Hartmann Report

Who’s next? Trump’s ICE is snatching student protesters off the streets! Trump and his police-state goons are trying to frighten people who dare even come close to people protesting his or Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies. This is how dictators intimidate citizens, how freedom dies, and is a clear violation of our Constitution. And, in all probability, this is just the beginning of what historians will someday define as a very ugly episode in American history.

Wall Street landlords, foreign buyers, and the GOP’s war on affordable housing... Trump ordered Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser to evict homeless people from various parts of Washington DC. He then cut millions of dollars in federal support to house poor people. He didn’t make any suggestions about solving homelessness, mind you; he simply wants the problem moved out of sight. It’s a classic Republican strategy, and will work about as well as putting a Band-Aid over cancer. It wasn’t always this way in America.

WTF, America?! The country where kids with birth defects must beg for help… Welcome to America’s sickest reality show — where families turn to crowdfunding for cancer treatments while billionaires hoard obscene wealth. In no other developed nation do sick children depend on charity to survive, but here, it’s just another episode of our rigged system. Regular readers might have noticed that our monthly Zoom meeting has been moved back to March 15; it’s because Louise and I were with our family from Michigan on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. Yesterday afternoon (our last day), the ship was running a program where they were selling T-shirts to benefit St. Jude’s Hospital, a fine charity that’s doing great work. Weirdly, though, America is the only country in the world where children with cancer have to depend on the charity of others for research and treatment. Somehow, this doesn’t seem abnormal to Americans. In fact, we are marinated in constant reminders — that we ignore because they have just come to see normal — of how unique America is in this regard. Consider the ubiquitous ad for the company that buys life insurance policies. The senior citizen in the ad says something to the effect of, “We learned that we could sell our policy when a friend did so to pay their medical bills.”

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Donald Trump continues to ignore and violate multiple court orders regarding the funding of various congressionally mandated programs, while Elon Musk‘s DOGE teenagers continue to invade federal agencies, sometimes with armed muscle who appear to be pretending to be federal marshals. — Is Trump seriously trying to seize Canada as our 51st state? — Trump is seriously trying to screw Ukraine on behalf of Putin, and ‘Liddle Marco and the terrified Republicans in Congress are being forced to go along with it. — Want to send a few bucks to Texas Congressman Al Green by way of supporting his defiance of Trump‘s lies at the State of the Union? — Supreme Court Associate Justice Sam Alito is at it again, lying in a dissenting opinion while laying out a road map for Donald Trump to violate our Constitution. — Elon Musk sure does know how to manipulate Donald Trump: just spend a million bucks on TV advertisements flattering him and he’ll roll over like a dog wanting his tummy scratched. — Crazy Alert! Is the Pentagon really going to decide that they can’t mention the name of the Air Force plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima? — Wisdom School: The Pervasive Universal Consciousness Model: A New Frontier in Understanding Reality — Hunter in a Farmer’s World: ADHD: Learn to Postpone Gratification

How fake patriots are betraying their own country... Former Democratic Senator Joe Manchin accused Congressman Al Green and other Democrats of “disrespect” and — absurdly— “inhumanity” for standing up and pointing out Donald Trump’s over-100 lies in his State of the Union address. This is the same on-the-take Senator Joe Manchin who refused to break a filibuster and thus blocked legislation that would have reversed Citizens United and established an absolute right to vote in America. The same sellout-coal-baron Senator Joe Manchin who opened the door for Elon Musk to buy the election for Donald Trump and Republicans to throw around 4 million mostly-Democratic voters off voting rolls or refuse to count their votes.

America’s safety net is their next profit scheme — and you’re the target… Tuesday night, Donald Trump stood before the nation and, with the full backing of billionaires like Elon Musk, laid the groundwork for the biggest heist in American history — the rapid, systematic destruction of Social Security, disguised as “reform.” We saw the formal announcement of it during Trump’s State of the Union address, and the DOGE announcement earlier in the week that 7,000 employees at Social Security are to be immediately laid off — with as many as half of all Social Security employees (an additional 30,000 people) — soon to be on the chopping block. Republicans and their morbidly rich donors have hated Social Security ever since it was first created in 1935. They’ve called it everything from communism to socialism to a Ponzi scheme.

The last time American fascists tried this, FDR and Wallace took them down. Will we? Last night, we were treated to a litany of grievance, political bullshit, and lies. Of particular note was Trump’s declaration of war against the government of the United States, particularly Social Security, which I’ll discuss at more length tomorrow. But the larger issue, given the GOP’s adoption of neofascism, is how far Trump and his Republican enablers have dragged America from the form of government on which America was founded.

Russia’s cyber attack on Ukraine and subsequent invasion, it turns out, may just have been dress rehearsal… Tonight is Trump‘s first State of the Union speech of his second term. Observers all around the world are wondering how deferential he will be toward Putin. Already, there are ominous signs that he and Musk intend to bring America to its knees on behalf of the Russian dictator and to destroy our defenses against a possible Russian attack, should Trump lose Putin’s love or the next American president directly challenge Russia.

What happens when the country that once led the free world becomes the enemy of Democracy? Elon Musk just called for the United States to withdraw from NATO, leaving Europe to Putin’s tender mercies. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Hegseth ordered our federal operations to detect and stop Vladimir Putin’s infiltration of American cyber security — from our nuclear facilities and dams to our news and social media spaces — to cease.

Stopping Politicians from Choosing Their Own Voters As noted earlier, the Supreme Court in 2019 threw open the door to political gerrymandering by whichever party can gain control of a state in an election year ending in 0 (the Constitution requires a census and reapportionment every decade). Legislation should be passed explicitly overturning this decision and providing for “good government” nonpartisan commissions to draw legislative districts.