Hartmann Report

So, get ready: it's coming this fall. And unless the administration acts quickly, there will be nothing they can do about it. Gas at $6 a gallon could easily throw the election to Trump… Have you noticed gas prices are rising? Get ready: you ain't seen nothing yet. The bloodthirsty leader of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia loves his dictatorial soul-mate Donald Trump and is today setting the stage to intervene in November's election in a big way, much like he did with a smaller test run during the fall of 2022 when he drove US gas prices up above $5, forcing President Biden to release oil from the US strategic petroleum reserve. As Stanley Reed reported for the Business pages of The New York Times three days ago: "Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, said Sunday that it would extend [their one-million-barrels-a-day] cuts in oil production through June, noting that it was acting 'in coordination with some' other states." That "other state" would be their OPEC+ partner Russia, which also announced last weekend a simultaneous production cut of 471,000 barrels a day. Putin wants Trump back in the White House, too. This time, though, because Trump refused to block the sale of America's largest gasoline refinery to Saudi Arabia in 2017 (completed in 2019 with Trump's blessing), no matter how much oil Biden releases from the reserves will be irrelevant: if the Saudis shut down their Port Arthur, Texas refinery this October "for maintenance," US gasoline prices will explode.

Will this generation of treason-weasel Republicans drag us into another world war by ignoring Putin's fascist land-grab? "Our enemies, the Administration keeps telling the people, are Germany, Italy, and Japan, naming them. Not one off them has made a gesture toward us. For all we think and feel about Hitler, he has not attacked us. But the American government has attacked Hitler first by words, then by measures short of war, then by giving pledge to his enemies to assist them by all physical means to the utmost." — Tennessee Republican Representative John Jennings, July 14, 1940 "I know of no Member of this House, Mr. Speaker, who possess the remotest idea that any of Hitler's panzer divisions are to strike in the desert of Arizona or in the sand stretches of the Mojave. How long are the American people to be fed this stuff?" Michigan Republican Representative Paul Shafer, May 16, 1941 In the two years leading up to Pearl Harbor, roughly a hundred Republican members of Congress stood up to publicly defend Hitler and condemn Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for "war mongering" and "promoting socialism." Last week Marjorie Taylor Greene echoed their comments — almost to the word — in condemning President Biden's efforts to aid Ukraine against this generation's fascist menace, Vladimir Putin.

The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream. The popular mind is agitated with problems that may disturb social order, and among them all none is more threatening than the inequality of condition, of wealth, and opportunity that has grown within a single generation out of the concentration of capital into vast combinations to control production and trade and to break down competition. —Senator John Sherman, 1890, speaking of his Sherman Antitrust Act

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Moscow Mike Johnson postpones a government shutdown this week. — Biden and Trump both visited the US southern border on Thursday. — Hunter Biden outfoxes James Comer and the GOP. — Putin is helping flood Europe with brown-skinned immigrants to disrupt their democracies and assist rightwing politicians. — Wisdom School Alert! Is There a Magic Formula That Slows Down Aging? — Crazy Alert! Trump is trying to pawn off the false claim that Roe v Wade allowed women to kill their babies after birth. — Geeky Science! How ultra-processed foods are linked to bad health. — Hunter in a Farmer’s World Alert! ADHD: How to Train Your Attention Span with Meditation — Israeli troops slaughter starving Gazans. — In the Russia that Tucker Carlson

Will Jack Smith & the Department of Justice do battle against Ginni Thomas & a group of people who are openly working to manipulate our system to the benefit of Trump and his fascist cronies? Now that Republicans on the Supreme Court have forced a pause in Donald Trump's federal trial for trying to overthrow the government of the United States and install himself as dictator for life, Jack Smith and his team may have a little time on their hands. Respectfully, I'd suggest this may be a great time to dust off his identification of Trump's six main co-conspirators and roll out indictments against each of them. None were president so, even if Trump did have "total immunity for life," they are all vulnerable to immediate prosecution.

SCOTUS introduced what will be at least a 130-day delay in Trump's trial. They won't even hear arguments until April 22. Democracy be damned... At least four members of the most corrupt Supreme Court in American history have decided to help Trump delay his trial for trying to overthrow the government of the United States. Just like in 2000, when five Republicans on the Court ignored Al Gore's probable (later found to be definite) win in Florida to put Bush in the White House, today's Court is doing as much as they can to help Trump win this November. In a hail-Mary attempt to push his trials beyond the election, hoping he'd win with Putin's help and could then pardon himself and gut the DOJ, Trump's attorneys filed a claim that his efforts to overturn the 2020 election were "official acts" and that all presidents have "absolute immunity" while in office and for the rest of their lives thereafter.

How much more damage are we willing to take? Garland and the DOJ need to get some answers and share them with the American people soon… "When you see Trump with Putin, as I have on a few occasions, he's like the 12-year old boy that goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team. 'My hero!' It's really creepy." —Malcolm Turnbull, 29th Prime Minister of Australia Donald Trump needs money. Apparently, many of the documents Trump stole from the White House are still missing. Including the binder with raw intelligence about American spies in Moscow. Are they his "get out of jail free" card?

Economic crises represent social and political transition points, times of great difficulty but also times of great opportunity: We now stand at the edge of one those rare windows in time... America is recovering from an economic crisis and Russia and China seem hell-bent on pushing us into what may become a world war. We've been here three times before in the history of our country, and each one has heralded major changes in the nature and structure of our government. As we watch corporations pour increasingly large amounts of money into politics, it's a good time to reevaluate their role in governance and society. At the top of that list is the doctrine created out of whole cloth by the US Supreme Court in the late 19th century called "Corporate Personhood." It has become one of the most destructive forces in American politics. In 1776, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was published and the U.S. Declaration of Independence was signed. This was no coincidence: both were broadly embraced reactions, in part, to a widespread economic depression that had begun in the previous decade.

Here's what I'm hearing Republicans are planning in the event Joe Biden wins re-election & Democrats hold the Senate and take the House this November… Back on March 13, 2020 — almost exactly four years ago — I wrote an article that was published at alternet.org laying out how Republicans were then, ten months before January 6th, planning to partially repeat the debacle of the election of 1876 by having Vice President Pence refuse to certify swing state votes and thus throw the election to the House to keep Trump in office, no matter how the election went. When I published the article ten months before January 6th, I received concerned and even alarmed communications from several Democratic strategists and a few elected officials who basically said they didn't think there was any way Trump would try such an audacious move and, if he did, he wouldn't get away with it. But I was right and that was exactly what Trump had up his sleeve. We saw it play out on January 6th. The only thing that stopped him was Pence's unwillingness to go along with stealing an election. Now I'm hearing a new story from those same GOP insiders (as well as other commentators) about Trump's schemes for 2024.

No matter how much Robert Bork and his colleagues say they’re “pro-business,” what they’re actually advocating is helpful only to a very small class of very large businesses and the very wealthy people who own them or their stock. Small and medium-sized businesses, entrepreneurs, workers, communities, and start-ups are badly damaged by the focus of antitrust law being kept entirely on prices that consumers pay. Bork—and indeed his entire class of Chicago School economists—was always focused on the interests of straight, white, wealthy men to the exclusion of women, communities of color, and people who were not the “makers” and “job creators” of their lore. Consistent with that focus, whether applied to micro- or macroeconomics, to regulating pollution or monopolies, to their complaints about “anti-war hippies” “urban dwellers,” or “women’s libbers,” Bork and his friends managed to insert into the political and economic bloodstream of our nation the cancer-causing virus of “greed is good” ideology. Its impact has been devastating.