Hartmann Report

No matter how much Robert Bork and his colleagues say they’re “pro-business,” what they’re actually advocating is helpful only to a very small class of very large businesses and the very wealthy people who own them or their stock. Small and medium-sized businesses, entrepreneurs, workers, communities, and start-ups are badly damaged by the focus of antitrust law being kept entirely on prices that consumers pay. Bork—and indeed his entire class of Chicago School economists—was always focused on the interests of straight, white, wealthy men to the exclusion of women, communities of color, and people who were not the “makers” and “job creators” of their lore. Consistent with that focus, whether applied to micro- or macroeconomics, to regulating pollution or monopolies, to their complaints about “anti-war hippies” “urban dwellers,” or “women’s libbers,” Bork and his friends managed to insert into the political and economic bloodstream of our nation the cancer-causing virus of “greed is good” ideology. Its impact has been devastating.

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They don't care that democracy, here and around the world, is hanging by a thread… "Useful idiots" doesn't begin to describe the treason weasel twins, Comer and Jordan, who are enthusiastically promoting zombie lies Russia came up with in 2016 to help Trump win the White House. They're mainstreaming political poison directly into the bloodstream of our body politic. Purely for political profit. Vladimir Putin always knew he couldn't beat America militarily, so his next best option was to infiltrate our political systems and seize control of the GOP. It increasingly looks like he's pulled it off, right down to blocking US aid to Ukraine for over a year.

How Putin seized control of the Republican Party… There’s little doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin has succeeded in achieving near-total control over the Republican Party. They’re gutting aid to Ukraine (and have been for over a year), working to kneecap our economy, whipping up hatred among Americans against each other, promoting civil war, and openly embracing replacing American democracy with authoritarian autocracy. Putin has declared war on queer people, proclaimed Russia a “Christian nation,” and shut down all the media he called “fake news.” Check, check, check.

If a Republican is elected to the White House, you can expect all that caution to go out the window: every woman of reproductive age in America will have a target on her back — or her uterus… Right now, they're laying low. They're waiting for a Republican president to institute a national ban on abortion so they can start their jeremiads against women seeking abortions. In the meantime, they're getting ready. "They," of course, are the religious anti-abortion freaks in the GOP who want to punish "loose women" who seek abortions. Longer term, they also want to target women seeking birth control who, instead of being in the workplace or college, Republicans believe should be at home barefoot, pregnant, and in full-out tradwife mode.

The racist Trumpsters who want a second civil war call this an “acceleration,” & hope they can create enough chaos that they can finally fulfill their fantasies about fighting in a noble civil war… America is under assault, and, in the 9th year since Trump burst on the political scene, it’s happening so often now that it’s becoming normalized. This is a very real danger to the survival of our republic. And they’re getting more brazen: this past weekend a group of mask-clad Nazis marched through downtown Nashville complete with swastikas and racist chants. The media treated it like “just another day.” Republicans who run Texas are in open defiance of the US Supreme Court and the federal government over who has legal responsibility for enforcing our immigration laws and protecting our borders. It’s the most significant challenge to federal authority since the Nullification Crisis of 1832 that led us straight toward the Civil War. And, indeed, it’s stirring up pro-new-civil war rhetoric among the racist base of the GOP.

It's time to again tax the rich, be they individuals or giant corporations, to restore the American middle class and return our nation to the vitality that, before the Reagan Revolution, was normal... Most Americans have a radically incomplete understanding of how taxes work. As a result, changes to the tax code made by Republicans in the years since the Reagan Revolution have done real damage both to the American economy, working class people, and to the vibrancy and viability of our towns and communities. Just like the debates around raising personal income tax rates are demagogued by rich people and their shills, there's a world of misinformation around the issue of raising corporate income taxes. Most of these myths promoted by the morbidly rich exploit the fact that only a tiny fraction of Americans have ever run a business or taken a business course in college, and so most Americans don't have a clue how corporate income taxes work.

Bork was Richard Nixon’s solicitor general and acting attorney general and had a substantial impact on the thinking in the Reagan White House—so much so that Reagan rewarded his years of hard work on behalf of America’s monopolists with a lifetime appointment to the federal bench in the DC Circuit, frequently a launching pad for the Supreme Court. In the years following Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo, as numerous “conservative” and “free market” think tanks and publications grew in power and funding, Bork’s ideas gained wide circulation in circles of governance, business, and the law. In 1977, in the case of Continental T.V., Inc. v. GTE Sylvania, the Supreme Court took up Bork’s idea and, for the first time in a big way, embraced the “welfare of the consumer” and “demonstrable economic effect” doctrines that Bork had been promoting for over a decade.

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It shouldn't surprise us when we learn Republicans are willing to set aside their deep-seated hatred of trans people in exchange for a $10,000-a-plate fundraiser... Remember when Republicans lost their minds because Anheuser-Busch hired transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney to promote their diet beer brand, Bud Lite? Trump is now telling them to back off, because an Anheuser-Busch lobbyist named Jeff Miller is throwing a $10,000-a-plate fundraiser for him next month in Washington, DC.