Hartmann Report

Apparently, Medicare now needs the money to pay the Advantage scammers, who continue to pour millions into TV advertising to sucker in new rubes…er…customers. The latest grim news from the for-profit “Advantage” assault on Medicare is two-fold. First, the private “Advantage” plans continue to rip us all off; there’s a new round of busts of companies caught defrauding our government and every worker in America who’s paying into Medicare through their FICA payroll taxes. Second, the “Real Medicare” price hike of a few months ago (originally rationalized by the price of the new Alzheimer’s drug) will stay in place, even though that drug won’t generally be available. Apparently, Medicare now needs the money to pay the Advantage scammers, who continue to pour millions into TV advertising to sucker in new rubes…er…customers.

How Corporations Became 'People' - and How You Can Fight Back. During the bruising primary election season of 2008, a right-wing group put together a ninety-minute hit-job on Hillary Clinton and wanted to run it on TV stations in strategic states. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) ruled that advertisements for the “documentary” were actually “campaign ads” and thus fell under the restrictions on campaign spending of the McCain-Feingold Act and thus stopped them from airing. (Corporate contributions to campaigns have been banned repeatedly and in various ways since 1907 when Republican President Teddy Roosevelt pushed through the Tillman Act.) Citizens United, the right-wing group, sued to the Supreme Court.

This morning I sent our "Saturday Report" to our paid subscribers — including a rather freaky Geeky Science about a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) program that, without being told to do so by its programmers, has invented its own internal language with which it talks to itself! And we just wrapped up a great Zoom meeting with some really fascinating questions and thoughts, including issues like “Star Voting,” whether Democrats should campaign on issues or values, how to build movements, and the future of progressivism in America.

The Best of the Rest of the News. - Trump trade advisor and January 6th co-conspirator Peter Navarro was busted yesterday for refusing to release documents to, and meet with, the House committee investigating that act of sedition. - Was Chuck Grassley in on the coup? - ‘It’s going to be an army’: Tapes reveal GOP plan to contest elections. - Is Tucker Carlson playing the dictator's game? - What could possibly go wrong with DeSantis assembling his own private militia paid for with state funds? - The Supreme Court has put on hold an attempt by Texas to use the force of law to require Facebook and other social media groups to carry openly Nazi and racist hate speech without moderation. - Geeky Science! The climate is changing faster than we’d anticipated, and scientists are scrambling to understand what’s happening. - Geeky Science #2! Should we be concerned that an artificial intelligence (AI) program has invented its own language and is talking to itself with it? - Crazy Alert! Fox’s Ingraham says our epidemic of gun deaths aren’t so much caused by guns as by legal marijuana.

White freak-out about Black people having weapons back in the 1960s was a stronger motivator for Republicans than today’s slaughter of innocent children - at least so far... On May 2, 1967, the destinies of Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Ronald Reagan collided. The day saved untold thousands of lives. At the time, California was an open-carry state with few gun restrictions. Governor Reagan was on the steps of the State Capitol to meet and share lunch with a group of visiting 8th graders when Newton, Seale, and nearly 30 other Black Panthers pulled up out front in a small caravan of cars. Armed with everything from pistols to 12-gauge shotguns, they climbed the half-dozen steps to the area around the front doors of the building.

In addition to an economy held together with the baling-wire of Fed stimulus (that’s ending), both the US & the world are facing a wild spectrum of assaults that could have huge economic impacts. The CEO of America’s largest bank is worried, and for good reason. Yesterday the Fed started something it hasn’t done for quite a while. It started dumping bonds.

Right now with guns we’re at the point where advocates for gay marriage were in the 1990s when it seemed impossible... Democrats are gearing up for quick policy battles in the House and Senate over “gun safety.” They should also be preparing for a decades-long war over “gun control.”

Bought-off Republican stooges in Congress and state legislatures — along with their allies on the Supreme Court — are openly trying to bring our country down, to destroy a 240-year-old democracy... Tucker Carlson and Fox “News,” rightwing billionaires, a bought-off Supreme Court, polluting industries, and the politicians they all own have screwed up America so bad that Canada — Canada, for G-d’s sake! — is worrying about us.

Neither is a nation where a simple accident or illness can result in homelessness. Or a nation where a raped woman is forced to carry a pregnancy to term at the point of a gun... Today is Memorial Day, the day we remember the 1.2 million Americans who have fought and died in our wars going all the way back to the American Revolution. These people volunteered or were conscripted to fight and die for their nation and deserve our respect and memorialization. But what about the 1.5 million Americans who have died from guns in America just since the Supreme Court, in 1978, gave the NRA the power to purchase American politicians and thus set the stage for today’s carnage?

The first direct shot across the bow of the doctrine of a corporation’s "right to lie" by using its "personhood" to claim First Amendment "free speech" rights came in April 1998, when Mark Kasky, a California political activist, noticed that Nike was engaged in what he considered to be a deceptive greenwashing campaign.