Hartmann Report

No democracy in the world can work if its citizens don’t believe their votes are legitimately counted: This lie that started in 1964 is now a harpoon pointed at the heart of our democracy. Following Donald Trump’s corrupt script, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is encouraging his followers to shut that country down because he is, so far, refusing to acknowledge that he lost the election. This is a crisis for democracy. Nations have to figure out how they are to be governed. Most of recorded history tells the story of kings, popes, priests, lords, and barons who ruled through violence and imposed themselves on their people rather than the people selecting them. Ultimately, as we all learned in high school civics, you can have a government chosen democratically with a free and fair vote or you can have a government chosen through brute force and violence. There really aren’t any other choices. That was the great American experiment. Replacing a violent hereditary warlord king with a president and congress elected by the people. Democracy.

They're betting no one will notice the GOP is increasing their wealth & lowering their taxes while manipulating white male anger & violence against women, immigrants, liberals, and people of color... America’s rightwing billionaires are making a risky bet. They’re betting that supporting openly fascist policies and politicians will increase their wealth, lower their taxes, and let them get away with more and more questionable business practices without government oversight. All without blowing back on them. They’re betting that, with the blessing of 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court (Citizens United), they can pour just enough money into election campaigns to swing them by slim margins to friendly politicians, but hold back enough on their funding (and those electoral margins) that it won’t be obvious to everybody that they’re simply buying elections all across the nation.

Sunday book excerpt: The Hidden History of the War on Voting. Wealthy white men have had the right to vote in America since the beginning of our republic. It’s been a very, very different story for women and Native Americans. Women’s voting rights took a long time. Native Americans’ took longer.

The Best of the Rest of the News — He was watching Nancy! Politically-inspired violence. — New research proves GOP policies are killing Americans. — Two Presidents gave talks this week and one was ignored. — Why don't they ever say "Republican"? — We now know a Trump-humping FBI chief blew the Portland protest all out of proportion. — Why the GOP can't help with inflation. — Now, even the Mayo Clinic is warning people about the Medicare Advantage scam! — Geeky Science: There's good news and bad news on the climate. The UN reports that we're at "a sobering moment" for the planet... renewable sources of electricity are, with only few exceptions, now cheaper than any other form of power generation. — Twitter seems to be pretty damn shocking under its new management.

If Democrats had run all the Red states in 2019, then 171,030 fewer Americans would have died that year; if the GOP ran the Blue states, there would have been an additional 217,635 dead Americans. If you were born and live in Japan, you can expect to live to 85 years old. For South Korea average lifespan is 83, as are Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Israel, and Australia. It’s 82 for Italy, Spain, Ireland, France, Finland, and New Zealand. Cuba (!) and Panama are 79; Uruguay and Croatia are 78. A total of 61 countries have average lifespans of 78 years or older, ranging from Singapore’s 84 to Estonia’s 78. And then there’s the United States. Our average lifespan comes in at a paltry 77 years, along with Iran, Tunisia, and Morocco. And it’s entirely because of Republican policies.

Economic crises represent social and political transition points, times of great difficulty but also times of great opportunity - We now stand at the edge of one those rare windows in time. America is in the midst of an economic crisis and Russia and China seem hell-bent on pushing us to what may become a world war. We’ve been here three times before in the history of our country, and each one has heralded major changes in the nature and structure of our government. As we watch corporations pour increasingly large amounts of money into politics, it’s a good time to reevaluate their role in governance and society. At the top of that list is the doctrine created out of whole cloth by the US Supreme Court in the late 19th century called “Corporate Personhood.“ It has become one of the most destructive forces in American politics.

We can tell Saudi Arabia’s dictator and the most predatory oil companies to go screw themselves at the same time we do the best thing for an average working Americans. It’s not even winter yet, and America’s Northeastern states are already experiencing both shortages and price shocks on heating oil. The headline at Bloomberg this week says it all: “New York, New England Ration Heating Oil Even Before Peak Winter.”

Simply put, the elections are “tightening” because rightwing billionaires and giant corporations are pouring billions of dollars into advertising. And advertising works. The polls are tightening up right now, and the media is treating it like it’s some mystical force of nature causing people to shift their concerns from abortion, guns, climate, democracy, and the survival of Social Security over to gas prices, Black crime, banning books, and trans kids playing sports. The media, of course, knows what’s going on. They’re the secondary recipients of it, right behind the politicians, because they’re making billions conveying the GOP message to America. Which, of course, is why they won’t tell you what the real game is here or how it’s being played.

Authoritarianism has been interwoven into the fabric of our republic since its inception and the Republican Party is today fighting what will hopefully be a losing battle to hang onto and expand it… Americans are afraid of the wrong thing. When you ask most Americans what authoritarianism looks like, they’ll describe jackbooted thugs goosestepping up to their house to drag them away to a concentration camp. That, however, is not authoritarianism: that’s Nazi style tyranny, aka totalitarianism, where the government controls every aspect of life including those that are social, religious, and economic, along with a police state that uses terror to rule with absolute power.

Sunday book excerpt: The Hidden History of the War on Voting As the drama of writing the Constitution for a new nation was going on during the summer of 1787 in Independence Hall in Philadelphia (then the home of the Pennsylvania Legislature), a different kind of drama was playing out in the streets of that city. It was, according to the newspapers of the day and the letters sent home from delegates to the convention, a brutally hot, muggy, mosquito-infested summer in Philadelphia. This was during a time when the mechanisms of weather were largely unknown, and superstition was thickly merged with Christianity. Thus, on May 5, when a boy of about five years died of an apparent heatstroke, an elderly woman in town was accused of being the witch who’d cast a spell upon him.