Hartmann Report

If they can move more than half of Americans off traditional Medicare and onto these corporate plans, it’ll provide the political cover to kill off Medicare altogether — and they’re nearly there now. Share In 2003, George W Bush set up the destruction and privatization of Medicare. The end of “real Medicare” is getting closer every day, and Congress and Medicare’s administrators are doing nothing. Last Friday the Centers for Medicare Services (CMS) announced a 14.5% increase in Medicare Part B premiums, raising the monthly payments by the lowest-income Medicare recipients from $148.50 a month to $170.10 a month next year. If you’re trying to live on the bottom rung of Social Security (about $365/month), that’s consequential. People with Medigap policies are also seeing their policy price rises announced this month.

When LBJ signed the Civil & Voting Rights Acts the white Racists were homeless - so Nixon prepared one, Reagan fluffed up the pillows, & Trump stood out front with a bullhorn & a “Whites Only” sign. Yesterday all but 2 Republicans in the House of Representatives went on record saying it’s okay to openly encourage the assassination of one of their own, a person of color and elected Member of the House. That last part about Representative Ocasio-Cortez not being white was no coincidence, by the way. It was really at the core of the issue: Republicans now openly refer to her and the women of color who call themselves “the Squad” as the “Jihad caucus.” As in “Muslim terrorists,” as in “the Other.”

It’s time to break the curse of “Voodoo Economics”; a return to manufacturing must be at the core of the effort to rebuild the “wealth of this nation.” China just surpassed America as the nation with the greatest wealth in the world. But what does that mean? What is “wealth”? Look around you. If you’re at home, you may be seeing a living room with furniture and a television. In the kitchen there are appliances, dishes and cookware. Other rooms have beds, a desk, bookshelves and tools. The house or apartment itself sits on a foundation and is made of 2x4s and sheetrock and copper wiring and piping, covered with siding and roofing to protect it from the elements. All of those things are wealth. They have value.

This is one way to reveal how shallow and rotten so much of our lawmaking and business activity is today: put every decision to this test -- How will it affect the grandchildren of our children? Juice Media, one of the groups I support on Patreon, has a new video out (with a cameo at the end by Greta Thunberg) that puts the failures of the COP26 meeting in perspective. In summary, they say we are…well…to keep this family-friendly (in print at least), let’s just say “we’re screwed.”

We may well be facing that terrible question that Trump true believers faced last year: what do we do? Winter is coming... We’re demonizing the wrong people. This is not a call to “understand” or “have compassion” for Trump voters. Instead, it’s a call for a wholesale political and social indictment of Trump’s Big Lie, along with every elected Republican politician or media member who knows Trump lost but keeps perpetuating that Lie. If we fail, history may repeat itself and — this time — the result will be far worse than Bush’s lying us into two wars and privatizing Medicare.

If you were looking for a date when our modern American oligarchy started, it would be January 30, 1976. It was a clear day in Washington, DC, the temperature well above freezing with a light wind.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Violence has become normalized in the GOP. — Trump says murdering Vice President Pence was just "common sense". — McCarthyism reappears in Wisconsin. — Republicans in Florida want to force employers — with a $50,000 fine — to keep people on the job and in the workforce who refuse to get vaccinated or wear a mask. — A man in New York has been arrested for threatening a GOP lawmaker. — Media Matters for America is reporting how Fox "News" has been spreading vaccine and Covid lies, myths and misinformation on a daily basis ever since Biden was elected. — A few of our Nazis — specifically the ones who organized the "Unite the Right" rally where Heather Heyer was murdered — are being held to account in a civil lawsuit. — The Bulwark is reporting on a 2020 plan to use corrupted police to keep Donald Trump in office. — A judge whose phone's ringtone is Donald Trump's campaign theme song has ruled that the jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse murder trial can't know that Rittenhouse was a white supremacist who posed with a terrorist group and flashed the white power sign for an iconic photo.— Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich is making a point I highlighted in my book The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream. — Coal baron Joe Manchin is, according to several billionaires who support him, soon to be the guest of honor at huge fundraisers. — Another woman has died because of "fetal heartbeat" and other draconian abortion restrictions. — In Science News, as Covid recedes among Blue state humans, it's exploding in the feral deer population. — Also in Science News, the oceans aren't the only thing rising from global warming: so is the outer edge of our atmosphere. — In Good News for our Republic, Steve Bannon has been indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of contempt of Congress. — More good news: California has expanded booster access to all adults as research suggests immunity wanes after 6 months or so.

Meanwhile, all across social media, the word is spreading: “The storm is upon us.” In 1926 Ernest Hemmingway published his novel The Sun Also Rises, which has this extraordinary bit of dialogue about how change happens in most aspects of life — and how governments rise and fall. “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. ”Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” ”What brought it on?” “Friends," said Mike. "I had a lot of friends. False friends.” For some unfathomable reason, Democrats insist on calling their Republican colleagues their “friends.” They are not friends. They are systematically destroying American democracy with the clear objective of replacing it with strongman authoritarianism, a new and American version of what Benito Mussolini called fascism.

Why is free money a good thing for the children of wealthy white kids but free money to poor people or minorities is a terrible social ill that damages those young people for life? Earlier this week, Newt Gingrich dropped by my show to promote his new book, Beyond Biden: Rebuilding the America We Love. We talked about how terrible it is when people get “free money” from the government, how it destroys individual initiative and turns otherwise productive people into lazy whiners.

American workers are fed up with minimum wage "Do you want fries with that?" jobs that you can't raise a family on or pay off student loans with. Reagan’s neoliberal policies — maintained to this day — sent our good manufacturing jobs overseas and now most all we’re left with are, “Do you want fries with that?” service jobs. Americans are furious.