Hartmann Report

Nothing, MAGA Mike argued, was more important than cutting back on the IRS’ ability to audit billionaires while reducing social program spending… Yesterday, House Speaker MAGA Mike Johnson gave his first press conference. The billionaires sure picked the right guy: his performance was flawless. Slick, slimy, and unctuous. For example, even though every dollar the IRS spends auditing billionaires produces between $6 and $12 in added tax revenue to our government, Johnson insisted with a straight face that we need to cut over $14 billion from the IRS’ budget to “fully pay for” a package of military aid to Israel. No reporter — as is so often the case when interviewing Republicans — was willing to point out what BS his pitch on behalf of his billionaire owners was. (Nobody wants to be banned from future press conferences or ignored during question time.)

Does the GOP want citizens to die young? Their priority, instead, is the profitability of the companies in their states & keeping the taxes on their oligarchs low… In the 1930s, after FDR rolled out programs to aid the homeless and unemployed across the country, America enjoyed a longer life expectancy — and more healthy years within that life expectancy — than any other wealthy nation. While some of that was due to the public health crisis echoing across Europe in the wake of World War I, it was largely because FDR’s Democrats in charge of the country were building schools and hospitals like there was no tomorrow. Republican President Eisenhower followed in that tradition through the 1950s, and in the 1960s LBJ rolled out Medicare and Medicaid. As a result, we continued to have the world’s best lifespans and quality-of-life. Then came Reagan’s austerity and neoliberalism campaigns in 1981 and America began to become unraveled.

Religious charlatans like Speaker MAGA Mike, exploiting a basic human urge to know the unknowable, to touch the mystery of life, are the most dangerous of all the various types of con men on Earth… Mike Johnson wants a religious litmus test for office holders, and thinks environmentalists are possessed by the Devil himself. This shows that his shtick is about power, not Christian religion. If it were about religion, he would be singing an entirely different tune... For them, it’s rarely about religion: instead, it’s all about controlling others and acquiring wealth and power for themselves. Which is why more people have been murdered in the name of religion than any other single cause. Certainly, charlatans like Johnson surround themselves with the trappings of religion. They pray in public with great fervor. They claim, with absolute certainty, that their particular god or holy book tells them who should be favored and who should be shunned. They know the rituals and behaviors that will give their god a smile or provoke his (it’s almost always a man) wrath.

America’s oligarchs have always known that their warnings about making people “dependent on government” and “lazy” were a scam… Cities across America (and around the world) are proving, with new Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiments, how wrong the old Republican canard really is. And what kind of damage it’s done to America during the 80 or so years it’s held the GOP in its thrall. The first time I heard it I thought it was profound wisdom. Of course, I was only 16 years old, but it still seemed pretty important.

Oligarchy is always a transitional system, typically a mere waystation in the shift from democracy to fascism or some other form of authoritarianism… Many of America’s oligarchs — the people whose great wealth and/or ownership of media properties gives them tremendous influence over our politics — believe they’re arguing for policies that will produce a “better” America. Or at least an America that’s better and safer for oligarchs and their families and businesses. Tragically, they’re wrong. Their support for GOP-aligned racist, “free market deregulation,” and climate denial policies are tearing America apart and will threaten their grandchildren every bit as much as they do yours and mine. Nonetheless, in America and increasingly around the world, oligarchs taking over the political dialogues of nations are all the rage. From America to Turkey to Russia to the Philippines, oligarchs have either risen to near-absolute power or bought off so many politicians that they have effective control of entire political parties and thus entire nations. Increasingly, America’s oligarch problem has become the world’s oligarchy problem, as country after country follows the GOP’s example and sidelines labor rights, women’s rights, voting rights, and democracy itself.

There are two basic types of monopoly: those created by a business growing so large that it controls a marketplace, and those explicitly created by government. At the time of the writing of the Constitution, the term monopoly was generally used to describe either corporate monopolies like the British East India Company or government-created ones like patents and copyrights. Much of this book is devoted to the East India Company types of monopoly, but the monopolies created by patent and copyright laws are important as well, particularly because these systems can either foster or stifle innovation and markets.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — MAGA Mike Johnson says there's no need for gun laws cuz we still use cars... — Did you know that last quarter we had "blockbuster" GDP growth running at 4.9%? — Will Dean Phillips upset the campaign or will he be marginalized? — The GOP is eating their own: Matt Gaetz outs a gay Republican congressman — Why don't the judges threaten Trump with jail time now? — Why do auto execs think that EVs are not working? — Is the Koch network all about getting the "right" cases to the Supreme Court? — Speaking of the Supreme Court, it appears that the quarter-million-dollar loan a wealthy healthcare baron gave Clarence Thomas to buy a luxury super-bus was never repaid — Exposed: the Dangers in Viewing ADHD as a "Disorder" — Geeky Science - Here's the best "pill" to keep cancer at bay

If America is to recover any semblance of meaningful democracy in our country, we must cut out the cancer of big money in our political system by overturning Citizens United… According to Talkers Magazine, the “Bible of the Talk Radio Industry,” I talk with around 6 million people every week on my nationally syndicated call-in radio/TV show. What I’m hearing, increasingly (I’ve been doing this program for 20 years now), is frustration bordering on despair about the inability of America to get basic, necessary things done. Why is it, people ask, that we can’t do anything about guns amidst all these mass shootings? Or homelessness? Or affordable healthcare and education? Why are we moving so slowly on climate change? How did social media get excused from responsibility for its own content and then become overrun by Putin bots and Nazis?

In Johnson, the GOP have found the perfect embodiment of their deplorable basket of hatreds - the only “loves” are rightwing billionaires, the fossil fuel industry & of course Trump’s buddy, Putin... The election of Louisiana’s Mike Johnson as House Speaker proves the premise that all the GOP has left are Donald Trump and hate. As Congressman Jamie Raskin told reporters yesterday: “Donald Trump has cemented his control over the Republican conference in the House of Representatives. He has a stranglehold on the Republican Party. Even as he faces 91 criminal charges and several of his election lawyers have pleaded guilty now to election-related offenses, one of his enablers on January 6 has just become the speaker of the House Representatives.” Johnson’s hate of Democrats is so deep that he led a Trump-backed effort in the House to get Republicans to back a lawsuit by 18 Republican state attorneys general to overturn Biden’s election as president.

It’s so dramatic & so shocking that scientists — typically not prone to hyperbole — published in the journal BioScience: “Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory...” Sometime in the past year, this tiny planet we live on in an obscure corner of our Milky Way galaxy went through some sort of tipping point, a “state change” of sorts, and now things are different from how they’ve been at any other time in the 300,000 year history of the human race. Nobody knows for sure what that change or tipping point is.