Hartmann Report

While the “safety net” prevents personal, family or community disasters, “rights of citizenship” provide the foundation for society itself. Senator Joe Manchin, echoing the rightwing billionaire’s think-tanks’ PR and every Republican in Congress, recently said his objection to free college for students and eyeglasses for seniors was that such things created an “entitlement society,” a slur that means “a nation of welfare recipients.” In that, he displays a fundamental ignorance about what governments do and how societies work, as well as the difference between what we usually call the “social safety net” and things people should expect simply as a “right of citizenship” in a first-world country. He also misunderstands the difference between expenses and investments.

The filibuster is not in the Constitution & its only purpose, way back, was to block discussion of legislation that involved slavery or civil rights. Yesterday Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer held a vote in the Senate to simply open a discussion on the Freedom To Vote Act, authored by Senator Amy Klobuchar and co-authored by Senator Joe Manchin. After the failure of the For The People Act to get even one single vote from any Republican, Manchin told his fellow Democrats that he could tweak the legislation to both protect the vote and get Republican votes. Clearly, he failed. But the bill did functionally get 50 votes and, with the Vice President’s tie-breaking vote as President of the Senate, that’s enough to make it into law according to the Constitution.

Billionaires & racists who killed the GOP are now turning it into an anti-American insurgency, along the lines of the Confederacy. Congressman Steve Scalise, the #2 Republican in the House of Representatives and the guy who ran for office as “David Duke without the baggage,” has announced that he’s whipping Republican votes today to block a criminal contempt referral from the Jan 6 Select Committee against Steve Bannon to the DOJ.

If we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation's middle class, it all starts with taxing the rich: The time is long past due for us to roll back the Reagan tax cuts. The American middle class has collapsed. We’re heading in the direction of looking like the 19th century England that Dickens wrote about in his novels, unless we can stop this grab by the rich. Here’s how and why...

Now that rightwing media has arguably caused more Americans to die than has tobacco, it’s time to consider a strategy like we used with cigarettes to balance their deadly lies and misinformation. It happened three times yesterday, and I only watched or half-watched a few hours of TV news. It happens every day, it seems. Somebody wonders out loud (yesterday’s most prominent was Alex Witt with Dr. Anthony Fauci) why over 60 million Americans who’re eligible to be vaccinated are still refusing — including hospital workers in some parts of the country. Everybody treats it like it’s a confounding question with no easy answer. The actual answer, though, is pretty straightforward: the psychopaths running the rightwing media ecosystem dominated by Fox “News” and social media, and echoed by 1500 radio stations across the country, have decided people dying and being disabled is both profitable and politically advantageous to them.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — The media is largely ignoring or poo-poohing Trump’s claim Wednesday that Republicans won’t show up to vote in 2022 and 2024 unless the party orients itself totally around “election integrity.” But, as I noted in yesterday’s Daily Rant, that phrase (among others) is his code for rigging elections so he can regain power in 2024.

What they’ve created has taken on a life of its own & is now tearing America apart - Steve Bannon, echoing Hitler, predicted, “We’re putting together a coalition that’s gonna govern for 100 years” Trump’s agenda is to destroy democracy in America, and the GOP and their billionaire donors are going along with it while much of the media are treating it like politics as usual. It’s a two-part plan that involves both corrupting our election processes and fomenting a violent “rebellion” by white supremacists to shatter our society. Part one is to end free and fair elections in America.

We’re seeing tent cities & massive homelessness in cities across America because a handful of Wall Street billionaires want to make a killing: Will America remove housing from their clutches? It seems that everywhere you look in America you see the tragedy of homelessness. Rarely, though, do you hear that Wall Street is helping cause it. Thirty-two percent seems to be the magic threshold, according to new research funded by the real estate listing company Zillow. When neighborhoods hit rent rates in excess of 32 percent of neighborhood income, homelessness explodes. And we’re seeing it play out right in front of us in cities across America because a handful of Wall Street billionaires want to make a killing.

Somebody needs to tell the politicians: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” On March 13, 1962 President Kennedy said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Today we have armed militias in our streets; violence in our state capitols, school boards, and on airplanes; and just ten months ago we saw an actual attempt at violent revolution in our US Capitol. What happened to the “peaceful revolution”? A quick glance at the past 40 years of American history answers the question while giving us a modern insight into Kennedy’s prescient warning.

We are close to either a collapse or a renewal of democracy: which way will America go? While there’s apparently “nothing to see here” when it comes to conservative media outlets and even, in many ways, mainstream media, it’s worth asking the question: “How far down the road toward authoritarian oligarchy, or even outright fascism, have we gone?” The answer to that question informs our understanding of how close in time we may be to some sort of “final” crisis, and to how easy or difficult it will be to pull back and preserve a functioning democratic republic.