2024 Archives

Posted at Hartmann Report on Feb. 27, 2024

Have We Reached the Point Where Corporatism is Triumphing Over Democracy?

Economic crises represent social and political transition points, times of great difficulty but also times of great opportunity: We now stand at the edge of one those rare windows in time... America is recovering from an economic crisis and Russia and China seem hell-bent on pushing us into what may become a world war. We've been here three times before in the history of our country, and each one has heralded major changes in the nature and structure of our government. As we watch corporations pour increasingly large amounts of money into politics, it's a good time to reevaluate their role in governance and society. At the top of that list is the doctrine created out of whole cloth by the US Supreme Court in the late 19th century called "Corporate Personhood." It has become one of the most destructive forces in American politics. In 1776, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was published and the U.S. Declaration of Independence was signed. This was no coincidence: both were broadly embraced reactions, in part, to a widespread economic depression that had begun in the previous decade.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Feb. 26, 2024

The New "Over the Top" Secret Plan on How Fascists Could Win in 2024

Here's what I'm hearing Republicans are planning in the event Joe Biden wins re-election & Democrats hold the Senate and take the House this November… Back on March 13, 2020 — almost exactly four years ago — I wrote an article that was published at alternet.org laying out how Republicans were then, ten months before January 6th, planning to partially repeat the debacle of the election of 1876 by having Vice President Pence refuse to certify swing state votes and thus throw the election to the House to keep Trump in office, no matter how the election went. When I published the article ten months before January 6th, I received concerned and even alarmed communications from several Democratic strategists and a few elected officials who basically said they didn't think there was any way Trump would try such an audacious move and, if he did, he wouldn't get away with it. But I was right and that was exactly what Trump had up his sleeve. We saw it play out on January 6th. The only thing that stopped him was Pence's unwillingness to go along with stealing an election. Now I'm hearing a new story from those same GOP insiders (as well as other commentators) about Trump's schemes for 2024.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Feb. 25, 2024

Monopoly Is Anti-business: The Hidden History of Monopolies

No matter how much Robert Bork and his colleagues say they’re “pro-business,” what they’re actually advocating is helpful only to a very small class of very large businesses and the very wealthy people who own them or their stock. Small and medium-sized businesses, entrepreneurs, workers, communities, and start-ups are badly damaged by the focus of antitrust law being kept entirely on prices that consumers pay. Bork—and indeed his entire class of Chicago School economists—was always focused on the interests of straight, white, wealthy men to the exclusion of women, communities of color, and people who were not the “makers” and “job creators” of their lore. Consistent with that focus, whether applied to micro- or macroeconomics, to regulating pollution or monopolies, to their complaints about “anti-war hippies” “urban dwellers,” or “women’s libbers,” Bork and his friends managed to insert into the political and economic bloodstream of our nation the cancer-causing virus of “greed is good” ideology. Its impact has been devastating.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Feb. 24, 2024

Saturday Report 2/24/24 - Why are conservatives calling for the end of democracy?

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Why are conservatives calling for the end of American democracy? — Biden imposes more than 500 new Russia sanctions after Navalny’s death. — Texas says to hell with the kids and to hell with the grocers who’d provide their food. — Is a Fukushima or Chernobyl-style meltdown the next way Russia intends to kneecap Ukraine? — Florida surgeon general defies science amid measles outbreak. — Texas Republicans nearly killed another woman this week. — Alabama Justice Parker, who ruled embryos are children, wants preachers running America. — Tennessee Republicans vote affirmatively to force 8- to 12-year-old girls to carry rape-caused pregnancies to term. — Hunter in a Farmer’s World Alert: Vindicated! ADHD is an Evolutionary Success! — Geeky Science! Tart cherries can help reduce inflammation and pain. — Do conservatives want to end recreational sex?

Posted at Hartmann Report on Feb. 23, 2024

Comer & Jordan are Mainstreaming Political Poison into the Bloodstream of Democracy

They don't care that democracy, here and around the world, is hanging by a thread… "Useful idiots" doesn't begin to describe the treason weasel twins, Comer and Jordan, who are enthusiastically promoting zombie lies Russia came up with in 2016 to help Trump win the White House. They're mainstreaming political poison directly into the bloodstream of our body politic. Purely for political profit. Vladimir Putin always knew he couldn't beat America militarily, so his next best option was to infiltrate our political systems and seize control of the GOP. It increasingly looks like he's pulled it off, right down to blocking US aid to Ukraine for over a year.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Feb. 22, 2024

How Far Will Republicans Go To Bring America to Her Knees on Behalf of Putin & Trump?

How Putin seized control of the Republican Party… There’s little doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin has succeeded in achieving near-total control over the Republican Party. They’re gutting aid to Ukraine (and have been for over a year), working to kneecap our economy, whipping up hatred among Americans against each other, promoting civil war, and openly embracing replacing American democracy with authoritarian autocracy. Putin has declared war on queer people, proclaimed Russia a “Christian nation,” and shut down all the media he called “fake news.” Check, check, check.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Feb. 21, 2024

How the Religious Anti-Abortion GOP Freaks Will Use Data Brokers to Track Women

If a Republican is elected to the White House, you can expect all that caution to go out the window: every woman of reproductive age in America will have a target on her back — or her uterus… Right now, they're laying low. They're waiting for a Republican president to institute a national ban on abortion so they can start their jeremiads against women seeking abortions. In the meantime, they're getting ready. "They," of course, are the religious anti-abortion freaks in the GOP who want to punish "loose women" who seek abortions. Longer term, they also want to target women seeking birth control who, instead of being in the workplace or college, Republicans believe should be at home barefoot, pregnant, and in full-out tradwife mode.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Feb. 20, 2024

The “Acceleration” of the New Reich

The racist Trumpsters who want a second civil war call this an “acceleration,” & hope they can create enough chaos that they can finally fulfill their fantasies about fighting in a noble civil war… America is under assault, and, in the 9th year since Trump burst on the political scene, it’s happening so often now that it’s becoming normalized. This is a very real danger to the survival of our republic. And they’re getting more brazen: this past weekend a group of mask-clad Nazis marched through downtown Nashville complete with swastikas and racist chants. The media treated it like “just another day.” Republicans who run Texas are in open defiance of the US Supreme Court and the federal government over who has legal responsibility for enforcing our immigration laws and protecting our borders. It’s the most significant challenge to federal authority since the Nullification Crisis of 1832 that led us straight toward the Civil War. And, indeed, it’s stirring up pro-new-civil war rhetoric among the racist base of the GOP.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Feb. 19, 2024

Why the Corporate Tax Bracket Should Go Back to 52%

It's time to again tax the rich, be they individuals or giant corporations, to restore the American middle class and return our nation to the vitality that, before the Reagan Revolution, was normal... Most Americans have a radically incomplete understanding of how taxes work. As a result, changes to the tax code made by Republicans in the years since the Reagan Revolution have done real damage both to the American economy, working class people, and to the vibrancy and viability of our towns and communities. Just like the debates around raising personal income tax rates are demagogued by rich people and their shills, there's a world of misinformation around the issue of raising corporate income taxes. Most of these myths promoted by the morbidly rich exploit the fact that only a tiny fraction of Americans have ever run a business or taken a business course in college, and so most Americans don't have a clue how corporate income taxes work.

Posted at Hartmann Report on Feb. 18, 2024

The Fortunes Bork Made: The Hidden History of Monopolies

Bork was Richard Nixon’s solicitor general and acting attorney general and had a substantial impact on the thinking in the Reagan White House—so much so that Reagan rewarded his years of hard work on behalf of America’s monopolists with a lifetime appointment to the federal bench in the DC Circuit, frequently a launching pad for the Supreme Court. In the years following Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo, as numerous “conservative” and “free market” think tanks and publications grew in power and funding, Bork’s ideas gained wide circulation in circles of governance, business, and the law. In 1977, in the case of Continental T.V., Inc. v. GTE Sylvania, the Supreme Court took up Bork’s idea and, for the first time in a big way, embraced the “welfare of the consumer” and “demonstrable economic effect” doctrines that Bork had been promoting for over a decade.