Hartmann Report

At the very least, let’s stop the egregiously deceptive advertising. Only Medicare should be able to call itself “Medicare.” Congress must pass a law to stop the deceptive advertising of Medicare Advantage plans. Only Medicare should be able to call itself Medicare. Unless you’ve been out of the country for the past few years, you’ve seen the ads on TV featuring Joe Namath, Jimmy Walker, or William Shatner hawking so-called “Medicare Advantage” plans. Medicare Advantage is not Medicare.

Let’s take the first small step rolling back Reagan’s neoliberalism by making “income” from Social Security, unemployment benefits, and tips tax-free once again! It’s The Ronald Reagan Memorial Competition: which Republican can make the rich richer and the poor poorer the fastest? This week, Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin wants to one-up Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida in this perpetual GOP contest over who can most effectively screw working people. Johnson wants Congress to vote every year whether or not to continue funding both Social Security and Medicare, while Scott says it should only be every five years.

How CEOs pulled off their coup, ending the Golden Age of growth for the middle class while beginning the current era of the CEO as modern-day superyacht-owning Emperor… Want to get rich without doing much work? Insanely, fabulously rich? Private yacht, country estate, private jet rich? So do America’s CEOs. They began hustling for an old-time scam to accomplish this when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. Soon thereafter, they got their way. This is the story.

If their plan works, they’ll rewrite our Constitution and state governors, the US Congress, and the President will have no say whatsoever in the process. If you think the Supreme Court overturning abortion rights in this country was radical and shocking, you ain’t seen nothing yet. There was a convention you should know about this past weekend in Denver, funded by some of the wealthiest men and foundations in America, that has received altogether too little publicity. Imagine if most public schools in the country closed and were replaced by for-profit charter and private academies — often racially segregated and only serving families who could afford their tuition — because the Constitution required federal compulsory education laws and federal funding for education (at all levels) to end.

The libertarians have had 40 years to make their project work, we’re hitting peak libertarianism and it’s tearing our country apart, pitting Americans against each other, and killing people every day. This weekend Senator Pat Toomey went on Jake Tapper’s State of the Union to try to clean up Republican sabotage of a bill to provide healthcare to millions of veterans exposed to toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. He didn’t do himself or his party any favors as he tried to weasel out of responsibility; America knows that after the bill was defeated Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley fist-bumped in celebration of screwing our vets. How is it that Republicans can casually embrace such cruelty? Why have 12 GOP-controlled states refused to this day to expand Medicaid for their 30 million minimum-wage working people when the federal government covers 90 percent of the cost?

In the absence of the controls recommended by the Founders and early state regulation, corporations have continued to grow in size and power without limit. But they haven’t done it just by creating new wealth in the economy. Much of it, instead, has been accomplished by increasingly consolidating existing wealth, moving it out of the hands of the middle class and into the hands of the top few percent of Americans economically. Of course, some new wealth has been generated, but nowhere near enough to explain the observable facts.* The past thirty years has, in fact, seen the largest transfer of wealth from working people to the rich and very rich in the history of both this nation and any nation on earth.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Thursday my daily take was about how our manufacturing dependence on China cripples our ability to stand up for Taiwan, one of the most vibrant and boisterous democracies on the planet. Now China has doubled-down. — Republican Senators Pat Toomey and Mitch McConnell engineered a vote against funding for US veterans sick or dying from cancers and other diseases they got from open burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Josh Hawley (R-Chickencoop) and Ted Cruz fistbumped in celebration. — In Ohio, multimillionaire hedge fund manager and GOP senatorial candidate JD Vance has said the quiet part out loud: women must, in his opinion, be subservient to their husbands "for the children," even when their husbands beat, rape, or otherwise subject them to violence. — Ever since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision, Congress has been in a state of perpetual paralysis. — Republicans hate gay and trans kids so much they want to deny them school lunches until the Biden administration stops requiring schools to report instances of hate and discrimination against LGBTQ children. — A group of Texas Republicans are suing to block Obamacare’s requirement that insurance companies provide preventative healthcare for STDs, including HIV and HPV. — Crazy Alert! The Sperm Bros are touring the world, offering to help women who don’t want to go through fertility clinics get pregnant.

The GOP has become a rotting corpse, politically, infested with maggots & defended by wealthy vultures. It has only one true principle, greed, & is determined to reinvent America in greed’s image. Many Americans, looking at the GOP’s position on the issues, find themselves confused. Why would the party claiming to be the last bastion of reverence for “life” in America also be the party that supports 50,000 American gun deaths every year, the leading cause of death among children and more than every other developed country in the world combined? Why would they support anti-abortion laws that don’t even contain exceptions for the life of the mother? Why do they fight so hard to keep healthcare out of the reach of so many Americans (12 GOP-controlled states still refuse to offer Medicaid — 90% paid for by the federal government — to their low-income working people)?

Bringing our manufacturing back from overseas will reverse the 40-year-long slide of the American middle class and rebuild our nation’s security & economy. China is threatening the United States: this could get very ugly, very quickly. Here’s what’s happening. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is planning a trip to Taiwan, the first for a Speaker in a quarter-century, as part of a larger trip to the region that will include Singapore, Japan, Indonesia and Malaysia. China broke away from Taiwan in 1949 and has claimed ever since that the island nation is part of China proper. Taiwan, one of the worlds’ most vibrant democracies, wants to maintain their independence as a separate, sovereign nation. China is not happy about Pelosi’s trip and the increased level of US recognition of Taiwan’s independent existence that it endorses, making implied threats of military or significant diplomatic punishment if she goes through with the trip.

We are stumbling — seemingly oblivious — into the bared teeth of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch driven by humanity itself. We are walking straight into it and pretending it’s not here. The world today is on the verge of a major food emergency, provoked in part by Russia’s attack on Ukraine but more broadly by the damage heat from global warming is doing to crops worldwide. This is both a crisis and an opportunity. Let’s start with the basics. Food is the raw material that makes people. More food, more people; less food, fewer people. This is a basic law of nature. The insect-eating bird population around us, for example, is a fraction today of what it was 20 years ago because its food — the insect population — has been decimated by pesticides and loss of habitat (their food source), over the past few decades.