Hartmann Report

America's billionaires — along with the rest of us — should be every bit as frightened of the avatars of fascism like Trump, Bannon, and Orbán as they are of the ghosts of the long-dead USSR... America's rightwing billionaires are freaked out about communism and, in their paranoia, they are funding and encouraging the rise of a form of fascism that will eventually turn on them, too. Will they wake up in time? Louise and I just finished watching the extraordinary Showtime series, A Gentleman in Moscow, which takes place in the years and decades immediately after the Russian Revolution of 1917. A wealthy aristocrat (he was a count) is basically imprisoned in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow and has a front-row seat to observe how the well-intentioned revolt against the excesses of the Romanov dynasty turned into a brutal dictatorship, ultimately headed by a sociopathic Joseph Stalin. The banality of evil. It flashed me back to the 1960s and a number of conversations I had as a young teenager with my father and heard on TV shows that we watched together like those moderated by William F. Buckley Jr. and Joe Pyne. The fear those days was that Soviet-style communists were plotting to take over America, confiscate all the wealth from the morbidly rich, and then line them up against a wall and shoot them as Lenin and his followers had done in Russia. It was a fear that, at the time, seemed rational to many Americans.

Why both Thomas — whose bribe-taking in exchange for his votes on Citizens United and other cases is well documented — and his rightwing buddy Sam Alito must resign or face impeachment... Senator Dick Durbin, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, needs to act. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sam Alito was just caught red-handed promoting Trump's fascist "stop the steal" campaign to overthrow the 2020 election and end democracy in America by flying the upside-down flag at his home. He then went on Fox "News" and lied that it was his wife's fault and that she did it because schoolchildren at a nearby bus stop saw a neighbor's "F*ck Trump" yard sign. In fact, as the Lincoln Project's Steve Schmidt pointed out this past weekend: "Mrs. Alito was so alarmed by the degradations and profane, yet protected speech that she went immediately home, and inverted the American flag signaling distress. Here's the problem: there were no school buses and no school children on them in January 2021 in Alexandria, Virginia. Schools in the city were closed for a full year as a result of the pandemic and didn't re-open until March 2021." But Alito's fingers were apparently far deeper in the January 6th coup attempt than most Americans realize. Trump lawyer Sydney Powell pointed out on Stew Peters' rightwing YouTube channel that she, Louie Gohmert, and Kari Lake (among others) had filed a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence to prevent him from certifying the Electoral College vote on January 6th. It was a legal attempt to try to do what Trump sent a mob to do when the legal strategy failed.

Robert Bork’s consumer welfare framework for determining if a company is a monopoly concerns itself with only two outcomes: 1. Low prices for consumers 2. High returns for investors But if a company is concerned only with consumers and investors, then it is going to squeeze everything else, from environmental protection to wages and worker safety to product quality. This is also an incentive to cut labor expenses by merging with other companies and eliminating entire departments. The new company won’t need two sales, HR, or accounting departments; tens of thousands of jobs are typically lost in large mergers. Bork’s policy, now America’s policy, means that companies now cut pensions as a way of cutting liabilities. It means that all firms are encouraged to cut corners on environmental, workplace, and consumer protections, and to lobby endlessly to kill those protections entirely.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — It’s time for corrupt, billionaire-funded Justice Sam Alito to step down or be investigated and impeached. — Tomorrow at 10 AM PT/1 PM ET, I’ll be speaking at the “Embracing Our Emergency” conference — A Trump-linked dark-money group spent $90m on racist and transphobic ads in 2022 and are fixing to repeat the performance this fall. — Why is cable news refusing to report on Trump’s solicitation of a $1 billion bribe? — Is the GOP planning to outlaw no-fault divorce? — Ron DeSantis makes “Climate Change Isn’t Real” the official law and policy in Florida. — Why are we allowing ultraprocessed food corporations to cram junk down our children’s throats? — If you thought China was our friend, think again. — Hunter in a Farmers World Alert! ADHD: The “Mirror Technique” from Claude Bristol — Wisdom School Alert! Four Mistakes Have Brought Humankind to a Crisis — Mike “Squeaky” Johnson Alert!

Is America in the final stage of the 40-year transition from a forward-looking & still-evolving democratic republic into a white supremacist ethnostate ruled by a small group of fascist oligarchs? The headline in this week's Fortune reads: "Billionaire investor Ray Dalio warns U.S. is 'on the brink' and estimates a more than 1 in 3 chance of civil war" Billionaires and civil war? A billionaire-funded Supreme Court Justice flew the American flag upside down outside his house after January 6th in apparent support of Donald Trump's attempt to overthrow our government. Americans for Tax Fairness reports that 50 billionaire families have, at this early stage, already injected almost a billion dollars into our political system — the overwhelming majority of it going to Republicans and in support of Donald Trump — in an effort to maintain enough control of our political system that their taxes won't go up. And that total is just what's reported: it doesn't count the billions in unknowable dark money that's sloshing around the system thanks to Citizens United.

"Both Texas and Georgia are actually Blue states; the only reason Republicans have as much power as they do in each is because of massive voter roll purges and voter suppression laws." If a state wants to take away your gun, they must first go to court and prove there's a clear and legally defensible justification for that "extreme" action. You can appeal their move all the way to the US Supreme Court. On the other hand, if a Republican governor, secretary of state, or local official wants to take away your voter registration or refuse to count your ballot, they don't even have to tell you they've done it.

Congress must stand up for what’s right and consistent with American values: Legally bribed politicians and judges isn’t that... Is there a way to reverse the decision by five Republicans on the Supreme Court that it’s OK for billionaires and big corporations to bribe politicians? Americans are watching with increasing shock and dismay: — President Biden tried to knock up to $20,000 off the debt of every person in the country with a student loan. Republicans decided this might somehow, someday mean fewer profits for banks — who financially support the GOP — so they sued at the Supreme Court. The Republican appointees on the Court, over the objections of the three Democratic appointees, killed the president’s effort without providing any cogent constitutional rationalization.

The GOP has gotten really good at stealing the White House… The GOP's favorite phrase when it comes to presidential politics appears to be, "Nobody knew at the time." Once a president is sworn into office, regardless of how much evidence there is of crimes and irregularities committed to get him there, both the press and the electorate just seem to want to ignore that evidence and move along. After all, there's never been a successfully contested presidential election in American history. Which is why the GOP will again count on getting away with their crimes against electoral democracy this fall. The big question for America will be, "What did we miss that we should have known at the time?" We have, you'll recall, seen this movie before: — When Richard Nixon ran against incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968, nobody knew at the time that Nixon's campaign had reached out to the South Vietnamese leadership and promised to make them rich if they'd refuse to go along with the Paris talks and thus sabotage the peace deal that LBJ had worked out with them earlier that summer.

Fully 20% of American business is now controlled by private equity, which is draining billions out of our economy every week to stash in the money bins of its morbidly rich owners... The last time Louise took one of our pets to the vet, there was a cute little dog running around the clinic as if he owned the place. She asked about him, and it turned out that somebody had brought him in for a medical problem but then wasn't able to pay the vet's bill; they simply left the dog behind. The cost of veterinary medicine has been exploding since 2020, in large part because that was the year private equity firms began buying up vet clinics across the country. Once acquired, the clinics and pet hospitals are drained of assets by some of America's most morbidly rich individuals. The simple result: higher prices for pet care. Most people think private equity is essentially the same as venture capital, the business/investment model you see on TV shows like Shark Tank. Venture capitalists invest their own (or their company's) money in startup companies so the recipient company can use that money to bring a new product to market, expand operations, and generally grow the business. The venture capital investors make their return by the company growing and thus increasing the value of its stock. Private equity, however, is an entirely different animal, borne out of Reagan era deregulation, lowering of capital gains taxes, and lobbying — facilitated by five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalizing billionaires buying legislation from members of Congress — that even created an entirely new income tax loophole called "carried interest" just for private equity managers.

If the continuous accumulation of wealth and the political power associated with it is a cancer in our economic, political, and social system, then the immune system that can take it on is an empowered middle class. A middle class that outnumbers both the rich and poor combined is a uniquely American invention. At our nation’s founding, the middle class made up the majority of free Americans, in part because land stolen from the Indians was so cheap, and free slave labor helped produce a general prosperity for white people. While the source of the American middle class in the 18th century may have been pernicious, the lesson for us today is how it produced a general economic, political, and social stability.