Hartmann Report

It’s already too late for millions of insect, plant, and animal species that have gone extinct; it may soon be too late for us if we don’t wake the hell up and take decisive action... It’s early summer here in the Pacific Northwest and the flowers are blooming; above is a photo Louise took with her iPhone yesterday morning as we were walking along the Columbia River. The hillside is ablaze with wildflowers. But it was also eerily silent. Look carefully: No matter how much you enlarge the photo you’ll not see a single insect. Thirty years ago this hillside was swarmed with bees, flies, and dozens of other winged bugs. Today, although pretty, walking by it felt like I was passing a graveyard. I’ll never forget the day the trucker called into my radio show from southern Illinois. It was about seventeen years ago, and he was a long-haul driver who regularly ran a coast-to-coast route from the southeast to the Pacific Northwest a few dozen times a year.

So, here we are, handing billions of dollars a month to insurance industry executives so they can buy new Swiss chalets, private jets, and luxury yachts... They're competing unfairly with Medicare, and you and I are paying for it. It's obscene. When George W. Bush and congressional Republicans (and a handful of bought-off Democrats) created Medicare Advantage in 2003, it was the fulfillment of half of Bush's goal of privatizing Social Security and Medicare, dating all the way back to his unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978 and a main theme of his second term in office. Medicare Advantage is not Medicare. These plans are private health insurance provided by private corporations, who are then fully reimbursed by the Medicare trust fund regardless of how much their customers use their insurance. Thus, the more they can screw their customers and us taxpayers by withholding healthcare, the more money they make.

How did America reach this point where about half our country thinks up is down, black is white, and Republicans are best trusted with our money and national security? The fifteen or twenty percent of Americans who follow actual news reporting are dumbfounded.

Such an action could swing our election toward Trump, but also risks provoking a third world war... Donald Trump has overtly taken the side of dictators including Putin, Xi, Orbán, and Kim over the past eight years, most likely because he admires the way each has crushed efforts toward democracy and ruled their respective nations with an iron fist. Now US intelligence agencies say their big worry is that one or more of these nations will reciprocate Trump's love by launching some sort of October Surprise to push voters closer to Trump in time for this fall's election. Such an action could swing our election toward Trump, but also risks provoking a third world war.

I was oblivious to the real significance of Facebook in everyday life until the company disabled my personal, private account. The list of possible reasons they posted for doing this included “impersonating a celebrity,” so maybe they shut me down because they thought I was pretending to be that guy who’s a talk show host and author (ahem).

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court just legalized racial gerrymanders. — Trump's felon crew wants to crime again in 2024. — Corporations are abusing "free speech" to destroy the world. — How 2016 WAS stolen — with help from Russia! — Is Putin trying to move his border into the Baltics? — Here's a poll that I'll bet won't show up on the front page of the New York Times. — Speaking of polls, do you know what that money Michael Cohen confessed to "stealing" from Trump was for? — Good News Alert! President Biden is moving forward with a whole series of progressive policies, even going around Congress. — Wisdom School Alert! My Journey to Mastering Writing: Discover How You Can, Too. — Hunter in a Farmer's World Alert! ADHD: Can You Learn to Pay Attention to Paying Attention?

Thus, today’s Republicans are finally close to fulfilling Hammond’s and Reagan’s vision (while ironically repudiating America’s first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln)… Odds are you’ve never heard of the “mudsill theory of labor,” but you and everybody else in this country really should learn about it. It explains a whole spectrum of Republican behavior that otherwise seems baffling and self-defeating. For example: — The past 7 years have seen a near-fivefold increase in documented child labor violations by employers. States have responded to this alarming trend in two ways: Democratic-controlled states are putting more teeth into their laws and upping enforcement; Republican-controlled states are loosening their laws and cutting back on enforcement so children can drop out of school and go to work.

Trump's political Teflon coating is at least a hundred times more effective than Reagan’s was in his wildest dreams. Why? Americans are dumbfounded. How is it that half this nations’ voters are on the verge of returning to office a guy who: — Began his life of crime busted for writing “C” for “Colored” on Black rental applicants’ forms, — Mismanaged the Covid crisis so badly America had the developed world’s highest mortality rate with at least a half-million unnecessary deaths, ...

Money-as-speech has metastasized so extensively it threatens to kill its host, ending democracy here and turning America into another Putin- or Orbán-style autocracy run by Trump... An international fascist movement — led by Russia, Hungary, and China — is on the march worldwide, and America is in its crosshairs. Case in point: Ohio Republican Senator and maximally rich dude J.D. Vance, who dresses up his Trump/Putin toadyism in more elegant and acceptable garb than "bleach blonde bad-built butch body™" Marjorie Taylor Greene is capable of. In an article for the elite Financial Times, Vance recently wrote: "We owe it to our European partners to be honest: Americans want allies in Europe, not client states, and our generosity in Ukraine is coming to an end. Europeans should regard the conclusion of the war there as an imperative. ... And Europe should consider how exactly it is going to live with Russia when the war in Ukraine is over." Instead of expressing shock at such a treason-weasel statement, the wise elders at Politico ran an article quoting him that was headlined: "J.D. Vance Has a Point."

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.