Hartmann Report

Will service workers benefit, or will hedge funds and big banks reclassify bonuses or bribes as tips? Back in 1982, Republicans and the Reagan administration determined that they needed to raise taxes on average working people to pay for part of the massive tax break they were giving billionaires (they dropped the top income tax bracket from 74% to 28%). Reagan imposed income taxes on elderly people on their Social Security income, ended the tax deductibility of interest on car loans and credit cards, and ended the tax deduction on two-income households. But one of the most truculent ways Reagan went after average working people to fund his tax cuts for billionaires was to sign legislation and issue new rules requiring the IRS to more aggressively require employers to track and report tips earned by their employees, and tightening penalties on tipped workers who’d failed to report their tip income. Speaking last month in Nevada — the state with the highest percentage of tipped workers in the nation — Donald Trump proposed eliminating taxes on tips altogether. Not to be outdone, Kamala Harris has also endorsed the idea. But there are big differences between the two.

How one woman’s ego Is endangering Democracy and destroying the Green Party... Jill Stein doesn’t give, as the old saying goes, a flying f*ck about democracy. Instead, she’s all about how famous she can become and how much money she can grift off her repeated presidential campaigns. It’s a damn dangerous game. Fresh off her 2016 political quacksalvery, in which she handed that year’s election to Donald Trump, this professional grifter — who’s been doing real damage to the Green Party for over a decade — is trying to get Trump back into the White House. As her Wisconsin campaign manager, Pete Karas, told Politico: “We need to teach Democrats a lesson.” Arguably, Democrats have already learned that lesson.

How expanding and regulating the court could save America from GOP billionaires. The six Republicans on the US Supreme Court are up to their old tricks, ruling this week that Texas’ draconian abortion ban can continue without modification, meaning that more women in that state will die or bleed out to the point where their lives are in danger and/or their ability to have future children is ended. They are doing this, in part, because the Court has been captured by a fringe rightwing Catholic death cult, the result of an intentional, well-funded campaign.

This election may be America's last stand against this country becoming, like Hungary and Russia, a full-on oligarchy run of, by, and for the morbidly rich… "The evil man is a source of fascination; ordinary persons wonder what impels such extremes of conduct. A lust for wealth? A common motive, undoubtedly. A craving for power? Revenge against society? Let us grant these as well. But when wealth has been gained, power achieved and society brought down to a state of groveling submission, what then? Why does he continue? The response must be: the love of evil for its own sake." — Unspiek, Baron Bodissey Donald Trump has been found by a jury of his peers to have raped a woman. He's a traitor who's embraced foreign dictators, particularly Vladimir Putin, who just sentenced an American to prison while actively bombing a democratic American ally. He's a convicted criminal who stole money from a children's cancer charity and scammed students out of millions of dollars. He tried to end American democracy by force. Like Hitler justifying the Holocaust, he claimed some Americans are genetically inferior. And he's a whisker away from the presidency. How is this even possible? You can trace it all back to dark money.

The pandemic's psychological toll and the rise of Trump's dangerous movement… Could the Covid disaster of 2020 — which Trump botched so badly that America has had more Covid deaths than any other nation in the world except Peru (whose president denied Covid was dangerous) — be what's fueling the Trump MAGA cult? Are we, in other words, as a nation suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and that's driving a national mental illness crisis that opened the door for Trump's cult to grow? — Colorado elections worker Tina Peters, for example, was just sent to prison for nine years for her role in trying to subvert the 2020 election; she'd completely bought into Trump's lie that Democrats had stolen that election and is paying for it with the rest of her life. — My barber was telling me this past weekend about how one of his regulars is stocking up on guns, ammunition, and dried food in anticipation of a second Civil War. This guy is now fully in the Trump cult and is thus perfectly willing to kill his neighbors for politics, once somebody declares the war is now underway (as many of these guys expect Trump to do in the next few weeks). — All across America, families are being torn apart by the Trump cult, and sometimes the conflicts even lead to violence.

In a pivotal 1996 memo from GOPAC, a Republican non- profit, to Republican politicians and activists distributed by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, R-Georgia, the speaker and his colleagues made it clear that the future of the GOP wasn’t going to be in meeting the needs of average Americans; instead, they suggested, it was in talking in a way that would cause people to think the GOP was. Never again would they blunder into clear and blunt language about their true goals, as David Koch had so disastrously done in 1980. Titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” the memo declared, “We believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.”

The Best of the Rest of the News. — My new book is out and you can now order The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class and How to Rescue Our Future. — Trump is lying in a way that could get people killed. Will right wing media echo him? — Oklahoma's Superintendent of School Instruction Ryan Walters wants his state to buy 55,000 Trump Bibles so they can put millions into Trump's personal pocket. — Election denier Tina Peters sentenced to nine years in prison. — The Wisconsin Green Party wants to "teach Democrats a lesson" by pulling votes away from Kamala Harris and handing the election to Donald Trump. — One of deadliest hurricanes of the modern era... — The UAW Slams Trump-Vance as a "Menace to the Working Class." — Crazy Alert! "They Can Control the Weather," Claims Marjorie Taylor Greene After Deadly Hurricane Helene Kills More Than 200. — Hunter in a Farmer's World Alert: Tired of Tossing & Turning? ADHD's Secret Sleep Fixes Revealed — Wisdom School Alert: In Praise of Shitty First Drafts & Talking To Yourself

Republicans worship cheap labor — and having a steady and reliable supply of cheap labor requires widespread poverty… We must not confuse statistical probability with some transcendental and utterly compelling force. — Unspiek, Baron Bodissey One of the enduring mysteries of America is why the citizens of Red states are generally poorer, less educated, and sicker than the citizens of Blue states. To that question, I step up as your hierophant with an answer to this deep mystery that you may not have previously considered.

Jack Smith reveals Trump's illicit crimes to power, showing how Republicans repeatedly break the law in elections... The media is shocked, shocked, I tell you, that Jack Smith has the goods on Trump and, holy cow, we had a traitor in the White House! And he committed crimes to both gain and try to hold office! But our media continually ignores context: this is nothing new for Republican presidents. What's troubling isn't so much Trump's being busted for a very small slice of his multitude of crimes, but that our media so consistently ignores the crimes of past Republican presidents as if they never happened. For example, Tuesday was Jimmy Carter's 100th birthday, but did you read in any media reports that the 1980 election was criminally stolen from him by the Reagan campaign cutting a treasonous deal with the Iranians to hold the American hostages?

Birds, dolphins, and insects are vanishing — and we're the killers... More properly, the question should be, "Are we killing off the natural world?" Because if it is dying, it's dying at our hands. In the debate last night JD Vance lied about several things, as expected, but his most egregious lie was about climate change (which just killed hundreds of Americans), saying the United States has the "cleanest" economy in the world while generally dismissing the topic. The global carbon budget finds that the United States emits .26 kilograms of carbon dioxide per dollar of economic activity and is the third dirtiest economy behind India and China. And Trump is still claiming that climate change is a "scam," parroting the fossil fuel billionaires who fund the GOP.