Hartmann Report

Hopefully this time Democratic politicians and our media will, finally, call the GOP out on Wanniski’s and Reagan’s Two Santa Clauses scam and put an end to it once and for all… As the United States barrels toward a GOP-caused fiscal disaster and government shutdown, House Republicans have laid out their vision for the future of America. In a budget document they released yesterday, the legislators proposed dramatic $9 trillion cuts to Social Security, food stamps, aid to women and children, Medicare and Medicaid, along a new round of tax cuts for America’s billionaires. Their argument is that we need to “balance the budget now!” This is the classic Two Santas strategy that the GOP has been running ever since 1981.

For today’s bought-off GOP (and a handful of bought-off “problem solver” Democrats), as long as Republicans on the Supreme Court keep the corrupt payola machine running, there simply is no bottom… According to a Lexington Law survey, a third of Americans check their bank balances every day. People who don’t check daily are most likely to check after a paycheck has been deposited or should have been through direct deposit. Now, imagine if you looked at your bank balance and saw that your employer just put $2,596,153.00 into your account. And then the same amount showed up the following week. And the week after that. Every week for the entire year.

America gives a lot of lip service to the American Dream, but we haven’t led the world in meeting human needs since the Reagan Revolution... American families with children — and the American Dream they’re trying to live — are about to face a serious crisis. Counterintuitively, the pandemic brought a child-care boon to working families with kids. This was in large part due to the extraordinary efforts of Nancy Pelosi in the House and Bernie Sanders in the Senate, who got billions for expanded childcare funds to families in distress. Although these were technically emergency funds, they were similar to normal, routine programs offered by virtually every other developed country in the world. But when the pandemic was declared officially over, Republicans dug their feet in and said that there was no way America would ever do for its families what Europe, Canada, and the democracies of Asia do for theirs.

How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream. This is the most important, dynamic book—small as it is—on the cancers of monopoly by giant corporations written in our generation. I have read many books on monopolistic practices and have written on this subject. None had the potential to reach the moral imagination and indignation of the American people, where they live, work, and raise their families, like Hartmann’s engrossing volume. None, for sure, had the potential to reach so many members of Congress who are finally awakening to the long-overdue accounting of monopoly’s many costs—economic and beyond economic—and the need to strengthen the old antitrust laws and enact the new ones that reach all the way to Silicon Valley.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — The UAW is on strike and it's starting to feel like the pre-Reagan era! — Republicans in Red states are stripping power from urban voters. — The US economy is going strong under Biden, but Americans don't believe it. — Why are some high-profile Democrats encouraging SCOTUS to block a billionaire wealth tax? — Corrupt Republicans don't want the public to know what they're up to. — The Healthcare cost crisis. — Planet Earth is now operating outside parameters that are safe for humanity. — Time to make them pay.

It echoes the terror campaigns run by followers of Mussolini and Hitler in the early days of their rising to power… The DOJ’s indictment of Hunter Biden reveals a horrible truth: our criminal justice system just caved to threats of political violence. This is a terrible milestone, revealing how far down the fascist rabbit-hole the GOP has gone. It should be front-page news but is instead relegated to a footnote. Trump-aligned Nazis threatened violence against FBI agents and prosecutors investigating Hunter Biden after Republicans in Congress and hosts on Fox “News” and other rightwing outlets named people they claimed were “going soft” on the president’s son. As a result, the FBI has been forced to create a unit just to protect people working on the gun and tax charges brought against Hunter yesterday and in previous months.

Will January 6th be like the Kennedy assassination? Will we never know the whole story? This week we heard from a Secret Service agent who says there was more than one shooter at Dealy Plaza in Dallas back in November, 1963. JFK’s top aide, Dave Powers — who was in the car just behind JFK at the time of the assassination — told me the same thing, as Lamar Waldron and I reported in our book Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination. While people may disagree on their favorite theory of who was behind and who executed the killing, there’s broad agreement across America that we still don’t know the entire story (and the CIA and FBI continue to refuse to declassify thousands of pages of documents).

Slander campaigns like this must instead be hit head-on with outrage and ferocity... House Republicans have revived the infamous Swiftboat lie strategy that helped defeat John Kerry in 2004. In essence, it involves relentlessly lying about a candidate and smearing his or her name and reputation in the hopes it’ll shave a few points off their popularity with independent voters. While virtually 100 percent of the men who served with Kerry in Vietnam spoke glowingly of his service, a group who did not serve with him made up lies and exaggerations. Kerry and those who served with him tried to get the truth out, but, as Mark Twain is often credited as saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

Can we reverse Citizens United and other decisions that have handed America over to our oligarchs? Will it start with a solid progressive Democratic majority in Congress? Rightwing billionaires have seized control of our Supreme Court and, through that, pretty much other every other aspect of American political and economic life. For example, Heidi Przybyla reported this week on Politico that the wife of Clarence Thomas — the deciding vote on the Supreme Court with their 2010 Citizens United decision — was ready and waiting for that decision. Just a few weeks before it was handed down, she set up a corporation to take full advantage of it. Citizens United, of course, finished the job the Court had started in the 1970s when Lewis Powell wrote the decision in Bellotti that initially and partly legalized corporations buying and owning their very own politicians. Those decisions overturned more than a hundred years of good-government anti-bribery legislation, handing control of much of American politics over to the morbidly rich.

America has been lied into too many wars. It’s cost us too much in money, credibility, and blood. We must remember the lies, and tell our children about them so that memory isn’t lost... Today is 9/11, the event that first brought America together and then was cynically exploited by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to have a war against Iraq, followed by their illegal invasion of Afghanistan just a bit more than a year earlier. Yet the media today (so far, anyway) is curiously silent about Bush and Cheney’s lies. Given the costs of both these wars — and the current possibility of our being drawn deeper into conflict in both Ukraine and Taiwan — it’s an important moment to discuss our history of wars, both illegal and unnecessary, and those that are arguably essential to the survival of democracy in the world.