Hartmann Report

The key to a functioning regulated-capitalist economy is competition; as competition declines, so do innovation, investment, employment, and the wealth of working people. Lacking competition, those people and corporations in the economic top .01% will explode their wealth while everything and everybody else suffers. Since the 1980s, when Reagan began aggressively applying Chicago School neoliberal policies and Robert Bork’s perspective on antitrust, industry after industry, sector after sector, has been interpenetrated and then consumed almost entirely by cancer-like monopolies and oligopolies. Not only have wages and innovation suffered, but the overall economy itself has largely stagnated, relative to the preceding four decades.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — With Religious fascism on the rise… — Is it a “break glass” moment with Judge Cannon? — The Supreme Court has already helped Trump beat his federal rap for trying to overthrow our country and steal the 2020 election. — In Red states, TV weather is getting way too political. — The climate crisis is also an insurance crisis. — Fascist Alert! RFK Jr.’s campaign wants “serious jail time” for CNN’s Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, and others. — Crazy Alert! Republican legislator arrested chasing an adult dancer down a public street waving a gun at her at 2:45am - but it gets even weirder than that. — Hunter In a Farmer’s World Alert! ADHD: Practice Keeping On Task — Wisdom School Alert! robert wolff's Ancient Way of Knowing

It is utter BS to justify imposing religious doctrine on impressionable youth: there isn’t that much overlap between the Ten Commandments and American or Louisiana law... “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” —Thomas Jefferson How will the Ten Commandments do anything at all to help Louisiana’s many crises?

In less than a month, Republicans will meet in Milwaukee to crown Donald Trump as their Emperor King and Sun God. But the real powers behind the GOP — the billionaires and their institutions that created Project 2025 as a how-to manual to convert American democracy into something like the old Confederacy — don’t much care about poor old Donald. Sure, they want him to be the nominee because NBC trained him well in the dark art of playing a successful businessman on television. He brings in the rubes like nobody since Huey Long; he’s a singularly brilliant politician, much as Putin, Hitler, Orbán, and Mussolini are and were. But he can also be irrational, impulsive, disloyal, dishonest, and unpredictable, qualities that make the men who want to revive the Confederacy to replace our republican form of government wary. They have big plans — far bigger than Trump’s tiny dream of vengeance — and don’t want him screwing things up. Thus, the real action in Milwaukee won’t be the show — though it’ll be a hell of a show — around Trump’s coronation; it’ll be in the back rooms where Trump is told who’s going to be his vice president. That’ll be the guy (it will be a guy) who does the actual heavy lifting in “deconstructing the administrative state,” seizing control of our media, and stripping average Americans of what’s left of their wealth and rights.

The new GOP motto might as well be, "We don't need no stinkin' issues; we just want power and revenge for the heroes of the Old South and the New Insurrection." Have you noticed how rarely Republicans talk about actual issues?... All of this is because the GOP is now a post-politics party.

In our post-Citizens United world, when industry or a "generous" billionaire opposes a policy, what they want beats democracy almost every time... Exactly 178 years ago this month, French astronomer and mathematician Urbain Le Verrier calculated the existence of the then-unknown planet Neptune based on irregularities in the orbit of Uranus, which he postulated were caused by the unknown planet's gravitational pull. Some invisible force was clearly distorting Uranus' orbit, and, when he did the math, he'd not only discovered but accurately predicted the location of the planet Neptune. Many Americans watch our generation's political dysfunction and Congress' inability to get simple things done that would help our country and world and wonder, "Is there a dark planet, some dark force, that is pulling at and distorting our politics?" Turns out, there is. Read on.

Trump's Legacy and the Weaponization of Lies in the 2024 Election. Hitler's brilliant propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, famously told the Fuhrer, "Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth." Donald Trump and the MAGA faction of the Republican Party have taken Goebbels' advice to heart, and it's going to make this fall's election one like we've never seen before. Already they've been lying so often and so effectively that nearly all Republicans, and majorities or near-majorities of Americans, believe: — the GOP lie that we're in a recession (we're in better shape, in most ways, than any time since the 1960s and inflation last month was zero while Ronald Reagan never got it below 4.1% in his entire eight years); — Republican lies about crime being up (it's down dramatically since Trump); — their lies that "Democrats want elective abortion up to the moment of birth" (none have ever said that); — Trump's lie that the 2020 election was "stolen" from Trump by "voter fraud"; — GOP lies that the southern border is "wide open"; — the Republican lie that Social Security is on the verge of bankruptcy and must be saved by privatization or benefits cuts; — their vicious lie that queer people are pedophiles targeting America's schoolchildren; and — their NRA lie that more and more deadly guns will keep our kids safe.

Corporations have successfully argued before the Supreme Court that they should have First Amendment rights of free speech, Fourth Amendment rights of privacy, Fifth Amendment protections against takings, and 14th Amendment rights as “persons” to “equal protection [with you and me] under the law,” among other “rights of personhood.” It’s long past the time that these “persons,” when they become egregious and recidivist criminals (and particularly when they repeatedly kill people), be treated the same as human criminals: remove them from society permanently. New, smaller, more innovative companies can fill the spaces now occupied by bloated corporate criminals. The result will be (as it was after AT&T was broken up in the 1970s for violating anti-monopoly laws) an explosion of innovation, com- petition, and opportunity.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Thankfully, I’m getting over Covid. — Horrified critics blast Fox’s Ingraham for suggesting a 50-year MAGA reich is possible. — Clarence Thomas, who only barely disguises his hatred of our nation, just guaranteed more mass slaughters. — American healthcare spending is almost double of every other country in the world…and as much as half of that money is going into the pockets of hospital, healthcare, and insurance industry executives and shareholders. — Few dispute that Trump and his enablers are sociopaths (who else would delight in ripping nursing babies from their mothers and then trafficking them into Texas, the nation’s #2 producer of child pornography?) — Heat: the Great Killer. — Crazy Alert! Trump supporters are all-in on the idea that the Earth is “flat as a pancake.” — Hypocrisy Alert! Republican candidate for Colorado’s 4th Congressional district Richard Holtorf paid for his girlfriend’s abortion and bragged about it on the floor of the Colorado legislature. — Wisdom School Alert! robert wolff's Ancient Way of Knowing — Hunter in a Farmer’s World Alert! — Morphic Resonance: The “Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon”

There's way too much celebrating around the unanimous SCOTUS decision yesterday which The NYT characterized with the headline, "Supreme Court Maintains Broad Access to Abortion pill." It didn't… There's way too much celebrating going on around the unanimous Supreme Court decision yesterday that The New York Times characterized with the headline, "Supreme Court Maintains Broad Access to Abortion Pill" and The Washington Post headlined, "Supreme Court upholds broad access to key abortion pill mifepristone." In fact, the Supreme Court took no such stand with regard to mifepristone, abortion, Plan B, or even contraception. They merely said that the doctors who brought the case had not yet suffered any actual harm themselves, and therefore had no basis to sue in the first place. Turning the case down was also a quick-and-easy way for the Republican justices on the Court to get out from under the spotlight glaring on personal corruption, bribe-taking, and their other anti-woman decisions, causing people to think that maybe they can be reasonable, Sam Alito arguing otherwise notwithstanding.