Hartmann Report

To save our Democracy -- it needs to be taken from the hedge funds, movie makers, and merchandise sellers, and returned to the hands of journalism professionals who understand and care about it. “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” —Thomas Jefferson

Neoliberalism is a wounded, dying animal. America is returning to populism, whether our politicians want it or not: the big question is will it be progressive or fascist populism? Populism was the big winner in the Virginia election yesterday. As Glen Abernathy noted this morning in The Washington Post: “The fact that parental rights in education became a central campaign issue shows that populism is still a potent element in U.S. politics. And in the Republican Party, even with Trump out of the White House, populism — not conservatism — remains the GOP’s principal identity.” But populism can cut two ways, as the world saw in 1932 when Americans and Germans brought to power two very different types of populists: FDR and Hitler.

If a half-million people had died — unnecessarily — while Obama was president, you know how the GOP would react: after all, they held 4+ years of hearings over Benghazi and hounded Clinton for years. All across America this past year-and-a-half 700,000+ people have died an agonizing, terrifying, drowning-in-their-own-fluids death, their relatives helpless, saying goodbye using Zoom or FaceTime. Families broken and shattered; husbands, wives, children and grandchildren left bereft; doctors, nurses, and physicians assistants dying along with them or holding their hands as they drew their final, tortured breath. Many of those deaths were absolutely unnecessary. They happened because of decisions made by a small group of people led by Donald Trump.

There is no country in the world or time in history when racism as a political strategy has ended well for a nation - If the GOP fails to purge itself of its racist politicians our future is grim. For Democrats, there are tons of issues on the ballot. Climate change, free college, expanding Medicare, family leave after giving birth, Pre-K education, middle-class tax cut, child tax credit, the minimum wage, the right to unionize, and literally dozens of other less high-profile ways to expand democracy and rebuild our middle class after 40 years of assault by neoliberal Reaganomics. For Republicans there’s really only one issue: race. Or, more specifically, maintaining the dominance of white people over every other racial group in America, and the survival of political and economic white supremacy.

How the Supreme Court made itself the most powerful branch of government. Part One: The Hidden History of Judicial Review. To understand the Supreme Court, one must understand the zeitgeist of the Founding Fathers’ generation and the philosophical history that led the founders and framers to create the Court itself. Part 1 of this book looks at the founders’ intents and concerns—and how quickly the Court seized the power of judicial review to become a nearly despotic branch of government. The conclusion of part 1 explores how one man sparked a right-wing movement to seize control of the American government—including the outsized power of the Supreme Court.

The Best of the Rest of the News — We're at a crisis-for-democracy moment because of Trump's Big Lie. — The Anti-Defamation League wants to know how many more people need to die so the Murdochs' can make more money? — Death is their electoral strategy and its working. — Republicans claimed that people were quitting their jobs all across America because unemployment benefits were too generous. — Jurors in the "Unite The Right" Nazi march in Charlottesville are being asked if they "listen to the Thom Hartmann Program," while the judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse murder trial in Kenosha, Wisconsin has told attorneys that they may not refer to the dead victims as "victims" but only as "looters, arsonists or rioters." — On the other hand, a judge has ordered the Post Office to stop delaying absentee ballots from reaching voters in Blue counties in Virginia. — Is Facebook still facilitating the slave trade? — This past week, oil industry CEO's testified before Congress that they were not funding climate change lies and disinformation. — Chicken producers in America have a salmonella problem. — In Geeky Science: Two different studies show that both Covid and processed foods appear to harm the brain, producing loss of cognitive ability and memory. — In Good News: Chicago is on the verge of creating one of the nation's largest experiments with a guaranteed basic income program. — More Good News: A group of high-profile folks ranging the political spectrum from Bill Kristol to Noam Chomsky have authored a letter to Congress asking the Senate to blow up the filibuster to pass voting rights to save our democracy.

Billionaires & their companies now own politicians -- and the Supreme Court set it all up with their poisonous Citizens United decision. If President Biden’s Build Back Better plan goes down in flames, you can blame the US Supreme Court. Their Citizens United decision, in fact, is destroying both American politics and the planet. Case in point: Oil industry executives testified before Congress this week, suffering a barrage of questions, including particularly intense ones from Reps. Ro Khanna, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Katie Porter. The CEOs exhibited the same sort of arrogant insolence Mark Zuckerberg displayed in July of last year when he was hauled before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. It was, basically, a smug, “Screw you, Congressperson.”

The filibuster is the world’s largest fig leaf, big enough to hide dozens of cowardly or bought-off senators of both parties, all at one time. If the American republic is to die in the next few years, it’ll have the filibuster’s fingerprints all over it. Republican legislatures around the country are passing laws that will let them — rather than their states’ voters — decide which presidential candidate gets their state’s electoral college votes in 2024. If such laws were in effect in 2020, Donald Trump would still be president.

Working people in poorly-run, wildly-infected Red states are singing along with Johnny Paycheck. It’s the Covid, stupid! That simple reality is apparently too complex for most of the media to figure out, as they transcribe and repeat Republican talking points over and over again about how people are quitting their jobs because the $300 a month unemployment benefits earlier this year were “too generous.”

Perot was right & so were Henry VII, Alexander Hamilton, and Deng Xiaoping -- It’s time for America to recover our gutted middle class & to ensure our national security. Late last week Ryan Petersen, the CEO of Flexport, put together a truly fascinating twitter thread describing the massive bottleneck of containers at the Port of Long Beach, the nation’s busiest... While the immediate bottleneck problem had to do with too many containers and not enough land on which to handle and store them (particularly empty ones), it highlights an even larger problem that goes back to a major change in US trade policy in the 1980s, a part of Reagan’s neoliberal revolution.