Hartmann Report

Because we don't have a right to vote, America's billionaires and the GOP are preventing Democrats from voting… Over four thousand Pennsylvania residents who live overseas just had their right to vote challenged by a group using data from a billionaire-funded outfit. As Sam Levine wrote for The Guardian: "So far officials in Bucks, Lancaster, Lehigh, York, Cumberland, Dauphin, Beaver, Centre, and Lycoming county have all received challenges, said Andy Hoover, an ACLU spokesman." Many of America's rightwing/neofascist billionaires don't want you to vote. And they've funded extraordinary efforts across multiple states to put that desire into law.

America is the only developed country in the world that's allowed an unaccountable, unelected Supreme Court to hand its political system over to its richest citizens… The biggest lesson Americans learned this election year is that billionaires basically own half of our political process. In the seven most tightly contested Senate races, billionaire spending on Republican candidates outpaces that on Democratic ones by seven-to-one. This is not how a democracy is supposed to work. The "demos" in democracy means "the people." Democracies are supposed to fulfill the will of the people; add the protections for minority groups a republic provides and you have what the Founders called "republican democracy" and we refer to as a democratic republic.

Aside from outright attacks and procedural hurdles that suppress the vote and give Republicans an edge (more on those in the following chapters), there is another two-pronged attack in the Republicans’ war to preserve minority rule in America. The first prong is that a faction of Republicans wants to find a new answer to the broad question “Who deserves representation in the United States?” This question is as old as the country, and it was even re-answered with the ratification of the 14th Amendment.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Don't despair! — Last year Trump wanted General Milley put in front of a firing squad; now he's saying that should happen to Liz Cheney. Do you still think he's joking? — Crazy alert! Tucker says a demon attacked him while he was in bed with his wife and four dogs. — Europe's Greens ask professional grifter Jill Stein to pull out of US election to prevent a Trump victory — Texas Republicans Ted Cruz, Ken Paxton, and Greg Abbott just put another notch in their manly-man belts: An 18-year-old Texas woman died after being turned away from two hospitals for her miscarriage complications. — WTF? Our National Archives are removing displays and information about MLK, Native Americans, the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement, unions, birth control, and the American internment of Japanese during WWII because it may upset Republican legislators. — Georgia official warns of Russian interference in this year's election.Hunter in a Farmer's World Alert: ADHD: Learning to Ask Questions Can Be a Game-Changer — Wisdom School Alert: Is This Common Drug the Secret to Defying Age?

While we struggle, they scheme—how a Trump crash could line the pockets of America's elite… America's billionaires would love to have a recession, particularly a really severe one. In a recent "town hall," billionaire Elon Musk acknowledged what 23 Nobel Prize-winning economists across the country have predicted: If Trump is elected and he and Elon undertake their project to gut government spending, it will provoke a severe recession. "We have to reduce spending to live within our means," Musk said. "And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity." Most Republican voters aren't taking his embrace of a recession or a short-term depression like George W. Bush brought us seriously.

From silenced voices to erased truths, this could be the dark new order under Trump's iron grip… 31 October 2025 Leavenworth, Kansas Dear Louise, It's been almost a year since the last time I saw you, as they were arresting me on the "designated enemy within" sedition charge that's kept me in this prison. If the underground network here succeeds, you should get this letter within a few weeks; it's the third I've written you that got out of the prison, but I understand the first two couriers were busted for carrying contraband mail and are now in prison themselves. The day after President Trump was re-elected (when Speaker Johnson and then the Supreme Court recognized the disputed ballots in five states and threw the election to the House of Representatives), you'll recall, he invoked the Insurrection Act and began the mass arrests. They tell me Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Merrick Garland are in here, too, although I haven't seen them; apparently the "high value" former administration officials are locked down in a separate wing.

A few thousand votes could rewrite history – don't leave it to chance… Last night, in a brilliant speech before 75,000+ people on the ellipse in Washington DC — the place from which Trump sent a murderous mob against our Capitol — Vice President Kamala Harris asked for your vote. She was explicit about the stakes: "It will probably be the most important vote you ever cast. This election is more than just a choice between two parties and two different candidates. It is a choice about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American, or ruled by chaos and division." Will you, and those you know, respond by voting? One of the most common reasons people don't vote is because they think their vote won't matter. That it'll be lost in a sea of millions of votes. Over the past 21 years of doing a daily nationwide radio program, I've heard this excuse at least a few thousand times. But it's wrong: In reality, when people think like this, they have their math upside down. Elections aren't additive or subtractive: they're comparative. That's literally the whole point of an election.

We need a cultural shift that views wealth not just as privilege, but as a duty to uplift society—reviving the forgotten principle of noblesse oblige... "To try to make the world in some way better than you found it is to have a noble motive in life." —Andrew Carnegie Last Sunday the richest man in America — who owes most of his wealth to President Obama bailing out his electric car company and government contracts — endorsed a man for president who's a naked racist, fascist, and xenophobe who famously said: "My whole life I've been greedy, greedy, greedy. I've grabbed all the money I could get. I'm so greedy. … I want to grab all that money." Two days before, we learned that the billionaire owners of The LA Times and The Washington Post killed their own newspaper's planned endorsements of the Harris presidential campaign, presumably to avoid angering Donald Trump so he wouldn't mess with their business interests should he be elected. "To hell with democracy," they essentially said. "There's money to be made!" What ever happened to the sense of obligation that wealthy Americans used to feel to help out their country and her people in need?

From Bezos to Musk, America's richest are using media control to shape politics and grow profits... Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.—Yale historian Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny I cancelled my Washington Post subscription Friday evening. Jeff Bezos, Mister "Democracy Dies In Darkness" (the Post's slogan on their masthead), by blocking his editorial staff from endorsing Harris chose darkness over his nation's future, and I can't support that. The big mistake John D. Rockefeller made back in the day — that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk appear committed to not repeating — was not buying a media outlet like a newspaper. Had John D. had that sort of a vehicle to mold public opinion, American history may be very different.

The framers of the Constitution were pretty skittery about the issue. The roughly half of the Constitutional Convention that represented slaveholding states didn’t want anything that might one day force their states to allow enslaved people to vote, and many of the Northern representatives were wary of too much democracy breaking out and leading to what John Adams referred to as “the rabble” voting. And there was an absolute consensus that women should never be allowed to vote. Thus, voting is only really addressed in the amendments to the Constitution, and in each case very, very carefully.