Hartmann Report

How would you react if one day you were sitting at home and the phone rang and when you picked it up you heard a man shout: “Kill yourself now so we can save ammo!”

During these short, dark days let’s remember this ancient Christmas knowledge that illumination always follows darkness & that with love and compassion we will re-light our nations & lives... Today is Christmas Eve, a connection to some of the most ancient of all known northern European shamanic traditions. Like people living in the north for millennia, we continue to embrace them with regional, national, and religious tweaks. It occurs during the week of the shortest day and longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere, when ancient holy men and women lit “yule logs” to push back the darkness and implore the gods or nature to bring back the light of summer.

The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream. As productivity continued to rise, due to increasing automation and better technology, so too would everyone’s wages. Or so went the theory. The glue holding this logic together was the then-top marginal income tax rate. In 1963, just before the Time article was written, the top marginal income tax rate was 90%. What that did was encourage CEOs to keep more money in their businesses: to invest in new technology, to pay their workers more, to hire new workers and expand. After all, what’s the point of sucking millions and millions of dollars out of your business if it’s going to be taxed at 90% (or even the 74% that President Lyndon Johnson lowered it to in 1966)?

The Best of the Rest of the News. — The six Republicans on the Supreme Court are either in the bag for Trump or terrified of him — or both. — Racism is a feature, not a bug, for Republicans in the 2024 campaign, — Lordy, there’s another recording of Trump criming! — A hospital in Seattle is suing Texas because that state’s attorney general, the oft-indicted, unfaithful-to-his-wife, and massively corrupt Ken Paxton, is demanding that they turn over all their records for treatment of trans patients from Texas to him. — President Biden is looking at seized Russian assets to fund the Ukraine war if Republicans in Congress continue to support Putin over America. — Putin’s getting desperate. — Republicans on the Huntington Beach City Council want to block any celebrations of Pride Month or Black History and replace them with festivals commemorating the discovery of oil in the town in the last century. — Geeky Science: Smoke cigarettes and your brain will irreversibly shrink!

When will America — and, particularly, American media — wake up to these scams and start calling them out for what they are? The GOP — to keep the support of “average” American voters while they work entirely for the benefit of giant corporations, the weapons and fossil fuel industries, and the morbidly rich — have run a whole series of scams on voters ever since the original Reagan grift of trickle-down economics. Oddly, there’s nothing comparable on the Democratic side. No lies or BS to justify unjustifiable policies: Democrats just say up-front what they’re all about:.

If you thought it can’t happen here, I have an old Sinclair Lewis book to share with you… If Trump is re-elected, he’d be America’s 47th president, so he’s named the plans for his second term “Agenda 47.” At best, it’s a dystopian nightmare: at worst it means ending our current system of American government; aligning the US with Russia and other autocratic nations; and the USA leading the charge against democracy and in favor of authoritarian, strong-man forms of government across the world. Over at his website, Trump lays out the details of his governing agenda, complete with short videos promoting each of the steps he plans to take.

In last year’s election fully six Red states used illegal maps in defiance of the courts, keeping the House of Representatives and state legislatures in GOP hands through the 2022 balloting… Republican election theft used to be covert and was almost never covered by the press. Now they’re doing it out in the open and defying federal courts to stop them, while ignoring press coverage that outs what they’re up to. As Alexander Hamilton pointed out in the Federalist Papers, the courts have neither sword nor purse: they don’t have any mechanism to force compliance with their rulings. So it appears that multiple Republican states have chosen to simply ignore their own courts, as well as the federal courts and the Supreme Court. This is a big step up from how they used to steal elections.

Understanding how they got here — and dragged the rest of us with them — may give us some clues to how to get out of this mess… "Treason doth never prosper. What's the reason? Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason." — Sir John Harington (1560-1612) Now that Donald Trump is openly calling for fascism in the United States, complete with concentration camps "for millions" including "Democrats" and "the media," it's a good time to look at how the GOP became so badly corrupted. Understanding how they got here — and dragged the rest of us with them — may give us some clues to how to get out of this mess. I was thirteen years old in 1964 when my dad, a Republican activist, gave me a copy of John Stormer's book "None Dare Call It Treason." The Goldwater campaign had sent it to him, and its claim that the State Department was filled with communists intent on handing America over to the USSR had his friends buzzing. Ironically, Stormer's book and the movement it ignited within the GOP is largely responsible for that party today standing on the precipice of fully endorsing fascism as an alternative to democracy in the US.

If the GOP's price for aid for Ukraine and Israel is to stop the flow of immigrants into this country for year or so, I say pay the ransom… It may be time for Democrats to engage in some good-old-fashioned backroom dealmaking. If they do it right, they can strip Republicans of one of their most potent electoral issues while setting the stage for true reform of what has become a true American crisis. Russian President Putin has ordered Donald Trump to sabotage US aid to Ukraine, and Trump has passed the word along to Republicans that anybody who doesn't go along with the two of them will face a primary challenger. Trump just doubled down on it this weekend in New Hampshire, praising Putin up one side and down the other while quoting Orbán and Hitler that immigration by nonwhite people "poisons the blood" of a nation. In an attempt to appease Trump and Putin, Republicans in the Senate claim they're putting together a "security" deal to send foreign and military aid to Ukraine and Israel while also "securing" our southern border from immigrants and asylum seekers.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party: it happened exactly 250 years ago. And once again there’s a growing movement in America to push back against monopolistic corporate power. So, here’s an edited excerpt from my book Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “People”…