Hartmann Report

Now is the time for Republicans to show the courage of Mandy Connell and loudly and publicly leave their party. As Germans learned by the late 1930s, if they don’t act now it may soon be too late... Following the January 6th insurrection and coup attempt, The New York Times documented hundreds of thousands of Republicans across America leaving their party by going to the effort of changing their party registration. Most, like Republican strategist Stuart Stevens, say it’s because of the hate. Particularly since the rise of Trump in 2015, but certainly dating back to Trump’s 2008 Birther conspiracy theory — and with the seeds planted in Richard Nixon’s 1968 Southern Strategy — hate has become the rotted core of the GOP. Hate of queer people; hate of college professors; hate of Black people; hate of immigrants; hate of public school teachers and books; hate of Hispanics; hate of drag queens; hate of liberals; hate of American history; hate of Asians; hate of “woke” and other terms to describe tolerance and compassion. Hate has become the primary driving force within today’s Republican Party.

America has an entirely new type of slum we haven’t seen here since the 1930s, the product of 42 years of the Reagan Revolution. We call them “tent cities” & roadsides lined with old RVs and cars… Louise and I got home Saturday from a week with extended family in Central America. On the drive from our rented vacation condo by the Pacific Ocean back to the airport, we passed miles of slums or barrio bajos. Some homes were made from scavenged cinderblock and brick, but most were scrap wood and cardboard with tarps as roofs. Along the rudimentary streets ran ditches filled with raw sewage, and electricity was hijacked from streetlights. Back in the 1980s, when I was doing international relief work for the German-based Salem organization, I spent months in such places in Uganda, Peru, Kenya, Colombia, Mexico, southern Sudan, Ecuador, Peru, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and several other “Third World” countries. At that time, four decades ago, the “slums” in America looked like high-quality housing compared to those countries, with most having electricity, running water, and reliable sewer systems. But no longer: America has an entirely new type of slum we haven’t seen here since the 1930s, the product of 42 years of the Reagan Revolution. We call them “tent cities,” along with their more upscale neighbors: roadsides lined with old RVs and cars in which desperate or hopeless people live.

As we learned from the Iroquois, working on behalf of and protecting society from greedy predators should be the first job of every government… The failure of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) shows us, once again, that unrestrained greed isn’t good. For even modest greed to have a positive effect in society, it must be regulated. The CEO of SVB didn’t like the regulations imposed after the 2008 financial meltdown by Congress’ Dodd-Frank legislation, and spent over a half-million dollars bribing…er, influencing…legislators (legalized by 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court) to change the law and exempt his and other smaller, regional banks from what he argued was the heavy hand of government. While SVB and other smaller banks were generally prosperous and profitable, many wanted to escape from the regulations Congress imposed to protect both depositors and the economy, so they spread some money around Washington DC. Donald Trump then enthusiastically signed the deregulation of smaller banks like SBV into law in 2018.

"Crossing the Threshold Boldly dared is well nigh won! Half my task is solved aright; Ev’ry star’s to me a sun, Only cowards deem it night." — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “To the Chosen One” (1797)

The Best of the Rest of the News — Will Republicans go along with reducing our massive budget deficit? — Democrats on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee proposed a simple resolution condemning racism and white supremacy. — The infrastructure of America’s freeways and air traffic control system are among the worlds best and safest, but the same cannot be said for our rail system. — Twelve years after the meltdown and they’re still trying to deal with the poison. — George Santos: the GOP’s grifter poster boy. — Our oceans are groaning under the burden of plastic pollution. — Geeky Science! We have a salt crisis.

Have we just watched as Jared & Trump walked away with billions after selling out Yemen, Khashoggi, and the United States? With virtually no questions from the mainstream media or Congress? Lauren “Bam Bam” Boebert announced at CPAC: “We are going to investigate Hunter Biden because he has used his father’s positions in government for shady business dealings with Ukraine and China. We no longer need a resident in the White House. We need a president who puts America first and not his business dealings with corrupt foreign countries.” You’d think such a statement by a Trump supporter would be met with shocked silence, but the crowd went wild with applause. And there is, of course, some legitimacy to the sentiment.

If our media and body politic are infected with a cancer it’s time to isolate it so it can’t further harm our democracy and, by extension, the democracies of the world. What country in its right mind would allow a foreign entity to come into their country, set up a major propaganda operation, and then use it to so polarize that nation that its very government suffers a violent assault and its democracy finds itself at a crossroads? Apparently, the United States. And we’re not the first, according to former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Words matter, as Joe McCarthy knew well. Republicans, by trashing the name of the Democratic Party, are simultaneously trashing the concept of democracy itself… It’s one of the most toxic and corrosive memes the GOP is pushing today, that’s now being used to minimize the importance of universal, free, and fair elections. Writing at the Heritage Foundation’s website in a warning about “egalitarianism,” for example, Bernard Dobski also uses the famous John Birch Society mantra as the title for his article: “America Is a Republic, Not a Democracy.” It’s a memorable slogan, and the GOP has been pushing it ever since the 1950s when Senator Joe McCarthy echoed it while recommending that Republicans only refer to the Democratic Party as: “The ‘Democrat Party,’ with emphasis on the ‘rat.’”

January 6th was a rehearsal; they're now planning 2024. Coups quietly build to an explosive tipping point, then suddenly appear as a fait accompli… 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. With few exceptions, 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.

We must abandon our simplistic Cartesian worldview and stop thinking that somebody or something (or some as-yet-undeveloped technology) will save us… It is, quite literally (and to paraphrase Dickens), the best of times and the worst of times. Technological wonders abound, from our ability to look billions of years back in time through the depths of interstellar space to the creation of entirely new forms of life and artificial intelligence. At the same time, our world is in crisis. A new report shows, for example, ice levels at both the north and south poles have disintegrated to the point where the human race is now facing inevitable sea level rise that will, at the least, become civilization-altering, since the majority of humans on the planet live near seacoasts.