Hartmann Report

Why are the GOP and billionaires so committed to gutting worker protections while increasing the wealth of the top one percent? Do elite Republicans and the CEOs who fund them hate working people? Or are they simply unable to control themselves, even when deep down inside they know they're ruining America?

The billionaires believe the GOP embrace of authoritarianism and oligarchy to replace the democracy that is increasingly rejecting them at the polls will keep them safe. They're wrong... The oligarchs are on the move, and they know who they want leading America. The RNC held an annual fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago this past weekend, attended by Republican senators and members of Congress, along with a few hundred morbidly rich individuals. Two donors paid $1 million to get up on stage to support Trump’s assertion that Jack Smith is a “fucking asshole,” “deranged,” and an “evil thug.” Trump added that Joe Biden is running a “Gestapo administration” and — in an astonishing bit of projection — is a “Manchurian candidate.”

Monopoly also produces extremes of inequality, and extreme inequality kills societies. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett of the Equality Trust in the UK have done extensive research on the topic, leading to two best-selling books and a brilliant website.51 They document in startling detail, going nation by nation and, in the United States, state by state, how inequality damages the lives of everybody except those who live in massive wealth bubbles at the top. It’s not the poverty that extreme inequality produces that does much of the damage. Instead, because we’re wired like all mammals to understand and perceive both fairness and unfairness, when we find ourselves in unfair situations, our interactions with the world and each other become distorted.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — The New Republic is now publishing occasional content from Hartmann Report! — Republicans have handed America's wealth to the billionaires: where's the outrage? — Are Republican Supreme Court justices colluding With Trump to "catch and kill" his insurrection case? — Ankle monitors for pregnant women? Sure, Trump says, why not? — As bird flu spreads to chickens, cats, cattle and a dolphin, how concerned should we be? — Are Democrats finally standing up to Big Oil? — Bigot Alert: Republicans in Utah roll out a "snitch line" to turn in Trans people using public and school bathrooms in that state. — Hunter in a Farmer's World Alert! Is ADHD Useful in Our Workforce? — Wisdom School alert! Can mindfulness help in the workplace? — Crazy Alert! Local paper takes down Republican SD Governor Kristi Noem for lying about meeting Kim Jong Un.

The H5N1 "bird flu" is ripping across America, decimating bird flocks and even infecting a few humans and other mammals. Should we be concerned? The H5N1 "bird flu" is ripping across America, decimating bird flocks and even infecting a few humans and other mammals. Should we be concerned? Particularly since Trump is polling so well after he totally botched our response to Covid? Keep in mind, Trump shut down the offices of pandemic preparedness in the White House and NSC in 2017, leaving America vulnerable to Covid; in this week's TIME magazine interview he says if he becomes president again he'll repeat that performance by shutting down the new Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR) that Congress authorized in 2022.

When Black or Hispanic voters show up to vote, the Task Force officers are there to stop them before they enter the polling place, asking to see their voter registration card and ID... While the media devotes much hand-wringing to Republican vulnerability in this November's election because of abortion, virtually no attention is paid to what's been that party's primary electoral strategy since the 1960s: preventing citizens from voting. This year, it appears, voter purges, signature challenges, and election worker intimidation are how the GOP thinks they can overcome America's distaste for their support of criminalized abortion.

Trump has unleashed his inner psychopath and if he wins this election it's going to get uglier here in America than most people today can imagine… TIME magazine reporter Eric Cortellessa spent hours interviewing Donald Trump, producing a shocking cover story this week. Converting one of his opening paragraphs into bullet points for readability, he summarized that Trump fully plans: — "To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland. — "He would let red states monitor women's pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. — "He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. — "He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn't carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America's founding. — "He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. — "He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn't paying enough for its own defense. — "He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen."

An entire series of outrages from the radical Republicans on the Supreme Court have ginned up calls for President Biden and Congress -- to "pack" or expand the size of the Court. The headline from last week's Christian Science Monitor lays it out bluntly: "Majority of voters no longer trust Supreme Court." An entire series of outrages from the radical Republicans on the Court have ginned up calls for President Biden and Congress — should he be re-elected and Democrats take both the House and Senate — to "pack" or expand the size of the Court. Outrages include Republicans on the Court overturning Roe v Wade, gutting affirmative action, spitting on the Voting Rights Act, limiting civil rights, and a growing anticipation that the Court will soon go after the rights of queer people while further restricting access to abortion and birth control medications. How did we get here, and what can we do about it?

Why are Great Britain Conservative Members of Parliament welcomed into the Labour Party, but here in the US it's almost impossible for a Republican to successfully become a Democrat? Last week Dan Poulter, a Conservative Party member of Great Britain's Parliament, abandoned the Tories to become a member of the progressive Labour Party. In 2022, Christian Wakeford similarly left the Tories to join Labour, the equivalent of an American Republican member of Congress being welcomed into the Democratic Party. The last time a Republican member of the US Congress became a Democrat was New York's Michael Forbes, who made the switch more than two decades ago in 1999. Democrats in his district overwhelmingly rejected him in the 2000 election: although he raised and spent $1.4 million to hold his seat, he was defeated by a 71-year-old librarian who'd raised and spent a mere $40,000.

When people consider monopolies, or even highly concentrated markets like airlines or pharmaceuticals, generally the only thing they think of is the ability of companies in concentrated markets to set prices wherever they’d like. But there are fully three primary benefits to monopoly or oligopoly, from the monopolists’ point of view. In addition to setting prices by restricting competition, monopolies can (and typically do) drive down wages so that they end up with a steady supply of cheap labor, and—both by market (selling) control and labor market (workers) control—they send vastly more money flowing to stockholders and senior management than can companies in truly competitive marketplaces.