Hartmann Report

Just like a tiny trim tab alters the direction of an airplane or ship, it’s small groups and even single individuals who are always at the core of societal change. You can help save democracy in America. Seriously. You. You may think that being part of a small group of activists can’t possibly really produce large social changes, but in reality the opposite is true. Throughout history, it’s almost always been small groups who trigger larger social and political changes.

The best of the rest of the news. The Big Story — It was like a magic trick where the magician distracts you with his right hand doing something flashy while his left hand is flipping the lever that releases the rabbit into the hat. Trump threw Rudy Giuliani out into the media world as a total circus (he’s not even paying him, now that his service as Trump’s “clown” has ended) to distract us from the plot he, Mark Meadows and Jeffrey Clark were hatching to end American democracy.

Republicans are pushing a full-blown authoritarian agenda & they know it’s so unpopular that the only way they can get it through is to rig the system -- so they have... You’d think we have a right to vote, rather than just a privilege that Republican-controlled states could take away in dozens of different ways. After all, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution references “the right to vote at any election” and even says that any state that violates that right shall lose members of its congressional delegation as punishment.

Democrats & Biden face a choice. Do they finish the job and end neoliberalism? Or do they declare “mission accomplished” and revert back to neoliberal policies? The Democratic Party is having an internal battle over the “small” and the “large” infrastructure bills, but what’s really at stake is the future of neoliberalism within the party. The smaller “bipartisan” bill represents the neoliberal worldview, including public-private partnerships and huge subsidies to for-profit companies, whereas the larger “reconciliation” Democratic Party-only bill hearkens back to the FDR/LBJ classic progressive way of doing things.

American conservatism has been a scam since the 1920s, and continues to exclusively benefit the very white and the very wealthy. Ron DeSantis’ executive order making it illegal for teachers to require kids in their classrooms to wear masks to protect the teacher and other kids in the class (and their families) isn’t about masks. If it was about masks and their health potential, pro or con, he’d be discussing how to reduce the transmission of this deadly virus in Florida, which now accounts for more than 20% of all new Covid cases in America.

The unthinkable has arrived and the top star of America’s right is openly celebrating and highlighting how to destroy democracy in a constitutional republic. Breaking, alarming news: Fox “News’” top-rated star Tucker Carlson is doing his show live this week from Budapest, Hungary, and heavily featuring Hungary’s president, Viktor Orbán. This is a very, very bad omen for the future of American democracy.

There is nothing more powerful than a warrior who doesn’t fear dying, but instead lives in breathless anticipation of a “good death” on the battlefield. With armed militia groups trying to take down our democracy, from January 6th to invading state capitols, things seem bad, maybe even Civil War bad. But if they hook up with the Christian right — with one small change to their ideology — we could be plunged into a hellscape right out of the tenth century. There’s a thin line between what we call “civilization” and the kind of grim barbarism created by ISIS, Boko Haram and Al Qaeda. That line is defined by a single and simple tweak of a culture and its main religion’s primary story-line with a variation that, from time to time, infects human cultures.

It turns out sedition and treason are pretty profitable as the coup rolls on… Even though the number of dying Trump followers increases daily, his coup rolls on. Now, in the Trump shadow-universe he’s created a shadow-government for his shadow-fans. It’s not as wacky an idea as it seems and suggests Trump’s solidifying his control over the GOP going toward 2022 and 2024.

The best of the rest of the news. — Almost two weeks before January 6th, apparently in anticipation of that attempt to hang Mike Pence and assassinate Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump told the top official in the Justice Department to declare that the 2020 election was marred by corrupt voter fraud, which he and his Republican allies were alleging happened in largely-Black parts of Detroit, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Phoenix. If they’d done that publicly, then he and his Republican buddies — he named Congressman Jim Jordan and Senator Ron Johnson — could overturn Joe Biden’s electoral college win in Congress.

Emperor Nero, it’s said, fiddled while Rome burned; If you don’t want our politicians to continue to follow his example while the world burns, get politically active now. We are standing in an extinction event. Many of us started noticing it when the insects began to vanish in large numbers right after the turn of the century.