Hartmann Report

The libertarians have had 40 years to make their project work, we’re hitting peak libertarianism and it’s tearing our country apart, pitting Americans against each other, and killing people every day. This weekend Senator Pat Toomey went on Jake Tapper’s State of the Union to try to clean up Republican sabotage of a bill to provide healthcare to millions of veterans exposed to toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. He didn’t do himself or his party any favors as he tried to weasel out of responsibility; America knows that after the bill was defeated Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley fist-bumped in celebration of screwing our vets. How is it that Republicans can casually embrace such cruelty? Why have 12 GOP-controlled states refused to this day to expand Medicaid for their 30 million minimum-wage working people when the federal government covers 90 percent of the cost?

In the absence of the controls recommended by the Founders and early state regulation, corporations have continued to grow in size and power without limit. But they haven’t done it just by creating new wealth in the economy. Much of it, instead, has been accomplished by increasingly consolidating existing wealth, moving it out of the hands of the middle class and into the hands of the top few percent of Americans economically. Of course, some new wealth has been generated, but nowhere near enough to explain the observable facts.* The past thirty years has, in fact, seen the largest transfer of wealth from working people to the rich and very rich in the history of both this nation and any nation on earth.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Thursday my daily take was about how our manufacturing dependence on China cripples our ability to stand up for Taiwan, one of the most vibrant and boisterous democracies on the planet. Now China has doubled-down. — Republican Senators Pat Toomey and Mitch McConnell engineered a vote against funding for US veterans sick or dying from cancers and other diseases they got from open burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Josh Hawley (R-Chickencoop) and Ted Cruz fistbumped in celebration. — In Ohio, multimillionaire hedge fund manager and GOP senatorial candidate JD Vance has said the quiet part out loud: women must, in his opinion, be subservient to their husbands "for the children," even when their husbands beat, rape, or otherwise subject them to violence. — Ever since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision, Congress has been in a state of perpetual paralysis. — Republicans hate gay and trans kids so much they want to deny them school lunches until the Biden administration stops requiring schools to report instances of hate and discrimination against LGBTQ children. — A group of Texas Republicans are suing to block Obamacare’s requirement that insurance companies provide preventative healthcare for STDs, including HIV and HPV. — Crazy Alert! The Sperm Bros are touring the world, offering to help women who don’t want to go through fertility clinics get pregnant.

The GOP has become a rotting corpse, politically, infested with maggots & defended by wealthy vultures. It has only one true principle, greed, & is determined to reinvent America in greed’s image. Many Americans, looking at the GOP’s position on the issues, find themselves confused. Why would the party claiming to be the last bastion of reverence for “life” in America also be the party that supports 50,000 American gun deaths every year, the leading cause of death among children and more than every other developed country in the world combined? Why would they support anti-abortion laws that don’t even contain exceptions for the life of the mother? Why do they fight so hard to keep healthcare out of the reach of so many Americans (12 GOP-controlled states still refuse to offer Medicaid — 90% paid for by the federal government — to their low-income working people)?

Bringing our manufacturing back from overseas will reverse the 40-year-long slide of the American middle class and rebuild our nation’s security & economy. China is threatening the United States: this could get very ugly, very quickly. Here’s what’s happening. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is planning a trip to Taiwan, the first for a Speaker in a quarter-century, as part of a larger trip to the region that will include Singapore, Japan, Indonesia and Malaysia. China broke away from Taiwan in 1949 and has claimed ever since that the island nation is part of China proper. Taiwan, one of the worlds’ most vibrant democracies, wants to maintain their independence as a separate, sovereign nation. China is not happy about Pelosi’s trip and the increased level of US recognition of Taiwan’s independent existence that it endorses, making implied threats of military or significant diplomatic punishment if she goes through with the trip.

We are stumbling — seemingly oblivious — into the bared teeth of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch driven by humanity itself. We are walking straight into it and pretending it’s not here. The world today is on the verge of a major food emergency, provoked in part by Russia’s attack on Ukraine but more broadly by the damage heat from global warming is doing to crops worldwide. This is both a crisis and an opportunity. Let’s start with the basics. Food is the raw material that makes people. More food, more people; less food, fewer people. This is a basic law of nature. The insect-eating bird population around us, for example, is a fraction today of what it was 20 years ago because its food — the insect population — has been decimated by pesticides and loss of habitat (their food source), over the past few decades.

No republic in history has ever survived as a functioning democracy more than a few generations once political bribery is legalized or becomes widespread. A recent poll from the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics found that a majority of Americans agree that the government is “corrupt and rigged against everyday people like me.” Sixty-six percent of Republicans and 46 percent of Democrats agreed with that statement; only 9 percent of Republicans and 25 percent of Democrats disagreed.

There are resources and there are resources. For corporations, resources include raw materials, labor, the property and the equipment they use, the talents of the people they employ, and cash. For humans, resources include air, water, food, shelter, clothing, health care, and the means of exchange to ensure these.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Unless you've been living under a rock or watching Fox "News" you know that the January 6th Committee delved deeply into the 187 minutes during which Trump watched an armed crowd attack the Capitol and kill five people while looking to assassinate the Vice President and Speaker of the House. — Arguably the most important "stabilizer" of the US government is our Civil Service, made up of around 2 million federal employees. — One in five Americans now says that violence against other Americans to achieve a political goal is acceptable. — Three Republican-controlled counties in Pennsylvania are refusing to certify the recent primary election, in an apparent test of their ability to refuse to count mail-in ballots, which come predominantly from Democrats. — Apparently some evangelical Christians have started reading their Bibles. — Idaho Republicans say if it's a choice between a fetus or mom, mom dies and the fetus lives. — A handful of rightwing billionaires have put up about half of all the money raised by the two major GOP super PACs that work to elect Republicans to the House and Senate. — Donald Trump Junior ripped off investors, vendors, employees and customers of a company he started while his dad was in the White House. — The UN's Secretary General, António Guterres, tells the world that humanity now faces "collective suicide" if we don't take prompt action to stop climate change. — Geeky Science! Will monarch butterflies soon be extinct? — A special note about Monday. I'm on a book deadline for The Hidden History of American Democracy and taking Monday off from the radio/TV show as well as this newsletter. You'll get the Sunday Book Excerpt tomorrow, then I'll be back in your inbox on Tuesday. Thanks for understanding… — Crazy Alert! Josh Hawley has broken the internet, as people all over the world are rolling on the floor laughing

Do Republicans really think public schools are communist? Or is there something else going on here? Michael Peroutka is the Republican Party’s nominee — elected in the primary this week — for Maryland Attorney General. He wants to close the state’s public schools because, he says, they are “communist.” Do you believe he’s really afraid that the heir to Fidel Castro’s presidential palace will overthrow America? They don’t even have communists in Russia anymore. The Chinese use the word, but they don’t do it: capitalism is thriving there, even beating us in some ways.