Hartmann Report

Like in 1933, a Democratic President is calling out fatcats and fascists in the GOP while uniting Americans in a great project to rebuild our nation... It’s easy to get lost in despair and outrage over the state of affairs in America. Women and queer people are being forced back into the kitchen and closet, climate change is killing scores of Americans every week, our schools and public areas are under constant assault by armed Republican gangs and GOP-sanctioned mass shooters. Over the past decade more than a million American lives have been lost to “deaths of despair” as a result of our 40-year experiment with Reagan’s neoliberalism. And it’s not just domestic bad news coming out of the GOP’s open opposition to democracy. After Trump betrayed Ukraine, Russia attacked them; China is openly threatening a similar sort of war against Taiwan. There’s lots to be concerned about. Nonetheless, I’m hopeful right now.

The people have got to know if their president is a crook," U.S. President Richard Nixon told a national television audience on November 11, 1973, when asked at a press conference if donations from the dairy industry had caused him to reverse his position on dairy price supports. He added, "Well, I am not a crook." A bit over two years earlier, however, Nixon had a meeting at the White House with representatives of the dairy industry, who had apparently just given him a $2 million campaign pledge. With the tape running on March 23, 1971, Nixon said, "Uh, I know…that, uh, you are a group that are politically very conscious…And you're willing to do something about it. And, I must say a lot of businessmen and others…don't do anything about it. And you do, and I appreciate that. And I don't have to spell it out."

The Best of the Rest of the News. — The MAGAts are squealing, even though most didn’t hear Biden’s speech because none of America’s major TV networks chose to carry it. — What did Trump steal, and who did he give it to? — Is the new coarseness and brutality in American politics the result of Trump or social media? Or both? — You could soon lose your right to government benefits, if rightwingers on the Supreme Court go the way observers fear. — The case of Ginny Thomas’ efforts to overthrow our democracy got even more alarming this week. — The destruction of the Amazon is reaching crisis proportions as Brazilian President Jail Bolsonaro has largely refused to enforce laws against illegal logging.. — Geeky Science: Ultra-processed foods, which make up 57% of the American diet right now, are positively tied to bowel cancer.

Trump's Fuhrerbunker moment, his abused-wife-is-leaving moment, his Jim Jones-in-the-jungle moment, when he turns on America, trying to destroy whatever he can in & of this nation, is coming... In President Biden‘s speech yesterday, he spoke tough truths that had to be said out-loud. This country is under attack from within. And the attack is led by a madman. Donald Trump may be about to throw America into a crisis that could make January 6th look like a romp in the park. It has to do with something called “narcissistic collapse.”

If the Democrats fail in restoring Americans’ faith in the ability of government to solve problems and serve the people, get ready. The next Jackson, Mississippi will be your town. Philosophy matters. And philosophy turned into law matters a lot. Particularly in this brave new world of severe climate change. Jackson, Mississippi has a crisis of clean water, which shouldn’t surprise any of us. Like Michigan was when Flint’s water supply was crippled, it’s a Republican-controlled state and Republicans will always prioritize tax cuts for the morbidly rich over building or maintaining infrastructure. Even in the face of climate-change-driven flooding. Nine of the ten poorest states in the nation are Red states; that’s also no surprise.

The ten least populous states have a combined 7.9 million residents but throw equal weight in the senate to the ten representing 164 million Americans. How can we fix this? Three republican presidents did it, in every case to hold onto a Republican Senate. Lincoln did it. Grant did it. Harrison did it. It’s getting close to time for Biden to do it. Saturday, Mitch McConnell was on TV telling wealthy donors to a fundraiser in Kentucky, “We’ve got a 50-50 Senate right now. We’ve got a 50-50 nation.”

Tracking and lying to pregnant people should not be an Industry. When the Dobbs decision came down from six Republicans on the Supreme Court, many folks were wondering how long it would take before vigilantes and GOP-controlled states might start tracking women seeking abortion services. After all, pregnant women in Republican-controlled states didn’t just lose the right to an abortion with that decision. They can now legally be the victims of any man — be he a nosy neighbor, bounty hunter, or police authority —who wants to harass or control them. And there is no shortage of such men. We’re there. It’s now. Between corporate data brokers and religiously affiliated Crisis Pregnancy Centers, women are under surveillance in ways never before seen. And soon we will be seeing that surveillance turned into actual prosecutorial action.

Was there a high-level conspiracy in the Trump administration, done with one or more foreign countries, to end democracy in America? Was their next plan to realign us with Russia & autocratic nations? There was, it increasingly appears, a conspiracy involving some in the most senior levels of the Trump administration to end American representative democracy and replace it with a strongman oligarchy along the lines of Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary. This would be followed, after the January 20th swearing-in of Trump for a second term, by a complete realignment of US foreign policy away from NATO and the EU and toward oligarchic, autocratic nations like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary. As the possibility of this traitorous plan becomes increasingly visible, the GOP, after a frantic two weeks of not knowing what to say or do, has finally settled on a response to Trump’s theft of classified information: “Hillary did the same thing, and she didn’t go to jail!”

In researching this book, I ran across an astonishing piece of writing from our nation’s early years. It’s a fitting prologue for this chapter. In May 1831, a young French aristocrat named Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the young nation of the United States of America. He was here at a pivotal time in American history. In the “Revolution of 1800,” Thomas Jefferson had ousted John Adams’s minority Federalist Party (largely made up of what Jefferson called “the rich and the well born”) and shifted control of the government to the Jeffersonian Democrats. To de Tocqueville (and most Europeans), American democracy was still very much an unproven experiment. De Tocqueville himself was skeptical that the American Experiment would last, as he thought that the “natural” state of man was to live in an aristocracy, but he was fascinated by the idea of an aristocracy made up of the workers. He was both skeptical and hopeful. In 1835, just fifty-two years after the end of the American Revolution and forty-six years after the French Revolution, de Tocqueville closed his book Democracy in America* with a chapter titled “What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear.”

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Why did he do it? That’s the big question about Trump’s squirreling away super-top-secret documents that could have included payroll records for our spies in Russia, details on our first-strike and response-strike options for a nuclear war with Russia, and details on Russian involvement with the 2016 election. — The Republican war on women rolls on. In Louisiana a woman with a nonviable fetus was denied an abortion, putting her life at risk, a story that’s now been repeated in multiple states — After spending almost two years lying about the outcome of the 2020 election, Republicans have settled on a new big lie to campaign on. — After Mitch McConnell started whining about the student debt relief granted this week by President Biden, Senator Elizabeth Warren pointed out that McConnell’s tuition, when he went to college before the Reagan Revolution, was $330 a year. — Investigative reporter Vicky Ward, at her Vicky Ward Reports Substack newsletter, has a slashing new analysis of Jared Kushner’s new book. — Geeky Science: Did California again rescue America from auto exhaust and this time help the planet with climate change? — In Very Good News: President Biden finally uses the F-Word. While Democrats across the nation have been calling Republican policies fascist for years... President Biden has been more rhetorically restrained. No more.