Hartmann Report

We did it before, and the result was the creation of the world’s first and largest middle class and a level of peace and prosperity that held its own until Ronald Reagan took a meat-axe to it… “Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and regulations minimal. America’s billionaires (and soon to be trillionaires) pay an average of around 3.1 percent as their functional income tax rate; as a result, America is the most unequal developed society in the world. The last time severe poverty and extravagant wealth coexisted in such extremes as today in this country was during the 1920s and 1930s.

The crisis for any Republican who wants to run against Trump is that they’ll have to run to the right of fascism. But what occupies that space? Pure, raw, genocidal dictatorship that ends America... Ron DeSantis has a problem. No matter how hard he tries to kill off The [“woke” Black] Little Mermaid by taking down the company that brought her to life, it’s not going to help him beat Donald Trump in the GOP primary. Nobody in the Republican Party, in fact, can successfully “run to the right of Trump” because Trump is running as an open fascist. And the only thing to the right of an open fascist is a total dictator who has utterly shattered even the façade of fascist democracy (remember that Putin and many other modern autocrats were “elected” repeatedly).

Republicans know the only way they can continue to hold onto national power — and even keep their control over states like Texas, Georgia, and Florida — is by making it difficult to register and vote… The first rule of business and marketing is that if you make it easy for folks to buy your product or engage with you, more people will do so. If you don’t want people to buy or use your product or service, on the other hand, just make them jump through hoops to complete the transaction and many won’t bother. Republicans know this and have been applying it to voting for the better part of 50 years; recently they’ve turned it into a science.

In 2021 the Zelenskyy declared a campaign to “de-oligarchize” his nation, having diagnosed Ukraine's political & economic crises as tracing back to the corruption by the morbidly rich. Can little Ukraine teach big America how to deal with our oligarch problem? Viktor Medvedchuk was the Rupert Murdoch of Ukraine. He ran a rightwing television network and owned TV stations across the country, while simultaneously being one of the richest men in that nation. He promoted hate and division, tax cuts for the rich and gutting the Ukrainian social safety net, and supported some of Ukraine’s most toxic politicians. Like many of today’s American oligarchs, he owned hundreds of politicians, who consistently voted in Parliament, state, and local governments to protect his businesses, wealth, and influence. Then came Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who successfully campaigned for president on a Teddy Roosevelt-like anti-corruption platform and, like both Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, declared outright war on politically active oligarchs.

A recent study of 100 US cities found that — between 1993 to 2017 — billions were spent to expand highway capacities by 42% but, instead of reducing congestion, traffic delays actual went up 144%! It’s Memorial Day, and millions of Americans are on the highways. You’d think that if your freeway is clogged up every rush hour, adding an extra lane would reduce the congestion. You’d be wrong. And an uprising against Oregon state government plans to widen the I-5 freeway here in Portland may end up changing how cities around the country decide to use the hundreds of billions of dollars in highway funds coming to them from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The Gunshot That Ended Reconstruction "If this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle [of ending slavery] . . . I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it." —Abraham Lincoln, speech in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, February 22, 1861

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Geeky Science! Scientists call out Ron DeSantis. — How the GOP is legally paving the way for the Proud Boys and extreme right-wingers to threaten people on election day. — Are Nazis & white supremacists are now deciding which books can be read in Red states? — Why isn't the Justice Department looking at the sketchy relationship between Trump & the Saudis? — What can America do about being drowned in religion? — How Alabama is using a chemical endangerment law to lock up pregnant (and even not-pregnant) women... — Good News! Minnesota joins the national compact to elect the president by the popular vote instead of the Electoral College. — Five Republicans on the Supreme Court deliver a “catastrophic loss for clean water protections” in a decision so hideous that even Brett Kavanaugh dissented. — Crazy Alert! Lauren Boebert wants to make America safe for antisemitism.

Republicans are dropping their Two Santas bomb right onto President Joe Biden’s head. It worked against Clinton & Obama and the media never caught on. Why wouldn’t they use it again? As the Fitch credit rating service puts the United States on “watch” for a possible downgrade and Democrats dither about the 14th Amendment, Republicans just declared the House of Representatives in a break because, from their point of view, there really is no crisis. In fact, from the GOP’s perspective, it’s all going according to plan.

Today’s climate crisis dwarfs the 1940s threat of Nazism, the 9/11 attack, or the massive bank robberies that took place during the Reagan & Bush administrations. It threatens all life on earth… If somebody had set your house on fire, killing your child and pets, and then your city demanded that you give that somebody hundreds of dollars a year for the next decade, how would you feel? That’s pretty much the situation of families across America who’ve lost their homes, family members, and livelihoods to wildfires, floods, extreme heat and cold, mile-wide tornadoes, bomb cyclones, heat domes, hurricanes, and drought caused by today’s climate emergency, but nonetheless have to pay taxes that subsidize the fossil fuel industry executives who helped caused it all.

This Court is out of control, and if Durbin, Schumer, and Biden don’t get together and do something about it now, there may not be another chance… Clarence and Ginni Thomas want to stay on the Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo gravy trains (among others), and Crow’s lawyers are essentially claiming Thomas has every right to continue to act like a corrupt third-world autocrat who’s accountable to nobody, not even the voters and citizens of the United States or — more importantly — the very Congress that created the Supreme Court in the first place.