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— Vladimir Putin has spent the past year turning “plausible deniability” into a full-time European hobby, and this week Germany finally pushed back sorta, kinda, maybe hard. It took an explosive-laden drone found near an Ukraine-bound cargo plane at Germany’s Leipzig airport to provoke Berlin to formally accuse Moscow of running “a well-established pattern” of hybrid warfare. They expelled the Russian ambassador, shut down the Russian consulate in the capital city of Bonn, and put in place new visa restrictions on Russian visitors. After CIA Director and Trump lickspittle John Ratcliff made a sorta-secret visit to Russia, Trump tried to reassure the world, saying that his master Putin “is not going to be attacking a NATO territory.” Except that they already have, repeatedly, and are continuing to. The New York Times worried out loud this week about “a fight that spirals out of control.” Trump consistently kisses Putin’s ass while JD Vance recently said one of the “proudest” moments of his time in office was cutting off defensive weapons to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russia keeps probing the defenses of European countries with drones and missiles, particularly the Baltic states. This administration’s cowardice and craven whimpering in the face of Putin’s aggression, and the complicity of Republicans in Congress, could easily lead us to a larger war in Europe that, in turn, could trigger World War III. And if Trump refuses to go along with Article 5 of the NATO treaty, as he has suggested may happen, this could be exactly what Putin and Xi are aiming for.

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— Javier Milei has apparently decided that if you can’t win an economy, you can always win back a windswept archipelago full of penguins with 3,000 sheep-farmers. Great Britain has claimed and run the Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina, since 1833. But Milei is in big political trouble as his neoliberal reforms have gutted that nation’s middle class (just like neoliberal Reaganomics did to America’s) so — like Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, Bush Sr.’s invasion of Iraq, Bush Jr.’s invasion of Afghanistan, and now Trump’s attack on Iran — the Argentinian wannabe strongman has decided to whip up nationalist fervor over the islands to get voters’ minds off the economy. He’s apparently coordinating this with his “good friend” Trump, as our president recently said he’s “thinking of reviewing” America’s 70-year neutrality stance on the issue of the islands. When the actual Falklanders themselves held a referendum on which country should control them back in 2013, fully 99.8 percent of the voters wanted to stay with Britain. Downing Street, for its part, reaffirmed an “unshakeable“ commitment to the islands. Somewhere, Winston Churchill’s ghost is checking the tide tables while Abraham Lincoln’s is looking at the wreckage of the party he brought to power and sobbing…

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— ICE has found a new frontier for cruelty at California’s largest immigration lockup: outlawing the hug. The California City Detention Facility is a former prison in the Mojave Desert that CoreCivic has converted into a concentration camp for brown-skinned people. It was reportedly opened without the proper permits and has since been running as a black box free of federal inspections. And now they’re forbidding “inmates” — the vast majority of whom have not committed any crime whatsoever (being in the country without authorization is a civil, not criminal, offense) — from touching their own families. Instead of the meeting rooms common in prisons (there’s one in this facility, too, although it’s unused), the company is apparently going along with the Trump policy of maximum cruelty by keeping people behind thick glass walls so they can only communicate with family members, children, newborns, and loved ones via a phone that goes through the glass. In response, a grassroots campaign called Hugs Beyond Bars has spent months trying to shame ICE and CoreCivic into allowing contact visits, delivering a 1,100-signature petition to Senator Alex Padilla’s office after a San Francisco vigil for the (at least) 24 people who’ve died in ICE custody so far this year. This is the same facility where a federal judge had to issue a preliminary injunction to force ICE to provide blankets and medical care to the roughly 1,000 people caged there in the near-freezing desert nights. Nothing radicalizes people quite like watching your own government decide affection is a security risk…

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— Missouri’s Supreme Court just handed Trump’s national gerrymandering crusade its first real faceplant. That state’s highest court, in an unanimous ruling, blocked a Republican-drawn congressional map pushed through last September at Trump’s urging. It was specifically designed to dismantle Kansas City Democrat Emanuel Cleaver’s district, giving the GOP a seventh out of eight House seats from a state that’s only 49% registered Republicans. Rightwingers are freaking out: Attorney General Catherine Hanaway declared the ruling has thrust the state into a “constitutional crisis” and vowed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, while Trump himself took to his Nazi-infested social media site to call it a “Dark Day for ‘Justice.’” Democracy, deployed correctly, can still occasionally out-muscle a gerrymander, assuming the five black-robed on-the-take rightwingers in DC don’t decide otherwise in the next two months.

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— Speaking of senators who’ve forgotten what their job is, John Fetterman’s transformation from Bernie-backing mayor of Braddock to Fox News’ favorite Democrat cleared its final decency checkpoint this week. The Wall Street Journal broke a bombshell investigation yesterday, finding that Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman is behaving more like a Republican than a Democrat. He claimed his stomach was upset so he couldn’t meet with three paralyzed veterans who’d traveled from rural Pennsylvania, but then an hour later strolled into his office and did an upbeat hit with Fox “News” to support Netanyahu’s genocidal policies. When Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said they were eager to talk to him about Medicaid cuts, he reportedly texted back, “Well I’m not,” claiming the hospital just wanted “free trips to DC.” He blew off a busload of flood-zone constituents who spotted him in the hallway — he refused to even acknowledge them — while finding time that same week for a meeting with a pro-Netanyahu college basketball coach. When he was told that a police funeral for three slain officers could run three hours, he texted, “This may be a nonstarter.” He’s popped into 26 hearings just long enough to get marked “present” but didn’t speak a single word in 20 of them. And now conservative donor cash is rolling into his campaign coffers and he polls better with Pennsylvania Republicans than their actual Republican senator does. Pennsylvania Democrats are genuinely horrified but they — and the rest of us — are stuck with this badly damaged and sadly deranged man for at least another two years.

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— Trump has apparently spent so much time threatening to weaponize the Federal Reserve, sanction foreign assets, and personally inspect Fort Knox that America’s oldest allies have started quietly walking their gold out the door. As Hitler was moving across Europe, country after country shipped their gold reserves to the United States for safe-keeping. Now, they’ve concluded that Trump’s so deeply embedded up Putin’s backside and so irrational that they can’t trust us any longer, so they’re shipping it all back home. The Netherlands announced this week it’s moved roughly $12 billion in bullion — most of it previously parked in New York — over to London, while France already sold off $15 billion held in New York and replaced it with bars kept safely in Paris. Germany and Italy, the world’s second- and third-largest gold hoarders, are reportedly weighing whether to bring theirs home too. When the people who fled their assets out of Europe because they were worried about Hitler begin to do the same because of Trump, Americans should take serious note of what a dangerous sign of the times this is.

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— Elon Musk, a man who spent a quarter-billion dollars to buy the last election for Trump and got access to Americans’ private data with it (along with stopping dozens of investigations into him and his companies), is reportedly in a full panic over a documentary he can’t buy his way out of. Ashley St. Clair, one of the mothers of Musk’s 14 known children, says that Musk told her how the 2024 elections results would come out, but did so “hours” before the public knew thanks, he said, to a secretive satellite data program. Now, Musk is freaking out because director Alex Gibney’s film “Musk,” due out October 16, is said to expose the billionaire as among the most dangerous men on Earth, and reportedly digs into St. Clair’s claim. My old friend and colleague David Sirota summed up Musk’s meltdown succinctly: “The bully is mad.” Musk has already called the film a “hit piece” and Gibney a “douche,” which, from the man who bought a social media platform specifically so he could promote white supremacy and control his own narrative, tracks. Turns out there’s one thing money still can’t buy: an accountability journalist and documentary-maker who isn’t afraid of you.

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Whenever I spoke with Gloria Steinem on my program over the years, I always got a sense of a person with both incredible charisma, intellect, and a real grasp of what power was and how to use it. She was a force of nature.

When the announcement that she’d passed away at 92 hit the news yesterday morning, it perfectly juxtaposed against the story the major “conservative” site Townhall had published titled, “No, the World Would Not Be a Better Place If Women Ran It.” Their point was:

“Anyone who went through middle school, junior high or high school knows full well the kind of nasty behavior that females are capable of.”

Nobody planned that coincidence; there’s so much hate against women floating around in Republican circles these days that if it wasn’t that piece it’d be something else, but it highlights a worrying trend in American culture and politics, one with echoes of a troubling past.

Back in 1972 Louise and I got married, and when she went to get her first credit card in her own name I had to co-sign for her. Not because I was more creditworthy; she’d been supporting herself by working since she was 15. It was the bank’s requirement because she was a woman.

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That year was a bit of a touchstone for the women’s movement.

It was the year Steinem’s Ms. magazine sold out its entire 300,000-copy run in eight days; the year that her first issue ran a “We Have Had Abortions” statement signed by 53 women including Steinem, Billie Jean King, and Susan Sontag all confessing to what was then a crime; the year Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment and sent it to the states; and the year Title IX became law.

And even though our culture was racing ahead, my bank still demanded a man’s name on the signature line. It wasn’t until Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974 that a woman — of any age or income — no longer needed a husband, father, brother, uncle, or male friend to co-sign for credit, a mortgage, or pretty much anything else. And, more often than not, the credit history belonged to the man and didn’t mention the woman, so a divorce or a death could erase everything she’d built.

While this may sound both dystopian and like ancient history to today’s young people, it’s a world that many within the GOP are actively trying to recreate.

Pastor Joel Webbon, for example, has been preaching for years that women shouldn’t have a voice in American politics because, he says, a woman’s political voice properly comes from her husband, and if she isn’t married, from her father, brother, uncle or whichever man in her life “loves her most.” That’s the same list Louise’s bank used: husband, father, brother, uncle, family friend...

Webbon helped write “The Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel” alongside Oklahoma state Senator Dusty Deevers and former Trump administration official William Wolfe. His “Right Response Conference” has put Doug Wilson, Stephen Wolfe, Steve Deace, and Auron MacIntyre on stage. He’s endorsed candidates, and he sat for a ten-part interview series with notorious neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.

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He’s part of the “TheoBros” network, which is connected to Republican officeholders mainly through Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s church membership and VP JD Vance socializing with people in it.

Whiskey Pete belongs to Doug Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), and last year our SecDef reposted a CNN segment in which Wilson and other CREC pastors proclaimed their belief that women shouldn’t vote. Instead, they argued, an entire household should have a single vote, and it should be exclusively cast by the man of the house.

In February of this year, Pete invited Wilson to preach at the Pentagon’s monthly worship service, itself a violation of the Constitution, stood beside him on stage, and broadcast the entire event on the Defense Department’s internal TV network.

In the Pentagon, Hegseth has become obsessed with pushing women out of leadership roles and instituted mandatory testosterone screening in the name of “lethality.” And over at HHS, the former heroin- and sex-addicted lawyer with no medical training whatsoever Trump put in charge seems equally obsessed with his own masculinity and testosterone levels.

These are the men Republicans think should be role models for the generation of boys and young men coming up today:

— Hegseth paid $50,000 in a confidential settlement to a woman who told Monterey police that he took her phone, blocked the door of a hotel room, and assaulted her as she kept saying, “No.”

—Kennedy kept a 398-page journal in 2001 with a ledger in the back listing 37 women by first name, each rated on a scale of one to ten according to how far things had gone. His wife Mary Richardson Kennedy found it, and her family has always believed his promiscuity contributed to her death by suicide in 2012.

— Trump has been held liable by one jury for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and by a second for defaming her about it. The Epstein files the Justice Department tried to keep buried include FBI interview summaries in which a woman alleged that Epstein introduced her to Trump when she was somewhere between 13 and 15, that he forced oral sex on her, and that he beat her up when she bit his tiny penis. He publicly cheated on all three of his wives, and bragged to Billy Bush that he could sexually assault any woman he wanted because, he said, “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”

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— Then there’s Musk, who’s fathered at least 14 children with multiple women. While Hegseth, Trump, and Kennedy seem to think the sole role of women is to be arm candy and to provide pleasure in bed, Musk apparently thinks they’re most useful as toaster ovens for white babies.

These are the men writing the rules for our daughters and granddaughters.

And that year Louise and I got married seems to have been one of history’s hinge points. Lewis Powell wrote his infamous Memo in 1971 and Nixon put him on the Court to carry it out the following year. My old debating nemesis Phyllis Schlafly started her Eagle Forum to fight ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972.

The Heritage Foundation was founded the next year, in 1973, the same year the Supreme Court decided Roe, and it all laid the foundation for Rush Limbaugh to spend decades trash-talking “Feminazis” and pushing his Hillary Clinton Testicle Lock Box. Andrew Tate carries on his crusade, as does Trump’s former body man, John McEntee, who joked that when conservatives said they wanted mail-only voting “they meant male, spelled m-a-l-e.”

Many men and businesses think they benefit when women can’t have an economic life independent of them, can’t start a business, or take a risk, or even negotiate on their own behalf. Women’s liberation gave half the American workforce the power to walk away from a bad marriage or a bad job, and Republicans are resentful of it.

But the cost to both women and society for this resurgence of naked misogyny is huge. ProPublica found, looking at 7 years of Texas hospital data, that after that state banned abortion, sepsis rates jumped more than 50 percent and that maternal deaths have been climbing in Texas while falling in Blue states.

Texas’ Attorney General is right now pushing criminal charges and a $1.6 million bond against a Houston midwife, while in Missouri Republican legislators are pushing a state registry of expectant mothers they can then monitor to make sure they don’t get an abortion.

Elon Musk’s Grok AI has generated an estimated 23,000 sexualized images of children and a reported 1.8 million sexualized images of women in just 11 days, after which Musk posted that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero,” as his company put the feature behind a paywall, monetizing it.

Meanwhile accused rapist Andrew Tate — whose $8,000-a-year War Room ran a PhD course on seducing, isolating, and pushing women into sex-cam work — has cultivated the president’s youngest son, with an associate telling the New York Times he’d given Barron dating advice while Tate became a big brother to him.

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This is all incredibly damaging to young men, as well. These views of women and male dominance produce men who can’t ask for help, can’t be a real partner, and can’t ever truly get close to anyone including their own families. And these incels blame their loneliness on the women, sometimes with murderous violence.

One of the great missions of Gloria Steinem’s life, as she told me more than once on my program, was the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced in 1928 and re-introduced in 1972, that says, simply:

“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

It’s impossible to measure how many discoveries and accomplishments for the human race we’ve already lost to the suppression of women’s agency and rights, but now is a great time to take the next step toward ending this horror.

The Equal Rights Amendment has been ratified by 38 states, the number the Constitution requires, but Republicans are still fighting it by claiming that they weren’t ratified before 1982 and therefore aren’t valid. The Republicans on the Supreme Court refuse to examine the case.

Two weeks ago, the new Archivist of the United States told senators he’ll stick with his predecessor’s refusal to certify it, following a Justice Department opinion rather than the plain text of Article V of the Constitution, which doesn’t mention dates or times for constitutional amendments at all.

Congress can settle this and establish women’s rights by law with a simple resolution with a majority vote.

So, call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your representative and both senators you want them co-sponsoring the resolution affirming ERA ratification. Then check your registration at vote.org, because Republicans are again openly discussing repealing the Nineteenth Amendment that gave women the vote.

I signed for Louise in 1972 because the bank required it; nobody should have to do that ever again. We need to put women’s rights into the Constitution, where no rightwing politician can again challenge them.

If this article helped you see how the pieces fit, please share it and consider supporting the Hartmann Report so we can keep doing this work. None of this fixes itself and if we want a better future for our daughters and granddaughters we can’t just stand idly by.

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Louise’s Daily Song: “The Men Who Want To Sign…”

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The September book of the month is Looking Backward, From 2000 to 1887, by Edward Bellamy. Buy a copy or download it for free here.

This is a utopian science fiction novel published in 1888. When Julian West falls into a hypnotic sleep in 1887 Boston, he awakens 113 years later to find America transformed into a socialist utopia. Through conversations with his guide, Doctor Leete, West discovers a radically reimagined society where industry is nationalized, goods are equally distributed, and citizens retire at 45. This bestselling novel sparked a political mass movement and inspired over 162 discussion clubs across America.

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In one of the most obscene segments ever aired on Fox “News,” yesterday morning our billionaire Treasury Secretary said the inflation Americans are suffering from is Ukraine’s fault because, in response to Putin’s criminal regime daily murdering Ukrainian civilians (a war crime), Zelenskyy has been blowing up Russia’s energy assets.

Stupidity? Hypocrisy? Owned by Putin? Or is something even more sinister at work here?

That same morning, the Financial Times revealed that for the past three years Russia has been helping Iran build a supersonic cruise missile capable of blowing our ships out of the water, and at an Iran/Russia/China summit with Iran’s president, Putin, and Xi in Bishek this week, Putin said he’ll continue to supply Iran with “the necessary goods” that can be used to kill Americans.

Europe’s policy chief told the world that Russia gave Iran the satellite intelligence they needed to target and kill and maim American troops while destroying billions worth of our military infrastructure in the region. A senior official confirmed to CBS that Moscow was doing this, with 13 killed and 380 wounded by Iran (official numbers) just in the first forty days.

Still, Trump invited Russia’s finance minister to the G20 meeting that was supposed to focus on punishing countries that are aiding Iran.

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked about it all, he waved the question off as irrelevant, saying that Putin’s got his own set of problems.

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Are you seeing the same pattern I am? Before lunch just yesterday, our Treasury Secretary scolded Ukraine for fighting back against naked, murderous Russian aggression, our Secretary of State shrugged his shoulders about Iran and Russia working together to kill our troops, and Trump issued a new threat against our closest neighbor and ally, Canada.

If Putin had sat down Trump, Hegseth, Kennedy, Bessent, Rubio, and Stephen Miller in a room and ordered them to hurt and weaken the US, exactly what would they have done differently?

Of course, it was Trump who gave the orders and created the environment for all this to help Putin and screw America. And his motivation may be even more disgusting than the simple treason that this Manchurian Candidate scenario seems to indicate.

Start with the war. Ignoring the Constitution’s requirement that only Congress can declare war, Trump has now bombed at least 8 countries, the most recent being Iran where we’ve now burned through air defenses that we could have used to defend Europe (including Ukraine) from Russia or Taiwan from China.

Our Patriot interceptor inventory has collapsed from 2,330 before the war to somewhere between 759 and 827 today, a drop of at least 65 percent, and our military has expended nearly four-fifths of its THAAD inventory. It’s going to take years to rebuild those stocks, and in the meantime we’re badly weakened on the world stage.

While Russia knows that the Patriot is pretty much the only weapon capable of knocking down the ballistic missiles Russia’s been throwing at Kiev every night — and Trump has refused to provide any more new ones to Ukraine for over a year-and-a-half — Moscow has kicked their own missile production into high gear to exploit that shortage. Their ballistic missile strikes on Ukraine went from 61 in April to 198 in July with an even more radical increase across August.

The war Trump chose to join against Iran in violation of our laws and Constitution, in other words, is directly helping Putin kill children in Ukraine and assists Iran in hitting our troops in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, a humiliated South Korean President Lee had to go on TV and admit to his country that he was incapable of stopping Trump from pulling THADD components and Patriot batteries out of South Korea at the same time North Korea’s brutal dictator, Russian/Chinese ally, and Trump’s “good friend” Kim Jong Un is adding to his nuclear weapon inventory and testing ballistic missiles capable of incinerating Los Angeles and San Francisco.

While all that’s happening, Whiskey Pete Hegseth is hollowing out the Pentagon from the inside in his crusade to get rid of women and Black or Hispanic officers. The Army’s top civilian leader, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, resigned this week after multiple disputes with Pete, who’d previously fired Army chief General Randy George.

The resulting disaster is that our Army has no Senate-confirmed civilian or uniformed leadership in the middle of a shooting war.

Morale has collapsed, just like Putin would want, as Pete has most recently blocked another six officers from promotion, forced polygraphs on his own subordinates, and installed white male MAGA-only officers in senior slots.

And when reporters at Stars and Stripes — published since 1861 and started by Abraham Lincoln — dared write about the hardships sailors were enduring aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, Pete fired the paper’s editor and publisher. So much for a free and honest press for our troops.

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There’s also, in no particular order:

— Ordering new carriers back to steam catapults on a ship already under construction
— Making the future drone-carrier harder to build because now the ship won’t reach the fleet until 2034
— Bombing boats in the Caribbean in what legal scholars across the spectrum call criminal extrajudicial killings
— Our national debt hitting $40 trillion because of Reagan’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s tax cuts, on pace to break the World War II record by 2030
— Interest on that debt is already exceeding all defense spending, money that instead could have given us healthcare and free college for the past two generations
— Handing roughly a trillion dollars in tax cuts to the top one percent last year while cutting Medicaid by about the same amount
— Cutting SNAP so hard that more than a million poor American children lost their food benefits
— Refusing to raise the minimum wage or make it easier to unionize
— Cutting the CDC’s parasite surveillance staff from eleven people to three and stopping surveillance for cyclospora
— Driving inspections of foreign food facilities to historic lows
— Cutting the childhood vaccine schedule from seventeen diseases down to eleven while discouraging Americans from getting any vaccinations
— Refusing to enforce our antitrust laws
— Firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for publishing a jobs number he didn’t like, so now we’re getting happy-talk numbers that must be corrected 2 months later
— Attacking our closest allies and trading partners, Mexico and Canada, with punitive tariffs
— Withholding $1.7 billion from NIH and canceling 2,200 grants for medical research and cancer cures while Europe and Canada recruit our scientists
— Moving nearly 150 programs out of the Education Department to kill it and our kids’ chances at a better future
— Killing Voice of America and smiling about it as Russian and Chinese state media move to fill the vacuum
— Weaponizing the DOJ against Trump’s personal enemies
— Defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, and NPR because they told the truth
— Threatening the broadcast licenses of networks that offended Dear Leader
— Hollowing out our cybersecurity agency protecting our infrastructure and elections (CISA) so today states are freaking out that there’s no federal election security plan for the midterms
— Pausing enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, our main defense against foreign money bribing or otherwise corrupting American officials, including the president
— Handing our media to friendly oligarchs
— Deregulating the crypto underground that moved $104 billion to sanctioned entities in a single year, most of it Russian, Iranian, and North Korean
— Pardoning the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other cop-killers and then erasing their seditious conspiracy convictions entirely
— Sending masked, unmarked, armed federal agents into American neighborhoods
— Deploying armed National Guard troops into American cities over the objections of their governors, mayors, and citizens and in violation of posse comitatus
— Labeling “anti-capitalism” and “anti-Christianity” as terrorism indicators under NSPM-7
— Destroying faith in our elections
— Standing up an FBI and IRS joint effort to harass good-government and anti-corruption nonprofits
— Capping federal student borrowing in ways that hit aspiring teachers hardest.

In addition to hugely helping out Vladimir Putin, almost every thing on that list can be used in one way or another to put money (often government money) into somebody’s pocket.

At the same time Trump’s appointee at the CFTC is suing states that try to regulate the futures betting markets, Uday’s … er, Don Jr’s … 1789 Capital venture fund led a billion-dollar funding round for Polymarket, valuing that betting outfir at $21 billion. Uday himself told Republican attorneys general to back off.

Both Uday and Qusay now have major stakes in both drone and other defense companies that benefit from our Pentagon tax dollars (that are never audited), and a rare-earth firm Uday invested in just got a $620 million Pentagon loan after the White House intervened to make it happen.

Whatever happened to my father’s GOP that fought fascists in WWII, hated repressive governments like in Russia and China, and preached fiscal moderation?

Between the Powell Memo, Jude Wanniski’s Two Santas strategy, five corrupt on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court, and Trump’s ass-kissing embrace of Putin, it’s pretty much entirely dead. Nothing left but suck-ups, bigots, and cynical opportunists who figure the best way to win an election is to shut down polling places in Texas.

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We’re now watching a government run by people philosophically (and often financially) aligned with Putin and other tinpot dictators, who view our nation as a resource to be stripped for their own private gain.

So make sure everybody you know is registered and ready via vote.org, and double-check your registration if you live in a Red state. And then this November, turn out and vote these greedy bastards out of office while voting is still available to us.

And if this is the kind of reporting and analysis you want more of, please subscribe to the Hartmann Report and share this piece with the people in your life who need to hear it. Getting this kind of information in front of one more voter today matters more right now than almost anything else we can do.

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Louise’s Daily Song: “What if Putin Gave the Orders?”

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The September book of the month is Looking Backward, From 2000 to 1887, by Edward Bellamy. Buy a copy or download it for free here.

This is a utopian science fiction novel published in 1888. When Julian West falls into a hypnotic sleep in 1887 Boston, he awakens 113 years later to find America transformed into a socialist utopia. Through conversations with his guide, Doctor Leete, West discovers a radically reimagined society where industry is nationalized, goods are equally distributed, and citizens retire at 45. This bestselling novel sparked a political mass movement and inspired over 162 discussion clubs across America.

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Share

Here we go again with American colonialism, this time with a crazy scheme Trump thinks is “brilliant.”

You’d have thought we’d have learned our lesson with our stupid intervention in Iran in 1953, which led us straight to America’s humiliation in 1980 and today’s war with the Mullahs. This is going to be an epic disaster, one that will most likely cost us dearly in both American blood and treasure.

Back in February of 1989 I arrived in Caracas, Venezuela for a brief visit. Just a few hundred yards onto Venezuelan soil, I was stopped by a group of soldiers who told me I had to turn back and leave the country. My main memory is how young they were and how they seemed apologetic.

What I’d stumbled into was an uprising called the Caracazo.

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Four years earlier, Reagan and his Treasury Secretary James Baker had begun leaning hard on Venezuela to cut back on their social programs and reduce their taxes on rich people, just like they’d done here with trickle-down, only this one under the banner of “austerity” and IMF-supervised “restructuring.”

Venezuela’s President when I arrived was Carlos Andrés Pérez, a guy who’d successfully campaigned in 1988 against the Reagan/Bush austerity plan, calling the entire thing “a neutron bomb that kills people but leaves buildings standing.” He’d also been the president five years earlier, and in that time had nationalized Venezuela’s oil, making him a bit of a folk hero.

But when he took office on February 2, 1989, three weeks before I arrived, the previous president (Jaime Lusinchi) had run the country $33 billion into debt, giving Bush and the IMF an excuse to force their neoliberal austerity program onto new President Pérez, who — disastrously — went along with it. His first step was to raise bus fares, which he thought would be benign. It wasn’t.

In the country with the largest proven oil reserves on Earth — larger than Saudi Arabia’s, Russia’s, or America’s — Bush’s price for debt relief was that the country’s poor had to pay more to get to work. Just 25 days later, the day I arrived, millions of angry people flooded the streets in response to that increase in bus fares and Pérez declared a state of national emergency.

By the end of the next afternoon, the 28th, Pérez had suspended the constitution and his army had killed at least 276 civilians and wounded another 1,500. Human rights groups said thousands died as bodies were dumped into unmarked pits in a corner of the Cementerio General del Sur that Caraqueños call La Peste, “the plague.” The brutal state of emergency, endorsed by US President GHW Bush, lasted another month.

Now, we’re not only risking a repeat of that, but we’ve also run this movie before in other countries. In an incredible irony, the most well-known of those was Iran in 1953 when our CIA overthrew democratically-elected Iranian President Mohammad Mossadegh because he’d nationalized that country’s oil.

We replaced Mossadegh with the brutal, repressive rule of the Shah, and we’re still paying for that one, this time with American blood and treasure thanks to Trump’s and Hegseth’s criminal attack and bumbling incompetence.

Calling his latest imperialist scam in Venezuela “the biggest oil deal in world history,” Trump is now filling in some of the details of his corrupt attempt to make off with some 65 billion barrels of oil sitting across 17 fields that represent about a fifth of Venezuela’s estimated 303 billion barrels total.

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And it’s a grim repeat of our worst experiments in colonialism from the 19th and early 20th centuries. As Gregory Brew, senior energy analyst with the Eurasia Group, told Fortune magazine yesterday:

“If the U.S. scheme in Venezuela sounds colonial, that’s because it is.”

Trump tried to put a happy face on his scheme to steal Venezuela’s oil by saying that he’ll be using it to refill our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which he’s drained down to 286 million barrels in a desperate attempt to lower gas prices, its lowest level since 1982 in the wake of the Arab Oil Embargoes.

But, like with so much else Trump says, that’s an easily disproven lie; our salt caves can’t hold Venezuela’s thick, heavy sour crude because they and their pumping equipment are designed and built for light, sweet crude like we pump here. Putting Venezuelan oil into them would gum them up and destroy their usefulness forever.

We do have, however, massive refineries along the Gulf coast that were built by the Koch brothers and others specifically for that heavy Venezuelan crude back in the days when it was easily flowing to America. They’re probably salivating at the opportunity to dump the expensive Canadian tar sands oil they’re now refining and get back to the cheaper and easier stuff from down south. Perhaps this was all even their idea.

Trump says he’s “negotiated” a 100-year lease with Delcy Rodríguez, the illegitimate “acting president” of Venezuela who was Maduro’s VP when the two of them lost the election but stayed in power anyway. Today, the only things keeping her in power — after a majority of voters said “No” — are their army and our Navy and Air Force.

Like I said, we’ve seen this movie before.

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To make things even more classically Trumpian, he’s giving the contract to handle this oil we’re snatching to an allegedly corrupt billionaire who’s wanted for arrest in Switzerland, a fellow named Alejandro Betancourt López.

López made his fortune from insider no-bid power plant contracts with Chávez; Transparency International’s Venezuelan chapter estimated he’d overcharged the Venezuelan government by $2.9 billion. American prosecutors identified him as an “unnamed co-conspirator” in a scheme they say embezzled more than a billion dollars from those deals, leading Swiss authorities to freeze his assets and issue an international arrest warrant for him.

When British police arrested Betancourt López in London in November of 2025, The Washington Post reports that Trump’s senior officials intervened, pushed the Swiss to close the case without charges, refused to act on the arrest warrant, and gave him a visa to enter the United States.

The corrupt lawyer who argued in American courts that López shouldn’t be charged with embezzlement was then staying at one of López’s mansions in Madrid and has a familiar name: Rudy Giuliani.

So, not only did Trump and Hegseth illegally and without congressional authorization invade a sovereign country, kill more than a hundred people, and abduct its head of state, but we then handed a massive chunk of that country’s oil — for the next century — to a man whose arrest warrant we’re sitting on and refusing to execute.

Meanwhile, nobody can find the money from the tanker-carried oil we first seized right after our invasion of Venezuela.

According to The Financial Times, Trump collected roughly $13 billion selling seized Venezuelan crude, routed at first through a bank account he controlled in Qatar, and six months later it appears to have vanished into thin air. It’s definitely not back in Venezuela.

Elizabeth Warren says the entire oil seizure and sale is a crime, and Democratic Representative Juaquin Castro and Republican Representative María Elvira Salazar are echoing her sentiment. The money didn’t even show up when the country was begging for it this June when two earthquakes killed 2,595 people and they desperately needed the cash for rescue and reconstruction.

Given all this, it should be obvious that this sleazy deal is going to fail, and that failure will be both spectacular, bloody, and expensive.

Exxon and ConocoPhillips are still owed billions from Chavez’ nationalization and aren’t going anywhere near this one. Trump sneered at Concoco’s CEO when he asked for reparations for what was taken from them back in the day.

And oil industry experts say it’ll take years, perhaps a decade, to get Venezuelan production meaningfully increased, a timeline that will run well past the political lifetimes of both Trump and Rodríguez.

Get ready: somewhere in the barrios I once worked in above Caracas, a young officer and his friends are running the political arithmetic I saw people doing during those hours I was there in February of 1989. He’ll be the next Hugo Chavez, the guy who overthrew López and re-nationalized the oil.

Seriously, do we really think the citizens of that country — after all they’ve been through over the past four generations — are just going to sit back and take it as our military props up a government nobody elected, hand their oil money to an accused money launderer Trump crony, and let us ship the proceeds through a Trump-owned bank account in Qatar?

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Is anybody in America that naïve other than Republican voters who live on a diet of Fox “News”? As Senator Jack Reed — the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee — said:

“President Trump’s effort to turn the U.S. military into an investor in Venezuelan oil is a blatant abuse of power and taxpayer dollars.”

Which raises the question: Where are Republicans who control Congress on this harebrained doomed-to-fail scheme? Every one of them knows just how crazy it is, but it seems most of them are figuring that their silence will buy them a million-dollar-a-year lobbying job if they can just keep their heads down and not challenge Trump and his oil billionaire buddies.

Call your senators and your representative at 202-224-3121 and ask them what happened to Venezuela’s $13 billion and to support a war powers resolution to stop Trump’s insane war against Iran and further military actions in Venezuela.

And if my experience and this information that I spent hours digging up and composing was useful to you, please share it and subscribe to the Hartmann Report. Independent journalism like this doesn’t have a corrupt billionaire behind it. I just have you.

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Louise’ Daily Song: “Crude”

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The September book of the month is Looking Backward, From 2000 to 1887, by Edward Bellamy. Buy a copy or download it for free here.

This is a utopian science fiction novel published in 1888. When Julian West falls into a hypnotic sleep in 1887 Boston, he awakens 113 years later to find America transformed into a socialist utopia. Through conversations with his guide, Doctor Leete, West discovers a radically reimagined society where industry is nationalized, goods are equally distributed, and citizens retire at 45. This bestselling novel sparked a political mass movement and inspired over 162 discussion clubs across America.

Here’s the video of this Daily Take:

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What should we Americans do when it comes out that our Secretary of Defense has been committing crimes in plain sight and nobody in the administration seems concerned about it?

Back in 2008, New York Times reporter David Barstow revealed that the Pentagon under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, starting in the fall of 2002, had recruited dozens of retired military officers to go on TV as if they were independent military analysts.

They were paid to push the Bush administration’s propaganda about weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds, and other lies to build support for the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that the president and vice president had lied us into.

The hired guns got their talking points from the Pentagon, and internal documents called them “message force multipliers.” One participant later described it as “psyops on steroids.” Barstow disclosed how this was pure propaganda, noting:

“[M]embers of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated.”

Those unnecessary and illegal wars cost America the lives of about 7,000 troops and 7,600 contractors, led more than 30,000 service members and veterans of those conflicts to later commit suicide, 52,000+ wounded for life, and added roughly $5 trillion to our national debt with an estimated $2 trillion in veterans care and interest still to be paid.

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Barstow won a Pulitzer Prize for his work and Congress — responding to widespread horror among the public that America would start targeting the civilian and voting population with propaganda the same way Hitler routinely did in the 1930s and Putin does daily in Russia — passed 10 U.S.C. 2241a, which says simply:

“Funds available to the Department of Defense may not be obligated or expended for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not otherwise specifically authorized by law.”

Ever since, every Pentagon appropriation has carried a similar restriction known as Section 8001, following a similar prohibition passed 74 years ago as the Federal Labor-Security Act of 1952 which says:

“No part of any appropriation . . . shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress.”

Propagandizing the American people has been a crime for more years than Hegseth has been alive: there shouldn’t be any doubt that our government using our tax dollars to target us with psyops is illegal. But don’t bother telling that to Whiskey Pete. He apparently doesn’t care.

This past Sunday, Dan Lamothe and Tara Copp revealed in The Washington Post (Pentagon Secretly Installs Military Influencers in Civilian Roles) that Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon has been quietly moving several conservative military veterans with large online followings into government roles, all while refusing to answer any questions about what they actually do.

What we do know is that most have been using their public personas to push stories favorable to Pete and Trump and to trash-talk opponents of this administration’s policies.

Just like another influencer, this one a deaf Utah housewife with nearly a million followers on social media and until June an accredited Pentagon reporter. Since July, though, she’s been a “special government employee” at the Department of Defense, something that she didn’t bother to disclose to her audience when she started the DSA Explorer, an interactive map of Americans she claims are associated with the antiwar Democratic Socialists of America.

The Pentagon refuses to explain what she does for them or which office she runs this McCarthy-esque operation out of; she claims it’s a private project.

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It brings to mind Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky, who said in Congress in 1948, as he tried to “restate the existing prohibitions on domestic dissemination” of American-produced propaganda designed to hit Russia:

“By law, the USIA cannot engage in domestic propaganda. This distinguishes us, as a free society, from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity. … The American taxpayer certainly does not need or want his tax dollars used to support U.S. Government propaganda directed at him or her.”

If authorizing and paying for all of this with our tax dollars is a crime, it doesn’t seem to bother Whiskey Pete. Of course, he’s never been all that concerned with following the law.

It’s also a crime in both American and international law to murder survivors of a shipwreck, even if you caused it in a war, but that didn’t stop Pete from ordering a double-tap on one of the boats he was targeting in the Caribbean.

Law professors told TIME magazine that intentionally killing a shipwrecked person is a war crime, and that absent an actual armed conflict it’s simply criminal murder, punishable by life in prison. Congress asked for the video of the killing and the written orders, but fifteen months later neither Congress nor the American public have seen either one.

Or the killings of the unnamed and unidentified men piloting small boats who’ve never been charged with a crime or faced any sort of due process.

Or the Signal affair, where the Pentagon’s inspector general (before being demoted) concluded that Hegseth illegally transmitted the number and strike times of manned American aircraft over hostile territory through a commercial app on his personal phone hours before those aircraft flew.

Pete declined to be interviewed, never turned over the phone, and some of the messages had auto-deleted before anyone could capture them.

When the Bush administration secretly paid Armstrong Williams to push No Child Left Behind, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) ruled that Bush’s Education Department had violated Congress’ multiple prohibitions on government-funded propaganda directed at American citizens.

They also ruled that by spending money Congress hadn’t specifically authorized, the Bush administration had violated the Antideficiency Act, 31 U.S.C. 1350, a class E felony which carries two years in prison for the people who break it and goes back to 1905. (Bush declined to have his Attorney General prosecute his Secretary of Education.)

And here is Whiskey Pete doing it all over again.

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Back in 2018, when a federal grand jury determined that Putin’s Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg had built fake American social media profiles to influence American public opinion in favor of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run, they criminally indicted thirteen Russians and three Russian companies. Although they didn’t have Pentagon email addresses, they were doing essentially the same thing on behalf of Trump that these retired military officers are accused of.

It appears that history is repeating itself, although this time it’s Hegseth doing it instead of Putin.

Odds are close to impossible that Trump will have Todd Blanche indict Pete for these crimes, any more than Bush was willing to indict his Education Secretary Rod Paige over the Armstrong Williams crime. But there are other options.

— Any member of Congress can request the GAO to investigate and issue a formal legal decision on whether any of these arrangements violate Section 2241a and Section 8001.

— The Defense Department’s inspector general can be made to produce for Congress the appointment memoranda, position descriptions, ethics opinions, timekeeping records, and compensation for every “special government employee” and “highly qualified expert” hired into Hegseth’s office since January 2025.

— There’s also the Office of Special Counsel, which can take Hatch Act complaints about federal employees engaged in partisan political activity.

— And then there’s impeachment. A cabinet secretary is a civil officer of the United States under Article II, Section 4 and thus vulnerable to impeachment and removal from office. While rare — only US Grant’s Secretary of War, William Balknap, has been impeached (in 1876) for corruptly using his office — but it’s still an option should Democrats take over Congress come January.

And, in fact, there are already two articles of impeachment that have been dropped in the House against Whiskey Pete.

Shri Thanedar filed H.Res. 935 in December over the campaign of lethal strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and Yassamin Ansari led fourteen members in filing H.Res. 1177 in April, containing six articles covering the “unauthorized war against Iran,” “violations of the law of armed conflict and the targeting of civilians,” “the reckless handling of sensitive military information,” “obstruction of congressional oversight,” and “conduct bringing disrepute upon the armed forces.”

Impeachment doesn’t have to just be about getting a conviction and removal from office. Even if it never makes it to the Senate, the process in the House forces evidence into the permanent public record under oath, and establishes for history that a crime was committed, even if it was never punished.

Both impeachment resolutions are sitting in the House Judiciary Committee, where congressional Republicans are trying to pretend they don’t exist.

Meanwhile, Hegseth appears to be exploring a run for president. Talk about deluded! And yesterday, Dan Driscoll, the Secretary of the Army, resigned, apparently because he is disgusted with Hegseth’s lack of competence and management skills.

So call your representative and your two senators at 202-224-3121 and politely ask them to request a formal GAO legal opinion on whether the Pentagon’s undisclosed influencer payroll violates 10 U.S.C. 2241a and triggers the Antideficiency Act.

Tell them you want the Pentagon’s inspector general to force production of appointment and compensation records for every special government employee in the Secretary’s office, and the Senior Service College Task Force report released, and a Hatch Act referral to the Office of Special Counsel.

And if your representative isn’t already a cosponsor of impeachment resolution H.Res. 1177, ask why not.

Then double-check your voter registration, and if this information was useful to you, share it, forward it, post it, and subscribe at hartmannreport.com so we can keep doing this work. Democracy isn’t a spectator sport, and it never was.

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Louise’s Daily Song: “Hegseth’s Crime”

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The September book of the month is Looking Backward, From 2000 to 1887, by Edward Bellamy. Buy a copy or download it for free here.

This is a utopian science fiction novel published in 1888. When Julian West falls into a hypnotic sleep in 1887 Boston, he awakens 113 years later to find America transformed into a socialist utopia. Through conversations with his guide, Doctor Leete, West discovers a radically reimagined society where industry is nationalized, goods are equally distributed, and citizens retire at 45. This bestselling novel sparked a political mass movement, kicked off the progressive era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and inspired over 162 discussion clubs across America.

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Last Thursday, a federal judge in Massachusetts put her foot down and stopped Trump’s Republican toadies on the Postal Board of Governors from seizing control of your mail-in ballot this fall. She noted that neither the Constitution nor Congress gives him or them that power and, besides that, there’s no time for states to comply with their demands.

They’re still trying, though, and if they’re unsuccessful we can fully expect this scheme to reappear in the presidential election in 2 years with even greater intensity.

I’ve seen up-close-and-personal how this plays out when corrupt leaders driven by sex, money, and revenge take over a nation. It ain’t pretty.

Thanksgiving Day of 1980 I was the guest of host Sanford Ungar on NPR’s All Things Considered show, live from the famine zone of Kampala, Uganda, describing what I’d seen in the preceding days. Both times he asked me about soldiers (the country was militarily occupied by Tanzania at the time, them having evicted Idi Amin) the military cut the phone line and we had to re-dial.

I told him how Kampala, build on seven hills like Rome, was once one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but we’d been walking through burned-out buildings, broken glass, and confronted tens of thousands of hungry faces.

The city had no running water, and when the Commissioner of the Ministry of Rehabilitation met with Herr Müller and me, I apologized for arriving filthy in 4-day-old clothes; he told me not to worry about it as he hadn’t had a bath or shower in the two years the city had been “dry” since the war started. On one short morning walk, Herr Müller and I counted nine bodies.

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We spent an afternoon at the Namalu “Detention Center” prison farm, one of Amin’s favorite torture sites, that was then a feeding station run by an Irish volunteer named Ann who gave each starving child a single bowl of ground corn and powdered milk every day. A few months after we met, Ann was shot dead by a sniper as she was feeding those kids.

Amin had fled the country in April of 1979 as the Tanzanians joined the opposition forces; he’d been gone almost two years when I got there, and the water still wasn’t running. The lesson for me was that bad men leading nations invariably corrupt or even destroy their institutions of government both to stay in charge and to enrich themselves and their families. And once the process starts, it begins to compound on itself until there’s little but wreckage left.

There’s a word for this, and a phrase that describes it.

Louise and I have been binge-watching a British crime series, The Chelsea Detective, and on the show we watched last night one of the characters said to another that her cop grandfather had told her to “always watch for the holy trinity: sex, money, and revenge.”

Not only was she describing how to sort types of criminals, she was also describing Donald Trump; there’s almost nothing in his public record for the past 50 years that doesn’t fall into one of those three categories.

In Idi Amin and Donald Trump’s cases, though, what separates them from run-of-the-mill criminals and abusers is that they weren’t concerned about the law restraining their worst impulses. If anything, once they seized power the law protected those impulses and facilitated their acting them out.

The name for this type of government — where the leader is both a psychopath and has seized so much power he faces few or no legal or political restraints — is called “personalism.” It refers to the concentration of all decision-making and appointment-making power in a single man’s hands at the expense of everybody else except those in his inner circle (typically his family).

Democracy researchers Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Eric Frantz have put together what’s probably the world’s most comprehensive data set on this, detailing roughly 200 dictatorships since WWII. Titled How Dictatorships Work, it details how what I saw in Kampala (and roughly a dozen other countries in the years I did international relief work) comes about, and has deep lessons for us in today’s Trump- and oligarch-run America.

Personalist rulers invariably — always, really — leave the countries they’ve ruled worse off than when they started and their damage typically long outlives them. Social scientist Max Weber called this patrimonialism: it’s when a ruler treats the nation, its commons, and its collective wealth as his own personal property to loot and share with his closest relatives and cronies.

Like converting the Department of Justice into your own personal instrument for revenge, blinding the IRS to your crimes, and tearing down the East Wing without asking anybody’s permission or advice. Or taking a country to war without congressional authorization. Or giving away federal lands to major donors and killing regulations to enhance their profits. Or his kids becoming defense contractors.

Once a country is essentially converted into the personalist property of one man, his family, and his billionaire cronies, his private lusts and grudges become public policy and the line defining the difference between his desires and the nation’s interests vanishes.

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Putin, who appears to be tutoring Trump with their regular hour-long phone calls and in-person visits, ran this exact same sequence in Russia even though they still have elections and still claim that nation is a republic.

— His prosecutors went after the richest man in Russia when he started to defy Putin, then took apart his company and gave its pieces to Putin’s cronies.

— The Russian equivalent of the FCC broke the back of independent media; the press in Russia was brought to heel in fewer than two years with the help of a handful of loyal oligarchs who bought up the nation’s largest private media properties.

—Then came the “foreign agent” laws that, like Trump’s NSPM-7, categorized civil society organizations and dissenters as national security threats. And his illegal war to steal the wealth of Ukraine.

Instead of suspending the Russian constitution, Putin simply seized control of every one of the government’s agencies and their resources and redirected them all to supporting his iron-fisted rule while turning a blind eye to his looting the country.

Trump is doing the same thing here, from the IRS to the FBI to ICE to the Pentagon. For example, he replaced a real prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia with his personal attorney, Lindsey Halligan, who had no prosecutorial experience in her life, and within 3 weeks she’d come up with an indictment for Leticia James, the NY AG who’d won a half-billion-dollar fraud judgement against Trump.

When a federal judge blocked that for being illegal, Trump’s Justice Department tried to reindict James twice, in two different districts; so far only the refusal of grand juries to go along have prevented him from going full Putin, although the case is now in front of the Fourth Circuit appeals court dominated by Republican-appointed hard-right judges.

Now his DOJ has opened an investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the writer he raped in New York according to two juries who ordered him to pay her millions in damages. Again, right out of Putin’s and Amin’s playbook: sex and revenge, and all of his harassment of Carroll is paid for with our tax dollars.

Which brings us to the money. Trump’s net worth has tripled since he took office, mostly based on crypto scams that his own administration’s regulatory agencies legalized and authorized for him.

At the same time, billionaires Trump and Musk gutted the IRS by firing about a third of its enforcement staff; Yale’s budget lab says the 2025 DOGE personnel cuts alone will let billionaire tax cheats screw us out of at least $600 billion, all against the background of a current estimated $700 billion a year in routine tax cheating by the Epstein class.

The IRS under Trump is now auditing low-income families claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit at a rate 35 times higher that they audit the morbidly rich. Dwight Eisenhower and my Republican father are both rolling over in their graves.

Following Amin’s and Putin’s script, Poynter has documented more than a hundred federal actions against journalists and news outlets, with Trump personally responsible for roughly a fifth of them.

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FBI agents raided a Washington Post reporter’s home in January, two independent journalists (including Don Lemon) were arrested for covering a protest in Minnesota, and now we discover the Pentagon is compiling a blacklist of reporters.

Trump’s NSPM-7 executive order categorized anybody who disagrees with his ideas of what patriotism, capitalism, or Christianity mean as a “potential terrorist,” leading now to Putin-like FBI and IRS investigations of nonprofits across the country. Instead of going after morbidly rich tax cheats, they’re now going after good-government organizations that personalist leader Trump considers a threat to his family’s and his cronies’ power and ability to loot our nation’s wealth.

Like in Uganda and Russia, too, the very rich are tossing in to support this personalist leader because it can mean billions of our tax dollars flowing into their money bins.

Republicans in Congress are cowering, as are their spokespeople on TV and in the press, while billionaires (both American and foreign) line up to shower Trump with gold bars and jet airplanes in violation of the constitution’s emoluments clauses.

Elon Musk has revived his America PAC for the midterms and, according to independent writer Lalisa Stands, is harvesting voter data in Texas in a way that’s, shall we say, less than transparent. Her article is worth a careful read and I’m looking forward to more corroboration as details continue to come out.

Which brings us to this November. History shows us that once the prosecutors have been captured, the tax collectors neutered, the reporters cowed, and the protestors labeled as terrorists, the only way to get a personalist leader out of power short of physical violence is with an election.

So, like with Amin and Putin before him, Trump and his lickspittles are doing everything they can to corrupt or even seize control of this fall’s and the 2028 elections. That’s on Judge Talwani’s docket this coming week, along with multiple other efforts by state attorneys general and folks like Marc Elias, but they’re going up against the formidable power of the entire executive branch that possesses a functionally unlimited budget and has the power to imprison and even kill their “enemies” with impunity.

This is how former spy-chief Vladimir Putin became one of the richest men on the planet, having played the game Trump started last year, and as I was feeding starving refugees in Uganda, Idi Amin was living it up in a massive mansion in Jeddah with maids, cars, drivers, cooks, and concubines, all paid for by the same Saudi government that gave Jared Kushner billions. This is simply how personalist governance works.

In Federalist 51, James Madison notes that if men were angels we’d have no need for the checks on presidential power that he and his colleagues had written into the Constitution. They thought they’d built a system that could survive a bad president and, for the first 250 years, they appeared to be right.

Now, with Amin as a role model and Putin as a mentor, Trump is testing that system and the entire world is watching, aghast. Republicans in Congress and the states, who have the tools Madison gave them to stop our slide from democracy into personalist authoritarian rule, are simply standing around terrified while making up excuses and rationalizations for doing nothing or collecting their own shares of the loot.

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Trump’s obsession with sex, money, and revenge is tearing America apart at the seams while it guts both our soft and hard power around the world, just as Putin had hoped.

At least until this November. The GOP‘s cowardice means only you and I can stop this insanity and we’ll have to do it at the polling places this fall.

Double-check your voter registration — particularly if you live in a Red state (Texas just purged more than a million voters from its rolls) — and if you found this story useful, share it with others and please consider subscribing to the Hartmann Report. Independent journalism only survives when its readers decide it should, and holding a personalist government to account is the work that now falls to all of us.

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Louise’s Daily Song: “Sex, Money, and Revenge”

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The September book of the month is Looking Backward, From 2000 to 1887, by Edward Bellamy. Buy a copy or download free here.

This is a utopian science fiction novel published in 1888. When Julian West falls into a hypnotic sleep in 1887 Boston, he awakens 113 years later to find America transformed into a socialist utopia. Through conversations with his guide, Doctor Leete, West discovers a radically reimagined society where industry is nationalized, goods are equally distributed, and citizens retire at 45. This bestselling novel sparked a political mass movement and inspired over 162 discussion clubs across America.

Thom Hartmann talked about his book, Who Killed the American Dream, as well as Unequal Protection, which inspired it.

We welcomed a wide range of members to the live chat, and several asked Thom questions over the hour. Thank you to all who joined Thom and moderator Nigel today.

The full hour is available to you, whether or not you are a subscriber, as this is the first live session.

September Book of the Month

Looking Backward is available as a free download from Project Gutenberg.

Each Sunday in September, Thom will post a summary of parts of the book, and paid subscribers can comment on their thoughts.

To be able to comment on posts during the month, you’ll need to be a paid subscriber to the Hartmann Report.

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On the last Sunday of the month, September 27, we will hold a live session on Substack, where you can ask Thom your questions and chat with other book club members. The live session starts at Noon ET / 9 am PT.

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10 days ago · 44 likes · 3 comments · Thom Hartmann

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In a few hours we’ll meet here on Hartmann Report to discuss this book; next month there will be a new book, Looking Forward by Edward Bellamy. Here’s the final part of the last chapter of Who Stole the American Dream? The Greatest Crime Ever Told.

Two Possible Futures

The two possible futures we face today aren’t just about democracy or corporate power in the abstract. They represent starkly different visions of America: will we become more like FDR’s ideal, or will we continue down today’s road to oligarchic neo-feudalism like Russia and Hungary did?

Future One: Oligarchy Triumphant

In this possible future, the America of We the People fails. The billionaire oligarchs complete their capture of what’s left of our democracy, corporate constitutional rights remain the law of the land, and wealth concentration accelerates until a handful of trillionaires own most of our politicians as well as everything else worth owning.

The middle class shrinks down to around 10 or 20 percent of us as the American economy comes to resemble the Victorian England that Charles Dickens wrote about in almost every one of his many books. Most Americans become permanent renters, never owning homes, never building wealth, and never achieving anything close to financial security. We work multiple jobs for oligarchs and corporations that face no democratic accountability, under conditions that grow steadily worse, for wages and benefits that somehow never keep pace with costs.

Healthcare remains unaffordable, education is financed by debt, and housing fully becomes a speculative playground for private equity and foreign investors. Climate change accelerates as fossil fuel corporations use their constitutional rights to block every attempt at regulation or the construction of alternative energy systems.

Democracy becomes nothing more than theater, like in most of the other oligarchies and tyrannies across the planet. Elections are held, but oligarchs fund all of the viable candidates and use their media and “free speech” to destroy any politicians who dare try challenge the system. The illusion of choice masks total corporate and billionaire control of our society and our governments, while the Constitution is twisted by a corrupt Supreme Court into a vestigial document that only protects their patrons and allies.

If this current trend continues and those of us who remember America before Reagan’s corporate constitutional rights Revolution die out, the American Dream becomes a mere historical curiosity, a quaint, idealized past that young people skeptically read about in history books, a brief shining—but improbable—moment between the old aristocracies of Europe and the new oligarchies of the twenty-first century.

You could call it a new form of feudalism decorated with smartphones and compliant media, and it’s where we’re headed if we do nothing.

Future Two: Democracy Restored

In this future, democracy and the middle class win. The movement to end corporate constitutional rights reaches its tipping point and the Twenty-Eighth (or Twenty-Ninth) Amendment passes, explicitly stating that constitutional rights belong only to human beings.

With corporate constitutional rights stripped away, democracy can function again without corrupt Republican justices on the Supreme Court constantly constraining it. Congress is once again free to pass laws regulating corporate behavior without confronting endless constitutional litigation. States again revoke the charters of corporations that harm the public interest, corrupt executives once again go to prison, and local communities can again care for their people with revenues from taxing the morbidly rich.

Unions will recover and rebuild America as workers regain their bargaining power and union busting is outlawed. Wages rise to match productivity and the cost of living. And the fifty-plus trillion dollars that was stolen by the Reagan Revolution begins flowing back toward the working families whose labor created it in the first place.

Healthcare becomes a right like in every other advanced democracy in the world and ceases to be just another corporate profit center. Higher education becomes affordable again, and our public schools are rebuilt like Eisenhower did back in the day. Housing becomes a human need to be met, and exploiting it as a speculative commodity is outlawed or taxed into nonexistence. Climate change is addressed because fossil fuel corporations can no longer use their “free speech rights” to buy politicians and block regulation.

The American Dream is, in other words, reborn. Not the old dream of the 1950s, with its racial and gender exclusions and limitations, but a new dream for a new century. A dream where hard work is consistently rewarded, where every family can afford a home regardless of where or to whom they were born, where sickness doesn’t bankrupt people, where education opens doors instead of creating debt prisons, and where each generation once again does better than the last.

This is the America we could bring about, and it all begins by exposing Davis’s toxic headnote and using the public outrage to end corporate constitutional rights.

The Story They Could Tell

The newspapers and editorialists of the 2030s could write that in the 2020s people began to wake up.

They could chronicle how researchers dug through dusty law libraries and found the evidence of Davis’s and Field’s crime, revealed that the infamous headnote was a fraud and the oft-quoted Santa Clara decision never said what everyone thought it said. They could explain how, for 140 years, American democracy had been undermined by a lie, and the American Dream had been stolen by corporate oligarchs.

Activists organized. The Move to Amend Movement spread from community to community, educating millions. Towns such as Spokane, Lafayette, and hundreds of others passed ordinances rejecting corporate constitutional rights. States passed resolutions calling for a constitutional amendment.

The stories would document how the oligarchs fought back with everything they had, spending billions on propaganda while purchasing politicians, judges, and airtime. How they used every constitutional right they’d fraudulently acquired to prevent their own disempowerment.

But the people persisted.

Town by town, state by state, year by year, we educated neighbors. We ran for office, organized, and voted. We built a movement that finally broke through.

And in 2030, after decades of organizing, we passed the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, declaring that corporations are not persons and money is not speech.

As in 1865 in the South and 1933 nationwide, a third oligarchic era ended in America, and a new democratic age was kicked off. Corporate charters were revoked for corporations that harmed the public interest, monopolies were broken up, and wealth was redistributed through a return to rational individual and corporate taxation. Workers rebuilt unions, and communities regained control of their futures.

The American Dream, they’ll write, was reborn.

It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t quick. And it certainly wasn’t easy. But it happened because ordinary people refused to accept rule by the morbidly rich—founded on the lie of corporate constitutional rights—as inevitable. Because we understood that the American Dream wasn’t some nostalgic fantasy but a real achievement that had been stolen from us and our children, and we chose, instead of going along any more, to rise up and take it back.

Or the Story, If We Fail

Historians in the 2030s could also write a different story, explaining how in the early twenty-first century the climate catastrophe accelerated, killing millions and creating caravans of climate refugees. The billionaires and tech bro oligarchs tightened their grip on our lives and our news. As a result, what was left of our democracy after Trump’s gilded presidency collapsed under the burden of corporate money and media manipulation. The American Dream became merely a bitter memory.

Some people, they’ll tell us, saw what was happening. Researchers found the evidence of the 1886 fraud, activists tried to organize resistance, and a few communities even passed ordinances. A handful of states called for a constitutional amendment to reverse Davis’s fraud.

But most Americans—struggling just to pay the rent and childcare bills—were too busy, too distracted, too exhausted, or too cynical to care. They knew the system was rigged; they just didn’t believe they could change it, so they didn’t even try.

As a result, the oligarchs won by default. Democracy died with a shrug, a footnote in a back section of the New York Times.

In this scenario, by 2050 America becomes a brutal, iron-fisted tyranny in fact as well as function. By 2075, even the pretense of democracy is abandoned to corrupt, strongman government based on the Russian and Hungarian system. The old US Constitution had become an anachronism, a museum piece from a bygone era when people naively believed in self-governance and dreamed of economic security for all.

The crime that started in 1886 and was kicked into high gear with the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s was never punished, the theft of constitutional rights never reversed, and the American Dream never restored.

The oligarchs won.

Climate collapse made much of the Earth uninhabitable. Billions died. Civilization fragmented. The survivors lived in a world of scarcity, surveillance, and oligarchic control. The historians of 2090, if any exist, would look back at the early twenty-first century as the last moment when change was possible, when people could have acted but failed to.

When the American Dream could have been saved but wasn’t.

Which Story Gets Told?

America’s future now depends on what you do.

Will you read this book and forget it? Or will you act?

Will you share this story? Will you join Move to Amend, Progressive Democrats of America, Public Citizen, or a similar organization dedicated to fighting corporate constitutional rights? Will you attend your local city council meetings and demand your community reject corporate constitutional rights? Will you organize your friends and neighbors? Will you vote for candidates who support the amendment? Will you run for office yourself?

Will you talk to your family about this over dinner? Will you explain it to your friends and acquaintances on social media? Will you help us make it impossible for people to plead ignorance?

Will you persist when it seems hopeless? Will you keep fighting when the oligarchs push back? Will you refuse to give up?

What you do today determines the history they’ll write tomorrow.

A Final Word

Thomas Jefferson knew this day would come. In 1816, he wrote: “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.”

We didn’t crush it in its birth but instead let it grow for two centuries. Now it’s crushing us.

But it’s not too late.

This bizarre, artificial aristocracy of moneyed corporations and their billionaire oligarchs can still be defeated. The morbidly rich can still be stopped, and democracy can still be reclaimed, restoring the American Dream.

The greatest legal crime in American history was committed in 1886. We’re going to solve it.

We’re going to restore the American Dream.

Join us.

Let us reclaim America’s destiny, as Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. . . . ​The reflection is awful, and in this point of view, how trifling, how ridiculous, do the little paltry cavilings of a few weak or interested men appear, when weighed against the business of a world.”

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion...

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— Senator Ron Wyden wants a criminal investigation of Bob Kennedy. The Guardian and the AP used a FOIA lawsuit to pry loose letters showing that Kennedy’s 2019 trip to Samoa was, in fact, all about vaccines even though Kennedy told the Senate at his confirmation hearings it wasn’t. Following his visit, a measles outbreak killed 83 people in that country, most of them children under five, so Wyden is asking Republicans for a criminal referral to the Justice Department, saying, “There are consequences for lying to Congress.” American Oversight is calling for an investigation, and Hawaii Governor Josh Green, a physician who went to Samoa to help during the outbreak, wants Kennedy gone from his position. HHS called the whole thing “defamatory,” which is rich. After 2 people died from measles this week in Pennsylvania and there’s currently an 875-case outbreak in North Carolina alone, America is on the verge of losing the international “measles-free” status we achieved in 2000. The only problem Wyden and Markey face is that the DOJ is run by a Trump lickspittle who’s just as corrupt and willing to ignore the law (look at the Epstein files about Trump that they are still hiding as a prime example) as Trump himself. Accountability may have to wait another two years for the next administration to be sworn into office.

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— The “Godzilla” El Niño building in the Pacific right now is not a run of bad luck. University of Michigan researchers published an article in the journal Science this week reporting that fossil fuel-driven heating has been intensifying the warm phase of the El Niño that’s building in the Pacific and is fixing to hit us all in the next few months with dramatic consequences. Every single “severe” El Niño ever recorded has happened since the 1980s when, no coincidence, Reagan took Jimmy Carter’s solar panels off the roof of the White House, killed off his Solar Bank program, and nuked the green subsidies Carter had started. Trump just did essentially the same to Biden’s green projects, paying billions to companies not to build wind farms off our coasts. Ocean surface temperatures are the hottest ever recorded and perhaps the hottest in over 100,000 years. Close to 50 million people will face famine before the end of the year because of this El Niño, according to the UN’s World Food Program, as monsoon rains will dry up across India and drought will hit Indonesia and Australia. India is already stockpiling grain in anticipation. The fossil fuel industry has spent billions lying to us and buying our politicians since the 1970s when they first truly realized what their product would do to the world. It’s way past time to hold them and their Republican toadies accountable.

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— Arizona’s attorney general has a blunt message for the United States Postal Service. Kris Mayes has joined up with 24 other Blue states to sue the USPS to block the rule they finalized last week putting themselves in between your state and your ballot at Trump’s request. Early voting starts in North Carolina in just a few weeks, with other states following on soon after. This all came out of a wildly unconstitutional executive order Trump signed to try to block voting by people he thinks are likely to go for Democrats. What’s particularly ironic about this particular lawsuit is that Arizona’s vote-by-mail system was designed, built, and put into place by Republicans decades ago when they ran that state and more than three-quarters of voters in that state use it every cycle (as does Trump himself, via Florida). This is what it looks like when our president takes vote-rigging advice from Putin because he’s desperate to avoid being investigated by people with the power of subpoena.

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— The National Park Service has spent over a year quietly detailing how to hand a slice of Yosemite National Park to a Republican-donating Nevada real estate firm. Kingsbarn Realty Capital owns 83 acres just outside the park’s boundary, about five miles from the fabled sequoias, and wants a chunk of land to build a road into that area. Previous administrations turned them down, but now people are smelling the possibility of a GOP-donating rat as Trump is trying to give them what they want. Congressman Jared Huffman said, “It kind of smells, you know,” adding that these places belong to future generations and shouldn’t be “sold off to Trump’s ultrawealthy friends to profit off of.”

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— Trump also wants to run roads through 45 million acres of untouched national forest to help out his logging, mining, and drilling donors. This would be the single largest rollback of protected public lands in the history of our country, opening the last large unfragmented stretches of national forest across 37 states and touching 70,000 miles of waterways. This week the Center for Biological Diversity published a paper titled Deadly Incursions finding that the blast radius for this would hit more than 400 threatened and endangered species and 7.5 million acres designated “critical habitat” along with 1,800 miles of protected rivers and streams. Grizzlies in the Rockies, salmon in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, Mexican spotted owls and Gila trout in the Southwest, Hellbenders in Appalachia, and rare butterflies more or less everywhere are all threatened. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — a morbidly rich Trump lickspittle who sold his company to Microsoft for more than a billion dollars but has no background whatsoever in forest management — has been bizarrely claiming that Richard Nixon’s Endangered Species Act was “weaponized” by previous administrations. The public comment window closes September 21.

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— Crazy Alert! Diesel hit $5.50 a gallon and billionaire-owned Fox “News” finally found sixty seconds for it. The week diesel broke through $5.50 a gallon nationally (August 19-26) Fox “News” found exactly one minute of airtime the entire seven days. Diesel moves pretty much everything we eat, wear, or buy and — combined with the fertilizer and oil shortage from Trump’s Iran war — is crushing farmers as well. During that one minute Fox spent on the topic they claimed that the price hike was because refineries had been closed “because of green goals,” a total crock. Media Matters, which tracks Fox, revealed this, as well as their claim that Fox spent a mere 15 minutes last month discussing the rising price of gas, and also blamed that on “green” policies. Somewhere in Iowa a farmer is watching Fox and has decided the reason his fuel bill doubled is Greta Thunberg…

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how 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.

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