Hartmann Report

We once celebrated those who pushed back against greed, from Dickens’ Christmas Carol to the Grinch: we must condemn greed and again celebrate community, love & selflessness. As the Omicron variant puts us in its cross-hairs, America is still stuck with a predatory health insurance and healthcare system that’s barely up to the task of meeting our nation’s needs. This new variant apparently emerged from South Africa, which has been unsuccessfully begging the WTO for 14 months for a “TRIPS Waiver” to allow them to manufacture Covid vaccine…which might have prevented this variant from evolving.

I published this book in 2008 to help Democrats with messaging, but it applies to just about every aspect of life...

The Best of the Rest of the News: Find out if your cat is a psychopath like Trump, and explore a modern-day Jules Verne-like expedition to the "Center of the Earth"...

A warning, a call to protect the future, and a prayer for love and decency... On this Thanksgiving weekend, I thought you may find of value a short (less than 5 minutes) collection of my favorite 5 clips from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address at the end of his presidency, as he peacefully handed the reins of American power over to President John F. Kennedy. Although it was given a few months after Thanksgiving, it carries a concern, a warning, a call to protect future generations, and ends with a prayer for peace, understanding, and — from this old warrior who defeated the Nazis and saved the world from fascism in WWII — love.

If Congress wants democracy to survive, it must both roll back Citizens United & regulate Big Tech, forbidding them from allowing foreign governments to pretend to be Americans on social media. Former Assistant Director of the FBI, Frank Figliuzzi, just posted on Twitter: "Divide & conquer: A sample of 32,315 pro-Rittenhouse hashtag tweets, Nov 19-20, showed 29,609 with disabled geolocation. Of those, 17,701 were listed as “foreign”, but a deep scrub revealed most of those were in Russia, China, and the EU. @Tara_Writer @TAPSTRIMEDIA #Rittenhouse". The fact-checking site Snopes looked into similar claims and found massive evidence of foreign-based social media accounts pretending to be Americans while cheerleading Rittenhouse and questioning the viability of America.

We’ve already banned fully-automatic weapons, shoulder-fired missiles & sawed-off shotguns, only used to kill humans -- it’s not a stretch ban Rittenhouse’s AR15 & Russian AK47s to save American lives. Expect the gun control debate in America to really get hot over the next 12 months as Beto O’Rourke runs for governor of Texas. O’Rourke said, when running for president in 2019, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47!” And it’s entirely time for this debate. America has just a bit more than 4 percent of the world’s population, but, with more guns than people in our country, we have more than 40 percent of all the guns in civilian hands in the world.

All the Republican Party has left, now that they’ve abandoned any pretense over the past 40 years of supporting working people or even basic infrastructure, is hate, fear and death. The Rittenhouse verdict sent a shudder through America as terrorists and vigilantes celebrated: one rightwinger called for wholesale slaughter of Democrats saying on Telegram, “The left won’t stop until their bodies get stacked up like cord wood.” On Facebook, rightwing sites celebrating the verdict were the most popular nationwide by a factor of 9 to 1.

Echoing warnings Jefferson made a century and a half earlier, Roosevelt argued that America’s survival depended on constant vigilance against the Economic Royalists... This book, which was startlingly prescient about what’s happened over the past five years and essentially predicted the 2016 Trump election back in 2013, is no longer in print. But there’s some really great stuff in it, particularly the story of how Jefferson, Lincoln, and both Roosevelt presidents took on the oligarchs of their day and warned posterity of the dangers of oligarchy in America.

The Best of the Rest of the News... — The singlemost ransacked office in the Capitol on January 6th was the office of the Parliamentarian. — As Paul Gosar was censured for threatening the life of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a colleague who’s a woman of color, the Washington Post reports that, “About a dozen Republicans stood beside Gosar in a show of support as he was censured.” — A key part of the GOP’s new Southern Strategy is to bleach white the history of America taught to our children, particularly white children, making white supremacy more mainstream, normalized, and palatable. — Lose your job in North Dakota for teaching even the smallest details of the history of slavery or the modern Civil Rights movement? That’s what the new law signed by that state’s governor requires. — Bogus economic stories in the media are driving down President Biden’s poll numbers. — Sweden is prosecuting oil executives for their complicity in war crimes. — Bernie notes, "While we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs and one out of four Americans can't afford the medicine they need, the top 15 pharmaceutical executives pulled in more than $470 million in salaries and bonuses last year.” — Getting Pregnant Shouldn't Up Your Chances Of Getting Killed. — How Many Lives Could Have Been Saved If Trump & Cronies Didn't Muzzle Experts? — In Geeky Science: Coffee and tea consumption reduces risk of both stroke and dementia. — Also, in Geeky Science: 300 Minutes a Week of Moderate Exercise May Help Ward Off Cancer. — In Good News: The Biden administration is reversing Trump’s gutting of clean and environmental water regulations, restoring federal protections to waterways across the nation.

If they can move more than half of Americans off traditional Medicare and onto these corporate plans, it’ll provide the political cover to kill off Medicare altogether — and they’re nearly there now. Share In 2003, George W Bush set up the destruction and privatization of Medicare. The end of “real Medicare” is getting closer every day, and Congress and Medicare’s administrators are doing nothing. Last Friday the Centers for Medicare Services (CMS) announced a 14.5% increase in Medicare Part B premiums, raising the monthly payments by the lowest-income Medicare recipients from $148.50 a month to $170.10 a month next year. If you’re trying to live on the bottom rung of Social Security (about $365/month), that’s consequential. People with Medigap policies are also seeing their policy price rises announced this month.