Hartmann Report

If you were looking for a date when our modern American oligarchy started, it would be January 30, 1976. It was a clear day in Washington, DC, the temperature well above freezing with a light wind.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Violence has become normalized in the GOP. — Trump says murdering Vice President Pence was just "common sense". — McCarthyism reappears in Wisconsin. — Republicans in Florida want to force employers — with a $50,000 fine — to keep people on the job and in the workforce who refuse to get vaccinated or wear a mask. — A man in New York has been arrested for threatening a GOP lawmaker. — Media Matters for America is reporting how Fox "News" has been spreading vaccine and Covid lies, myths and misinformation on a daily basis ever since Biden was elected. — A few of our Nazis — specifically the ones who organized the "Unite the Right" rally where Heather Heyer was murdered — are being held to account in a civil lawsuit. — The Bulwark is reporting on a 2020 plan to use corrupted police to keep Donald Trump in office. — A judge whose phone's ringtone is Donald Trump's campaign theme song has ruled that the jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse murder trial can't know that Rittenhouse was a white supremacist who posed with a terrorist group and flashed the white power sign for an iconic photo.— Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich is making a point I highlighted in my book The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream. — Coal baron Joe Manchin is, according to several billionaires who support him, soon to be the guest of honor at huge fundraisers. — Another woman has died because of "fetal heartbeat" and other draconian abortion restrictions. — In Science News, as Covid recedes among Blue state humans, it's exploding in the feral deer population. — Also in Science News, the oceans aren't the only thing rising from global warming: so is the outer edge of our atmosphere. — In Good News for our Republic, Steve Bannon has been indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of contempt of Congress. — More good news: California has expanded booster access to all adults as research suggests immunity wanes after 6 months or so.

Meanwhile, all across social media, the word is spreading: “The storm is upon us.” In 1926 Ernest Hemmingway published his novel The Sun Also Rises, which has this extraordinary bit of dialogue about how change happens in most aspects of life — and how governments rise and fall. “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. ”Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” ”What brought it on?” “Friends," said Mike. "I had a lot of friends. False friends.” For some unfathomable reason, Democrats insist on calling their Republican colleagues their “friends.” They are not friends. They are systematically destroying American democracy with the clear objective of replacing it with strongman authoritarianism, a new and American version of what Benito Mussolini called fascism.

Why is free money a good thing for the children of wealthy white kids but free money to poor people or minorities is a terrible social ill that damages those young people for life? Earlier this week, Newt Gingrich dropped by my show to promote his new book, Beyond Biden: Rebuilding the America We Love. We talked about how terrible it is when people get “free money” from the government, how it destroys individual initiative and turns otherwise productive people into lazy whiners.

American workers are fed up with minimum wage "Do you want fries with that?" jobs that you can't raise a family on or pay off student loans with. Reagan’s neoliberal policies — maintained to this day — sent our good manufacturing jobs overseas and now most all we’re left with are, “Do you want fries with that?” service jobs. Americans are furious.

If Democrats continue to ignore the American working class’ increasing hatred of neoliberal policies — particularly so-called “free trade” — they’ll get buried by it in the next elections. As I detailed last week, the neoliberal era that the Reagan presidency ushered in and has held until the past few years is disintegrating. The idea that the “invisible hand of the free market,” putting profits over people and turning America over to our billionaires and corporate monopolies will solve all our problems, is now largely seen as a disaster.

If we’re committed to reaching zero emissions, we must return to that goal of local self-sufficiency, this time with free power from the sun & wind instead of clear-cutting forests or burning fossils. Electric vehicle (EV) sales are booming in Oregon: we’ve gone from around 300 sold a decade ago to over 12,000 sold in our tiny state last year. And EV owners are saving a ton of money on their daily commutes — as much as half the cost of gasoline — by just plugging into their homes every night to recharge. But what if that home’s electricity wasn’t generated by a faraway dam or power plant, but from each car owner’s own home’s roof? The savings and convenience would be revolutionary.

The Iroquois Confederacy had a “law” that every decision had to be made in the context of its impact on the seventh subsequent generation... Imagine if scientists succeeded at genetically modifying a bacteria that’s found on the roots of almost all plants on Earth — and it was modified in a way that caused it to kill those plants. At the most extreme, if it got loose it could wipe out most plant life on Earth — and that almost happened just a few decades ago! At their core, all these crises and near-misses are really cultural as much as technological problems. That assertion runs through this book, "Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture."

The Best of the Rest of the News. The Best of the Rest of the News. — Good News: We may be on the edge of the end of the pandemic crisis. — More Good News: Congress has passed the largest infrastructure bill in decades. — January 6th was worse than we knew. — A thousand unionized nurses in Huntington, West Virginia have adopted "Build Back Better" for some of their signage as they strike against a huge hospital chain. — Meet the House's versions of Manchin and Sinema. Representatives Stephanie Murphy (D-FL), Ed Case (D-Hawaii), Jared Golden (D-Maine), Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.). — Seven Republicans who participated in the January 6th treason attempt were elected to public office last Tuesday. — Some within the Qanon movement/religion are saying that their ultimate goal is to kill Democrats and liberals. — In Science News: Could the Supreme Court Destroy the Planet?

Freedom of religion is one of America’s top values and deserves respect. Terror groups, on the other hand, have no place in a civilized society. A significant number of Qanon followers, according to NBC News reporter Ben Collins, believe the end-point of their religion will be reached when Donald Trump takes back control of America, unleashes police to mass-arrest elected and other high-profile Democrats, and Qanon followers then engage in an orgy of violence and murder against Democratic Party-aligned neighbors, friends and family.