Hartmann Report

For America to survive as a democratic republic, we must restore the legal guardrails that keep psychopaths from the political process. And we must hold the known psychopaths accountable. The “election audit” in Arizona continues, with Republican hacks handling the ballots in ways that pretty clearly violate federal law — and now we’re learning there’s an open router connected to the auditing computers. It’s not just a scam — the FBI/DOJ is investigating it as an actual crime.

Instead of cleaning up their act, Republicans are embracing international crooks Liz Cheney is wrong. The GOP is now so deeply embedded with the international criminal class that it's not worth saving. For 40 years the GOP has been a peripheral but important part of the international criminal class; Donald Trump pushed the Party fully into its embrace while trying to drag the entire country with him.

There's apparently no depth to which they won't go. Authoritarian Trump followers within the GOP are actively promoting death and disease among Americans to win elections. The brutality and cynicism is breathtaking. As we saw yesterday, Rand Paul and several of his Republican colleagues in the Senate, grilling Dr. Fauci, did their best to advance one of the GOP's two major 2022/2024 election strategies.

It will guarantee that every citizen in this country, regardless of their race or economic status, will have an equal right to vote in all elections that have any federal component whatsoever. With all their new "voter suppression" laws in the states, Republicans are working to keep and improve a corrupt system that's put them in power and keeps them in power, despite only representing a minority of Americans nationwide. That's why they're trying to change our election law with little tweaks like making it harder to get a mail-in ballot or preventing people from bringing a drink of water to somebody in line.

The Republican Party has gone from being a threat to the lives, health and wealth of working people to being a full-on threat to democracy and our republic itself. Jamie Dimon is whining about Biden's upcoming tax increases on rich people like himself: screw him. But more about that in a minute. Ever since the late 1970s and early 1980s, both the Republican and Democratic parties have been operating, in part, on delusion and fantasy.

The roots and brutality of the hard-right grew in the soil of libertarianism and Ayn Rand’s writings. Many Americans are baffled by the Republican Party’s embrace of billionaire sociopath Trump and elected Republicans’ willingness to overlook the death of seven Americans, including three police officers, in an attempted coup. (Particularly after they spent over 2 years and tens of millions of dollars obsessing on 4 dead Americans in Benghazi.) They’re also wondering why Kevin McCarthy would reject Liz Cheney to embrace someone like Elise Stefanik, an apologist for the January 6 treason attempt, or go along with Mitch McConnell’s attempts to sabotage the American Rescue Plan, the American Jobs Plan, and the American Family Plan. After all, people are hurting.

It appears Garland has unleashed the FBI and other investigators in ways that must be sending shockwaves through Mar-a-Lago and the ranks of former Trump officials. One can only hope… George HW Bush and Ronald Reagan were facing the possibility of treason charges. Who did they call? Bill Barr. That was in the '80s and early '90s, but now we discover the Bill Barr really, truly, definitely also lied to America about presidential treason this decade. Shocking.

America has a serious fascism problem, but it goes way beyond the kinds of authoritarianism displayed by people like Donald Trump. It goes deep, now, into the very structure of corporate America. There's been a lot of talk lately about fascism, generally in the context of Republicans denying people their right to vote or Donald Trump sending an armed mob to murder five people at the US Capitol to try to install him as America's first strongman dictator.

Nobody is asking the bigger question: "Why would a professional, lifelong politician and master tactician like Mitch McConnell make such a huge mistake?" Nobody's asking, "Why?" Just like he did with the Covid rescue bill a few months ago, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just said that there will not be one single Republican vote in support of President Joe Biden's infrastructure plan.

Forty years of Reaganism and trickle-down economics have left America pockmarked with refugee camps and people hanging onto life by their fingernails. The award-winning movie Nomadland is every bit as brilliant as the reviews, but it's also, for this era, a hell of a wake-up call.