Hartmann Report

The best of the rest of the news. — “But it was just theater!” Counties that went along with Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen from him are now discovering (as they were warned) that when they turned their voting machines and ballots over to unqualified, uncertified Republican-affiliated hustlers for “audits,” their equipment would lose its certification and must be replaced. Now they’re facing huge bills to replace their voting infrastructure, while also facing possible prosecution should Merrick Garland’s Justice Department ever decide to finally start holding Republicans accountable for their crimes. (It’s a clear and felonious violation of federal law to hand over ballots or machines within 22 months after a federal election.) Nonetheless, even more Republicans around the country are trying to repeat the stunt in an effort to further erode faith and confidence in American democracy so when, in 2022 and 2024, they start using their new “election integrity” laws to throw out huge numbers of ballots from mostly-Black districts people will think it’s normal.

If one of Trump’s larger crimes involved leaning on Anthony Kennedy to resign & greasing the skids for a pliable stooge in Brett Kavanaugh, Americans & Congress have an absolute right to know. During the confirmation process for Brett Kavanaugh, over 4500 tips about sexual assault, gambling and other issues came into the FBI, including several now known to have come from highly credible sources. Instead of investigating them, we learned this week, Chris Wray’s FBI handed them over to the Trump White House…where they died.

The only way to deal with parasites is to remove them from their host. It’s time to expand Medicare to all Americans so we can dislodge these healthcare parasites from our body politic. Parasites attach themselves to your body and suck your blood to feed themselves. Most, like ticks and mosquitos, while they may provide food for birds, bats and other animals, seem to provide no direct benefit at all to humans. That “no benefit” equation goes double for the latest parasites who have attached themselves to the backs of Americans and are rapidly draining us of our economic blood: health insurance companies.

If we're not going to be a force for good in the world, it’s time for us to close down our foreign military bases & operations & spend some time & money rebuilding this country, gutted by Reaganomics. America needs to define a consistent, honest and public position on foreign aid and foreign interventions. If we fail to do so, we’ll continue to produce disasters that have long-term consequences not only for the countries with whom we’ve interfered but also here in the US.

Inequality causes crime because it destroys social trust, the core fabric of any society: Without social trust, empathy and shared values disintegrate and culture begins to collapse. Yesterday morning, a burglar tried to break into my home. Thankfully the doors were all locked, but a few houses down wasn’t so lucky; our neighbor was home and is now pretty traumatized to have experienced a home-invasion burglary. By the time the police arrived, the burglar was long gone in a stolen car.

What’s unique now is one of our political parties — the Republican Party — has fully embraced autocratic governance and is doing everything it can to stop “will of the majority” Democracy. Ted Cruz has compared President Biden and the people in his administration working to stop Covid to “Nazi stormtroopers.” Republicans in his state are trying to ban any mention of Susan B. Anthony, Cesar Chavez and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. from their schools’ textbooks and give Republicans the power to challenge and even reject votes they don’t like in future elections. What is going on here?

The best of the rest of the news this week. — On January 6th, Mike Pence refused to get in the Secret Service car. He appears to have realized that Donald Trump just tried to kill him to hang onto power. This is how close we came to a total coup overthrowing the government of the United States and replacing it with a neofascist Trumpist dictatorship…and most of the GOP is doing its best to set it up again for 2024. New laws have been passed in 17 states that let Republicans decide which votes to count and which to throw away; these laws are taking us closer and closer to that possible reality of an unelected (and, thus, dictatorial) government.

Our government has been corrupted by greed and the money it brings, and that corruption has spread like a cancer to religion, education and helping professions like healthcare. Every aspect of American life has been corrupted by greed. One of the purposes of government is to protect both individuals and society from such corruption, and that means protecting people and institutions from greedy predators. In that simple task, over the past 40 years since America embraced Reaganomics and Reaganism, our government has failed. We once enforced laws that protected small businesses from greedy oligarchs who knew that crushing or buying out competitors and creating monopolies was a fast, although societally destructive, way of getting rich. We saw how John Rockefeller brutally crushed thousands of small businesses on his way to becoming the richest man in the world, and we passed laws against his practices.

The old Confederacy, like Freddy Krueger, is trying to rise from the dead and slash our nation with its “superstition, ambition and ignorance.” Prior to 1965, the only American president to have both promoted and presided over a multiracial democracy was Ulysses Grant, the former general in Lincoln’s army who became president when impeached Southern slaveowner Andrew Johnson’s term expired on March 4, 1869. Grant (and Johnson, but grudgingly) saw freed African Americans not only voting but taking political office by the hundreds. It lasted until the day Grant left office, when the Tilden/Hayes election “compromise” of 1876 ended the period known as Radical Reconstruction the following year. During this brief time, more than 600 African Americans were elected to state legislatures (the majority in South Carolina and Louisiana) and 16 served in the US House of Representatives.

Before you say that what the GOP is doing won’t work or can’t end democracy in America, you may want to make a trip to Budapest. The GOP seems to have gone nuts. But, in reality, they’re following a plan. And it’s not even a new plan; it’s worked elsewhere. Seventeen Republican-controlled states have now passed 28 voter suppression laws, in most cases even asserting that if elections don’t turn out the way the Party likes they can simply change or ignore the results. It’s driven Texas legislators, faced with another law like that, to flee the state in a desperate effort to preserve their voting rights.