Hartmann Report

With the election of 1980, Americans — most unknowingly — chose great wealth over democracy, oligarchy over a middle class, billionaires over working people. Twenty-two years ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote for The New York Times Magazine about the era in which he and I both grew up, when the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich ran between 74 and 90 percent... Back then most business people avoided politics, preferring to stick to running their companies; in large part this was because when the rich seized political control of America in the Roaring 20s they crashed the economy so bad they were shamed into staying out of the political arena.

When Republicans talk about the American Dream, what do they mean? And how does their view of the American Dream differ from that of that of Democrats? Donald Trump and JD Vance, like most politicians from both parties, love to invoke the American Dream. When billionaire Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency in 2015, he said: "Sadly, the American Dream is dead. But if I get elected president, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before and we will make America great again." When multimillionaire hedge fund manager JD Vance accepted his nomination for vice president at the RNC, he similarly said: "Some people tell me I've lived the American dream, and of course they're right. And I'm so grateful for it." But when Republicans talk about the American Dream, what do they mean? And how does their view of the American Dream differ from that of that of Democrats?

Your retirement security is hanging in the balance, threatened by Republicans who don't have your best interests at heart... Recently, a retired woman seeking advice wrote into MarketWatch's financial advisor, saying: "I was 'financially set' after my husband died. But my current adviser lost $500,000 over the last few years, and then a new adviser said my portfolio was 'a mess' and wants 1.25% to fix it. What's my move?" She was the victim of an unethical financial advisor hustling decades of churning commission-based products that essentially transferred her money into his pocket. As she told MarketWatch, "The adviser was paid per trade." President Biden wants to do something about this.

Mentally and emotionally we never stand still; we are always either moving toward something we want or moving away from something we fear... "An old English judge once said, 'Necessitous men are not free men.' Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for." —President Franklin D. Roosevelt, June 27, 1936. When President Joe Biden was running for reelection, his main pitch was about the danger Donald Trump represented to American democracy and peace in the world. Now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee, she's shifted the emphasis of the campaign away from that danger and onto the opportunities that lay before Americans if we can just elect enough Democrats to bring them into reality.

Before considering the details of how Republicans have, for the past 40-plus years, waged a war against the right to vote for all but wealthy white people (and why Democrats did the same before the GOP picked up the mantle in the 1960s), it’s important to understand why each party historically has worked to manipulate the electorate to its own favor. The Democratic Party’s antipathy toward voting had roots deep in the 19th century, in the years following the Civil War. That war, and the subsequent 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution pushed through by Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans, gave pretty much all adult men, regardless of race, the right to vote. Thomas Jefferson had founded the Democratic Party (it was then called the Democratic Republican Party, but the “Republican” part was dropped in the late 1820s and early 1830s), and throughout the 19th century that party (as opposed to the Whigs and the Republicans) was closely associated with support for slavery.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Ali Velshi is one of the finest journalists working today in American television. — Supreme Takeover: Experts alarmed by Court’s aggressive power grab — “They’re going to lay the groundwork” for his administration, Trump bragged of Project 2025. — Arizona Republican mayor launches “Republicans for Harris,” saying “our party’s nominee is not qualified for office. — Trump “Fat Elvis Phase” Alert! — Election Infiltration: MAGA groups and sheriffs team up to intimidate voters who are using drop boxes. — Slash rates now or face collapse: the Fed's last chance to preserve the economy. — Wisdom School Alert! How Honey Bees use voter-based democracy. — Hunter in a Farmer’s World Alert! ADHD: Is forgiveness therapy?

If Democrats survive the onslaught that's coming and emerge victorious at the federal level, the first order of business next year must be to strip the cancer of dark money out of our body politic... Get ready: massive pools of dark rightwing money are soon going to clobber us. Will Democracy survive this onslaught by the morbidly rich? Democrats are giddy right now; the substantial lead that Trump had held over Biden for months has largely vanished as the match-up has changed to Harris and Walz. In the ten polls aggregated by RealClearPolitics since Biden's withdrawal, Trump has lost 3 points and only leads by one. In the DailyKos/Civiqs poll Harris leads Trump 49/45, Reuters puts the race at 43/42, and Morning Consult has it at 47/46. Trump is blustering in ways that indicate he thinks he's losing (yesterday's presser at his shabby golf motel was particularly pathetic), while JD Vance's poll numbers are in the toilet…or the couch…and showing no indication of recovery any day soon. That said, other lessons from this and recent past years should keep Democrats from easing up or becoming overconfident. The official beginning of the election season is still almost a month away, and the big money pledged by rightwing and neofascist billionaires hasn't even shown up yet.

They must go to court to take away your gun, but they can take away your vote without even informing you... Last week I documented how in Georgia both Governor and former Secretary of State Brian Kemp and current Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger have been actively purging millions of Georgians, particularly Black voters, from voter rolls for years. How Kemp purged over 100,000 Georgia voters and then "beat" Stacy Abrams by about 50,000. A similar scheme has been underway in Ohio ever since Republicans took over that state, and also operates in most other Red states that have large Blue cities. The purges that started in a big way under Republicans in Ohio gained both notoriety and lawsuits, one going all the way to the Supreme Court. They did, however, produce a significant blowback: people got pissed off when they showed up to vote and were told that they'd been removed from the voting rolls by the Republican administration of their state. So, Republicans in Texas have come up with a new twist that's designed to avoid directly confronting and angering voters. You could call it "passive aggressive vote suppression."

Tim Walz is the antidote to the Fox "News" poison that is now so widely imitated across the rightwing ecosystem, embracing the hearts and minds of millions... All across America families are in mourning: their parents and grandparents, particularly the men in their lives, have been stolen from them by the rightwing hate and rage machine. Jen Senko produced a movie — The Brainwashing of My Dad — about losing her own father to Fox "News"; it was also made into a book of the same title. She's been a guest on my show a few times and her story is one replicated across America millions of times: her father — a totally normal Midwestern guy — began watching Fox "News" when he retired and within a year had become withdrawn, bitter, angry, and filled with hate. Jen and her family staged an intervention and locked Fox out of Dad's TV with the child lock option built into her cable system; within a few months, back to watching normal TV news like CNN, MSNBC, and BBC, Dad made a full recovery from the temporary mental illness Murdoch's infamous hate machine had thrown him into. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is America's intervention against the mind poison Trump, Fox "News," and rightwing hate radio have infected our nation with.

It's not Bill Barr's first time playing cover-up for a Republican president who committed crimes that rise to the level of treason against America... The Washington Post reported last week that there's very good reason to believe that Egypt's dictator, Gen. Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, organized a $10 million cash bribe to Donald Trump when he was most desperate for the same amount of money during the 2016 election. American intelligence reported that el-Sisi ordered $10 million in $100 bills be taken from a bank in Egypt — representing a large chunk of that country's entire US dollar foreign reserves — and have them transported, possibly, to Donald Trump.