Hartmann Report

Welcome to Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club, one of the perks of your subscription to the Hartmann Report. We’ll be meeting live on the last Sunday of every month at noon ET, 9 am PT. One book a month. And the timing couldn’t be better. On July 30th, a federal appeals court gave Arkansas the green light to start arresting librarians. Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin enthusiastically praised the neo-Nazi-style book-banning ruling, saying it “allows Arkansas to move forward in enforcing a law that protects children from obscene materials while increasing accountability for public-library curation decisions.” Act 372 makes it a crime to hand a minor any “harmful item,” is punishable by up to a year in jail and a $10,000 fine, and it lets city and county rightwing politicians decide what books, newspapers, and magazines are “harmful.”

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — Trump stuns 5,000 exhausted Sailors: nine months at sea isn’t “nearly long enough.” — Trump‘S DOJ is building a shield against Democratic investigations before the midterms. — AI crosses a terrifying line, and researchers are debating hitting the brakes. — Trump’s team targets nursing home voters with chilling new election rules. — Big Pharma hits jackpot as record 59% of Americans struggle to afford prescriptions. — Putin tests NATO again, as Trump burns through America’s weapons. — Geeky Science Alert! Scientists make a stunning discovery about how birth order may affect your health. — Trump guts America’s firefighting capabilities as historic heat and hurricane threats explode.

His administration is destroying one of the paper trails investigators need to follow secret money… Trump just took steps to make it very difficult to prosecute money laundering, a crime he and his real estate buddies may well have been committing much of their felonious lives. Last week we learned that Capital One Bank closed over 300 Trump Organization accounts back in 2021 because, they said, their internal fraud department had flagged illegal money-laundering activity. But on who’s behalf? We know from the Mueller Report and public reporting that Putin spent millions and did his best via social media and hacking the DNC to get Donald Trump into the White House in 2016, and was probably doing the same in 2020 and 2024.

Once government can place one group beyond the protection of law, the boundary can always expand to the rest of us… “People are disappearing into this no man’s land. They have no connection to their new country, and they also apparently have no legal rights.” —Immigration rights attorney Alma David, quoted in The New York Times “Terrible things are happening outside... poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.” — Anne Frank diary entry January 13, 1943 Authoritarianism doesn’t just begin when a government embraces brutality. It steps in on cats’ feet when brutality becomes politically useful, legally routinized, and morally acceptable because a government has first declared its victims undeserving of our empathy. When average people in the bureaucracy just “do their jobs” inflicting horrors on other humans simply because they’ve been declared “the other.” Outside of military coups like Pinochet’s Chile, countries don’t generally slide from republican democracies into totalitarianism and fascism in a single step. There’s a process, and it always begins by the government deciding that some people simply don’t deserve the basic human rights that have been foundational to western civilization for centuries.

From mail ballots to voting machines, his allies are identifying pressure points that could throw November into chaos… Back in the days when conservatives were so hungry for media platforms that they’d come on progressive shows, I used to regularly debate Wayne Allen Root (here and here, for example). Instead of trying to convince me, though, Root has recently taken to giving Trump ideas about things to do, like stealing the election this fall. On his show on “Real” America’s Voice, Root told Trump: “Let me put an idea in your head. Because it’s so hard to get the Senate to do anything, now they’re on recess, they never get anything done. If they never get the SAVE America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections. … “And the Supreme Court ruled in 1983, under Reagan, in INS vs. Chadha that if you declare a national security emergency as the President of the United States, they can’t challenge it. It can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress. “So if you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail-in ballots, and you don’t even need the Senate’s vote.” Trump seemed both unsurprised and unfazed, as if this were a regular topic of conversation in the White House.

From Teddy Roosevelt to Navalny and Zelenskyy, history shows that exposing corrupt elites can mobilize voters and topple entrenched power. With all but 2 Republican senators voting to make Todd Blanche our Attorney General, Donald Trump just walked away from a $100 million fine for tax fraud that the IRS has been trying to collect from him for over a decade. This was the centerpiece of the “settlement“ that Blanche wrote up that says that Trump, Uday and Qusay, Jared and Ivanka, Tiffany and Boulos, and even Barron will never again have to worry about paying taxes or ever being audited. It may well even extend to their business partners. Meanwhile, last week Capital One bank submitted sworn testimony to a court that back in 2021 they shut down and closed 385 Trump-owned businesses because their fraud department — and its leader, a man with “extensive financial fraud law enforcement experience” — believed Trump’s businesses were engaging in illegal money laundering and the bank wanted nothing to do with it. Even more astonishing, neither of these revelations from the past two weeks made more than the tiniest stir in our corporate media, which is increasingly afraid of crossing Trump or his neofascist billionaire buddies

From the American Revolution to the New Deal to the Great Society, crisis has repeatedly transformed America. Could universal healthcare be next? If Trump wants Republicans to win this fall, all he has to do is endorse Medicare For All and call it a Republican policy. After all, conservatives across Europe are generally quite happy with their national healthcare systems and definitely don’t want them going away or to be replaced by for-profit insurance companies. When I did did my show from Denmark’s Danish Radio’s studios, I interviewed multiple conservative politicians and to a person their response to my question, “Do you want to get rid of your healthcare system?” was, “Are you nuts?” This may not even be all that radical by today’s Republican standards: after all, Trump’s embraced the purely communist idea of the federal government taking control of the means of production and distribution — the textbook definition of communism — by having our government take stock in over 30 companies over the past 18 months.

How They Pinned the Crime on Scapegoats Recently, an aficionado of Fox “News” called into my radio program to say that he was “sick and tired of being ripped off by these Somali [Black] welfare cheats.” I asked him if he realized that from an average taxpayer’s point of view, the amount of federal tax dollars that goes to everyday safety-net programs like SNAP or basic welfare “is about $324 per taxpayer, but direct subsidies and special tax breaks that favor big businesses and industries cost each taxpayer thousands of dollars per year.” He grunted, as if he didn’t believe me, and hung up the phone. These guys are truly well indoctrinated, which raises the question: how and why did that happen? Reagan and the oligarchs who funded him were faced with a problem of growing discontent among “the rabble.”

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — Trump has figured out a way to grift off the plight of immigrant kids — Trumponomics is even worse than Hoovernomics or Reaganomics. — Over at Montana Dispatch, Ryan Busse lays out the five Big Lies Republicans are using to steal our public lands. — Trump has figured out a new grift to let his oil company donors profit from his drawing down the National Oil Reserve. — America’s oligarchs and the Republican Party they own know how to hold onto potentially wayward members of Congress. — The solar industry claims a scalp. — Is Israel using rape, electric shocks, and beatings to discourage activists from bringing food and medicine to Gaza? — Is that a squirrel on Trump’s head?

Third Way's multimillion-dollar offensive threatens Medicare for All, labor rights, climate action, and the progressive movement driving the party's energy… The Third Way has functionally declared their intention to purge the Democratic Party of progressives. They will not, in my opinion, get us the things progressive are working for and most Americans and the large majority of Democrats want: — A national healthcare program that covers everybody — Free or affordable college — A clean environment and relief from climate wilding — Reasonable taxation for billionaires and corporations — Affordable housing and groceries — Widespread unionization and an increased minimum wage — An end to the brutality of ICE and the frantic construction of concentration camps. These corporate Democrats just formally declared war on those candidates who eschew corporate money, and that has the potential to destroy our chances this fall. But to understand how this tear in the Democratic Party came about and why, a bit of history is vital: In 1961, President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson had been pushing hard for expansion of the New Deal, with their centerpiece being a new program to provide healthcare for seniors that could eventually serve all Americans.