2025 Archives

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 12, 2025

The Machines Are Learning — and They’re Learning to Be Fascists

AI is not just another tech revolution. It's the perfect storm of surveillance, manipulation, and digital obedience — and the far right already has a head start… Pope Leo XIV just labeled AI one of the main threats facing humanity, saying it poses challenges to "human dignity, justice and labor." He's right, but it's even worse than that: it represents, unless it's rigorously regulated, a threat to democracy itself. In every generation, the enemies of democracy change costumes, but their playbook remains eerily familiar. They lie, divide, intimidate, and exploit every available tool to consolidate power. In the 1930s it was radio, in the 2010s it was social media, and now, in 2025, the newest and most dangerous weapon in the authoritarian arsenal is artificial intelligence. Make no mistake: AI is not just another technology. It is power, scaled. And in the hands of the far right, it becomes the most effective tool for dismantling democracy ever invented.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 11, 2025

Expanding the base of the middle class: The Hidden History of the American Dream

The middle class was, until the 1970s, largely the province of single-wage-earning married white men and their families. Through the 1960s, following passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, African Americans and other minorities who had previously been shut out of the professions and management positions, and even excluded from most unions, began to find new opportunities as the result of anti-discrimination legislation. The legalization of the birth control pill in 1961, and the nationwide legalization of birth control in 1965 with the Supreme Court’s Griswold decision, similarly brought a wave of women into the workforce. Women could now delay childbearing and plan for their futures, giving them access to more educational and economic opportunities.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 10, 2025

Saturday Report 5/10/25 — Is the Trump administration “looking into” suspending habeas corpus for you & me the same way they did for Kilmar Garcia?

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Stephen Miller says the Trump administration is "looking into" being able to suspend habeas corpus for you and me the same way they did to Kilmar Garcia. — Bernie Sanders says Republicans in Congress want to help Trump make more billions off his crypto grift. — Justice Sonia Sotomayor says lawyers should stand up and fight for our legal system and our rights rather than roll over for the Trump administration. — Trump's new attack on the law could mean billions for Elon. — Ever since Trump fired hundreds of FAA workers who maintain radar and communications systems, those systems have begun to fail in Newark. — Refugees are shut out of America. Except for white South Africans. — France and Sweden tell Trump to stuff his racism.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 9, 2025

How the Republican Party Became America’s Ministry of Propaganda

FDR warned us 80 years ago about the rise of political lies. Today, the GOP has turned that warning into a roadmap... Donald Trump has been lying to us ever since he came down that escalator. He just never stops lying because, as a lifelong con man, it's all he knows how to do. He's still insisting he won the 2020 election, despite having lost by about 7 million votes and being wiped out in the Electoral College. He lied at the State of the Union about having a mandate to cut Medicaid, as congressman Al Green pointed out. Along with over 100 other lies he told that day. And now he's lying about his trade deals with the UK and other governments. Every single day he adds to the pile of lies he's inflicting on the American people and the world. Science, it turns out, explains why this works for him.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 8, 2025

America’s Moral Collapse Is Not Hypothetical — It’s on a Plane to Libya

Good God. America stands at a moral precipice, and we’re about to tumble over the edge. The Trump administration is now planning to transport immigrants on U.S. military planes to detention centers in a warlord-controlled part of Libya, a decision that reveals how far we’ve strayed from our foundational values and basic human decency. If this shocks you, it sure as hell should. The news broke this week that the administration is preparing to send migrants to Libya on military flights as early as tomorrow. And this isn’t just another policy announcement from the daily outrage factory; it’s the latest escalation in a deliberate strategy of cruelty that began during Trump’s first term.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 7, 2025

The Republic or the Tyrants? The Choice Jefferson Faced in 1776 Is Now Ours in 2025

Will we defend the dream of self-rule, or surrender to the very powers our ancestors bled to escape? The American Revolution wasn't just a break from Britain — it was an uprising against three ancient tyrannies: warlord kings, the morbidly rich, and theocrats. Today, those same forces are clawing their way back into power, and if we don't fight them now, everything the Founders built could collapse. In the Declaration of Independence and throughout his years of personal correspondence, Thomas Jefferson (and multiple others among the Founders) identified three historic tyrannies that he and his colleagues fought the Revolutionary War to overthrow and replace with a democratic republic. The first were the warlord kings, who'd been conquering nations and peoples for millennia and, by 1776, were considered "normal" by most citizens of the world. These were families who, in the earlier years of their countries, had acquired power by conquest: war, pillage, rape, and the subjugation of the people they'd vanquished.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 6, 2025

A Nation Without Empathy Is Just a Crime Syndicate With a Flag

While billionaires warm their hands over tax breaks, Dwayne LaBrecque — a diabetic father of five in Maine — wonders how he'll survive the winter without toes, heat, or help… Dwayne LaBrecque, a diabetic who lost several toes and part of his foot to infection, will be severely impacted by cuts to LIHEAP, the low income fuel oil heating program that Congress started in 1981 and Trump and Musk put on the chopping block. After losing his job as a shipping manager, Dwayne's income plummeted, making it difficult to support his fiancée and five children in rural Maine. He expressed grave concern about making it through next winter without this assistance, stating: "If the president turned around and did away with that funding, I have no idea how we'd survive in the winter." But Donald Trump and congressional Republicans don't care: the budget Trump just released and they're endorsing kills off LIHEAP. Empathy is the ability to experience what another person is going through as a real sensation, a genuine emotion or even physical reaction, in body and mind. It's what causes us to flinch or look away when we see a dog getting hit by a car or a fellow human experiencing real trauma.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 5, 2025

The Great MAGA Job Scam: How Trump is Plotting the New American Sweatshops

They say they're "bringing back jobs," but what they really want is a desperate, powerless workforce with no healthcare, no unions, and no future — just the way Wall Street likes it… Trump and his billionaire toadies like Howard Lutnik and Scott Bessent are peddling a dangerous lie to working-class Americans. They're strutting around claiming their tariffs will bring back "good paying jobs" with "great benefits," while actively undermining the very thing that made manufacturing jobs valuable to working people in the first place: unions. Let's be crystal clear about what's really happening: Without strong unions, bringing manufacturing back to America will simply create more sweatshop opportunities where desperate workers earn between $7.25 and $15 an hour with zero benefits and zero security.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 4, 2025

Chapter 3: What it takes to build a middle class: The Hidden History of the American Dream

FDR built America’s first truly large and robust middle class by passing the National Labor Relations Act (the “Wagner Act”)[xxxviii] that legalized and gave federal protection to unions and their members, while putting jobless Americans back to work with a variety of three- and four-letter federal agencies (referred to at the time as “the alphabet agencies”) that ultimately spent over $3 billion to lift over 20 million people out of unemployment and poverty. They principally included a number of programs that Republicans mercilessly attacked as “socialism”.

Posted at Hartmann Report on May. 3, 2025

Saturday Report 5/3/25 -- “Don’t fly into Newark; it’s not safe.”

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Trump loyalist eyes new enemy list? — Hegseth basically declared war on Iran Thursday night with an unhinged X post — Collapsing bird numbers in North America prompt fears of ecological crisis. — Geeky Science: Now that we know gut microbiomes can regulate everything from obesity to depression, here's some good news: you don't need a fecal transplant, just a high-fiber, low-fat diet! — Courts, including one run by a judge Trump appointed, are standing firm against his unlawful and unconstitutional behavior — "Don't fly into Newark; it's not safe." Trump's and Musk's cuts are taking a toll on air traffic safety. — Bob Kennedy is screwing up an updated Covid vaccine. — Rightwingers being paid by the Kremlin are now claiming that Ukraine is selling American weapons to drug gangs in Central America.