Hartmann Report

Inequality causes crime because it destroys social trust, the core fabric of any society: Without social trust, empathy and shared values disintegrate and culture begins to collapse. Yesterday morning, a burglar tried to break into my home. Thankfully the doors were all locked, but a few houses down wasn’t so lucky; our neighbor was home and is now pretty traumatized to have experienced a home-invasion burglary. By the time the police arrived, the burglar was long gone in a stolen car.

What’s unique now is one of our political parties — the Republican Party — has fully embraced autocratic governance and is doing everything it can to stop “will of the majority” Democracy. Ted Cruz has compared President Biden and the people in his administration working to stop Covid to “Nazi stormtroopers.” Republicans in his state are trying to ban any mention of Susan B. Anthony, Cesar Chavez and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. from their schools’ textbooks and give Republicans the power to challenge and even reject votes they don’t like in future elections. What is going on here?

The best of the rest of the news this week. — On January 6th, Mike Pence refused to get in the Secret Service car. He appears to have realized that Donald Trump just tried to kill him to hang onto power. This is how close we came to a total coup overthrowing the government of the United States and replacing it with a neofascist Trumpist dictatorship…and most of the GOP is doing its best to set it up again for 2024. New laws have been passed in 17 states that let Republicans decide which votes to count and which to throw away; these laws are taking us closer and closer to that possible reality of an unelected (and, thus, dictatorial) government.

Our government has been corrupted by greed and the money it brings, and that corruption has spread like a cancer to religion, education and helping professions like healthcare. Every aspect of American life has been corrupted by greed. One of the purposes of government is to protect both individuals and society from such corruption, and that means protecting people and institutions from greedy predators. In that simple task, over the past 40 years since America embraced Reaganomics and Reaganism, our government has failed. We once enforced laws that protected small businesses from greedy oligarchs who knew that crushing or buying out competitors and creating monopolies was a fast, although societally destructive, way of getting rich. We saw how John Rockefeller brutally crushed thousands of small businesses on his way to becoming the richest man in the world, and we passed laws against his practices.

The old Confederacy, like Freddy Krueger, is trying to rise from the dead and slash our nation with its “superstition, ambition and ignorance.” Prior to 1965, the only American president to have both promoted and presided over a multiracial democracy was Ulysses Grant, the former general in Lincoln’s army who became president when impeached Southern slaveowner Andrew Johnson’s term expired on March 4, 1869. Grant (and Johnson, but grudgingly) saw freed African Americans not only voting but taking political office by the hundreds. It lasted until the day Grant left office, when the Tilden/Hayes election “compromise” of 1876 ended the period known as Radical Reconstruction the following year. During this brief time, more than 600 African Americans were elected to state legislatures (the majority in South Carolina and Louisiana) and 16 served in the US House of Representatives.

Before you say that what the GOP is doing won’t work or can’t end democracy in America, you may want to make a trip to Budapest. The GOP seems to have gone nuts. But, in reality, they’re following a plan. And it’s not even a new plan; it’s worked elsewhere. Seventeen Republican-controlled states have now passed 28 voter suppression laws, in most cases even asserting that if elections don’t turn out the way the Party likes they can simply change or ignore the results. It’s driven Texas legislators, faced with another law like that, to flee the state in a desperate effort to preserve their voting rights.

Letting Americans die to win elections. Is that how low today’s GOP has sunk? What other possible explanation could there be? Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a CNN Medical Analyst, said last week, “A surprising amount of death will occur soon...” But why, when the deadly Delta variant is sweeping the world, are Republicans and their media warning people not to get vaccinated? There’s always a reason. People don’t do things — particularly things involving a lot of effort and a need for consistency — without a reason. It just doesn’t happen. No matter how bizarre, twisted or dysfunctional the reason may be, there’s always a reason.

If the filibuster can’t be done away with or turned into a “Jimmy Stewart filibuster,” then Congress has the obligation to Act on the “Nuclear Option.” The US Senate is back in session today, as Texas Republicans prepare to pass another massive voter suppression bill. The only remedy available to the American people is for the federal government to use its constitutional authority to regulate federal elections to block what President Biden has referred to as the GOP’s “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”

President Biden fired the Trump holdovers at the head of Social Security and Medicare... What happens when the GOP actually flips an election?... The brutal, punishing, racist Republicans strike again.... Are hate and death all they have left?...Evangelical Christianity is dying, and the GOP is what's killing it... When big American corporations claimed they would no longer send money and other support to those members of Congress who actively worked to overturn the 2020 election…they lied... Congressman Chip Roy comes right out and tells a group of Republican activists that their entire legislative and political strategy for 2021 and 2022 is to prevent Democrats from getting anything done for the American people... Who would oppose teaching our children the true racial history of America?... The Second Amendment is a failed experiment, and it's time for reasonable people to admit that fact... The Weather Channel says they'll be documenting the role climate change plays in today's extreme weather events. So, how does the billionaire Murdoch family empire respond to this? They're rolling out a new weather channel themselves, Fox Weather... Over at Daily Kos, GoodNewsRoundup has compiled "Fifty Great Things Biden Has Accomplished in less than half a year in office."

Between great wealth, control of the media, police-state tactics and social media-driven “militias,” authoritarianism is itching to take over completely. We are on the brink & must stop them . In an oligarchy, the rich can get away with anything and average people who try to stop harms to themselves and their communities get crushed. We’re now there; the question is whether we’ll pull back from this horror show, or whether it’ll continue its evolution toward a full-blown police state.