Hartmann Report

History shows that police states aren't declared: they're assembled piece by piece, until one day ordinary people realize the freedoms they once took for granted have quietly disappeared… Tuesday morning in Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo did what he’d done nearly every morning for 35 years. He woke at 5 a.m., kissed his wife goodbye, loaded his van, and drove off to pick up his construction crew in Magnolia Park, the neighborhood that’s anchored Houston’s Mexican American community for a century. He’d raised three sons in that city; they became a teacher and two engineers. He had no criminal record, and he was partway through the legal process of getting a work permit, biometrics and fingerprints already done. By 7 a.m. he was lying face down on Canal Street with a bullet in his abdomen, crying out for help in Spanish while a federal agent knelt over him talking on the phone. He died at Ben Taub Hospital, the same hospital where two of his sons were born. The Harris County medical examiner has ruled the manner of his death a “homicide.”

They don't agree on politics. They do agree that the American Dream is slipping away, and that could change everything… Democratic primary elections, in particular, are showing us America is both in the midst of a deep crisis and is on the verge of what could be transformational, positive, life-altering political and economic change comparable to FDR’s New Deal. It became obvious, really, in the first minute of New Year’s Day this year, when two things happened at once vividly showing us all the contrast and the crises around where America stands right now. In a long-abandoned subway station deep under lower Manhattan, progressive Democrat Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of New York City, largely on the simple promise that New York could once again become “a city we can afford.” And at that very same midnight — because Republicans refused to extend them — the enhanced Obamacare subsidies expired for more than twenty million Americans, jacking their health insurance prices overnight into stratospheric amounts that are now pushing families to skip pills, skip meals, and skip the doctor entirely.

Trump's latest Red Scare recycles one of America's oldest political tricks: invent an internal enemy to distract voters from the policies reshaping the country… So, now Trump says we’re communists, you and me, after having earlier called us “potential domestic terrorists.”

From corporate personhood to Citizens United, the hidden story behind today's billionaire political power - and what we can do about it… My new book, Who Killed the American Dream? The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told, is out today, and it plainly lays out why so much has gone wrong in this country since the Reagan Revolution and how the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision came about. The timing turns out to be almost eerie. Just this week, in a Common Dreams op-ed about California’s Proposition 40, Congressman Ro Khanna posed the question that has become both urgent and existential for America: Are we actually willing to tax billionaire oligarchs, or are we only willing to talk about it? Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once tried to warn us about this very moment, a warning which has echoes throughout history and in dozens of nations: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

The real divide isn't political:?it's between those willing to normalize modern fascism's cruelty and those who refuse… The “partisan split” of Americans showed up in a big way at Fourth of July celebrations and backyard barbecues last week, but the media, while noting or even complaining about it, rarely mentions exactly why it’s happening. A few weeks ago Louise and I were having coffee with an old friend who’s known us since the early days of the radio show, and somewhere between the second cup and the muffins she said something that’s been rattling around in my head ever since. Her sister, a three-time Trump voter, had finally called — after months of silence — and demanded to know why our friend had stopped returning her calls. “It’s just politics,” the sister said. “Why are you taking this so personally?” Our friend, who is queer and married, listened for about thirty seconds and then said, very quietly, “Because you voted for the people who want me to disappear, and you knew that when you did it.” Then she hung up. She told us she felt awful about it for about an hour, and then she felt nothing at all, and the nothing was almost worse than the guilt would’ve been.

The story of the battles both for and against corporate constitutional rights didn’t begin in 1886. For seventy years before the Santa Clara non-decision, corporations fought a relentless legal war to gain access to the same constitutional rights the Founders and Framers intended exclusively for humans. They lost battle after battle until, with Davis and Field, the railroad oligarchs finally found a way to win by fraud. Once we understand this, it’s easy to see that corporate constitutional rights were never an accident or a misunderstanding: the doctrine was, instead, the result of a sustained, deliberate campaign by morbidly rich interests to acquire constitutional weapons they could use against the “mob rule” of democratic governance. The railroad and other American oligarchs tried honest arguments for seven decades, but, when that failed, they turned to fraud. This history also shows exactly what the oligarchs were fighting against: virtually every reform that would later build—and today sustains—the American Dream and the social democracy that made it possible.

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — Two hundred and fifty years on, the real fight over the Declaration of Independence isn’t about fireworks: it’s about who gets to own it — Nothing says “Happy Birthday, America” quite like a heat dome trying to kill a hundred million of us. — And right on cue, a federal appeals court ruled that the Trump administration can keep throwing the signs explaining all of that down the memory hole. — Good news! The world got nearly 11% richer last year. The bad news is you can probably guess who’s holding it. — Speaking of the folks who did get richer: the President bought 327 stocks the day before he personally moved the entire market. — The headlines insisted Trump “lost” at the Supreme Court this term. Down in the fine print, though, King Trump is doing just fine — Meanwhile, the agency Trump just funded to the eyeballs handcuffed a 56-year-old nun on her way to Mass. — Geeky Science Alert! Want to outlive the billionaires? Turns out you should eat like a peasant.

The founders threw out the Redcoats. So why does America's 250th birthday feel like they're back in charge? Tomorrow America turns 250 years old, and instead of a celebration of the republic those 56 men who signed the Declaration risked the hangman’s noose to create, we’re getting a MAGA rally. Donald Trump has taken the nation’s 250th birthday, the once-in-a-lifetime anniversary that belongs to all of us, and rebranded it as a tribute to himself. He shoved aside the bipartisan “America 250” commission that Congress created a decade ago, stood up his own White House-controlled operation ironically called “Freedom 250,” and steered our taxpayer money toward his own vanity celebration while the congressional commission was left begging for the funds it was promised.

From Caesar's denarius to Trump's meme coin, the message is always the same: "I am the state and you damn well better both fear me and pay me tribute!" On Tuesday the Office of Government Ethics released Donald Trump’s annual financial disclosure, and the astonishingly corrupt number that jumps off its 927 pages — a length his team laughingly insists proves his “commitment to transparency” — is $1.4 billion. That’s what he personally reported earning from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures in the single year of 2025 when he was president for roughly 11 months, dwarfing everything he took in from real estate, hotels, and golf courses combined. The largest slice, roughly $635 million, were royalties on the $TRUMP meme coin, a “collectible” digital token — basically, a little JPG-style image he sold to the rubes — whose entire “collectible” value rests on one thing, which is his name and face stamped onto what he’s hustling as internet money. This is one of the oldest cons in the long history of men who decided that the state and its treasury were, first and foremost, there for themselves to loot.

An afternoon in East Berlin became the lens through which today's America suddenly makes terrifying sense... In the winter of 1986 while living in West Germany I visited East Berlin with my oldest daughter, who was still a teenager, and on the far side of Checkpoint Charlie we were picked up by a young man named Torsten who ran a gypsy cab. Before we’d gone more than a block he had the two of us rehearsing a story, that we were his long-lost cousins over from the West, so we’d all say the same thing if the Volkspolizei or Stasi stopped the car. He couldn’t have been much past twenty, and he was kind to two strangers all afternoon (and grateful for the 20 Deutschmarks I gave him), but under all of it he was afraid the entire day, because in the country he lived in a man could be hauled in for the crime of driving people around and not being able to account for himself. That fear, the quiet hum of it running beneath an ordinary afternoon, is exactly what a “papers, please” society feels like from the inside.