Hartmann Report

Greed, one of the seven deadly sins, is both toxic to society and intrinsic to human nature. It can’t be ended or “stopped” -- but it can be regulated, which is the goal of good tax policy. In the late 1970s, the US Supreme Court, under the guidance of Justice Lewis Powell, decriminalized political bribery: specifically, in 1976 they legalized bribery of politicians by the morbidly rich and in 1978 they legalized bribery of politicians by corporations. With this newfound power to buy politicians and to shape American policy, CEOs and the very rich could have done anything. They could have ended childhood poverty. They could have made sure every American had a quality education at no cost. They could have given every American free, quality healthcare like in other developed nations.

Last Friday, with this recent bomb cyclone, 53.7% of the nation was covered in snow; more than any time since record-keeping began -- As the oil industry knowingly lies to us and rakes in profits. William Clay didn’t realize this was the weekend fossil fuel billionaires’ intentional actions would lead to his death, but that’s what happened. He died in Buffalo on his 56th birthday, Christmas Eve, and was found frozen to death about a mile from his house, attempting to walk home from the store.

"Too many people don’t know that when they harm the earth they harm themselves, nor do they realize when they harm themselves, they harm the earth" - Rolling Thunder (Cherokee, died 1997)

The Best of the Rest of the News. — The January 6th House Select Committee has issued its 845-page, eight-chapter report and it's a doozie — Omnibus bill passes, but MAGA Republicans are furious and promise revenge…against other Republicans. — Republican politics can kill you, according to Washington Post reporting on two massive peer-reviewed studies, one published by the British medical journal — Bernie claims a victory in the Omnibus bill that just passed. — Kaiser Health News reveals how badly privatized Medicare Advantage plans are ripping us all off, draining billions out of the Medicare trust fund and thus presumably speeding the demise of actual Medicare (my opinion, not expressed as theirs). — How to corrupt the news: give publishers big bucks to write glowingly about for-profit power utilities that are ripping off and poisoning their customers. — Geeky Science! Testosterone and narcissism interact in men to produce generosity.

May all your dreams and good work be realized as our sun’s eternal energy returns to full life in our part of Earth this coming New Year… Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, a connection to some of the most ancient of all known northern European shamanic traditions. Like people living in the north for millennia, we continue to embrace them with regional, national, and religious tweaks. It occurs during the week of the shortest day and longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere, when ancient holy men and women lit “yule logs” to push back the darkness and implore the gods or nature to bring back the light of summer.

As America’s housing & homelessness problems reach crisis levels - the housing equivalent of malnutrition & starvation - Sen. Merkley has submitted legislation to stop the corporate feeding frenzy… This week’s brutal winter storm’s impact on homeless people across the nation — it will certainly kill many —reminds us how essential safe housing is for us human beings. There are commodities and there are necessities. Sometimes, they’re the same. Food, for example, is both a commodity and a necessity.

As the Russian campaign of murder, rape, and destruction continues, America has both a moral and a legal obligation to defend Ukraine and enforce the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is visiting the United States today and speaking to a joint session of Congress. He will be pushing back against those on both the extreme left and right who keep whining that in 1991 President George HW Bush said NATO would not expand toward Russia (a comment that was never reduced to writing and never part of any agreement) and the Minsk cease-fire Agreements, which President Putin declared on February 22 “no longer exist.” Hopefully President Zelenskyy will remind Congress that America is party to an actual contractual agreement to protect the integrity of Ukraine’s borders, an agreement we signed to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world.

Who on Earth would want to send thousands of desperate people to our Southern border just in time for every midterm facing a Democratic president? Who would be that crass and cynical? Just a month ago we finished President Biden’s first midterm election and, as predictably as the sun rises in the east, right around election time and for the months afterward a wave of refugees and immigrants have shown up at our southern border. This happens every two years when a Democratic President is in office. And finally the US news media seems to be getting a clue as to why. More about that in a moment.

Is our economy here to serve average Americans, or are we here to serve those who own and control most of the money flowing through our economy? At the urging of Republican Senators Hawley and Rubio, a new think tank is working out ways for the GOP to change their messaging. They want to shift their rhetoric from support for corporations and the morbidly rich to pretending they care about working people. This new organization will, they say, "think differently about labor vs. capital than Republicans have in recent generations." It's a cynical effort to capture Trump's working class base. He'd promised he'd bring our jobs home from China, empower labor unions, raise taxes on the rich so high that "my friends won't ever talk to me again," and give every American full health insurance that cost less than Obamacare. Those promises helped win him the White House. All were lies, but the GOP base bought it and gave him tens of millions of votes; now Hawley, Rubio, et al think they can bottle that populist rhetorical magic and repeat Trump's shtick for 2024.

Sunday book excerpt: Table of Contents & Preface. "Be not like the lintel, which no hand can reach, but like the threshold, trodden by all. When the building falls, the threshold remains." —Eleazar HaKappar, Abot de R. Nathan, 26. "A human being is part of a whole, called by us the “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." —Albert Einstein (1879–1955)