Hartmann Report

Thus, today’s Republicans are finally close to fulfilling Hammond’s and Reagan’s vision (while ironically repudiating America’s first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln)… Odds are you’ve never heard of the “mudsill theory of labor,” but you and everybody else in this country really should learn about it. It explains a whole spectrum of Republican behavior that otherwise seems baffling and self-defeating. For example: — The past 7 years have seen a near-fivefold increase in documented child labor violations by employers. States have responded to this alarming trend in two ways: Democratic-controlled states are putting more teeth into their laws and upping enforcement; Republican-controlled states are loosening their laws and cutting back on enforcement so children can drop out of school and go to work.

Trump's political Teflon coating is at least a hundred times more effective than Reagan’s was in his wildest dreams. Why? Americans are dumbfounded. How is it that half this nations’ voters are on the verge of returning to office a guy who: — Began his life of crime busted for writing “C” for “Colored” on Black rental applicants’ forms, — Mismanaged the Covid crisis so badly America had the developed world’s highest mortality rate with at least a half-million unnecessary deaths, ...

Money-as-speech has metastasized so extensively it threatens to kill its host, ending democracy here and turning America into another Putin- or Orbán-style autocracy run by Trump... An international fascist movement — led by Russia, Hungary, and China — is on the march worldwide, and America is in its crosshairs. Case in point: Ohio Republican Senator and maximally rich dude J.D. Vance, who dresses up his Trump/Putin toadyism in more elegant and acceptable garb than "bleach blonde bad-built butch body™" Marjorie Taylor Greene is capable of. In an article for the elite Financial Times, Vance recently wrote: "We owe it to our European partners to be honest: Americans want allies in Europe, not client states, and our generosity in Ukraine is coming to an end. Europeans should regard the conclusion of the war there as an imperative. ... And Europe should consider how exactly it is going to live with Russia when the war in Ukraine is over." Instead of expressing shock at such a treason-weasel statement, the wise elders at Politico ran an article quoting him that was headlined: "J.D. Vance Has a Point."

America's billionaires — along with the rest of us — should be every bit as frightened of the avatars of fascism like Trump, Bannon, and Orbán as they are of the ghosts of the long-dead USSR... America's rightwing billionaires are freaked out about communism and, in their paranoia, they are funding and encouraging the rise of a form of fascism that will eventually turn on them, too. Will they wake up in time? Louise and I just finished watching the extraordinary Showtime series, A Gentleman in Moscow, which takes place in the years and decades immediately after the Russian Revolution of 1917. A wealthy aristocrat (he was a count) is basically imprisoned in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow and has a front-row seat to observe how the well-intentioned revolt against the excesses of the Romanov dynasty turned into a brutal dictatorship, ultimately headed by a sociopathic Joseph Stalin. The banality of evil. It flashed me back to the 1960s and a number of conversations I had as a young teenager with my father and heard on TV shows that we watched together like those moderated by William F. Buckley Jr. and Joe Pyne. The fear those days was that Soviet-style communists were plotting to take over America, confiscate all the wealth from the morbidly rich, and then line them up against a wall and shoot them as Lenin and his followers had done in Russia. It was a fear that, at the time, seemed rational to many Americans.

Why both Thomas — whose bribe-taking in exchange for his votes on Citizens United and other cases is well documented — and his rightwing buddy Sam Alito must resign or face impeachment... Senator Dick Durbin, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, needs to act. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sam Alito was just caught red-handed promoting Trump's fascist "stop the steal" campaign to overthrow the 2020 election and end democracy in America by flying the upside-down flag at his home. He then went on Fox "News" and lied that it was his wife's fault and that she did it because schoolchildren at a nearby bus stop saw a neighbor's "F*ck Trump" yard sign. In fact, as the Lincoln Project's Steve Schmidt pointed out this past weekend: "Mrs. Alito was so alarmed by the degradations and profane, yet protected speech that she went immediately home, and inverted the American flag signaling distress. Here's the problem: there were no school buses and no school children on them in January 2021 in Alexandria, Virginia. Schools in the city were closed for a full year as a result of the pandemic and didn't re-open until March 2021." But Alito's fingers were apparently far deeper in the January 6th coup attempt than most Americans realize. Trump lawyer Sydney Powell pointed out on Stew Peters' rightwing YouTube channel that she, Louie Gohmert, and Kari Lake (among others) had filed a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence to prevent him from certifying the Electoral College vote on January 6th. It was a legal attempt to try to do what Trump sent a mob to do when the legal strategy failed.

Robert Bork’s consumer welfare framework for determining if a company is a monopoly concerns itself with only two outcomes: 1. Low prices for consumers 2. High returns for investors But if a company is concerned only with consumers and investors, then it is going to squeeze everything else, from environmental protection to wages and worker safety to product quality. This is also an incentive to cut labor expenses by merging with other companies and eliminating entire departments. The new company won’t need two sales, HR, or accounting departments; tens of thousands of jobs are typically lost in large mergers. Bork’s policy, now America’s policy, means that companies now cut pensions as a way of cutting liabilities. It means that all firms are encouraged to cut corners on environmental, workplace, and consumer protections, and to lobby endlessly to kill those protections entirely.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — It’s time for corrupt, billionaire-funded Justice Sam Alito to step down or be investigated and impeached. — Tomorrow at 10 AM PT/1 PM ET, I’ll be speaking at the “Embracing Our Emergency” conference — A Trump-linked dark-money group spent $90m on racist and transphobic ads in 2022 and are fixing to repeat the performance this fall. — Why is cable news refusing to report on Trump’s solicitation of a $1 billion bribe? — Is the GOP planning to outlaw no-fault divorce? — Ron DeSantis makes “Climate Change Isn’t Real” the official law and policy in Florida. — Why are we allowing ultraprocessed food corporations to cram junk down our children’s throats? — If you thought China was our friend, think again. — Hunter in a Farmers World Alert! ADHD: The “Mirror Technique” from Claude Bristol — Wisdom School Alert! Four Mistakes Have Brought Humankind to a Crisis — Mike “Squeaky” Johnson Alert!

Is America in the final stage of the 40-year transition from a forward-looking & still-evolving democratic republic into a white supremacist ethnostate ruled by a small group of fascist oligarchs? The headline in this week's Fortune reads: "Billionaire investor Ray Dalio warns U.S. is 'on the brink' and estimates a more than 1 in 3 chance of civil war" Billionaires and civil war? A billionaire-funded Supreme Court Justice flew the American flag upside down outside his house after January 6th in apparent support of Donald Trump's attempt to overthrow our government. Americans for Tax Fairness reports that 50 billionaire families have, at this early stage, already injected almost a billion dollars into our political system — the overwhelming majority of it going to Republicans and in support of Donald Trump — in an effort to maintain enough control of our political system that their taxes won't go up. And that total is just what's reported: it doesn't count the billions in unknowable dark money that's sloshing around the system thanks to Citizens United.

"Both Texas and Georgia are actually Blue states; the only reason Republicans have as much power as they do in each is because of massive voter roll purges and voter suppression laws." If a state wants to take away your gun, they must first go to court and prove there's a clear and legally defensible justification for that "extreme" action. You can appeal their move all the way to the US Supreme Court. On the other hand, if a Republican governor, secretary of state, or local official wants to take away your voter registration or refuse to count your ballot, they don't even have to tell you they've done it.

Congress must stand up for what’s right and consistent with American values: Legally bribed politicians and judges isn’t that... Is there a way to reverse the decision by five Republicans on the Supreme Court that it’s OK for billionaires and big corporations to bribe politicians? Americans are watching with increasing shock and dismay: — President Biden tried to knock up to $20,000 off the debt of every person in the country with a student loan. Republicans decided this might somehow, someday mean fewer profits for banks — who financially support the GOP — so they sued at the Supreme Court. The Republican appointees on the Court, over the objections of the three Democratic appointees, killed the president’s effort without providing any cogent constitutional rationalization.