Hartmann Report

I have a few questions in trying to make sense of Gaza... This past weekend, Hamas launched a brutal, horrific attack against civilians in Israel. While there is a very real history that has led up to this, there is no justification for it. Even in a state of war, civilians must be protected. This horror raises a couple of important questions. First, did Hamas somehow get inside information about Israel’s defenses that helped them pull this off? Second, how might this play out, how might it be resolved, and how can America and the world avoid the mistakes from previous but similar situations?

As much as it pains me to say it (my personal urge toward salvationism is as strong as anybody else’s), nobody is coming to save us... “Saved at the last minute” is pretty much the story of our culture. It’s built into our major salvationist religions, particularly Christianity and Islam. Even when killed or facing death, Jesus and Muhammed managed to ascend to heaven at the last minute and claim eternal life. By this worldview, no matter how terrible a life you’ve lived, if you say a handful of magic words at the last minute before you die, you’re guaranteed a spot in paradise. There’s always the last minute. It’s at the core of most all of our fiction, and a good chunk of our nonfiction. In the old Greek dramas it was deus ex machina — the god in the machine — when Our Hero was finally trapped in an impossible situation but then a platform is cranked down from the ceiling of the amphitheater with a god on it, who waves his hand and makes everything okay again.

America was birthed in a fight against monopoly. There’s a pervasive myth in America—promoted by wealthy anti-tax activists—that the Revolutionary War was fought because colonists didn’t want to pay taxes to England. While that sentiment was certainly widespread, the spark that lit the fuse of the Revolution was monopoly and a giant tax cut for the world’s largest corporation, not an increase in taxes. By 1773, Great Britain had a stranglehold on the economy of the colonies, enforced through the British East India Company, which held monopoly rights to much of the commerce with North America.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Is a "Dangerous conspiracy" to end democracy in 2025 succeeding with right-wing billionaires? — Is MAGA politics poisoning the world? — Trump discussed sensitive nuclear info with a foreign billionaire who paid him $200,000. — Will Gym Jordan as speaker strengthen the authoritarian "Red Caesar" movement or damage them? — Interest rates & jobs report: Alan Greenspan lives on. — There are some crucial cases before SCOTUS this year that will impact Americans for decades if not centuries. — Breaking Good News/Bad News Alert! A federal court has approved a new congressional map for Alabama while the Governor of Virginia, Glen Youngkin, oversees the purging of tens of thousands of voters from that state's rolls. — "Absolutely gobsmackingly bananas": September 2023 was the hottest month in the history of humankind. — Crazy Alert! Now we know how conservatives think children should be raised to not be snowflakes: they need to be beaten with a belt!

Just the overcharges happening right now in that scam are costing Americans over $140 billion a year: more than the entire budget for the Medicare Part B or Part D programs… President George W. Bush and Republicans (and a handful of on-the-take Democrats) in Congress created the Medicare Advantage scam in 2003 as a way of routing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of for-profit insurance companies. Those companies, and their executives, then recycle some of that profit back into politicians’ pockets via the Citizens United legalized bribery loophole created by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court. Just the overcharges happening right now in that scam are costing Americans over $140 billion a year: more than the entire budget for the Medicare Part B or Part D programs. These ripoffs — that our federal government seems to have no interest in stopping — are draining the Medicare trust fund while ensnaring gullible seniors in private insurance programs where they’re often denied life-saving care.

If the six Republican justices rule the way the oligarchs who support their extravagant lifestyles want, America could be a very, very different place in just a few years… Republicans are “this close” — just a matter of months away — from ending Social Security, a goal they’ve worked toward ever since 1935. They’re hoping to use six Republicans on a corrupted Supreme Court to get there. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse points out, in his book The Scheme and his YouTube series about same, that American oligarchs launched a campaign to seize control of the Supreme Court — and, thus, the American government — over 40 years ago and they’re now close to their goal of turning America back to the 1920s.

Sunlight and accountability are still the best disinfectants and America needs to close this ugly chapter in our history with a sense of both finality and justice… Kevin McCarthy is humiliated, the first Speaker in history to have been thrown out of his office by his own party (or any party, for that matter), and the House has been thrown into chaos. By Matt Gaetz, a bizarre congressman under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for sex trafficking minor girls in Florida. Putin, Xi, and MBS are loving this, as it freezes America’s ability to defend our democratic ally Ukraine, further destabilizing the international order and providing China with a model for their hoped-for attack on Taiwan. And because Putin is loving it, Trump mandated it to his followers in Congress. Along with other actions that have taken a bite out of average Americans’ hide.

Either the GOP will be crushed to near irrelevance in the 2024 elections, or they will win enough power to end the American experiment. Which will it be? “Thirty years ago,” Damon Linker told The Guardian, “if I told you that a bunch of billionaires and intellectuals on the right are waiting in the wings to impose a dictatorship on the United States, you would have said that I was insane.” Now, however, the senior lecturer at Penn State University’s Department of Political Science and author of the Notes from the Middleground Substack newsletter has reconsidered. “But it’s no longer insane,” Linker writes. “It’s now real. There are those people out there.” And, Linker notes, “The question is: will they get their chance.” The simple reality is that they already have had their chance in multiple Red states, and when we watch what they’re doing with it we see that step-by-step, day-by-day the GOP is inching towards full-blown fascism. Now they’re calling to end democracy and replace our president with a “Red Caesar.”

So now it’s largely up to us. You and me. People who value democracy and want to see a world safe from tyrants and wannabee tyrants like Putin, Xi, MBS, and Trump… Russia is not just at war with Ukraine; they’re also in a cold war with us. And last week Putin got a significant victory in that war, which is now being fought on the battleground of social media and the Internet. Representative Matt Gaetz and Senator Rand Paul helped lead Putin’s victory this week in his cold war with America by stripping aid for Ukraine out of the continuing resolution to keep our government funded for the next 45 days. It was a clear signal from Republicans in Congress to Putin that if he can just hang on long enough, his propaganda efforts will eventually lead America to drop out and hand Ukraine over to them. It was also a signal to China, Japan, Australia, South and North Korea, and Taiwan that America can’t be trusted to defend allied democracies when they’re physically attacked by larger authoritarian states. By increasing the chances of an aggressors’ victory, the GOP’s continuing resolution encourages authoritarian states like Russia and China and, thus, made the world less safe.

Left to its own logic, Big Business cares only about profit. With the rules that are currently in place, Big Business is encouraged to ruthlessly pursue profit at the expense of workers, communities, and the environment. Just like in the game of Monopoly, this will eventually result in a situation where one person, or company, owns nearly everything (at least sector by sector). This happened with the railroads at the end of the 19th century, with the electric lines at the beginning of the 20th century, and with copper telephone lines in the mid-20th century in America under the Bell System, aka “Ma Bell.” Each time, it has taken the heavy hand of government to break up these monopolies, because monopolies aren’t just bad for consumers, they’re also bad for the economy as a whole.