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ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer's World with Thom Hartmann

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

They're Shocked We Won't Pretend Anymore

Thom Hartmann — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 14:07:19 GMT

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What You May Have Missed

Thom Hartmann — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 15:44:07 GMT

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COMMONWEALTH REPORT

HUNTER IN A FARMER’S WORLD

The Hunters Finally Got Their Farmer

Louise has a line about me she’s been using for over forty years. She says I don’t have a filing system, I have a piling system…

4 days ago · 68 likes · 3 comments · Thom Hartmann

WISDOM SCHOOL

The Wisdom School: What it Means to be Human

Has Science Finally Found the Crack in the Cosmic Egg?

When I was in my early twenties, somebody handed me a paperback with a strange title, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, by a former humanities teacher named Joseph Chilton Pearce. I read it in a couple of long sittings, and by the end something in me had quietly rearranged itself. (You know that feeling, when a book doesn’t so much hand you new information a…

5 days ago · 88 likes · 4 comments · Thom Hartmann

Chapter 5: The Seventy-Year Legal War

Thom Hartmann — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 13:05:04 GMT

Who Killed the American Dream? Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

Chapter 5: The Seventy-Year Legal War

The story of the battles both for and against corporate constitutional rights didn’t begin in 1886. For seventy years before the Santa Clara non-decision, corporations fought a relentless legal war to gain access to the same constitutional rights the Founders and Framers intended exclusively for humans. They lost battle after battle until, with Davis and Field, the railroad oligarchs finally found a way to win by fraud.

Once we understand this, it’s easy to see that corporate constitutional rights were never an accident or a misunderstanding: the doctrine was, instead, the result of a sustained, deliberate campaign by morbidly rich interests to acquire constitutional weapons they could use against the “mob rule” of democratic governance. The railroad and other American oligarchs tried honest arguments for seven decades, but, when that failed, they turned to fraud.

This history also shows exactly what the oligarchs were fighting against: virtually every reform that would later build—and today sustains—the American Dream and the social democracy that made it possible.

The Early Republic and Corporate Charters

Queen Elizabeth I created the first modern limited liability corporation—the British East India Company—in 1601, but by the time America was founded, corporations were still rare and tightly controlled. The Founders had fought a revolution against the British East India Company’s economic and legal tyranny, and they weren’t about to allow that kind of corporate power in their new republic.

In the early 1800s, corporations were only created by special acts of state legislatures. Each charter was a custom document specifying exactly what the corporation could do, how long it could exist, and what restrictions on its behavior applied.

A corporation chartered to build a toll bridge, for example, couldn’t just suddenly decide to buy or open a bank. A textile mill corporation couldn’t invest in railroads. Charters specified purpose, duration, capitalization, and governance. They could be revoked if the corporation “violated the public interest,” an event called “the corporate death penalty,” and frequently were dissolved this way.

That wasn’t capitalism being stifled: it was democracy controlling its own creations for the benefit of the nation and its citizens.

As Thomas Jefferson warned in 1816: “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

The Founders understood what we seem to have forgotten: corporations are not natural beings like you and me. Instead, they’re legal fictions created by government to serve public purposes. By the standards of the Declaration of Independence (“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) and the Constitution, they have no inherent rights, only privileges granted them by We the People via the state governments that chartered them.

The First Corporate Rights Claims

As corporations grew larger and more powerful in the 1830s and 1840s, they began testing the boundaries of state regulation. Could they claim constitutional protections? Could they escape state oversight?

The answer, initially, was “no” to both questions.

In The Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), the Supreme Court ruled that a corporate charter was a contract that states couldn’t just arbitrarily revoke; there had to be cause. This gave corporations “artificial personhood” capabilities and some stability, but it didn’t make them persons with constitutional rights.

Chief Justice John Marshall, writing for the Court in that case, emphasized that corporations are merely “artificial beings, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.” They possessed only those properties that their charter granted them by the state in which they were incorporated.

That early decision protected contract rights, not corporate constitutional rights.

Through the 1830s and 1840s, corporations (mostly railroads, but also banks and trading companies) brought case after case claiming they deserved the same constitutional protections as human beings. They lost consistently. Courts understood the difference between natural persons and artificial legal entities.

The Civil War Changes Everything

The Civil War transformed America’s economy. Prior to 1860, most corporations were small, local, and tightly regulated. After 1865, massive national corporations emerged in part because of federal subsidies, especially the railroads to which Lincoln had given tens of millions of acres of federal lands.

These new national railroads weren’t like earlier corporations. They operated across state lines, employed thousands, and controlled vast wealth. And they had every incentive to escape state regulation as a way of jacking up their profits.

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, gave them the opening they’d been searching for.

The Amendment’s framers never mentioned corporations. The congressional debates around it focused exclusively on protecting the recently freed slaves. Every speech, every argument, every explanation we can find on the record concerned racial equality and civil rights for Black Americans.

But the amendment used the word “person” rather than “natural person” or “citizen.” And that got the corporate lawyers’ attention.

The Fourteenth Amendment Campaign

Starting in 1868, corporations launched a systematic campaign to claim Fourteenth Amendment rights as railroad after railroad brought cases arguing that state regulation violated their rights as “persons” under the amendment.

In The Railroad Tax Cases (1872), which Stephen Field had brought to the Court from the 9th Circuit, the railroad corporations argued that “discriminatory taxation” violated their Fourteenth Amendment rights. They (and Field) lost.

In Munn v. Illinois (1877), grain warehouse companies (with Field’s agreement) argued that state regulation of their rates violated their Fourteenth Amendment rights to the sanctity of property. They also lost.

Chief Justice Morrison Waite, writing for the majority in Munn, firmly rejected corporate constitutional rights: “When private property is devoted to a public use, it is subject to public regulation.”

The Court consistently ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to protect the recently freed enslaved people, not big corporations. Regulation of corporate activity for the public good was entirely constitutional.

But the corporations kept trying. They had, after all, virtually unlimited legal budgets so they could afford to lose ninety-nine cases if they won the hundredth. And they knew that the composition of the Court changed over time and may one day become more amenable to their arguments.

What the Oligarchs Were Fighting Against

To understand why corporations fought so hard for constitutional rights, you first have to realize what they were frantically fighting against: the First Progressive Era and everything it promised to working-class people.

By the 1870s and 1880s, democratic grass-roots movements were challenging corporate power across America. States were responding with laws that would have seemed impossibly radical just a generation earlier, limiting both corporate activity and money in politics.

The income tax was being debated repeatedly during that era, and would eventually become the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, giving the federal government the ability to tax corporations as well as individuals and fund public infrastructure and benefits. (Prior to that, most federal funding came from tariffs.) Corporate lawyers fought the income tax relentlessly, arguing that it violated corporate property rights.

Direct election of senators was also being demanded back then; they used to be appointed by the states. State legislatures, however, had been notoriously corrupt, with corporate money buying Senate seats, leading to multiple bribery scandals (the most notorious was in Montana in 1899). The Seventeenth Amendment in 1913 would give that power to voters instead. Corporate interests fought it right to the bitter end, because they’d largely perfected the dark art of bribing state legislators.

Labor protections were also spreading nationwide. States were limiting working hours, requiring safety standards, and prohibiting child labor. Corporate lawyers fought every one of these laws, unsuccessfully claiming they constituted unconstitutional interference with property rights and freedom of contract.

In response to national outrage about the growing concentrations of wealth at the top of the corporate world, antitrust laws were being proposed. The Sherman Antitrust Act would pass in 1890, giving the federal government the power to break up monopolies. Corporate lawyers spent the next century trying to gut it before five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court helped them out in the twentieth century.

In short, corporations were battling virtually everything that would later build the American Dream: every protection for workers, every tax on wealth, and every regulation of corporate behavior. They opposed, in other words, pretty much any and all democratic reforms that threatened their oligarchic power.

But they needed constitutional weapons to fight back if they wanted to be able to rise above state laws and regulations; and corporate constitutional rights, turning on the Fourteenth Amendment, would give them exactly that.

Roscoe Conkling’s Conspiracy Theory

In 1882, a curious event occurred that would later fuel claims about the Fourteenth Amendment’s “true” purpose that last to this day.

Roscoe Conkling, a former US senator who’d served on the joint committee that drafted the Fourteenth Amendment, appeared as a witness on behalf of the railroads before the Supreme Court in the 1885 San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company case, another Stephen Field decision in the 9th Circuit that came before the Supreme Court with an “equal protection” argument. Conkling was now a high-priced corporate lawyer, and the railroad paid him handsomely to testify.

Conkling presented what he claimed was a “secret journal” from the joint committee’s congressional deliberations. This supposed journal, Conkling argued, proved that the committee had intentionally used the word “person” instead of “citizen” or “natural person” to specifically include corporations.

It was a lie.

No such secret journal existed. Conkling had manipulated a handful of notes from the deliberations to make it appear the committee had discussed corporate rights. But later historians found the committee’s actual debates, thoroughly documented in the public record, and those discussions focused exclusively on protecting freed slaves.

Conkling’s “conspiracy theory” brazenly further claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment’s framers had secretly intended to protect corporations but pretended it was about racial equality just to get it passed.

This was also nonsense. The framers of the amendment discussed their intentions publicly and repeatedly; there was no secret corporate protection agenda.

But Conkling’s argument gave that era’s corporate lawyers the talking point they needed. Even though the Supreme Court didn’t decide San Mateo on constitutional grounds, Conkling’s conspiracy theory persisted. Some corporate attorneys still argue it today.

The Pattern of Defeat

Through the 1870s and into the early 1880s, corporations fought and lost case after case claiming Fourteenth Amendment rights:

Munn v. Illinois (1877): Lost. States can regulate businesses affected with a public interest.
Railroad Commission Cases (1886, decided just before Santa Clara): Lost. States can regulate railroad rates.
Stone v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. (1886): Lost on the constitutional question, though they won on other grounds.

The pattern was clear. The Supreme Court justices (other than Field) weren’t buying the corporate lawyers’ constitutional rights arguments. The Fourteenth Amendment meant what its framers said it meant: protection for freed slaves, not protection for soulless corporations that were mere creations of state law.

Corporate lawyers determined they needed a different strategy, as they couldn’t win by honest argument. So, they stopped trying to win that way and went straight to the Court’s reporter, J.C. Bancroft Davis.

The Santa Clara End Run

The genius of the Santa Clara headnote strategy, if you can call fraud genius, was its indirection.

The railroad didn’t need to win on the constitutional question: they just needed to get inserted into the official record that the chief justice claimed the Court had already decided the question.

J.C. Bancroft Davis’s headnote accomplished this perfectly. Future courts would cite Santa Clara’s headnote without ever reading the actual decision. They’d rely on Davis’s summary, which fraudulently claimed the Court had ruled on corporate constitutional rights.

The seventy-year legal war for corporate rights ended not with a victory in court but a sleight of hand in the court reporter’s office.

After 1886, the record shows, corporations stopped losing Fourteenth Amendment cases because courts now cited the Santa Clara headnote as establishing that corporations were persons. The precedent was manufactured by Davis, of course, but it became precedent nonetheless the first time another decision cited it.

That first happened in 1889, in Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway Company v. Beckwith, when the Supreme Court itself cited the Santa Clara headnote in ruling for corporate constitutional rights without questioning whether the earlier case had actually decided that issue.

The lie had become the law. The seventy-year war was over. The corporations had won.

Not through honest argument. Not through democratic process. Through fraud.

The Progressive Era Fights Back

Corporate constitutional rights didn’t stop the First Progressive Era: it just made the fight a hell of a lot harder.

Between 1890 and 1920, reformers won remarkable victories despite these repeated corporate constitutional claims. The Sherman Antitrust Act passed in 1890. The income tax became constitutional through the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913. Direct election of senators came through the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. Women won the right to vote through the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

Over shrieks of outrage from corporate lawyers, states passed worker protections, food safety laws, and regulations on corporate behavior, particularly with regard to their participation in politics.

Muckraking journalists gleefully exposed corporate abuses, outraging working people. Teddy Roosevelt busted trusts (monopolies) to the delight of small businesses. Woodrow Wilson created the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission to take control of the economy away from private banks and corporations and give it both stability and credibility.

But at every step, corporate lawyers used their new constitutional rights defined in the Santa Clara headnote to fight back. They challenged the income tax as a taking of property. They challenged hundreds of labor laws as violations of freedom of contract. They challenged antitrust enforcement as interference with corporate due process rights.

Sometimes they even won. In Lochner v. New York (1905), the Supreme Court struck down a state law limiting bakers to working sixty hours per week, ruling that the law violated the “liberty of contract” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Lochner Era, as it came to be called, saw both state and federal courts successfully and repeatedly striking down progressive legislation for decades—minimum wage laws, maximum hour laws, child labor restrictions, worker safety requirements. All were challenged as violations of the corporate Fourteenth Amendment constitutional rights allegedly granted by Santa Clara, and the Court went along with the corporate lawyers in nearly every case.

The fraudulent headnote of 1886 had given corporations a weapon they would use against every democratic reform for generations, including right up to this very day.

The Seeds of the Second Progressive Era

The First Progressive Era, however, laid the groundwork for something even bigger. Despite corporate resistance, it established a set of core principles that would again flower in the 1930s with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The income tax created a mechanism to fund public goods and redistribute wealth. The direct election of senators made the federal government more accountable to voters. Antitrust laws established the principle that corporate power could be constrained by government. And labor protections, though often struck down by courts (including to this day), established the principle that workers had at least some rights.

When the Republican Great Depression hit in 1929 and FDR was elected to solve the problem in 1932, these foundations were ready. Franklin Roosevelt built on them to create the New Deal, launching a Second Progressive Era that would finally make the American Dream real for a majority of Americans, at least until Reagan and the GOP took a meat axe to it.

But corporate constitutional rights remained, as the fraudulent pre-cedent of Santa Clara was never overturned or, frankly, even carefully examined. It sat in constitutional law like a dormant virus, waiting for the right conditions to reactivate.

Those conditions came in 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office and began the systematic dismantling of almost everything the Progressive Eras had built.

To clearly see how we got from 1886 to today, we first must know what the Founders actually believed about corporations. Their vision, it turns out, was the polar opposite of corporate constitutional rights. And recovering that vision is essential to undoing Davis’s and Field’s crime.

Saturday Report 7/4/26 — On America’s 250th birthday the billionaires got 11% richer, the Court crowned a king, and ICE handcuffed a nun on her way to Mass...

Thom Hartmann — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 13:26:10 GMT

— Two hundred and fifty years on, the real fight over the Declaration of Independence isn’t about fireworks: it’s about who gets to own it. Trump has spent the run-up to the semiquincentennial draping himself in the founding parchment like a gold-lamé toga, but as a sharp New Republic essay reminds us, that document has been contested since the ink was still wet. And it was never a birthday card: it was a fighting manifesto. Its most radical line isn’t the bit about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that gets cross-stitched onto throw pillows; it’s the part where Jefferson insisted that when any government “becomes destructive of these ends,” it is the right of the people “to alter or to abolish it.” The men who signed it weren’t celebrating a king. They were firing one. So it’s a rich spectacle to watch a president who muses aloud about third terms, pardons his own insurrectionists, and stamps his face on everything but the currency (give him time) claim Thomas Jefferson as a hype man. The Declaration doesn’t belong to the guy building the throne room replica of Putin’s in St. Petersburg: it belongs to the people it was written to protect, and it still comes with instructions.

— Nothing says “Happy Birthday, America” quite like a heat dome trying to kill a hundred million of us. As the nation fires up the grills, the National Weather Service warned that record-shattering temperatures would drive the heat index as high as 115°F from the Midwest to the East Coast, with more than 100 million people in the path, a drought gripping 45 states, and El Niño pouring gasoline on the whole thing. Across the Atlantic, Europe had just finished burying roughly 2,000 people in Spain and France after a June that hit 44°C — and the scientists at World Weather Attribution confirmed, in the dry prose of people who are quietly furious, that burning fossil fuels made it dramatically worse. That’s the fossil-fuel barons’ whole business model in one sentence: privatize the profit, socialize the corpses. And now the bill is coming due for our history itself, because Jamestown, Virginia is literally drowning. The site of the first permanent English settlement, the first representative assembly in 1619, and the arrival of the first enslaved Africans that very same year has watched the sea rise 1.6 feet in a century, with another three feet projected by 2075. As one archaeologist grimly put it, do nothing and we go “from Jamestown Island to Jamestown Islands.”

— And right on cue, a federal appeals court ruled that the Trump administration can keep throwing the signs explaining all of that down the memory hole. On July 2, the First Circuit lifted a judge’s order that would have forced the National Park Service to reinstall dozens of exhibits on slavery and climate change it had torn out under Trump’s executive order to “restore truth and sanity” to American history. The district judge, Angel Kelley, had accused the administration of trying to rewrite the nation’s story “with a white-out pen,” which is about as gentle as that description gets. Savor the double erasure: at Jamestown the rising water is dissolving the physical evidence of both American democracy and American slavery, while a thousand miles away the Trump regime and its employees are prying off the plaques that would explain either one. They pulled the climate signage out of Acadia last fall, presumably because a placard about rising seas might “disparage” the sea. And here’s the tell: even a panel of judges appointed entirely by Democratic presidents waved it through on a procedural technicality, which is the surest measure of how far the goalposts have already been dragged. The plaintiffs at Democracy Forward called it a “temporary procedural setback.” History is very much hoping they’re right.

— Good news! The world got nearly 11% richer last year. The bad news is you can probably guess who’s holding it. UBS’s new Global Wealth Report found global personal wealth jumped 10.8% in 2025 — the fastest pace since 2017 — minting close to a million new millionaires at a clip of some 2,680 a day, with the United States alone cranking out more than 440,000 of them and the billionaire count swelling 13% to 3,302. Champagne all around. Except for the “fly in the ointment” the bank tucked a little further down: median wealth actually fell in most countries even as the average rocketed upward — because “average” is the number you get when a few thousand people vacuum up the gains while the person standing in the exact middle just treads water. America ranks second in the world in average wealth and a humbling 28th in median wealth: the mathematical signature of an oligarchy wearing a middle-class Halloween mask. The World Inequality Report sharpens the knife: the top 0.001% — roughly 56,000 people — now control more wealth than the poorest four billion human beings on Earth combined, and their share has nearly doubled since 1995. That’s not a bug in the system: that’s forty-five years of Reaganomics and neoliberalism performing exactly as it was engineered to.

— Speaking of the folks who did get richer: the President bought 327 stocks the day before he personally moved the entire market. Buried in Trump’s new 927-page financial disclosure is the revelation that his investment accounts made 327 stock purchases on April 8, 2025 — worth as much as $12.8 million in names like Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Alphabet — exactly one day before he announced the tariff “pause” that sent the S&P 500 up nearly 10% and restored some $4 trillion in market value in a single session. The trades were disclosed more than fourteen months later than the law requires. The penalty for filing a year past the deadline? Two hundred dollars: roughly two D.C. parking tickets levied against a nearly $13 million bet. Remember when Martha Stewart did five months in a federal prison for a single well-timed phone call to buy some stock? The Founders wouldn’t have been shocked in the slightest at Trump’s corruption: as a companion New Republic piece lays out, the men who built this republic warned obsessively that concentrated wealth would one day swallow self-government whole, and those warnings have now “come appallingly true.” They wrote our Constitution to stop a king from looting the treasury; they just never imagined one who’d do it through a brokerage app.

— The headlines insisted Trump “lost” at the Supreme Court this term. Down in the fine print, though, King Trump is doing just fine. Yes, the 6–3 conservative majority rejected his bid to end birthright citizenship and struck down his emergency-powers tariffs, which are genuine losses, worth every bit of the celebration. But look at what those same justices handed him on the way out the door: they overruled a 91-year-old precedent to give him the power to fire the heads of independent agencies at will, gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, and — because Citizens United apparently didn’t finish the job — struck down limits on coordinated party spending mere months before the midterms, flushing still more dark money into the GOP’s massive, billionaire-funded machine. Layer on the “shadow docket,” where a run of unexplained emergency orders keeps quietly clearing Trump’s path, and the pattern is unmistakable. Harvard’s Laurence Tribe warned the republic is now “hanging by a thread”; Princeton’s Kim Lane Scheppele compared this bench to the pliant courts Putin and Orbán packed with loyalists. And Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said it plainest of all, accusing her own colleagues of contorting the law so that Trump “always wins.” The scholars say next term’s target is the professional civil service itself, as I mentioned earlier this week when discussing the history of the Pendleton Civil Service Act.

— Meanwhile, the agency Trump just funded to the eyeballs handcuffed a 56-year-old nun on her way to Mass. Sister Leticia “Letty” Ugboaja — a Nigerian-born Catholic sister who has spent a decade working as a registered nurse in South Texas — was walking the single block from her home to Our Lady of Sorrows in McAllen for Sunday Mass, in her habit, when ICE agents stopped her, took her rosary, cuffed her, and hauled her to a detention center an hour away, where she reportedly was held without the medication she needed. She was released the same day only after a frantic bipartisan scramble including Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz, who allowed that “a Catholic nun on her way to church is not a threat.” You don’t say! This is the same MAGA/GOP movement whose IRS just blessed partisan politicking from the pulpit and whose DHS quietly struck houses of worship from its “sensitive locations” list back in January: the self-styled defenders of Christendom who clutch their crosses at the prayer breakfast and then zip-tie a nurse holding a rosary. As one local official warned, if they’ll grab her, “even the best of us are not safe.” Somewhere, Jesus is flipping over a table.

— Geeky Science Alert! Want to outlive the billionaires? Turns out you should eat like a peasant. A new study written up over at StudyFinds — drawn from research in Cell Metabolism — finds that a mostly-plant “longevity diet” with a little fish, modeled on the old Mediterranean and Okinawan patterns, trimmed body fat and frailty, while the fashionable Western and keto diets did the opposite: more fat, more frailty, worse metabolic numbers all around. In other words, the beans-grains-olive-oil-and-sardines menu that kept Blue Zone grandmothers spry into their hundreds beats the influencer steak-and-butter regimen, and it does it without a single supplement bought from one of Bob Kennedy’s buddies. The through-line is the one your great-grandmother knew for free: eat the plants, skip the processed junk, and don’t let anyone sell you longevity in a bottle. The billionaires can keep the caviar.

Is America Celebrating 250 Years on the Wrong Side of the Revolution?

Comments on Friday’s Daily Take:

“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Words spoken to Sen. McCarthy of the red scare by Fred Fisher. A quote I would love to say to everyone still supporting Trump.

~ G2

Correctly outlined. Again, accurate remembrances that so sadly need to be replayed so that people don’t forget. So many assaults to trust. So much pain and destruction.

~ G.P. Baltimore

Click on the image above for the Commonwealth Report

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Is America Celebrating 250 Years on the Wrong Side of the Revolution?

Thom Hartmann — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 12:49:41 GMT

Tomorrow America turns 250 years old, and instead of a celebration of the republic those 56 men who signed the Declaration risked the hangman’s noose to create, we’re getting a MAGA rally.

Donald Trump has taken the nation’s 250th birthday, the once-in-a-lifetime anniversary that belongs to all of us, and rebranded it as a tribute to himself.

He shoved aside the bipartisan “America 250” commission that Congress created a decade ago, stood up his own White House-controlled operation ironically called “Freedom 250,” and steered our taxpayer money toward his own vanity celebration while the congressional commission was left begging for the funds it was promised.

He staged a violent, brutal UFC cage fight on the White House lawn to satisfy his own bloodlust. He sent a fleet of eighteen-wheelers loaded with white supremacist PragerU’s cartoon versions of American history rolling across the country. And this weekend, on the same National Mall where Americans once gathered to mourn Lincoln and to hear Dr. King, he’s throwing what he actually called, in his own words, “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all.”

Two hundred and fifty years ago we declared our independence from exactly this. From a man who conflated himself with the country. From a ruler who believed the government, the honor, the lives and sacrifice of generations were his personal property, to be used for his own personal glory and profit.

When our nation’s Founders overthrew a king in 1776, they paid a huge price for it. Altogether, seventeen of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were wiped out by the war they declared.

The signers wrote in the Declaration, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor,” and it was a simple statement of fact. The day they signed that document, each legally became a traitor and was sentenced to death for treason by the ruler who controlled their lands and their homes.

One the wealthiest of the signers was Thomas Nelson of Virginia, but a year after the signing the British had seized his home and lands. When he and George Washington attacked the British in Nelson’s hometown, he encouraged Washington to attack the Nelson homestead, which British General Cornwallis had taken as his headquarters, with cannons. The house was destroyed, and after the war Nelson, unable to repay loans he’d taken out against it to help finance the Revolution, lost his property; he died in poverty at the age of 50.

The wealthy Philadelphia merchant, Robert Morris, lost 150 ships at sea in the war, wiping out his small fortune; he died destitute. Signer William Ellery of Rhode Island similarly lost everything, as did Virginia’s Carter Braxton and Benjamin Harrison, Pennsylvania’s George Clymer, New York’s Philip Livingston, Georgia’s Lyman Hall, and New Jersey’s Francis Hopkinson.

The British destroyed New York’s Francis Lewis’ property and threw his wife into such a hellhole of a jail that she died two years later. Three of South Carolina’s four signers — Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., and Arthur Middleton — were captured by the British and held in a filthy, unheated prison and brutally tortured for a year before George Washington freed them in a prisoner exchange.

New Jersey farmer John Hart’s wife died shortly after he signed the Declaration, and his thirteen children were scattered among sympathetic families to hide them from the British and conservative loyalists. He never saw them again, dying alone and wracked with grief three years later.

New Jersey State Supreme Court Justice Richard Stockton took his wife and children into hiding after he signed the Declaration, but conservatives loyal to the crown turned them in. He was so badly beaten and starved in the British prison that he died before the war was over. His home was looted, and his wife and children lived the rest of their lives as paupers.

Altogether, nine of the men in that room died and four lost their children as a direct result of putting their names to the Declaration of Independence. Every single one had to flee his home, and, after the war, twelve returned to find only rubble.

They were all willing to fight and die for the idea of democracy in America. Every one of them.

So on our 250th birthday — with draft-dodger “Corporal Bonespurs” and his lickspittle Republicans’ corruption and refutation of democracy so painfully obvious — it’s worth asking the question directly, the one this whole grotesque spectacle forces on us:

Do the Redcoats (at least in philosophy) once again rule America?

Does today’s America reflect the belief that all people “are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” as Hegseth purges our military of Black and female officers? As ICE terrorizes anybody whose skin isn’t white with their “Kavanaugh Stops”? As a man gets three decades in prison for hiding anti-fascist literature?

Are we a nation ruled by MAGA-aligned oligarchs or by We, the People?

By overwhelming majorities, Americans want:
— cheaper and more universal healthcare and drugs,
— quality, secular public schools and free higher education available to all,
— the right to unionize and a livable minimum wage,
— protections from discrimination,
— freedom from fear of death by firearms,
— a clean environment and immediate action to mitigate the climate emergency,
— affordable housing,
— an end to corporate monopolies that lock small business out of the marketplace while generating obscene profits for Epstein-class oligarchs,
— a humane end to our twin crises of homelessness and untreated mental illness,
— medical-based (rather than prison-based) programs to help people suffering from addiction,
— morbidly rich individuals and giant corporations to pay their fair share of taxes,
— strengthened Social Security and real Medicare,
— the right to vote without challenge or interference,
— the right to abortion, IVF, and birth control,
— and punishment for leaders who lie us into wars, commit torture and rape, and try to overthrow our republic by deceit and violence.

If we were truly a democratic republic — the imagined goal of the Declaration and Constitution — we would have already joined every other developed democracy in the world in having these things.

Instead, we are the developed world’s outlier.

How is this possible in a nation that has, for over two centuries, proclaimed itself a republic where — within the bounds of the protected rights of minorities — the will of the majority is supposed to be enacted into law?

With a Republican-controlled House, and a filibuster enforced by Republicans in the Senate (who represent 41 million fewer Americans than their Democratic Senate peers), and six Republican toadies to billionaires on the Supreme Court, can we honestly say — as Jefferson proclaimed — “that to secure these rights” of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” our state and federal governments are today “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”?

Tomorrow we celebrate the legal and formal declaration of a war — the second-bloodiest in American history — that we fought to separate ourselves from a brutal warlord, the King of England, and the morbidly rich oligarchs who propped him up.

We’ve never fully acted out the ideals the Founders and Framers borrowed from the Huron and Iroquois — as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy — but throughout our history we have been moving forward in fits and starts for over two centuries.

At least we were moving forward until the Reagan Revolution, when a small group of billionaires and industrialists put together a plan, authored in 1971 by Lewis Powell (who Richard Nixon put on the Supreme Court in 1972), that billionaires and Republicans on the Court and in Congress have been following like a blueprint ever since.

And the consequences have been devastating, a naked repudiation of the ideals of July 4, 1776.

In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s — as unions flourished and Eisenhower and Kennedy used a top 90% income tax rate on the morbidly rich to build freeways, airports, and tens of thousands of gleaming new schools and hospitals across the land — Americans had a lot of trust in our government. Around 80 percent of Americans told pollsters they trusted our government, a number similar to that of the citizens of virtually all the western European countries.

Today, the Pew Research Center says, only 17 percent of Americans say they trust our government. Fewer than half of us even know today that we’re celebrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

How did this happen?

For the morbidly rich and big corporations back in the 1970s, this average American’s trust in a government that was then maintaining high tax rates and — through the newly-created EPA, Clean Air Act, and Clean Water Act — holding corporations accountable for their pollution and poisonous products, was, they believed, an existential threat to their wealth and power.

Thus, in response to the growing environmental and consumer movements kicked off by Rachel Carson’s 1961 book Silent Spring and Ralph Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, giant corporations and the morbidly rich people they created set out to destroy Americans’ faith in our tax-and-regulate form of government.

As Lewis Powell wrote in his infamous 1971 Memo arguing that businesses and very wealthy individuals needed to mobilize to stop this “assault” on American business:

“Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader who — thanks largely to the media — has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.”

Powell then quoted a May 1971 article profiling Nader (who wrote the foreword to my book The Hidden History of Monopolies) in Fortune magazine:

“The passion that rules in him — and he is a passionate man — is aimed at smashing utterly the target of his hatred, which is corporate power. He thinks, and says quite bluntly, that a great many corporate executives belong in prison — for defrauding the consumer with shoddy merchandise, poisoning the food supply with chemical additives, and willfully manufacturing unsafe products that will maim or kill the buyer. He emphasizes that be is not talking just about ‘fly-by-night hucksters’ but the top management of blue-chip business.”

This was no less, Powell declared in his next paragraph, than:

“A frontal assault … on our government, our system of justice, and the free enterprise system…”

His solution, as history shows, was for big corporations and the morbidly rich to create a network of think tanks to alter public opinion, to build a filtering organization to help pack the courts, to create rightwing media empires — particularly in the realms of television, social media, and talk radio — to replace trust in government with cynicism, and to insert “business-friendly” rightwing teachers and professors in schools and colleges while purging woke “liberals.”

After Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court and five corrupt Republicans overturned Teddy Roosevelt’s Tillman Act and legalized corporate campaign donations in a decision Powell himself authored (Bellotti), corporations began sponsoring politicians willing to put deregulation and tax cuts at the top of their agenda in exchange for large campaign contributions and other forms of support like cushy jobs after leaving office.

Clarence Thomas, after taking millions in “gifts,” then cast the 2010 deciding vote in Citizens United to destroy the few remaining remnants of law preventing naked bribery of public officials; in 2024 he and his Republican colleagues tripled down on corrupting our form of government in Snyder by declaring that bribes paid out after politicians and judges do the bidding of rich people or corporations are mere “gratuities.”

The key to making the entire project work was destroying citizens’ faith in the government our ancestors (I’m a member of SAR) fought to create in 1776, because Powell and the tobacco and fossil fuel oligarchs who owned him believed government was taking too much of their taxes (at that time the top income tax bracket was 74% and corporate income taxes could max out at nearly 50%), and regulations to protect consumers, workers, and the environment were cutting into profits.

If they could get the American people to reject government and instead embrace corporations “sponsoring” public goods like research centers, hospitals, and civic centers; privatize Medicare (through George W. Bush’s Medicare “Advantage” scam); privatize public education through vouchers, the Ten Commandments, and charter schools; and have public parks, stadiums, museums, and other institutions turn to billionaires for charity instead of depending on tax dollars, then they could eventually get their taxes lowered and those pesky regulations crushed (as the corrupt Republicans on the Court did in 2024 by blowing up the Chevron deference).

The Powell Memo brought into being a plethora of rightwing think tanks, radio and “news” networks, and advocacy organizations that today litter the top hits on any search of government-mediated topics from free trade to tax policy to “right to work for less” assaults on organized labor.

Their efforts show up regularly in news stories, college textbooks and courses, and thousands of opinion pieces published across the internet, in major national publications, and on social media every day. Rightwing talk radio — with some individual hosts getting over a million dollars a year in subsidies — has provided a steady drumbeat of “government can’t do anything right” for almost forty years.

The result of this corrosive social and political poison has been that Powell and his billionaire acolytes were successful in turning average Americans against their government and its leaders. So successful that, as one 2022 poll famously showed, “62% of Republicans say Putin is a ‘stronger leader’ than Biden.”

Powell’s work also set the stage for the 1981 Reagan presidency, which lowered income taxes so much that today’s average billionaire pays around 3.4 percent, radically cut the corporate tax rate while de-funding the IRS, and slashed regulations, particularly on the fossil fuel and chemical industries.

Reagan famously said, in 1986, that “The nine most frightening words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

In other words, don’t trust the government we proclaimed, fought for, and many of our ancestors died to create on this day in 1776: instead, appeal to your friendly local corporation or billionaire for help.

Reagan also kicked off the modern neoliberal era by negotiating the GATT (leading to the WTO) and his VP, George HW Bush, negotiated the NAFTA agreement that began the process of moving over 60,000 mostly-unionized factories and over 15-20 million good-paying union jobs out of the US and into low-wage countries.

While destroying faith in government has worked out well for transnational corporations and the morbidly rich, its main side-effect has been to empower demagogues and enemies of democracy like Donald Trump, JD Vance, and the prime-time lineup at Fox “News.” Half of Republican voters now say they’re ready to reject democracy altogether.

The Trump v US presidential immunity decision by six on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court in 2024 that set the stage for “Führer Trump” raises an urgent question on this 250th Fourth of July:

“Can we even recover our republican democracy, the one generations of Americans have fought and died for?”

Republicans (state and federal) have passed hundreds of new laws, all with the approval of five or six (depending on the year) corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, designed to make it more difficult for American citizens to participate in the process of selecting their representatives, the core function of a democratic republic.

They’ve also proposed or passed numerous laws so severely criminalizing voter registration drives that the League of Women Voters has abandoned their efforts in multiple Red States.

Republicans have criminalized protest and dissent, primary American values written into the First Amendment, and even — outrageously — given a “get out of jail free” card in numerous Red states to people who intentionally kill protesters like Heather Heyer. As just one example, a headline at Truthout bluntly states:

“DeSantis Signs Bill Ending Vehicle Driver Liability For Hitting Protesters.”

In Idaho, a local Republican Party followed other Red states in running a fundraiser called “Trigger Time with Kyle” where enthusiastic MAGA donors could fire assault weapons at black human-like targets alongside the man who was acquitted — after bizarre jury instructions by a rightwing judge — of murdering two nonviolent people protesting George Floyd’s murder.

The head of the Heritage Foundation even proclaimed the Republican Party’s possible willingness to slaughter Americans who oppose their Project 2025 agenda.

Today’s Republican Party no longer believes in democracy or the core ideals on which this nation was founded: they reject “equality before the law” of all human beings, and the concept that our government derives its power and legitimacy from “the consent of the governed.”

Instead, like the Loyalists and Tories during the Revolutionary era, and the traitor Confederates in the 1860s, they’ve sworn their allegiance and fealty to the rich and powerful; to would-be monarchs and dictators like Trump and Vance; to armed militias and bullies seeking to whitewash American history, intimidate voters, and control our schools and public institutions.

And now six Republicans on the Supreme Court have given Trump and future presidents craven enough to use them king-like powers over the very agencies Congress created to protect the rest of us and our environment.

If it seems like America is re-fighting the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, it’s because there’s a sizeable group of right-wing Americans who will proudly tell you (and have even proclaimed to judges in January 6th trials) that’s exactly what they believe they’re doing.

In both of those two past wars, one group of Americans believed in the ideal of a pluralistic democracy and a republic deriving its authority from the will and consent of its people.

On the other side were people who believed that democracy was a dangerous experiment and a grave mistake; that the rich and powerful should rule and only white male landowners should vote or hold political office.

This is what the Republican party now represents: Oligarchy.

— Rule by the rich, ignoring “the consent of the governed.”
— The suppression of dissent, the oppression of minorities, and replacing the ballot box with the iron fist of a police state run of, by, and for the wealthy few.

And they’re pushing us there hard and fast:

— A political network run by a group of right-wing billionaires has a larger budget and more employees than the entire Republican Party.
— A family of billionaire oligarchs from Australia crank democracy-hating propaganda into the American political bloodstream nearly every day on cable television and in print.
— Voices openly denigrating democracy and promoting hate and intolerance — the hallmarks of brutal fascism — are on local radio and television in every American city, every single day, and similarly dominate the secret algorithms of Social Media.
— The single largest source of threats of violence and murders by terrorists in America today are committed by white-supremacists aligned with the GOP who hate and fear the idea of a pluralistic, democratic society.

Tragically, for the third time in our nation’s history, patriots who believe in the ideals of July 4, 1776 must defend America against those who don’t.

Several of these hard-right groups have openly declared their intention to start a second American Civil War. Tim McVeigh is their hero. They celebrate the anniversaries of Waco and McVeigh’s bombing. They honor Hitler’s birthday. They have their “fourteen words” which show up in one after another mass shooter’s manifestos.

They say they want to see Americans killing each other in the name of white supremacy and rule by the rich, and have slaughtered Hispanics (El Paso), Jews (Tree of Life), and Blacks (Mother Emmanuel). They terrorize Asian American, queer, and Native American communities for sport. They applaud ICE.

They declare their loyalty to a white-supremacist real estate oligarch from New York, get their news from Australian and Russian oligarchs, and have embraced an ideology championed by Germans in the 1930s. At a Republican rally last year they were openly waving swastika flags and, when asked to denounce them, Florida’s governor instead claimed the reporter asking the question was trying to “smear me as if I had something to do with it.”

We had our third chance in 2024, and we let it slip. Trump won, and he came back not chastened but emboldened, surrounded by the same billionaires who bankrolled his rise and are now getting their return on investment in spades.

Everything the Loyalists and the Confederates and the Redcoats ever wanted — rule by the rich, contempt for the ballot, a leader who answers to no one — is being assembled in front of us in real time.

But here’s what the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots always forget: the people who signed that Declaration were, at first, losing too.

They were outgunned, outspent, and written off. But they won anyway, because enough of them decided a republic was worth more than their own comfort. We get to make that same decision now, peacefully in the streets, in the 2026 midterms, and in every town council and school board and courthouse where these people are trying to plant their MAGA flag.

When “moderate” voices within their ranks, like Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger, and even (for G-d’s sake!) Bill Kristol, dare pop their heads up, the majority of the Republican Party viciously attacks them.

Dissent — like in the colonies before 1776 or the Old South leading up to the Civil War — is no longer allowed in the GOP. Authoritarianism like that celebrated by King George III and his then-Colonial-toadies now prevails. Oligarchy has completely seized the Party.

These are, as Thomas Paine (a fervent believer in democracy) said, “the times that try men’s souls.”

Seven months before the Declaration of Independence was signed, General George Washington had lost New York to the British, was encamped at McKonkey’s Ferry on the Delaware River opposite Trenton, New Jersey, and 11,000 men had just deserted his army and fled back to their homes. A brutal winter was upon him and the brave men who stayed with him including one of my ancestors.

In response, Thomas Paine, knowing the consequences of losing the war, wrote a pamphlet titled The American Crisis that Washington ordered read to all American troops across every field of battle. It said, in part:

“The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered…”

We must not let the right-wing billionaires, politicians, and their masked terrorists prevail.

These oligarchs and their lickspittles are daily working to destroy our public schools, end freedom from religious domination, and eliminate our right to vote or trust that our politicians and judges are working for us instead of billionaires and giant corporations.

When Rhode Island’s Stephen Hopkins signed the Declaration of Independence, he remarked to his friend William Ellery that, “My hand trembles, but my heart does not.” But Virginia’s Benjamin Harrison, who weighed nearly 300 pounds, commented to Massachusetts’ Elbridge Gerry, a short, thin man, “With me it [the hanging] will all be over in a minute, but you will be dancing on air an hour after I am gone.”

Will any Republican in today’s House or Senate — the bodies those men created — find even a fraction of the courage of those who founded this nation? Will Democratic candidates repudiate big, dark, and foreign money and embrace the ideals of the New Deal and Great Society, the ideals that Paine wrote about in Agrarian Justice and The Crisis?

This July 4th let us all remember, as Paine wrote in words that inspired a new nation and ultimately changed the course of history:

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Tag, we’re it.

Click on the image above for the Commonwealth Report

Is America Celebrating 250 Years on the Wrong Side of the Revolution?

Thom Hartmann — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 12:05:45 GMT

3July2026 Podcast

Every Republic in History Has Feared the Man Who Put His Face on Their Money

Thom Hartmann — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 13:04:00 GMT

On Tuesday the Office of Government Ethics released Donald Trump’s annual financial disclosure, and the astonishingly corrupt number that jumps off its 927 pages — a length his team laughingly insists proves his “commitment to transparency” — is $1.4 billion.

That’s what he personally reported earning from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures in the single year of 2025 when he was president for roughly 11 months, dwarfing everything he took in from real estate, hotels, and golf courses combined.

The largest slice, roughly $635 million, were royalties on the $TRUMP meme coin, a “collectible” digital token — basically, a little JPG-style image he sold to the rubes — whose entire “collectible” value rests on one thing, which is his name and face stamped onto what he’s hustling as internet money.

This is one of the oldest cons in the long history of men who decided that the state and its treasury were, first and foremost, there for themselves to loot.

When Julius Caesar put his own portrait on a Roman coin in 44 BC, it struck the citizens of Rome like a slap in the face. For centuries the Republic had minted gods and dead ancestors onto its silver but never a living man, because a living ruler’s face on the money was understood as the visual representation of kingship, the mark of the very Eastern caliphates and Northern European tyrannies that free Romans claimed to despise and had risen above.

Caesar was dead within a month, stabbed on the Senate floor by men who read that image on their coins as his final abandonment of what Jefferson would have called “republican values.” He’d told them who he thought he was — a king, rather than the leader of a republic — and he’d told them via the one object every Roman handled every day.

It was, essentially, his declaration that Rome was no longer a republic, and history shows it signaled the beginning of the end of the Roman state as one ruled, at least in part, by its own people.

Trump has made the same confession, only digitized, although unlike Caesar he’s (fortunately: we are considerably less barbaric than Ancient Rome) lived to file the paperwork and brag about his picture being plastered everywhere you look.

The striking parallel here runs deeper than the Trump’s “coins” (including the $Trump and $Melania): Julius Caesar and the corrupt emperors who followed him as the Roman empire disintegrated didn’t just stamp their faces on the currency.

They extracted the wealth of ordinary Romans through that currency, shaving the silver content of the denarius a little at a time, spending the debased coins at full value, and letting the savings of farmers and shopkeepers hollow out across generations while the gilded ballrooms and the triumphal arches went up.

The emperor kept the silver. The commoner kept a coin that bought a little less bread every year. It was the cleanest wealth transfer the ancient world ever devised, and it ran straight through the ruler’s own mint.

Now look at what Trump and his hustler sons have built: a Reuters investigation found that Trump’s increasingly brazen criminal family has now pulled roughly $2.3 billion out of four crypto ventures since he returned to the White House, and — astonishing in its shamelessness — that more than a million ordinary MAGA followers who bought into those same ventures similarly lost roughly $2.3 billion.

Dollar for dollar, like a well-oiled machine.

That money didn’t vanish in some market crash or weird Fed devaluation; it moved out of the pockets of a million MAGA true believers who Trump saw as marks and into the pockets of the guy who put his face on the “coin.”

The $TRUMP token is down 97 percent from its peak. A 29-year-old software engineer in California put in $2,000 because Trump’s name read to her as a guarantee, and watched it shrink to under $120.

What took the Caesars three centuries of debasement, Trump managed in eleven months, and he didn’t even have to hide it inside the nation’s money supply.

His MAGA suckers lined up and handed their life savings over, because they thought he was a “brilliant businessman” who’d make them rich. Just like all the thousands of others he’s fleeced over the decades (many of whom ended up suing him).

Then the machinery of the state bent to protect his scams, which is what I wrote about in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, where I argued that oligarchs rarely bother stealing from the treasury directly when they can simply capture the system that’s supposed to stop them. Handing America over to billionaires and corporations, after all, was the essence of Clarence Thomas’ corrupt deciding vote in Citizens United after he and his wife had taken millions themselves.

And so Trump, his kids, and his wife did it right out in the open, and not a single elected Republican or rightwing media oligarch has so far objected!

— Weeks after the Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun poured tens of millions into World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s DeFi venture, the SEC quietly paused its fraud case against him.

— Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire Binance founder who’d pleaded guilty to money-laundering compliance failures, after Binance helped enrich the Trump family’s stablecoin. Two hundred million dollars of foreign money flowed in to the Trumps in that case, investigations disappeared, and pardons flowed out.

Draw that sequence on a whiteboard for any prosecutor and watch them start muttering the word “racketeering.” The silence around all of this is its own kind of obscene tell.

Elected Republicans are either in on the con or terrified of what Trump will do to them — like Caesar would have done in 44 BC — if they object to his fleecing their own voters.

Roman coins were also propaganda as much as currency, and the populace often learned a new emperor had seized power only when his face turned up on the money in their pockets.

Following Julius Caesar, a major job of the Roman mint was to broadcast the ruler’s image and thus remind everyone whose nation, whose empire, this had become.

Our modern version of that old Roman mint are Trump’s toadies who’re hanging banners of his glowering face on federal buildings all over DC and stamping his visage on this year’s passports. Not to mention the Trump gold coins he had minted for America’s anniversary and the talk of putting his face on a $250 bill.

And the right-wing media machine, so quick to fly into screaming outrage when Hunter Biden — not Joe, who took not a penny — made a mere million bucks a year for being on the board of Burisma, have gone strangely quiet about a president himself who just self-reported fleecing a million of his own supporters to the tune of billions.

The same rightwing-billionaire-owned propaganda apparatus that screamed for years about the dick-pics on Hunter’s laptop and manufactured weeks of near-hysterical outrage over Obama’s eight-page disclosure can’t summon even a hoarse whisper about a 927-page one.

Which brings me back to Rome.

In August of 1998, Louise and I spent a day wandering that city, touring the private galleries of the Vatican in the morning with one of the Pope’s personal assistants and standing inside the Colosseum in the afternoon, marveling at the engineering of an empire that ran on conquest and tribute and the flat certainty that some men were born to consume the fruits of the labor of others.

The next day we were driven up to Castle Gandolfo, the papal summer residence in the hills, where I’d been invited to a private audience with Pope John Paul II after a dear friend of his read my book The Prophet’s Way and suggested to him that we should meet. I’ve rarely felt history sit so close, or had such a great honor.

Something about that visit and the historical research I did afterward deeply reminds me of today.

The Catholic papacy rose out of the wreckage of that very Roman empire, and the title the pope now carries, Pontifex Maximus, was originally the title of the Roman emperors, held first by Caesar himself, the same Caesar who first put his face on the Empire’s coinage.

I Saw This Happen Behind the Iron Curtain. I Never Expected to See It Here...

For centuries the Roman Catholic Church wore the empire’s crown and behaved like an imperial power in its own right. And then, slowly, that institution turned itself inside out: today the strongest, most honored and respected voice on Earth against the idolatry of wealth and the machinery of exploitative empire comes from that very chair.

The man sitting in it now is an American, and a genuinely decent human being. Pope Leo XIV has spent this year pointing to the richest enclaves on the planet while condemning the “idolatry of power and money,” warning against the “pursuit of unjust wealth and the illusion of dominion,” and describing an economy that lets a wealthy few live in a bubble of comfort and luxury while everyone else absorbs the losses.

An American pope wearing a Caesar’s title, calling out the sins of the Epstein/billionaire class, while a billionaire American president (and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet) wearing a Caesar’s ambitions commits Julius’ crime in a 927-page confession and laughingly calls it “transparency.”

The Romans could have told us how this story ends. When one man puts his face on the money and the buildings, captures the courts, and treats the public treasury as his personal party-fund to build vanity ballrooms and arches, the Republic has already been broken, brought to its knees, no matter what anyone still calls it.

The one advantage we hold over the first century’s Romans, however, is that we still have a vote — at least for now, in defiance of Trump’s and the GOP’s best efforts — and we still get to decide whether the crimes against the nation and his own followers that he confessed to will ever be stopped and prosecuted.

So use it. Call your senators and your representative through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them that a president ignoring the Constitution to monetize his office and pardoning his donors in exchange for millions deserves immediate action.

Make sure you’re registered and ready at vote.org, and find out who’s on your state and local ballot at openstates.org: the people who can actually check this kind of power sit as often in your statehouse as in Washington.

And if this work of mine gave you a clearer way to see what’s in front of all of us, share it, forward it, and post it where the algorithm can’t quietly bury it.

Independent journalism survives because readers refuse to be lied to, and refuse to let their neighbors be lied to either. Subscribe at hartmannreport.com, support the work if you’re able, and pass it along.

This wannabe emperor has told us exactly who he is and who the lickspittles who serve him are. The only question left is what the rest of us intend to do about it.

Comments on Wednesday’s Daily Take:

Today, thanks to a tinpot Dick-Tater, we’ve become TV’s “Mission Impossible’s” Ghalea

Ghalea was a fictional African country threatened by a massive counterfeiting scheme in the Season 2 episode “The Money Machine” (1967). [Sounds like Crypto, to me.]

~ Sir Okie Doke

This rapidly ascending police state status is a topic for a letter to the editor of your local newspaper and for social media or even local radio and TV. Thom has supplied the facts and many of the sordid details

~ Robert B. Elliott

Read the Article | See all Comments

Click on the image above for the Commonwealth Report

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is available this week in bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

Every Republic in History Has Feared the Man Who Put His Face on Their Money

Thom Hartmann — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 07:31:18 GMT

7-2-26 podcast

I Saw This Happen Behind the Iron Curtain. I Never Expected to See It Here...

Thom Hartmann — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:04:16 GMT

Image by mnswede70 from Pixabay

In the winter of 1986 while living in West Germany I visited East Berlin with my oldest daughter, who was still a teenager, and on the far side of Checkpoint Charlie we were picked up by a young man named Torsten who ran a gypsy cab. Before we’d gone more than a block he had the two of us rehearsing a story, that we were his long-lost cousins over from the West, so we’d all say the same thing if the Volkspolizei or Stasi stopped the car.

He couldn’t have been much past twenty, and he was kind to two strangers all afternoon (and grateful for the 20 Deutschmarks I gave him), but under all of it he was afraid the entire day, because in the country he lived in a man could be hauled in for the crime of driving people around and not being able to account for himself.

That fear, the quiet hum of it running beneath an ordinary afternoon, is exactly what a “papers, please” society feels like from the inside.

I’ve been thinking about Torsten all week, because the reporting now says that immigration checkpoints are being set up within the United States, and that more than 213 million of us Americans live inside a hundred-mile band running inward from every land border and coastline where federal agents can now stop your car and demand proof of your immigration status. No international crossing required.

That zone, first drawn by a federal regulation back in 1953, swallows ten entire states and cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and the libertarians at the Cato Institute, who are nobody’s idea of open-borders radicals, call it the “Constitution-free zone” and have gone to the trouble of mapping the checkpoints one by one.

It’s “Constitution-free” because ICE has decided that the Fourth Amendment, which reads, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…” is just a suggestion, rather than one of the foundational guarantees of American liberty; just an obstacle standing between the Trump administration and the police state it’s steadily but relentlessly building.

In Washington, D.C., for example, a construction worker got waved over by the Park Police for a minor traffic matter, and within a minute ICE agents had surrounded his truck, asking where everyone was from and whether they were in the country illegally. Two of his passengers were taken away, and nobody would tell him where.

ICE is also now paying state and local police to help, and the money is staggering. One estimate says the total could hit two billion dollars this year alone. In Florida, police departments pocketed nearly forty million dollars for vehicles and gear. In the Florida Keys, agents threw up a checkpoint on the only highway in and out, a tourist route, and made more than three hundred arrests.

They’re stationed at courthouses, bus stations, train terminals, and airports too, snaring domestic travelers who never came near a border. The ACLU’s Naureen Shah put it plainly. “We’ve never seen this financial incentive scheme exist.”

When the Supreme Court first blessed these interior checkpoints in the 1976 Martinez-Fuerte decision, it authorized a brief stop and a question or two about citizenship, nothing more, no searches, no fishing expeditions. What Cato and others have documented in the years since is a steady drift into prolonged detentions, questioning about anything and everything, and drug dogs brought out with no particular reason.

And this past September five neofascist Republicans on the Supreme Court (led, in this case, by “Pillsbury Doughboy Brett Kavanaugh”) went further, clearing agents in the Los Angeles area to treat the color of your skin, your Spanish or accented English, the kind of work you do, or even the corner where you wait for it as reasons enough to stop you. They now call them “Kavanaugh Stops.”

One of the citizens swept up before that ruling was a young brown-skinned man born in East L.A. who kept shouting that he’d been born right here as agents pinned his arm behind his back. And if you try to flee one of these checkpoints by car at speed, a federal statute makes that its own felony punishable by up to five years.

Earlier this week, masked, armed, anonymous ICE thugs snatched and handcuffed a nun off the street in Texas and threw her into a “detention” cell; she was a nurse dressed in a full habit, but her skin was brown, an apparent violation of the new Trump doctrine of Make America White Again.

If this seems to you like something out of the old world, you’re right, but we didn’t need to import it from the Nazis or the Soviets. We built our own version early and often, and Trump and his Republican lickspittles on the Court and in Congress seem determined to reinvent it here in the 21st century.

Prior to the Civil War, enslaved people in this country couldn’t travel a country road without a written pass, and, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, the slave patrols that were ubiquitous across the Old South would stop any Black person and demand to see it.

After emancipation the Black Codes and the vagrancy laws did the same work under new rationalizations. And in 1892, racists in Congress passed the Geary Act, which ordered every Chinese resident in America to carry a photographic “certificate of residence” at all times or face arrest, hard labor, and deportation.

It was the first time this country made illegal presence a federal crime, and Chinese immigrants understood exactly what it was, calling the papers “dog tags” because a Chinese laborer now carried his number in his pocket the way a licensed dog carried his on a collar, and any white man who felt like it could stop him and demand to see it.

It was “Papers, please,” made in America from the start of our republic, aimed at whoever white men decided didn’t belong.

Then there’s what I saw for myself living overseas. For part of our years in Germany my family lived right on the East/West German line, in the little town of Höchheim, where I worked for the international relief organization Salem.

A few hundred feet from our house stood two enormous fences, both built on Eastern soil, with a raked strip of sand between them so the guards could read a single footprint, and watchtowers rose some thirty feet with men and machine guns inside. When we walked near the road they’d swing the guns toward us.

Now and then someone trying to cross got shot dead in that sand. The border towns we could see on the far side were lit up all night so no one could slip out in the dark, and in the spring, when the thaw shifted the ground, we’d be woken by the muffled thump of land mines going off on their own.

Years later we took a train through East Germany and the police came down the aisle with machine guns and dogs, demanding to see everyone’s papers, and when my eight-year-old son lifted a camera to take a picture they threatened him until he put it down.

That same instinct built the apartheid pass laws of South Africa, where every Black adult had to carry a passbook they bitterly nicknamed the dompas, the “stupid pass,” and where in 1960 police shot sixty-nine people dead, most of them in the back, outside a police station in Sharpeville for the crime of showing up without one.

The Soviets ran their whole country on internal passports that told you where you were allowed to live and work, just like they erected statues to Joseph Stalin everywhere you went.

Every one of these systems existed for a single purpose: to monitor, intimidate, and control the movement and behaviors of people the state had decided it couldn’t trust to be compliant. And Trump, Miller, et al apparently believe they should be the model for the new America they’re trying to build with the help of rightwing media oligarchs, toadies hanging banners with his face on them across federal buildings, National Guard patrols in our cities, and compliant Republicans on the Court and in Congress.

Which is why today the Trump regime no longer even needs a man in a uniform to stop you and ask who you are and what you’re up to. Last spring, researchers pulled apart the official White House app for Trump’s MAGA loyalists and found it capable of tracking a user’s precise location every few minutes, shipped with a privacy disclosure that falsely told Apple it collected nothing, while routing most of its traffic to private third-party servers to get around the Fourth Amendment.

When a security firm actually ran the app on real phones they didn’t catch it broadcasting locations, so the code could do the tracking even if no one saw it happen: the Trump regime built a tool capable of following you everywhere you go and then lied to the app store about what it collected.

As I wrote in The Hidden History of Big Brother in America, the surveillance state rarely arrives announcing itself. And the irony in this one is that the app wasn’t initially aimed at immigrants or dissidents but at the administration’s own supporters, the people who downloaded it to feel close to Trump with regular rants and updates straight from the Oval Office.

Somewhere along the way we even turned “papers, please” into a video game, a Cold War diorama you boot up for the pleasant shiver of it, and now REAL ID has quietly added a document check to the airport line you already dreaded.

The old checkpoint needed a guard to ask to see your papers: the new one just scans your face and instantly identifies you, a feature that’s now also available to police watching people drive or walk along the streets in most big American cities.

ICE is now using it to monitor protestors. As The Washington Post documented earlier this year:

“Federal immigration officers fanning out across Minnesota and other parts of the country are newly equipped with an array of state-of-the-art surveillance technologies, thanks to a bill passed last summer that transformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the country’s most highly funded law enforcement agency.
“ICE has wasted no time spending its war chest, buying new tools ranging from biometric trackers to mobile phone location databases, spyware and drones, while loosening restrictions on how it uses some of these technologies.
“These new surveillance powers come at a time when ICE is also pushing the bounds of its traditional role of immigration enforcement. In recent months, ICE leaders, backed by top Trump administration officials, have asserted the authority to use all available tools to monitor and investigate anti-ICE protester networks, including U.S. citizens.”

The freedom to move through our own country without stopping to account for ourselves, without proving to a masked, armed, anonymous officer answering to Trump that we have permission to be on the street, is one of the most ancient things — from the days of the Roman republic to 1980s East Germany to today — that separates a free people from a police state.

Torsten understood that in 1986, which is why he was scared even while he was being decent to two strangers who could have gotten him arrested.

We’ve come here in America from the slave pass to the Chinese dog tag to biometric surveillance, facial recognition, automatic license plate readers, cellphone location tracking, and immigration checkpoints miles from any border. The through-line never changes, only the tools and the intentions of the government that uses them.

So don’t let this one slide past as somebody else’s problem just because you were born here and can carry the right documents. Call your representatives through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them to rein in interior checkpoints and roving patrols and to restore the Fourth Amendment inside that so-called “hundred-mile zone.”

There’s also increasing resistance to Trump’s police state instincts and programs among the more progressive members of Congress and candidates for office: support them any way you can.

Learn your rights before you’re standing at a checkpoint rather than after, and if you see a neighbor stopped, film it and bear witness. Support the groups suing to hold the line, from the ACLU to the immigrant-defense networks and civil liberties groups in your own town.

And if this piece helped you see the shape of the thing more clearly, share it, forward it, and send people to hartmannreport.com, because the whole goal of Trump’s “papers, please” state and the assassinations of Renee Good and Alex Pretti is that everyone learns to keep quiet, and the surest way to refuse it is to keep talking to each other out loud.

Comments on Tuesday’s Daily Take:
Warning: The Supreme Court Just Revived a System America Buried in 1883

Yes, but - and I’m a grasping simpleton here - if the faceless bureaucrats are not accountable to the President, who are they accountable to? Americans are disillusioned with democracy because they vote for Dems, then they vote for Repubs, then they vote for Dems; and nothing changes

~ Oregon Larry

Just watch how the Supremes contort themselves when the next Democratic president tries to fire all of Trump’s thugs. Roberts and his five integrity challenged associates will find a way to prevent it.

~ TruthBeTold

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I Saw This Happen Behind the Iron Curtain. I Never Expected to See It Here...

Thom Hartmann — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 09:36:10 GMT

1July2026

Warning: The Supreme Court Just Revived a System America Buried in 1883

Thom Hartmann — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:42:19 GMT

The six unscrupulous Republicans on the Supreme Court — over the loud objections of the three true constitutionalists on the Court — are aggressively dragging America back not just to the 1950s but, as of yesterday, to the 1830s.

Arguably the most depraved president in American history, Andrew Jackson (aka “The Indian Killer” a title he gave himself), Trump’s favorite, whose picture he hung in the Oval Office, invented what came to be called the “Spoils System.”

If you wanted a job in the federal government, or a favorable ruling from one of the then-few federal agencies, all you had to do was give a big enough gift to President Jackson, or pledge your loyalty to him instead of the Constitution and the people, and your wish would be granted.

Prior presidents, particularly among the Founding generation, were generally strongly opposed to such a corrupt system.

Weeks after Thomas Jefferson was sworn in as president in 1801, the merchants of New Haven, Connecticut wrote a letter to the new president worrying out loud that he’d install loyalists rather than capable administrators who may have some oversight of issues like duties and tariffs that would impact them. Jefferson replied:

“The remonstrance [your concerned letter] laments ‘that a change in the administration must produce a change in the subordinate officers;’ in other words, that it should be deemed necessary for all officers to think with their principal [the president].”

Jefferson then implicitly referenced the integrity of President George Washington, whose closest advisor, speechwriter, and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton wrote of Washington’s hiring process:

“He will... investigate with care the qualities requisite to the stations to be filled, and to prefer with impartiality the persons who may have the fairest pretensions to them.”

And Jefferson pointed to the occasional corruption of President John Adams (who Jefferson had beat in that election of 1800, as Dan Sisson and I wrote about in The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction and What This Means Today), writing that his administration:

“[S]hall return with joy to that state of things, when the only questions concerning a candidate shall be, is he honest? Is he capable? Is he faithful to the Constitution?”

Yesterday, however, in a shocking turnabout, the six corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court — placed there via a 50-year-long project funded by America’s morbidly rich oligarchs — started America back down the road to Jackson’s corrupt Spoils System…except for the Federal Reserve (more on that and why it’s so mind-bogglingly corrupt in a moment).

Ironically, Jackson’s spoils system was ended in the late 19th century as much to protect the president from harm as to discourage the naked corruption it represented.

Back in 1881, a man named Charles Guiteau thought he’d properly bribed President James Garfield by giving the president, during an in-person visit in the White House, a speech he’d written for Garfield to use. Garfield was polite but refused to offer Guiteau the federal speechwriter’s job he was seeking, which provoked Guiteau to a murderous rage: shortly thereafter, Guiteau met Garfield’s train and shot him twice, killing him.

After Guiteau failed to gain his “spoil” or “patronage” from Garfield and killed him, President Chester Arthur oversaw the writing and passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883.

It separated all those government jobs from the administration in power, turning federal workers from patrons of the president into permanent bureaucrats, whose first loyalty was to the nation instead of to the guy who happened to be in the White House at any particular time. It realized the vision Hamilton described, that Washington had tried so scrupulously to follow.

It also explicitly outlawed bribing the president to get a job or other federal favors. The goal, which it accomplished and held for 143 years, was to end corruption in the bureaucratic branches of the federal government that the Constitution requires the executive branch — the president’s branch — to oversee and “faithfully execute the laws” and administer the agencies Congress had passed and created.

But, like Jackson, Donald Trump wanted to functionally end or at least cripple the Civil Service system with a modern version of the Spoils System and replace the top levels of the nation’s 2.7 million federal workers with people loyal exclusively to himself, essentially overturning the Pendelton Civil Service Act, at least for senior officials.

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He tried to do this in the last months of his first presidency through an October 21, 2020 executive order, Schedule F, that reclassified those workers out of their Civil Service jobs and into political appointee positions, doing the same work but now entirely dependent on the good will of the president himself to keep their jobs.

President Biden overturned Trump’s executive order creating Schedule F on his first day in office, restoring honesty and integrity to the executive branch across the entire federal bureaucracy, but last month, on June 3rd, Trump reinstituted Schedule F, reestablishing the essence of the Spoils System.

When Trump tried to replace Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter, she sued, claiming he was violating the FTC Act of 1914 which Congress created as an independent agency free from presidential coercion.

While they Court didn’t specifically rule based on the Pendleton Act (she was a Senate-confirmed appointee, not a civil servant), the principles are similar and point to how future all-Republican rulings by this Court could affect the Civil Service itself.

And, sure enough, yesterday those six Republican lickspittles on the Supreme Court universalized the new, Trump-era Spoils System by ruling that Trump can replace the heads of any federal regulatory agency (with one exception) with his own toadies, who can then turn the agencies away from their job of protecting our democracy, our public lands, our people, and our environment into new ways to enrich himself, his family, his Epstein/billionaire class, his corporate donors, and his cronies.

That one exception was that yesterday the Court also ruled, 5-4 with 2 Republican appointees joining the three Democratic ones, that Trump can’t fire Lisa Cook on the Federal Reserve, who holds a position eerily similar to that of Rebecca Slaughter on the FTC.

Why the difference?

The Federal Reserve protects the nations’ banking system and thus ensures stability and prosperity for America’s billionaires and the companies that made them that way. By blowing up Trump’s attempt to remove the Fed’s one Black governor (presumably as part of his and Hegseth’s Make America White Again campaign), the Republicans on the Court defended America’s oligarchs.

The other federal agencies, like the FTC, mostly protect you and me. They oversee our environment, consumer product safety, the purity of our food and drugs, and so on. If anything, America’s oligarchs consider them a pain in the ass.

Republicans, who — with the conspicuous exception of Dwight D. Eisenhower — have been exclusively serving the morbidly rich and powerful since the election of Harding in 1920 (he cut the top tax rate from 90% to 25% and instituted massive deregulation of the banks, leading straight to the Republican Great Depression) are cheering.

But, as we approach America’s 250th anniversary, the rest of us should be outraged.

The next time Democrats have true power in Washington, DC, overturning Slaughter and other corrupt all-Republican Supreme Court decisions (particularly Citizens United) must be Job One.

Comments on Monday’s Daily Take:
Predators Always Need Prey. Now They’re Running America

EVERYTHING in this country has become a grift, a scam, or a snow job because of the psychos and sickos that are like a cancer within the government. Whether it is local, state or national, business leaders have way too much influence over government officials.
~ alis

Yes people are dying from Climate change . And the policies to curtail this killer are arrested by the wealthiest .

The administration does their bidding , they make much more money blocking the actions that would allow more human beings to live. Not to mention the rest of our world, nature , who we are morally obligated to protect.
~ Patricia Lane

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Warning: The Supreme Court Just Revived a System America Buried in 1883

Thom Hartmann — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 11:43:28 GMT

Predators Always Need Prey. Now They're Running America.

Thom Hartmann — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 14:22:09 GMT

Hundreds of people died yesterday across Europe from the heat; they’re a symptom of a larger problem that governments around the world have failed to address — that goes far beyond simply global warming — and that the Trump regime is making far worse.

Its foundation is one of the most troubling aspects of human nature called predation: while most people just want to live their lives, raise their kids, and have a comfortable old age, some small percentage of those among us have simply become, for lack of a better word, predators.

In nature, there are natural predators and natural prey; foxes and rabbits are the classic example.

Rabbits, like most prey animals, have wired into them by evolution a response called “tonic immobility”; we used to think that when a rabbit or mouse was seized by a fox or eagle and went limp that they were playing dead (“thanatosis”) but, in fact, we now know their body is suddenly flooded with hormones, chemicals, and nervous reactions that essentially put them into a coma to either/both fool the predator or avoid experiencing the pain of being torn to pieces.

Predator animals — including humans — also have this instinct/mechanism; we see it when people “faint from fright” or are paralyzed by PTSD. But it’s far less frequently activated in predatory animals, particularly social animals like apes and humans, largely because we invent social systems to discourage predation.

Among modern humans, according to psychology, predation against other humans is a form of psychopathy, twisting the predator instinct our species once used to hunt food, instead, against others of our own kind, whether it be via physical/sexual violence or via theft and fraud.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote to his dear old friend and advisor Edward Carrington on January 16, 1787:

“If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves.
“It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”

To prevent this psychopathic predation within our societies is why we created governments. I’m reminded of the years Louise and I spent living in Europe where the landscape is dotted with castles and walled cities built not to defend against wolves and bears but against other humans.

It’s been this way for millenia; the castles and walled cities of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East were designed to keep out invading human predators, be they the Huns, Vikings, Ottomans, or Crusaders.

Modern cities, as technology improved, developed the equivalent of walls to keep the predators out; airborne missile defense systems and the like.

But the problem we Americans now face — one that citizens of modern nations have faced in various parts of the world for centuries — is that our government, seized and then run by psychopathic predators, has become predatory itself rather than protective.

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For example, JD Vance, who once wrote proudly about how when his father left the family and his mother was stealing drugs from the nursing home where she worked he and his sister existed on food stamps (SNAP benefits), is now “actively working to strip American children who were just like him of their SNAP benefits…”

And now our federal government is hand-delivering notices that “You may have violated federal law” to people who’ve criticized ICE murdering American citizens in Minneapolis.

That is what is happening today in America, with the Trump family, Republican politicians, massive monopolistic corporations, and the Epstein/Oligarch class extracting billions from us at the same time they threaten us when we protest. The top headline in yesterday’s online edition of The New York Times, for example, was:

“Trump Cut a Billion-Dollar Mining Deal. His Sons Stand to Profit.”

Predation has also become the new American business model as well; everything, it seems, is a hustle design to prey on us.

We pay a fee for our car to open remotely or have navigation; to use a word processing or other necessary program; or must surrender all of our private information simply to have a laptop operating system function properly, even though we paid thousands for the hardware.

But as much of a problem as corporate predation has become (largely through the GOP’s Reaganism, neoliberalism, and Clinton’s Third Way deregulation), the biggest danger is government predation, because — unlike Microsoft or Apple or a car company, which can each just hustle a few bucks from us every month — government has the power to take all of our money, end our freedom and lock us up, and even — as Alex Pretti’s and Renee Good’s families learned — kill us with impunity.

This is where America stands today. The Trump regime, and those states controlled by Republicans more generally (which are almost universally the poorest, with the highest rates of illiteracy, poverty, STDs, unwanted pregnancies, murder, rape, and other violent crimes), have turned predatory.

They are using the weapons of theft and violence (which our government holds legally) against us citizens when we protest their modern forms of predation: their corruption, ICE violence, encouragement of predatory corporate behavior, and general rigging of the system to the benefit of the Epstein/billionaire class and the politicians it owns.

Now we find that even people protesting against ICE and other Trump regime abuses are being arrested and sentenced to decades in prison, people posting about these outrages are being visited by DHS to intimidate them, and the Trump regime promises to rig the upcoming elections.

It’s a problem as ancient as our government itself. As Jefferson also wrote in that same letter to former Continental Congress member Edward Carrington:

“I am persuaded myself that the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves. The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution.
“To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people.
“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

This is why the acquisition/control of our news and social media sites by morbidly rich Epstein/billionaire class predators — whose first loyalty is to their peers rather than democracy — is so dangerous to both our republic, the poor, and what’s left of our middle class.

It’s why Trump taking hundreds of millions from the fossil fuel and other industries and then either ignoring their lies and their poisoning our planet or their theft from us via banking and insurance predation is so destructive of both faith in government and life itself.

It’s why the 50-year-long project funded by American oligarchs to pack our courts (particularly the Supreme Court) with toadies and ideologues, to build rightwing media empires, and to seize control of our universities and public schools has done such violence to our society, be it in school massacres, women dying because doctors are afraid to provide lifesaving reproductive care, or working families watching their children inherit a nation with fewer rights, fewer opportunities, and a planet pushed ever closer to ecological collapse.

So, what do we do?

I agree — as have generations of Americans — with Jefferson’s comment that, “[The] good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves.”

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We must, in other words, do everything we can to stop, block, and even prosecute the predators among us who’ve seized outsized control of both our government and our economy.

— To take on the fossil fuel industry and the Republicans who continue to both defend and subsidize it and its executives, who should be investigated for their decades of lies about global warming that are, today, literally killing thousands around the planet every day.

— To rebuild the New Deal and Great Society programs that neoliberals in both parties have been tearing apart for 45 years.

— To replace the predators in the insurance and banking industries with a Medicare For All style national healthcare program and free or affordable higher education like my parents’ generation enjoyed.

Public opinion polling and recent elections show that Americans are waking up; our work — our obligation as both citizens and decent human beings — is to assist and speed along that process by speaking out.

We must demand better of our elected representatives: work to strip our electoral system of the dark and billionaire money five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court authorized in Citizens United; strengthen the right to unionize while raising the minimum wage; rebuild a green electrified America; end the cap on Social Security taxes; and assist the growing progressive movement within the Democratic Party.

Tag, we’re it!

Comments on the Saturday Report
Saturday Report 6/27/26 — The Supreme Court files its anti-democracy paperwork, California goes after 250 billionaires, and the DOJ stands guard over Trump’s sex secrets…

Just Watch Nazi Republicans Jump Ship Like Rats In Coming Years “It was out of my control.” “I had no idea that this was happening.” “I had no say about what the RNC was doing.” “I’ve always said that there’s no place for big money in politics.”
~ Protect the Vote

The thing with the rich is that their wealth is not liquid, it is tied up in property, stocks and bonds, which they either live off via dividends or coupons or borrow against for their lifestyle and needs, and repay the loans, not out of their own pocket, but with the proceeds of the companies they own.
~ William Farrar

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ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer's World with Thom Hartmann

Predators Always Need Prey. Now They're Running America.

Thom Hartmann — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 13:23:50 GMT

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Thom Hartmann — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 18:48:26 GMT

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Chapter 4 The Mastermind: Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field

Thom Hartmann — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 20:41:32 GMT

Chapter 4 The Mastermind: Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field

If J.C. Bancroft Davis was the triggerman, then Justice -Stephen Johnson Field was the mastermind behind the corporate theft of constitutional rights. He’d spent three decades on the Supreme Court, building the intellectual infrastructure that would transform corporations into constitutional persons.

We must understand Justice Field to clearly see how democracy was hijacked by the oligarchs of that era. But more than just that, understanding Field also reveals the ideology behind the hijacking. This wasn’t just a case of corruption or greed, although there was plenty of both. This was, instead, a vision of America fundamentally opposed to the Founders’ and Framers’ vision of America and explicitly at odds with the possibility of creating a thriving middle class.

Field, like the railroad oligarchs to whom he was beholden, believed that property rights always trumped human rights. He believed the wealthy deserved constitutional protection from what John Adams called “the rabble”: the democratic majorities, the “common people.” He believed that workers organizing for better wages, farmers demanding fair treatment from the railroads they needed for their survival, and states regulating corporate behavior were all forms of tyranny against the morbidly rich of his day.

His vision was thus essentially feudal: a small class of white male property owners should rule over everyone else, protected by constitutional rights that the democratic majority could never touch.

Corporate constitutional rights were the weapon he—and the oligarchs close to him—chose to make that vision real.

The Gold Rush Justice

Stephen Field arrived in California in 1849, just as gold fever swept the territory. He wasn’t, however, looking for gold in the ground. He made his considerable fortune in lawyers’ fees, land speculation, and by exploiting and supporting raw political power.

Field established himself as a lawyer in Marysville, then became the alcalde for the town, a title encompassing the combination of mayor, judge, and local potentate inherited from California’s Mexican period. He wielded power arbitrarily, frequently jailed his more outspoken critics, and almost always ruled in favor of those clients who paid him well.

When California became a state, Field joined the state legislature, then became a justice on the California Supreme Court. He was ruthless, ambitious, and utterly convinced that rich people and their corporations were the only ones that really mattered.

In 1863, President Lincoln appointed Field to the US Supreme Court. It was a political appointment, as Lincoln needed California’s support and Field’s Democratic credentials to help balance the Court (with the bonus that he wasn’t, like the Southern Democrats, a slaveholder).

Lincoln would later regret his appointment, as Field quickly became one of the most consequential justices in American history, and not in a good way.

The Ideology of Oligarchy

Field brought to the Supreme Court a fully formed ideology that would reshape American law: corporations were property, property was sacred under the Constitution, and any democratic attempts to regulate or even “excessively” tax property were simple tyranny.

This wasn’t capitalism in any way Adam Smith would have recognized. Smith, in both Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, advocated competitive markets and warned against monopolies that conspired against small competitors and the public. Field, on the other hand, pushed for corporate power and saw democratic regulation of business activity as the enemy.

Field’s ideology came from his experience in California. He’d seen and admired vigilante justice, rough-and-tumble mining camps, and the rapid accumulation of massive fortunes. As an attorney, he’d watched the railroad oligarchs build an empire, and as a judge had become invested in their success.

Most importantly, he agreed with that era’s oligarchs (who were often murdering labor leaders) that the wealthy deserved protection from the democratic majority. The “mob” couldn’t be trusted with power, particularly the power to tax or regulate the railroads. Property owners, especially corporate property owners, needed constitutional shields against populist politicians.

The Fourteenth Amendment, he hoped, would finally give Field his opportunity to repay decades of largesse from the nation’s richest men.

Field’s War Against the Emerging Middle Class

Field wasn’t just pushing corporate rights in the abstract. He was waging war against the emerging American Dream even before it could be named or fully take shape.

During Field’s time on the Court, workers were organizing into unions, demanding living wages that would allow them to support families, buy homes, and give their children opportunities they never had. Farmers were forming cooperatives to escape the stranglehold of railroad monopolies. Small businesses were fighting against corporate consolidation that threatened to crush them.

States responded positively to these deeply popular movements by passing laws limiting working hours, requiring safe working conditions, preventing monopolistic practices, and taxing corporate wealth to fund public schools and infrastructure.

Every one of those laws threatened Field’s oligarchic vision of America. Every one weakened the power of the oligarchs and gave it to democratic majorities. Every one moved America closer to what FDR would later call a nation where poor and working class “necessitous men” could become “free men.”

Field saw all of this as a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a dangerous move toward the hot new idea of Marxism that was then sweeping the world’s intelligentsia. He believed that workers demanding fair wages was simple theft from property owners. He saw states regulating corporations as an unconstitutional interference with property rights and the democratic majority asserting control over economic life as mob rule.

Corporate constitutional rights were Field’s legal weapon against the American Dream before it could fully emerge.

Rewriting Reconstruction

The Fourteenth Amendment was meant to protect freed slaves, but Field believed it could be used to a different purpose: protecting corporations from state regulation.

Starting in the 1870s, Justice Field began writing dissents in both the 9th Circuit and the Supreme Court arguing that corporations were persons under the Fourteenth Amendment. He lost those arguments repeatedly as the majority of the Court understood what the Fourteenth Amendment was actually for, and several—including Waite—even occasionally ridiculed Field as a “man obsessed.”

But Field was patient. He knew that the Supreme Court’s composition would change with time. He knew that repeating an argument often enough can make it seem reasonable. And he knew that corporate money would fund challenges to every regulation, every tax, and every democratic attempt to constrain corporate power, and he wanted that money behind him and his presidential aspirations.

Field was playing the long game, building an intellectual framework that future courts could adopt.

The Slaughterhouse Dissent

In 1873, in the Slaughterhouse Cases, Field wrote one of the most important dissents in American legal history. It was important not because it was right, but because it laid the groundwork for what would later be called corporate constitutional rights.

The case involved the state of Louisiana granting a statewide monopoly to one single slaughterhouse in New Orleans owned by one of that state’s wealthiest men. Small and independent butchers sued, claiming their Fourteenth Amendment “equal protection” rights were violated.

The majority on the Supreme Court ruled against the independent butchers by throwing out the Fourteenth Amendment argument. Justice Samuel Miller, writing for the Court, explained that the Fourteenth Amendment was “designed to assure to the colored race the enjoyment of all the civil rights that under the law are enjoyed by white persons.” It wasn’t, in other words, ever meant to revolutionize federal–state relations or create new property rights.

Field dissented furiously. He argued that the Fourteenth Amendment protected broad economic rights, including the right to pursue any lawful occupation without government interference.

This argument of Field’s was eventually adopted by the Court and became known as “substantive due process,” the idea that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects not just fair procedures, but also certain fundamental rights from government interference.

It was a radical reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. And it was exactly what corporations needed to argue for constitutional protection from regulation.

Building the Case

Through the 1870s and 1880s, Justice Field kept pushing. In dissent after dissent, opinion after opinion, he argued that corporate property rights deserved constitutional protection, that corporations were persons, and that democratic regulation was, to use his word, tyranny.

The railroad oligarchs noticed and jumped aboard, funding legal challenges designed to reach Field’s Court with a fact pattern that would fit with his worldview. They hired the best lawyers money could buy and cultivated relationships with sympathetic judges.

Field was thus their champion on the Court. He socialized with railroad executives, owned railroad stock, and traveled on private railroad cars. The conflicts of interest were obvious and enormous, but in that era were frequently overlooked.

In a later time, Field would have been forced to recuse himself from cases involving the railroads. But in the 1880s, much like with today’s Roberts Court, judicial ethics were whatever the Court’s judges said they were. Field, therefore, had no intention of recusing himself from the cases that mattered most to his ideology, his future political ambitions, and his investment portfolio.

The Santa Clara Set-Up

When the Santa Clara case reached the Supreme Court in 1886, Field saw his moment.

The case wasn’t perfect, by any means. The legal issues were technical and boring, involving fence valuations and tax procedures. But it involved the railroad, whose very well-paid lawyer Sanderson was willing to argue the Fourteenth Amendment, and it thus gave Justice Field an opportunity to finally, after all those years of effort, establish a legal basis for corporate constitutional rights that would endure for more than a century.

Field’s biggest problem, however, was that the majority of the Court didn’t agree with him. They were skeptical of his Fourteenth Amendment arguments and generally preferred to rule on narrow grounds and—unlike today’s corrupt Republican-dominated Court—generally tried to avoid constitutional questions altogether.

Field, then, couldn’t control the majority. But he could influence the Court’s official reporter.

J.C. Bancroft Davis and Stephen Field shared more than ideology. They were friends who socialized in the same circles. They both had financial interests in railroad stock. And they both believed corporations and the oligarchs who owned railroads deserved constitutional protections that went far beyond those applied to average working people.

Did Field simply come out and tell Davis to write a fraudulent headnote? While possible, the historical record doesn’t prove a direct conspiracy. But it does show how opportunity, alignment of interest, and mutual benefit all came together that day in 1886.

What we know for certain is that after Davis wrote the headnote, Field never objected. In subsequent cases, in fact, Field cited the Santa Clara headnote as proof positive his Court had established corporate constitutional rights. He’d gotten what he wanted, even if he couldn’t pull it off through the Court’s actual decision.

The Long Shadow

Field stayed on the Supreme Court until 1897, becoming the second--longest-serving justice in American history at that time. His final years on the Court were marked by senility and bitterness, but his ideology had won.

By the late 1890s, the Court was regularly citing Santa Clara as pre-cedent for corporate constitutional rights. Field’s dissents became majority opinions, and his radical reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment became settled law.

And the freed slaves for whom the Fourteenth Amendment was written? By 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” was constitutional, setting up more than a half-century of legal discrimination and apartheid.

Justice Henry Billings Brown’s opinion in that case acknowledged that the post–Civil War amendments made Black people citizens and forbade states from denying equal protection, but insisted the Fourteenth was meant to secure legal/political equality, not to abolish “distinctions based upon color” or to require “social equality.”

The Fourteenth Amendment—which was supposed to protect Black Americans from discrimination—was instead used to uphold segregation.

Meanwhile, corporations flourished under Fourteenth Amendment protection. By 1900, the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of corporations claiming Fourteenth Amendment rights in dozens of cases. The amendment meant to serve freed slaves now mainly served to free corporations from democratic control by local, state, or even agencies of the federal government.

Field’s transformation of American law was complete. The oligarchs had won, and democracy and the emerging American middle class had lost.

And it all traced back to that one fraudulent headnote in that one infamous 1886 case.

Field’s Feudal Vision Realized

Field died in 1899, two years after leaving the Court. He’d spent thirty-four years as a Supreme Court justice. He’d reshaped American constitutional law more profoundly than almost any other jurist in history.

And he’d done it in service of a feudal vision that most Americans would have rejected if they’d understood it clearly.

His vision was the opposite of the American Dream that promised that hard work would be rewarded, ordinary people could build secure lives, and children would have more opportunities than their parents. Field’s vision, instead, promised that the wealthy would stay wealthy, the powerful would stay powerful, and democratic majorities would be powerless to change anything.

For fifty years after Field’s death, his vision seemed to triumph. The Gilded Age gave way to the Roaring Twenties, another era of oligarchic excess. Corporate power again grew unchecked, and wealth again concentrated at the top. Workers were again crushed when they tried to organize, and the American Dream began to seem like a cruel joke.

Then came the Great Crash of October 1929 and the Republican Great Depression. Field’s America, the oligarchs’ America, had collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, excesses, and naked thefts.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt built a new and different America on the wreckage, where workers could organize, corporations were regulated for the public good, and the morbidly rich paid their fair share. We became, for the first time in the history of the world, a country where two-thirds of families could achieve the middle class by 1980.

But Roosevelt couldn’t undo Justice Field’s constitutional legacy empowered by court reporter Davis’s headnote. Corporate constitutional rights remained embedded in the law, a then largely dormant weapon waiting to be activated. Thus, when Ronald Reagan’s “Revolution” began in 1981, that weapon was turned against everything Roosevelt had built, and Donald Trump and the GOP are doubling down on it today.

After forty-plus years of Republican and neoliberal Democratic rule, Field’s feudal vision is ascendant again today. Three men own more wealth than the bottom half of America combined. Corporations claim constitutional rights to buy elections, block regulations, and crush workers. And the American Dream is dying.

Stephen Field would be pleased, if not giddy: this is exactly what he wanted.

But Field and Davis didn’t invent the idea of corporate constitutional rights out of nothing. Instead, they built on decades of corporate legal strategy. To understand how deeply rooted this fraud really is, we need to take a quick look at the seventy-year legal war that preceded Santa Clara.

Saturday Report 6/27/26 — The Supreme Court files its anti-democracy paperwork, California goes after 250 billionaires, and the DOJ stands guard over Trump’s sex secrets…

Thom Hartmann — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 14:01:41 GMT

— There’s no longer any mystery about whose side the Supreme Court is on; the only mystery is why it bothers pretending otherwise. The Roberts Court has turned its so-called shadow docket — the emergency pipeline once reserved for death-row stays — into a drive-thru where Trump places an order and the six Republican justices hand it out the window, usually with no explanation and no signature. The Brennan Center counts more than thirty such applications since Trump returned to office, granted roughly 80% of the time, while George W. Bush and Obama combined asked for emergency relief eight times in sixteen years. Just this term the Court greenlit Texas’s racially rigged maps — over the objection of a Trump-appointed lower-court judge — and cleared the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians who’d registered, paid fees, and passed background checks. Justice Sotomayor, in dissent, warned we now live in a country where the government can “seize anyone who looks Latino.” Which, of course, is the entire point for the GOP’s white supremacists. Rep. Jamie Raskin has introduced the SHADOW Act to force the justices to simply show their work within seven days, a bill that wouldn’t be necessary if the Court hadn’t decided that explaining itself is beneath it…or it has something to hide. This is the same institution that gave us Citizens United and corporate “personhood,” the legal scaffolding that turned 45 years of Reaganomics into one-dollar-one-vote (my new book Who Killed The American Dream? The Greatest Crime Ever Told, out in a week, explains where this came from and how to fix it). The robes were always a costume. Now they’re not even bothering with the theater of impartiality or a concern for the Constitution shtick that Scalia and Rehnquist used to do so well…

— Somebody finally proposed making California’s 250 billionaires chip in, and you should hear them scream. Organizers announced Thursday that a one-time wealth tax has been officially certified for the November ballot, surviving a furious last-minute effort by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and an armada of billionaire money to strangle it before the deadline. The measure would levy a 5% tax on residents worth more than a billion dollars, raising an estimated $100 billion to plug the holes Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” Medicaid cuts blew in the state’s health system, and it qualified with more than 1.6 million signatures, double what was needed. “The billionaire tax will be on the November ballot, and we intend to win,” said union spokesperson Debru Carthan. The opposition tells the story all by itself: Google co-founder Sergey Brin bankrolled competing initiatives and physically fled the state to dodge the levy, while a billionaire coalition has raised north of $100 million to confuse voters with copycat measures designed to cancel the real one out. Newsom — eyeing the White House in 2028 — reportedly wouldn’t even entertain a watered-down 2% version as he’s presumably planning to imitate Clinton and Obama and lean heavily on billionaire contributions (a situation that prevented even one single bankster prosecution for the bank-crash-and-theft of 2009 and the ACA handing our healthcare system off to massive insurance companies). As Rep. Ro Khanna put it, there are 250 billionaires right now in a state of 40 million people. Just between 2023 to 2025, the wealth of those Californians surged 144%, but they’re hysterical about coughing up 5% so the rest of the state can get healthcare. Forty-five years after Reagan promised the riches would trickle down, the people are simply asking to turn the faucet around…

— Senate Democrats noticed that traditional Medicare is the only insurance in America with no limit on what it can cost you, and decided to do something about it. Sen. Ron Wyden and 14 co-sponsors introduced legislation Thursday — the Medicare Cost Cap Act — to put a $5,000 annual ceiling on out-of-pocket spending for seniors in traditional Medicare. Right now, beneficiaries owe 20% of their medical bills with no upper bound, which means a cancer diagnosis or a long hospital stay can run into tens of thousands of dollars; that terror is precisely why 43% of enrollees shell out for separate Medigap policies whose premiums keep climbing each year. (As I document in shocking detail in The Hidden History of American Healthcare, that 20% hole was put in there by Southern conservatives to keep Black people from using the system.) Every other corner of the insurance world — employer plans, the ACA — already has a cap. Wyden framed the coming fight as Democrats trying to give Medicare patients “a fair shake” while the other side runs interference for billionaires, and Protect Our Care hailed it as a direct answer to the Trump-era affordability crisis. Yes, it would cost the Treasury real money — perhaps $50 billion a year — and yes, the bill is a long shot in this GOP-run Congress. But that’s the whole point: it draws the line in bright paint heading into November. Following Reagan’s old “Two Santas” strategy, a Republican-run government that found trillions for billionaire tax cuts suddenly developed a “steely concern for the deficit” the moment a middle class grandmother with cancer might benefit. That reflex, too, is a 45-year-old GOP inheritance…

— A federal judge just told Trump’s Justice Department to stop hiding the files on the woman who says Trump sexually assaulted her when she was 13. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — Trump’s own former criminal-defense lawyer — to either release unredacted Epstein documents by July 2 or explain in court why he won’t. The order came in a suit by journalist Katie Phang, who accused Blanche of violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act by publishing only about half of the six million pages the government holds, much of it blacked out. At issue are FBI notes from interviews with a South Carolina woman who told agents — over four separate sessions the Bureau found credible — that Epstein introduced her to Trump in the 1980s, when she was about 13, and he then forced her to perform oral sex on him and hit her when she bit him. Trump denies it. Remember the sequence: Trump spent much of last year leaning on Republicans to kill the Transparency Act, and only after it passed did his DOJ start slow-walking and redacting. Phang says Blanche now has to “put up or shut up.” Sullivan also ordered the department to produce a log of every redaction it’s made, which is the bare-minimum transparency the law already requires. For a White House that keeps insisting the files “totally exonerate” the President, they sure are fighting like hell to keep us from reading them…

— Trump’s mentor Vlad may be plotting a poke at NATO, and he’s picked the perfect moment, because the man in the Oval Office treats the alliance like a protection racket he resents paying into. Two countries on NATO’s eastern flank warned this week that Russia is preparing a “provocation” against the Baltics or Poland: not a full invasion, but a hybrid jab of missiles, drones, or sabotage designed to test whether the West will actually honor its mutual-defense pledge. Latvian intelligence said flatly that it sees indications Russia is “preparing military provocations against the Baltic countries or Poland.” The calculation is coldly logical: with Ukraine now landing deep-strike drones on Moscow and St. Petersburg, a cornered and humiliated Putin has every incentive to “roll the dice” on Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania to see if Article 5 still means anything, especially when he suspects Trump might shrug. And why wouldn’t he suspect that? This is a President who has spent years flattering and sucking up to Putin, virtually lick-shining his shoes in Helsinki and Alaska, trashing NATO, and turning American security guarantees into a giant question mark. The alliance holds its annual summit in Ankara this month under a cloud of doubt about U.S. commitment, doubts that Trump manufactured personally. Putin isn’t testing NATO’s resolve; he’s testing Trump’s, and he likes his odds…

— While Trump was busy feuding with Giorgia Meloni over a photo op, the woman actually positioned to end Meloni’s career was quietly building her case. Meet Elly Schlein — the 41-year-old socialist who leads Italy’s official opposition and whose Democratic Party smells blood after Meloni’s flagship rightwing judicial “reform” was crushed in a March referendum, with 54% of Italians voting no. Schlein counts Bernie Sanders, Brazil’s Lula, and Spain’s Pedro Sánchez among her allies, and she offers Italian voters a mirror-image of Meloni’s culture-war act. To Meloni’s trademark chant — “I’m Giorgia, I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m a Christian!” — Schlein answers simply: “I am a woman. I love another woman.” Her real pitch, though, is bread-and-butter: the right crows about “traditional families” while gutting the kindergartens those families need. It’s working well enough that Meloni is reportedly weighing an early election for as soon as April, terrified her approval will keep sliding. The global right has always been better at coordinating than the global left because Trump, Meloni, Putin, Modi, Erdoğon, Orbán, and the rest treat each other as franchise partners. Schlein is betting Italy is ready to franchise something else…

— The hellscape currently broiling Europe is not weather, it’s a receipt for fifty years of lies from the fossil fuel industry. Scientists with the World Weather Attribution group reported Friday that the record heat dome roasting the continent is the most severe ever recorded there and would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change; as a result, the brutal nighttime temperatures are now made dramatically more likely than they were just two decades ago. Britain logged its hottest June day in history, 36.4°C (97.5°F) in Somerset, and nearly half of the 850 cities studied are enduring their worst-ever “heat stress,” the deadly combination of heat and humidity that defeats the body’s ability to cool itself by sweating. For scale: more than 60,000 Europeans died from heat in the summer of 2022, and Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average. UN climate chief Simon Stiell pinned it precisely on the world’s “addiction to burning coal, oil and gas.” The fossil-fuel barons knew all this decades ago and spent fortunes telling us it was a hoax, running the same playbook of privatized profit and socialized catastrophe that the tobacco and asbestos companies pioneered and Reagan’s deregulation perfected. The corpses are real now. The denial is still on the payroll to the GOP…

— Geeky Science Alert! The $300 ring you bought to fix your sleep may be the thing keeping you awake. Sleep researchers have a name for it — orthosomnia, coined back in 2017 at Rush University — and it describes exactly the trap the Washington Post just flagged: you obsess over a bad “sleep score,” the anxiety wrecks your actual sleep, the next score is worse, and around you go. Northwestern’s Dr. Sabra Abbott defines it as “an unhealthy or excessive concern with achieving the perfect sleep.” The cruel joke is that the wrist gadgets aren’t even measuring your brain: they’re guessing from motion and heart rate, and they routinely overstate how much you slept while flunking at detecting when you were awake. So the industry sells you a device that misreads your night, generates a number that frightens you, and then — naturally — has a premium subscription to help you cope. Capitalism found a way to monetize a function our ancestors performed for free with their eyes closed. The fix, doctors say, is radical: take the damn thing off…

Comments on Friday’s Daily Take

Six Unelected Justices Just Gave Trump the Power to Ignore Congress and Every American Should Be Terrified

Every U.S. taxpayer should be furious; not terrified. This is the time to take back our country. As J.D. Vance told E.U., “The real danger comes from within”.
~ US Taxpayer

When I saw the news about the Supreme Court rulings yesterday about immigration I became as angry as I have ever been. I cursed & shouted at the TV, I called my Representative, I cursed & shouted some more at the TV, not at my Rep!
~ return to normalcy

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is out next week in bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

Six Unelected Justices Just Gave Trump the Power to Ignore Congress and Every American Should Be Terrified

Thom Hartmann — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:50:50 GMT

Something happened inside the Supreme Court chamber on Thursday that almost never happens: Justice Sonia Sotomayor was so disgusted by what the six radical, on-the-take Republican appointees had just done that she read her dissent aloud from the bench, and Justice Samuel Alito, who’d written the majority opinion, snapped back at her in real time, a breach of the Court’s normally stage-managed decorum that left veteran reporters in the room visibly startled in slack-jawed amazement.

On the surface they were fighting about asylum seekers. But Sotomayor understood, as Alito surely did, that the real question wasn’t who gets to cross the border: it was whether the laws Congress writes still mean anything once a neofascist, imperial president (like Alito and his peers want) decides he’d rather not follow them because he’s above the law.

To understand this — and why it’s so insanely radical — look carefully at what the Court actually did in the two 6-3 all-Republican immigration rulings it handed down yesterday morning.

Back in 1980, a bipartisan Congress passed the Refugee Act to bring American law in line with our promise not to send the persecuted back to be killed, and it laid out a specific, mandatory set of steps.

Under the law Congress wrote that year, a noncitizen who reaches our border and says she fears persecution gets referred for an asylum interview to determine the legitimacy of her fear of violence or death in her home country or the country she’s fleeing. The word Congress chose to write into the law was the administration “shall,” not “may,” hold that hearing and a judge “shall” make that determination.

On Thursday the Republicans on the Court, however, ruled that Trump can erase or effectively ignore that law by simply ordering border agents to physically block people on the Mexican (or, presumably, Canadian or at an airport arrival) side of the line, so they never technically “arrive in the United States” and the law never kicks in.

Sotomayor called the reasoning illogical, because it is. A person standing at the threshold of a port of entry has plainly arrived. The Republican Trump toadies on the Court, however, pretended otherwise so Trump’s racial enforcers could essentially ignore both the intention and the letter of the law that elected members from both parties in Congress wrote.

The second ruling is even worse, albeit quieter.

Congress (whose job is to write laws for the United States) created Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in 1990 for people who can’t safely go home, and it built in court review of whether an administration followed the required procedures before yanking that status away.

The Trump administration recently tried to strip TPS protections from hundreds of thousands of Black Haitians and brown-skinned Syrians as part of its “Make America White Again” program, and multiple lower courts found it had ignored those procedures the law requires, noting that Trump’s Haiti decision, in particular, was tainted by racial animus (hate of Black people from what Trump calls “shithole countries”).

As Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog wrote about Justice Elana Kagan’s reaction:

“Kagan called it ‘plain to see’ that race played a role in the decision to terminate the TPS designation for Haiti. ‘The evidence’ that the Haiti TPS beneficiaries ‘have offered,’ she stressed, ‘includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.’ But those ‘statements fairly shout,’ she said, ‘in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.’”

The Republican majority didn’t even bother to say if the Trump regime had or had not complied with the plain letter and clear intent of the law Congress passed. Instead, the six corrupt Republicans on the Court declared that no court anywhere in America is allowed to even ask if Trump, et al, are breaking that particular law (an oversight process by a court called “judicial review”).

As the American Immigration Council pointed out, that means even an openly illegal decision is now insulated from any review by any judge in the country, closing the courthouse door in a way that, in my opinion, even the most conservative of the Founders would have found astonishing and plainly unconstitutional.

Congress, in other words, wrote a law that told the courts to check the legitimacy of asylum seekers claims to determine if they can or cannot stay here and apply for legal status; writing such laws is what the Constitution requires of an elected Congress.

But the six radical justices that rightwing billlionaires have spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to get on the Supreme Court told all the rest of the courts in America to simply look away and ignore the law. They’re not allowed to enforce it any more, even though Congress passed it and a president signed it.

Robert Reich put his finger on it yesterday afternoon, noting in his excellent newsletter that:

“[A] majority of the current Supreme Court — the abominable Roberts Court — has bent over backwards to ignore those laws.
“This must be seen for what it really is — a systemic effort by the six Republican appointees on the court to shrink congressional authority and enlarge the authority of the executive branch.
“If there was any doubt before, there should be none now: The Supreme Court is part of the anti-democracy movement led by Trump and the billionaires behind him.”

This agreement with Trump’s racist efforts to purge America of Black and brown refugees aren’t only losses for those would-be immigrants. As Reich points out, these decisions are stripping power from Congress, from the basic idea that the people’s elected representatives get to write laws that the Constitution requires a president to obey.

The Court’s defenders will tell you I’m being unfair in that assessment, claiming that the justices are just neutral umpires reading statutes as written. But that’s a lie, and recent history proves it.

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Back in 2021, this very same Court struck down Joe Biden's pandemic eviction moratorium, the one keeping millions of struggling families in their homes during a deadly COVID surge, ruling that his CDC had reached “past what Congress allowed” and declaring that if such a moratorium were going to continue, Congress, and not the president, would have to specifically authorize it.

Just a few years later, the same conservative bloc reasoned its way to blocking Joe Biden’s student debt relief, insisting Congress would never hand a president that kind of authority without saying so in unmistakable language.

When a Democratic president acts, in other words, they read laws Congress has passed with a magnifying glass and demand crystal-clear permissions. But when Trump (or, presumably, future Republican presidents) wants to shred the asylum process or wants his immigration purges of nonwhite people placed beyond the reach of any judge, the magnifying glass disappears and the words suddenly bend whichever way Trump wants.

These six lawyers in robes started from the outcome that today’s captured hard-right MAGA Republican Party and its white supremacist Dear Leader wants and reverse-engineered their reasoning to reach it, and the reasoning changes from case to case because the only thing that has to stay fixed is who wins.

As Sotomayer wrote, pointing to that magnifying glass in her dissent to yesterday’s Mullin v. Al Otro Lado decision:

“The Court’s illogical interpretation [of Congress’ written law] is driven almost entirely by a fixation on a single word: ‘in.’”

And the consequences of these decisions aren’t merely academic: people will die because of the actions these corrupt Republicans just took allowing the President and his whiteness enforcers to ignore the statutes that Congress wrote, both parties passed, and presidents signed into law. As Sotomayor also wrote in her dissent:

“One woman who had fled Honduras after receiving death threats from gang members was beaten, cut, and knocked unconscious by an unknown man after being turned back from a port of entry. Another asylum seeker who was turned back at a port three times was later raped in the presence of her child.
“Those living in migrant camps were subjected to break-ins, robberies, and assaults, ‘fac[ing] serious harm at the hands of criminal organizations, including kidnapping, extortion, physical violence, and sexual assault.’ Some were ‘murdered in Mexico while waiting for an opportunity to be processed by U. S. officials.’
“Desperate to flee these conditions and secure the opportunity to apply for asylum, ‘[s]ome attempted to reach U. S. soil by other means,’ including by attempting to cross the border between ports of entry by trekking through deserts or swimming across the Rio Grande. Often, these efforts had tragic ends.
“One couple that grew discouraged after a month of waiting in a camp near the border decided to cross the river and ask for asylum once they reached U. S. soil, but they were caught in a swift current and drowned. Another woman also drowned, along with her 2-year-old son, after she gave up waiting in a tent camp and attempted to swim across the river. Hundreds of others have met a similar fate, and many more died crossing the desert along the southern border, all making 2020 and 2021 some of the ‘deadliest year[s] for migrant crossings’ in various regions of the southern border.”

I lived and worked in Germany in the 1980s, and you couldn’t be there in those years without feeling how the entire postwar refugee framework — in America and across postwar Europe — grew out of one unbearable lesson, that turning desperate people away at the door and sending them back to die is something decent nations swore they’d never do again.

In 1939, the United States turned away the St. Louis, a ship carrying 937 Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s Nazi Germany purge of all “non-Aryan” people. The ship returned to Europe where the Nazis seized its passengers, ultimately murdering 254 of them in the “detention centers” Germany ran in occupied countries.

Americans were horrified and humiliated as the story became known well after the war, and the Refugee Act of 1980 was our nation writing the promise that we’d never repeat such a horror into law; it passed with broad bipartisan support.

On Thursday of this week five unelected men and one unelected woman in robes decided that promise is now optional for a president who welcomes white South African “refugees” but wants to purge American of people whose skin is darker than his.

I’ve argued for years, including in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, that Republicans on this Court long ago seized powers the Framers never gave it, and have — since Nixon flipped the court to the right and appointed Lewis Powell (of Powell Memo infamy) in 1972 — spent the last fifty years using them on behalf of the morbidly rich and the party that serves them.

From Buckley in 1976 and Bellotti (written by Powell himself in 1978) through Citizens United in 2010, this generation’s Republican justices — each carefully placed on the Court by big money interests since the 1980s — rewrote our democracy and turned it into an auction; earlier this term they even gutted what was left of the Voting Rights Act to help solidify raw GOP political power.

Now they’re telling Congress its laws are merely suggestions whenever a Republican president disagrees.

Justice Louis Brandeis warned us a century ago that, “[W]e can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.” The morbidly rich men who put these justices on the Court made their choice, and the justices are delivering for them, tearing another bite out of our democracy with every decision.

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The good news is that the branch the Court just tried to sideline is the one closest to you. Ahilan Arulanantham, who argued the Syrian case, urged Congress to act to overrule the Court, and he’s right, because Congress can restore judicial review, can rewrite these statutes in language even Sam Alito can’t twist, can expand and rebalance the Court itself, and can be made to do all of it if enough of us demand it.

Call your senators and representative at 202-224-3121 and tell them a Court declaring Congress irrelevant is a five-alarm constitutional emergency: we need a judicial code of ethics for SCOTUS so they have the follow the same laws as all other federal judges must; impeachment hearings for Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Roberts; 18-year term limits; and a rapid expansion of the Court to at least 13 members to bring it into line with previous, historic ratios to other senior courts.

None of this changes unless ordinary people refuse to let it stand. So get loud, stay in it, and if this piece helped you understand what really happened yesterday, share it and send people to hartmannreport.com so more of us understand exactly what we’re up against, exactly who to hold responsible, and how.

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The Truth About “Socialism” that Republicans and Corporate Dems Don’t Want You to Hear

People who are against Socialism practice Antisocial-ism. Look up “antisocial behavior” to find out how they think.
# Paul_

Just as “liberal” became a dirty word, dissolving into the acid of wokeness and attack on it, I find it interesting that if not a dirty word, the label of “progressive” has lost its meaning. Progressive values are human values of dignity, a democratization of wealth, participation and voice. Not “progressive enough” it has been split, to its left, by the now proud label of democratic socialist.
~ J. Newman