Hartmann Report

So, if you want to see what Republicans have in mind for the rest of America if Trump or another Republican becomes president and they can hold onto Congress, just visit the Old South… Tomorrow is the first Biden-Trump debate and many Americans are wondering how each will articulate their ideas for the future of America. Republicans have a very specific economic vision for the future of our country, although they rarely talk about it in plain language: they want to make the rest of America look and function just like Mississippi. Including the racism: that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s called the “Southern Economic Development Model” (SEDM) and has been at the core of GOP economic strategy ever since the days of Ronald Reagan. While they don’t use those words to describe their plan, and neither did the authors of Project 2025, this model is foundational to conservative economic theory and has been since the days of slavery.

While hate has always been a part of the American landscape, the entrance of Trump onto the American political scene has led to an explosion of hate crimes against racial and religious minorities... She may never be the same. This past weekend, three American citizens were hanging out at their apartment complex swimming pool, a mom and her two children, a little girl, 3, and a boy who was 7 years old. Mom was Muslim, so she wore a modest swimsuit and a hijab. Which infuriated Elizabeth Wolf, a 42-year-old white woman, who, upon arriving at the pool, began loudly berating the young mother, using racial slurs to tell her she wasn't welcome in white America. Wolf then jumped into the pool and grabbed the two children, who were playing in the shallow end, and tried to drown them.

A middle class is not a normal thing, and if a country wants one it must be created by direct government intervention in the marketplace… As we head toward the presidential debate this week, the Republicans' vision for America is becoming clearer by the day. From Trump to Project 2025 to the speeches of multiple Republican senators and members of Congress, you'll frequently hear the phrase "post-constitutional" applied. They refer to a "post-constitutional moment" and a Republican "post-constitutional presidency." But what do they mean by this?

The key to a functioning regulated-capitalist economy is competition; as competition declines, so do innovation, investment, employment, and the wealth of working people. Lacking competition, those people and corporations in the economic top .01% will explode their wealth while everything and everybody else suffers. Since the 1980s, when Reagan began aggressively applying Chicago School neoliberal policies and Robert Bork’s perspective on antitrust, industry after industry, sector after sector, has been interpenetrated and then consumed almost entirely by cancer-like monopolies and oligopolies. Not only have wages and innovation suffered, but the overall economy itself has largely stagnated, relative to the preceding four decades.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — With Religious fascism on the rise… — Is it a “break glass” moment with Judge Cannon? — The Supreme Court has already helped Trump beat his federal rap for trying to overthrow our country and steal the 2020 election. — In Red states, TV weather is getting way too political. — The climate crisis is also an insurance crisis. — Fascist Alert! RFK Jr.’s campaign wants “serious jail time” for CNN’s Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, and others. — Crazy Alert! Republican legislator arrested chasing an adult dancer down a public street waving a gun at her at 2:45am - but it gets even weirder than that. — Hunter In a Farmer’s World Alert! ADHD: Practice Keeping On Task — Wisdom School Alert! robert wolff's Ancient Way of Knowing

It is utter BS to justify imposing religious doctrine on impressionable youth: there isn’t that much overlap between the Ten Commandments and American or Louisiana law... “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” —Thomas Jefferson How will the Ten Commandments do anything at all to help Louisiana’s many crises?

In less than a month, Republicans will meet in Milwaukee to crown Donald Trump as their Emperor King and Sun God. But the real powers behind the GOP — the billionaires and their institutions that created Project 2025 as a how-to manual to convert American democracy into something like the old Confederacy — don’t much care about poor old Donald. Sure, they want him to be the nominee because NBC trained him well in the dark art of playing a successful businessman on television. He brings in the rubes like nobody since Huey Long; he’s a singularly brilliant politician, much as Putin, Hitler, Orbán, and Mussolini are and were. But he can also be irrational, impulsive, disloyal, dishonest, and unpredictable, qualities that make the men who want to revive the Confederacy to replace our republican form of government wary. They have big plans — far bigger than Trump’s tiny dream of vengeance — and don’t want him screwing things up. Thus, the real action in Milwaukee won’t be the show — though it’ll be a hell of a show — around Trump’s coronation; it’ll be in the back rooms where Trump is told who’s going to be his vice president. That’ll be the guy (it will be a guy) who does the actual heavy lifting in “deconstructing the administrative state,” seizing control of our media, and stripping average Americans of what’s left of their wealth and rights.

The new GOP motto might as well be, "We don't need no stinkin' issues; we just want power and revenge for the heroes of the Old South and the New Insurrection." Have you noticed how rarely Republicans talk about actual issues?... All of this is because the GOP is now a post-politics party.

In our post-Citizens United world, when industry or a "generous" billionaire opposes a policy, what they want beats democracy almost every time... Exactly 178 years ago this month, French astronomer and mathematician Urbain Le Verrier calculated the existence of the then-unknown planet Neptune based on irregularities in the orbit of Uranus, which he postulated were caused by the unknown planet's gravitational pull. Some invisible force was clearly distorting Uranus' orbit, and, when he did the math, he'd not only discovered but accurately predicted the location of the planet Neptune. Many Americans watch our generation's political dysfunction and Congress' inability to get simple things done that would help our country and world and wonder, "Is there a dark planet, some dark force, that is pulling at and distorting our politics?" Turns out, there is. Read on.

Trump's Legacy and the Weaponization of Lies in the 2024 Election. Hitler's brilliant propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, famously told the Fuhrer, "Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth." Donald Trump and the MAGA faction of the Republican Party have taken Goebbels' advice to heart, and it's going to make this fall's election one like we've never seen before. Already they've been lying so often and so effectively that nearly all Republicans, and majorities or near-majorities of Americans, believe: — the GOP lie that we're in a recession (we're in better shape, in most ways, than any time since the 1960s and inflation last month was zero while Ronald Reagan never got it below 4.1% in his entire eight years); — Republican lies about crime being up (it's down dramatically since Trump); — their lies that "Democrats want elective abortion up to the moment of birth" (none have ever said that); — Trump's lie that the 2020 election was "stolen" from Trump by "voter fraud"; — GOP lies that the southern border is "wide open"; — the Republican lie that Social Security is on the verge of bankruptcy and must be saved by privatization or benefits cuts; — their vicious lie that queer people are pedophiles targeting America's schoolchildren; and — their NRA lie that more and more deadly guns will keep our kids safe.