Your Invitation

The second live session for members of Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club is on Sunday.

Join Thom Hartmann in a live session on Substack and share your thoughts on our September book of the month, Looking Backward, From 2000 to 1887.

Time and Place

Day: Sunday, September 27
Time: Noon ET / 9am PT
Place: The Hartmann Report Substack (hartmannreport.com) and in the Substack app

How it Works

Thom Hartmann will be live to talk about the book and take your questions.

You can ask questions in the chat and, if you like, can be called into the ‘room’ where you will need your video and audio on.

To use chat or to be called into the room, you need to be a paid subscriber to the Hartmann Report.

Nigel Peacock will be your moderator.

Thom will also announce the October Book of the Month.

To join in, subscribe now

Join the Book Club

This is the second live session for the book club using Substack, so we are still learning how it works. Should be fun!

See you there!

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Turn on Fox “News” at night this week and you’ll see something no American has ever seen before but Russians would immediately recognize.

Images of the American president flash across the screen while a singer repeats the words “love me” over and over, Trump’s voice promises to defeat “communism, socialism and Marxism,” UFC boss Dana White calls him “the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met,” and then, at the bottom of the screen, six words appear:

“Paid for by the U.S. government.”

Mediaite has confirmed that the ad ran through three shows on Fox but the White House says it’s all fine because it’s a “public service announcement” that’s “educational and unapologetically patriotic” and “clearly not political” because “the President is not on the ballot.”

The singer, JMSN, says he never authorized his song for “ANY political agenda or campaign.” Even Republican Senator Thom Tillis said using taxpayer dollars like this “feels like Viktor Orbán” and John Kennedy of Louisiana said he doesn’t “like to see politicians use public money to pay for their own campaign ads.”

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Even more astonishing, this bit of state-run, taxpayer-funded propaganda that promises to destroy communism aired the same day Trump was rolling out a literal red carpet for Xi Jinping, an actual communist.

We’re finally reaching Full Putin here in America; with the “paid for by…” admission, this is the latest and most blatant example of Trump using the property, money, and machinery of the United States government to build a personal cult around himself and his billionaire buddies.

This pathetic, strongman-style self-aggrandizement isn’t new for Trump, of course, other than the admission in black-and-white type that our tax dollars are funding it.

— Back in 2020, Trump demanded his signature be prominent on the pandemic stimulus checks Congress appropriated to keep the economy afloat.
— When puppy-killer Kristi Noem budgeted $200 million for ads featuring her on horseback, she told a crowd at CPAC that Trump told her, “I want the first ad, and I want you to thank me.”
— Three-story banners of Trump’s face went up on the Agriculture, Labor, and Justice Department buildings in Washington, and Senator Adam Schiff’s office documented at least $50,000 in taxpayer contracts to pay for them.
— The State Department put his portrait and signature inside our U.S. passports, the first living president ever to appear there.
— The Treasury is now minting a gold-colored dollar coin with his face on it, even though federal law says only a dead person’s likeness can appear on our currency and the bipartisan coin advisory committee refused to review it.
— His name was slapped on the Kennedy Center, on TrumpRx.gov, on the Palm Beach airport, on “Trump accounts,” and on a “Trump class” of battleships, among other things. Now he’s reportedly considering renaming Fords’ Theater where Lincoln was shot.

This nation’s Founders warned us, repeatedly, about exactly this sort of presidential self-aggrandizement.

When Congress wrote the very first Coinage Act in 1792, the Senate’s version called for the president’s head to appear on our money, just as the king’s did in England. George Washington, then the president, wanted no part of it, calling it a “monarchical act.”

He then used his Farewell Address to warn about future “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who would use the power, wealth, and levers of government to “subvert the power of the people.” As a result, the House version (which became law) of the Coinage Act specifically calls for “an impression emblematic of liberty” rather than a living president.

John Adams said we were to be “a government of laws, and not of men,” and Ben Franklin said he’d helped to create “a republic, if you can keep it.” Those men had put their lives on the line to create America, and now Trump is committed to destroying this republic and replacing it with a form of government like his mentor and owner, Putin, has created for himself in Russia.

There’s the presidency, and then there’s the president. In a strongman state they’re the same; in a democratic republic they’re very different things.

Previous presidents understood that they were temporarily occupying that office and saw it as their sacred trust to preserve our republic. But now we have a guy — and a shockingly large entourage of lickspittles, brown-nosers, and sycophants — who’re not only destroying our reputation and power around the world but gutting our democracy itself here at home.

We’ve all seen how this has played out in other countries over the past century.

Pravda telling Russians how to think, Lenin’s picture in every classroom, songs praising Stalin sung by a government choir and played on state radio, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s faces on banners on their governments’ buildings, Mao putting his visage on everything a Chinese citizen could see or touch, Ceaușescu showing reels of himself every night on Romanian television…

When we saw those things, we immediately recognized them for what they were: signs of tyrannical cults of personality that had seized sovereign governments and twisted them into instruments of personal wealth and self-aggrandizement. We called them either communists or fascists, but knew for sure they weren’t small-d democrats.

Now our government — the American government, funded with our tax dollars — is going down this same deadly-to-liberty road.

Congressman Jamie Raskin — a constitutional scholar — says these ads are a clear violation of the Hatch Act that makes it a crime to use government facilities or resources for political purposes. Republican Senator John Kennedy objected, and Republican Senator Thom Tillis said:

“It’s inappropriate. It’s not like they need a GoFundMe page to have the dollars to do that sort of ad and they could do it. But using taxpayer dollars, it feels like Viktor Orbán.”

And it is. Orbán had spent hundreds of millions in Hungarian taxpayers’ money to promote himself with “public service announcements” like this, as does Putin on an almost daily basis. Both of them — like pretty much every other dictator in the world — tried to normalize the idea that the state and its leader are the same thing.

And that’s the damage here.

Tens of millions of Americans are being taught, by their own government, that this is what a president is supposed to do.

A generation of MAGA voters is learning that loyalty to one man is the same thing as patriotism, that the American Treasury funded by us taxpayers is really his to spend on his own self-promotion, and that ignoring the law is the prerogative of billionaires (particularly when they’re in elected office).

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If this isn’t both stopped and spectacularly repudiated, that lesson could take a generation to unlearn, and Trump has more than two years left in office to keep teaching it.

Every one of these encroachments — the coin, the passports, the banners, the ads — will have to be undone by future presidents and Congresses, and the law must be fixed so that no president can ever commit these kinds of crimes against the ideals of America again.

There is already law on the books: much of what Trump is doing is already either a civil or criminal violation. Every appropriations bill for decades has barred spending federal money on “publicity or propaganda,” and the Government Accountability Office found the Bush administration broke that law when it secretly paid Armstrong Williams to promote No Child Left Behind and Bush’s association with it.

Jamie Raskin, who’ll chair the House Judiciary Committee if Democrats win in November, has already called the ad “blatantly unethical under numerous federal ethics provisions” including the Hatch Act.

What’s missing right now is a Congress and Justice Department willing to investigate or enforce any of it, and a press corps willing to treat this as the constitutional violation that it is rather than as just another one-day “Trump will be Trump” curiosity.

So call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and representative you want GAO to issue a formal ruling on this ad, you want the Office of Special Counsel to open a Hatch Act investigation, and that you want the next appropriations bill to say in plain English that not one dime of public money can ever again be spent promoting the personal image of any sitting president.

Then make sure you and everyone you know is registered to vote, and please share this piece and support the Hartmann Report. The government just told you to “love” Orange Caligula; somebody has to tell the truth about what’s really going on here.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Love me, America!”

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Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

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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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The “affordability crisis” that Democrats are running on and Trump calls a “scam” is almost always framed as being about prices being too high. But that’s only half of the equation, and the other half — income being too low — is almost never discussed outside of Bernie Sanders’ circles. There’s an insidious reason for that, which I’ll lay out in just a moment.

Politicians promise to “bring prices down” as if prices exist in some sort of economic or political vacuum. But prices are set in dollars, and the true definition of inflation isn’t that prices go up (that’s a consequence of inflation) but that the value of the dollar goes down.

Inflation, in other words, doesn’t quantify the rising cost of living so much as it measures the declining purchasing power of the dollar. And inflation never reverses (except in true depressions). As the CEO of McDonalds said just this week:

“One of the things I’ve talked to our team about is we need to stop talking about that being a difficult environment, and just say that is the environment. Because I think, as we look out forward, we’re not expecting things to change.”

For example, in 1957 my dad bought the Lansing, Michigan house I grew up in for $13,000. Today it’s worth, according to Zillow, $140,400, about ten times as much. But it’s not that the price of our house went up; the value of the dollar has gone down by about a factor of ten in the intervening ~70 years.

In 1957, for example, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ average retail food price tables for that year, a dozen eggs ran about 56 cents, a pound of hamburger was 46 cents, and a loaf of white bread cost 19 cents. Today, going by the most recent BLS average price data (June), eggs averaged $2.14 per dozen, ground beef was $6.83 per pound, and a loaf of bread comes in at $1.85.

This basket of three groceries that cost $1.21 when Dad bought that house now costs $10.80, just about ten times the 1957 price.

In other words, the purchasing power of a dollar in 1957 was about the same as ten dollars today.

But that’s only half of the equation.

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My dad worked in a tool-and-die shop in Lansing and on that one single union paycheck was able to buy that house, a new car every three years, take a vacation every summer, put his four sons through school, and have a nice pension and cushion for retirement. That was the historic definition of being in the middle class.

Two-thirds of us were in that middle class when Reagan took office in 1981 and declared the Republican War on Working People, and as a result of his efforts it today takes two full-time jobs to hit that goal and only around 40% of us can pull it off.

The problem today, in other words, isn’t that prices have gone up too far, but that wages haven’t kept up with them. And for that, you can thank Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, and the GOP.

Just 199 days into his presidency, Reagan fired the nation’s air traffic controllers and decertified their union, kicking off the GOP’s War on Workers. Almost two-thirds of all workers in America back then had the wages and benefits of a union job (because a third of us were unionized, and that set the local wage and benefits floor for another third of us).

And the minimum wage when Reagan came into office was $3.35 an hour or $12.58 in today’s dollars.

In the 45 years we’ve been living in the Reagan Revolution, union density has collapsed to around 6 percent of the private workforce, taking those good wages and benefits with it, while the minimum wage has been frozen by Republicans in Congress at $7.25 an hour (purchasing power of $1.96 in 1981 dollars) for the past seventeen years.

As a result, working class Americans are getting wiped out. As I noted in Who Stole the American Dream?:

“When my Boomer generation was the same average age as Millennials are today, back in 1990, we held 21.3 percent of the nation’s wealth. Louise and I shared in that wealth: although we were still in our 30s, in 1990 we owned a profitable small business—our fourth—and a nice home. …

“Millennials today, by contrast, are roughly the same number of people as Boomers were in 1990 but hold only 4.6 percent of the nation’s wealth. If they’re the same age I was in 1990, they’re most likely struggling to own a home, are deeply in debt, and find it nearly impossible to start a small business.”

And just this summer the Federal Reserve found that about half (49%) of all adults under the age of 30 still live with their parents.

Meanwhile, the Rand Corporation did the math and found that the result of the destruction of our unions and freezing of our minimum wage, combined with massive tax cuts for billionaires from Reagan, Bush, and Trump, have transferred a mind-boggling $79 trillion from the middle class into the money bins of the morbidly rich since the Reagan era.

Republicans and their billionaire owners, in other words, robbed working people for 45 years and are continuing to do so today. And rather than letting you know that they’ve been suppressing wages and benefits all these years, they want you to think that there’s some mysterious “inflation” force of nature that’s responsible for your difficulties.

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The math is irrefutable, as MSNBC’s Steve Rattner points out. When a worker produced $100 worth of value for their employer when Reagan came into office, that worker got paid about $65 of that as pay and benefits. Today, the same worker producing the same value for their employer gets about $52.

The remaining $13 goes straight into the pockets of shareholders (driving up the stock market) and CEOs (so they can buy new yachts, million-dollar weddings, and Swiss chalets), and this has been going on pretty much every year since Republicans began this scam.

This is why it seems like it’s all about prices; because of the GOP War on Working People, folks don’t have the income to meet today’s costs of living. Which is why Drudge led his newsletter yesterday with the following headlines at the very top:

10-year yield leaps to 19-year high...
Mortgage rates surge above 7%...
MCDONALD’S CEO: HIGH INFLATION HERE TO STAY...
Big Beautiful Bill Starting to Bite...

While it’s true that “the rent’s too damn high,” the solution isn’t to lower prices. That’s not going to happen (outside of anomalies caused by changes in tariffs, bird flu, the Iran war, and Trump’s trade wars) because we’ve been experiencing actual inflation: the deterioration of the value of the dollar, now running at about 3% a year.

Instead, we should be talking about how to get wages back up to where they should be:

— The minimum wage peaked in buying power in 1968 at the crest of America’s middle class prosperity: it was $1.60 an hour, the equivalent of $15.70 today. We should at least double today’s federal $7.25 minimum wage as soon as possible.

— Similarly, unions are both democracy in the workplace — a desirable situation in a nation that claims to value democracy — and give workers the bargaining power to demand a fair share of the value they’re producing for their employers.

We should be doing everything we can to make it easier to form and join a union. Instead, we’re subsidizing billionaire anti-union employers.

For example, in Nevada, 48.4% of Amazon workers and 29.3% of Walmart workers were enrolled in Medicaid (free healthcare for low-income people) in 2024. Other states have similar statistics, although the numbers are highly regional because Democratic-controlled states tend to have far higher minimum wages than Republican-controlled ones.

Nationally, a new 2026 GAO report found that virulently anti-union employers with morbidly rich CEOs — including Walmart, Amazon, Dollar General, McDonald’s, Dollar Tree, Target, and Home Depot — had huge numbers of workers receiving Medicaid or SNAP, with literally millions of them working full time but still earning so little that they qualify for these welfare subsidies paid for with your and my tax dollars (the billionaires, by and large, aren’t paying income taxes above 4%).

Research from the UC Berkeley Labor Center found that 27.8% of nonunion workers’ families rely on SNAP, the EITC, or TANF. These are direct, taxpayer-funded subsidies for the billionaires who own and run these companies and refuse to pay an honest wage for honest work.

Our national corporate media, of course, would rather not discuss any of these simple realities for two very basic reasons:

1. If they acknowledged this echo of the Reagan Revolution, they’d have to pay their own workers more or seem like hypocrites.

2. They don’t want to “seem partisan” by calling out the GOP’s 45-year campaign to rip $79 trillion away from working families to give to the oligarchs who, in many cases, own these very same media properties.

So, it’s up to us. While it’s okay to talk about affordability and inflation, let’s always be sure to point out that the real problem is that working people are being ripped off by their employers and we need to raise wages and union density nationwide.

And that’s something that politicians can change — and progressive Democrats (and Dwight Eisenhower) did during the years from 1933 to 1981 — with government policies. With our support, they can do it again.

Vote!

Louise’s Daily Song: "They Stole It From Your Paycheck”

Subscribe so you can comment

Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Subscribe to the Commonwealth Report

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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A CNN insider told Variety magazine yesterday that the mood inside CNN right now is “like a funeral.” Nepo-baby David Ellison, bankrolled by his father who’s one of the richest men in the world and a major Trump suck-up and donor (and is in the Epstein Files), is on the verge of taking over the company that owns the news network.

The day-before-yesterday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a group of Democratic state attorneys general rolled over and agreed to stop trying to block the $111 billion takover of Warner Bros. Discovery, now to be almost 50% funded by rightwing dictatorships in the Middle East who’ve given billions in gifts, loans, and investments to Trump and his family.

California Governor and presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom hailed the agreement, saying it would both protect California jobs and preserve CNN’s “editorial independence.”

If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge for you in Brooklyn.

As The Lever reported yesterday, the fine print tells the entire story:

Going forward, CNN and CBS will be overseen by an “editorial independence board” composed of people hand-picked by the Ellisons and their agents. When Rupert Murdoch took over The Wall Street Journal from the Bancroft family back in 2007, he ran the same scam, as CBS News then reported:

“As part of the deal package that cemented Rupert Murdoch's longstanding effort to acquire Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co., the two sides agreed to create an editorial board that would act as a buffer between the media mogul and the newspaper…”

That worked out real well, right?

There are also squishy promises for movies and jobs that are not backed up with any meaningful enforcement mechanism, and all of Ellison’s commitments can be set aside via a force majeure clause that lets Paramount off the hook in the event of “strikes, labor disruptions, [or] economic recessions.” So, all Trump has to do is extend the Iran war another few months to crash our economy and the oligarchs are free to do what they want!

And if that doesn’t happen, there’s still the sunset clause that ends all their commitments in five years. Lee Hepner of the American Economic Liberties Project called it “a countdown to a cliff.”

These are the same billionaires who handed Trump a check for $16 million to “settle” a frivolous lawsuit against 60 Minutes, then cancelled Stephen Colbert’s show days after he referenced that as a “big fat bribe,” then reportedly offered the Trump White House up to $20 million in free “public service announcements” and installed a Trump-humping “ombudsman” at CBS News to police “bias” at the network.

And the FCC, run by Trump’s favorite brown-noser Brendan Carr, has blessed Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar taking a 49.5 percent equity state in the new entity that will control two of the three most important news networks in America.

Don’t expect any future analysis of Saudi involvement in 9/11, critical exploration of what Trump gave up in exchange for a $400 million 747 jet, or the billions that have gone to Kushner and the Trump boys, Uday and Qusay.

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Because of momentous decisions made by presidents Reagan and Clinton, freedom of the press in America is now as much an economic issue as a political one. As I laid out in The Hidden History of Monopolies (with a foreword by Ralph Nader), when Reagan came into office 90 percent of the American media landscape was scattered among over 50 companies; now a mere five conglomerates dominate that 90 percent of the media Americans consume.

Reagan stopped enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (and others) in 1983, leading to the “M&A Mania” of mergers and acquisitions that characterized the late 1980s and 1990s. As a result, there’s not a single major industry in America that’s not dominated by a handful of companies that generally behave like cartels, and the average American family pays an annual “monopoly tax” — in additional costs for pretty much everything — of around $5,000, according to economist Thomas Philippon.

Cell phone service that costs $15 a month in France or $12 a month in Australia bills out at an average of $61.85 per month in the United States. High-speed broadband that’s a bit over $31 a month in France or $36 in Germany (for higher speeds and better reliability than almost anywhere in the United States) averages nearly $70 per month in the US.

Similar metrics are found with pharmaceuticals, airfares, and medical costs, among dozens of other product and service categories.

But it’s most deadly to democracy when it comes to the media.

Since Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 — which eliminated most of the rules about how many outlets one family or company could own — oligarchic monopoly of the media has spread its cancerous tentacles into politics, as well, destroying the ability of government to make policy that allows free people to make their own decisions about their own lives.

As Teddy Roosevelt, the great trust buster, said:

“There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task...”

And as Adam Smith wrote, in Wealth of Nations,

“...the monopoly which our manufacturers have obtained...like an overgrown standing army, they have become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature.”

And this is no small project by billionaires who explicitly distrust democracy and want complete control over America and her people. I’ve seen how this works up-close and personal when a Republican billionaire came after a media business I helped start.

In 2003, Louise and I had sold our last business and were retired in Vermont; that Thanksgiving, we drove to Michigan to visit my family for the holidays and all the way there I kept tuning across the radio dial looking for an intelligent conversation to occupy my mind while driving. In city after city, all I could find was Sean Hannity.

The outcome of that trip was my writing the initial business plan for Air America Radio and starting the radio show I’m still hosting 23 years later as a “proof of concept.” We were leasing stations from Clear Channel and reached over 90 percent of America; many credited Obama’s 2008 victory to our being on the air.

So, of course, billionaire Mitt Romney — with an eye to running for president in 2012 — had his company Bain Capital buy up all of the Clear Channel radio stations and, one at a time, take us off the air until we didn’t have enough of a signal to make money selling advertising. The network died in 2010 (and Romney lost).

The people who own the media pipes, in other words, get to decide what flows through them.

Remember when Uber was offering rides for half the price of taxis, until they’d put so many of the taxi companies out of business? Or Walmart offering goods at little to no margin just to drive local competitors out of business? Monopolists and wannabe monopolists understand exactly how this works.

While Rupert Murdoch reportedly lost an average of $80 to $90 million a year for about five years before Fox News turned a profit, he never viewed that as a loss: it was an investment. Economists Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan later did the math and found that Fox News succeeded in shifting 3 to 8 percent of its audience toward the Republican Party, which in Florida alone in the 2000 election was worth more than 10,000 votes for George W. Bush in a state he carried by fewer than 600.

Had there been no Fox “News,” in other words, there would have been no war in Iraq or Afghanistan, and thousands of Americans and millions of Iraqis and Afghans would still be alive. And there would have been no Bush tax cuts, so our national debt would be nowhere near so bad. And Al Gore would have done something about the environment.

This is critical stuff: no democracy can survive the assault of what Jefferson referred to as “an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents” when only one family or political perspective dominates the media.

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Refer a friend

Franklin D. Roosevelt — the Bernie Sanders of his day — saw all of this coming. On April 29, 1938, in his Message to Congress on the Concentration of Economic Power, he told the country what fascism actually is:

“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”

FDR understood that when a monopolized industry gets big enough, its main rival then becomes the government itself because only the government has enough remaining power to break it up. Adam Smith made the same point in Wealth of Nations in 1776, writing that the East India Company and its allies had, “like an overgrown standing army,” become “formidable to the government” and could “intimidate the legislature.”

The simple reality is that in every country that’s slid from democracy into strongman rule over the past half-century, the first step was capture of the media by friends of the regime.

— Four days after Vladimir Putin was inaugurated in May, 2000, ICE-like masked agents raided the offices of Media-Most, the company that owned Russia’s largest independent national TV network (NTV). They threw its owner, Vladimir Gusinsky, in prison on fraud charges and confiscated his stake in Gazprom, then took over the network with the deal finalized in April of 2001. That same year Boris Berezovsky was forced to sell his share of the ORT network to Roman Abramovich, a fellow oligarch but one who’d pledged his total loyalty to Putin. Within a few years, every national channel in Russia was in the hands of the state or a Putin-friendly billionaire, and still are.

— Viktor Orbán’s people were slightly more sophisticated in 2018, having his oligarch buddies buy up media properties after he sued dissenters into bankruptcy by claiming libel. By the following year, the media monitor Mérték estimated that 77.8 percent of Hungary’s news media was directly or indirectly controlled by Orbán’s party, which is why when Péter Magyar successfully ran against Orbán he had to visit virtually every city and town in the country to get around the media blackout on his candidacy.

— In Egypt, el-Sisi was less elegant in his approach to the media. He had his version of the FBI — the General Intelligence Service — use a front company called Eagle Capital to buy up virtually every TV network, radio station, and newspaper in the country. Reporters Without Borders found that a dozen once-powerful media owners were pushed to sell to intelligence-linked companies, while the handful of businessmen who backed Sisi got to keep theirs. The spy agency’s media group now owns the ON, CBC, Al-Hayah, and DMC networks, and those Egyptian journalists who dared criticize the regime all went to prison.

— Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines used regulatory power the same way Trump lickspittle Brendan Carr’s FCC does. The country’s largest newspaper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, was forced to sell to a billionaire Duterte ally under threat of imprisonment for breaking “media rules.” Duterte’s rightwing buddies in Congress then refused to renew the broadcast franchise of ABS-CBN, the nation’s biggest network, which had made the mistake of exposing the extrajudicial killings of his so-called drug war. Eleven thousand people lost their jobs, and Nobel laureate Maria Ressa’s little opposition newspaper The Rappler was ordered shut.

Almost without exception, this is the process autocrats use to destroy democracies, as documented brilliantly by people like Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

First the strongman’s friends acquire the newsrooms, then the coverage softens, then the elections start experiencing “anomalies,” and by the time most people notice, there’s nobody left on the air to expose the oligarchs and fascists.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1786:

“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”

So, here we are. Bonta and Newsom have caved, and only the attorneys general of New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Minnesota tried to hold out. You may want to call your own state attorney general and ask where they were on this case; you should be able to easily find their number with a quick internet search.

We should also contact our members of Congress (202-224-3121) and demand hearings on the FCC’s corrupt behavior, restoration of our anti-trust laws, and a return to the media ownership limits that Clinton blew up in 1996.

And please share this piece and hartmannreport.com with anyone who still thinks it can’t happen here. It has already happened everywhere else that’s seen their democracy disintegrate, and the first thing to go into oligarchic hands was always the news.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Who Owns the Truth?”

Subscribe so you can comment

Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Subscribe to the Commonwealth Report

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.

Share

Tayler Gonzalez is 32 years old, athletic, and engaged to be married; earlier this year, he suffered a stroke and needed extended rehab to recover. His insurance company, UnitedHealthcare, inserted themselves between Tayler and his doctor, saying that they wouldn’t pay for it, so Tayler and his fiancée just put up a GoFundMe page to cover the cost.

Welcome to America, where six Republicans on the Supreme Court say that it’s totally legal for massive corporations to pay off judges and politicians to keep their profits up. Even politicians slated to possibly become the Speaker of the House.

UnitedHealthcare is the third largest company in America, as John Oliver pointed out Sunday night, ticking through a long list of similar outrages. It’s first president, “Dollar Bill” McGuire, made about $1.5 billion dollars during his time with that company. To avoid prosecution in 2007 he had to cough up $468 million, but still walked away a billionaire. Stephen J Hemsley, his successor, made off with around half a billion.

Most Americans have no idea that the United States is quite literally the only country in the developed world that doesn’t define healthcare as an absolute right for all of its citizens.

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We’re the only one that lets for-profit companies and the vultures who run them stand between us and our physicians, making life-and-death decisions often based off an algorithm that’s main purpose is to jack up profits for the insurance companies and the morbidly rich oligarchs that run them.

That’s it. We’re the only one.

As a result, we spend more on “healthcare” than any other country in the world: about 17% of GDP.

Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden and Japan all average around 11%, and Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia all come in between 9.3% and 10.5%.

Health insurance premiums right now make up about 22% of all taxable US payroll, whereas Medicare For All would run an estimated 10%.

We are literally the only developed country in the world with an entire multi-billion-dollar for-profit industry devoted to parasitically extracting money from us to then turn over to healthcare providers on our behalf after they’ve skimmed hundreds of billions off the top. The for-profit health insurance industry has attached itself to us like a giant, bloodsucking tick.

And it’s not like we haven’t tried to remove this parasite. As I pointed out in The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all proposed and tried to bring a national healthcare system to the United States.

Which raises the question that our corporate media literally never, ever ask out loud in public but should be the very first one we’re all demanding answers to:

“Why are for-profit insurance companies involved in medical decisions at all?”

Why should a neurosurgeon have to beg an insurance corporation for permission to rehabilitate a 32-year-old stroke patient? Why should some low-level employee sitting behind a desk, who knows their employer makes more money when it pays fewer claims, get to second-guess the doctor standing next to the patient?

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More than 60 years ago, a Baptist preacher who’d run for office in Saskatchewan, Canada asked essentially the same question.

In 1910, when Tommy Douglas was six years old, he injured his leg and, lacking access to a doctor or hospital, it healed badly. The wound continued to hurt and fester until, four years later, the infection worked its way deep into his leg bone itself.

In desperation, his parents took him to a doctor, who said that surgery to open the leg and clean out the wound would be too expensive and complex for the family to afford; he’d have to amputate the leg. By happenstance, another surgeon at the hospital “took an interest” in the case and offered to do the surgery for free if his medical students could watch, a deal the Douglas family made, saving the leg.

‘‘Had I been a rich man’s son,’’ Douglas wrote, ‘‘the services of the finest surgeons would have been available. As an iron molder’s boy, I almost had my leg amputated before chance intervened and a specialist cured me without thought of a fee.’’

Douglas eventually entered politics and by 1959 was the premiere of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan when he proposed a province-wide program he called Medicare, charging $5 a month and providing full medical, hospital, and dental coverage for all Saskatchewan residents of all ages.

In the leadup to the vote, the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) and the American Medical Association (AMA) worked together with insurance companies and Saskatchewan’s conservative elite to fight Douglas’s proposal tooth-and-nail.

They raised a war chest unseen in previous Canadian politics, flooding the airwaves and newspapers with warnings of “socialism!” and delivering detailed indictments of “government-controlled medicine” to every home. Provincewide, local Chambers of Commerce and Boards of Trade held public rallies charging Douglas and advocates of Medicare with communist leanings, saying they’d destroy the very fabric of the nation.

One anti-Medicare propaganda piece said that Douglas’ proposal would drive so many physicians out of Saskatchewan that, “They’ll have to fill up the profession with the garbage of Europe; some of the European doctors who come out here are so bad we wonder if they ever practiced medicine.”

Nonetheless, Douglas prevailed and Saskatchewan got Medicare for all its citizens. The people of the province loved it and those in others wanted it.

Medicare and Douglas’ popularity in Saskatchewan provoked Prime Minister Diefenbaker to work with him to bring Saskatchewan’s Medicare program to the entire country with the first successful federal legislation to accomplish this introduced in 1961, splitting the costs roughly 50/50 between federal and provincial governments.

Again, the CMA, AMA, Chambers of Commerce and other business organizations launched a campaign, this time nationwide, of vilification similar to the earlier one in Saskatchewan, highlighted by a 23 day nationwide doctor’s strike in 1962 in protest of “socialized medicine,” along with “racial slurs, red-baiting, acts of violence and threats of blood in the streets.”

The “Keep Our Doctors” committee — a 1960s astroturf version of the Koch Brothers’ 2009 Tea Party — joined in, with the Billy Graham of Canada, a rightwing priest named Athol Murray, telling a nationwide radio audience, “This thing may break into violence and bloodshed any day now, and God help us if it doesn’t!”

Nonetheless, Canadians could see with their own eyes how well it worked in Douglas’ Saskatchewan: a national Medicare system was fully implemented when the last province ratified it 1966, making Douglas a national hero and helping Diefenbaker maintain his hold on federal politics until he died in office in 1979.

It hadn’t been easy for Douglas. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (their federal police force, like our FBI) harassed and spied on him for decades, compiling an official file on him covering over 1,100 pages.

He’d been burned in effigy numerous times, threatened with death, and was accused by the American Medical Association and their Canadian brethren of communist leanings, alternately depicted in conservative media as a “Nazi, Stalinist or both.”

Despite it all, today every Canadian has comprehensive health insurance provided by that nation’s Medicare program, and Tommy Douglas, “the father of Canadian Medicare,” has repeatedly been selected as the most popular Canadian in history.

It’s easy to imagine that the third largest company in America, and its peers that are also billion-dollar behemoths, will launch a similar attack against Democrats who work to get a single-payer program for America.

After all, it’ll mean the loss of billions to the companies, even though it’ll save an estimated 100,000+ lives a year, end medical bankruptcy (we’re the only country in the world that even has such a thing), and save our country trillions of dollars over the coming decade.

We have fire and car insurance because we don’t expect our house to burn down or our car to get in an accident; we insure against high-cost low-probability events and that makes sense.

But every American gets sick, every single one of us will one day face the costs and difficulties of dying, and healthcare shouldn’t be treated the same as a house fire or car accident.

It should be normal and routine, no drama, and little or no cost to individuals because it’s responding to a universal need. Everybody in — because we’re all mortal human beings — and nobody out for lack of money.

Last week, Congressman Mark Pocan, a former chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a regular on my radio/TV program, told me and my audience that he thinks healthcare will become “the defining issue” for this 2026 and the 2028 elections.

Meanwhile, Hakeem Jeffries, who’ll lead Democrats if they take the House this fall, says that he doesn’t support Medicare for All, the system that Canada and most every other developed country in the world has.

Clearly Jeffries doesn’t have the courage that Douglas did. But many other Democrats do, and we need to do everything we can to encourage them and have their backs.

One may well end up being remembered, like Douglas is in Canada, as the most beloved politician of modern times.

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Louise’s Daily Song: “Why the Hell is a Corporation Making Your Medical Decisions?”

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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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Ka$h Patel’s (his preferred spelling) pathetic performance before Congress last week has left many Americans wondering what’s going on with our federal government. We now have, as a result of Trump’s choices and the endorsement of every or virtually every Republican in the US Senate:

— An alcoholic B-list weekend TV star in charge of our military,
— A formerly heroin- and sex-addicted brainworm-infected lawyer in charge of our public health,
— A wrestling promoter in charge of our Education Department,
— The president’s personal criminal defense lawyer in charge of the Justice Department,
— A C-list reality TV star in charge of our air traffic control system,
— A plumber in charge of Homeland Security,
— A “miracle weight-loss pill” TV hawker in charge of Medicare and Medicaid,
— A social media hustler and children’s book author in charge of the FBI,
— A predatory hedge fund guy in charge of the Treasury,
— A fracking CEO who denies the climate crisis in charge of the Energy Department,
— Jeffrey Epstein’s former next-door neighbor and Epstein Island visitor in charge of the Commerce Department,
— A politician who built his career on a phony story about his parents fleeing Castro in charge of telling America's story to the world,
— The mentee of an anti-democracy billionaire as our VP,
— A Project 2025 architect who was excited to put federal workers “in trauma” in charge of America’s federal budget,
— A racist whose own uncle publicly denounced him as an immigration hypocrite, and whose leaked emails pushed white nationalist material to Breitbart, in charge of immigration policy,
— A former NFL player in charge of public housing,
— A real estate developer and golf buddy with no diplomatic experience whatsoever negotiating with and sucking up to Vladimir Putin,
— The world’s richest man firing people investigating him and his companies while gutting the federal government and killing millions by “feeding USAID into the wood chipper,”
— And a self-described “proud Islamophobe” with no government job vetting the National Security Council staff.

The model here is straightforward: government is something to be exploited for personal gain not public service, because government is essentially an evil thing. So, load it up with incompetents, suck up as much money as you can, and leave the mess to the Democrats:

— Three Republican presidents borrowed over $35 trillion, put it all on the national credit card, just to hand all that money to the billionaires who fund their campaigns and sustain their lavish lifestyles.
— Republicans in Congress have thrown millions off of food stamps (SNAP) and Medicaid and refuse to fix Social Security or Medicare.
— Trump just discarded many of our pollution rules, a move that will lead to more cancers and asthma among our children.
— Bob Kennedy saluted putting cancer-causing chemicals on our food supply.
— Anything Putin wants from Trump he gets.
— They’re selling off public lands and destroying our park system like there’s no tomorrow, while rewriting America’s history into a white supremacist fantasy.
— Miller’s ICE goons are murdering Americans and getting away with it while imprisoning brown-skinned people without due process.
— Trump has made billions since becoming president through crypto scams and bets on his own war proclamations.

And that’s just the beginning. Which is causing millions of Americans, scratching their heads in wonder, to ask:

“Where did this anti-American-government insanity come from, and how did it come to seize control of the entire Republican Party?”

It all started with the Libertarians

Reporter Mark Ames documents how, back in the 1940s, a real estate lobbying group came up with the idea of creating a new political party to justify deregulating the real estate and finance industries so they could make more money.

This new Libertarian Party would give an ideological and political cover to their goal of becoming government-free, and they developed an elaborate pretense of governing philosophy around it.

Their principal argument was that if everybody acted separately and independently, in all cases with maximum selfishness, such behavior would actually benefit society. There would be no government needed beyond an army, a police force, and a court system to defend the rights of property owners. It was a bizarre twisting of Adam Smith’s reference to the “invisible hand” that regulated trade among nations.

In 1980, billionaire David Koch ran for vice president on the newly formed Libertarian Party ticket. His platform included calls to privatize the Post Office, close public schools, give Medicare and Medicaid to big insurance companies, end food and housing support and all other forms of “welfare,” deregulate all corporate oversight while shutting down the EPA and FDA, and selling off much of the federal government’s land and other assets to billionaires and big corporations.

Reagan, who won that 1980 election, embraced this view in his inaugural address, saying, “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

He then doubled down on the idea by beginning the systematic process of gutting and crippling governmental institutions that historically had supported working people and the middle class.

The child-killer who inspired a movement

Reagan wasn’t just echoing the Libertarian vision; he was also endorsing Ayn Rand’s “Objectivist” view of the world, which traces its roots to a murderous psychopath in 1927.

Back in 2015, Donald Trump told USA Today’s Kirsten Powers that his favorite book was Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, “The Fountainhead.”

“It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions,” he told Powers. “That book relates to … everything.”

Ayn Rand’s novels have animated libertarian Republicans like former Speaker of the House of Representatives and current Fox News board member Paul Ryan, who required interns to read her books when they joined his staff.

Powers added, “He [Trump],” told her that he “identified with Howard Roark, the novel’s idealistic protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.”

Rand’s hero Roark, in fact, “raged” so much in her novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite just to get what he wanted. Sort of like tearing down the East Wing of the White House and threatening to level the Kennedy Center.

Rand, in her Journals, explained where she got her inspiration for Howard Roark and so many of her other novels. She writes that the theme of The Fountainhead, for example, is:

“One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself.”

On Trump’s hero Howard Roark, she wrote words that Trump must have loved, saying that he:

“[H]as learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.”

It turns out that Roark and many of her other characters were based on a real person. The man who so inspired Ayn Rand’s fictional heroes was named William Edward Hickman, and he lived in Los Angeles during the Roaring Twenties.

Ten days before Christmas in 1927, Hickman, a teenager with slicked dark hair and tiny, muted eyes, drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High School in Los Angeles and kidnapped Marion Parker — the daughter of a wealthy banker in town.

Hickman held the girl ransom, demanding $1,500 from her father — back then about a year’s salary. Supremely confident that he would elude capture, Hickman signed his name on the ransom notes, “The Fox.”

After two days, Marion’s father agreed to hand over the ransom in exchange for the safety of his daughter. What Perry Parker didn’t know is that Hickman never intended to live up to his end of the bargain.

The Pittsburgh Press detailed what Hickman, in his own words, did next.

“It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he said. “I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then, before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly.”

Hickman didn’t hold back on any of these details: he was proud of his cold-bloodedness.

“I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead.”

But Hickman wasn’t finished.

“After she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”

Hickman then dismembered the child piece-by-piece, putting her limbs in a cabinet in his apartment, and then wrapped up the carved-up torso, powdered the lifeless face of Marion Parker, set what was left of her stump torso with the head sitting atop it in the passenger seat of his car, and drove to meet her father to collect the ransom money.

He even sewed open her eyelids to make it look like she was alive.

On the way, Hickman dumped body parts out of his car window, before rendezvousing with Marion Parker’s father.

Armed with a shotgun so her father wouldn’t come close enough to Hickman’s car to see that Marion was dead, Hickman collected his $1,500, then kicked open the door and tossed the rest of Marion Parker onto the road. As he sped off, her father fell to his knees, screaming.

Days later, the police caught up with a defiant and unrepentant Hickman in Oregon. His lawyers pleaded insanity, but the jury gave him the gallows.

To nearly everyone, Hickman was a monster. The year of the murder, the Los Angeles Times called it “the most horrible crime of the 1920s.” Hickman was America’s most despicable villain at the time.

Ayn Rand falls in love with a “superman”

But to Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a 21-year-old Russian political science student who’d arrived in America just two years earlier, Hickman was a hero.

Alissa was a squat five-foot-two with a flapper hairdo and wide, sunken dark eyes that gave her a haunting stare. Etched into those brooding eyes was burned the memory of a childhood backlit by the Russian Revolution.

She had just departed Leninist Russia where, almost a decade earlier, there was a harsh backlash against the Russian property owners by the Bolsheviks. Alissa’s own family was targeted, and at the age of 12 she watched as Bolshevik soldiers burst into her father’s pharmacy, looted the store, and plastered on her Dad’s doors the red emblem of the state, indicating that his private business now belonged to “the people.”

That incident left such a deep and burning wound in young Alissa’s mind that she went to college to study political science and vowed one day she’d become a famous writer to warn the world of the dangers of Bolshevism.

Starting afresh in Hollywood, she anglicized her name to Ayn Rand, and moved from prop-girl to screenwriter/novelist, basing the heroes of several of her stories on a man she was reading about in the newspapers at the time. A man she wrote effusively about in her diaries. A man she hero-worshipped.

William Edward Hickman was the most notorious man in American in 1928, having achieved the level of national fame that she craved.

Young Ayn Rand saw in Hickman the “ideal man” she based The Fountainhead on, and used to ground her philosophy and her life’s work. His greatest quality, she believed, was his unfeeling, pitiless selfishness.

Hickman’s words were carefully recounted by Rand in her Journals. His statement that, “I am like the state: what is good for me is right,” resonated deeply with her. It was the perfect articulation of her belief that if people pursued their own interests above all else — even above friends, family, or nation — the result would be utopian.

She wrote in her diary that those words of Hickman’s were:

“[T]he best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.”

Hickman — the monster who boasted about how he had hacked up a 12-year-old girl — had Rand’s ear, as well as her heart. She saw a strongman archetype in him, the way that people wearing red MAGA hats see a strongman savior in Donald Trump.

As Hickman’s murder trial unfolded, Rand grew increasingly enraged at how the “mediocre” American masses had rushed to condemn her Superman.

“The first thing that impresses me about the case,” Rand wrote in reference to the Hickman trial in early notes for a book she was working on titled The Little Street, “is the ferocious rage of the whole society against one man.”

Astounded that Americans didn’t recognize the heroism Hickman showed when he proudly rose above simply conforming to society’s rules, Rand wrote:

“It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. … It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.”

Rand explained that when the masses are confronted with such a bold actor, they neither understood nor empathized with him. Thus, she wrote,

“[A] brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy [was] turned [by the media] into a purposeless monster.”

The protagonist of the book that Rand was writing around that time was a boy named Danny Renahan. In her notes for the book, she wrote, “The model for the boy [Renahan] is Hickman.” He would be her ideal man, and the archetype for a philosophical movement that would transform a nation.

“He is born with the spirit of Argon and the nature of a medieval feudal lord,” Rand wrote in her notes describing Renahan. “Imperious. Impatient. Uncompromising. Untamable. Intolerant. Unadaptable. Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob… an extreme ‘extremist.’ … No respect for anything or anyone.”

Rand wanted capitalism in its most raw form, uncheck by any government that could control the rules of the market or promote the benefits of society. Such good intentions had, after all, caused the hell she’d experienced in the Bolshevik Revolution.

Ayn Rand, like Hickman, found peace and justification in the extremes of her economic, political, and moral philosophy. Forget about democratic institutions, forget about regulating markets, and forget about pursuing any policies that benefit the majority at the expense of the very rich — the petty political rule-makers and rule-enforcers could never, ever do anything well or good.

Libertarianism and Ayn Rand set the stage for Trumpism

Only billionaires should rule the world, Trump has suggested.

And he tried to put it into place, installing a billionaire advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist representing billionaires in charge of the EPA, a billionaire-funded oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department. Trump’s former chief of staff said that putting children in cages and billionaire-owned privatized concentration camps (where 25 so far have died) would actually be a public good.

As Ayn Rand might say, “Don’t just ignore the rules; destroy them.”

Welfare and other social safety net programs were, as Rand saw it, “the glorification of mediocrity” in society. Providing a social safety net for the poor, disabled, or unemployed, she believed, were part of a way of thinking that promoted, “satisfaction instead of joy, contentment instead of happiness… a glow-worm instead of a fire.”

Psychopaths of the world, unite!

Rand, like Trump, lived a largely joyless life. She mercilessly manipulated people, particularly her husband and Alan Greenspan (who brought a dollar-sign-shaped floral arrangement to her funeral), and, like Trump, surrounded herself with cult-like followers who were only on the inside so long as they gave her total, unhesitating loyalty.

Like Trump, Patel, Musk, Vance, Kennedy, and their billionaire backers, Rand believed that a government working to help out working-class “looters,” instead of solely looking out for rich capitalist “producers,” was throwing its “best people” under the bus.

In Rand’s universe, the producers had no obligations to the looters. Providing welfare or sacrificing one nickel of your own money to help a “looter” on welfare, unemployment, or Social Security — particularly if it was “taken at the barrel of a gun” (taxes) — was morally reprehensible.

Like Trump saying, “My whole life I’ve been greedy,” for Rand looking out for numero uno was the singular name of the game — selfishness was next to godliness.

Rand’s philosophy, though popular in high school and on college campuses, never did — in her lifetime — achieve the sort of mass appeal she had hoped. But today Ayn Rand’s philosophy is a central tenet of today’s Republican Party and grounds the moral code proudly cited and followed by high-profile billionaires and three former presidents of the United States.

Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a “looter” in 1982, unaware that her her promotion of William Edward Hickman’s sociopathic worldview would one day validate an entire political party’s embrace of a similarly psychopathic president.

The result so far is over a half-million Americans unnecessarily dead from Covid, an economy laid waste, another unending war, the destruction of America’s standing around the world, and the collapse of this nation’s working class.

While the ideas and policies promoted by the libertarian wing of the Republican Party have made CEOs and billionaire investors very, very rich in recent decades, it’s killing the rest of us.

A return to sanity

In the 1930s through the 1960s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and JFK/LBJ put America back together after the First Republican Great Depression and built the largest and wealthiest middle class in the history of the world at the time.

Today, 45 years of Ayn Rand’s ideas being put into practice by libertarian Republicans from Reagan to Bush to Trump have gutted the middle class, made a handful of oligarchs wealthier than any kings or Pharaohs in the history of the world, and brought a whole new generation of predators, hustlers, and grifters into the GOP.

And then there’s Trump’s war against Iran, his theft of Venezuela’s oil and gold, his attacks on NATO and threats against Greenland, his cutting off weapons to Ukraine, his cashing in on the presidency in ways that clearly violate the Constitution, and his and the GOP’s multiple efforts to rig our elections.

There’s a popular meme going around the internet these days that says:

“If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to find out what the heck was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes.”

If America is to survive as a functioning democratic republic, we must repudiate the “greed is good” ideology of Ayn Rand and libertarianism, get billionaires and their money out of politics, stop Trump and his lickspittles, and rebuild our civil institutions.

That starts with waking Americans up to the incredible damage that 45 years of Rand’s writings and libertarian “Reagan Republicans” have done to this country and giving Congress to Democrats who’ll actually investigate and prosecute these crimes against both democracy and our nation itself.

And that starts with checking your voter registration at vote.org and making a plan today to be sure your vote is both cast and counted.

Tag, we’re it!

Louise’s Daily Song: “Did Ayn Rand Plant the Seed?”

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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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PART THREE. A Society That Rests on Its Base (Chapters 15 through 21)

This is the part of the book where Bellamy stops dazzling Julian West with inventions and gadgets and starts filling in the civic machinery of America in the year 2000. Keep in mind, the book begins — and was written — in 1887, and is entirely speculating what life in our country will be like in the year 2000. It became the foundation and inspiration for most of the progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In Chapter 15, Leete takes West into his library and shows him that Dickens is the country’s favorite author, even years after his death, because he always cared about the fate of the poor. He lays out the economics of publishing books and newspapers (subscribers elect their editors!), and most of the system is what today we’d call reader-supported media.

From there, he lays out how American industry works. Management within companies and within the “industrial army” rise strictly on merit; the heads of the ten great “industrial departments” and the president of the United States are all chosen by workers, both currently employed and retired. To deal with corruption, most everything is taken out of the hands of politicians and put into the hands of career civil servants (the Pendleton Civil Service Act had only been passed in 1883, most likely around the time Bellamy was writing this book). The result is a government that runs on competence and the needs of average people rather than one that’s powered by campaign money.

In Chapter 19, West takes a walk through old Charlestown and notices that the old state prison has vanished. Leete explains that Americans finally figured out that the reason crime was a big deal in poor areas and relatively rare in upscale neighborhoods was because it was almost always driven by inequality. It was “fully nineteen twentieths of the crime” caused by that, so solving inequality became America’s biggest project.

“Want tempted the poor, lust of greater gains, or the desire to preserve former gains, tempted the well-to-do,” Bellamy writes. Remove the want and cap the accumulation of wealth, and, Leete told West, the crime withers “like Jonah’s gourd, in a day.”

Those who still insist on breaking the law are considered mentally ill and treated with “compassion and firm but gentle restraint.” The prisons are all gone, although there are secure mental hospitals. “’We have no jails nowadays. All cases of atavism are treated in the hospitals.’”

“Formerly, society was a pyramid poised on its apex. All the gravitations of human nature were constantly tending to topple it over, and it could be maintained upright, or rather upwrong (if you will pardon the feeble witticism), by an elaborate system of constantly renewed props and buttresses and guy-ropes in the form of laws. … Now society rests on its base, and is in as little need of artificial supports as the everlasting hills.”

That’s the basic argument of the whole book in one paragraph. Most law is simply the capitalist scaffolding that props up inequality. Take away the inequality and you take away the need for most of that scaffolding.

In Chapter 20, Edith takes West down to the excavated chamber where he slept for a century, and Bellamy lets the love story move forward. West is falling for her, and he can’t quite understand why she seems to know him so well. Hold onto that thread: it pays off in the final section.

Chapter 21 is all about the schools, and it may be the most quietly radical chapter in the book. Everyone is educated to age twenty-one, at public expense, and given “what you used to call the education of a gentleman.”

West asks about cost of going to school or college. “If it took half the revenue of the nation, nobody would grudge it,” Leete says.

West suggests that education is wasted on the dull, and Leete answers that we mow lawns and plant gardens even though they yield nothing, because untended land is an eyesore to everyone around it, and the same is true of untended minds.

“If, indeed, we could not afford to educate everybody, we should choose the coarsest and dullest by nature, rather than the brightest, to receive what education we could give.”

Then he lays out the three rights on which the American system of the year 2000 rests:

“First, the right of every man to the completest education the nation can give him on his own account, as necessary to his enjoyment of himself; second, the right of his fellow-citizens to have him educated, as necessary to their enjoyment of his society; third, the right of the unborn to be guaranteed an intelligent and refined parentage.”

On schooling, Bellamy he was a century ahead of us, and we still haven’t caught up. Who in your community is being told they’re not worth educating?

The final quarter of Looking Backward that we’ll visit next Sunday is where Bellamy makes his economic case, preaches his sermon, and springs his ending. If you only read one section closely before we meet, make it this one.

Watch this incredible short video that filmmaker David Ambrose (who has a great Substack newsletter) just produced about the crisis of corporate personhood and how we got here. It mentions my new book Who Killed The American Dream as well, and is an incredible bit of film-making crunched into a tight 11 minutes that you’ll want to share with others.

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— Trump just banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, because apparently the First Amendment now needs his signature to be valid. Yesterday afternoon, the man who refused to put his hand on the Bible when he swore an oath to uphold the Constitution just announced on his Nazi-infested failing social media site that those three news outlets will no longer be allowed into the White House Press Room. He added that, “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.” Back in his first term, he tried this by banning CNN’s Jim Acosta but a federal judge ordered Acosta’s press pass restored. So far this term courts have stopped him fully 75 times from violating the First Amendment’s provisions about a free press, something both Trump and his mentor and owner Putin hate and do everything they can to destroy. This ban came the same day our news media caught Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon lying to America about how many soldiers we’ve lost in Israel’s and Trump’s stupid war against Iran and CNN revealed that we almost got into a shooting war with China because an AI program hallucinated. Every news agency still allowed into the White House Press Room now must make a decision: do they defy the anti-American autocrat or roll over and pretend this is just the new normal? Stay tuned…

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— More American soldiers have died in Trump’s Iran war than Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is willing to admit. Six different officials close to Pentagon casualty numbers tell The Washington Post that at least 22 service members have been killed by Iran with Russian targeting help, rather than the dozen dead that this administration acknowledges. This is the second time Whiskey Pete and his slobbering, testosterone-amped sycophants in the so-called “War Department” have been busted lying to us about casualty figures to make Trump and his stupid, illegal, criminal war look good. Back in July it was The New York Times that discovered Whiskey Pete had quietly dropped the casualty numbers from 18 to 14, claiming that the other four died during a Trump-declared “cease fire” and therefore weren’t “wartime casualties.” The Pentagon tried to bullshit the press and military families, who deserve an honest count. Congress has subpoena power and oversight responsibilities here: they damn well better use them.

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— Armed federal agents at polling places is a felony crime and has been for more than a century, but Trump’s people keep floating it. Our laws that make it a federal felony to place any armed person in or near any polling place date back to the end of the Civil War, so yesterday Democracy Forward filed suit in federal court arguing that the Trump regime’s constant hints and suggestions that they’ll do just that are, themselves, an unlawful form of voter intimidation and voter suppression. Meanwhile, NPR reports a whistleblower says DHS’s so-called “Unlawful Voter Initiative” and ICE’s involvement with it are both racing ahead on junk data and flagging American citizens. Denver’s election clerk, Paul López, a plaintiff in the suit, has a plan if agents show up to intimidate his voters, telling NPR: “They’re going to face prison sentences.” We need more local officials with that kind of spine. Check your registration this week, make a plan, vote early if your state lets you, and bring a friend.

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— Senators Markey, Merkley, and Sanders are trying to stop Trump from shipping 5,000 one-ton bombs to the Saudi crown prince who had a Washington Post columnist dismembered. While Trump shipping tens of thousands of 2,000 pound bombs to Israel got a lot of press this week, Orange Caligula is also trying to help out his Saudi buddies who gave him millions for his golf tour and gave billions to his slumlord son-in-law. The three senators introduced a resolution of disapproval this week against a $5 billion sale of JDAM kits and 2,000-pound bombs to the kingdom; these are “privileged resolutions” and thus can force every senator to vote on the record. The same day, while still refusing to provide munitions to Ukraine, Rubio’s State Department moved forward an additional $24.3 billion sale of 48 F-35s to the Saudis. And then there’s the once-unthinkable Saudi nuclear deal: Trump sent Congress a 30-year nuclear cooperation agreement with the kingdom but classified two side letters that alter what the deal actually does, something no administration has ever done before. Even Republican Senators Rand Paul and John Kennedy signed the letter demanding to see them. Markey, noting the $2 billion the Saudis handed Jared Kushner, called it what it is, saying: “This is not diplomacy; this is corruption at the expense of U.S. national security.” I’m proud of my senator, Jeff Merkley, and his colleagues. Call your own senators and ask how they plan to vote on bombs for Mohammad bin Bone Saw.

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— Trump’s war of choice is about to come home to every oil tank in New England, so of course he spent last weekend at his shabby golf motel in Ireland. Heating oil inventories in the American northeast are the lowest they’ve been in the modern era and winter is approaching; one family-owned Vermont fuel oil company just sent a letter to their customers warning them that after a quarter-century of buying fuel futures they could only nail down about 25% of what they’ll need this winter. A former OPEC economist told ABC TV station WMUR that inventories are the lowest they’ve been in 45 years. Then Exxon’s Joliet, Illinois refinery, which turns out around 11 million gallons of gasoline and diesel a day for the Midwest, went down last Sunday and still hasn’t restarted. AAA says regular was at $4.47 a gallon yesterday, and diesel is pushing ten bucks a gallon in some parts of the country. Governors and legislatures in the Northeast are freaking out…although the Republicans are reluctant to say anything out loud that might piss off the man-baby in the Oval Office.

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— Saudi Arabia just told Europe there’s no oil for them next month. October oil deliveries to Europe, contracted for months ago, are not going to be delivered according to the Saudis because Trump’s insane war against Iran has led to their pipeline and pumping stations being knocked out by Iranian-allied militias in Iraq. Iran has managed to shut down both the Saudi’s front door for deliveries (the Strait of Hormuz) and now both back-doors via the Red Sea and their east-west pipeline. As of June, Europe was importing 577,000 barrels of Saudi crude a day. Aramco says they hope to be back at full capacity in six weeks, and in the meantime they’re prioritizing their Asian customers including China while Europeans scramble for more North Sea oil. Fossil fuel billionaires and Putin are making a fortune off this disruption from Trump’s and Netanyahu’s criminal war and, if Reagan hadn’t shut down Carter’s Solar Bank program we may well have been out of the fossil fuel loop altogether by now: nobody has ever blockaded the sun or sent a drone after the wind. Countries that spent the last few decades building solar, wind, and batteries are insulated from this, but we pissed it away by letting fossil fuel billionaires and their Republican lickspittles write our energy policy.

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— Poland’s prime minister says Putin is planning rocket and drone strikes on NATO countries, so Trump wrote Putin’s alibi for him. Polish Premiere Donald Tusk told the Polish parliament Thursday that intelligence shows Russia is planning to amp up their hybrid attacks on countries that support Ukraine, including Poland. Putin will pretend they’re all accidents, Tusk said, to “paralyze or at least weaken” NATO’s willingness to invoke Article 5 and respond with military force. In just the past week there have already been four Russian attacks at Poland’s border crossings with Ukraine, and Germany says Russia was definitely behind the attempted bombing at the Leipzig airport. The Telegraph and Metro have more details. Let’s not forget that a year ago this month, when 19 Russian drones flew into Poland, Trump covered for Putin saying that it all “could have been a mistake.” Putin obviously heard that loud and clear. Europe is rearming on the assumption that Trump is now wholly-owned by Putin. Meanwhile, Congress could still pass Ukraine aid and sanctions with veto-proof majorities if only enough Republicans remember which side their party was on when Reagan was alive. I’m not holding my breath.

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— Crazy Alert! A chatbot made up a nuclear smuggling plot, and Pete Hegseth’s military scrambled planes to board a Chinese ship over it. Seriously, an AI chatbot’s hallucination could have provoked World War III. Now that Whiskey Pete has integrated Musk’s Grok and other AI products into our military, an analyst at Special Operations Command Pacific asked an AI chatbot to determine what was going on with a suspicious Chinese cargo vessel in the Middle East. The bot mashed together open-source stuff and speculation on the internet and social media together with classified signals intelligence and concluded the ship was carrying parts for a nuclear weapons program. The analyst then had the AI chatbot write up the “analysis” as if it were a standard intelligence report and sent it up the chain of command. As a result, American military aircraft were in the air and armed troops were preparing to board the Chinese ship before somebody thought to check the work and found it was pure fiction. One source admitted to CNN’s reporters that the incident nearly started a war. This is what we get when the guy who purged the nation’s most competent generals orders three million personnel to “unleash experimentation” with software that confidently invents things. In addition to impeaching Whiskey Pete now, Congress must require a human being to sign off on any intelligence that could put Americans in a firefight with a nuclear power before the next hallucination gets any further than this one did and the results are truly disastrous.

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— Medicare for All isn’t dead, it’s waiting for us to do our part. Nancy Altman runs Social Security Works and knows more about how America built its social insurance system than just about anybody alive. She has a new book out, The Road to Medicare for All. Americans have been fighting for national health insurance for more than a century, and we won real ground with Medicare and Medicaid. Altman argues that the time is finally and truly here for the program that would replicate what most other democracies already have had for decades. We pay more for healthcare than any other country on Earth, all to make insurance company fatcats richer so they can kick back bribes to Republican legislators. As I also laid out with The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, we have to fix this and the next few years are going to be critical.

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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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Trump has now repeatedly offered his voters $5,000 checks if Republicans hold onto the House and Senate this fall, calling it the “Trump dividend.” On Sunday he told a rally that it’ll “happen 100 percent” if enough people turn out to vote GOP.

Since his own party controls both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, he could now get an appropriation passed for the ~$1.2 trillion this will add to the national debt; the fact that he’s not doing this is pretty much proof that what’s really going on here is a good old fashioned vote-buying scheme dressed up with some fancy language to make it seem less like the crime it is.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that “if the Republicans win” is quite simply a way of telling millions of Americans that there’s five grand riding on how they vote.

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And then there’s Trump telling a crowd in North Carolina that he's not going to send any more disaster aid via FEMA unless they elect a Republican senator. He claims it was a joke, like when he joked about tearing down the East Wing, or building a triumphal arch, or trying to end mail-in voting.

It's really just a variation on the $5,000 check: “Vote the way I want, and I'll make sure you get something; vote against me, and I’ll withhold benefits from you.”

Americans have seen this corrupt movie before, and the last time we saw it we made it a crime.

During the 1938 midterm elections in the midst of the Republican Great Depression, about a quarter of all American families were surviving on paychecks from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a program Republicans decried as “communism.” Democrats, though, controlled both branches of Congress and the White House, and more than a few of the local Democratic politicians were willing to exploit that widespread dependence on the public dole.

Reporter Thomas Stokes documented how WPA workers were being leaned on for both votes and campaign contributions; the reporting earned him a Pulitzer. TIME magazine reported that Harry Hopkins, the guy heading up the WPA, was promising both jobs and promotions in exchange for votes, and a Texas Democratic senator investigated, finding similar reports out of Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.

The scandal ripped across the front pages from coast to coast, and people were rightly disgusted. Given that a quarter of the population were only able to survive because of WPA payments, the threat to pull them (or expand them) in exchange for votes and contributions seemed like extortion.

So the president’s own party decided to clean up its own act. New Mexico’s Democratic Senator Carl Hatch wrote a bill he titled “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities” that explicitly outlawed government officials from using the power of their offices to influence politics or elections. A Democratic House passed it 241 to 134 and FDR signed it into law on August 2, 1939. We call it the Hatch Act.

Section 3 of the 1939 Hatch Act contained a criminal statute that’s still on the books, only lightly amended, as Title 18, Section 600 of the U.S. Code. It doesn’t begin with “any federal employee,” it opens with “Whoever”:

“Whoever, directly or indirectly, promises any employment, position, compensation, contract, appointment, or other benefit, provided for or made possible in whole or in part by any Act of Congress … to any person as consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity or for the support of or opposition to any candidate or any political party in connection with any general or special election to any political office … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.” (emphasis added)

A companion law, Section 597, makes it a two-year felony to offer any sort of expenditure to influence anybody’s vote; former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner argues Trump crossed that line the moment he made that promise. And, he points out, “if the Republicans win, you win with us” is a clear, neat description of offering a reward for supporting a political party in a general election.

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Fox “News” and Trump’s other lickspittles argue that in 1982 the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Hartlage, already said that politicians can make campaign promises involving money because in that case a Kentucky candidate had promised that, if elected, he’d cut his own salary.

But that guy was describing what he’d do to himself if he won the office he was seeking; there’s never before in American history been an offer of cash to voters with a trigger clause that says the money only comes if one party wins and the other loses.

That’s why Republican Thomas Massie said he’s insulted at Trump suggesting his and his constituents’ votes could be bought for a mere $5k, why former GOP Congressman Bob Good called it a “vote-buying scheme,” and why the libertarians at Reason magazine used the word “brazen” to describe Trump’s latest corrupt scheme.

As I mentioned here yesterday, 89 percent of Americans now believe that our government is experiencing “widespread corruption” because for over fifty years Democrats have let Republicans get away with their crimes, including Carter endorsing Ford’s pardon, Clinton’s “look to the future,” Gore’s concession, and Garland’s fifteen-month nap. Every one of those choices by Democrats told the next sleazy Republican that there was basically no price to be paid for corrupting our democracy.

This $5,000 vote-buying scheme and Trump’s FEMA threats are the perfect pivot points for Democrats to highlight how insanely corrupt the GOP has become since Nixon first started taking bribes and selling legislation.

And while Trump has the immunity that six on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court gave him, the people around him who are echoing and promoting these illegal schemes don’t.

Both Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Vice President JD Vance have been out hustling this $5,000 scheme on television, and Section 600 makes it a crime for anyone who makes such a campaign promise “directly or indirectly.”

And the federal statute of limitations is five years, which carries this particular offense out to September of 2031 when it’s reasonable to hope/assume Democrats will again control our federal government and its ability to prosecute crimes.

So, Democrats in Congress need to get ready with subpoenas and serious questions: Who drafted this crazy plan? Who at Treasury and Commerce worked on it, and was it during their government-paid work hours? Did the RNC coordinate any aspect of this? And what the hell is going on with FEMA?

Those are the questions the Hatch Act was written to let us ask.

There are also anti-vote-buying laws on the books in every one of the 50 states and DC, and each state has its own ability to launch investigations, empanel grand juries, and go after corrupt officials. Democratic state attorneys general could, at the very least, begin notifying corrupt Republicans to preserve their records and documents, putting everybody on notice that finally, after all these years of GOP corruption, clean and accountable government is on its way.

Democrats cleaned up their own vote-buying corruption in the late 1930s, and now it looks like they’re going to have to clean up this Republican scheme along the same lines. Let your elected officials know you want Hatch Act and FEMA investigations started on Day One of the new Congress in January.

And please share this piece and support hartmannreport.com; it’s readers like you who make it possible for me to keep saying these things out loud.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The $5,000 Promise”

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Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Subscribe to the Commonwealth Report

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.