Hartmann Report

Cell phone service that costs $15 a month in France or $12 a month in Australia bills out at an average of $61.85 per month in the United States. High-speed broadband that’s a bit over $31 a month in France or $36 in Germany (for higher speeds and better reliability than almost anywhere in the United States) averages nearly $70 per month in the US. Similar metrics are found with pharmaceuticals, airfares, and medical costs, among dozens of other product and service categories. Why is this? Monopoly. The average American family pays an annual “monopoly tax”—in additional costs for pretty much everything—of around $5,000, according to economist Thomas Philippon. And things are steadily getting worse as monopolistic concentrations continue to tighten their grip on every American industry from banking to telecom to food.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Shutdown Watch! McCarthy hands the gavel to Gaetz as Jeffries tells the GOP: “We’re not paying the ransom note.” — The UAW Strike expands, and we’re just at the beginning of a nationwide movement toward better labor protections. — Senator Bob Menendez says, “I was indicted because I am a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings.” — Holy Moly! Clarence Thomas secretly participated in Koch network donor events. — Trump is going to use auto workers as props for his counter-programming against the GOP debate & Democrats are having none of it. — Are Trump’s GOP opponents in an “Arm’s race to our-extreme & out-cruel each other”? — “Who revels in such cruelty?” — What Maslow Overlooked: The Need to Feel Alive. — Geeky Science! From cage-free chicks to puppy mills, the GOP is trying to roll back animal protections and not only is it cruel but it would also speed the spread of zoonotic diseases. — Crazy Alert! The GOP are complaining to Merrick Garland about a YUGE issue: the “World Naked Bike Ride.”

So now we’re all standing largely naked before the coming onslaught of disinformation that is sure to come along with the 2023 and 2024 elections: the lies will be coming fast and furious… China, Russia, and a handful of rightwing billionaires are trying to tear down our democracy. “Putin Republicans,” aka the MAGA GOP, are trying to help them. For most of the 7,000-year history of modern civilization autocracy has been the default system all over the world, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy. The past two centuries, however, have featured an ongoing battle for primacy between democracy and autocratic oligarchy. At the time of the Civil War there was only a small handful of democratic nations in the world, and they all held their breath to see if the American experiment would fail or succeed. Between the Civil War and the turn of the 21st century there was a steady growth in the number and vitality of democratic nations; since then, however, multiple democracies (Egypt, Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Philippines, Brazil, Peru, etc.) have turned away from democracy to embrace strong-man governments and rule by the rich.

This is an idea whose time has come... President Biden yesterday rolled out a new American Climate Corps. I’ll get to the details in a minute, but first it’s important to understand the backstory. America is facing an environmental crisis that’s costing us thousands of lives and tens of billions a year. The last time our country faced such a natural disaster President Franklin D. Roosevelt stepped up and dealt with it; now the Biden administration is doing the same. In 1933, America was both in the depths of the Republican Great Depression and facing an environmental disaster of national proportions. Sweeping from Texas to Nebraska, the Dust Bowl lifted 1.2 billion tons of soil from over 100 million acres, blowing it as far east as New York City, where it browned out the skies for weeks.

Hopefully this time Democratic politicians and our media will, finally, call the GOP out on Wanniski’s and Reagan’s Two Santa Clauses scam and put an end to it once and for all… As the United States barrels toward a GOP-caused fiscal disaster and government shutdown, House Republicans have laid out their vision for the future of America. In a budget document they released yesterday, the legislators proposed dramatic $9 trillion cuts to Social Security, food stamps, aid to women and children, Medicare and Medicaid, along a new round of tax cuts for America’s billionaires. Their argument is that we need to “balance the budget now!” This is the classic Two Santas strategy that the GOP has been running ever since 1981.

For today’s bought-off GOP (and a handful of bought-off “problem solver” Democrats), as long as Republicans on the Supreme Court keep the corrupt payola machine running, there simply is no bottom… According to a Lexington Law survey, a third of Americans check their bank balances every day. People who don’t check daily are most likely to check after a paycheck has been deposited or should have been through direct deposit. Now, imagine if you looked at your bank balance and saw that your employer just put $2,596,153.00 into your account. And then the same amount showed up the following week. And the week after that. Every week for the entire year.

America gives a lot of lip service to the American Dream, but we haven’t led the world in meeting human needs since the Reagan Revolution... American families with children — and the American Dream they’re trying to live — are about to face a serious crisis. Counterintuitively, the pandemic brought a child-care boon to working families with kids. This was in large part due to the extraordinary efforts of Nancy Pelosi in the House and Bernie Sanders in the Senate, who got billions for expanded childcare funds to families in distress. Although these were technically emergency funds, they were similar to normal, routine programs offered by virtually every other developed country in the world. But when the pandemic was declared officially over, Republicans dug their feet in and said that there was no way America would ever do for its families what Europe, Canada, and the democracies of Asia do for theirs.

How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream. This is the most important, dynamic book—small as it is—on the cancers of monopoly by giant corporations written in our generation. I have read many books on monopolistic practices and have written on this subject. None had the potential to reach the moral imagination and indignation of the American people, where they live, work, and raise their families, like Hartmann’s engrossing volume. None, for sure, had the potential to reach so many members of Congress who are finally awakening to the long-overdue accounting of monopoly’s many costs—economic and beyond economic—and the need to strengthen the old antitrust laws and enact the new ones that reach all the way to Silicon Valley.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — The UAW is on strike and it's starting to feel like the pre-Reagan era! — Republicans in Red states are stripping power from urban voters. — The US economy is going strong under Biden, but Americans don't believe it. — Why are some high-profile Democrats encouraging SCOTUS to block a billionaire wealth tax? — Corrupt Republicans don't want the public to know what they're up to. — The Healthcare cost crisis. — Planet Earth is now operating outside parameters that are safe for humanity. — Time to make them pay.

It echoes the terror campaigns run by followers of Mussolini and Hitler in the early days of their rising to power… The DOJ’s indictment of Hunter Biden reveals a horrible truth: our criminal justice system just caved to threats of political violence. This is a terrible milestone, revealing how far down the fascist rabbit-hole the GOP has gone. It should be front-page news but is instead relegated to a footnote. Trump-aligned Nazis threatened violence against FBI agents and prosecutors investigating Hunter Biden after Republicans in Congress and hosts on Fox “News” and other rightwing outlets named people they claimed were “going soft” on the president’s son. As a result, the FBI has been forced to create a unit just to protect people working on the gun and tax charges brought against Hunter yesterday and in previous months.