Hartmann Report

Let's hope the damage Republicans have done over the last four decades isn't so severe that America can't be brought back from the brink of chaos and desperation… Here at the Democratic Convention, speaker after speaker is pointing out how the Biden presidency and the Harris/Walz campaign are rewriting the economic rules of our country in an effort to bring back the middle class. As we stand at the edge of the end of the Reagan Revolution, an end signaled by one particular phrase in President Biden's speech early in his presidency (which I'll get to in a minute), its really important that Americans understand the backstory. Reagan and his conservative buddies intentionally gutted the American middle class, but they did so not just out of greed but also with what they thought was a good and noble justification.

How GOP Policies are Forcing Women into Submission and Putting Lives at Risk Josh and Amanda Zurawski thought they had the American Dream going for them; they'd gotten married a year earlier and bought a beautiful Austin, Texas home with views of a lake and golf course. And Amanda was pregnant; they were looking forward to their first child. And then they ran afoul of the tradwife obsession that motivates the Texas Republican Party.

The history behind the elaborate techniques that today’s Republican Party uses to suppress Black and Latino votes is rooted in the “Massive Resistance” movement in reaction to Brown v. Board of Education that has also led to systemic resegregation. Although the end of the Civil War and the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were, in theory, supposed to grant equal status and station between Black and white citizens, that is not the case to this day. After the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, which determined that “separate but equal” met the “equal protection” demands of the 14th Amendment, virtually every public school system in America that hadn’t already been segregated along racial lines set out to do so.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz are leaving Reagan's neoliberalism in the dust as they double down on President Biden's incredibly successful Keynesian economics strategy to rebuild the middle class and invigorate the economy. — Are insults all Republicans have left? Is that why they can't they just let people be who they are and debate policy? — In what has to be the most bizarre attack on Harris yet, Trump says that if she's elected a truly terrible thing will happen: In his own words, "everybody will get healthcare!" — Speaking of idiocy, JD Vance says Amazon gave money to Black people to burn down big retail stores to increase Amazon's profits. It doesn't get weirder — or more racist — than that. — Geeky Science! "We should have better answers by now": climate scientists are baffled by the unexpected explosion of global heating. — Wisdom School Alert! Are You In the "Having Mode" or the "Being Mode?" — Hunter in a Farmer's World Alert! Why It's Important to Develop "Boredom Response Techniques"

And now they are "pulling the ladder up" to make it harder for entrepreneurs and small business people to succeed in America. Recently, a reporter spoke with one of the chief architects of Project 2025 using a hidden camera and microphone and learned they're still in tight with Trump, still planning to run his administration if he's elected, still planning to gut the guardrails America has placed around capitalism over the past 100 years, and even planning to "pull the ladder up" to make it harder for entrepreneurs and small business people to succeed in America. Their plan relies on a major reinvention of modern capitalism and is being pushed by people suffering from an identifiable metal illness. To see how they're hoping to pull this off, it's important and necessary to first understand that there are two types of capitalism: raw and regulated.

With the election of 1980, Americans — most unknowingly — chose great wealth over democracy, oligarchy over a middle class, billionaires over working people. Twenty-two years ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote for The New York Times Magazine about the era in which he and I both grew up, when the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich ran between 74 and 90 percent... Back then most business people avoided politics, preferring to stick to running their companies; in large part this was because when the rich seized political control of America in the Roaring 20s they crashed the economy so bad they were shamed into staying out of the political arena.

When Republicans talk about the American Dream, what do they mean? And how does their view of the American Dream differ from that of that of Democrats? Donald Trump and JD Vance, like most politicians from both parties, love to invoke the American Dream. When billionaire Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency in 2015, he said: "Sadly, the American Dream is dead. But if I get elected president, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before and we will make America great again." When multimillionaire hedge fund manager JD Vance accepted his nomination for vice president at the RNC, he similarly said: "Some people tell me I've lived the American dream, and of course they're right. And I'm so grateful for it." But when Republicans talk about the American Dream, what do they mean? And how does their view of the American Dream differ from that of that of Democrats?

Your retirement security is hanging in the balance, threatened by Republicans who don't have your best interests at heart... Recently, a retired woman seeking advice wrote into MarketWatch's financial advisor, saying: "I was 'financially set' after my husband died. But my current adviser lost $500,000 over the last few years, and then a new adviser said my portfolio was 'a mess' and wants 1.25% to fix it. What's my move?" She was the victim of an unethical financial advisor hustling decades of churning commission-based products that essentially transferred her money into his pocket. As she told MarketWatch, "The adviser was paid per trade." President Biden wants to do something about this.

Mentally and emotionally we never stand still; we are always either moving toward something we want or moving away from something we fear... "An old English judge once said, 'Necessitous men are not free men.' Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for." —President Franklin D. Roosevelt, June 27, 1936. When President Joe Biden was running for reelection, his main pitch was about the danger Donald Trump represented to American democracy and peace in the world. Now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee, she's shifted the emphasis of the campaign away from that danger and onto the opportunities that lay before Americans if we can just elect enough Democrats to bring them into reality.

Before considering the details of how Republicans have, for the past 40-plus years, waged a war against the right to vote for all but wealthy white people (and why Democrats did the same before the GOP picked up the mantle in the 1960s), it’s important to understand why each party historically has worked to manipulate the electorate to its own favor. The Democratic Party’s antipathy toward voting had roots deep in the 19th century, in the years following the Civil War. That war, and the subsequent 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution pushed through by Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans, gave pretty much all adult men, regardless of race, the right to vote. Thomas Jefferson had founded the Democratic Party (it was then called the Democratic Republican Party, but the “Republican” part was dropped in the late 1820s and early 1830s), and throughout the 19th century that party (as opposed to the Whigs and the Republicans) was closely associated with support for slavery.