Hartmann Report

May all your dreams and good work be realized as our sun’s eternal energy returns to full life in our part of Earth this coming New Year… Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, a connection to some of the most ancient of all known northern European shamanic traditions. Like people living in the north for millennia, we continue to embrace them with regional, national, and religious tweaks. It occurs during the week of the shortest day and longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere, when ancient holy men and women lit “yule logs” to push back the darkness and implore the gods or nature to bring back the light of summer.

As America’s housing & homelessness problems reach crisis levels - the housing equivalent of malnutrition & starvation - Sen. Merkley has submitted legislation to stop the corporate feeding frenzy… This week’s brutal winter storm’s impact on homeless people across the nation — it will certainly kill many —reminds us how essential safe housing is for us human beings. There are commodities and there are necessities. Sometimes, they’re the same. Food, for example, is both a commodity and a necessity.

As the Russian campaign of murder, rape, and destruction continues, America has both a moral and a legal obligation to defend Ukraine and enforce the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is visiting the United States today and speaking to a joint session of Congress. He will be pushing back against those on both the extreme left and right who keep whining that in 1991 President George HW Bush said NATO would not expand toward Russia (a comment that was never reduced to writing and never part of any agreement) and the Minsk cease-fire Agreements, which President Putin declared on February 22 “no longer exist.” Hopefully President Zelenskyy will remind Congress that America is party to an actual contractual agreement to protect the integrity of Ukraine’s borders, an agreement we signed to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world.

Who on Earth would want to send thousands of desperate people to our Southern border just in time for every midterm facing a Democratic president? Who would be that crass and cynical? Just a month ago we finished President Biden’s first midterm election and, as predictably as the sun rises in the east, right around election time and for the months afterward a wave of refugees and immigrants have shown up at our southern border. This happens every two years when a Democratic President is in office. And finally the US news media seems to be getting a clue as to why. More about that in a moment.

Is our economy here to serve average Americans, or are we here to serve those who own and control most of the money flowing through our economy? At the urging of Republican Senators Hawley and Rubio, a new think tank is working out ways for the GOP to change their messaging. They want to shift their rhetoric from support for corporations and the morbidly rich to pretending they care about working people. This new organization will, they say, "think differently about labor vs. capital than Republicans have in recent generations." It's a cynical effort to capture Trump's working class base. He'd promised he'd bring our jobs home from China, empower labor unions, raise taxes on the rich so high that "my friends won't ever talk to me again," and give every American full health insurance that cost less than Obamacare. Those promises helped win him the White House. All were lies, but the GOP base bought it and gave him tens of millions of votes; now Hawley, Rubio, et al think they can bottle that populist rhetorical magic and repeat Trump's shtick for 2024.

Sunday book excerpt: Table of Contents & Preface. "Be not like the lintel, which no hand can reach, but like the threshold, trodden by all. When the building falls, the threshold remains." —Eleazar HaKappar, Abot de R. Nathan, 26. "A human being is part of a whole, called by us the “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." —Albert Einstein (1879–1955)

The Best of the Rest of the News — Next week will be the last official public meeting of the January 6th Select House Committee. — When Twitter bans journalists, does it hurt Twitter or democracy? — Is more voter suppression coming to Georgia after Democratic runoff wins? — Will Puerto Rico become a state? That's great, but why not DC first? — Are cars freedom machines or a new tool for destroying Black people's lives? — As astonishing as it may seem, Ron DeSantis is empaneling a state grand jury to investigate Covid vaccines. — Geeky Science! India's renewable plans include exporting solar energy globally. — Crazy Alert! Yes - You are going to jail for an NFT Salesman... — Good News! Oregon's Governor Kate Brown has commuted the death sentences to life without parole for all 17 people on that state's death row.

The question today is whether we as a nation and a people will recover from it, or if it will, as Reagan promised, destroy the American experiment of pluralistic liberal democracy. Back in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was sworn in and implicitly promised to destroy our government because it was “the problem,” many of us who strongly opposed him wondered what the final stage of Reaganism would look like.  Now we know. We’re there.

Let’s join the rest of the developed world and bring competition to the business of providing the internet to our homes and businesses... Perhaps you’ve noticed there are several new phone companies offering very low-cost cell service, some for as little as $5/month. There’s competition in the cellphone space that’s driving down prices and driving up service, at least in many parts of the country. So why isn’t the same thing happening on the internet side, with the company that brings the web into your home? Why can’t Americans in as much as half the country pick among multiple companies offering high-speed internet and get the one whose price and service best matches their needs?

Imposing a judicial code of ethics on SCOTUS like the European Parliament is creating this week is a vital place for Congress and the White House to begin... The European Parliament and the US Supreme Court are both ensnarled in major corruption scandals. Each was caused by powerful politicians having no independent legal check on their own behavior. And on “this side of the pond” Congress needs to act as soon as possible (as are the Europeans).