Thom Hartmann

By choosing loyalists over experts, Trump risks unraveling the integrity of U.S. agencies while empowering adversaries like Putin… The mainstream media is baffled: Why would Trump promote candidates to oversee critical agencies with millions of employees and multi-billion-dollar budgets who have little to no management experience and have openly expressed hostility toward the institutions they'll oversee? I've seen legendary reporter Bob Woodward, who wrote several books about Trump, on three different TV shows this week asking to the effect of, "What could Trump possibly gain from these incompetent appointments? If he just wanted loyalty, there's no shortage of rational, competent members of the military and intelligence community who're loyal to Trump. So why is he selecting people like Hegseth, Gaetz, and Gabbard to run agencies that could directly involve confrontations with Russia?

Unbundling is the word that the multibillion-dollar industry that controls much of our news and politics, our understanding of the world and our interactions with each other, doesn’t want us to discuss. But it may well be one of the most vital words for all Americans to understand. And it’s at the core of effective challenges to monopoly, particularly with regard to tech. Unbundling could cut your TV, phone, and internet bills from an average of around $180 collectively to around $30 or $40 a month. It would diminish the control that giant ISP corporations like Comcast and AT&T have over our ability to access information. And it would create space for competition in the telecommunications sector generally and providers of internet access particularly.

Corporations don't need pure food, clean air, or safe drinking water, but they control our government and elections… and the outcome is proving disastrous. America is in the midst of a domestic political crisis with a literal madman and his cult/Party — heavily supported by some of America's largest companies — threatening to turn America into a dictatorship. As Yahoo news reports this morning: "Could a second Donald Trump presidency slide into dictatorship? A sudden spate of dystopian warnings has got America talking about the possibility less than a year before the US elections. "Dark scenarios about what could happen if the twice-impeached Republican former president wins in 2024 have appeared in the space of a few days in major US media outlets that include The Washington Post, The New York Times and the Atlantic." So, where are we now and how the hell did we get here? It turns out we are seeing the consequences of a corrupt, bribed Supreme Court from over 150 years ago. It was a fraud at the time, the result of a Supreme Court Justice having been bribed by the big railroads, and continues to be a fraud to this day. This didn't originate with an American billionaire paying off Clarence Thomas; that's just the latest incarnation of it.

About 75 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to "do what is right" when polled during most of the last years of the Eisenhower administration and early years of Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency. In 2019, when the Pew Research Center released its most recent poll of public trust in the government, only 17 percent of Americans trusted their government. It's so bad that armed protesters have shown up nationwide to protest the "tyranny" of having to wear masks during a pandemic… and have been cheered on by the president of the United States and Fox News. This is no accident.

Can Americans Stop the Republican Party and Their Billionaire Lifeline Before Another Hundred Thousand Americans Die? If a group of international billionaires who don't like democracy, business regulation, or the idea of a functioning multiracial culture wanted to hire somebody to destroy America, they couldn't have done better than Donald Trump.

Looting is the word of the day, on the lips of every newscaster, the president, and elected officials across the country. And, indeed, looting is a major problem in America. In 1981, when Ronald Reagan ended the New Deal era, crushed labor unions, and massively cut the top personal and corporate tax rates, he kicked off the most massive and widespread looting of America since the 1920s.

Every advanced democracy in the world has its coronavirus epidemic largely under control except the United States. And we’re on the verge of melting down again because a substantial minority of Americans simply don’t know the basic science of how an epidemic works and why wearing masks is part of breaking the epidemic chain. Hopefully, you can help your Trumpy friends understand, by sharing this short article with them.

Several new studies and models suggest that if Donald Trump had simply declared a state of national emergency, largely shutting down the country, a few weeks earlier than he did, tens of thousands of people who are dead right now would still be alive.

In addition to the hard Nazi right celebrating Donald Trump's election, we've got this kid who murdered all these students in Parkland wearing a Make America Great Again hat and putting his swastikas in his books.

When young people or anybody goes to speak to their Republican members of the House or Senate, they generally don't get through.