Hartmann Report

In 1776 we declared independence from the world’s richest man and the planet’s largest corporation. Today, we again confront a similar challenge… Now it’s official. Twenty-seven men run this country. Pundits are fond of saying, “The President of the United States is the most powerful person in America.” He’s not and hasn’t been for over a decade. Political power in this country, since five Republicans on the Supreme Court fully legalized both overt and secret political bribery in their 2010 Citizens United decision, is now centered in the money bins of the morbidly rich.

Barack Obama‘s election in 2008 was the tipping point for millions of racist Republicans trying to maintain over 200 years of legal white supremacy… America today is in the midst of our second attempt at creating a truly pluralistic, multiracial democracy. The GOP is doing everything they can to sabotage the effort: can we pull it off despite their treachery?

The Republican death cult is playing Russian Roulette with women’s lives. People will die because of this grotesque effort to court the vote of misogynist men and religious zealots… Last week a Texas woman with an ectopic pregnancy — a life-threatening condition that never produces a baby — was forced to wait until it ruptured inside her, putting her life in danger. Imagine if that was you or someone you loved. Republican laws are now making doctors wait until women are nearly dead before they can provide life-saving medical treatment for lethal conditions like that ectopic pregnancy and incomplete miscarriages. This is insane.

Who reads your mail? Nobody? It depends what system you use for communication. Paper mail that is delivered by the government-run U.S. Postal Service carries legal protections for the privacy of our communications. Nobody, at least without a court order, can read our letters or track what we send and receive. But if you send an e-mail, the corporation that provides your Internet access can keep track of who you correspond with, what Web sites you visit, and everything you write, read, and view.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Because we haven't held Trump accountable he's now forming a shadow government. — Why haven't Members of Congress who participated in Trump's traitorous coup plot been pulled before a grand jury? — It looks like Fox "News" is trying to get another abortion doctor murdered. — Manchin is destroying Democrats' chances in the elections this fall. — Who deletes their texts BEFORE getting a new phone? — Attempts to replace our secular government with white Christian dominionist theocracy have shifted into high gear. — In a twitter thread earlier this week I laid out the GOP history Republicans hope women won't know about or remember this fall. — What will Ted Cruz do with the items from the childhood victims of mass shooters? — Geeky Science: How hot is too hot for the human body? — Crazy Alert! The new rightwing story about Trump's witness tampering attempt is that it was a butt-dial. Seriously.

How is it possible that the rest of the world is recovering from the Covid/Oil/War inflation bump, but things are getting worse here in the USA? “[T]he monopoly which our manufacturers have obtained against us … like an overgrown standing army, has become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature.” — Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776 There’s lots of speculation about what may be causing today’s terrible inflation to continue to rise. Is it rebound demand from Covid? Too much “quantitative easing” stimulus from the Fed? Chinese botched-Covid supply chain issues? Saudi Arabia withholding oil from world markets? Russia’s terrorist campaign against Ukraine?

The NRA used to say, “An armed society is a polite society.” The truth is that an armed society is a fearful, dangerous, and — eventually — authoritarian society. When I was a child there was a kid in our neighborhood who made my life hell. Dennis was a bully and delighted in chasing and beating up me and several others; we’d alter our route home from elementary school to avoid him. Some of the kids he pounded on joined him as a way of protecting themselves from him — the way Lindsay Graham sucks up to Donald Trump — which only increased the terror level for the rest of us in our little lower-middle-class suburb as Dennis and his friends formed their own gang.

Your generation today holds only 4.6% of the nation’s wealth and you’re most likely struggling to own a home & are deeply in debt. What happened? In a word, Republicans… Dear millennials: back in the 1980s a lot of us worked like hell to try to stop the Reagan revolution. We failed. This may be our last chance to save American democracy and the American middle-class. When my boomer generation was the same average age as your millennial generation is today, back in 1990, our generation held 21.3% of the nation’s wealth. Louise and I shared in that wealth; although we were still in our 30s, in 1990 we owned a profitable small business (our fourth) and a nice home in suburban Atlanta. That was, in fact, the “American dream.” It was normal then.

Will Ron DeSantis succumb to the same temptation to rig the election for himself, like Jeb Bush did for his brother George? As Michael Keaton once said in a movie, “Is a frog’s ass watertight?” It appears that Ron DeSantis is getting ready to pull a Jeb Bush: Floridians should get ready. Jeb, then governor of Florida, famously threw the 2000 election in Florida — with a little help from 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court — to his brother, Texas Governor George W. Bush, who won the election by a mere 537 votes. Jeb did this through his Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, using voter purges and “spoilage” of Black people’s ballots.

Will enough Americans finally wake up to this 40-year grift to put an end to it and return our country to sanity? Minneapolis residents Jess and John Pentz — a couple who’ve been married for 17 years — were traveling through Hayward, Wisconsin over the 4th of July weekend when Jess realized she’d forgotten to bring her birth control pills. They pulled into the local Hayward Walgreens pharmacy, where Jess picked up a box of condoms from a shelf and handed them to the clerk manning the register. “Manning” seems to be the right verb here: “John,” the Walgreens clerk, refused to ring them up.