Hartmann Report

Why right wing crises face incompetence or cynical exploitation. Bush and “heckofajob Brownie”; Netanyahu and Gaza; Trump and Covid, or his cynically tossing paper towels at hurricane victims.. Over at The New York Times yesterday, Jerusalem-based reporter Isabel Kershner writes about the horrors of the past two weeks and the worries Israelis have for how the ongoing war against Hamas may go. “All this is happening,” she notes in the article’s third paragraph, “amid a total breakdown of trust between the citizens and the state of Israel, and a collapse of everything Israelis believed in and relied on.” She then quotes a Tel Aviv author, Dorit Rabinyan, who speaks of the sobering reality Israelis are facing because they’d chosen Benjamin Netanyahu as their prime minister: “We have woken to a terrible sobriety about whose hands we put our fate in. … We thought we had military superiority, but there’s a feeling that someone up there forgot why he is there.” What happened? Instead of taking seriously now-confirmed warnings about a coming Hamas attack shared by Egyptian and, apparently, US intelligence, the prime minister was instead occupied by “months of political and social turmoil over the divisive plans of Mr. Netanyahu’s ultranationalist government to curb the judiciary and undermine the country’s liberal democracy.”

How risky will it be for America and the world for Jim Jordan to become Speaker of the House? Republicans appear on the verge of picking Jim Jordan as the next Speaker of the House of Representatives; if they do, they’ll be putting Donald Trump, by proxy, in charge of the House half of Congress. This is a true danger to our republic and an embarrassment in front of the rest of the world. Trump is a convicted rapist and sexual predator. With this decision, Republicans would put a man who stands accused with covering up the sexual assault of multiple students when he was a wrestling coach as Trump’s front man in Congress. You’d have thought that after Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert went to prison for what Jordan is accused of covering up, the GOP would have figured out this isn’t a good look, but, no.

The more things change, the old saying goes, the more they stay the same. It’s true, at least with regard to giant corporate interests fighting regulation and seizing control of governments that might try to restrain them. The year of 1776 had a huge impact on the future of the world. Not only did Thomas Jefferson and friends declare that they’d no longer submit to the military, commercial, and political power of Great Britain, but one of the world’s great analysts of capitalism, Adam Smith, published his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.3 At the same time that the American colonists were decrying the monopoly that the East India Company held over them, Smith was criticizing the Company—and the others who had succeeded in creating monopoly—in Great Britain.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — What threat does ‘Day of Jihad’ pose to American cities? — Voting rights had a bad day in the Supreme Court. — There’s a double standard for Democrats versus Republicans saying stupid things: when Democrats do it, it fills the news cycle for a week; when Republicans do it, we get silence. — Has Trump succeeded at getting his espionage trial pushed back until after the election? — The Trump family is doubling down on Nazi. — Red state conservatives are dying thanks to the people they vote for: Republicans aren’t just at war with each other in the U.S. House of Representatives; they’ve been quietly at war with their own constituents for decades. — DOJ is suing Ebay in a crackdown on “rolling coal” devices. — Geeky Science! Nearly half of flowering plant species face extinction from climate change.

And...Russia is close to having the upper hand because of Putin’s ability to get Republican politicians to mouth his talking points and propaganda... In a very real way, the US and Russia have been at war for eight years now. Russian partisans will tell you that the US started it when Victoria Nuland was representing US interests in Ukraine in 2014, around the time Russia invaded and seized Crimea. Robert Mueller and the FBI will tell you it really started in 2015 and 2016 when Russia spent millions (via the Internet Research Agency) to successfully intervene in the US election and put Trump into the White House. However it got started, this is the current status of the war: The US has invested something on the order of 2 percent of our defense budget to arm Ukraine (without putting a single American soldier in danger) and the result has been the destruction of more than 4,000 Russian tanks, 8,000 armored personnel carriers, several Russian warships, three elite Russian brigades, a major Russian air defense system, and just two weeks ago, Ukraine’s army commander claimed that Russia’s 72nd Motor Rifle Brigade, the 31st Air Assault Brigade, and the 83rd Air Assault Brigade were all “crushed” in the Bakhmut area fighting.

These are moments pregnant with possibility, but also saturated by danger - they require exceptional and farsighted leadership, statesmanship instead of politics & a commitment to the general welfare… We are living through one of those hinge points in history, a time people remember other events in the context of “before” and “after” that moment, the kind that comes along only once every few generations... In this generation, we Americans may well determine the fate and future of democracy all around the world. If our democracy falters in the 2024 election thirteen months from now, the United States will almost certainly go neofascist like Russia and Hungary have. As a result, authoritarianism and oligarchy will spread all across the world and it could be decades or even centuries before democracy again emerges.

The difference between Republican and Democratic visions for America is as clear as the difference between Russia and Norway (or California and Mississippi)… Today’s Republican Party is dedicated to destroying what they call the “deep state” and the rest of us call the American government. From Trump followers in MAGA hats at rallies to Republican US Senators, they’ll all tell you this without a moment’s hesitation. Steve Bannon even proclaimed it as the main goal of the Trump presidency in their first months in the White House, saying Trump’s goal was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Talking about government regulations that protect the environment, punish companies and con men who rip off consumers, and provide for a safe workplace, Bannon said in March, 2017: “That’s all gonna be deconstructed and I think that that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.” In this, the GOP, Putin, and fossil fuel billionaires are all working toward the same goal: to do away with or at least fatally weaken the institutions of our government that prevent the morbidly rich and wannabee strongman autocrats from taking over America.

I have a few questions in trying to make sense of Gaza... This past weekend, Hamas launched a brutal, horrific attack against civilians in Israel. While there is a very real history that has led up to this, there is no justification for it. Even in a state of war, civilians must be protected. This horror raises a couple of important questions. First, did Hamas somehow get inside information about Israel’s defenses that helped them pull this off? Second, how might this play out, how might it be resolved, and how can America and the world avoid the mistakes from previous but similar situations?

As much as it pains me to say it (my personal urge toward salvationism is as strong as anybody else’s), nobody is coming to save us... “Saved at the last minute” is pretty much the story of our culture. It’s built into our major salvationist religions, particularly Christianity and Islam. Even when killed or facing death, Jesus and Muhammed managed to ascend to heaven at the last minute and claim eternal life. By this worldview, no matter how terrible a life you’ve lived, if you say a handful of magic words at the last minute before you die, you’re guaranteed a spot in paradise. There’s always the last minute. It’s at the core of most all of our fiction, and a good chunk of our nonfiction. In the old Greek dramas it was deus ex machina — the god in the machine — when Our Hero was finally trapped in an impossible situation but then a platform is cranked down from the ceiling of the amphitheater with a god on it, who waves his hand and makes everything okay again.

America was birthed in a fight against monopoly. There’s a pervasive myth in America—promoted by wealthy anti-tax activists—that the Revolutionary War was fought because colonists didn’t want to pay taxes to England. While that sentiment was certainly widespread, the spark that lit the fuse of the Revolution was monopoly and a giant tax cut for the world’s largest corporation, not an increase in taxes. By 1773, Great Britain had a stranglehold on the economy of the colonies, enforced through the British East India Company, which held monopoly rights to much of the commerce with North America.