Hartmann Report

The so-called “party of life” doesn’t, it turns out, give a damn about actual human life unless it has a net worth over a half-billion dollars... Kevin McCarthy has a keen new idea about what he thinks he can get out of Democrats in Congress in exchange for Republicans authorizing the government to pay the trillions in debt that Donald Trump racked up in his four years in office. In exchange for lifting the so-called debt ceiling, McCarthy wants Biden and congressional Democrats to throw millions of families off food stamps (SNAP) and end even the possibility of any help to low-income young people unable to pay off student loans.

The vast majority of politically-inspired violence and murders in America over the past two decades have been committed by rightwing extremists. How many are watching Fox News? Fox “News” has settled with Dominion, paying them about three-quarter-billion dollars and admitting that they lied. But nobody died at Dominion. Nobody’s life and family were turned upside-down at Dominion by being thrown into prison for sedition and insurrection. Nobody at Dominion was hospitalized or committed suicide because of the injuries they received at the hands of an angry mob Fox helped incite. While Dominion had a strong legal case against Fox for lying on the air and harming their business, the families of Ashli Babbitt, Anthony Antonio, three dead and over 140 injured police officers, and patriotic Americans across the country have an even stronger moral case.

Rebuilding American manufacturing not only returns jobs to our country, but also keeps profits here in America. Instead of strengthening China, we'd be rebuilding our own nation... Why are we using tax policy to subsidize giant American corporations in their dependency relationship with the Communist Chinese dictatorship? For 30 years, American corporations have been helping build China into a massive industrial empire while collapsing manufacturing capacity here in the United States. That country now has a stranglehold on things essential to America, from pharmaceuticals to electronics to consumer goods, all because of a neoliberal fantasy that if we helped them become wealthy through trade they would become more democratic.

And are rightwing billionaires who want more, more, more money willing to make common cause with bigots, fascists, and wannabee killers to get it? ..."Transatlantic" is a gripping drama about a group of Jewish refugees — including Hannah Arendt and Marc Chagall — who are trapped in Marseilles trying to flee the Nazis as they sweep across France in late 1940. Complicating their flight, the American envoy and the head of the local French police are both in agreement with the Nazis that the Jewish refugees are “degenerates” and “animals” who should appropriately end up in the Nazi camps. The parallels to today’s America are startling. The Republican rhetoric about the queer and Black communities — and, often, about Jews (usually coded as “George Soros”) — is startlingly similar to that of the Nazis and the Vichy French about Jews. Donald Trump, for example, is openly calling Alvin Bragg an “animal.” But how do things get this far? How and why did it happen in Germany, and how and why is it happening here today?

From Columbus to Jamestown. "They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear." —President Andrew Jackson, in his fifth State of the Union address to Congress, December 3, 1833

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Will Clarence Thomas be indicted? — Is Congress now part of Trump’s defense team? — Ron DeSantis just effectively banned all abortion in Florida. — The GOP’s cruel push to gut food and medical aid for the poor gathers steam. — It looks like lifelong Republican and Fed Chair Jerome Powell is going to get the recession he wanted for the 2024 election. — Crazy Alert! Tucker Carlson lies that ‘American soldiers are fighting Russian soldiers’ just hours after three different Fox News reporters said the meme was a lie. — Geeky Science! Why we should be gazing at more sunsets...

If our republic is to be successful and Americans are to have decent lives, we must stop the commodification of America’s commons and turn power over life’s essentials to We The People. Americans used to understand the difference between private and public, between what government should regulate or even administer, and what is appropriately left in the private marketplace. Ever since the Reagan Revolution, however — as I lay out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America — even our very lives have become fodder for the buzzsaw of unrestrained raw capitalism controlled by the morbidly rich. Last week, the nation learned that it’s become a routine practice in the assisted living industry to drain elderly people of their entire life’s savings and then, when Medicaid kicks in at a slightly lower payment level to cover their costs, evict them onto the street.

No Labels and the Corporate Problem Solvers are now playing with political fire, flirting with fielding a “moderate” (i.e. bought-off) candidate for president next year. Dark money is preparing to disrupt the 2024 election, and it could get really, really ugly. All because a large handful of corrupt politicians and washed-out political hacks are enthusiastic about doing the bidding of their largest donors. — In the presidential election of 1968, George Wallace carried almost 14 percent of the national vote.

And even if there is no war, our children are now paying the price for the GOP’s embrace of this hate and bigotry — and the guns that go with it — every single day. According to a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 21% of Americans have been threatened with a gun, 19% tell researchers a family member was killed by a gun, and 17% say they’ve seen someone shot in front of them. Fully 54 percent of Americans or members of their family have had one of these experiences. Eighty-four percent of Americans consider how to avoid getting shot when they go out in public. But why?

Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin is now Chairman of the Judiciary Committee & for reasons apparently only known to him, he’s kowtowing to Republican senators blocking Democratic nominees... Why is Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin — Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, through which all judicial nominees must pass before getting a full Senate vote — letting Republican senators blow off qualified federal judges proposed by President Biden? Most recently, Mississippi GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith blocked via “blue slip” Democratic judicial nominee Scott Colom, just like last year when Wisconsin’s Republican Senator Ron Johnson blue-slip-vetoed Judge William Pocan, the brother of Congressman Mark Pocan, apparently because he’s gay.