Hartmann Report

Most of the countries of Europe & Asia (Australia, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan) have laws in place that guarantee a healthy middle class: poverty, like in America, doesn't haunt their dreams. The Washington Post just published a heartbreaking story about Dave Ramsey Jr., a working class American who fell out of the middle class and couldn’t afford an urn for his father’s ashes, much less a memorial ceremony. To save money, the funeral home gave him his dad’s ashes wrapped in a cloth bag.

Some democracies fall apart because of invasion by a neighbor, terrorism, or a natural disaster, but most are being taken down by their own own greedy oligarchs. It’s important now, in light of both world events and the way the Republican party has been captured by a small group of rightwing billionaires and white supremacists, to introduce Americans to an 18th century word that is new to most people alive today, at least in the context of partisan politics. That word is: faction. The crises caused by faction were a big deal at the founding of our republic. Faction was a matter of conversation among average people. It was the same when the South was seized by an oligarchic faction of plantation owners and turned from a whites-only democracy into a neofascist oligarchy in the 1840s and 1850s. Factions are destroyers of democracies.

Serializing the entire book to you, one chapter every Sunday... Back in 2002, when I wrote this book, most Americans thought the Boston Tea Party was a revolt against "excess taxes" and that "corporate personhood" was something the Supreme Court conferred on companies back in 1886. This book blew up both myths, pointing out that the Boston Tea Party was a revolt against the British government giving the East India Company the largest corporate tax cut in history (so they could unfairly compete with small colonial tea merchants) — basically a revolt against the Wal-Mart-ization of the colonies — and that the Supreme Court did not rule that corporations are persons and thus entitled to rights under the Bill of Rights in 1886 (it was a corrupt scam by a bribed SCOTUS justice and Court Clerk). In the 20 years since Unequal Protection first came out, this "new" knowledge is now widespread. With permission from the publisher, Berrett-Koehler, I'll be sharing the entire book (the updated edition) with you, one chapter at a time, over the next dozen or so Sundays.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — It's time to prosecute Trump for his crimes against America and the American people. —Putin held a superspreader rally in Moscow yesterday and it had an eerie resemblance to Trump's early rallies, right down to the paid attendees like Trump hired when he announced his candidacy in 2015. — Last Thursday the House of Representatives voted 428-8 to suspend permanent normal trade relations with Russia. — China is the Ukraine wild-card. — While Koch Industries refuses to leave Russia, polling shows that 80 percent of US voters favor a windfall profits tax on Big Oil. — Roger Stone is trying to sell a plan to make Trump president next year; that's how bizarre and desperate these anti-American conspirators have become. — Elected Republicans are increasingly using "eliminationist" rhetoric, normalizing the idea that violence against Democrats and minority groups in America is an acceptable form of "legitimate political discourse." — In Good News, Denver has sent out mental health teams to deal with 911 calls over 2000 times and not once did they need police backup. — Trekkie Alert! Star Trek uber-fan Stacey Abrams stars as the leader of planet Earth in the newest season of Paramount+'s Star Trek series.

Sinclair Lewis was wrong. It happened there, and it can also happen here. Russia’s President Putin isn’t an irrational actor; he and his administration are suffering from a deficiency of democracy, and that’s why he’s making terrible decisions. Seriously. Follow me on this: The media has recently been full of speculation about why and how Putin so badly misunderstood the will of the Ukrainian people to fight for their democracy. That he has damaged himself and his country for the rest of history is not in dispute. The question is, “Why?”

Zelenskyy’s proposal is an important conversation to engage, and the American press, by ignoring it, does a disservice to the cause of world peace. Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy yesterday proposed that the world create a new agency, one that is well-armed enough to take on the most powerful nations, to defend smaller countries and, particularly, smaller democracies that are under attack from larger nations. The American press is ignoring it. But it’s the opening for a conversation the world should engage now, as democracies around the world are increasingly failing and under attack.

“Please name one country, anywhere in the world, any time in the last 7000 years, where libertarianism has succeeded and produced general peace and prosperity?” First, Michigan’s Republican Governor ended the power of cities to govern themselves, replacing them with “emergency managers” and producing the Flint water crisis. Now the Republicans who run Tennessee are trying a similar trick, wanting to defy the voters to take over the town of Mason in that state. As the headline at the Tennessee Lookout newspaper notes: “State officials ask residents of a small, predominantly Black town near the site of new Ford investment to forfeit their city charter or face takeover.”

Public outrage is building: the Court’s approval rating is now around 40% - Congress needs to act, before an entire branch of government sinks into an irredeemable Trump-fueled muck of corruption. So now, as expected after decades of taking big bucks for her rightwing work on behalf of America’s oligarchs, we learn that the wife of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginny Thomas, was in Trump’s January 6th “rally” up to her eyeballs. Let’s just say it right out loud: the US Supreme Court is corrupt. And Americans know it.

If we don’t start listening to our screaming planet, Covid and Ukraine may be the least of our worries. Our planet is screaming a message at us, and Covid is part of that communication. The death of nature and the appearance of Covid are all part of the same thing. And it also ties into Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine.

Glimpses into the life of an extraordinary man . More than two decades ago I spent a fair amount of time over several visits to remote northeastern Australia with Geoff Guest, who was thinking of affiliating his program for Aboriginal children with the German Salem International program I worked with for decades. Geoff was part Aboriginal, part white and was stolen from his parents at a young age as part of Australia's program back in the day to "civilize" Aboriginal youth. He was part of the "Stolen Generation" of Aboriginal or mixed-race children taken from their parents by the Australian government between 1910 and 1970.