Hartmann Report

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Jared Kushner wants to make Tehran the next Trump Tower, and you're paying for it. — A federal judge just told Trump he can't pay himself $1.8 billion of your money — at least not yet. — Boom for the banksters, bust for everybody else: this is what 45 years of Reaganomics looks like. — Republicans, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that dying younger is a form of liberty. — Brooke Rollins, the Marie Antoinette of Big Macs, says starving Americans are "moving into the American Dream." — Speaking of starving the poor to feed the rich: Trump just handed Corporate America another $40 billion tax-dodge gift. — Say What?!?Alert! The Pentagon has issued a fatwa: no fatties at the President's birthday cage match.

From Citizens United to Delaware, the long corporate campaign to seize the rights of human beings just crossed a historic line… Corporations can now vote in Delaware. And they’re doing it. Seriously. Not dystopian science fiction or a new novel by an AI version of George Orwell. Actual corporations — what America’s first Supreme Court Justice, John Marshall, in 1819 called “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law” — are today voting in elections for everything from the mayor and town council to referendums on corporate taxes and limits on corporate behavior. What could possibly go wrong?

We’re over it, Republicans; we want fun and meaning back in our lives, rather than just working ourselves to death so Bezos and Zuck can buy new yachts... A new national survey of Americans finds that almost half of us (48%) say our lives are “lacking in fun” with fully 12% saying they can’t recall the last time they had an entire day they could simply enjoy. More than half (57%) said this was because they couldn’t afford to have fun, which makes perfect sense when you consider how 45 years of Reaganomics have destroyed the union movement and progressive taxation, and thus gutted the American middle class. Like idiots, we Americans bought Reagan’s siren song hook, line, and sinker back in 1980. He told us prosperity would “trickle down” if we just abandoned the largely non-profit healthcare system we had nationwide (most states required hospitals and health insurance companies to be nonprofits), the unions that fought for us to have good pay and benefits, enforcement of anti-monopoly laws, free college, and subsidized housing.

While Trump declares “total victory,” the world is watching American power, alliances, and credibility unravel in real time… The war Donald Trump started with Iran in February is now collapsing, slowly and predictably, into the same theater of fraud he’s run his entire life. So get ready for the next Big Lie: it’s coming as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning. Three months in, his bombing campaign has done less damage than he claims, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, gas is pushing five bucks a gallon, his own Pentagon admits Iran’s nuclear program was only set back a few years rather than “completely obliterated,” and the negotiations he’s been bragging about in Islamabad are, by Iran’s own foreign ministry’s careful phrasing, simultaneously “very far and very close” to a deal. Translation: there is no deal and it’s unlikely there will be one anytime soon, at least on terms Trump can honestly defend. And so, just as Wall Street learned to call his serial lies, bluffs, and retreats on tariffs the “TACO trade” — Trump Always Chickens Out — we’re about to watch the wartime version of the same play.

Trump’s Inner Circle Appears to Be Running a Smash-and-Grab Operation on the U.S. Government… "Mothers keep praying while the rich men steal Truth disappears behind another deal Flags keep waving over broken trust Empires always fall when they rot from lust." Donald Trump knows his time is running out, both personally and politically, so he’s doing a smash-and-grab, making off with as much of our (and others’) money as he can. And his family is in on it.

The following year Barack Obama was elected to the presidency. In his inaugural address he told the American people that markets needed supervision to work. “Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill,” President Obama said, looking into the camera. “Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched. But this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control. The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.” Americans who were hopeful that the age of neoliberalism was coming to an end (even if they didn’t know there was a name for it) cheered: Obama’s popularity soared above 60 percent.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Why doesn’t anybody mention that Trump himself is the biggest recipient of his “settlement” $1.776 billion fund? — America is officially traumatized, and the diagnosis is in. — Welcome to the Golden Era, where six in ten Americans can’t afford lunch. — The Trump administration tried to ban voting machines in half the country, and we’re only finding out now. — Marco Rubio is about to inherit a starved island, and he’s calling it a legacy. — If you wanted a green card, the new rule is: leave the country to get it. — rump, acting like a 10-year-old bully, posted an AI video of himself beating up Stephen Colbert and throwing him in a dumpster. The White House posted it too.

The GOP somehow found billions for Trump’s “anti-weaponization” slush fund overnight, but says America can’t afford insulin, affordable housing, or dignity for the elderly who built this country… Over at her Substack, the cartoonist and writer Aubrey Hirsch took a look at Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded “anti-weaponization” slush-fund and did something that should make every Republican in Washington squirm. She started doing the math. What if, she asked, we put that money toward something other than enriching Trump, his family, and the mob he summoned to the Capitol on January 6th, 2021? Her list is devastating. With that $1.776 billion we could, she writes, replace 150,000 lead pipes in hundreds of communities, build 10,000 new affordable housing units, establish hundreds of community-owned grocery stores in food deserts, fully fund 70 community mental health clinics for a decade, support tens of thousands of foster youth aging out of care, erase all the school lunch debt in this country for the next nine years, or pay the salaries of 2,500 new teachers for ten years.

The hard-right fantasy behind Bezos’ “no income tax” pitch, and who really profits from it… The fourth richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, told CNBC yesterday that he doesn’t think people making $70,000 a year should pay a penny in income taxes. For him, that’s a threefer. First, it gets millions of Americans on the “we shouldn’t ever pay any income taxes at all” train that’s been rolling for billionaires ever since Reagan first gutted our tax code, leading to an explosion of the morbidly rich.

Nixon at least understood the people had a right to know. This crowd has decided the people have no rights the president needs to respect & they’ll keep believing that exactly as long as we let them… In November of 1973, with Watergate closing in around him and his approval rating in free fall, Richard Nixon stood in front of four hundred newspaper editors at Disney World in Orlando and said something that, whatever else you think of the man, revealed an instinct that has gone entirely extinct in today’s Republican Party. He said, in the words that became his epitaph, that “people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.” He was lying, of course, when he added, “Well, I’m not a crook.” But notice the premise underneath the lie. Nixon understood, even as he was going down, that a president owes the American people an accounting, that accountability is the price of the office, and that the public has a right to know who’s running their government and how.