Hartmann Report

From Greedy Kings to Corporate Conglomerates – It's Always Been the Same Fight Yesterday, I wrote about how the mental illness of hoarding syndrome afflicting a few hundred of our nation's rightwing billionaires has destroyed a large chunk of the American middle class and is threatening the health of our biosphere. But the overall story is larger than just that. Trump is embroiled in a bribery scandal that has the entire world agog. The potentates and dictators of the Middle East are openly contemptuous of his willingness to defy Congress and sell them advanced American weapons systems in exchange for billion-dollar Trump hotels in their countries. Putin and his state-owned media ridicules Trump daily, pushing his attacks on Ukraine in Trump's face. And federal workers and our military are aghast at the incompetence, corruption, and even the alleged alcoholism of the people Trump has scraped off the floor of Fox "News" to run their agencies and make federal prosecutors. All of this corruption and incompetence has one major goal: the enrichment of the Trump family and the people close to them. It's an old, old story, that dates back to the earliest days of human prehistory.

How a sick obsession is killing workers, democracy, and our planet… It happens every few generations. It’s what drove the fascist oligarchs of the Confederacy to reach out and try to conquer the entire United States in the 1860s. It caused the Robber Barons to murder union organizers and ultimately crash America into the Republican Great Depression in the early decades of the 20th century. And it’s why wages have been stagnant while billionaires’ wealth has exploded in the years since the Reagan Revolution. What I’m talking about here is the rise of greedy oligarchs who are driven by an identifiable mental illness, what’s either a subset of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) or a defect in impulse control called Hoarding Syndrome.

Once you’ve labeled your opponents as subhuman, how do you work with them? How do you compromise? You don’t. Trump opened Memorial Day in the most disgusting way possible, not by praising our fallen heroes but by attacking Democrats. He wrote on his Nazi-infested social media site on Monday morning: “Happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds…” When the President of the United States calls members of the oldest political party in the world and a former president “scum,” it’s not just another ugly outburst that embarrasses America before the rest of the world: It’s a warning sign. A bright red flag. It tells us that something far more sinister than partisan posturing is afoot. Something our media has already decided to overlook in their perpetual effort to normalize the abominable. This kind of rhetoric isn’t new, and it’s not harmless. History has shown us—again and again—that when political leaders use dehumanizing language to vilify their opponents, they’re in actuality laying the groundwork for authoritarianism, repression, and violence.

The chilling similarities to past tyrants—and why America can't look away anymore… "All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force." — George Orwell It's axiomatic that dictators are corrupt. But understanding the inevitable relationship between corruption and dictatorship — and how it flows in both directions — is essential to understanding the direction the Trump Crime Family is taking America. First, it's important to know that there's no such thing as a dictator who's not corrupt. Every dictator in world history, with the possible exception of Cincinnatus, has been massively corrupt. To defy public opinion while skimming wealth out of the state's coffers and public commons, national leaders must use the typical tools of dictatorship to intimidate good government advocates into silence: violence, threats, capture of police agencies and courts, intimidation of the press, cowing politicians, and prisons.

In 1935, Congress passed, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed, the National Labor Relations Act, often referred to as the Wagner Act, legalizing labor unions in the United States for the first time. It was referred to as “the most radical piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress.”[lvii] New York’s Democratic Senator Robert Wagner was the new law’s main author, and his legislative aide, Simon H. Rifkind, told Theodore J. St. Antoine in 1986 that there were several reasons for the law. First, there was considerable labor unrest across the nation; it had been particularly bloody over the preceding fifty or so years since the labor movement first emerged in a big way in the 1880s. Employers would hire private security companies or pay off local politicians and police to harass, beat, and often even kill workers to prevent unionization.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Trump creates another pump-and-dump opportunity for the billionaires in his cabinet and people close to him (including his kids). — Well, so much for the lie that tax cuts for billionaires — including this $4 trillion one Republicans tried to pass in the dead of night — don’t do a damn thing for the economy other than running up the debt that we and our kids will have to pay off. — “The orgy of corruption…” — Trump amplifies his authoritarian attacks on media he doesn’t approve of, spitting on the graves of the Founders and Framers who wrote the First Amendment’s protection of the press and free speech into the Constitution. — Taking America back to 1950. — Crazy Alert! AI program threatens to blackmail a user about a secret affair when he said he’s going to try to get the program taken offline. — Want to live longer? Take your Vitamin D! — Final note

The billionaires robbed us blind for 44 years — and we thanked them for it... Will it still work for the GOP? We're about to embark on what will be one of the most interesting political, sociological, and media experiments of our lifetimes. It'll answer the question: "Can Republicans still get away with lying to their own voters?" Forty-four years ago, the Reagan administration — after winning the White House because they cut a criminal, treasonous deal with Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to hold the American hostages until after the 1980 election — decided to take a second massive chance at deceiving the American voters.

Dictators don’t go quietly. They orchestrate fear, silence dissent, and distract with spectacle. Trump’s moves in 2025 suggest he’s not planning to lose power — no matter the cost. Trump is starting to lose big, from courtrooms, to the press increasingly calling him out, to millions of Americans showing up in the streets every few weeks. As anybody who’s ever lived or worked in an autocratic state (I have) can tell you, a strongman or wannabe dictator is most dangerous when he’s on his back foot. Trump’s tariffs have put America on the verge of a serious inflationary recession, the Supreme Court and multiple lower courts have repeatedly ruled against him, his public approval polling is in the crapper, and even conservative publications and former Republican politicians (free from the strictures of an upcoming primary) are openly calling him out (including in Murdoch publications). The first lesson they teach in dictator school is that “there must be an enemy within.” Trump embraced this from the first day of his campaign for president when he attacked “Mexican rapists and murderers” he said were “invading” America.

Why the destruction of public institutions, the middle class, and government itself may not be a mistake — but the mission… Neal deGrasse Tyson makes a very relevant point this week: "If a foreign adversary snuck into our Federal budget and cut science research and education the way we're cutting it ourselves — strategically undermining America's long-term health, wealth, and security — we would likely consider it an act of war." Trump's administration just said you can't get the Covid vaccine unless you're over 65 or sick, setting up America for more death and disease.

In a legal sleight of hand, Republicans want to strip judges of their power to enforce rulings — because holding Trump in contempt might actually work… With almost no mention by our mainstream corporate press, Republicans in the House of Representatives are proposing to end all checks on the power of Donald Trump, effectively ending the American experiment of a democratic republic. It's shockingly anti-American. Since the only branch of government standing against Trump right now is the courts, Republicans believe they've found a way to end that resistance. Here's the backstory. The grand invention of our Founders, cribbed from the Iroquois Confederacy and following an outline Montesquieu suggested (based on his reading about Native Americans), was a three-branches-of-government system where each branch would act as a check on the power of the other two.