Hartmann Report

How ordinary Americans became numb to authoritarianism—step by chilling step I fear our mistakes far more than the strategy of our enemies. —Thucydides (470–400 b.c.), Pericles' Funeral Oration It wasn't all at once (although sometimes the last three months seem that way). Authoritarianism never is. It happens drip by drip, crisis by crisis, until people forget what normal even felt like. This is how fascism seduces a nation: not by storming the gates, but by wearing down our ability to be outraged. And Donald Trump, more than any political figure in modern American history, has weaponized this steady march into moral and civic numbness.

Exploring the GOP’s strategy to keep wages low and the poor desperate... Bob Kennedy, Mehmet Oz, and two Trump administration colleagues recently published an op-ed in The New York Times justifying the GOP’s attempt to cut Medicaid and SNAP benefits by imposing draconian prove-you’re-working paperwork and hoop-jumping requirements on recipients. In their article titled “Trump Leadership: If You Want Welfare and Can Work, You Must,” they noted: “Our agencies are united in a very straightforward policy approach: Able-bodied adults receiving benefits must work…” Which raises the question: “Why?”

Musk and Rubio's deliberate gutting of USAID and the lives it's ending every hour… It's one of the greatest preventable mass deaths in modern history: around two people every minute of every day, day and night, week after week, soon to be year after year. In the time it takes you to read this article, several dozen children will have died because of actions taken — with full knowledge of this consequence — by South African immigrant Elon Musk, Big Balls and his teenage buddies, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio. Children who wanted to live as desperately as do yours and mine, whose parents grieve them every bit as much as we would grieve the death of our own kids, are dying as you read these words. Even worse, Musk and Rubio keep lying about the blood on their hands. Nobody knows if Rubio is drinking himself to sleep to deal with the guilt, but according to The New York Times Musk is taking mind-numbing drugs at a level that would make Charles Manson blush.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was created out of an earlier Europe-only group (that led, in part, to the European Union) in 1961. Its purpose stated purpose was to promote economic “progress” and trade among nations. Its member nations include most of the developed world, encompassing 1.4 billion people and representing fully 62.2 percent of nominal global GDP. Its first members included Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, West Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States, with Japan, Finland, Australia, and New Zealand added in the 1970s. The OECD was formed out of an earlier neoliberal consensus that argued increasing unregulated trade among nations would inevitably lead to more democracy and a more robust middle class. Sadly, that belief has not panned out, as I explain in detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — The Trump Administration wants to create an "Office of Remigration": Say what?!? — It's being reported that while Musk was on a "daily high of ketamine and psychedelics," it appears that Trump and Musk are letting 103 people per hour die and two-thirds of them are children. — A Texas cop searched license plate readers, including in Blue states where abortion is legal, to find a woman who he thinks had an abortion. Say what?! — Canada declares independence from the US military in a shock move that'll damage the US defense industry as much as it humiliates Trump. — Bob Kennedy must be using ChatGPT to write his reports to the American people. — Crazy Alert! Trump posts meme saying he's "on a mission from God" featuring the racist alt-right symbol Pepe the Frog.

How this centuries-old political tool could restore faith in government and defeat Trump’s billionaires… On election day 2020, I suggested on my radio program that if the Biden ticket were to lose (something we did not expect, but after 2016 who knew what could happen) he, Harris, and Democrats in Congress should set up a “shadow government” to be a visible and ongoing opposition and alternative to Trump’s second term. Apparently, somebody on Team Trump was listening. Or they copped the idea from the same place I did: the UK, Canada and Australia, all countries where the party out of power assembles a “shadow government” with a “shadow cabinet” that regularly informs voters of how and why they’d run the government differently were they in power.

From Greedy Kings to Corporate Conglomerates – It's Always Been the Same Fight Yesterday, I wrote about how the mental illness of hoarding syndrome afflicting a few hundred of our nation's rightwing billionaires has destroyed a large chunk of the American middle class and is threatening the health of our biosphere. But the overall story is larger than just that. Trump is embroiled in a bribery scandal that has the entire world agog. The potentates and dictators of the Middle East are openly contemptuous of his willingness to defy Congress and sell them advanced American weapons systems in exchange for billion-dollar Trump hotels in their countries. Putin and his state-owned media ridicules Trump daily, pushing his attacks on Ukraine in Trump's face. And federal workers and our military are aghast at the incompetence, corruption, and even the alleged alcoholism of the people Trump has scraped off the floor of Fox "News" to run their agencies and make federal prosecutors. All of this corruption and incompetence has one major goal: the enrichment of the Trump family and the people close to them. It's an old, old story, that dates back to the earliest days of human prehistory.

How a sick obsession is killing workers, democracy, and our planet… It happens every few generations. It’s what drove the fascist oligarchs of the Confederacy to reach out and try to conquer the entire United States in the 1860s. It caused the Robber Barons to murder union organizers and ultimately crash America into the Republican Great Depression in the early decades of the 20th century. And it’s why wages have been stagnant while billionaires’ wealth has exploded in the years since the Reagan Revolution. What I’m talking about here is the rise of greedy oligarchs who are driven by an identifiable mental illness, what’s either a subset of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) or a defect in impulse control called Hoarding Syndrome.

Once you’ve labeled your opponents as subhuman, how do you work with them? How do you compromise? You don’t. Trump opened Memorial Day in the most disgusting way possible, not by praising our fallen heroes but by attacking Democrats. He wrote on his Nazi-infested social media site on Monday morning: “Happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds…” When the President of the United States calls members of the oldest political party in the world and a former president “scum,” it’s not just another ugly outburst that embarrasses America before the rest of the world: It’s a warning sign. A bright red flag. It tells us that something far more sinister than partisan posturing is afoot. Something our media has already decided to overlook in their perpetual effort to normalize the abominable. This kind of rhetoric isn’t new, and it’s not harmless. History has shown us—again and again—that when political leaders use dehumanizing language to vilify their opponents, they’re in actuality laying the groundwork for authoritarianism, repression, and violence.

The chilling similarities to past tyrants—and why America can't look away anymore… "All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force." — George Orwell It's axiomatic that dictators are corrupt. But understanding the inevitable relationship between corruption and dictatorship — and how it flows in both directions — is essential to understanding the direction the Trump Crime Family is taking America. First, it's important to know that there's no such thing as a dictator who's not corrupt. Every dictator in world history, with the possible exception of Cincinnatus, has been massively corrupt. To defy public opinion while skimming wealth out of the state's coffers and public commons, national leaders must use the typical tools of dictatorship to intimidate good government advocates into silence: violence, threats, capture of police agencies and courts, intimidation of the press, cowing politicians, and prisons.