Hartmann Report

The GOP has put fascism on the ballot in 2022 and 2024: will democracy survive? When fascism reared its ugly head in Europe and Japan in the 1920s, it signaled a coming war. As a newer and slicker form of that despotism rises here in America, it may well bring the same type of crisis. We stand on the threshold of momentous change in this nation. While it’s rarely discussed in this frame, the next two elections will almost certainly determine what form of government we’ll have for at least a generation. Will America become more free and democratic, or will we devolve into a 21st century form of Trumpy fascism?

Or will we avoid the horrors of Americans killing each other in another futile effort to protect wealth gained by evil and destructive business practices, this time in service of fossil fuels? Christopher Sheats wanted no part of the insanity the rich people in the rest of his state were ginning up. The wealthiest plantation owners of Alabama had hatched a scheme to join up with the fabulously rich planters of several nearby states and try to take down the government of the United States. They had the money to make it happen, controlled most of the political power in the state, and had already required thousands of Alabama’s young men to prepare their slave patrol militias for a much larger war against their own nation.

Hunger in the USA — which stalks the lives of 1 in 5 American children — could end with just $25 billion a year, while this year Congress gave the Pentagon $25 billion more than they requested. Why? It’s the time of year that we’re all inundated, from email to postal mail to ads on TV, to give to charity. Christmas puts us into a giving spirit, and for those who itemize their taxes the 2021 deductions vanish on December 31st. Yet I keep finding myself talking back to the TV and crushed by the mail appeals. Why is a children’s hospital on TV asking for money when every other developed country in the world finances pediatric research and pays the full cost of kids who need medical care?

Privatization is a YUGE con perpetrated on the American people, run not by “the best minds” but by the greediest -- Now threatening to turn Ben Franklin’s libraries into corporate profit centers. It happened fifty-six years before Ben Franklin walked out of Independence Hall in Philadelphia and told Elizabeth Willing Powel, the wife of Philadelphia’s mayor and one of the most influential women in the nation, that they had just created “a republic, if you can keep it.” On July 1, 1731, Franklin and his twelve Junto Club associates incorporated the nation’s first public library.

But there's never been a more important time to look up, wake up, and get active... On Christmas Eve, Louise and I watched on Netflix the brilliant Don’t Look Up! starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, written and produced by Adam McKay and David Sirota. It’s being lauded as a metaphor for how we’re dealing with climate change in the face of petrobillionaire- and corporate-funded disinformation campaigns, but it’s so much more than that.

The book that lays bare a 50-year conspiracy by a small but fabulously wealthy group of mostly white men to seize control of the American political system and turn it exclusively to their own profit. Introduction: The Heartbeat of Democracy Our vote is the most important part of the American commons.

During these dark days and short nights let’s hold to this ancient knowledge that illumination always follows darkness, and that we will re-light our nation and lives. It’s Christmas Eve, a connection to some of the most ancient of all known northern European shamanic traditions. Like people living in the north for millennia, we continue to embrace them with regional, national, and religious tweaks. It occurs during the week of the shortest day and longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere, when ancient holy men and women lit “yule logs” to push back the darkness and bring back the light of summer.

We deserve to know where Republicans stand, since any one or two of them could swing everything in the direction overwhelmingly supported by American public opinion. Washington is overrun with reporters, pundits and political opinion writers (I lived there and was one of them for 7 years during Obama’s presidency). Their job, particularly for the reporters, includes asking politicians questions on issues of importance.

America must get to the bottom of this before these "traitors or saviors" let it happen again, perhaps as soon as next November. So, which was it? Because of the diligent work by the January 6th Select Committee in the House of Representatives, we’re learning that “stop the steal” was first planned for when Trump lost the 2016 election, except they had to put it on the shelf for four years because he unexpectedly won.

In these days of dark news from the rise of militarism to a new wave of Covid, there are green shoots: neoliberalism is finally being replaced by social democracy around the world & in America. Seventeen years before Reagan plunged America into the pains of our current 40-year-long experiment with neoliberalism, Henry Kissinger, the CIA and the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman helped a murderous general, Augusto Pinochet, stage a military coup in Chile. Their goal was to “prove” Friedman’s bizarre new economic and political theory could one day save the world from both communism and fascism. Not only did neoliberalism not save the world, it has (predictably) empowered authoritarians across the planet.