Hartmann Report

The GOP needs a new slogan. Is there any area where Republicans will put the interests of life above making a buck or pandering to their base? I can’t find a single one… Because they oppose a woman having the right to terminate a pregnancy, Republicans claim to be the Party of Life. In fact, they’re the Party of Death. Seriously. Unless you’re white, straight, male, Christian, and morbidly rich, Republicans appear to want you and your children dead. In every instance, they will put a corporation or a rich white man’s making a buck over the life of anybody else. — Toxic waste kills people, but Republicans have worked for decades to cripple the EPA and other agencies’ ability to regulate it. Trump alone rolled back over 100 environmental regulations that protected families and children.

In the 1940s, Republicans appeasing a fascist dictator were led in the media by an ambitious young man named Charles Lindbergh; today’s GOP follows — and fears — Tucker Carlson. For Boris Johnson, a student of history, it must have been déjà vu all over again. The former British Prime Minister visited Republicans — his “fellow conservatives” — on Capitol Hill a few weeks ago and came away shocked that so many were rooting for Putin to crush the Ukrainian democracy and take over the largest country in Europe, much as Hitler did with Poland in 1939. When asked later in the week at a meeting at The Atlantic Council how NATO and the West should respond to Russian disinformation and propaganda campaigns, Johnson was blunt about his meetings with GOP lawmakers.

Now is the time for Republicans to show the courage of Mandy Connell and loudly and publicly leave their party. As Germans learned by the late 1930s, if they don’t act now it may soon be too late... Following the January 6th insurrection and coup attempt, The New York Times documented hundreds of thousands of Republicans across America leaving their party by going to the effort of changing their party registration. Most, like Republican strategist Stuart Stevens, say it’s because of the hate. Particularly since the rise of Trump in 2015, but certainly dating back to Trump’s 2008 Birther conspiracy theory — and with the seeds planted in Richard Nixon’s 1968 Southern Strategy — hate has become the rotted core of the GOP. Hate of queer people; hate of college professors; hate of Black people; hate of immigrants; hate of public school teachers and books; hate of Hispanics; hate of drag queens; hate of liberals; hate of American history; hate of Asians; hate of “woke” and other terms to describe tolerance and compassion. Hate has become the primary driving force within today’s Republican Party.

America has an entirely new type of slum we haven’t seen here since the 1930s, the product of 42 years of the Reagan Revolution. We call them “tent cities” & roadsides lined with old RVs and cars… Louise and I got home Saturday from a week with extended family in Central America. On the drive from our rented vacation condo by the Pacific Ocean back to the airport, we passed miles of slums or barrio bajos. Some homes were made from scavenged cinderblock and brick, but most were scrap wood and cardboard with tarps as roofs. Along the rudimentary streets ran ditches filled with raw sewage, and electricity was hijacked from streetlights. Back in the 1980s, when I was doing international relief work for the German-based Salem organization, I spent months in such places in Uganda, Peru, Kenya, Colombia, Mexico, southern Sudan, Ecuador, Peru, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and several other “Third World” countries. At that time, four decades ago, the “slums” in America looked like high-quality housing compared to those countries, with most having electricity, running water, and reliable sewer systems. But no longer: America has an entirely new type of slum we haven’t seen here since the 1930s, the product of 42 years of the Reagan Revolution. We call them “tent cities,” along with their more upscale neighbors: roadsides lined with old RVs and cars in which desperate or hopeless people live.

As we learned from the Iroquois, working on behalf of and protecting society from greedy predators should be the first job of every government… The failure of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) shows us, once again, that unrestrained greed isn’t good. For even modest greed to have a positive effect in society, it must be regulated. The CEO of SVB didn’t like the regulations imposed after the 2008 financial meltdown by Congress’ Dodd-Frank legislation, and spent over a half-million dollars bribing…er, influencing…legislators (legalized by 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court) to change the law and exempt his and other smaller, regional banks from what he argued was the heavy hand of government. While SVB and other smaller banks were generally prosperous and profitable, many wanted to escape from the regulations Congress imposed to protect both depositors and the economy, so they spread some money around Washington DC. Donald Trump then enthusiastically signed the deregulation of smaller banks like SBV into law in 2018.

"Crossing the Threshold Boldly dared is well nigh won! Half my task is solved aright; Ev’ry star’s to me a sun, Only cowards deem it night." — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “To the Chosen One” (1797)

The Best of the Rest of the News — Will Republicans go along with reducing our massive budget deficit? — Democrats on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee proposed a simple resolution condemning racism and white supremacy. — The infrastructure of America’s freeways and air traffic control system are among the worlds best and safest, but the same cannot be said for our rail system. — Twelve years after the meltdown and they’re still trying to deal with the poison. — George Santos: the GOP’s grifter poster boy. — Our oceans are groaning under the burden of plastic pollution. — Geeky Science! We have a salt crisis.

Have we just watched as Jared & Trump walked away with billions after selling out Yemen, Khashoggi, and the United States? With virtually no questions from the mainstream media or Congress? Lauren “Bam Bam” Boebert announced at CPAC: “We are going to investigate Hunter Biden because he has used his father’s positions in government for shady business dealings with Ukraine and China. We no longer need a resident in the White House. We need a president who puts America first and not his business dealings with corrupt foreign countries.” You’d think such a statement by a Trump supporter would be met with shocked silence, but the crowd went wild with applause. And there is, of course, some legitimacy to the sentiment.

If our media and body politic are infected with a cancer it’s time to isolate it so it can’t further harm our democracy and, by extension, the democracies of the world. What country in its right mind would allow a foreign entity to come into their country, set up a major propaganda operation, and then use it to so polarize that nation that its very government suffers a violent assault and its democracy finds itself at a crossroads? Apparently, the United States. And we’re not the first, according to former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Words matter, as Joe McCarthy knew well. Republicans, by trashing the name of the Democratic Party, are simultaneously trashing the concept of democracy itself… It’s one of the most toxic and corrosive memes the GOP is pushing today, that’s now being used to minimize the importance of universal, free, and fair elections. Writing at the Heritage Foundation’s website in a warning about “egalitarianism,” for example, Bernard Dobski also uses the famous John Birch Society mantra as the title for his article: “America Is a Republic, Not a Democracy.” It’s a memorable slogan, and the GOP has been pushing it ever since the 1950s when Senator Joe McCarthy echoed it while recommending that Republicans only refer to the Democratic Party as: “The ‘Democrat Party,’ with emphasis on the ‘rat.’”