Hartmann Report

Orbán’s speeches this week raise the question: Is he teaching the American GOP through his example, or is the GOP teaching him through their “replacement theory” & new laws banning books. Republicans believe that Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán has figured out the “secret sauce” to turn a republic into a hard-right oligarchy, and today they’re in Budapest drinking deep from his insights on the fine points of destroying democracy. In two speeches this week, Orbán laid out his Hungarian version of the racist American “Great Replacement Theory,” trashed Jewish financier George Soros as a proxy for Jews around the world, reiterated the importance of having friendly rightwing billionaires seize control of a nation’s media, and attacked societies that allow gay marriage and tolerate trans people as engaging in “gender madness.”

We need a new political vocabulary that includes "populist," "sellout," & "fascist": If the American press were to use simple, clear labels like this, it would save us all a lot of political confusion. The Chyron on MSNBC yesterday said, “Populist Fedderman Wins PA Primary.” A few weeks ago during the French elections the American press was referring to Marine Le Pen as a “French populist.” Trump is often called a “populist” in our media, as is Bernie Sanders. All of which raises the question: “Why are we using this one single word to describe radically different types and stripes of politicians?” Is “populist” simply shorthand or pop-news-speak for media-friendly, outrageous, or high profile politicians?

The poison that is racism has never made a nation better; every time it’s been used for profit or power it’s ended up destroying both its victims and, eventually, its promoters. Yesterday‘s elections show both a strong progressive drift across the Democratic Party, and an aggressive move toward fascism being driven by the base of the GOP and some of its billionaire donors. But more urgently, the Republican Party has a terrorism problem, and the failure this week of the party’s leadership and members to call it out after the terrorist attack in Buffalo suggests they’re just fine with it.

The white supremacy industry in America with a healthy fundraising and publishing arm stood right beside him giving him talking points and a twisted history to justify his rage... When the Buffalo Terrorist murdered 10 people with a semi-automatic rifle, he didn’t act alone. The weapons industry in the United States stood right beside him, making sure he had easy and legal access to highly profitable weapons of war that are banned or heavily regulated in every other developed country in the world. The Republican Party stood right beside him, taking money from that industry in exchange for blocking legislation the majority of Americans support that would regulate guns in America. Republican appointees on the Supreme Court stood right beside him.

When Donald Trump, Paul Manafort & Vladimir Putin set out to destroy the government of America, they aimed their largest weapons at this single most important element of any society: trust. The crisis with the Supreme Court; the racist mass shooter in Buffalo; Republican primary candidates trying to one-up each other on how they will refuse to count all the ballots in the 2024 election; and our hitting 1 million deaths from Covid all derive from the same thing: the destruction of trust. Donald Trump destroyed our trust in our public health institutions for his own political gain, so we have massively more Covid deaths than, for example, Australia. As the New York Times noted this weekend: “If the United States had the same Covid death rate as Australia, about 900,000 lives would have been saved.”

How Corporations Became 'People' - and How You Can Fight Back. People, at the time, generally weren’t all that concerned about the fate of the world’s dolphins. It was the last week of June 1944, and the war wasn’t going well for Adolf Hitler. The killing machines of his death camps were running full out, straining his resources and creating consternation as word leaked out across Europe. His forces were falling back before the Soviets, and his generals openly worried about an Allied invasion on the French coast. On Thursday, June 29, almost all of the eighteen hundred Jews of Corfu were murdered upon their arrival at Auschwitz, while twenty thousand Jewish women were relocated to the concentration camp at Stutthof. On Friday, June 30, more than a thousand Parisian Jews arrived at Auschwitz.

The Best of the Rest of the News. - We're in danger of losing our democracy and most Americans are in denial. - Today is a nationwide day of action for abortion rights, and to protest the loss of privacy rights embodied in Alito's draft opinion that will affect us all. - The baby formula shortage proves we have a monopoly problem in America. - Republicans don't care about "freedom," unless we're talking about the freedom to avoid paying taxes or the freedom to pollute. - Congressman Hakeem Jeffries has a question for Justice Clarence Thomas and it's really worth taking 2 minutes to watch - Why is inflation being blamed on Biden? - Crazy Alert! President Trump thought the increased severity of hurricanes and other terrible weather in America wasn't caused by global warming but, instead, that China had a "hurricane gun" they were shooting at us.

Republicans not only cling to minority rule, they now want to go to the next step and impose a neofascist Taliban-style government on America run by the morbidly rich and fanatically religious. Minority rule is killing America. This is most obvious in our Senate and Supreme Court, although it’s also hurt the credibility of the presidency and is damaging many of our states. It’s happening because of two issues dating back to the founding of our republic, which brought us the Electoral College and unequal representation in the US Senate.

To stop our climate-change-driven suicide, Congress must stop allowing oil exports, end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, and promote clean American energy. Each American — man, woman and child — paid around $2000 last year to subsidize the fossil fuel industry, according to an analysis this year by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Worldwide, the fossil fuel industry’s lobbying power has gotten it about $6 trillion a year in subsidies; America’s $600 billion a year gift to the energy barons pours cash into this massively profitable industry at the rate of a million dollars a minute. We’re funding our own suicide: the world’s largest fossil fuel companies right now have drilling and mining operations underway that, if completed, will push the world well past a catastrophic 2.7 degrees Celsius, the level that some scientists estimate could lead to a dinosaur-level extinction.

It’s time to establish an ethics standard for the Court, as well as passing a law that legalizes abortion nationwide that can’t be struck down by 5 handpicked religious fanatics. Pramila Jayapal and Elizabeth Warren just introduced legislation to impose a code of judicial ethics on the Supreme Court. Today Chuck Schumer is holding a vote in the Senate to legalize abortion nationwide. The barrier to either becoming law is the Supreme Court’s own argument that it’s essentially above the law with regard to ethics and that — on constitutional issues — it has final say and can’t be overruled by Congress without a constitutional amendment.