Hartmann Report

In America it was inflation that opened the door to Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism. Inflation is usually caused by one of two things: international devaluation or internal dilution of a country’s currency, or widespread shortages of essential commodities that drive up prices enough to echo through the entire economy. The early 1970s got both, one deliberately and the other as the result of war. Between 1971 and 1973, President Nixon pulled the US out of the Bretton Woods economic framework that had been put together after World War II to stabilize the world’s currencies and balance trade. The dollar had been pegged to gold at $35 an ounce, and the world’s other currencies were effectively pegged to the dollar.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Russia’s main goal for years has been to cripple NATO by getting US troops out of Germany — Thanks to six corrupt bought-off Republicans on the Supreme Court, Louisiana Republicans are colluding in broad daylight to rig this fall’s election and silence the voices of Black voters. — The Trump regime is the most lawless in America’s history. — Americans of all stripes and political affiliations agree: Data Centers are a plague. — The Trump grift is multigenerational. — Democracy around the world is under assault by rightwingers who get themselves elected and then flip their nations into autocracy and oligarchy. — Joe Walsh UNLEASHES Tea Party smear machine on a Democrat fighting for us working people.

Candidates who take on power and promise real progressive change are the ones voters are rallying behind, because anything less isn’t worth showing up for… Today is the May 1st National Day of Action; I’ll be wearing a black armband on TV and millions will be skipping school, work, and shopping to protest Trump and his fascist policies… Maine just handed Democrats a wake-up call that they’d damn well better actually listen to this time. Governor Janet Mills suspended her Senate campaign yesterday, leaving Marine veteran and oyster farmer Graham Platner as the presumptive Democratic nominee to take on Republican Senator Susan Collins in November. The message Maine voters are frankly shouting is the same one I’ve been hearing from listeners on my radio/TV show for years and the same one that pollsters across the spectrum keep picking up across the country: people are sick and tired of mealy-mouthed corporate Democrats who run on focus-grouped slogans and govern like they’re scared of their own shadow. They want fighters.

While Putin, the Trump kids, and their fellow billionaires are rubbing their hands in glee, it’s going to be a hell of a year or three for the other 99% rest of us… The Wall Street Journal reports in an article titled “Trump Tells Aides to Prepare for Extended Blockade of Iran” that: “President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iran, U.S. officials said... In recent meetings, including a Monday discussion in the Situation Room, Trump opted to continue squeezing Iran’s economy and oil exports by preventing shipping to and from its ports. … “For now, Trump is comfortable with an indefinite blockade, which he wrote Tuesday on Truth Social is pushing Iran toward a ‘State of Collapse.’” So, Putin — who Trump took orders from for a full 90 minutes yesterday — and America’s billionaires who religiously read the WSJ are officially tipped off to prepare for what may well be a worldwide repeat of the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s.

He keeps asking the same question — “What happens if I do this?” — and the answer from those who should be defending democracy is always: nothing… Donald Trump isn’t just breaking norms, he’s running a live experiment on the limits of American power. Each move is a test: How far can a president go? What laws and how much of the Constitution can be ignored? And, most importantly, will anyone actually stop him? It took the King of England to remind Congress that their job is to restrain a president, not cheer him on no matter what.

Because when you look at what’s been stopped, delayed, or killed, a clear pattern emerges… Gallup just found that only 10% of Americans approve of the job Republicans in Congress are doing, with 86% actively disapproving of the GOP’s behavior. Turns out, there’s a reason.

Unpacking the system that turns outrage into profit and democracy into collateral damage… The attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night shouldn’t surprise us. Not only does America have the world’s most active small-arms industry that essentially controls the GOP (the reporters got a taste of what American — and only American — schoolkids experience every few months from their “realistic” active shooter drills), but we also host the world’s largest and most profitable hate-amplification industry. Algorithms that amplify hate and division in order to “increase engagement” have made Mark Zuckerberg into one of the richest people on the planet, complete with a super-yacht and a doomsday bunker estate in Hawaii; Elon Musk’s X has turned into a sewer of Nazi-style rhetoric while Musk himself has posted, according to The Washington Post, nakedly white supremacist slogans and statements over 850 times just in the past seven months.v

“Blind faith in the efficiency of deregulated financial markets and the absence of a cooperative financial and monetary system created an illusion of risk-free profits and licensed profligacy through speculative finance…” —United Nations Conference on Trade and Development report on “The Global Economic Crisis”[liii] The neoliberal ideology of Mises, Hayek and Freidman (et al) has now heavily influenced much of the developed and developing world, creating economic, political, and social disasters from Thailand to South Africa to El Salvador. But its biggest openly-declared national-scale experiments were kicked off in 1973 in Chile, 1981 in the United States, and 1991 in Russia. In each case, rejecting a democratic government “of, by and for the people” and replacing it with a corporatist government “of, by and for the corporate and wealthy” has produced widespread disaster.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — So, we’re back to firing squads. — Trump’s approval rating and Americans’ economic sentiment collapse together. — Has Trump’s mental health deteriorated so badly he’s a danger to the world? — Brown skin, speak Spanish, even US citizens get deported by Trump’s ICE. — Trump continues to help Putin by coming up with ways to “punish” NATO allies as he tries to fracture the alliance. — DeSantis wants to further rig Florida’s electoral maps for Trump.

What began with data collection is rapidly evolving into something far more dangerous: systems that can decide and act to kill people here in America… Ever think a drone could chase you down the street or fire a bullet through your living room window because you pissed off Trump, Miller, or their ICE thugs? If the answer is “that’s science fiction,” please read on: that reality may be only a few months away, and every single part of the spying and death-dealing infrastructure needed to make it happen has been quietly assembled by the Trump regime over the last fourteen months.