Hartmann Report

The core argument of the “government is bad” crowd is that government is, itself, a monopoly. Since everybody knows that monopolies are bad things, so, too, government must be an intolerable affront that reduces the quality of life for its citizens. This meme has been incredibly destructive to America’s working people, who’ve become hostile to government while losing their wariness of corporate monopoly. There’s one type of monopoly that’s actually good, with a single caveat. That’s called a “natural monopoly,” and for it to work properly, it generally requires government. Consider your home. While you can buy a new stove or sofa or rug from many different companies, you’ll be hard-pressed to buy your water, electric, or septic from more than one single vendor. There’s only one power line, water line, and sewer line attached to your home. Thus, power, water, and septic are generally referred to as “natural monopolies.”

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Trump's foreign cash scandal is, to paraphrase Bernie, "YUGE!" — Wisdom School Alert! The #1 Lesson to Become a Brilliant Writer Revealed — Breaking News: New evidence shows Trump's campaign "directly orchestrated" the criminal fake elector plot to steal the White House in 2020 — A new report says Trump killed 17,000 Americans by pushing his fake covid cures — Crazy Alert! Florida's crackpot surgeon general calls Covid vaccines "the anti-Christ." Really!? — Florida is set to follow Ohio and secure abortion rights, although Republicans are playing dirty — Help California close the money loophole! — Geeky science! Hearing aids can extend your life!

Into the void steps the "pink slime journalism" newspapers and websites, funded by multiple rightwing billionaires, peddling lies and hate to get rightwing Republicans elected to office… It's an election year, so get ready: here comes "pink slime journalism." Pink slime, of course, is the ground up gristle that's colored red and sold as meat or a meat additive, but the term has come to mean anything that purports to be one thing but in fact is something quite different. In this case, these are rightwing propaganda outlets that purport to be local newspapers. They're taking advantage of the tragic reality that since Reagan stopped enforcing antitrust laws in 1983 and Clinton did away with ownership limits for news outlets in 1996, over 2,100 local newspapers in America have gone out of business. Into that void have stepped the "pink slime journalism" newspapers and websites, funded by multiple rightwing billionaires, peddling lies and hate to get rightwing Republicans elected to office.

Will excluding pregnant women (but not their fetuses) from EMTALA be the proverbial straw that breaks the back of the 38-year-long GOP scam? Ronald Reagan's strategy to kill an early Medicare For All campaign just came back to haunt America's pregnant women, particularly those without insurance or a fat bank account who live in Republican-controlled states. By putting fetuses at an equal footing with pregnant people, this bizarre decision will cause American women to die. As a result, it could signal a turning point in our national discussions about both abortion and healthcare in general.

The white Republican base has been so lied to and abused over the past forty or so years that they’ve become easy marks for the predators in both big business and the GOP… While many trace the beginning of the modern rightwing fascist-friendly MAGA-type movement to the 1954 Brown v Board decision and the way it put the John Birch Society on steroids, another interesting origin story for today’s GOP base is grounded in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In the years immediately leading up to the 1970 creation of the EPA, pollution in America had gotten so bad it was impossible to ignore and was quickly becoming a political issue.

White supremacists have gagged teachers, and now even kids are afraid to bring up the topics or complain when they’re harassed by christian nationalist bullies… The news has been all over Nikki Haley’s inability to say “slavery” before she was called out on it, but few are pointing to the larger issue: the institutionalization of racism through American law that has happened in 16 Red states now as well as in hundreds of smaller towns and individual schools. From Florida to Texas to little towns like Temecula, California, legislatures and school boards across America have been banning what they call “Critical Race Theory (CRT).” They’re doing it in a desperate attempt to freeze what’s left of America’s historic racial hierarchy, with whites in charge, in place.

To a large extent, this debate is really meta to a larger debate western civilization has been having since the days of Plato: are leaders made through experience & circumstance, or born to greatness? “No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” —Thomas Carlyle When Donald Trump fails or falls, are there other standing-in-the-wings fascist Republicans capable of taking his place?

Because the Founders set up America to be resistant to the coercive and corruptive influence of monopoly and vested interest, the monopolists didn’t have any direct means of taking over the American government. So, two processes were necessary. First, they knew that they’d have to take over the government. A large part of that involved the explicit capture of the third branch of government, the federal judiciary (and particularly the Supreme Court), which meant taking and holding the presidency (because the president appoints judges) at all costs, even if it required breaking the law; colluding with foreign governments, monopolies, and oligarchs; and engaging in massive election fraud, all issues addressed in previous Hidden History books. Second, they knew that if they were going to succeed for any longer than a short time, they’d need popular support. This required two steps: build a monopoly-friendly intellectual and media infrastructure, and then use it to persuade people to distrust the US government.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Now that both Colorado and Maine have disqualified Trump from the ballot for committing insurrection in violation of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, a few Democrats have joined virtually the entire GOP in claiming that it should be the “right of the voters, not the courts” to decide who our next president will be. — The Maine Republican who filed the initial complaint that led to Trump being removed from that state’s presidential ballots is also calling for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from Trump’s appeal of Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ finding that he’s disqualified by virtue of his treasonous attempted sedition. — Lev Parnas was sentenced to over a year in prison for funneling Russian money into the Trump campaign. — Putin is “betting the farm” on Trump getting elected in 2024. — Speaking of Putin and Ukraine, now that the entire US press corps has left Kiev and relocated themselves like lemmings to Israel, Russia is doubling down on their violent, criminal assaults on Ukrainian civilians, schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, and shopping centers. — The Argentine crises deepens. — Leonard Leo and his Christianist fellow travelers are setting up a new case for the Supreme Court to okay a religious school to be 100 percent funded with taxpayer money. — Coal multimillionaire unhappy with President Biden’s decision to promote green hydrogen — Geeky Science! Global warming is killing salmon.

As Nikki Haley well knows — the Confederacy rose up not simply to preserve slavery and the Southern oligarchy, but to extend that oligarchy to the rest of the United States… First, a curious person in her New Hampshire town hall this week asked Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, “What caused the Civil War?” You could almost see the gears turning in her head, as she backs away from the questioner and takes a long pause, knowing that if she says “slavery” she’ll offend the white racist base of the GOP.