Hartmann Report

America has been lied into too many wars. It’s cost us too much in terms of money, credibility and blood. We must remember the lies. We can’t afford to let this one go down the memory hole, too. Let’s never forget that what we are watching happen right now in Afghanistan is the final act of George W. Bush‘s 2004 reelection strategy. After 9/11 the Taliban offered to arrest Bin Laden, but Bush turned them down because he wanted to be a “wartime president” to have a “successful presidency.”

The best of the rest of the news. — Afghanistan falls. George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election strategy is finally coming to an end. Bush, you’ll recall, turned down the Taliban’s offer to arrest Osama Bin Laden after 9/11, and instead began bombing Afghanistan because he thought it was good politics. Twenty years later, here we are. Meanwhile, if President Biden really expected the Taliban to hold back until we’d evacuated the country, he needs to fire his advisors. No country wants to be occupied and every nation fights occupation: that principle was at the foundation of our nation, when people who’d lived in North America for generations rejected occupation by British forces. The Trump administration cut a deal with the Taliban that let Trump ignore the crisis of Afghanistan and further empowered the Taliban; it also made a safe withdrawal even more difficult. But at the end of the day, leaving was really the only option America had. Hopefully, after having experienced this twice in the past 50 years, we’ll learn from the lessons of Vietnam and Afghanistan…and probably soon Iraq as well. When presidents lie us into wars, it always turns out ugly.

So what do we do as a society when confronted with a psychotic former leader who’s continuing to spread contagious forms of mental illness among our nation? How do we repair the damage? When I was young my favorite writers were Ernest Hemmingway and Hunter S. Thompson, and my favorite Thompson novel was his 1971 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Which is why a caller last year who started on a rant about “adrenochrome” caused me to both cut him off the air and go back to my copy of the novel to see if my memory was right. Sure enough, there it was.

Their bet is that they’ll get away with letting tens of thousands of their citizens – and thousands of their citizens’ children – die and the people of their states will simply forget and move on. Hospitals are filling up and children are near death across a swath of Red states from Texas to Florida. The governors of those two states are leading a movement. Republican Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have gone all-in on a high-stakes bet, and the example of Donald Trump suggests they may just win it. Win or lose, though, they’re both tenaciously hanging onto their bans on mandated masks in schools.

Will the oligarchs and their useful idiots win? The stakes have never been higher... A study by the Peace Research Institute in Norway and the University of Aarhus that polled 6,000 adults from the United States, Denmark, Italy, and Hungary found that the Covid pandemic has further eroded faith in government among people all across Europe and the US. This is the capstone of “conservative” or neoliberal efforts to destroy faith in democratic governance in developed countries, an effort that goes back 50 years.

Meanwhile, Congress dithers over a few trillion dollars that could begin to change our nation’s emissions course and help save us all from a flaming nightmare. While Republicans dependent on fossil fuel and other billionaires in the “Koch Network” continue to deny even the existence of man-made global warming, the IPCC just came out with their first report to say that there’s absolute certainty that much of the extreme weather our planet is experiencing is caused by our burning fossil fuels into the atmosphere. There is no longer any doubt that global warming is here and wreaking havoc, the report says; the science is “unequivocal.” Over 14,000 different peer-reviewed studies were used to compile this report, and its results are stunning.

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.