Hartmann Report

Billionaires & their companies now own politicians -- and the Supreme Court set it all up with their poisonous Citizens United decision. If President Biden’s Build Back Better plan goes down in flames, you can blame the US Supreme Court. Their Citizens United decision, in fact, is destroying both American politics and the planet. Case in point: Oil industry executives testified before Congress this week, suffering a barrage of questions, including particularly intense ones from Reps. Ro Khanna, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Katie Porter. The CEOs exhibited the same sort of arrogant insolence Mark Zuckerberg displayed in July of last year when he was hauled before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. It was, basically, a smug, “Screw you, Congressperson.”

The filibuster is the world’s largest fig leaf, big enough to hide dozens of cowardly or bought-off senators of both parties, all at one time. If the American republic is to die in the next few years, it’ll have the filibuster’s fingerprints all over it. Republican legislatures around the country are passing laws that will let them — rather than their states’ voters — decide which presidential candidate gets their state’s electoral college votes in 2024. If such laws were in effect in 2020, Donald Trump would still be president.

Working people in poorly-run, wildly-infected Red states are singing along with Johnny Paycheck. It’s the Covid, stupid! That simple reality is apparently too complex for most of the media to figure out, as they transcribe and repeat Republican talking points over and over again about how people are quitting their jobs because the $300 a month unemployment benefits earlier this year were “too generous.”

Perot was right & so were Henry VII, Alexander Hamilton, and Deng Xiaoping -- It’s time for America to recover our gutted middle class & to ensure our national security. Late last week Ryan Petersen, the CEO of Flexport, put together a truly fascinating twitter thread describing the massive bottleneck of containers at the Port of Long Beach, the nation’s busiest... While the immediate bottleneck problem had to do with too many containers and not enough land on which to handle and store them (particularly empty ones), it highlights an even larger problem that goes back to a major change in US trade policy in the 1980s, a part of Reagan’s neoliberal revolution.

Either our country will continue down the road toward cruel oligarchy and violent fascism, or we’ll return to core American values of fairness, compassion, and a society that cares for all. In the latest example of cruelty-as-political-sport Lauren Bobert and JD Vance both tweeted genuinely deplorable things at the expense of the young woman who died on the set of Alec Baldwin’s movie. Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene is shouting slurs at Liz Cheney and Congressman Eric Swalwell shares the death threats he’s getting from Tucker Carlson viewers every day. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has replaced his surgeon general with a crackpot who pushes phony cures and, just last week, refused to wear a mask while visiting state Senator Tina Polsky, who has breast cancer and is immune compromised.

The Best of the Rest of the News — Is a day of reckoning coming for the rightwingers on the Supreme Court? — Sore loser and convicted grifter Donald Trump continues to promote his Big Lie about "election fraud" and the most recent lie-spree was among the worst. — The filibuster is anti-democratic and violates the spirit (and, maybe, the law) of the Constitution: it needs to reformed or ended now — Whatever the billionaires paid Kyrsten Sinema, apparently it worked. — The latest hysterical freak-out among Democrats came this week when David Corn reported in Mother Jones that Joe Manchin had told Chuck Schumer he'd be willing to change from (D) to (I) — Get ready for really expensive oil and gasoline. — White supremacy becomes blatant in Texas. — If the Trump-endorsed Q-supporting Republican candidate for Virginia governor wins his election November 2nd, he can thank the Koch network and the GOP's newest astroturf freak-out around Critical Race Theory and mask mandates. Judd Legum does a deep dive. — There's a huge benefit to firing cops and other government employees who refuse to get vaccinated. — Geeky Science: Oregon decriminalized magic mushrooms last year. Now it looks like there may be many added benefits to the new law — Crazy Alert! The rumor-mongers and conspiracy nuts on the right have watched the old move "Alien" too many times: they're now saying that Covid vaccines "implant" eggs into our bloodstreams that hatch into "synthetic parasites." — In Good News — What started out with two women in New York has become a national trend, with restaurants offering reusable "to go" packaging for the millions of delivery meals Americans are ordering every month. — Excerpt from The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America

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...