Hartmann Report

Jim Jones was a piker. Trump has him totally beat. For every person who listened to Jones and died from cyanide, 438 people died because they listened to Trump and didn’t take Covid seriously. Representative Jackie Spears got it right, and she should know. Back in 1978, Spears – then a 28-year-old aide to Congressman Leo Ryan – flew down to Guyana to investigate reports that Reverend Jim Jones was stealing money from his parishioners and subjecting them to horrors ranging from rape to beatings and public humiliation to “rehearsals” for mass suicide. Reverend Jones didn’t take kindly to their showing up and ordered them all killed.

Flipping the national conversation from CRT to the GOP’s 52-year racist election strategy history will be the only way to clean up all the “crap” Republicans are today using to “flood the zone”. “Be Afraid of Black People” is the GOP’s main message to white voters these days, leveraged by lies about an obscure academic pursuit sometimes called Critical Race Theory (CRT). Many white voters, it turns out, are listening.

So, if the majority of Americans want Scandinavian/European healthcare, schools, unions, wages and taxes-on-the-rich, why don’t we have these things?

The best of the rest of the news this week. — Donald Trump learned the way of mob bosses from his first lawyer and mentor, Roy Cohn, whose other “big” clients were John Gotti of the Gambino crime family and Jeffrey Epstein. That’s why Trump has always run his business (and the White House) like a crime boss would, refusing to put anything in writing, asking lawyers not to keep notes (and tearing up the translator’s notes from his time with Putin in Helsinki). As Michael Cohen has noted in sworn testimony before Congress, “Trump talks in code” to get things done…a variation on Henry II’s coded-assassination-request about Archbishop Beckett: “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?”

The 40-year con by wealthy developers, fossil fuel companies & morbidly rich billionaires, who’d rather shoot up into outer space than pay their taxes, has to end or more people will die. The collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo building in Florida, the deterioration of infrastructure all across America, and our failure to plan for or respond to the threat of climate change all have the same source: greed. And it’s killing us.

We should not have a two-tier justice system like this in the United States; America should hold the rich to the same level of accountability as the rest of us. Bill Cosby got the Rich Man’s Deal. Seriously. The only reason Bill Cosby is out of jail right now is because initially prosecutors offered him a civil settlement that allowed him to pay for his crimes financially rather than by going to prison. And they only did that because he was rich enough to pay. That prosecutor, who then went on to become one of Trump’s lawyers and promoted Trump’s “big lie” about the election, essentially acted as an agent for some of the women Cosby raped, to extract millions of dollars from Cosby on their behalf in exchange for a promise not to put him in jail.

True patriots love their country & work to make the nation better. Demagogues & rightwing billionaires just try to pit us against each other and tear our republic apart while enriching themselves. Republicans and the Australian billionaires who own and run Fox “News” have a mighty strange idea of what it means to love and respect one’s country. The network has spent years hosting white Republicans claiming “patriotism” to trash-talk Black athletes protesting racism in America, and they’re at it again.

America needs to solve it's parasitic billionaire problem or our democracy will continue to crash & burn. America has to reinvent our understanding of economics after 40 years of living under a tax-cutting, austerity-imposing, Republican-promoted trickle-down Reaganomics scam and return to a Keynesian system that still works in those countries like Norway, New Zealand or Denmark that never adopted “austerity.”

How do you fight white supremacist “conservatives” who are willing to use racism, lies and threats of violence to reach their goals? Swanson Foods-fortune heir and trustfund-baby Tucker Carlson, who says he spent his college years “mostly drunk,” is attacking Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley for saying that the military should understand the true history — including the racial history — of the country they’re willing to die to defend. Milley, who holds a Masters Degree in International Relations (one of his two MAs) from Columbia University and has served his country for almost 40 years, is, Carlson said on his Fox “News” program, “not just a pig — he's stupid.”

The best of the rest of the news this week. The most under-reported big story of the week is a blockbuster in The New York Times about how Eric Prince and other wealthy rightwingers paid infiltrators to sabotage the Democratic Party in Wyoming and the region. Nobody knows how many other states’ Democratic parties have been similarly infiltrated or what other sabatoge efforts are underway as the GOP moves closer and closer to becoming a full-blown fascistic party.