Hartmann Report

Private equity, billionaire agendas, and GOP-funded attacks are driving a stake through the heart of American media diversity… Have you heard that Comcast is planning to sell MSNBC? Is Rupert Murdoch planning to buy it? Will America's media landscape soon resemble those of Hungary and Russia? Without the rightwing media juggernaut, Donald Trump probably wouldn't be president next year and wouldn't have won in 2016. That said, the progressive media landscape looks like it might be about to get a whole lot worse. Comcast, which owns NBC and its subsidiaries CNBC and MSNBC (among other media outlets) announced this week that they'll be spinning off MSNBC (among others) next year. And the consequences are already showing up. It was reported this week that Rachel Maddow just took a substantial annual pay-cut because of the uncertain future of the network.

The West's response to Ukraine could redefine the future of democracy In the last week, Russia has unleashed one of its most violent missile attacks against Ukraine, and the United States and at least one other European country have given president Zelenskyy permission to use long-range missiles to attack within Russia. Putin has also brought in North Korean troops, internationalizing the incident as if he wants to turn it into World War III. Europe and the United States both know they must stand against this. And yesterday, reportedly, Putin launched an ICBM against Ukraine; ever since the days of the Cold War, the United States and Russia have always notified each other of ICBM launches because these are the missiles used to carry nuclear warheads. We mutually notify each other to prevent a nuclear response that could trigger Armageddon.

How Divisions and Complacency Allow Authoritarianism to Flourish… President Biden told the nation, "American democracy is under attack … [by the] former president of the United States…" I wrote about this years ago when Trump was trying to overthrow our government, and it's time to talk again about what an American authoritarian government would look like. Because over the next two months we may — depending on how Americans react to the changes in our form of government Trump has planned — very rapidly slide into a form of fascism much like the old Confederacy in the 1840-1860 era. Like the old Confederacy, it could feature political violence and threats of violence, rigged elections, and single-party rule combined with a corrupt oligarchy that finances the politicians. And, like the old Confederacy, it could try to destroy the historic democracy of the United States of America, only this time in 2025 and the three following years. The word "fascism" gets thrown around a lot, but most Americans have no idea what it would look like or how it would actually play out.

The road ahead could lead to dictatorship or renewed liberty, as the American people confront the corrosive power of wealth in politics… Oligarchy is a form of government where the richest people in a country have captured its political system (or even filled it with themselves) and use that control to direct much of the government's efforts to increasing their own wealth and power. We'll soon again have a billionaire president — helped to power by the richest billionaire on the planet — with his election campaign funded in large part by at least $2 billion in direct, reported donations from roughly 150 billionaire families. It appears that the other roughly 350 billionaires who openly funded Trump in 2020 chose, this time, to instead donate to "dark money" SuperPACs created by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court with Citizens United that don't list their donors or, in many cases, even report their expenditures. With an estimated $15 billion spent on this 2024 election, their expenditures probably dwarf the ones we know about (and collectively they carpet-bombed Americans in often-deceptive political advertising).

Most Americans, when they hear the name Viktor Yushchenko, vaguely remember a Ukrainian politician lying in a hospital bed with a severely disfigured face, the result of poisoning with a deadly form of dioxin, the toxic ingredient in Agent Orange. But it was exit polls that got him there. Exit polls are polls taken outside of voting stations or polling places, where people who have already voted are questioned as they’re leaving. They’re considered far more accurate than other types of pre- or post-election polling because they don’t rely on people answering their phones, returning a mailed inquiry, or asserting that they intend to vote when they may well not. In a clean election environment, it’s safe to assume that nearly 100 percent of the people polled actually voted, and history shows that such polls are typically (outside the United States) accurate to within a fraction of a point, or a point or two at most, depending on how many people are polled.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — I'll be on C-SPAN this Sunday morning at 9:15 am ET — Is changing the Democratic Party the way to remake our Democracy? — In an authoritarian regime it's important to cow and control the news, and here we go. — Speaking of authoritarianism, Texas Republicans want to outlaw websites that discuss how to get an abortion. — Sarah Hurst's Russia Report on Tulsi Gabbard will make your toes curl. — Blueprint of destruction: Is Trump following Orbán's and Putin's road to power? — Former Trump administration officials who turned on him are preparing to flee the country. — Are Republicans coming for healthcare for both retired and working people? — State-level authoritarians fall in line with Trump. — Hunter in a Farmer's World Alert: Thom Hartmann Finds Himself Right in the Middle of the ADHD Debate — Wisdom School Alert: Can We Slow Down Time?

From the Founders' Vision to the Billionaire Takeover of Democracy Alexander Hamilton thought he (and the others who wrote the Constitution) had it all figured out. He and his colleagues never imagined that a group of billionaires would spend 43 years and billions of dollars to seize the US Supreme Court, which would then legalize political bribery. They never conceived of a foreign billionaire family coming to American and building a nationwide media ecosystem that was capable of convincing Americans that up was down, wrong was right, and a convicted fraudster and rapist would be a noble president. They would've laughed at you if you told them that the richest man in the world would come from apartheid South Africa to hook up with a grifter billionaire to become co-president.

It's time to name the enemy and wage a real fight for the middle class… If my hypothesis from yesterday — that Democrats best way to win elections and regain political power is to engage in class warfare against the GOP and the billionaires that fund it — the immediate question is, "How?" The last century has seen two presidents engage in class warfare in a big and direct way that not only won them multiple elections but also altered the electoral map of America: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. There are multiple lessons to learn from both.

From FDR to Reagan to Trump: How the left lost its greatest power, and how to win it back… The great lesson of the election of 2024 is that, to a large extent, class has replaced race as the single most potent political dividing line. In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt took office and began a great experiment. Was it, he asked, really possible to create a society where more than half of a democratic and capitalist nation could enjoy a middle-class lifestyle? On the day of his inauguration the best estimate is that only about 15 percent of Americans had reached that economic milestone. Back at the founding of our republic, several philosophers and economists suggested it was possible for a majority-middle-class society to emerge on this continent. Adam Smith (of the 1776 Wealth of Nations fame) wrote a book Theory of Moral Sentiments arguing that if a nation were to intervene in the marketplace in "moral" ways that uplifted working class people, such a society could emerge. Thomas Paine similarly argued in Agrarian Justice for a number of progressive reforms including what today we call Social Security, a guaranteed minimum income, free public education, and the inheritance tax. But from the beginning of America until 1933 most of these dreams were unrealized.

As Homan returns to ICE, expect a brutal escalation in deportation raids, with few spared…and the rest of us will probably be next. When Trump was elected, many Americans wondered if we were in for a brutal nationwide reign of terror, or if he'd merely content himself with more tax cuts for billionaires and a repeat of his last term's personally profitable crony capitalism. While the mainstream media has treated him (for years) as if he's just another, albeit quirky, politician, others among us, as Carole Cadwalladr noted at The Power, remember that when Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines (whose constitution is modeled after ours) within a mere 6 months he was imprisoning opposition politicians, protesters, and journalists.