Hartmann Report

Putin's language of escalation highlights the danger that the GOP's embrace of Trump and Trump's ties to Putin have put the US and the entire democratic world in… On Saturday I published a "breaking news" op-ed here on Hartmann Report about the possible consequences of Putin using Friday's theater attack in a Moscow suburb the same way Hitler used the burning of the Reichstagsgebäude to end democracy and civil rights in Germany; Bush used 9/11 to attack Iraq and push the PATRIOT Act; Putin used a different theater attack in 2002 to destroy and seize Chechnya; LBJ used the phony Gulf of Tonkin incident to accelerate the Vietnam War; and Netanyahu is using the October 7 Hamas attack to stay in power and out of prison. In other words, might Putin be preparing to use the ISIS-K attack on the theater as an excuse to do something draconian? Would that mean he substantially escalates his war against democracy in Ukraine? Might that escalation lead to a confrontation with NATO? And where would that take the world?

"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." —Thomas Jefferson in 1786, to his close friend Dr. James Currie In 1983, 90% of the American media landscape (including magazines, books, music, news feeds, newspapers, movies, radio, and television) was dominated by 50 conglomerates. Just 36 years later in 2019, a mere five conglomerates dominated 90% of the media that Americans consume (Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom).

Like Hitler, Netanyahu, and Bush all did, Putin just claimed that up is down, that the terrorist attack he knew was coming was an unprovoked surprise, and that it came from Ukraine, not ISIS-K... Normally, I'd push this article out on Monday morning, as I publish these free "Daily Takes" every weekday and I usually write Monday's piece over the weekend. But this situation is so critical and the stakes are so high that I didn't want to wait. I welcome your comments in the comments section below. Keep in mind, what I'm suggesting is merely my speculation at this moment. But we all need to keep a careful eye on events as they unfold: Putin using the theater attack to start WWIII is not without precedent. Friday, a group of ISIS extremists claimed credit for the attack on a Moscow theater that killed at least 133 people and left the building a smoldering ruin. But Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his public comments today, didn't mention ISIS-K: instead, he placed the blame on Ukraine. As The New York Times headline after Putin's remarks laid out: "In First Remarks on Attack, Putin Tries to Link Assailants to Ukraine." The article's lede says it all: "President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia laid the groundwork on Saturday for blaming Ukraine for the Moscow concert hall attack. And in making his first remarks on the assault more than 19 hours after it began, he pledged to punish the perpetrators, 'whoever they may be, whoever may have sent them.'" We've seen this movie before, both here, in Israel, and Germany, and it never ends well.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Marjorie Taylor Green's latest stunt may be a gift to Democrats…or maybe not. — Just when you thought Republicans couldn't get any crueler, now they're forcing women to have unnecessary abdominal surgery. — Russia is arresting Queer folks under "extremism" laws just like Hitler used to do... — Republicans James Comer and Jim Jordan killed a motion to subpoena Jared Kushner to explain why he was given $2 billion by the Saudis over the objections of the Saudi Wealth Fund's management. — DOJ sues Apple for violations of American anti-trust laws. — Good News! Biden forgives more student debt & here's who qualifies! — Hunter in a Farmer's World Alert! Are "Normal" People Really "Abnormal"? — Wisdom School Alert! Can you change the world by simply waking up to the astonishing reality of life? — Crazy Alert! The Satanic Temple strikes again! Welcome to the After School Satan Club.

The men who made the intentional decision to murder my father are long dead; the men and women who today are plotting to render much of our beautiful planet uninhabitable are very much with us… ... now comes the fossil fuel industry, with a whole new crop of psychopathic executives, marketers, and attorneys. Burning their products produces air pollution that causes asthma, cancer, heart disease, and strokes; according to Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Medicine, an estimated 350,000 Americans die prematurely every year because of this industry's products.

Welcome to the 2024 GOP and their plans to "deconstruct the administrative state" and drag America back to the 19th century… "Moscow Mike" Johnson and his Republicans in the House are determined to continue to shorten the lifespans of Americans by forcing brutal Red State policies on the entire nation. It's literally killing people, but they frankly don't care so long as they can keep taxes on their billionaire owners low. Ronald Reagan is long gone, but a recent report shows how his policies and his party are still hurting us — and responsible for millions of lost years of Americans' lives. The study calls them "missing Americans." It wasn't always this way.

And now it appears that the six corrupt Republicans currently on the Court are preparing to make political bribery even easier for their well-heeled patrons… A democracy is run by and for the benefit of the demos, the people. An oligarchy is run by and for the oligoi, the "few," aka the morbidly rich. Thanks to a corrupt bloc of Republicans who've controlled the US Supreme Court since the Nixon era, America is more than halfway through the transition from democracy to oligarchy. But it's not too late for We, The People to reclaim our government from the forces of neofascism and great wealth who've worked so hard since the Reagan Revolution to seize complete control of it.

If you're female and pregnant in a Red state, the legislature and police of that state own you and your body, regardless of your maturity or life circumstances... It sure looks like Republicans want women to die. Particularly if they're teenagers and have the temerity to be sexually active. This is highlighted by what has to qualify as the most shocking scientific study of the year, published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network and titled Teen Pregnancy and Risk of Premature Mortality. The result of the study of over 2.2 million women who experienced teen and pre-teen pregnancies (the youngest in the study gave birth at 9 years of age, although most were older teens) is best summarized by the subhead in the article about it in March 14th's New York Times: "A large analysis in Canada finds that teenagers who had babies were twice as likely to die before age 31."

It's time for "truth in labeling" laws like the processed food industry complies with to apply to social media. The life — and democracy — that gets saved could be your own… While I agree with the bipartisan House and White House consensus that having TikTok owned by a company that, by law, must share its information with the Chinese Communist Party is a national security threat, there's a larger part of the issue — which includes a danger to Americans also presented by both Facebook and Xitter — that nobody is seriously discussing.

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" . Cindy Anderson predicted that hospital consolidation in rural Missouri would kill people. At the time, she didn't realize that her husband, Butch, would be one of its victims. The first big wave of hospital consolidations happened in the wake of Reagan stopping enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1983 and ran through the late 1990s. The second wave followed when the Affordable Care Act — written with plenty of input from the hospital industry — introduced more incentives to form monopolies in 2013. Thus, while there were 1,412 hospital mergers between 1998 and 2015, 561 of them happened in just the 2010 to 2015 period.