a Fox “News” article by a woman who paid off her loans in full.

The question today is whether we can twist free of them and again become a self-governing nation. Or if we’re doomed to continue to devolve into a full-blown oligarchy. “At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding , and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. “It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.” —Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissent in Citizens United

All the proof I need that Trump, if not the biblical Antichrist, is at least a political one, is what he says and does - his “fruits” tell us all we need to know about who he really is. Ari Melber yesterday opened his MSNBC show, The Beat, with a fascinating rant comparing Donald Trump and his lawyers to the role Al Pacino plays as Satan in the movie “The Devil’s Advocate.” A movie, Melber notes, that was shot in Trump’s apartment in Trump Tower where the devil lived. People claiming religious inspiration, and manipulating American political systems for what they say are religious reasons, have become a really big deal during the Trump era. It’s the new Republican thing, even among elected officials.

The GOP is threatening to turn Ben Franklin’s public libraries into corporate profit centers. It’s time for Americans to truly take our country back. I hope this week to be able to resume writing original articles for you every day; most likely, from what I understand about this type of back surgery, that should be Wednesday, but I’ll keep you up to date. In the meantime, this OpEd from last December is particularly relevant right now, as so much of the money in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal are specifically designated to go to “public-private partnerships,” one of the favorite techniques neoliberals use to make a buck off what should exclusively be public/government responsibilities. Enjoy!

Equal trade, fair trade, honest, decent trade requires reasonable balance between trading partners and strong domestic economies. When that happens, Adam Smith’s model works pretty well: prices for labor, materials, and finished goods all settle near the area where they “naturally” should be. But as we’ve seen from the immensely imbalanced statistics on distribution of wealth in chapter 19, something is not working the way Smith envisioned. Wages appear to be dwindling, and the number of strong, healthy competitors appears to be shrinking.