April 26, 2021

New Red State Evil Plot: Going Authoritarian & Ditching Democracy

Republicans in state after state are loading cannons as you’re reading this, and the very concept of democracy is the target. Will their scheme be completed by 2024?

Americans thought January 6 was the peak of the effort to end democracy in America and replace it with strongman authoritarian rule. But January 6 was merely the tip of the iceberg.

And it’s not just about Donald Trump. This “iceberg” monster that threatens to sink the United States is about ending democracy altogether here and replacing it with a wealthy, white aristocratic oligarchy.

The less visible but largest part of that iceberg is in the states, and it’s huge.

Red state after red state is nakedly and openly flipping from democracy to a form of authoritarian oligarchy.

Authoritarian Republicans at the state level, in state after state, are criminalizing protest with such severe penalties that simply stepping off the sidewalk and into the street during a protest could land you 15 years in jail.

At the same time, they’re legalizing the murder of pro-democracy, anti-fascist protesters.

The man who killed Heather Heyer and wounded numerous others at the Charlottesville Nazi/Trump rally with his car, for example, could well now be found not-guilty if legislation that has already passed in one state and is pending in multiple others were to pass in Virginia.

These new laws say that any motorist who is trying to “flee a riot“ and injures or kills people in the process can be held harmless. It’s the protest/automobile equivalent of “stand your ground laws.“

Finally, and most alarming, these authoritarian Republicans are seizing control of the actual mechanism of voting.

We’re seeing this writ large in Arizona right now, where rightwing conspiracy advocates were hired by Republicans in the state legislature to “audit” the November vote in an attempt to prove that Donald Trump actually won that states election.

While that sounds bad, wait until 2022 and 2024 when a couple dozen red states will have seized complete control of their election systems, like Republican politicians just did in Georgia.

They have cut election professionals and the Secretary of State out of the process entirely and handed to partisan Republicans the power to decide who actually won or lost the elections in the state, which votes get counted and which don’t, regardless of what the voters said overall.

These Republicans explicitly do not believe in democracy. They think it’s a quaint and outdated idea, but that they know a better way to run a country. Just let the “really smart” people make all the decisions and everything will work out just fine.

And how do you know who is “really smart?” Whoever is richest. Our culture constantly amplifies this message: the richest guy in the room is also the smartest. It’s the political version of Neo-Calvinism.

We find it throughout our media where our super-wealthy people are treated like rock stars and demigods, and it’s implicit in our legal system where wealthy criminals almost never go to jail.

Even when their crimes destroy the lives of thousands, like we saw during the the Bush crash of 2008, multimillionaires like Steve Mnuchin made off with huge piles of cash while tens of thousands of working-class Americans lost their homes and many lost their families and even their lives. As if to prove the rule, the one guy who did go to prison for financial fraud was Bernie Madoff – but he didn’t steal from average people, he stole from rich people. Now that is a serious crime.

Looking just at the most recent elections faced by House and Senate members who supported overturning the 2020 election, the Center for Media and Democracy found some mind-boggling statistics.

Josh Hawley and Rick Scott are arguably the two most serious contenders for president on the Republican side in 2024. Hawley received $41,169,601 from dark money groups leading up to his last election, according to the Center, and Rick Scott received $35,142,565.

This does not include money their official campaigns for the candidates themselves took in or spent; it’s just the largely invisible “dark money” spent to help them that we only learn about months after the election.

Rightwing billionaires, their report notes, put over $67 million into Kevin McCarthy’s Congressional Leadership Fund to support the 147 members of the House who voted against the 2020 presidential election results, and more than $40 million into Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund to support similarly-voting Republican senators.

They document how Senator Ted Cruz got well over $8 million, and even Colorado’s eccentric gun fetishist Lauren Boebert got $4,917,827.

All of this was made possible by right-wingers on the Supreme Court who blew up a whole series of good-government, anti-bribery laws Congress passed dating all the way back to 1907, with the ultimate knife in the back of democracy coming in 2010 with their Citizens United decision.

The top donor husband and wife who helped members of Congress who voted to overturn Joe Biden’s election kicked in $191.4 million to the dark-money groups supporting these politicians. Just behind them a single hedge fund CEO put in $59.8 million. Next was a guy who inherited a fortune from his father: he tossed in $50 million just support these authoritarians, followed by another financier at $46 million. The list goes on…

The Center documents how dozens of corporations also added in tens of millions of additional dollars to support those members of Congress who wanted to overthrow the election of 2020.

While the Center reports that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch tossed in $2 million, less than half of the $4.4 million Betsy DeVos put in, their network, Fox News, has done the really heavy lifting to support ending democracy in America.

Every night in prime time, multimillionaire hosts like Tucker Carlson promote the idea that white authoritarian rule is necessary to keep America from descending into chaos caused by dark-skinned immigrants and Black people, particularly if they’re allowed to vote.

While Ronald Reagan supported apartheid in South Africa, the modern conservative movement he birthed is now supporting it here in the United States.

We thought we dodged a bullet with the 2020 election. But Republicans in state after state are loading cannons as you’re reading this, and the very concept of democracy itself is in their bullseye.

Original post with hotlinks: HartmannReport.com

April 24, 2021

It's Time To Blow Up the Maskhole's Sick and Twisted Plan

For businesses wanting a competitive edge, a "let's all live" marketing strategy is the opportunity of the decade!

Well, it’s started. The United States has reached the point, in many parts of the country, where there are more vaccines available then there are people willing to take them.

Most of this so-called “vaccine reluctance“ is driven by pure politics.

Donald Trump‘s visceral hatred of Joe Biden, who beat him like a drum in the last election, and the Republican party’s commitment to raw power over anything that may help Americans, have brought us this crisis.

If Trump, Fox and the GOP can convince the people who follow them that they shouldn’t get vaccines, they can prevent President Biden from getting this pandemic under control.

If they can prevent Biden from getting the disease under control, they also prevent him from getting the economy back in shape.

And - Bingo! - if they prevent him from getting the economy back in shape, Republicans see victories in the 2022 midterm elections and might even take back the White House in 2024.

This is their simple but brutal math, and they frankly don’t care who it kills. The more the better, in fact, because chaos hurts the (Democratic) party in power. After all, they’ve already shown us they’re willing to kill a half-million Americans just to try to win the last election.

And, as village idiot and Senator Ron Johnson said yesterday as he was discouraging general consideration of vaccine documentation, “Why is this big push to make sure everybody gets a vaccine, to the point when you better impose it, you’re going to shame people, you’re going to force them to carry a card to prove that they’ve been vaccinated so they can just stay in society. I’m getting highly suspicious of what’s happening here.”

Right. It’s just a public health emergency that’s killed a half-million Americans. No big deal for rich Republicans.

So it’s up to us to blow up their plan. And if enough of us take one small, simple step we may be able to pull it off. Here’s how:

I’m calling restaurants, bars, stores, and other places of business that I’ve patronized over the past couple of years. Taking it slow, just one or two a day. Casual.

My conversation goes something like this:

Me: “I see we’re getting close to the point where the economy can open back up. I’m so excited about coming back to your (restaurant, store)! I love your (mention dish or product so they know I’m a real customer)! I just wanted to make sure, first, that you’re requiring proof of vaccination before you let people in?”

Them: “We don’t have any specific policy about that, but you’re more than welcome to come. All of us who work here are vaccinated!”

Me: “Well, let me give you my name and phone number and you can call me if you decide to change your policy. For at least the next year, I’m only going to patronize businesses that require proof of vaccination to get in the door. Even though I’m vaccinated, I don’t want to be exposed to someone who’s not and who might be carrying around one of those weird variants.”

Them (usually sounding a bit rattled): “I’ll be sure to tell the manager that you called...”

This can work.

The primary imperative of every business is something called “differentiation.” When I taught marketing and ran an advertising agency in Atlanta, I’d always ask, “What makes you different from your competitors? What is it you’re offering that they aren’t or can’t? Simply put, ‘what is your unfair competitive advantage?’”

More often than not, the answer to that question became the focus of a great marketing campaign.

America is experiencing a mind-boggling amount of pent-up demand right now. People want to go out and eat, drink, celebrate, dance and buy things. But many, almost certainly a majority, want to do so safely.

So, if even a small but meaningful percentage of businesses decide it’s good marketing to cater exclusively to people who have taken the time and trouble to get vaccinated, it’ll create a social pressure that will begin to wear down those who people Republican politicians and Fox News have convinced that the virus is no big deal.

But big deal or no, they still want to get into the restaurant! And that could get us to the 75%-85% vaccinated herd immunity threshold we need for a safe country regardless of Trump’s or Johnson’s inane sputtering or Tucker’s smarmy “questions.”

Back in the 1980s a dear friend of mine, Tom Larsen, owned one of the finest high-end restaurants in Boston, The Pillar House. Every restaurant in town at that time had both smoking and no-smoking sections, but Tom was committed to serving extraordinary food in a clean environment where you could actually smell and taste the flavors his chefs so meticulously curated.

So in 1986 he banned all smoking at The Pillar House, even in the bar and the bathrooms: his was the first consequential restaurant in Boston, and one of the first in the nation, to do so.

I remember when he made the decision. We discussed it quite a bit, in fact. I was fully expecting he would lose business, but instead, as word spread, his business continue to grow!

The restaurant got enormous publicity (it was picked up by the AP nationwide!), their non-smoking customers became fanatically loyal, and the few hard-core smokers they lost were insignificant to their business.

As an added bonus, restaurants around the country, reading about Tom’s experience, started emulating him. Non-smoking restaurants became a thing in 1986, and within a few years became the norm. Even Boston’s Newton-Wellesley Hospital went smoke-free, the first hospital to do so in the area, citing Tom’s restaurant as an example.

There are a lot of us out here who don’t want to be exposed to GOP- and Fox News-maskholes and the viruses they may be carrying.

They’re this generation’s version of the selfish smokers in the 1980s, and we’re the health-concerned non-smokers. We would very much like safe spaces to enjoy shopping, dining or other activities without smoke or germs being blown on us by inconsiderate people.

For businesses looking for a competitive edge, this “let’s all live” marketing prescription is the opportunity of the decade!

And with just a few simple phone calls, you can help make it happen.

Original daily post with link to Pillar House timeline: HartmannReport.com

April 23, 2021

6 Steps to Restore Democracy & Defund the GOP

Reagan defunded the Democratic Party in 1981: And, really, it’s just a case of “turnabout is fair play.”

Yesterday I told you how the Republican Party is animated by one single force: greed.

And greed in modern society is all about money. Which is why money is how you take down the Republican Party.

To maintain their greed, the Republican Party has kept all kinds of good things from us, from healthcare to unionization to education to the ability to start a small business for yourself, your family and the future. All that has been eaten alive by their greed.

For Democrats to defund and thus defeat the Republican Party, all they have to do is put into place a few straightforward “good government” steps, all things that should happen in any case:

* End Red State welfare. Kentucky gets $2.41 from the federal government for every tax dollar they send to Washington DC, giving Mitch McConnell billions in blue-state tax money to shower on his voters and maintain his power. Most other Red States are similarly “taker” states. So let’s fight for a law limiting states to no more than $1.50 for every dollar they send to DC in tax revenues and they have to pay for everything else by taxing their own in-state wealthy people. Call it Welfare Reform!

* End corporate welfare that gets recycled to GOP politicians. This includes $600 billion a year to fossil fuel companies, about a trillion a year we give to Big Pharma (including forbidding Medicare from negotiating drug prices), and government subsidies to massive insurance companies like the “Medicare Advantage” scam that puts individual seniors and the entire Medicare system at risk.

* End corporate monopolies that fund the GOP. Break up giant corporations and make America safe again for small businesses, which build local economies. From utilities to tech to banking and retail, giant monopolies rip off working-class Americans to the tune of an average $5000 per-family per-year, and use some of that money to fund Republican politicians. (Breaking up monopolies is actually good for both the nation and the companies themselves: when Nixon & SCOTUS in 1974 initiated the breakup of AT&T into 7 regional companies and Lucent, completed in 1984, it actually increased shareholder value and led to an innovation explosion.)

* Bring back Eisenhower’s 91% top tax bracket to restore the middle class that votes Democratic. America’s strongest economy was 1950 to 1980, with a top tax bracket of 91% to 74%. We built highways, schools, hospitals, and put men on the moon. CEOs averaged only 30x the pay their employees took. Democrats ran virtually everything, even in what we now call Red States. Then the Supreme Court changed the rules of the game, money flooded the GOP in 1980, Reagan cut that top bracket to 25%, and the billionaires it produced continue to pour cash into the GOP.

* Impose Elizabeth Warren’s 2% tax on great fortunes and use it to fund healthcare and education for working-class voters. Average Americans pay a wealth tax every year: it’s the property tax on their largest store of wealth, their homes. That annual wealth/property tax pays for schools, libraries, police, fire and other essential infrastructure. Billionaires, like average homeowners, should pay their fair share of the cost of the commons through a similar annual tax on their money bins and other investments.

* Reverse Citizen’s United to end the GOP’s campaign money from corporations, SuperPACs and billionaires’ ability to skew our politics. We did this in the 1970s after the Nixon bribery scandals, but the Supreme Court blew it up, saying that money was speech. There are multiple ways around that, and the Democratic Party should make this job one. (HR1 is a great start!)

Not only will these steps re-balance the money/power equation between Democrats and Republicans, they’ll be good for average working people and bring back a government that works for all Americans.

And, really, it’s just a case of “turnabout is fair play.”

It was forty years ago this Spring that Reagan and his buddies decided they’d strip the Democratic Party of most of its funding. And their audacious plan worked…until just the past few months.

In the 1970s, the Democratic Party was principally funded by working-class people through America’s labor unions, and the Republican Party got most of its money from big business and wealthy individuals.

America’s political system got a major shake up in 1976 and 1978: The US Supreme Court ruled in two cases those years that when billionaires or giant corporations owned politicians, that was no longer considered “corruption” or “bribery” as it had been since the founding of our republic. I lay this out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

In those two decisions, Buckley and Bellotti, conservatives on the US Supreme Court ruled that when rich people or corporations showered their favorite politicians with cash, that money wasn’t actually “money.” Instead, the Court ruled, that cash was actually “speech,” and pouring cash down a politician’s throat was simply First Amendment-protected “free speech.”

Those two decisions, the second written by Lewis Powell (of “Powell Memo” fame) himself, unleashed a tsunami of corporate and billionaire cash that flowed into the GOP in the late 1970s and floated Ronald Reagan into office in 1980. (SCOTUS conservatives, over the loud, unanimous objections of the Court’s Democratic-nominated justices, doubled-down on these decisions with Citizens United in 2010.)

In the 1970s Democrats got most of their funding from working-class Americans via their labor unions, so the Party didn’t take much notice then of those two decisions that opened up politics for rich people and corporations. The unions were so awash in money that a few corrupt union bosses were even skimming some off the top.

So when Reagan became president, he set out to destroy the Democratic Party’s main source of funding: labor unions.

Following the example of his role model, Margaret Thatcher, who just two years earlier had destroyed the United Kingdom’s largest and most politically powerful labor union (the coal miners), he took down PATCO, the air traffic controller’s union, and did it in less than a week in 1981.

The following twelve years of the Reagan/Bush administration’s war on America’s middle class so completely gutted labor union membership that in 1992 Bill Clinton and Al Fromm had to reinvent the DLC to work as a funnel to bring corporate money into the Democratic Party.

Tragically, Reagan’s biggest victory in his anti-union effort was changing the very nature of the Democratic Party from FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society party into Bill Clinton’s corporate-friendly DLC/New Democrat party, burrowing deeply into bed with big banks, insurance companies, and the emerging tech industry.

But thanks to the tireless work of progressives both inside and outside government, and a general awakening of the American public to the dangerous scam the GOP has been running these past 40 years, the Democratic Party now has an opportunity to regain its soul and its prosperity.

Now is the most vital time possible to contact your local Democratic Party and volunteer to help out. Become a Precinct Committee-person and you can actually help choose primary candidates and write the Party’s platform.

Or you can can participate with Democratic Party-aligned groups like Fair Fight, Indivisible or Progressive Democrats of America, and take the fight all the way to the ballot box.

Republicans and their billionaire donors have devastated the middle class and torn America apart for 40 years now. Together we’ll stop them, and recover both our Party and our democratic republic.

Original post: HartmannReport.com

April 22, 2021

Republican Greed Now Dominates Americans' Lives

It doesn’t matter how many people die, struggle in poverty, or are poisoned, as long as the profits roll in and taxes are low

Republican greed is why Americans can’t have nice things.

Every developed country in the world has some variation on a free or low-cost national healthcare system, and free or even subsidized higher education. In most developed countries homelessness is not a crisis, nobody goes bankrupt because somebody in their family got sick, and jobs pay well enough and have union pensions so people can retire after 30 or 40 years in the workforce and live comfortably for the rest of their lives.

But not in America. Republicans would never allow any of those things to happen.

It’s not about ideology. Republicans don’t hate Social Security and Medicare, for example, because they’re afraid that thos programs are going to somehow turn America into a communist country. They hate those programs because they’re paid for with tax dollars, and greedy Republicans hate to pay their fair share of taxes.

It’s not about racism, although it often appears that way. The reason Republicans work so hard to keep Black and Brown people down is because they subscribe to a weird economic theory that “requires” an underclass who do most of the hard work for very little money so rich Republicans, being part of the overclass, can reap the benefits and stuff the extra cash into their money bins.

If their use of racist language and iconography brings in a few more low-IQ white voters, that’s just icing on the cake. They can use the racist yahoos to get themselves reelected so giant corporations will continue to stuff their SuperPACs with lobbyist cash they can use for their own retirement.

It’s not about charity, although they love to say that the housing and healthcare needs of poor people should be taken care of through charity. What they’re really saying is that they don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes to maintain a healthy society.

It’s not about Christianity, although they’re constantly invoking Jesus for everything from pushing the death penalty on women who want to get an abortion to giving bigots the legal right to discriminate against gay and trans people. Jesus never once mentioned abortion and decried bigotry, but they regularly ignore and even flaunt His teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and His warnings in Matthew 25. They protect multimillionaire evangelists’ tax-free status, and the preachers repay them by preaching politics from the pulpit.

It’s not about saving Americans from the pandemic. Trump used the Defense Production Act to force mostly Brown and Black meatpackers back to work, not to keep Americans safe. As long as the factories are humming and the stock market is rising, a few hundred thousand dead Americans are just collateral damage.

It’s not about conservatism. They’re not interested in slowly or “cautiously” improving society, or “conserving” anything other than the balances in their own checking accounts. They like to use the word “conservative,” but they’ve rendered it meaningless at best and code for “racist” at worst.

It’s not about making the world a better place. They deny climate change, deregulate industries that poison our air and water, and do everything they can to screw working people out of unions, good wages and decent benefits. They’re totally down with pesticides that are killing our pollinators while they poison our atmosphere with their carbon emissions, all just to make a buck.

It’s not about having a better-educated electorate or populace. They’ve spent decades trying to destroy our public education system that was, in the 1960s, the envy of the world. When they did away with free and low-cost college education during the Reagan years they kicked off almost $2 trillion worth of student debt which is preventing people from starting families, opening small businesses, or even buying their first house. But it sure is profitable for Republican bankers!

It isn’t about “culture.” They do a good-old-boy NASCAR/Duck Dynasty routine to bring in the rubes, but there’s no way Donald Trump would ever invite the average Republican voter with a giant flag and a pickup truck to any of his golf clubs, nor would Ted Cruz want to vacation with one of them or their families in Cancun.

It’s not about “gun violence.” As long as their investments in weapons manufacturers are profitable and the problem of gun violence is limited to poor- and working-class Americans, Republicans don’t give a rat’s ass about “gun safety.” Althought they’re happy to use guns as a wedge issue to bring in male voters who are insecure about their own masculinity.

It’s not about immigrants taking jobs from working-class Americans. Ronald Reagan stopped enforcing the laws against wealthy white employers hiring people who are here without documentation. As a result, entire industries like construction and meatpacking that once provided good union jobs have been de-unionized, their former American-citizen union employees replaced by low-wage workers without documentation. And when the spotlight gets shined on them, Republicans are more than happy to put poor, hard-working Brown people in jail but there’s no way they’re ever going to go after wealthy white employers. They don’t give a damn about your job, particularly when they can find somebody else to do it cheaper.

It’s not about America “first.” Reagan and Bush the Elder negotiated NAFTA and revived the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) so businesses could offshore entire factories. Since the Reagan administration, over 60,000 factories have left America, along with at least 5 million jobs. Donald Trump‘s rewrite of NAFTA even gives American companies a huge new tax break if they move factories from America to Mexico.

At the end of the day, all Republicans care about is money. Greed is their principle animating force.

It doesn’t matter how many Americans die, how many humans struggle in misery and poverty, how many children’s growth is stunted or are poisoned by industrial and mining waste being poured into our air and rivers.

As long as the money keeps rolling in and their billonnaire patron’s taxes remain absurdly low, that’s all Republicans care about and are willing to fight for.

Original post: HartmannReport.com

April 20, 2021

A New GOP "Big Lie" Plot is in the Works - America can't let them get away with it.

The 21st-century version of the Confederacy is fixing to repeat the Big Lie strategy of its 19th century forebearers. And this one goes beyond the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Now they’re trying to sanitize treason as well.

George Orwell famously pointed out that, “Those who control the past control the future,” and the GOP is furiously trying to rewrite the history of January 6th to hide their participation in a heinous crime and promote their authoritarian agenda for the future.

Big lies, when heavily and institutionally promoted over generations, have incredible persistence.

Back in the early 1980s, Louise and I moved with our three kids down to Georgia to start a business in suburban Atlanta. The place was growing like a weed and opportunity abounded; we got our little start-up company on the front page of The Wall Street Journal within the second year.

But what I remember most vividly about those years is the answer I got one night at dinner when I asked our kids what they learned in school that day.

“We learned about the War of Northern Aggression,” one said, explaining that the New York bankers were trying to rob people in the South and so the South had to fight back.

This is what happens when history is allowed to be re-written for over a century. And it’s happening again, today.

As Mike DeBonis and Jeremy Barr, et al, document at The Washington Post:

Instead of an attempt to overturn the election by radicalized Donald Trump supporters, it was a choreographed attack staged by antifa provocateurs. Rather than an armed insurrection, it was a good-natured protest spoiled by a few troublemakers.

And instead of a deadly event that put the lives of hundreds of lawmakers, police officers and others at risk, the riot was no big deal at all.

A legion of conservative activists, media personalities and elected officials are seeking to rewrite the story of what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6, hoping to undermine the clear picture of the attack that has emerged...

Six weeks after the attack, some are taking advantage of fading memories and unanswered questions to portray the riot in a different, more benign light....

Democrats are trying to put together a commission to study what happened, and Republicans are fighting every effort.

When congressional committees controlled by Democrats try to look into the events of January 6, their Republican colleagues tie the proceedings up in bureaucratic knots.

Very little, right now, is getting done, while documents and other evidence are being destroyed, “lost” or “forgotten.” There’s even some doubt about whether all the pre-January 6th security video from the Capitol that may have shown legislators giving recon tours to insurgents still exists.

The new story, as told by Tucker Carlson, Ron Johnson and others is that it wasn’t all that big a deal when the Capitol was stormed, and it certainly wasn’t treason. Donald Trump even went so far as to say that his followers were “hugging and kissing” the Capitol Police officers.

A few hundred foot-soldiers have been arrested and are being prosecuted, but nobody has heard a peep about the meeting in Trump’s DC hotel the night of January 5 or any other meetings or actions that may imply organization and leadership.

Acting Secretary of Defense, Trump loyalist Christopher Miller, was installed right after Trump lost the election as part of a rapid general purge of senior leadership at the Pentagon.

Anticipating the January 6th attack to end American democracy, Miller issued a memo (reprinted below) on January 4 specifically forbidding the District of Columbia National Guard from:

being “issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons, or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.”

“to employ any riot control agents”

“To share equipment with law-enforcement agencies”

“To use Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance assets or to conduct ISR or Incident, Awareness, and Assessment activities.”

“To employ helicopters or any other air assets.”

“To conduct searches and seizures, arrests, or other similar direct law-enforcement activity.”

“To seek support from any non-DC National Guard units.”

Miller’s memo specified that the DC National Guard would be essentially neutered unless he gave the order, and he and other Trump loyalists weren’t answering the phone for hours during the attack.

But where’s the investigation? Where are the hearings? Who’s asking Miller who ordered him to do this and why he went along with it? What was the end game? Who else was involved?

It sure looks like we experienced an attempted coup d’état that only failed because of the integrity of a few Republican officials and Secretaries of State. It was a widespread and concerted effort to end the American Experiment.

Donald Trump and a group of his followers, it appears, tried to overthrow the legitimate government of the United States and install himself as a strongman dictator, ending the world’s oldest democracy.

But any time questions are asked about these details, about who participated at the higher levels, about what members of Congress might’ve been involved, the conversation gets changed. The discussion is shifted to Antifa, Maxine Waters or something altogether unrelated.

Trump’s Big Lie that he won the 2020 election was terrible in and of itself. Like Hitler’s “Stabbed in the Back” Big Lie that Germany was on the verge of winning World War I until the Jews and socialists sold them out, Trump’s Lie formed the basis for the attack on the Capitol and multiple ongoing attacks on our democracy.

But a second Big Lie that is emerging now, that the attack of January 6th was either not an “actual” or “serious” attack, or that, if it was, it was done by Antifa and Black Lives Matter members, is just as destructive. Perhaps more so, because it discourages further investigation.

These two Big Lies have already spread widely across social media and the Internet. Multimillionaire commentators on Fox News are doing their best to establish these lies as part of the documentary record, as are other rightwing media outlets.

America mustn’t let them get away with it.

We need to know the truth, including uncomfortable truths that may involve collusion and participation by elected officials and government employees, should that be proven to be the case.

America allowed the Big Lie of the “Lost Cause” and “the War of Northern Aggression” to survive and fester for over a century and the result is that Americans are still dying — daily — because of the color of their skin.

That elected Republicans are blocking efforts to find the truth about this January 6, 2021 act of treason, while actively using Trump’s original November 2020 Big Lie to cut back voting rights nationwide, is both despicable and dangerous.

It must stop. Now.

The perpetrators and collaborators — including those who are and/or work for elected officials — must be publicly held to account.

If Republicans continue blocking serious investigations and these crimes are successfullly whitewashed, the next authoritarian attempt to destroy our republic may well succeed.

Original post with letter from Christopher Miller blocking DC Guard action at: HartmannReport.com

April 19, 2021

The GOP stands atop an ocean of blood

America, John F Kennedy said, was like John Winthrop's idealistic "city on a hill." Ronald Reagan added the word "shining" to that description when he plagiarized Kennedy. And now Republicans across the country want to change the word "city" to "armed encampment."

Republicans in the Texas House of Representatives just passed a so-called "Constitutional Carry" law that would allow pretty much anybody over 21 to carry a gun, concealed or not, permitted or not, experienced or not.

Democrats offered an amendment that would've forbidden "domestic terrorists and white supremacists" from the gun-carrying "right," but Republicans voted that down.

The whole "city on the hill" metaphor was meant to evoke a nation that others would want to emulate. Apparently we're now there: Brazilian fascist strongman Jair Bolsonaro has proclaimed that he wants every Brazilian to have a gun "just like in America."

After all, his country has nearly caught up with us having the second highest Covid death rate in the world; why not have the second highest gun death rate, too?

The mass shooter in Indianapolis last week had had his shotgun confiscated earlier in the month after his mother reported he was planning to commit "suicide by cop." He simply bought two more guns, this time high-powered assault rifles so he could more easily kill eight people in a few seconds.

And those two weapons he bought weren't cheap: more money flowed into the blood-stained coffers of the NRA and their gun-manufacturing patrons.

As of last Friday, April 16, there have been 147 mass shootings in the US this year, a 73% increase over last year. Psychologists describe it as "a contagion," sort of like Covid. The more people do it, the more people will do it. We've known for decades that this is also how suicide works, which is why schools treat student suicide so differently from every other kind of death.

And, like with Covid, Republicans are doing everything they can to make sure that the contagious agent – in this case, a gun – is widely and freely available to anybody who may want it.

President Biden and the Democrats just proposed legislation that would limit gun magazines to no more than 10 rounds; Republicans are outraged.

After all, if you're going to wage war against your government because it's become "tyrannical" by offering things like free college, Medicare for All, and a wealth tax on billionaires to pay for it all, you're gonna need a hell of a lot more than just 10 rounds.

For most of the 18 years I've been doing my daily radio and TV show, I've been saying that, at the very least, we should regulate guns the same way we do cars. I lay out the details in my book The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment.

The gun should be registered with the state and that registration should renew every year just like a car; the gun owner should be licensed and must demonstrate proficiency and pass a written exam just like a car driver; and there must be an insurance company writing a mandatory liability policy so when someone's hurt or killed with a gun they or their family get the same kind of financial cushion they would have had they been hit by a car.

Now, Stephen Colbert has picked up the banner of "license guns like cars," and it couldn't be a moment too soon. Hopefully more celebrities will get with the program; it's not anywhere near as extensive a form of gun control as rational countries like Australia and most of Europe have undertaken, but it's a start that every American can understand.

Our country was founded on a set of values and ideals; the first to do so in history. Or at least that was the concept, and with every passing century we get closer to realizing those ideals.

It's time to re-capture John F. Kennedy's idealism and actually make America a "city on the hill" we can be proud of and others will once again want to emulate.

We start by ending our epidemic of gun violence and calling out the GOP for what they have chosen to become: a death cult committed to violence, bigotry, and the destruction of our planet.

Original post with links to sources at: hartmannreport.com

April 17, 2021

The Ku Klux Kaucus Will End in Tragedy

Well, now they’re just coming right out and saying it.

Several Southern Republican members of the House of Representatives have proposed a Ku Klux Kaucus that will adhere to “Anglo-Saxon” values and vigorously resist allowing any more people of color into America under any circumstances. They’re officially calling it the “America First Caucus.”

The original America First movement started in the autumn of 1940, with open support for Adolf Hitler, loudly promoting their fear that white people in America were subject to being “replaced” by people of color into the fabric of our country. Those engineering this Great Replacement, America Firsters believed, were wealthy, media-connected Jews.

It also openly opposed America doing anything to stop Adolf Hitler after his 1939 invasion of Poland, and was particularly against our engaging in any kind of military action against Germany’s leader.

At its peak, it had 800,000 members including future President Jerry Ford and future US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. It was largely funded by the mind-bogglingly wealthy rightwing families who owned Sears Roebuck and the Chicago Tribune, the “billionaires” of their day.

Dr. Seuss, who seems to be making a bit of a comeback thanks to Republican hysteria, produced one of the most famous America First cartoons. It shows a kangaroo named “America First” with baby kangaroos in her pouch labeled “Nazis,” and “Fascists.”

The movement’s leader, Charles Lindbergh, addressed the “Jews will not replace us“ issue in one of his most famous America First speeches when he said of Jewish Americans, “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.“

Small wonder that Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene and Arizona’s Paul Gosar, apologists for the traitors who attacked our republic on January 6th and fellow travelers with uber-racist Donald Trump, are the founding members of this new Kaucus.

In their introductory documentation, they argue that they’re only interested in promoting or voting for infrastructure that “befits the progeny of European architecture.” It doesn’t take a dog to figure out what that whistle means.

In fact, they are quite proud of the racism. According to a document obtained by Punchbowl News, the Kaucus’ main aim is to “follow in President Trump’s footsteps, and potentially step on some toes and sacrifice sacred cows for the good of the American nation.”

And what sacred cows might those be?

“[S]ocietal trust and political unity are threatened,” they say, “when foreign citizens are imported en masse into a country…”

As Donald Trump would say, they’re not talking about immigrants from Norway.

Republicans understand what the new Kaucus is all about, and a few who aren’t rushing to join are instead objecting to their racism and xenophobic hatred being so open and public.

Representative Liz Cheney, no shrinking violet but also apparently having a few scruples that must’ve skipped the previous generation, tweeted about the new Kaucus without mentioning it by name:

“Republicans believe in equal opportunity, freedom, and justice for all. We teach our children the values of tolerance, decency and moral courage. Racism, nativism, and anti-Semitism are evil. History teaches we all have an obligation to confront and reject such malicious hate.”

Her opposition will probably cause a few hundred more Republicans to eagerly join the Kaucus.

State-by-state organizations haven’t been announced, but it won’t be all that difficult for them to set them up and enlist members: all they have to do is buy the mailing lists for the existing Klan and White Citizens Council organizations in each of the Southern states.

America‘s most horrific crimes and our deepest wounds have always involved race. The largest genocide in the history of the world is arguably the near-extermination of Native Americans by European invaders. The slave trade to this country turned the South into a violent ethnonationalist police state. It’s Black residents lived in a state of terror that persists in many ways to this day.

We are still, this time by political proxy, fighting the Civil War, our nation’s bloodiest and most destructive conflict.

Greene, Gosar and others who are promoting this new Kaucus may think they are just conducting the most recent in a long line of racist GOP publicity stunts designed to raise their Fox News media profile and double down on the millions they raise every month promoting division and fear.

But, they are also giving aid and comfort to the traitors who attacked our Capitol on January 6th and tried, for the second time in America‘s history, to end our democratic republican form of government.

They’re contributing to the regional and racial hatred and fear that have, in the past, done so much damage to our republic and destroyed so many lives.

We’ve seen politicians use cheap and rhetorical devices like this to promote hatred and division in other countries.

Without exception, it has ended in disaster.

America must learn the lessons of its past. If we fail to, as the old saying goes, we shall be doomed to repeat our most terrible mistakes.

Original post with hotlinks to sources: HartmannReport.com

April 14, 2021

Is Genocide for Political Purposes Treason?

News that the Johnson & Jackson vaccine can cause blood clots in about one in 1 million women under 50 has exploded across the social media world. Republicans, along with countries that hate America, are smiling.

A fellow who runs a couple of communities on a popular social media site called into my program yesterday saying that the vaccine news had caused an “absolute explosion” of vaccine denialism. People who’d been on the fence are now outright opposed to getting the jab.

And Trump and the GOP are making hay with the announcement.

Discouraging Americans from getting vaccinated, and thus preventing President Joe Biden from getting the economy back on track, has been the first order of business for the GOP ever since Trump lost the election.

It is now their primary Electoral Strategy going into 2022 and 2024.

And, if the spam I’m seeing in my inbox and the trolls I’m seeing on social media are any indication, several countries that would like to see America fail are also enthusiastically encouraging Americans not to get vaccinated.

Tucker Carlson and Fox News are also pushing the “uncertainty, be careful!” meme.

Trump, of course, tripled down on the news.

He floated a bizarre conspiracy theory of his own, that he had promoted back in December as well.

Feigning outrage and using it to trash our new president, Trump wrote: “The Biden Administration did a terrible disservice to people throughout the world by allowing the FDA and CDC to call a ‘pause’ in the use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine.”

This is the same Donald Trump who, along with his wife, were both vaccinated while he was still president but went out of his way to keep it secret until long after he had left the White House.

He’s all about sabotaging Joe Biden. There’s probably nobody in the world Trump hates more, at this moment, than the guy who beat him badly in 2020. And he partially blames Pfizer.

“Remember,” Trump wrote yesterday, “it was the FDA working with Pfizer, who announced the vaccine approval two days after the 2020 presidential election. They didn’t like me very much…”

Warning his followers, once again, not to trust the American government, he added that the FDA “has to be controlled” particularly because of the “long time bureaucrats within.”

If you want to see what the US will look like if Trump and the GOP prevail and create widespread vaccine denialism and hesitancy, just look at Michigan right now. The British variant is ripping through that state, throwing huge numbers of people under 40 into hospitals.

This is exactly what Republicans want.

It’s the reason why the Republicans who control the Michigan House and Senate forced through legislation over Governor Whitmer’s unsuccessful veto requiring the state’s website to point out that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was tested on fetal stem cells.

Now another whole cohort of Americans are all hysterical about “baby parts” in their vaccines (they’re not) and vaccine compliance is starting to collapse in Michigan.

Sabatoge that Democratic governor!

It’s also why about half of all the Republicans in the US Congress refuse to disclose whether they have been vaccinated, and Senators Paul and Johnson openly proclaim that they won’t take a vaccine.

It has nothing to do with “freedom.” It’s all about sabotaging the Biden administration. And doing the same to any state with a Democratic governor.

Many Americans were shocked when they realized that Donald Trump’s deadly push to “open the economy” in September and October was just to try to get the economic numbers up so he could win reelection.

They’re even more dismayed now, learning that Trump and the GOP are actively working to sabotage any effort to get the pandemic under control so Democrats will lose next year’s elections and in 2024.

Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and his encouragement of the January 6 insurrection against our republic, were both treasonous and seditionist. He has demonstrated beyond any doubt that he is a traitor to our ideals and our nation.

But encouraging the deaths of hundreds of thousands more Americans is taking treason and sabatoge to a whole new level.

It took our media about three years to figure out and explicitly point out that Donald Trump was intent on destroying democracy in America. It took them more than two years to use the word “lies” to describe his…lies.

As Americans today are dying all across our country because of the vaccine skepticism promoted by Trump and the GOP, it’s more important than ever that all of us, including our media, call this what it is.

American genocide for political purposes. Treason.

HartmannReport.com

April 12, 2021

Republicans and "white nationalists" are playing with fire in their efforts to end democracy

Oligarchs Con White Bois

It’s no coincidence that Trump supporters, including those who attacked our republic on January 6 at the US capital, love to wave and display the Confederate flag. Somehow, they think, their whiteness will protect them from the consequences of ending democracy in America.

They’re wrong. The Confederacy was an ethno-nationalist police state, run by a small number of plantation-owning oligarch families like Robert E. Lee’s, and being white was no protection from the Confederacy’s brutality.

This sort of an iron-fisted oligarchy is exactly what people promoting white supremacy and “European” ethno-nationalism, want to impose on all of America. The Trump mainstream of the GOP is no longer a normal political party; it’s become an open advocate of the oligarchic values and systems that ran the South before 1865.

As Sally Hadden documents in her book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, each Confederate state’s “militia“ was also its slave patrol, and every white man who wasn’t part of the plantation-owning aristocracy had to show up for unpaid slave patrol duty at least once a week, traveling the back roads, inspecting plantations, and generally terrorizing Black people.

Cue the modern white militia movement. And the cops who threatened to kill a Black Army officer for having the temerity to drive a brand new car down the road. And George Floyd, Brianna Taylor, Eric Garner, Treyvon Martin, Tamir Rice...

But the Southern oligarchy wasn’t just about slavery and racism. It was an oligarchy that practiced absolute economic and political domination everywhere it had power.

Although they weren’t enslaved, poor whites had it rough in the Confederate states. They had no real access to due process, and in most cases were prevented from voting if they didn’t own land. Even when they did vote, ballot boxes were stuffed or ballots were burned when elections didn’t turn out the way the oligarchs wanted.

Through the period from the 1830s to the 1860s, as I document in my new book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, southern plantation owners’ wealth radically increased because of the invention of the Cotton Gin that started spreading across the south in the 1820s.

This new machine could clean as much cotton as 50 hardscrabble white farmers or enslaved people; thus, those few massive plantations that could afford a Gin soon economically and politically dominated the South in the era leading up to the Civil War.

By manipulating cotton prices, giant plantations ran small white-owned farms out of business. The plantation oligarchs would then buy up the distressed farms and use the poor white farmers’ own indebtedness to force them to work what had previously been their own land.

When poor whites protested or tried to fight back, they were often imprisoned on trumped-up charges or just killed and buried in unmarked graves. As Keri Leigh Merritt documents in Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South:

"[P]oor whites made particularly inviting targets for a southern legal system dominated by slaveholders... On the eve of secession, slaveholders were still jailing poor whites for small amounts of debt, publicly whipping thieves, and auctioning off debtors and criminals (for their labor) to the highest bidder. In addition to the region’s sophisticated legal system, the Old South also had an extremely effective extralegal system to keep the lower-class whites in their places. From vigilance committees to minutemen groups, these organizations helped maintain both slavery and the southern social hierarchy, and ultimately forced a divided region to wage an unwanted war.

Matthew McConaughey made a movie about Newton Knight, a poor southern white man who led a resistance movement against the Confederate oligarchs. Ten of his white compatriots were lynched by the plantation owners and left hanging as a warning to others, but he survived and escorted Sherman in his famous march through Georgia in 1864. Over 100,000 poor whites fled the South to fight in the Union Army.

And enslaved Africans who fought back usually encountered a fate even worse than death: unspeakable torture, followed by more years of enslavement. The brutality of the Confederacy was legendary, and they wanted it that way. Those Southern slave-holding generals whose statues Trump wants to preserve were among the most evil, vicious men ever to hold power in the US.

By the time of the Civil War, the Southern part of America was no longer a democratic republic (if you could argue that it had ever been one). It was a pure police-state oligarchy run by a few thousand families who controlled the wealth of the South. Nobody, of any race, who wasn’t related to one of the oligarch families was truly free.

This is the nation oligarch Donald Trump and his followers want to create. It’s what oligarch-owned Fox News is pushing us towards.

Like multimillionaire Senator Tom Cotton pointed out in a recent tweet, “We have a major under-incarceration problem in America.” More people need to go to jail, according to fascists like Cotton, in the country with 4% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners.

Eliminate the voting, economic and political power of poor and working-class people across the country, particularly those who are not white. Put more people in prison, especially minorities. Recruit poor whites to the cause by giving them people of color to sneer at and demonize. Toss them the bone of a “White Lives Matter” rally.

As Lyndon Johnson pointed out back in the day, “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

And he’ll help make sure that the people in charge are billionaires like Donald Trump. The new plantation owners. The aristocrats. The oligarchs.

It shouldn’t surprise us that Fox News is promoting this kind of ethno-nationalism with talking heads like multimillionaire Tucker Carlson.

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who would know, published an op-ed in the Sydney Morning Herald calling billionaire oligarch Rupert Murdoch the “Cancer eating the heart of Australian democracy.”

“Murdoch is not just a news organization,” Rudd wrote. “Murdoch operates as a political party, acting in pursuit of clearly defined commercial interests, in addition to his far right ideological worldview. ... Murdoch is also a political bully and a thug who for many years has hired bullies as his editors.”

Trump, Tucker, and their fellow travelers have raised a small army of white people across this land. They strut around with their “open carry,” and freak out about the whatever the most recent conspiracy theory may be. They call themselves “patriots,” just like the Confederate soldiers and slave patrollers did.

They think that putting people of color “back in their place” will somehow lift their chances to experience the American Dream. As if it’s all some bizarre sort of zero-sum game.

LBJ was right. They’re suckers and they’re wrong.

Destroying our democracy, as billionaire Trump tried to do last year and rightwing media continue to promote, will only flip us into a fascistic oligarchy resembling the Old South.

Everybody but the oligarchs will suffer.

Original post with links to sources: HartmannReport.com

April 10, 2021

The GOP and Trumpsters are apparently willing to sicken more Americans to regain political power

The Republican Plot to Stop Herd Immunity & Flip America Into Authoritarianism

Well, it’s all out in the open now. Donald Trump and his homicidal cronies actively worked to damage America’s public health infrastructure, so 500,000 Americans ended up dying unnecessarily. All to push America deeper into authoritarianism.

Back in the Spring, we saw the Trump administration turn on a dime after the April 7th revelation that Covid was mostly killing Black people and was worse in Blue states. They actively walked away from initial efforts in March to get the Covid crisis under control, thinking that blaming things on Blue State Democratic governors would benefit them politically.

Which would aid their 40-year plan to take down democracy and replace it with corporate- and billionaire-run authoritarianism.

Now we see, in documents just unearthed by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Outbreak and reported in The Washington Post, that in the Fall, in the three months leading up to the election, the Trump administration and their Republican allies actively sabotaged the CDC.

All so they could continue to mislead Americans about the dangers of this disease — again, for political gain so they can push us deeper into authoritarianism.

History tells, and Trump well knew, that presidents rarely get reelected when they preside over an economic disaster. Thus, Trump was doing everything he could to push Americans back into the workplace and back into stores, restaurants and shops to juice the economy.

The result, of course, was an explosion of Covid cases and deaths in the last three months of last year.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

But that’s all history now. Trump is no longer running for reelection, and even pushing people to take Covid risks to get the economy going at this point seems like it would only benefit President Joe Biden.

Yet Republicans continue to push myths and scare stories about coronavirus vaccines, and to play down the seriousness of the disease, and to discourage people from getting vaccinated.

To stop this pandemic in the United States, we have to hit between 70 and 90% vaccination rates to achieve herd immunity. Yet this Republican reluctance to get vaccinated will almost certainly prevent America from reaching those levels of protection.

So why, after pitching “herd immunity” through the last four months of Trump’s presidency, would Republicans now actively work to prevent America from hitting a vaccination rate that would guarantee it?

Donald Trump and his wife, for example, were both vaccinated against coronavirus in the last weeks of his administration, but went out of their way to keep it secret.

Right wing media, including Fox News, continue to promote bizarre stories that contribute to “vaccine hesitancy.”

As a result, among rural people who say that they definitely will not get vaccinated, almost 3/4 identify as a Republican or Republican-leaning, and 41% are white evangelical Christians.

How does preventing herd immunity and encouraging the death of more Americans possibly benefit the Republican Party today?

The answer is fairly obvious: if they can prevent a Democratic governor or President Joe Biden from getting a handle on the pandemic, they can blame them for the failure. People will die, but they get their political gain, what they hoped for a year ago but missed (letting 500,000 Americans die in the process).

Seriously, it’s most likely that craven and disgusting; it’s simply a variation on what they did before the end of the year, but they miscalculated back then and it ended up hurting, rather than helping, the GOP.

Having learned that lesson, they apparently now want to inflict the same pain on Biden and Democratic governors who are today in charge and thus will take the political heat for any Covid failures.

Making Covid worse will also keep our economy depressed, which further diminishes the chances of Democratic wins (particularly governors and US Senators) in the midterm elections next year.

Some would call this assertion a “conspiracy theory,” but just look at what’s going on and what went on last Fall. How else can we explain Republican governors like Abbott and DeSantis actively working to promote more infections, and Fox hosts and guests encouraging people to avoid vaccination?

How else can we explain billionaire-funded rightwing websites and media outlets promoting scary stories about vaccine, or downplaying the damage this disease can do to people?

They’re apparently willing to kill another half-million Americans to try to gain and hang onto political power while strengthening their own authoritarianism by spreading fear and confusion.

And if it throws the nation into chaos, all the better for the authoritarians within the Republican Party who are thirsting for power.

That “authoritarian” word sounds like strong language, but, seriously, do you think that if Donald Trump had been able to get a few Republican Secretaries of State to flip the election for him and hang onto power, that there would ever again be a free and fair election in this country?

Not to mention GOP efforts to sabotage democracy across the nation with over 300 voter suppression bills sitting in State legislatures right now.

And when a country has abandoned democracy as a governing principle, what is left? The world’s two major authoritarian models right now are oligarchic authoritarianism (Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia) or capitalist-communist authoritarianism (China, Vietnam).

We’re definitely not going to go communist, and we can clearly see that flat-out racist, corporatist authoritarianism is the direction the GOP has been pushing America for forty years.

Citizens United is their governing principle, as it lets authoritarian billionaires secretly fund an entire spectrum of political and social media activity while undermining faith in democracy.

This makes clear the meaning of “the death cult of the Republican Party.” And the role of “conservative” and social media in this genocidal effort.

Getting to herd immunity is the key to restoring normal economic and political activity in America, and the GOP — from the federal to the state level — is actively working against it.

It’s time to call them what they are: authoritarians who want to take down democracy and don’t care if it kills another half-million Americans in the process.

Original post with CDC graphics and hotlinks to sources here: HartmannReport.com