Hartmann Report

Will we continue to worship great wealth & allow the morbidly rich to manipulate our nation’s political processes to their own ends? Or will we wake up to the danger of this way of thinking? One of the stories out of the Davos Morbidly Rich Support Group meeting in Switzerland yesterday was Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema high-fiving each other, celebrating their success at killing voting rights legislation while preserving massive tax loopholes for banking and fossil fuel industry billionaires. But there was more “high” to that high-five than the media showed. They were literally high, both from the fortunes each has acquired and the billions they were surrounded by onstage. Science shows that acquiring wealth stimulates the pleasure/reward circuits in the brain’s ventromedial prefrontal cortex, just behind the eyes in the front-most part of the brain. Studies that map blood flow and electrical activity in the brain demonstrate that even anticipating money lights up this region, much like what happens when we’re presented with food or sex.

If working people were a bit more desperate about their economic situations, some conservative thinkers & the uber wealthy believe, they’d be less likely to organize, protest, or even vote. Why are America’s plutocrats funding efforts to weaken our democracy and replace it with plutocracy and oligarchy? Is it just about money? Or is there something much deeper that most Americans rarely even consider? An extraordinary investigative report from documented.net tells how morbidly rich families, their companies, and their personal foundations are funding efforts to limit or restrict democracy across the United States.

Why do other countries have extensive and functioning social safety nets and wealthy people who pay their taxes, and we have neither? We’re told by the Declaration of Independence that our nation was formed to provide every citizen with the basics of what government can and should provide: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” The “governed” in today’s America, however, aren’t getting the “happiness” they want or even, frankly, that they need

Anybody who thinks cooler heads will prevail like they did in 2011 doesn’t know these Republicans. Buckle up - we’re in for a wild ride that could spell worldwide disaster. The United States is hitting our self-imposed debt ceiling this Thursday. Outside of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, it doesn’t seem that anybody in Washington or our national media is taking seriously the House Republican threat to crash our economy if Democrats don’t agree to gut aid to higher education, the EPA, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But the situation is worse than most people realize. McCarthy’s goons really intend to follow through on their threat to cripple America if Democrats won’t go along with cutting entitlements for average working people and regulatory agencies. And the consequence, if history is any guide, could well be a worldwide depression that might even throws us into World War III.

"...women can act. ... Because the demographics and the opinion polls are on women’s side. Because women’s hour on the stage is long, long overdue. Because, whatever new obstacles are mounted against the future march toward equality, whatever new myths invented, penalties levied, opportunities rescinded, or degradations imposed, no one can ever take from the American woman the justness of her cause." — Susan Faludi, "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women" (1991)

The Best of the Rest of the News. — The new House rules continue to embrace Reaganomics to further impoverish the middle class and poor while making the morbidly rich even richer. — The difference between the way the French and Americans think about Social Security is fascinating — Is voter suppression the cool new thing for Republicans? — The Taliban has arrived in Missouri — Big Oil lies, wins, gains more political power, and continues working to destroy life on planet Earth — Geeky Science! Doing "acts of kindness" is one of the most effective psychotherapeutic interventions known to treat depression and anxiety — Crazy Alert! Trump wanted to use a nuclear weapon on N Korea & blame it on someone else? — Tweet of the day! AOC calls out the GOP meltdown on gas stoves, following a report that one in six cases of asthma are from childhood exposure to a gas stove in the home

These are the two primary strategies we all use to motivate ourselves and others every day. We use them in our internal self-talk, we use them with our children, and politicians use them constantly. Increasingly, the Democratic and Republican parties are offering us all a very real choice: trust or fear. Think back to the 2022 election we endured just two months ago. Remember the ads you saw on TV? Odds are each one fell into one of two very simple categories: “be afraid of the other guy” or “trust that I’ll make your life better.” Most of the “fear” ads came from Republicans; most of the “trust” ads came from Democrats. Pain or pleasure. Fear or trust.

Our hairdryer math gets really bizarre when we apply it to global warming. Most people know that a hairdryer draws about as much power as your average modern outlet will give it — typically around 1000 watts or, at 110 volts, just shy of 10 amps. (Plug in and turn on two hairdryers from the same outlet and you’ll usually blow a circuit breaker: most homes max out at 15 or 20 amp circuits.) If those numbers are gibberish to you, hang on: it’ll all have meaning in a moment, particularly when I get to the really shocking part about climate change and hairdryers.

We’ve entered the new McCarthy era, and Kevin is doing everything he can to empower Jordan as the new Joe. This column could get me thrown in jail. And the fact that I’m even thinking that way is the entire point of Jim Jordan’s new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, a subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee which Jordan chairs. He and his fellow fascist seditionists want Americans to be afraid of them, particularly Americans who may be in a position to identify their crimes and hold them to account.

And it’s not like we haven’t tried to remove that parasite. Republicans have taken control of the House of Representatives, and already have their sights set on forcing major cuts to “entitlements” like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. One of the promises McCarthy made to become speaker was to force a vote on dialing back 2023/2024 spending back to 2021 levels — and there’s been a 7% inflation increase in costs/expenses since then. In other words, they want massive cuts.