Hartmann Report

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.

No republic in history has ever survived as a functioning democracy more than a few generations once political bribery is legalized or becomes widespread. A recent poll from the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics found that a majority of Americans agree that the government is “corrupt and rigged against everyday people like me.” Sixty-six percent of Republicans and 46 percent of Democrats agreed with that statement; only 9 percent of Republicans and 25 percent of Democrats disagreed.

There are resources and there are resources. For corporations, resources include raw materials, labor, the property and the equipment they use, the talents of the people they employ, and cash. For humans, resources include air, water, food, shelter, clothing, health care, and the means of exchange to ensure these.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Unless you've been living under a rock or watching Fox "News" you know that the January 6th Committee delved deeply into the 187 minutes during which Trump watched an armed crowd attack the Capitol and kill five people while looking to assassinate the Vice President and Speaker of the House. — Arguably the most important "stabilizer" of the US government is our Civil Service, made up of around 2 million federal employees. — One in five Americans now says that violence against other Americans to achieve a political goal is acceptable. — Three Republican-controlled counties in Pennsylvania are refusing to certify the recent primary election, in an apparent test of their ability to refuse to count mail-in ballots, which come predominantly from Democrats. — Apparently some evangelical Christians have started reading their Bibles. — Idaho Republicans say if it's a choice between a fetus or mom, mom dies and the fetus lives. — A handful of rightwing billionaires have put up about half of all the money raised by the two major GOP super PACs that work to elect Republicans to the House and Senate. — Donald Trump Junior ripped off investors, vendors, employees and customers of a company he started while his dad was in the White House. — The UN's Secretary General, António Guterres, tells the world that humanity now faces "collective suicide" if we don't take prompt action to stop climate change. — Geeky Science! Will monarch butterflies soon be extinct? — A special note about Monday. I'm on a book deadline for The Hidden History of American Democracy and taking Monday off from the radio/TV show as well as this newsletter. You'll get the Sunday Book Excerpt tomorrow, then I'll be back in your inbox on Tuesday. Thanks for understanding… — Crazy Alert! Josh Hawley has broken the internet, as people all over the world are rolling on the floor laughing

Do Republicans really think public schools are communist? Or is there something else going on here? Michael Peroutka is the Republican Party’s nominee — elected in the primary this week — for Maryland Attorney General. He wants to close the state’s public schools because, he says, they are “communist.” Do you believe he’s really afraid that the heir to Fidel Castro’s presidential palace will overthrow America? They don’t even have communists in Russia anymore. The Chinese use the word, but they don’t do it: capitalism is thriving there, even beating us in some ways.

War is the use of armed violence to achieve political ends. If the armed, uniformed militias who attacked our Capitol on January 6th weren’t “levying War against” America, what were they doing? America is now under armed assault, a tyranny that suppresses free speech and has produced almost-daily mass- and school-shootings, in a gun ownership frenzy fed by people who claim their power comes from the Constitution. Their entire argument — that the Second Amendment gives Americans the right to form private militias and then turn their guns against the government — is a complete and utter scam.

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.