Hartmann Report

Part III: How Not to Fail. The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were. —John F. Kennedy

The Best of the Rest of the News — How the Senate is fine-tuning anti-democracy minority rule. — Senator John Fetterman’s brave admission of his clinical depression and hospitalization for it will almost certainly save many Americans’ lives. — Did rogue mostly Israeli contractors help put Trump into office and push Brexit on the British people on behalf of Russian and/or American billionaires? — Women in Kentucky who order abortion pills through the mail or travel to other states to end their pregnancies may one day soon be facing imprisonment and lethan injection for murder if a new bill becomes law. — Why does Rite Aid employ pharmacists who refuse to give Covid booster shots? — Will the Michigan GOP survive the ongoing assault by religious zealots, gun nuts, racist and homophobic bigots, and openly Nazi followers of the Confederate “lost cause” mythology? — It’s the John Brown Gun Clubs to the rescue of drag shows! — Geeky Science! Can preventing dementia and cognitive impairment just be a few thousand steps away? — Crazy Alert! Ann Coulter welcomes Nikki Haley — the American-born daughter of Indian immigrants — to the 2024 presidential race with the classic racist slur, “Go back to your country.”

Big Pharma is buying off members of Congress to encourage an end to “March-in” and block any efforts to regulate the cost of drugs or let Medicare negotiate prices. In his State of the Union address, President Biden called out insulin, a treatment for diabetes that was developed over 100 years ago and, he said, costs about $10 a vial to make. Americans can pay over $1,000 for that $10 vial. While he was successful at getting insulin costs capped at $35 per month for Medicare recipients, “Problem Solver” corporate sellout Democrats in the House and Kirsten Sinema in the Senate — along with every single Republican — blocked his efforts to extend that to all Americans with diabetes. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

It’s hard to overstate how much damage these corrupt rulings by Republicans on the Court — from Buckley and Bellotti in 1976/1978 to Citizens United in 2010 — have done to American democracy. I took a couple of flights this past weekend that reminded me again of the damage Republicans on the Supreme Court did to America when they legalized political bribery. The good news is that there are numerous things Congress can do to undo the Court’s bizarre doctrine that money is the same thing as free speech and corporations have Bill of Rights freedoms and protections as “persons.” Neither of these “rights to bribe” by the morbidly rich and corporations were recognized in the early years of our republic. Even today we’re unique among advanced democracies in holding these Supreme Court-created doctrines which underpin much if not most of today’s political corruption.

Will democracy survive in this land of its modern birth? Will we take seriously the threat of those who proudly called themselves “Cultural Warriors?” They call themselves culture warriors. In reality they’re fascists. Both the world and our American political system are rapidly dividing along two simple political lines: democracy or fascism. And the typical device fascists have used to rise to power, in country after country for centuries, has been what Republicans today refer to as their beloved “culture wars.” Democracies allow healthy debate about cultural and political issues, from the level of government support for the needy, to limits on immigration, to the funding of public functions like schools, libraries, and utilities. Control of government in democracies regularly and peacefully changes, reflecting the will of the people, as do the policies they legislate into law.

Is it useful to examine why so many white people, with their built-in white privilege, would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with wannabe dictators like Trump, Abbott, and DeSantis? Male white supremacy is real and white suppression of minorities, particularly Black and Brown people along with gender minorities and women, absolutely permeates every aspect of our society, from business to culture to governance. Without setting aside that reality, it’s useful to examine why so many white people, with their built-in white privilege, would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with wannabe dictators like Trump, Abbott, and DeSantis.

Back in 1896 & 1929 people didn’t need a detailed multi-decade, multi-country analysis of Horse & Sparrow to know it was bad news: the Great Panic & the Republican Great Depression convinced everybody. Kevin McCarthy’s House Republicans, in their demand that Democrats gut Social Security and education monies to give more trillions in tax breaks to billionaires, are once again trying the Reaganomics hustle. Only this time with a twist. Boomers and many Gen Xers remember how the media swooned for Art Laffer’s napkin in the 1980s, and then President Reagan turned it into a movement to cut taxes on billionaires because, he lied, it would make average working-class people richer. What most don’t remember — because none of us were alive back in the 1920s or 1890s — is that Laffer and Reagan hadn’t come up with anything novel.

"A spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar". — Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Budgets reflect policy priorities, and the GOP is now telling us what they're really all about: hunger for poor people, low taxes for billionaires, and to hell with students in debt. — If you agree that "God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society" then you're in alignment with 54 percent of all Republicans, according to a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute in association with the Brookings Institution. — First they came for American history, now they're coming for science. — Should the new GOP "Fair Tax" should be renamed the "Billionaire Wel-Fair Tax?" — Railroad companies paid off Republican politicians for the Trump administration to block safety rules before the Ohio 150-car train derailment and fireball explosion. — Saudis sentence an American to 19 years in a hellhole prison over a tweet. — In Good News — The Church of England is considering the question: must God be a man?

We're facing the early warning signs of a possible new pandemic perhaps more deadly than Covid, all because Trump chose to politicize the Covid pandemic in a racist fit. Trump’s no longer president, but he and his racism could still be responsible for millions more American deaths from a new pandemic disease. How and why? I’ll explain in just a moment, but first let’s look at the disease itself. One reason egg prices are so high right now is because a new strain of bird flu — H5N1 — has popped up among egg-laying chickens. The disease has a shocking mortality rate, leading to the death (both from disease and from euthanizing flocks to stop its spread) of almost 60 million domesticated birds in the US alone, so far.