Hartmann Report

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. One of the most infamous examples was the Ludlow Massacre in 1914.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — "Huge scandal": Internal documents catch Trump administration in massive Social Security lie. — How Trump's "Emergency" Powers Could Become Permanent. — Trump orders the FBI to lay off white collar crime in favor of hunting immigrants...Plus, apparently they're now harassing American journalists. — Georgia is forcing a brain-dead woman to complete her pregnancy and making her family foot the bill. — Trump ordered 15K workers to snitch & not a one did. — Geeky Science: Does 7000 steps keeps cancer away? — Crazy Alert! Why is the DHS looking at producing a reality show where immigrants compete for citizenship? — Here's your moment of Zen which provoked an angry rant from Donald Trump yesterday (Bruce Springsteen)

This is no accident. It's a coordinated attack on science, safety, and the truth—just in time for hurricane season… This disaster has me so angry I can barely type straight. Elon Musk and his phony "Department of Government Efficiency" — which isn't even a real government department, by the way — are systematically destroying the agencies that keep Americans alive when Mother Nature comes calling. And for what? Some twisted ideological experiment that's going to cost lives. The National Weather Service is falling apart right before hurricane season. They have 155 empty positions that should be filled with forecasters working around the clock to track storms and save lives.

Republicans in the House of Representatives voted out of committee early yesterday morning legislation that would strip as many as 14 million Americans of their Medicaid-based healthcare, including millions of seniors in nursing homes and children living in poverty. Ironically, Red states will be hit harder by this than Blue states, as they’re generally less capable of making up the loss of federal funds (Medicaid is administered at the state level with block grants from the feds). Which provokes some serious head-scratching among the pundit class; why would Republicans kneecap their own people? Do they really think they can get away with it, just to fund tax breaks for Elon, Mark, Jeff, and Donald? And, for that matter, why is it that Red states are so vulnerable to this GOP perfidy?

As Republicans slash Medicaid to fund tax breaks for the morbidly rich, America must decide: Do we honor our social contract or abandon it to greed? Here we are again, my friend, watching the age-old story play out before our eyes. The Republicans are preparing to hand out trillions in tax cuts to their billionaire benefactors, and how do they plan to pay for this latest giveaway to the oligarchy? By ripping healthcare away from 13.7 million Americans, including millions of our most vulnerable seniors who depend on Medicaid for their very survival. But this isn't just about healthcare policy. This is about the fundamental question that's defined America since the New Deal: Are we a society that believes in the common good, or are we returning to the brutal Social Darwinism of the Gilded Age?

The numbers are in. The evidence is overwhelming. And the silence is deadly. It’s time Democrats started calling this what it is: a decades-long criminal conspiracy to seize power by any means… Trump is an illegitimate president, but he’s not the first. The last Republican who was elected president without fraud or naked treason was Dwight D. Eisenhower. And it’s damn well past time that Democrats started telling the story. But let’s start with Trump, and then go to Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.

AI is not just another tech revolution. It's the perfect storm of surveillance, manipulation, and digital obedience — and the far right already has a head start… Pope Leo XIV just labeled AI one of the main threats facing humanity, saying it poses challenges to "human dignity, justice and labor." He's right, but it's even worse than that: it represents, unless it's rigorously regulated, a threat to democracy itself. In every generation, the enemies of democracy change costumes, but their playbook remains eerily familiar. They lie, divide, intimidate, and exploit every available tool to consolidate power. In the 1930s it was radio, in the 2010s it was social media, and now, in 2025, the newest and most dangerous weapon in the authoritarian arsenal is artificial intelligence. Make no mistake: AI is not just another technology. It is power, scaled. And in the hands of the far right, it becomes the most effective tool for dismantling democracy ever invented.

The middle class was, until the 1970s, largely the province of single-wage-earning married white men and their families. Through the 1960s, following passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, African Americans and other minorities who had previously been shut out of the professions and management positions, and even excluded from most unions, began to find new opportunities as the result of anti-discrimination legislation. The legalization of the birth control pill in 1961, and the nationwide legalization of birth control in 1965 with the Supreme Court’s Griswold decision, similarly brought a wave of women into the workforce. Women could now delay childbearing and plan for their futures, giving them access to more educational and economic opportunities.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Stephen Miller says the Trump administration is "looking into" being able to suspend habeas corpus for you and me the same way they did to Kilmar Garcia. — Bernie Sanders says Republicans in Congress want to help Trump make more billions off his crypto grift. — Justice Sonia Sotomayor says lawyers should stand up and fight for our legal system and our rights rather than roll over for the Trump administration. — Trump's new attack on the law could mean billions for Elon. — Ever since Trump fired hundreds of FAA workers who maintain radar and communications systems, those systems have begun to fail in Newark. — Refugees are shut out of America. Except for white South Africans. — France and Sweden tell Trump to stuff his racism.

FDR warned us 80 years ago about the rise of political lies. Today, the GOP has turned that warning into a roadmap... Donald Trump has been lying to us ever since he came down that escalator. He just never stops lying because, as a lifelong con man, it's all he knows how to do. He's still insisting he won the 2020 election, despite having lost by about 7 million votes and being wiped out in the Electoral College. He lied at the State of the Union about having a mandate to cut Medicaid, as congressman Al Green pointed out. Along with over 100 other lies he told that day. And now he's lying about his trade deals with the UK and other governments. Every single day he adds to the pile of lies he's inflicting on the American people and the world. Science, it turns out, explains why this works for him.