Hartmann Report

Violence is the cardinal characteristic, the logo, the brand identity of fascism. Every fascist movement in history has lifted itself to power on the scaffold of violence. Blood alone moves the wheels of history. –Benito Mussolini “Have you noticed that people are getting meaner?” the villain asks in a Paramount+ promo for their new show Evil. “What does it mean?” asks the “nice” character. “It means,” says the evil character with a note of triumph in her voice, “that your side is losing.” And here we are. The lede of an above-the-fold story in yesterday’s Washington Post lays it out: “In the past 24 hours, there has been an uptick in the number of violent threats against lawmakers on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and all lawmakers on the committee are likely to receive a security detail…”

How did a corrupt senator even find himself in a position where he could’ve handed two pieces of paper to the VP that would have changed the outcome of our presidential election? The Electoral College. We just learned from the January 6th hearings that Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson tried to hand a phony slate of electoral votes from Michigan and Wisconsin to Vice President Mike Pence just before the election was certified on January 6. How did a corrupt senator even find himself in a position where he could’ve handed two pieces of paper to the Vice President that would have changed the outcome of our presidential election? The Electoral College.

The GOP has planted their flag deeply into the soil of fear and hate, right up to and including a call to repeal the Voting Rights Act of 1965 - this year we must vote as if our future depends upon it. The Texas GOP’s state party meeting last week gave America a clear insight into Republican thinking going into this year’s election and the 2024 presidential race. They’ve planted their flag deeply into the soil of violence, fear, white supremacy, and hate right up to and including a call to repeal the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Democratic candidates across the nation, on the other hand, show that party is leaving behind the neoliberalism of Clinton and Obama and moving forward with a futuristic “Freedom Agenda.”

The SCOTUS is about to use it's ill-gotten power on behalf of the fossil fuel industry to cripple America’s ability to meet the challenge of climate change. It appears that Republicans on the Supreme Court are preparing to light our planet on fire. Longtime readers of my work and listeners to my program know that the Supreme Court has seized for itself extraordinary powers that the Framers of the Constitution never intended for it to have. There are summaries here and here, for example. This is not an opinion unique to me or my book The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America: two Harvard Law professors just this week wrote an article for The Atlantic that lays out pretty much the same arguments. And now it appears Republicans on the Court are about to use that ill-gotten power — on behalf of the fossil fuel industry — to cripple America’s ability to meet the challenge of climate change.

There’s a side to regulation that most people don’t think about, and it has far-reaching effects if representatives of corporations are writing the rules. Once a regulation is passed saying, “you can emit no more than 10 ppm [parts per million] of mercury,” you can legally emit up to 10 ppm.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — "A Big Mistake": Economists warn Fed rate hikes risk plunging US into recession. — Is America doomed to follow Russia and Hungary's path to fascism like Fox "News" and the GOP are hoping? — Hating on LGBTQ people has been the province of bigots and those who'd advance their political goals at the expense of people least likely to fight back. Cowards, in other words. — New Mexico is the first test run for Republicans refusing to count votes before the critical 2024 presidential election. — When Republicans want to string along Democrats — the modern version of Lucy and the football — they call on Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn. — Republicans have been trying to end Social Security and Medicare ever since both programs were put into law. — I remember "duck and cover" when I was in elementary school in the 1950s, but we never really took the possibility that we'd all die in a nuclear holocaust seriously, in part because we never saw any evidence of it happening (at least until the Cuban Missile Crisis). — In Good News, Houston has moved over 25,000 people off the Streets and into homes of their own. — GOP Death Cult Alert! DeSantis doesn't care how many children die from Covid, and is proud of it.

Student debt is a crime against our nation, weakening our intellectual infrastructure - Any nation’s single biggest asset is a well-educated populace and student debt diminishes that. Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) along with 55 colleagues just sent a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona requesting both details and rapid action on President Biden’s campaign promise to forgive student debt in America.

When Trump ordered Pence to overturn the 2020 election, he was trying to repeat what Republicans did in 1876. There are things we can do to prevent a third attempt in 2024 and we need to do them now. Today’s January 6th Committee’s hearings are about the pressure campaign on Mike Pence to hand the election of 2020 to Trump. Official Washington and the media are shocked — “Shocked, I tell you!” — that John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump had come up with the “bizarre” idea that Vice President Pence could toss the election to the House, thus keeping Trump in office. They’re amazed when they reference five states having submitted two slates of electors each, the “real” Biden ones and the “phony” Trump ones that Giuliani and Eastman conspired with Republicans to create. But this was neither bizarre nor new.

If saving trillions of dollars and millions of lives isn’t enough to end political bribery in America, what will it take? Monday, Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Lindsey Graham had a debate on Fox Nation. Sanders asked: “In the United States, Lindsey, we spend twice as much per capita on health care compared to the people of any other country, while major countries like Canada, the U.K., Germany manage to supply health care to all their people. Why is that?” The simple answer is the same reason we have an ongoing climate crisis and a student loan crisis that Republicans refuse to let Congress address: the legal bribery of politicians like Lindsey Graham.

Buying a Medicare Advantage policy is a leap in the dark, and the federal government generally is not there to catch you: forewarned is forearmed. In my multiple writings on the Medicare Advantage scam, the most common two responses I get (besides, “Thanks, you may have saved my life!”) are, “I’ve never had a problem with my Advantage plan,” and “If it’s so bad, how come so few people are saying so?” Both are honest, good-faith questions and highlight how easy it is for insurance companies to get away with their Medicare Advantage scams. The answer to both boils down to the unique nature of insurance being the only “product” we buy where we have no idea if it’s any good until something bad happens — which can take years. Every state in the union has an insurance commissioner. But why?