Hartmann Report

The question today is whether we can twist free of them and again become a self-governing nation. Or if we’re doomed to continue to devolve into a full-blown oligarchy. “At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding , and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. “It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.” —Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissent in Citizens United

All the proof I need that Trump, if not the biblical Antichrist, is at least a political one, is what he says and does - his “fruits” tell us all we need to know about who he really is. Ari Melber yesterday opened his MSNBC show, The Beat, with a fascinating rant comparing Donald Trump and his lawyers to the role Al Pacino plays as Satan in the movie “The Devil’s Advocate.” A movie, Melber notes, that was shot in Trump’s apartment in Trump Tower where the devil lived. People claiming religious inspiration, and manipulating American political systems for what they say are religious reasons, have become a really big deal during the Trump era. It’s the new Republican thing, even among elected officials.

The GOP is threatening to turn Ben Franklin’s public libraries into corporate profit centers. It’s time for Americans to truly take our country back. I hope this week to be able to resume writing original articles for you every day; most likely, from what I understand about this type of back surgery, that should be Wednesday, but I’ll keep you up to date. In the meantime, this OpEd from last December is particularly relevant right now, as so much of the money in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal are specifically designated to go to “public-private partnerships,” one of the favorite techniques neoliberals use to make a buck off what should exclusively be public/government responsibilities. Enjoy!

Equal trade, fair trade, honest, decent trade requires reasonable balance between trading partners and strong domestic economies. When that happens, Adam Smith’s model works pretty well: prices for labor, materials, and finished goods all settle near the area where they “naturally” should be. But as we’ve seen from the immensely imbalanced statistics on distribution of wealth in chapter 19, something is not working the way Smith envisioned. Wages appear to be dwindling, and the number of strong, healthy competitors appears to be shrinking.

In America today if you poison & kill your wife you'll go to prison - but - if you poison and kill 100s of 1000s of people you'll take home a multi-million-dollar paycheck and buy a new yacht. I’ll be back to the regular Saturday News Report next weekend, when, hopefully, I’m no longer living on post-surgery painkillers. This piece was first published here back in January, but since then the problem has only gotten worse and really needs to be highlighted again…

These hinge points of history are never painless, but they always leave enlightenment and true change in their wake. These hinge points of history are never painless, but they always leave enlightenment and true change in their wake. I’m recovering (hopefully <s>) from back surgery (and special and grateful thanks to all of you who posted comments or sent me notes wishing me well), and wanted to share with you an OpEd that’s even more relevant today than it was back in March when it was first published. Now that Ukraine has recovered somewhat from the damage Trump did to them by denying them defensive weapons for almost a year as part of his extortion scheme, Russia is starting to suffer significant setbacks on the battlefield, most recently near Kherson. This article puts the entire Ukraine situation in the larger context of 80-year cycles that I referenced somewhat obliquely in Wednesday’s Daily Take. I believe you’ll find it very, very useful information to help make sense of today’s world events and the radical changes we’re all witnessing at this hinge-point of history.

Hopefully Democratic politicians and our media will begin to call the GOP out on Wanniski’s and Reagan’s "Two Santa Clauses" scam. Today I’m in the hospital here in Oregon for back surgery, so yesterday I put this post together and scheduled it for delivery to you this morning. It was originally published back in September of last year, but I think you’ll find it even more timely today. Basically, it explains why Republicans on the weekend shows last Sunday were all claiming the would both increase inflation and the budget deficit (it will do neither), and are preparing to again crank up their rhetoric against “Democrat [sic] tax-and-spend policies.”

We must not let right-wing Redcoat/Redhat terrorists — who have openly proclaimed their goal of Americans killing Americans in an ideological and racialized war — prevail at this critical time… Every 80 years, it seems, America confronts a crisis in which we must again choose whether to remain a democratic republic, or to turn into a corrupt strongman oligarchy run by the richest men in America, along the lines of today’s Hungary or Russia. We’re there again, now.

No matter how hard Republicans try to reinvent the Founders & Framers in the image of their libertarian billionaire patrons, the reality is that America was history’s first great liberal experiment... While Trump-humping Republicans like to misquote the Founders of this nation and pretend a similar patriotism, the simple reality is that all of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution would have been disgusted by these modern-day grifters.

Let’s use this anniversary to honestly evaluate the actions that have so bloodied our soldiers, while transferring trillions of US taxpayer dollars to Bush- & Cheney-related military contractors. One year ago this week the United States pulled out of Afghanistan, ending the longest “war” in American history. For this anniversary the media has been covering Afghan government corruption, the Taliban’s reversion to violence and misogyny, and the famine that’s beginning to creep across that benighted nation. But the two most important aspects of the war from an American policy perspective are being completely ignored.