The Hartmann Report: Daily Take

When I was around twelve, my dad gave me his tattered copy of a paperback of Franz Kafka’s short novel The Trial and told me he wanted to discuss it after I’d read it. The book gave me nightmares for weeks, which was clearly his goal.

He was a tool-and-die maker in Lansing, a WWII vet, and a man who’d volunteered in 1945 to go fight and even die to defeat fascism and defend the rule of law. He saw The Trial as the essence of why he’d joined the Army straight out of high school.

The Trial opens with a bank clerk named Josef K. being dragged out of his bed one morning by two officers who won’t tell him what he’s being charged with. They made clear that even they didn’t know what his crime was.

Over the following year he’s pulled deeper and deeper into a dark court that’s never held in public or official buildings, whose judges he never sees, and whose files are “secret” and thus not available to him or his lawyer. Nobody ever sees or says what Joseph K. was accused of, and his attorneys advise him it’s best to stop asking because the fact that he was arrested in the first place will be considered by the court as all the proof they’ll need of his guilt.

The story ends when two men in frock coats drag him out to a quarry at night and carry out his execution as mandated by the secret court:

“Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the high court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread all his fingers.
“But the hands of one of the men closed around K.’s throat, while the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing eyes K. could still see the two men close in front of his face, cheek pressed to cheek, watching the outcome. ‘Like a dog!’ he said…”

When Kafka wrote that in 1914, he was a Jew living in Prague inside a dying empire. He never lived to see Hitler or the Gestapo or Putin build the very thing he’d imagined, but my dad did which is why he’d given me that book so I could understand what a police state would feel like from the inside. He told me repeatedly throughout my life that “only the rule of law” and the Constitution protected us from the tyranny he’d volunteered to fight as a teenager.

I got a glimpse into that world myself twenty-some years later, in the winter of 1986, when my teenage daughter and I crossed through Checkpoint Charlie and were picked up in East Berlin by a young gypsy cab driver named Torsten. Before we’d traveled even a full block he had us rehearsing a cover story, that we were his cousins from the West, in case the Volkspolizei or the Stasi pulled us over.

That’s because in East Germany — where the secret police were then largely run by a guy named Vladimir Putin — Torsten knew that anybody could be hauled into jail at any time for any reason and nobody would ever have to explain why.

What happened Friday here in America is the Trump administration’s version of the same thing:

— Under this bizarre law in these secret courts, 8 U.S.C. § 1534, the judge reviews the government’s classified evidence alone, in chambers, and neither the accused nor the public may learn what it is or where it came from beyond an unclassified summary.

— The Federal Rules of Evidence don’t apply.

— The government may use the fruits of FISA wiretaps and warrantless physical searches, and the accused is specifically denied the right to suppress evidence she claims was gathered illegally.

— You get a court-appointed “special attorney” with a security clearance who can look at the secret file on your behalf, but that lawyer is forbidden by law from telling you or other lawyers what’s in it, and if he does he faces ten to twenty-five years in federal prison.

Kafka gave Josef K. a lawyer who couldn’t see the file with the charges against him. Now Trump mandates a lawyer who can see the file, but goes to prison if he talks about it to any other living being.

Zada’s public defenders put it plainly before she was chained and thrown onto the plane to Afghanistan:

“Dragging lawful permanent residents into court but refusing to show them or their attorneys the evidence that will be used against them is a plain violation of due process,” they said in a statement, adding that her consent to removal “should not be seen as an endorsement of this court’s legitimacy.”

This secret court is only the most recent brick in the fascist wall Trump, his tech bro billionaire supporters, and his fascist lickspittles are building around what used to be American law. Last year he sent 238 men to life sentences in to a torture prison in El Salvador — most with no criminal record whatsoever — without even bothering with a hearing for them.

One of them — a gay makeup artist named Andry Hernández Romero who was snatched by masked, armed men at the asylum appointment the government had set up for him — was shipped off to his life sentence in a foreign hellhole on the strength of crowns tattooed above the words “mom” and “dad”; he spent 125 days incommunicado before a prisoner swap got him out.

Shades of Joseph K. 109 years later.

ICE today is holding roughly 65,000 people in detention, most of them never convicted of even any minor crime (being in the country without papers is a civil infraction, not a crime) and never having seen a real judge or courtroom. Most will wait months for a hearing that may never come, a clear violation of their Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

In their frantic efforts to purge America of nonwhite people, Trump’s racist toadies have frozen our refugee program since he was sworn in a year ago January, with more than 100,000 fully vetted people stranded abroad. We’ve only admitted 6,069 refugees, and all but three were lily-white South Africans.

These misogynist white supracist fascists are also purging our government’s own institutions of women and people of color. Whiskey Pete Hegseth has fired or forced out at least twenty generals, admirals, and senior civilian leaders; when he removed the Army’s chief of staff in April, in the middle of a war, the Pentagon announced it in true Kafkaesque fashion without even bothering to give a reason.

White South African immigrant Elon Musk’s DOGE and the OPM drove out more than 300,000 federal workers in a single year, with Black women losing roughly a third of those jobs. (I can no longer link to this because the administration deleted their workforce demographic data in March, 2025.) Many were fired with Joseph K.-style form letters that cited nonspecific “performance” issues, often sent to people who’d gotten glowing reviews just weeks previously.

One NIH analyst’s supervisor told her that management had been ordered to pick either misconduct or performance as the reason and so had simply randomly picked one. A federal judge correctly called the entire process a “sham” and when ProPublica dug into what ICE has been up to they found more than 170 US citizens who’d been dragged off and imprisoned, often for days with no access to either a phone or a lawyer, all in clear violation of the law and our Constitution.

Each of these examples of overreach and lawbreaking by Trump, ICE, and the DOJ are grounded in the same basic logic Kafka described: you are powerless before the all-knowing all-seeing state. Instead of being judged, you’re processed through an impersonal, uncaring, brutal machine.

If you’re arrested it must be because you’re guilty, even if nobody knows for sure of what. And when you ask why this is happening to you, the answer is a variation on, “You don’t need to know and, besides, we won’t tell you in any case.”

My father’s generation understood something we’ve lost track of in the years of rightwing hysteria since McVeigh and 9/11.

Our Sixth Amendment guarantees that every accused person — citizen or not — must be told the nature and cause of the accusation they’re charged with, have a public trial, and be confronted with the witnesses against them. The Fourteenth Amendment requires and guarantees due process for everybody confronted by the government, citizen or not.

When a government stops honoring the rule of law, due process, and fundamental human rights it cease to be a legitimate republic and has demonstrably slid into the early stages of being reinvented as a full-blown fascist state.

Zada may well have been involved in potential terrorist activity, although none of us will ever know because of the secretive nature of this case. If she was guilty, it should have been established in public; we have plenty of ways to protect sources and methods, when necessary, that are consistent with our Constitution.

Torsten knew what a country that doesn’t respect the rule of law and civil rights felt like. So did my dad, which is why he asked me to read The Trial when I was twelve. We’re not East Germany yet, but Trump’s clearly learned from his mentor/owner who used to run that country’s secret police, and this new terrorist court is now established as a legal precedent. Which means this is just beginning.

Call your senators and representative at the Capitol Switchboard, 202-224-3121, and tell them the Alien Terrorist Removal Court should be repealed and that not one more person, citizen or not, should be deported, detained, or fired by this government without being told why.

And if this piece was useful to you, please share it and support my daily work here, because the only real answer to a government that won’t explain itself is a public that never stops demanding it does.

Louise’s Daily Song: “He Told Me Why”

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.

Is America About to Get the Biggest “Special Assessment” in History?

Thom Hartmann — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:33:10 GMT

Get ready to get your financial ass kicked. That’s the message the bond market sent last week, although almost nobody in the corporate press bothered to translate it into English. If you’ve ever lived in a condo or home with an HOA, though, you may understand what’s happening better than you realize.

First, the current crisis:

Our federal government pays its bills two ways: using tax revenue, and borrowing when it’s short by issuing IOUs we call Treasury bonds. The single most important of these for you and me is the ten-year bond because our banking system sets mortgage, car loan, student loan, and credit card rates based on it.

Last week, that rate hit 4.92 percent, just a hair below the 5 percent rate that could trigger a freak-out reaction on Wall Street. The nationwide average 30-year mortgage is already hitting 6.7 percent, which is both shaking the housing market and crushing low- and middle-income people both in mortgage payments and mortgage costs that get passed through as rent.

That, in turn, threatens a recession; when lenders get nervous about being paid back, they charge more, and right now they’re getting very, very nervous.

The main thing that’s driving all this nervousness is that the national debt crossed the $40 trillion threshold three weeks ago; we’re now paying more than $1 trillion a year — enough to fund a national healthcare system and give everybody free college, if done right — in interest payments. That’s more than we spend on the entire military or on Medicare.

Our Treasury is writing interest checks of $95 billion a month, our nation’s debt is growing by nearly $7 billion a day, and that works out to about $117,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. (Into this mess, on Wednesday night, Donald Trump tossed a promise to mail every adult a $5,000 “Trump Dividend” if Republicans keep Congress, a stunt that would cost well over a trillion dollars, further freaking out the bond market.)

If you’ve ever lived in a home or condo that has a homeowners association (HOA), you may already have a meaningful insight to what 45 years of Republican irresponsibility have done to America, because you’ve probably had it happen to you or watched it happen to your neighbors.

Two friends of mine here in Oregon have been through this in just the past five years, and Louise and I briefly lived in a community that was heading in the same direction.

Our friends bought into what seemed to be well-maintained communities that had seductively low monthly dues. And then came the shock: in one case the roofs and another the parking structure hit the end of their useful lives and there was no money in the HOA’s account to pay for the necessary — and major — repairs. One was hit with a $40,000 “special” assessment, the other a bit less. Neither saw it coming.

The problem was that a previous generation of homeowner board members, wanting to keep their own costs low, kept the HOA dues down by simply ignoring the reality that one day the roofs and parking area would have to be repaired. The more recent purchasers ended up having to suddenly cover costs that should have been saved for over decades in what HOAs call “reserves.”

This is the same scam Republicans have been running on us since Reagan started it in 1981 on the advice of a Republican consultant named Jude Wanniski.

In essence, the boards that were keeping their HOA dues low and not bothering to build reserves for future maintenance were giving their then-current owners (and themselves) a tax cut.

The roof doesn’t care if there’s money to pay for its repairs; it’s going to deteriorate no matter what. And the longer the board waits, the more the repairs will cost until one day ceilings start leaking and it can’t be put off any longer. That’s when the current board has no choice but to hit everybody currently owning a property in the HOA with a special assessment.

— After the Surfside condos collapsed in Florida killing 98 people, that state finally passed a law requiring HOAs to both maintain their properties and build reserve funds for future maintenance.

— Owners at the Cricket Club condo complex in North Miami got hit with a proposed assessment of nearly $30 million for a new roof and facade work, which worked out to more than $134,000 per unit; one owner there had cashed out his 401(k) to buy a $190,000 condo and simply couldn’t pay.

— At the Mediterranean Village homes in Aventura, some owners were assessed up to $400,000. A 79-year-old woman in South Florida got hit with a mind-boggling $224,000 assessment on top of monthly fees that had already doubled from $1,500 to $3,000.

And it isn’t only Florida. Just this week a condo owner in Torrance, California opened a bill for $49,000, levied equally on all 499 units, because his board was finally forced by disintegrating properties to pay for $19 million in decades-deferred projects.

It turns out this isn’t a rare event; more than 75 million Americans live in communities with homeowner associations, and nearly 10 percent of all those associations hit their homeowners with a special assessment last year, up from 7.8 percent in 2021. That’s somewhere north of seven million people who got hit with a massive surprise bill in just one year (more recent stats aren’t yet available, but odds are things are getting worse because everybody’s so badly financially strapped right now).

But, of course, it’s not just people who live in HOA communities: America is on the verge of having to go through the same thing because our “board” policies have been run (or restrained) by corrupt Republicans for most of the past 45 years.

When Ronald Reagan took office the national debt was $914 billion. When he left, having slashed the top income tax rate from 70 percent down to 28 percent, our debt was $2.6 trillion, nearly tripled, and the annual interest payment had more than doubled.

And this HOA-level irresponsibility was neither an accident or the response to a crisis. We’d been steadily paying down our national debt every year since the end of World War II, to the point where when Reagan took office it was less than one trillion dollars.

But then, as I laid out in The Hidden History of the American Dream, Republican strategist Jude Wanniski laid out what he called his “Two Santa Clauses” strategy to screw Democrats and make Republicans look like financial geniuses.

Wanniski pointed out in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that Democrats had been winning elections for forty years by playing Santa with everything from Social Security to Medicare, Medicaid, the minimum wage, the GI Bill, food stamps, housing supports, free college, and dozens of other “gifts” to the American public.

Republicans had openly opposed every single one of them, making the public view them as Scrooge.

The key, then, was for Republicans to become what Wanniski called the “tax-cut Santas” and, at the same time, start spending money hand-over-fist when a Republican was in the White House. That would artificially stimulate the economy, making people think Republicans knew how to produce “good times,” and would also have the benefit of running up the nation’s debt.

When a Democrat came into office, Wanniski said, Republicans should flip the script and start screaming about the debt they’d run up — “Oh, the agony, our children will have to pay for this!!!” — to force that Democratic president to cut his own social spending.

Bill Clinton fell for it hook-line-and-sinker, giving us “the end” of both “big government” and “welfare as we know it.” And it’s worked every time a Republican has taken the Oval Office since Reagan; they all know the script and follow it to a T.

Reagan tripled the debt, and Clinton had to play the role of the grownup. George W. Bush cut taxes on billionaires twice, put two illegal wars on the national credit card, and doubled our national debt; when Obama took office he spent eight years being lectured about deficits by Republicans and right-leaning billionaire-owned media.

Now Trump has signed tax cuts that the Congressional Budget Office says could push our debt to 200 percent of GDP over the next two decades; he added $7.8 trillion to our debt in his first term and is now merrily running a debt of over $2 trillion a year.

This GOP scheme is the exact equivalent of the HOA board members who live cheap for 20 years and then sell their homes or condos to the poor suckers who inherit the disintegrating roof or parking garage.

But, in our nation’s case, the roof is the bond market. And the bond market is going nuts right now, which is giving serious jitters to everybody from Wall Street to foreign countries that are starting to dump US treasuries.

There are already three members of the Fed who are openly lobbying to raise interest rates this Wednesday to slow down the inflation all this deficit spending has created, oil is over $100 a barrel because Netanyahu finally found a president and defense secretary stupid enough to go along with him and attack Iran, and we’ll hit the $41.1 trillion debt ceiling sometime early next year.

When our “special assessment” finally arrives, it’ll show up as a mortgage you can’t refinance, a 15 percent car loan, a Social Security “reform” that cuts everybody’s checks, exploding Medicare premiums, and inflation that continues to eat away at your paycheck month after month.

It’ll hit, in other words, the average working people who just happened to be living in the HOA building when the roof started to fail, while the former owners who’d voted for 45 years of skipped maintenance have long since cashed out.

The fix for HOAs is pretty much the same thing as the fix we’ll need for this country: we need a special assessment and a return to regular taxation, but let’s make sure it hits the right people.

We require the board to fund the reserves — raise taxes on the morbidly rich — and claw back some of that money they’ve stolen from us (with $40 trillion worth of tax cuts and illegal wars over the past 45 years) via a tax on wealth like California is contemplating.

If we fail, our eviction notice will come in the form of a repeat of the last Republican Great Depression, courtesy of the bond and equities markets just like last time.

So, check your registration at vote.org, find out who’s running for your state legislature at openstates.org, and if this was useful to you, please subscribe to and share the Hartmann Report. Somebody in this building has to read the reserve study out loud.

Louise’s Daily Song: “They Got the Fortune, We Got the Debt”

Comments on Satirday’s Special:
When a Physicist Follows the Data Somewhere He Didn’t Want to Go

The premise of this book resonates with the Truths I’ve been encountering! It’s exciting to see!
~ Pamela Eisen

Holy s__t!! I must get this book! After saying that, I must also say that I am very skeptical although intrigued. I would like to believe there is more to reality than what our senses tell us. Certainly even the physical universe is far from being explained (dark matter, dark energy, particle entanglement).
~ Linda Silfven

Fascinating and terrifying in equal measure.
~ Michele Dukinfield

Read the Article | See all Comments

Click on the image above for the Commonwealth Report

Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

9/11: America Can’t Let the War Lies Go Down the Memory Hole Again

Thom Hartmann — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:17:03 GMT

Image by Thomas Wolter from Pixabay

Twenty-five years and the smoke still rises
In photographs, in names, in empty chairs
We remember the morning
We remember the falling
But who remembers what they told us after that?

Don’t let the lies die
Say their names, remember why
For every empty chair
For every mother who still cries

Twenty-five years
And this much remains

A country that forgets the lies
Can be lied into war again

Today is the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the event that first brought America together and then was cynically exploited by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to steal Iraq’s oil, following their illegal invasion of Afghanistan for pure politics just a bit more than a year earlier.

Yet the media today (so far, anyway) is curiously silent about Bush and Cheney’s lies.

Given the costs of both these wars — and Netanyahu and Trump using October 7th in a similar fashion to justify this insane war with Iran — it’s an important moment to discuss our history of wars, both illegal and unnecessary, and those that are arguably essential to the survival of democracy in the world.

To be clear, I support US involvement — and even an expanded US involvement — in the defense of the Ukrainian democracy against Putin’s Hitler-grabs-Poland-like attack and mass slaughter of Ukrainian civilians. Had the world mobilized to stop Hitler when he invaded the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in 1938 there almost certainly wouldn’t have been either the Holocaust or WWII, which is why Europe is so united in this effort.

If Putin succeeds in taking Ukraine, his administration has already suggested that both Poland and Moldova are next, with the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) also on the menu. That would almost certainly lead to another war in Europe.

And China is watching: a Putin victory in Ukraine will encourage Xi to try to take Taiwan. Between the two — war in both Europe and the Pacific — we could find ourselves in the middle of World War III if Putin isn’t stopped now.

That said, essentially defensive military involvement like with Ukraine or in World War II have been the exception rather than the rule in American history. We’ve been far more likely to have presidents lie us into wars for their own personal and political gain than to defend ourselves or other democracies.

For example, after 9/11 in 2001 the Taliban that then ran Afghanistan offered to arrest Bin Laden, but Bush turned them down because he wanted to be a “wartime president” to have a “successful presidency.”

The Washington Post headline weeks after 9/11 put it succinctly: “Bush Rejects Taliban Offer On Bin Laden.” With that decision not to arrest and try Bin Laden for his crime but instead to go to war, George W. Bush set the US and Afghanistan on a direct path to disaster (but simultaneously set himself up for re-election in 2004 as a “wartime president”).

To further complicate things for Bush and Cheney, the 9/11 attacks were not planned, hatched, developed, practiced, expanded, worked out, or otherwise devised in Afghanistan or by even one single citizen of Afghanistan.

That country and its leadership in 2001, in fact, had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, as I detailed in depth here on August 15th of last year. The actual planning and management of the operation was done out of Pakistan and Germany, mostly by Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

The Taliban were bad guys, trashing the rights of women and running a tinpot dictatorship, but they represented no threat whatsoever to America or our allies.

Almost two decades later, though, then-President Trump and Mike Pompeo gave the Taliban everything they wanted — power, legitimacy, shutting down 9 of the 10 US air bases in that country to screw incoming President Joe Biden, and allowed the release of 5000 of Afghanistan’s worst Taliban war criminals — all over the strong objections of the democratically elected Afghan government.

Trump did this so could falsely claim, heading into the 2020 election, that he’d “negotiated peace” in Afghanistan, when in fact he’d set up the debacle that happened around President Biden’s withdrawal from that country.

”The relationship I have with the Mullah is very good,” Trump proclaimed — after ordering the mullah who then named himself President of Afghanistan — freed from prison over the furious objection of Afghan’s government, which Trump had cut out of the negotiations.

Following that betrayal of both Afghanistan and America, Trump and the GOP scrubbed the record of their embrace of the Taliban from their websites, as noted here and here.

And the conservative Boris Johnson administration in the UK then came right out and said that Trump’s “rushed” deal with the Taliban — without involvement of the Afghan government or the international community — set up the difficulties Biden faced.

“The die was cast,” Defense Minister Ben Wallace told the BBC, “when the deal was done by Donald Trump, if you want my observation.”

So, Republican George W. Bush lied us into both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and then Donald Trump tried to lie us out of at least one of them.

But this was far from the first time a president has lied us into a war.

— Vietnam wasn’t the first time an American president and his buddies in the media lied us into a war when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara falsely claimed that an American warship had come under attack in the Gulf of Tonkin and LBJ went along with the lie.

— Neither was President William McKinley lying us into the Spanish-American war in 1898 by falsely claiming that the USS Maine had been blown up in Havana harbor (it caught fire all by itself).

— The first time we were lied into a major war by a president was probably the Mexican-American war of 1846 when President James Polk lied that we’d been invaded by Mexico. Even Abraham Lincoln, then a congressman from Illinois, called him out on that lie.

— You could also argue that when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 leading to the Trail of Tears slaughter and forced relocation of the Cherokee under President Buchanan (among other atrocities) it was all based on a series of lies.

Bush’s lies that took us into Afghanistan and, a bit over a year later into Iraq, are particularly egregious, however, given his and Cheney’s reasons for those lies.

In 1999, when George W. Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his family hired Mickey Herskowitz to write the first draft of Bush’s autobiography, A Charge To Keep.

Although Bush had gone AWOL for about a year during the Vietnam war and was thus apparently no fan of combat, he’d concluded (from watching his father’s “little 3- day war” with Iraq) that being a “wartime president” was the most consistently surefire way to get reelected (if you did it right) and have a two-term presidency.

“I'll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004.
“One of the things [Bush] said to me,” Herskowitz said, “is: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.
“[Bush] said, ‘If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency.’”

The attack on 9/11 gave Bush his first chance to “be seen as a commander-in-chief” when our guy Osama Bin Laden, who the Reagan/Bush administration had spent $3 billion building up in Afghanistan, engineered an attack on New York and DC.

The crime was planned in Germany and Florida and on 9/11 Bin Laden was, according to CBS News, not even in Afghanistan:

“CBS Evening News has been told that the night before the Sept. 11 terrorists attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan.”

When the Obama administration finally caught and killed Bin Laden, he was back in Pakistan, the home base for the Taliban.

But attacking our ally Pakistan in 2001 would have been impossible for Bush, and, besides, nearby Afghanistan was an easier target, being at that time the second-poorest country in the world with an average annual per-capita income of $700 a year. Bin Laden had run terrorist training camps there — unrelated to 9/11 — and they made a fine excuse for Bush’s first chance to “be seen as a commander-in-chief” and get some leadership cred.

Cheney, meanwhile, was in a world of trouble because of a huge bet he’d made as CEO of Halliburton in 1998. Dresser Industries was big into asbestos and about to fall into bankruptcy because of asbestos lawsuits that the company was fighting through the court system.

Cheney bet Dresser would ultimately win the suits and had Halliburton buy the company on the cheap, but a year later, in 1999, Dresser got turned down by the courts and Haliburton’s stock went into freefall, crashing 68 percent in a matter of months.

Bush had asked Cheney — who’d worked in his father’s White House as Secretary of Defense — to help him find a suitable candidate for VP.

Cheney, as his company was collapsing, recommended himself for the job. In July of 2000, Cheney walked away with $30 million from the troubled company and the year after that, as VP, Halliburton subsidiary KBR received one of the first no-bid no-ceiling (no accountability and no limit on how much they could receive) multi-billion-dollar military contracts.

Bush and Cheney both had good reason to want to invade Afghanistan in October 2001. Bush was seen as an illegitimate president at the time because his father’s corrupt appointee on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, had cast the deciding vote in the Bush v Gore lawsuit that made him president; a war that gave him legitimacy and the aura of leadership.

Cheney’s company was in a crisis, and Afghanistan War no-bid contracts helped turn around Halliburton from the edge of bankruptcy into one of the world’s largest defense contractors today.

Even Trump had to get into the “let’s lie about Afghanistan” game, in his case to have bragging rights that he’d “ended the war in Afghanistan.”

In 2019, Trump went around the Afghan government (to their outrage: he even invited the Taliban to Camp David in a move that disgusted the world) to cut a so-called “peace deal” that sent thousands of newly-empowered Taliban fighters back into the field, and then drew down our troops to the point where today’s ongoing chaos in that country was absolutely predictable.

Trump’s deal was the signal to the 300,000+ Afghan army recruits we’d put together and paid that America no longer had their back and if the Taliban showed up they should just run away. Which, of course, is what happened on Trump’s watch. As Susannah George of The Washington Post noted:

“The Taliban capitalized on the uncertainty caused by the [Trump] February 2020 agreement reached in Doha, Qatar, between the militant group and the United States calling for a full American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some Afghan forces realized they would soon no longer be able to count on American air power and other crucial battlefield support and grew receptive to the Taliban’s approaches.”

Jon Perr’s article at Daily Kos did a great summary, with the title: “Trump put 5,000 Taliban fighters back in battle and tied Biden’s hands in Afghanistan.”

Trump schemed and lied to help his own 2020 reelection efforts, and the people who worked with our military and the US-backed Afghan government paid a terrible price for it. And now Trump’s using ICE to deport them from America, compounding that disgusting betrayal.

As President Biden told America:

“When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on U.S. Forces. Shortly before he left office, he also drew U.S. Forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500.
“Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our Forces and our allies’ Forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict. I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.”

America has been lied into too many wars. It’s cost us too much in money, credibility, and blood. We must remember the lies, and tell our children about them so that memory isn’t lost.

When President Ford withdrew US forces from Vietnam (I remember it well), there was barely a mention of McNamara’s and LBJ’s lies that got us into that war.

Similarly, today’s reporting on the chaos in Afghanistan and the ongoing conflict around the Iraqi oil fields almost never mention Bush’s and Cheney’s lies and ulterior motives in getting us into those wars in the first place.

George Santayana famously noted, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

We can’t afford to let these lies go down the memory hole, like we have the other wars we were lied into that I mentioned earlier. Sadly, it’s clear now that neither Bush nor Cheney will be held accountable for their lies or for the American, Afghan, and Iraqi blood and treasure they cost.

But both should be subject to a clear and public airing of the crimes they committed in office and Bush should be required — at the very least — to apologize to the thousands of American families destroyed by the loss of their soldier children, parents, and spouses in those unnecessary wars, as well as to the people of both Afghanistan and Iraq.

If the media refuses to mention the Bush/Cheney lies on this anniversary of 9/11, it’s all the more important that the rest of us use this opportunity to do so. Pass it on.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Don’t Let the Lies Die”

Comments on Thursday’s Daily Take:
The Old America Is Dying. Who Will Build the New One?

Beautifully written and based in history and fact Democrats like Clinton and Obama and Biden have failed the people of the USA Time to acknowledging this fact and birth a new generation of Democracy a democratic socialism that taxes the Uber wealthy and protects the people Universal healthcare must be on the ballot along with accountability for the current regime and their blatant corruption
~ Cindy Felici

Vote by all means. Get everyone you know who isn’t MAGA to vote. It means something more symbolic here in California, where I have spent most of my life. Our MAGAts are fringe. But they are there, in the millions still.
~ Roy Shults

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The Old America Is Dying. Who Will Build the New One?

Thom Hartmann — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 13:51:49 GMT

“The old order is dying and the new cannot yet be born; in this interregnum, monsters appear.” —paraphrase of Italian anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci

While Hakeem Jeffries revealed, as he trash-talked Medicare for All, that he doesn’t believe we’re in a full-blown populist moment in America, Trump, Bannon, and the neofascist tech bros and billionaires fully realize what’s going on — and are committed to making the most of it. As are Bernie Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, El-Sayed and hundreds of other Democratic candidates this year.

At its core, populism is a way of understanding politics as a struggle between ordinary people and a powerful elite that has stopped serving them. It’s not inherently left- or right-wing; it’s really a way political scientists describe a moment when the majority of a population has lost faith in the existing system and is looking for alternatives to it.

Arguably, the greatest failure of government in the past century was the Republican Great Depression, kicked off by Herbert Hoover with GOP tax cuts and tariffs in 1929 and lasting largely through the end of World War II. It created a populist moment that brought to power a Bernie-like populist in America named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It also brought to power a Trump-like populist in Germany named Adolf Hitler.

Because populist moments or eras typically evolve out of desperation — a third of Americans and Germans were unemployed in the 1930s — they open the door to people who offer solutions that radically depart from the norm. Breaking the old model and replacing it with a new one, in fact, is the essence of that populist pitch, be it coming from the fascist or the democratic socialist side.

And make no mistake: America is now being pulled in both directions by powerful movements from both sides. A recent Pew poll found that while almost 90 percent of Americans trusted our government to “do the right thing” for them in the Eisenhower/Kennedy 1960s, today that number sits at a shocking 17 percent.

The ground for a major, wrenching transformation of America has been seeded and the neofascist movement — which figured it out first — has, for the moment, captured control of our federal government along with about half of our states. But there’s also massive progressive pushback and dissatisfaction that, if anything, is amplifying the widespread populist sentiment.

So, which side will prevail?

The creation story of this moment is found when Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian mullahs to hold onto their American hostages until after the election of 1980, thus destroying President Jimmy Carter’s chance at reelection. Reagan immediately began to execute a neofascist vision that had been presented to him by the billionaires who funded the Heritage Foundation with their 1981 “Mandate for Leadership,” that era’s version of Project 2025.

He destroyed the American union movement, slashed wages for working class people gutting the middle class, made it harder to retire on Social Security, made deep cuts to FDR’s social safety net, ended free college, killed Carter’s solar energy programs, gave trillions of tax dollars to billionaires while raising taxes on working people, slashed funding for our public schools, and repeatedly blamed the nation’s problems on Black people and “elites” in our universities.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton picked up Reagan’s neoliberal mantel and brought us “the end of the era of big government” and “the end of welfare as we know it” as Reagan’s draconian tax cuts — which no Democratic president since has seriously challenged — began the modern explosion of billionaires and monopolistic corporations.

President Obama, although he campaigned on the populist-sounding slogan of “hope and change,” continued the neoliberal plan, turning our healthcare system over to a handful of massive insurance companies and their billionaire executives.

Forty-five years of neoliberalism, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, have taken us from two-thirds of us being in the middle class with a single paycheck in 1981 down to a mere 41 percent of us claiming that status and having to have two full-time jobs to do it today.

Like the Republican Great Depression devastated average voters, so has this failed neoliberal experiment, bringing us to this second modern populist moment.

On the neofascist side, there’s a populist movement initially led by tech and fossil fuel billionaires that’s been joined by the over 200 billionaire families and foundations who spent nearly one in five of all dollars used in the 2024 election.

They’re aided daily in their efforts by propaganda operations run by Vladimir Putin (internet trolls), Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, and Benjamin Netanyahu (AIPAC), all committed to spreading strongman ethnonationalist movements across the world at the expense of democracy. And, of course, Donald Trump and his seizure of our federal government and police agencies.

Their most compelling weapon is their control of most of our media, particularly the powerful social media sites Facebook and X. As Peter Theil wrote in 2010, quoted in the opening of Gil Durand’s brilliant new book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy:

“The initial founding vision was that we were going to use technology to change the whole world and basically overturn the monetary system of the world… the basic idea was that we could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority… But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world—without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who were never going to agree with you—through technological means… technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”

On the side that still embraces democracy, the populist progressive movement has been led by Bernie Sanders for decades, although that mantle is increasingly being picked up across the Democratic Party as politicians recognized over the past decade this populist moment.

Multiple polls from 2016 showed that Bernie Sanders could’ve easily beat Trump, if the Democratic Party machine and the big donors Bill Clinton brought along hadn’t sabotaged Sanders. It was verified by Politifact. Populist voters were ready to elect a populist in that election, and the only one offered them was Trump.

They rejected the neoliberalism of Reagan and the Clintons alike, and those who vote for Democrats are clearly now opting for a reinvention of America along the social democracy lines pioneered by the Scandinavian nations.

In his book I Paid Hitler, 1930s steel baron Fritz Thyssen confesses that he was entranced by populist Hitler’s promise to “resurrect” Germany from the depths of the Depression and its loss in World War I. He organized the first seed money that got Hitler into power in 1933 and brought along many of his fabulously rich peers.

Today’s heir to Hitler’s authoritarian populist mantle is Trump (although Vance and Rubio, among others, are waiting for the king to fail so they can step into the vacuum).

During that same time, the plutocrat and former New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt turned his back on his own class and embraced a Bernie-like populist message, claiming that he could put America back together by taxing the morbidly rich at 90% and using government to meet workers’ needs.

Today’s heirs to FDR’s progressive populist mantle could well be billionaire Illinois Governor JB Pritzker or Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (although there are numerous competitors).

On both sides, the message is similar:

“The elites and the government have failed us, feathered their own nests while ignoring us and ours, and they must be overthrown and replaced. We need radical change in the direction of our government and our culture.”

The only difference is that the Republicans are saying they’ll fix things by handing the reins of government to billionaires and the stability of society to armed, masked ICE agents while Democrats are saying we must reverse Reaganism, tax the rich, and use that money to restore our middle class with free healthcare, education, and housing supports.

We’ve been in this populist moment since the middle of the GW Bush administration, although it was a slow boil until the 2016 election. The first indication was Obama winning with a populist message, and the for-sure proof was Trump winning twice on purely populist messages. The Trump movement, however, figured out that this was where America was at long before it occurred to Democrats (other than Bernie), and Biden’s efforts, although valiant, were too little and too late.

So, here we are at this populist moment, and our country faces a binary choice: fascism or democratic socialism.

Republicans are universally lined up on the fascist side, backing Trump and ICE while feeding at the trough of their billionaire donors. That unanimity gives them tremendous power; their only problem is that they’ve failed to deliver for the people and voters know it.

Democrats are split, between those corrupt neoliberals like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and John Fetterman who are deeply in the pockets of corporate and wealthy interests, and a new and growing generation of politicians who often describe themselves as democratic socialists or social democrats.

This schism, a remnant of the Clinton years, is weakening the Democratic Party’s populist appeal as many believe the Perez-style Democrats will prevent the AOC- or Pritzker-style Democrats from actually accomplishing the transition to a social democracy that America needs.

Some doubt that this is the most important election in our lifetime, noting that every cycle we hear that kind of rhetoric. But, given the stakes and the boiling populist energy arrayed on both sides, it’s hard to imagine this isn’t the most critical one since 1932 America and 1933 Germany.

Vote!

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Old America is Dying; Who Will Build the New One?”

Comments on Wednesdays Daily Take:
A Brazilian Meat Billionaire Walked Into Trump’s Oval Office. What Happened Next Should Terrify Us All…

For awhile now we’ve cut our consumption of both beef and pork on the advice of nutritionists who recommended using meat as more of a condiment than a ‘main,’ as in many casseroles, Chinese, Indian and other cuisines. (I am learning to cook international.) The meat we do buy is 100% organic and costs a fortune, but is well worth it to reduce the chance of food contamination.
~ Leigh Horne

It’s a day that ends in “y” so no one should be surprised by another report on Trump corruption. This one, however, is specially noteworthy.
~ Sam Myovich

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

A Brazilian Meat Billionaire Walked Into Trump’s Oval Office. What Happened Next Should Terrify Us All…

Thom Hartmann — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:36:38 GMT

In Monday’s New York Times, Eric Schlosser — the guy who freaked out a nation with his book Fast Food Nation a quarter century ago — published an article that kicks off with a simple observation: if you buy a T-shirt at the Gap, federal law requires a label that tells you where it was made and what it’s made of.

While the same is true for your car, your refrigerator, your television, and every apple and bag of frozen peas in the supermarket, as a result of lobbyists being able to openly buy politicians in America since 2010, beef and pork are the exceptions.

Which is why, Schlosser argues, Donald Trump could sign a one-man presidential proclamation allowing roughly 660 million pounds of foreign beef to enter America with neither inspection nor the usual 26.4 percent out-of-quota tariff.

If Americans knew where this mystery meat was coming from, they might not want to eat it, Schlosser notes, but Trump is apparently making sure we’ll never know.

Ironically, the same morning Schlosser was warning us about the incoming meat, Axios reported that the FDA just hit a record 19 simultaneous foodborne illness outbreak investigations, covering everything from infant formula to jalapeños.

A Cornell economist told them the American food safety system “has gotten hit so hard over the last year and a half.” This is quite simply what happens when you turn a nation’s food supply over to its oligarchs and shut down the regulations that protect average consumers.

Schlosser says much of the beef that’ll be coming into the US could have been frozen for years overseas, blended here with fattier American meat in massive industrial grinders.

Trump refuses to tell us where the meat is coming from, and his Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins — a former rightwing propagandist and fundamentalist Christian evangelist with no food safety background whatsoever — says she’s “not privvy” to that information.

Meanwhile, Schlosser pointed out that Uruguayan beef was recently found tainted with an outlawed antiparasitic drug, Argentine beef has repeatedly tested positive for a banned antibiotic that can cause nerve damage, and in 2017 Brazilian federal police raided nearly 200 meatpacking plants over allegations that inspectors and politicians had been bribed to allow rotten meat, chemically treated to mask the smell, to be sold to schools and hospitals and exported abroad.

Will your next burger come from one of those countries? We have some clues.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that on August 20, Joesley Batista, the Brazilian billionaire who co-controls JBS, the largest meatpacker on Earth, met privately with Trump in the Oval Office and made the case for dropping the tariff on Brazilian beef. (Haberman and Swan reported in their book that Batista’s longtime friendship with Melania Trump helped make Trump’s meetings with Batista happen.)

The next day Trump announced his “bring in the meat” plan on his Nazi-infested social media site. His proclamation dropped the entire 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef into the “other countries” quota category, which Brazil dominates.

This is the same guy who, along with his brother in 2017, confessed to bribing roughly 1,800 Brazilian officials to not examine their meat products. Trump’s own first-term SEC and Justice Department fined them and their companies $280 million under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, in part for using bribes here in America to grease their takeover of the American chicken giant Pilgrim’s Pride.

The SEC called their conduct a “profound failure” of corporate governance and had blocked JBS from listing on the New York Stock Exchange for nearly a decade.

Then Pilgrim’s Pride wrote a $5 million check to Trump’s 2025 inauguration — the single largest corporate donation, five times what Amazon or Meta gave — and Trump suspended enforcement against JBS of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Two days after the donation became public, Trump’s SEC also approved the stock market listing, and JBS began trading on the NYSE last June. Now the company’s co-owner walks into the Oval Office and walks out with a tariff holiday on the product his company sells. Senator Elizabeth Warren has been asking pointed questions about the entire sordid deal for over a year.

I spent a couple of decades doing international relief work, living and working in some of the roughest and poorest parts of the world. I was rarely worried about crime; very poor communities tend to police themselves, and they’re especially protective of the relief workers who show up to help.

What I worried about constantly, though, was that I’d eat something that would rip apart my guts or leave me with a brain-worm. That worry was foreign to me most of my life because I’d grown up in an America that had been so horrified by Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle in 1906 that we built an entire system to keep our food clean, and every president from Teddy Roosevelt to FDR to Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden took care to keep running smoothly and efficiently.

I’d spent my whole life simply assuming that the food on my plate wouldn’t hurt me. Now — much the way I used to look at a plate of food in South Sudan or in the barrios of Bogotá — I can no longer make that assumption. And neither can you.

When Upton Sinclair’s novel exposed the Chicago packinghouses in 1906, Teddy Roosevelt sent in his own investigators with much fanfare from the newspapers. They found that Sinclair’s descriptions were, if anything, conservative, and TR used his inspectors’ report as a moral bludgeon to force the packers to accept federal meat inspectors on the killing floor.

The Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, both signed by him the same day, gave us the USDA inspection system and eventually the FDA.

Exactly a century and two years later, in 2008, Congress added mandatory country-of-origin labels for meat.

Then in 2010 five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized bribery of our national politicians and judges, the meatpackers’ lobbyists swarmed DC, and in December 2015 Congress quietly repealed the labels for beef and pork by tucking that repeal into a 2,000-page omnibus spending bill.

Chicken and lamb still carry the label, but your hamburger doesn’t. The “mystery” in mystery meat was purchased by the industry a decade ago, setting up Trump’s desperate effort to lower beef costs (and screw our ranchers) before the election.

And then there’s Bob Kennedy, the onetime heroin addicted lawyer with no medical or scientific training whatsoever who promised to Make America Healthy Again. In April of last year he announced 10,000 layoffs across federal health agencies, including 3,500 at the FDA.

The Associated Press reported that the fired staff included both the lab scientists who test food samples for contamination and the communications specialists whose job is to alert us, the public, to food safety recalls.

Now, Bob’s FDA budget wants to shift routine food inspections away from the feds and onto the states, all while cutting the agency’s field laboratory operations by more than half. And he’s trying to pull this off at the same time that— under a Republican congress — the federal grants that pay for state inspections today are facing cuts approaching 60 percent.

The results of all this Reaganesque deregulation are already measurable: while in Biden’s 2024 the FDA identified the source of 77 percent of the outbreaks it investigated, in Trump’s 2025 that fell to a shocking 36 percent. This was an agency that had only 443 food inspectors for 36,600 facilities before the cuts began.

And then there’s the rule that would have made it possible for the remaining federal regulators to trace contaminated lettuce or eggs back to their source in hours instead of weeks. Congress wrote it into law in 2011, the FDA finished it as a rule to be implemented in 2022, and it was set to automatically take effect this past January.

But after the grocery lobby complained (and presumably made some well-placed donations to Republican politicians), Kennedy’s FDA pushed that rule back 30 months to July 2028 and Republicans in Congress then threw in a rider that barred the agency from spending even a single a dollar to enforce it before then.

You can see the consequences in the official numbers, which are certainly an undercount as they only represent “reported” cases. As of last week, the Cyclospora outbreak I wrote about in July has grown to more than 18,000 confirmed cases in 49 states, with 990 hospitalizations and two deaths.

And it’s not just pathogens — living organisms — that the FDA and EPA are supposed to be monitoring to keep our food supply safe.

Last week the AP reported that Trump has stalled for nearly two years an EPA investigation into which industries are dumping toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” into our rivers and streams, and how much of the treated sewage sludge containing PFAS’ ends up spread as fertilizer on our farms and thus gets into our food supply.

Welcome to the result of 45 years of Republican deregulation, based on claims that “government is the problem” and “the market knows best.”

When your TV fails, you buy another television, but, under Trump and Kennedy, when the system that keeps your food clean fails, your kid simply ends up in the hospital.

People living in the richest country in the history of the world should be confident their food is safe, and for most of the last century we were. Every president, of both parties, starting with Teddy Roosevelt in 1906, understood that and worked to make it real.

But now it appears that Trump and Kennedy have decided that the Batista brothers’ profits and Republicans’ ability to claim lower grocery prices in time for the election matter more than our kids’ health.

So it’s time to call our senators and representative at 202-224-3121 and tell them to restore mandatory country-of-origin labeling for beef and pork, reverse the FDA’s food safety cuts, and fund the “traceability rule” now rather than in 2028.

And please share this piece and support the independent work we do every day at hartmannreport.com.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Should You Be Afraid of What’s On Your Dinner Plate?”

Comments on Tuesday’s Daily Take:
Germany’s Far-Right and Trump’s Billionaires Are Proving FDR’s Darkest Warning Was Right

Thom’s post was a BINGO! Back when I was a military officer and civil servant, I gave occasional guest lectures at Dresden Technical University and did some consulting to help the Saxon government struggle to transition to democracy back in the early 90s. One thing that Thom did not touch on, but which likely explains the rise of the AfD is the economy.
~ Tomonthebeach

East Germany has a long history of Prussian and Soviet strongman rule. I think the modern German government has tried to distance itself from that. In this time of resurgent hatred and a desire for someone to solve the problems of a complex modern society, some people are seeking reassurance in old patterns of governance.
~ Daniel Paulson

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

Germany’s Far-Right and Trump’s Billionaires Are Proving FDR’s Darkest Warning Was Right

Thom Hartmann — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:36:49 GMT

While Americans were celebrating this Labor Day weekend, in Magdenburg, Germany a 35-year-old neofascist, Ulrich Siegmund, told a cheering crowd that his rightwing Alternative für Deutschland party was “taking our country back.” They’d just pulled 44 percent of the vote in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, double what it’d been just five years ago.

Their platform was simple: expel brown-skinned immigrants, dump the EU and NATO to instead build an alliance with Russia, and tear up the tech, climate, and energy rules so the fossil fuel and tech billionaires could take over Germany’s government like they are America’s under Trump.

It was a stunning victory for Vladimir Putin, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump, who all went online (Putin through spokesman Kirill Dmitriev) and immediately congratulated the heirs to Hitler’s party on their showing in the election.

That same weekend, Fareed Zakaria aired a conversation with Chrystia Freeland, Francis Fukuyama, and David French about why liberal democracy is in retreat, and Freeland argued that China’s so-far-successful model of state-directed capitalism is the biggest threat to democracy around the world.

And there’s a lot of truth in that, since China’s success proves that capitalism doesn’t need democracy to flourish and, in fact, may do even better in an authoritarian state like modern China and 1930s Germany.

But the most serious threat to American democracy isn’t coming from Beijing; it’s coming out of Wichita, Silicon Valley, Mar-a-Lago, and from Republicans in black robes who’ve been taking gifts from billionaires for years. Here’s why.

At the end of the day, capitalism is just a game we play, which is why pro football is such a good analogy. Football is a phenomenal engine for producing it’s goal — entertainment — and it works because there are rules, referees who enforce them, and a league that ruthlessly punishes cheaters.

But imagine a Trump-run NFL announcing that whichever team wrote the biggest check to the league’s head guy could put fourteen men on the field, pull face masks, and throw kidney punches with no flags. The richest team would win every game, the entertainment value would ultimately collapse, and within a few seasons the game itself would be dead.

Capitalism is exactly that kind of engine. Since Deng Xiaoping opened China to markets in 1978, according to the World Bank, growth of the Chinese economy has averaged over nine percent a year, lifting nearly 800 million people out of extreme poverty, the largest reduction of human misery in recorded history.

I spent the month of November, 1986 in Beijing studying acupuncture; the city was poor, the air choked with coal smoke, and capitalism was just getting off the block with experimental “special economic zones” like Shenzhen. Nobody voted for it; China was then and is now essentially a totalitarian state, proving that capitalism doesn’t need democracy to be successful.

As the Chinese figured out in the 1970s when they rejected Reagan’s neoliberalism and instead embraced state-run capitalism (I wrote about this at length in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America), in order to work well and produce general prosperity, capitalism just requires rules that prevent the most successful capitalists from rising up and taking over the state (as is happening here).

For example, when China’s richest man (Jack Ma) started complaining in 2020 that government regulators were holding his companies back from maximum profitability, the Chinese government killed off Ma’s Ant Group’s IPO and fined his Alibaba $2.8 billion for the monopolistic behavior of forcing merchants into exclusive contracts. Ma himself vanished from public view for a few months while he was “rehabilitated.”

I’m no admirer of a one-party state, and I’d never want to live under one. But the Chinese Communist Party figured out more than fifty years ago — from watching the failures in our example — that if you let the winners of capitalism write the rules of capitalism, they’ll first destroy the competition and then come for the government that hosts them.

They instead regulated their billionaires and their companies, in other words, because they knew what unregulated billionaires typically do to whoever’s in charge.

We Americans once understood that, and had a president who spoke about it in simple, straightforward terms.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office in 1933 to clean up the GOP’s mess of the Republican Great Depression; he fought back against his generation’s oligarchs, declaring in 1936:

“For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. …
“It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.”

FDR took on those “economic royalists” and defeated them. He explicitly called them out when the Democratic Party renominated him for president in 1936 in Philadelphia:

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”
He paused for a moment, then thundered, “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

The crowd roared, delighted that he’d put millions to work while stripping that day’s oligarchs of their power. And he raised the top tax rate on the morbidly rich back up to 90 percent, while stopping an effort to kidnap him and turn our government fascist.

“In vain,” Roosevelt said, “they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Four months later at Madison Square Garden FDR named the forces of “monopoly, speculation, and reckless banking,” said they were “unanimous in their hate” for him, and told the crowd he welcomed their hatred.

He wasn’t trying to abolish capitalism. He was putting it back under control of the people’s rulebook: Glass-Steagall, the SEC, the Wagner Act, antitrust enforcement, a minimum wage, and a top tax rate of 90%.

Republicans fought it all, calling it “socialism” in increasingly hysterical tones, but it worked and FDR put America back together and built the world’s first middle class that was more than half of a nation’s people.

The American oligarchs of that era, in response, pulled out of politics and went back to just doing business and getting rich, until Nixon put Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court and Powell began the process — from the bench — of turning America into a full-blown oligarchy.

During FDR’s era, fascism had risen out of the ashes of the Republican Great Depression, sweeping in a few short years across Italy, Germany, Austria, and Spain.

History tells us that when ordinary people are forced to watch the rich buy their government and that government then fails to sustain them, they lose faith in democracy long before they realize it was actually unregulated capitalism that screwed them.

Invariably, that’s when a strongman shows up promising to “take their country back,” and they cheer.

Roosevelt’s answer was to make democracy deliver for the working people, and to make the morbidly rich pay for it. And it worked: over the next forty years America built the largest middle class the world had ever seen.

I’ve spent most of my adult life inside capitalism; over the past fifty-five years Louise and I have started and run five small businesses. Not once in all those years did we go to a politician with a wad of cash and ask him to change the rules so we could get richer. We were working under FDR’s rules.

Then along came the fossil fuel billionaires funding Reagan, and it all changed in a single generation. The Powell Memo laid out the plan in 1971, and Fred Koch’s sons, along with Coors, Scaife, Olin, Murdoch, and Bradley built the think tanks, the media, and captured the university chairs to indoctrinate the next generation.

What Reagan added was a new sales pitch Americans hadn’t heard before: government is the problem, the rules are the enemy, and your real opponent is the Black family down the street or the woman you think took your promotion.

In one fell swoop, the richest men in America dismantled four decades of FDR’s restraints and taxes while working people argued with each other about whether Reagan’s reviled “union bosses,” immigrants, “welfare queens,” or queer people were responsible for their troubles.

Then in 2010 the five corrupt Republican appointees on the Supreme Court handed down Citizens United and told the billionaires they could buy American democracy’s referees openly. Several of those justices, we later learned from ProPublica, had spent years accepting undisclosed yacht cruises, private jets, and luxury vacations from billionaire donors with business before the Court while John Robert’s wife took millions from the same law firms that argued in front of her husband.

The result of this “football game” being corrupted by America’s capitalists is measurable. In the 2024 election, just 100 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion on federal races, one of every six dollars spent by anyone, and roughly 160 times what billionaires spent before Citizens United.

Virtually all of that money went to support Republican candidates who are back to Reagan’s old trick of blaming the middle class’ ills on the poorest and least powerful among us while jacking trillions into the money bins of Zuck, Musk, Trump, and Bezos.

Musk alone put up $278 million, then got handed the keys to the federal government so he could shut down investigations into himself and his businesses. And the man who moved JD Vance from obscure writer to vice president, Peter Thiel, wrote in 2009 that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible, a perspective both Putin and Xi heartily endorse.

These men aren’t confused about how they’re trying to transform America: they’ve watched Chinese state-run capitalism produce vast wealth without elections and concluded, correctly, that the elections were the unnecessary part, if only the people can be sufficiently intimidated or brainwashed.

Europe’s been running this same neoliberal experiment since the Reagan/Thatcher 1980s, and Saxony-Anhalt is its poster child. Decades of privatization, austerity, and deregulation left eastern Germans feeling that the government in Berlin had forgotten about them.

Into that void came a party whose leading figures have been under investigation for taking money from a Kremlin-linked influence network and whose richest cheerleader lives in Texas and controls the social media outlet that was arguably largely responsible for AfD’s success.

When Putin took over the new, fragile Russian democracy at the beginning of this millennium, his first job was to get control of the oligarchs who largely owned the economy. He killed some, imprisoned others, and made those who’d swear total loyalty and fealty to him richer than Midas.

Trump appears to be following that same plan, which is why America’s oligarchs are beating a path to his door, bearing gifts.

Democracy not only isn’t necessary in the minds of these “new Republicans”; it’s there to be bought-and-sold, bent to their will with billions spent on elections and propaganda, and ultimately turned against itself to create an authoritarian surveillance state of, by, and for the wealthiest capitalists.

Regulation is capitalism’s immune system and works for an economy the same way the NFL’s rules work for that game. Antitrust laws, campaign finance limits, financial transparency rules, and progressive taxation keep the richest teams from “buying the league” and corrupting the entire system.

Roosevelt understood that the “privileged princes” would always reach for control over government, and that the only defense was a government strong enough to say no. We had that for forty years, from the 1930s to the 1980s.

We can have it again, but only if the people who benefit from an honest game outvote the followers of the billionaires like Trump and Musk who’ve been paying to rig it.

We need a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United like I detail in Who Killed the American Dream?, real antitrust enforcement, free or low-cost healthcare and college for the middle class, more widespread unionization, rational immigration reform, and a return to high taxes on the morbidly rich: all programs the billionaires and their lickspittle elected Republicans oppose.

Check your registration at vote.org and find out who’s running for your state legislature at openstates.org, because the rulebook gets rewritten in statehouses too.

And if you found this useful, please subscribe to and share the Hartmann Report, because independent media that isn’t owned by a billionaire is also a major part of democracy’s immune system.

Tag, we’re it.

Louise’s Daily Song: “FDR’s Darkest Warning Was Right”

Comments on Monday’s Daily Take:
Has the Media Normalized the GOP’s Voter Suppression Right Before Our Very Eyes?

Not sure I believe Greg Palast’s stance on the ‘24 election, but who knows? It’s possible! Certainly, Repubs have been using sleazy methods to ensure college students & minorities don’t get to vote for decades now. It is pathetic how legacy media has covered this so poorly.
~ Nancy Bruski

Gawd, this makes my blood boil! Like you, I’ve mostly voted in the mainly-white suburbs. I always thought those long lines were due to unprecedented numbers of voters flooding their precincts! To learn that it’s a voter suppression technique is INFURIATING!!! This regime cannot be voted out and charged with felonies soon enough for me.
~ Dian Allison

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

Has the Media Normalized the GOP’s Voter Suppression Right Before Our Very Eyes?

Thom Hartmann — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 13:37:09 GMT

For over 50 years, our media has been covering up Republican voter suppression efforts. This year, though, they’re getting so obvious that it’ll be interesting to see if they continue to whitewash the practice.

Remember all those reports you’ve seen on TV during previous elections, where the reporter is outside a polling place with a line stretching around the block?

In the 2008 election, for example, CNN anchor Kirin Chetry noted that in Ohio:

“It was, after all, 120,000 votes that made the difference in that state in 2004 and gave the win to now President Bush.”

Republicans controlled the voting in Ohio, so they rigged polling places so people in mostly-Black, Hispanic, and student areas would have to wait hours and hours in line to vote, knowing that these were also the people most likely to be paid hourly and so would be unwilling to stand in line for hours to vote.

Here’s how it played on CNN from their November 4, 2008 transcript:

“MARY SNOW, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Kiran, certainly, around Ohio, board of election officials are bracing for long lines. And this is because the state is expecting record turnout, 80 percent of Ohio’s voters are expected to turn out and about a quarter of the voters vote early.

“And, of course, we’ve been seeing those long lines over the last several days in Columbus where voters had to wait several hours to cast a ballot, but for the most part, people were in good spirits. And the enthusiasm outweighs the frustrations.”

No mention that this is the #1 voter suppression technique that Republicans have been using in the states they control ever since the 1960s.

In that election, lines in Black neighborhoods in Republican-run Georgia ran eight to ten hours, four hours in Blue parts of Republican-run Florida, and the same in Democratic strongholds in Republican-run Virginia. As CNN’s Campbell Brown reported:

“Take a look at this. Early voting lines around Atlanta today were two, four and at times even 10 hours long, pretty maddening. And, unfortunately, for the impatient among us, it’s been the same in some of the other early voting states as well. But don’t let that dampen your enthusiasm.”

Nobody bothered to mention that the long lines are almost entirely in heavily-Democratic precincts. I’ve been voting since I was 18 — including a decade in Georgia — but have always lived in mostly-white mostly-upper-middle class neighborhoods so I’ve never waited more than 15 minutes to vote.

But the media seems to consistently miss that disparity or the reason Republicans always set it up, instead telling the stories of “brave” voters so “dedicated” to democracy that they’ll stand in line for hours.

Here’s the Washington Post on election day, 2012 from 40% nonwhite Arlington, Virginia, whose elections were controlled by a State Board of Elections appointed by Republican Governor Bob McDonnell:

“At 8 a.m., in Arlington, Va., 644 people were lined up outside an apartment building polling station, almost all of them late for work. ‘I’m glad to see everyone out, it doesn’t matter who they’re voting for,’ said Emma Durazzo, 84, who works at the Pentagon and, in 28 years in the neighborhood, has never seen lines like this on Election Day.”

In previous elections going back to 2002, Democrats (Governors Mark Warner and Tim McCain) had run the elections in Virginia.

Pew and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) did an in-depth analysis after the 2012 election and found that nationally 20% of Black voters and 17% of Hispanic voters reported waits exceeding 30 minutes, versus 11% of white voters.

The Brennan center found that Black voters typically waited 45% longer in line than white voters, and Latino voters waited 46% longer.

As Beto O'Rourke notes about what happened when John Roberts and his corrupt Republican colleagues on the Supreme Court destroyed the Voting Rights Act:

“Within minutes of the decision, Texas imposed the most restrictive voter ID law in the country, disenfranchising more than 600,000 citizens who, all of a sudden, couldn’t meet the state’s standard for proving who they were. Over the decade that followed Texas also closed more than 700 polling places, twice the number of the next most restrictive state, and almost all of them in African American and Latino neighborhoods. Congressional districts were racially gerrymandered, voting by mail was restricted and voting locations were moved miles away from colleges and universities.
“Without the protection of the Voting Rights Act, politicians were free to not only pick their voters, but they could now choose who could vote in the first place.”

While this may be a secret to the media and most white voters, Republicans are very, very clear about their favorite voter suppression strategy. Just look at what they did last week in Texas’ Tarrant County, where the 1.2 million voters are 60% nonwhite.

With 316 voting locations, the county experienced long lines in the 2020 presidential election, as CBS Dallas/Fort Worth reported. They noted:

“Bill and Dee Horn waited two hours, but said it was well worth it. Now in their 60s, they say they’ve voted in every presidential election since they were 18.”

But the lines in this increasingly blue area weren’t long enough for the Republicans who control the Commissioner’s Court that determines how many voting locations there will be and where. They cut out 92 of those polling places, virtually all of them in minority or student areas.

When people have to stand in line for six hours to vote in Tarrant County this November, will the media cover it the way ABC/Channel 11 in Republican-controlled North Carolina did?

“At University City library in Charlotte, lines were two hours long Thursday morning and growing. Some standing in line said they were ready for the election to end.
“‘Voting is the equivalent of the shower we all needed after the three (presidential) debates,’ said Gregory Weeks, chairman of the UNC Charlotte political science department, who waited two hours to cast his ballot.
“Back in Raleigh, Mitchell said she didn’t mind waiting in line.
“‘It’s important,’ she said, ‘and I’m happy to get the chance to do it.’”

During the Jim Crow era, conservatives used a wide array of strategies to prevent Blacks and other minorities (and often women) from voting, including guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar, so-called literacy tests, requiring the recitation of part of the Constitution from memory, poll taxes, etc.

When these were all outlawed with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Republicans shifted their strategy to creating long lines, purging people from voting rolls, and challenging signatures on mail-in ballots.

In the first national election after the Act’s passage, for example, the only precinct in Tallulah, Louisiana that was majority Black ended up with one single polling place for roughly 1,400 voters. When it opened at 6 a.m., approximately 600 people, virtually all Black, were already standing in line.

The newly-created US Commission on Civil Rights concluded, as Black aldermanic candidate Zelma Wyche said:

“[B]ecause of the long wait, many Negro voters…tired of waiting and went home without casting ballots.”

When reporter and former statistics professor Greg Palast went through official government numbers from the 2024 election, he found that Republican voter suppression won the day for Trump and the GOP, just as it had for George W. Bush in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004:

“Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.
“And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass ‘vigilante’ challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.”

And that doesn’t even begin to count all the people who simply gave up and went back to work after standing in line for an hour or two.

You can bet that if Democratically-controlled Blue states had been shorting voting machines and polling places in upscale white Republican areas, the GOP’s squeals could be heard halfway around the world. It would be an epic scandal, and the media would cover it as such.

This fall, how will they cover the long lines and outraged voters who show up only to discover they’ve been purged from the rolls by Republican secretaries of state? Stay tuned…

Louise’s Daily Song: “Will the Media Finally Ask?”

Comments on the Saturday Report:
Saturday Report 9/5/26 — Putin tests NATO’s patience, Milei tests Britain’s, and John Fetterman tests whether there’s a floor beneath which a Democratic senator can sink…

What, a country we have now Thom. A token of their appreciation, I’m sure. Our, country is a laughing stock. for what Thom. That sucks.
~ Jackie
American foreign policy is so uniquely awful that it will prop up a flailing, scorched-earth ignoramus in Argentina because he welcomes corporate patronage, but will bend every effort to take down a communist regime in Cuba (and did take down and colonize Venezuela),because they insist on their political and economic sovereignty over US interests. The same corporate imperialism and ethno-bigotry poisons our approach to the Middle East, Africa, etc. etc.
~ Jeffrey Hobbs

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The Men Who Want to Sign for You Are Coming for Your Rights

Thom Hartmann — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:54:06 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments on Thursday’s Daily Take:
What Would Trump Be Doing Differently If Putin Were Giving the Orders?

Trump and his mentor, Putin, share a worldview that is anti-democratic, elitist, imperialist, and deeply racist. Where they have a difference is over Israel, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Trump, not the so-called “antisemitic left”, ends up selling out Israel, if it would please his master.
~ Jeffery Hobbs

A different viewpoint is that Putin and Trump are colleagues in “Global Autocrats Inc”, with the goal of spreading fascist autocracy. The deal is that this helps both Trump and Putin. Trump is the one most in need, as he needs to overturn a 250 year old democracy of 340 million people. Putin is keeping the war going by supporting the Iranian regime. This could well be in Trump’s interests, rather than a strategic mistake.
~ lara keller

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

Here’s your video of today’s Daily Take:

What Would Trump Be Doing Differently If Putin Were Giving the Orders?

Thom Hartmann — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 13:30:36 GMT

Before getting into today’s Daily Take, please do me a quick favor: click that heart button and hit restack. That's the best way to help me break through to the people who really need to hear these stories. It only takes a few seconds and genuinely moves the needle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s also, in no particular order:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

Trump Brags About His “Brilliant” Venezuela Scheme While History Screams a Warning

Thom Hartmann — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 13:31:43 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Louise’ Daily Song: “Crude”

Comments on Tuesday’s Daily Take:
What Happens When America’s “Secretary of War” Starts Committing Crimes in Plain Sight?

“If authorizing and paying for all of this with our tax dollars is a crime, it doesn’t seem to bother Whiskey Pete.”Neither does genocide in Palestine, kidnapping leaders of sovereign nations, nor starving people in Cuba. So much for taxation without representation.
~ Rohn Kenyatta

It seems that the tv personalities that trump put in his cabinet have Teflon similar to their boss. Every time Hegseth breaks laws to destroy the military and recreate to the MAGA enforcers he gets a pass.

Who is supporting him behind the scenes.
~Rick N

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

Here’s the video of this Daily Take:

What Happens When America’s “Secretary of War” Starts Committing Crimes in Plain Sight?

Thom Hartmann — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 13:32:20 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here is Whiskey Pete doing it all over again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments on Monday’s Daily Take:
Sex, Money, and Revenge: What Happens When a Country Becomes One Man’s Property

ONE THING THAT DON the CON CANNOT RIG - MORTALITY

THE END IS NEAR FOR TRUMP AND PUTIN
~ JMcKay

The United States of America is in the hands of despicably small people of all stripes, across the board. They must be replaced.
~ Tom Halstead

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

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

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

Sex, Money, and Revenge: What Happens When a Country Becomes One Man’s Property

Thom Hartmann — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 13:51:27 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments on the Saturday Report:
Saturday Report 8/29/26 — Your Family Is Out $3,800, the Navy Is Out of Money, and Yosemite Is Apparently for Sale

Think I will make a new sign that says MILITARY LIVES MATTER. We know that the outrageous budget proposal doesn’t include anything that will improve life for the troops. Hell, Hegseth can’t even manage to keep them fed or do proper rotations.
~ alis

Just the other day, Bessent restated Reagan’s 46 year old lie that growth would take care of the deficit and debt. Only in America, amirite?! That there are people who continue to believe the lie boggles the mind!
~ Larry Bushard

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Click on the image above for 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 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.

Put the CEOs in Handcuffs: Trump’s ICE Is Arresting the Wrong People

Thom Hartmann — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:37:08 GMT

There’s a simple solution to our “illegal immigration” crisis: put some wealthy white CEOs — who are inviting these often desperate people into the country and hiring them — into prison. Ronald Reagan came up with the idea and put it into law, but no president since him has been willing to enforce it.

As a result, there’s a growing movement in America to defund and close down ICE, fire and prosecute their brutal and murderous thugs, and close their concentration camps.

Fox News found 59 percent of voters across the political spectrum say ICE is “too aggressive,” and nearly two-thirds of voters told Marist the agency “has gone too far.” Support for abolishing ICE outright has doubled since 2018.

While most people in the movement point to the barbarity of their tactics and how they’re now spying on protesters, an even stronger argument for ending the agency is that they’re simply not needed.

There’s an alternative, which will largely stop the flow of undocumented people coming into America in search of economic opportunity, and its already part of American law. It’s just that our politicians refuse to enforce it.

Farmers in Maine this week are nervously waiting for the knock. The Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association warned its members that ICE agents are already flying drones over fields and work sites looking for brown-skinned people. In Connecticut this week these masked, bloodthirsty goons have been dragging parents off in front of their kids at the school bus stops, at least 25 people in a single day were sent to concentration camps in Texas or elsewhere.

But have you heard of a single wealthy white farmer, general contractor, or other corporate employer of these “illegals” going to jail?

Of course not, because the show this administration is are putting on isn’t about preventing illegal immigration; it’s purely an effort to terrify people of color — including American citizens — being done by radical white supremacists like Stephen Miller and Donald Trump who find it a source of gleeful entertainment. After all, nobody wears a balaclava to serve a fine on a poultry executive.

As Fortune Magazine noted:

“Trump himself has been accused of employing unauthorized workers at his hotels, golf courses and other businesses.”

The rest of the world is more rational and less racist, it seems. I’ve worked in two countries (Germany and Australia) where I had to get a visa and a work permit to draw a paycheck. In both cases, it wasn’t the government that demanded I fill out the paperwork; it was my employers. Because they didn’t want to be hit with big fines or legal processes for paying an unauthorized foreigner.

Their systems attacked the problem of “illegal immigration” from the money end, something that instantly gets the attention of wealthy employers who want to hang onto their wealth and avoid being tossed in the clink.

America, on the other hand, decided a long time ago that it was easier to go after poor brown people than wealthy white employers, and that sentiment has carried through to today.

After all, undocumented people without papers can’t report wage theft, can’t complain about dangerous working conditions, and can’t sign up for a union. They’re easily abused and exploited, and generally their labor is cheaper than citizens, which is why companies employ them.

The AFL-CIO made exactly that argument in 2000 when then-Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson said:

“Employers often knowingly hire workers who are undocumented, and then when workers seek to improve working conditions, employers manipulate the law to fire or intimidate workers. This subverts the intent of the law and lowers working standards for all workers.
“The law should criminalize employer behavior, not punish workers.”

There’s an amazing history here, including a major role played by Ronald Reagan and Mitt Romney, that both emphasize how wrong the ICE approach is and how much more effective and humane a system that focuses on employers like other democracies do would be.

Our first serious attempt to criminalize undocumented immigration was in 1952 when Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, better known as the McCarran-Walter Act. It made it a federal crime to “harbor” an undocumented alien.

Wealthy white ranchers and meat processors in Texas, however, rebelled when the law was being debated and paid off enough legislators that the “Texas Proviso” was inserted into the law that explicitly said that employing a person wasn’t legally the same thing as “harboring” them.

That changed, however, in 1986 when Ronald Reagan pushed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 through Congress, which, in addition to granting legal status to about 2.7 million aliens, explicitly criminalized hiring future undocumented people. In his signing statement, Reagan said:

“The employer sanctions program is the keystone and major element. It will remove the incentive for illegal immigration by eliminating the job opportunities which draw illegal aliens here.”

The law was enforced for a few years, peaking at around 10,000 employer audits in 1990, but over the next decade audits fell by 77 percent. Cases where wealthy employers were actually fined dropped by 82 percent; total fines in 1996 were a measly $3.1 million, an amount the employers could just shrug off. Since then, it has fallen off a cliff.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University did and published the research: since 1986, no more than 25 employers have been prosecuted in any single year and in the 2018-2019 12-month period that they examined only seven cases were prosecuted and none of them involved going after a corporation.

During that same year, however, our government prosecuted 86,000 individual people for illegal entry and 35,000 for illegal re-entry. For example, in Mississippi in 2019 ICE agents arrested 680 workers at seven poultry processing plants in the largest workplace raid in a decade. Agents surrounded the buildings to prevent people from leaving, did mass arrests, and left children crying alone in cars in the parking lot.

As the Mississippi Free Press documented at the time:

“Left out of the indictments, though, are charges against personnel at two companies whose executives have given thousands of dollars to top Mississippi officials, and who received public endorsements from former Gov. Phil Bryant prior to the August 2019 raids.
“Those companies, PECO Foods and Koch Foods, represent five of the seven plants that ICE targeted in last year’s raids…that, in turn, poured thousands into the campaign coffers of some of Mississippi’s top federal officials, including [Republican] U.S. Senators Cindy Hyde-Smith and Roger Wicker.”

Then there’s the Mitt Romney moment of rationality from one of the few sane Republicans left. When the former Massachusetts governor was running for president in 2012, he forcefully argued in a January 23rd debate with President Obama that the key to solving the problem of illegal immigration wasn’t to arrest the brown-skinned people but, instead, to go after their employers.

That would cause the jobs to dry up, Romney argued, and that in turn would lead people who couldn’t find or maintain employment to “self-deport.” After Obama bragged that his administration had “presided over record 396,906 deportations in 2011,” Romney replied simply:

“The answer is self-deportation, which is people decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here. We’re not going to round people up.”

Romney’s idea, however, offended the white supremacists who were increasingly dominating the GOP. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus was quoted by CBS News right after the debate:

“‘Using the word ‘self-deportation’ - I mean, it’s a horrific comment to make,’ the chairman told reporters at the RNC’s annual meeting in Boston, according to an audio recording from Business Insider. ‘It’s not something that has anything to do with our party. But when a candidate makes those comments, obviously it hurts us.’”

Stephen Miller and his racist crowd would emphatically agree, as they delight in the idea of brown-skinned people being on the receiving end of 350-volt shock gloves, their latest nod to raw brutality worthy of the Klan in days of old. Even E-Verify, a good attempt, is still voluntary for most private employers under federal law.

The Trump/Miller mandate is straightforward: Don’t go after the rich white guys who invite “illegals” here; instead, terrorize and humiliate the people who just came here looking for a better life or to escape being murdered.

As Adam Serwer pointed out in The Atlantic in 2018, “The cruelty is the point.” Just watch the DHS press releases, the mugshot montages, and Trump’s gleeful all-caps posts on his Nazi-infested social media site and it’s all vividly clear. This isn’t law enforcement; it’s a show being put on for the very worst of the white supremacists and racists among us. And, tragically, the entire world is watching in horror.

It’s been forty years since Reagan called employer sanctions “the keystone” to solving the undocumented immigration problem, and every time anybody tries to solve that problem the business lobby jumps in and kills it. All while ICE gets tens of billions of dollars to chase and beat up dishwashers.

So, today may be a good day to call your member of Congress and your two Senators (202-224-3121) and let them know we should be arresting rich white employers instead of powerless employees.

And that we need to fix our system from top-to-bottom with legislation producing Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Texas Democrat Veronica Escobar has proposed a great start and gotten modest bipartisan support for her Dignity Act that does just that, and there was a good-faith effort championed by Republican Senator James Lankford that then-candidate Donald Trump ordered killed in 2024 because he wanted this brutality show instead.

We’ve all had enough of this disgusting racism and violence.

And if this piece was useful to you, please share it and subscribe to the Hartmann Report. Independent journalism runs on readers who pass this work along, and this is one story the people who own the poultry plants would very much like you to not think about.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Put the CEOs in Handcuffs”

Comments on Thursday’s Daily Take:
Big Tech Is Coming For Your Water, Your Land, Your Lungs, and Your Electric Bill

The health problems and pollution that results from these data centers is horrific. I hope that all the progressive social democrats running for the House and Senate can see this article of yours and incorporate this important info into their campaign speeches.
~ Lilla Russell

Today on CNBC,Jim Kramer had a conversation with Jensen Huang( Nvidia) about AI and what the future holds for AI. Huang is determined to expand the use of AI worldwide,with Nvidia chips. He is not concerned about the threat of AI creating massive job loss,he is gleeful about that possibility.
~ David

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

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Big Tech Is Coming For Your Water, Your Land, Your Lungs, and Your Electric Bill

Thom Hartmann — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:40:05 GMT

There’s a growing movement across America that’s turning conventional politics on its head. For example:

— Mostly-Republican farmers in Nebraska are joining up with mostly-Democratic environmentalist to fight a proposed 1,300-acre data center complex.
— Conservative ranchers and rural residents in New Mexico are challenging billionaire Larry Ellison’s Oracle over a massive water-consuming data center project.
— Communities in Texas that voted overwhelmingly for Trump are demanding moratoriums on the computer-rack warehouses that are increasingly pockmarking rural America.

This is the 2026 wave of a new populism, and Democrats are jumping on it.

Polling by Gallup finds that 71 percent of Americans are against having an AI data center in their community, and that number includes Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. They get it that the much-ballyhooed “cloud” is actually a gigantic collection of massive industrial buildings that consume staggering amounts of electricity and water, produce both air and noise pollution, and more often than not jack up local utility bills and buy off corrupt local politicians to get tax abatements.

The Department of Energy says that data centers sucked up 4.4 percent of all the electricity generated in America in 2023; by 2028, DOE says, that number could be 12 percent, or about an eighth of all the power produced in our country. And once the buildings go up, the number of jobs created is negligible.

Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and other tech giants often negotiate special “bulk” electricity rates behind closed doors, sticking homeowners and local small businesses with the cost of expanding the grid and power plant capacity.

People are over it.

Researchers at Harvard’s Electricity Law Initiative documented how these data center costs are rapidly being shifted from the companies to the public. For example, Meta/Facebook is planning a new data center in Louisiana that would suck up about twice as much electricity as the entire city of New Orleans, and require around $3 billion to build out the gas-fired generator capacity it’ll need.

And the contract that discloses how much Meta will pay for that power is conveniently considered “confidential” by the local Republican politicians, so nobody knows how bad the hit to regular people will be.

Working families and small businesses, in other words, will probably be forced to subsidize one of the richest corporations and richest billionaires in the world, and this is an increasingly common situation regardless of the company building the data center.

Even more alarming is the pollution these centers are producing.

Because data centers require an uninterrupted supply of power many contain dozens of back up diesel generators or build their own methane gas-fired turbines. The diesel engines produce exhaust filled with fine particles and other chemical pollutants that are known to cause asthma, heart disease, cancer, and premature death, while the gas-fired plants generate nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate pollution, and weather-wilding carbon dioxide.

And just this week we discovered that Trump’s EPA, largely run by former fossil fuel executives, is trying to make it even harder for local communities to find out how much and what type of pollution is in the air they’re breathing. They proposed eliminated federal public-participation requirements for data centers that they classify as “minor pollution sources.”

They’re pulling off this con by claiming that each one of the often-dozens of generators on a single data center site are “individual,” “small,” or “minor” sources, rather than dealing with the entire center as a single source. Thus, no public input is necessary to permit them, and the levels of emissions are treated as trade secrets. Families living nearby will never learn what they and their children are inhaling.

And it’s not inconsequential. Scientists at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health estimate that the pollution from just one single proposed data center in northern Virginia could produce between $53 million and $99 million in health damages every year.

That includes additional premature deaths, hospital admissions, asthma attacks, and lost worker productivity from sickness and crippling lung and heart disease.

And then there’s the water these centers use for cooling, which — particularly in the West and Southwest — is becoming a rarer and rarer commodity, competing with farmers, ranchers, and nearby towns. A typical hyperscale data center can consume three to seven million gallons of water a day.

Add that to the generator exhaust, disappearing farmland, secret tax breaks, and exploding electric bills and it becomes obvious why rural America is revolting, politics be damned.

This is not a new dynamic.

Back in the late 19th century the owners of the most advanced technology in the world were the railroad barons, and those oligarchs played largely the same game by using their great wealth and monopoly power to charge farmers absurd rates to transport their crops, bought up politicians, seized land with the complicity of corrupt governments, and forced the public to subsidize their empires.

That abuse produced the Granger movement, the Farmer’s’ Alliances, and eventually the progressive People’s Party. They didn’t oppose railroads; they used them heavily. They objected to the oligarchs exploiting them for their own profit.

Today’s AI oligarchs and Tech Bros echo those railroad barons, as does the backlash they’re engendering.

The appropriate response to this exploitation of rural America and homeowners is pretty straightforward, and more and more Democratic politicians are jumping on that bandwagon: force Big Tech to pay its own bills.

No more secret utility contracts, no more forcing residential electric ratepayers to bear the costs of expansion and construction to feed the data centers, no more corrupt tax breaks, and no more polluting generators unless there truly is no other option, and then only with local consent.

AI may turn out to be, on net, enormously beneficial (if it doesn’t destroy the world, as some fear), or it may be the biggest bubble we’ve seen since the internet bubble of the late 1990s. In either case, the richest men and most powerful corporations on Earth shouldn’t have the power to appropriate a community’s water, land, clean air, and electricity while sticking the locals with the bill and pollution.

This isn’t, in other words, a left-right issue; it’s an oligarchy versus democracy issue. And that’s right in the Democratic Party’s traditional bailiwick.

Rural Republican voters are finally waking up to the fact that populism was always about protecting people from the billionaires, not the other way around as the GOP would have it. And some are even embracing Democrats in the process.

Game on.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Big Tech is Coming for Your Water, Land, and Air”

Comments on Tuesday’s Daily Take:
RFK Jr. Gets Busted as America’s Vaccine Defenses Collapse

Putting RFK Jr. in charge of public health is like hiring an arsonist because he has strong opinions about smoke detectors. This is what idolatry looks like with a medical seal: evidence becomes heresy, expertise becomes corruption, and every corpse becomes somebody else’s fault.
~ Virgin Monk Boy

Jesus Christ! Lancaster County--that’s where I grew up, so this article hits close to home. Awful shame. Lots of You-Know-Who supporters there, unfortunately, but also a lot of people who know better. I certainly hope it doesn’t spread further.
~ R D Noisemaker

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RFK Jr. Gets Busted as America’s Vaccine Defenses Collapse

Thom Hartmann — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:30:36 GMT

Louise went to the local pharmacy yesterday to get her Covid shot because Covid is climbing in all fifty states right now. She was turned away, because there’s apparently no current Covid vaccine available anywhere in America.

This isn’t a minor risk to us all, and should be a national scandal. It’s baffling that the media is ignoring it, particularly given the consequences.

A Nature study published this month from Boston Children’s Hospital found that severe Covid reactivates other dormant viruses already quietly living inside us, including Epstein-Barr, cytomegalovirus, and herpes simplex. They noted that up to 50,000 Americans died of Covid in the 2025-2026 respiratory season and over ten million Americans are living with debilitating long Covid.

An earlier Nature paper out of the University of Colorado found that Covid infections can wake up dormant cancer cells sleeping in the lungs, roughly doubling the probability that lung cancer survivors will die of that cancer. They also pointed out that because the vaccine reduces the severity of the Covid inflammatory response, it also reduces the chances of lung cancers popping up after people catch the disease.

So, the shot she was trying to get wasn’t just because she didn’t want to spend a week in bed with a sore throat and a fever (although that’s good enough): these are deadly real-life consequences of letting your vaccination (and the immunity it confers) slide.

The lack of a vaccine and the muttering of our pharmacist about “the feds” led us on a search for reasons why there’s no current vaccine anywhere in America right now, while other countries are happily vaccinating their people as you read these words. Turns out it appears to be mostly Bob Kennedy’s responsibility.

Manufacturers stopped making last year’s formula long ago, and the new formula for the 2026-2027 season that includes the new and truly awful XFG strain was initially approved by the FDA back in May. Last year we got the new fall vaccine on August 27th, but that agency still hasn’t granted final approval to the new vaccines, so nothing is shipping and won’t until late September or October.

And it’s not like this couldn’t have been predicted; every year since the pandemic we’ve seen a late summer wave as people travel and kids go back to school. The wave this year is particularly bad, most likely because so many people haven’t gotten their boosters and so our national immunity has waned.

Why the delay?

— Bob fired all seventeen medical professionals who were members of the CDC’s Vaccine Advisory Committee and replaced them with anti-vax quacks. A federal judge, noting their lack of genuine qualifications, stayed Bob’s appointments in March (along with Bob’s rewriting the childhood vaccine schedule) so the committee that authorizes your insurance company to pay for your shots has been legally frozen for five months. If you want a shot, be prepared to fork over a hundred bucks or more. If you can find one.

— Bob also cancelled 22 mRNA vaccine research projects worth close to half a billion dollars, this same year that a breakthrough was announced with the development of an mRNA vaccine that knocks out the deadly skin cancer melanoma.

These new mRNA vaccines are safe and effective, and offer dramatic promise for fighting everything from regular diseases to cancers of all types. Because they’re made in a lab instead of grown in eggs like the conventional flu (and many other) vaccines, they can be quickly and inexpensively mass produced, something that’s particularly useful for rapidly mutating viruses like Ebola, Covid, and the flu.

And just two weeks ago, with Bob standing next to him, Trump signed an executive order cutting recommended childhood immunizations from 17 down to 11, ordered the MMR shot split into three separate injections (there is no scientific basis for this whatsoever), and ordered Todd Blache’s Justice Department to start suing states that don’t hand out religious and other exemptions for childhood vaccinations to pretty much any parent who wants one.

The result of this and Kennedy’s trash-talking vaccines for years is quickly becoming evident: Americans are dying. Two unvaccinated people died of measles in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania this week; they’re the first measles deaths in the US this year, and the first in that state in 35 years.

Why Lancaster County and why now?

Five years ago, on July 31, 2021, when he held no federal office, Bob Kennedy showed up at the Lancaster County farming fair and spoke to a crowd of around 1,500 people. He told them a joke about measles, saying when he got it as a kid it let him stay home and watch TV all week with his brothers and sisters.

The crowd laughed.

He then told them the treatment for measles was chicken soup and vitamin A, and warned that the feds were coming to vaccinate the local Amish community because “they cannot stand the fact that you are healthy.”

They’re not laughing now. They’re dying.

Paul Offit has written about that speech at length, and he noted that Bob had been to Samoa where he apparently cautioned people about vaccines. As a result, Offit notes, 83 people died, most of them children.

Measles vaccine coverage among kids in Lancaster County has fallen, since 2017, from 95.5% down to 87.6%. Because measles is the single most contagious disease known to humanity — it can linger in the air for several hours and infects 9 out of 10 unvaccinated people who walk through that cloud and take a breath — a community really needs to maintain around a 95% vaccination rate to avoid big outbreaks.

After yesterday’s two measles deaths, Bob called Governor Josh Shapiro to offer federal help. Shapiro turned him down, telling reporters:

“I was very, very blunt with him, and I made very clear that his actions and the rhetoric that’s coming from this administration are having a negative impact on communities across America, particularly right here in Pennsylvania.
“There’s real life consequences to spreading misinformation.”

Nationally, we’ve seen >2,700 cases this year so far, the worst year for measles since 1991, and we’re about to lose the “measles elimination” status we earned in 2000. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked Bob if he accepts any responsibility for that awful record, he said, “Absolutely not.”

So now that we know the “How,” what’s the answer for the “Why?”

Mary Trump, a brilliant writer and commentator, licensed clinical psychologist, and Trump’s niece who’s known him and his family since childhood, was on my radio/TV program yesterday and we discussed one possible answer: Vladimir Putin wants Americans sick and broke and Donald — who’s talked with Putin for more than an hour about every 2 weeks since his inauguration and whose CIA director is in Moscow right now — could be happy to oblige.

Pretty much everything Putin has asked of Trump or would want from him he’s gotten:
— Cut off weaponry to Ukraine,
— Reduce American troop strength in Germany,
— Block NATO membership for Ukraine,
— Trying to recognize parts of Ukraine as Russian territory,
— Ordering State and Treasury to give sanctions relief to Russian oligarchs,
— Letting the nuclear START treaty expire,
— Disbanding the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force,
— Closing the State Department’s R/FIMI office that mapped Russian disinformation efforts targeting Americans,
— Gutting CISA’s election security teams including the Election Security Resilience Team that could block Russian election-manipulation efforts and regional advisors, and more.

When Biden was president in 2021, our State Department nailed three English-language online outlets run by Russian intelligence that were trash-talking the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins published a study in the American Journal of Public Health showing how Russian troll accounts were “using vaccines as a wedge” to create the appearance of a debate among American scientists when none existed. They concluded the Russian goal was to “corrode trust in vaccines” among the American public.

Only two cabinet secretaries have ever been successfully impeached: Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876 and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in 2024. Neither was convicted and removed from office by the Senate.

Nonetheless, Congresswoman Haley Stevens filed articles of impeachment against Kennedy last December, charging abuse of authority and citing his efforts to undermine American public health.

While there’s no chance Mike Johnson or Republicans in the House will allow articles of impeachment against Kennedy to even get out of committee this year, supporting such an effort could — if Democrats can take the House and Senate this fall — pave the way for a return to normalcy either through replacing him or simply chastising him.

When Republicans impeached Mayorkas, they established the modern precedent of impeachment as a remedy for a secretary who’s considered incompetent by the majority of Congress.

So, it may be a good time to call your member of the House and your two Senators and put this on their radar screens (202-224-3121). Stevens’ impeachment resolution, H.Res.944 is still alive and worthy of getting some more co-sponsors.

And if you learned anything valuable from this article, please consider upgrading your subscription to help us expand the reach of this newsletter. Democracy isn’t a spectator sport, and neither is public health or the very large job of keeping the public informed.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Trump & Kennedy Let the Disease In”

Comments on Tuesday’s Daily Take:
Trump’s Inner Circle Panics Over “Natalie” as the Rasputin Parallel Gets Real

Thank you for retelling the story of Rasputin. That is exactly what this is.

And Hitler’s bunker/ballroom. We are truly living repeated history.
~ Laurie

It’s a stretch for someone who watches the news constantly but I can square that by the strict dietary brand of news he’s fed and by believing what he’s told. But how does his little mind explain away the massive booing he’s experiencing?
~ Sophia Demas

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Trump’s Inner Circle Panics Over “Natalie” as the Rasputin Parallel Gets Real

Thom Hartmann — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:55:56 GMT

The people around Trump, according to reports, call it “the Natalie situation.” The word they’re trying to avoid saying out loud is “Rasputin.”

In the past two weeks we’ve discovered that for quite some time his inner circle been trying hard to keep “Trump’s binky” away from the President of the United States.

So much so that they denied her a room at Bedminster (so she slept in the locker room), refused to give her a golf cart while at his golf motel in Scotland (so she chased Trump’s cart all over the golf course), and tried to keep her out of the motorcade going to Trump’s rape and defamation trial in New York (so she hopped into the trunk of one of the limousines). And let’s not forget her hiding with him in the food service truck in Turkey while the press and Secretary of State were relegated to the decoy plane.

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People in the White House don’t work that hard to try to thwart a president’s preference for companionship just because they think she’s odd or even amusing. They’re worried, frightened of something, and it’s almost certainly a legitimate fear.

Harp isn’t just a passive little girl (I realize she’s 35, but this is how the press keeps characterizing her) with a daddy obsession. She’s a grown-ass woman with strong opinions and a history in rightwing propaganda operations. And now she’s controlling much of what Trump sees and reads and, apparently, even writes on his Nazi-infested social media network.

She was a host on the rightwing One America News TV network, which had unsuccessfully sued Rachel Maddow for ten million dollars when Maddow pointed out that they once employed a Russian national who was simultaneously drawing a paycheck from a Kremlin media outlet that US intelligence had tied to Putin’s 2016 “support Trump” election interference operation.

In 2019 she went on Fox “News” and tried to credit Trump with saving her life, falsely saying that the “Right To Try” law he’d signed earlier that year had given her access to treatment for her bone cancer. (The treatment was already widely available and FDA approved; her use was off-label, but that had nothing to do with Trump or Right To Try, according to reporting in The Washington Post, that also found she’d posted on social media about starting her cancer treatment two full months before Trump signed that law).

That obsequious appearance on Fox led to Trump inviting her to speak at the 2020 Republican National Convention, where she repeated the story, which itself led her to a job on the air at OAN, which got her in close with Trump’s campaign. As The New York Times podcast The Daily noted yesterday, she’s basically been by his side ever since.

For years she was called “the human printer” (and referred to herself that way) because she carried a portable printer and laptop everywhere to print out stories for Trump, some about how wonderful he is and others sure to rile him up.

Reporting suggests she’s both reassuring Trump about the rightness of his instincts and biases, as well as feeding him a constant stream of rightwing propaganda that would make Vladimir Putin proud. As The New York Times’ Shawn McCreesh and Maggie Haberman detailed last week:

“As long as Ms. Harp is around, he enjoys an unvetted flow of information, some of it poisonous and counterproductive, at least as far as a number of his other advisers are concerned. She supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter (like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes) and provides him with a view from the world outside official Washington, of which he has always been mistrustful…. She is a platinum blond geyser of positivity, there to buck him up when the going gets rough.”

And that’s where the Rasputin parallel is getting positively scary.

Grigori Rasputin was a peasant Russian monk who told the Russian royal family, the Romanovs, that he could heal their hemophiliac son Alexei when Russian doctors had basically given up. The Romanov family had ruled Russia for three centuries at that time.

Some accounts suggest his major contribution was to get them to stop giving the child aspirin (which would have helped big-time), but Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra were entranced and brought him into their household and court, taking his advice and opinions on everything from medicine to politics to war, even when it contradicted their own professional advisors.

He convinced them that the growing restiveness among the Russian population wasn’t consequential and became the primary source of news and information to the family. The result was their being blindsided by the Russian Revolution, and shocked when the Bolsheviks led by Yakov Yurovsky arrived at the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg and murdered the entire family on July 17, 1918.

As biographer Antony Beevor notes, this “Siberian peasant, through his seduction of the imperial household, contributed to the collapse of the greatest autocracy in the world.”

This isn’t the first time in relatively modern history we’ve heard stories like this. My dear (late) friend Armin Lehmann was the 16-year-old Hitler Youth courier who handed Hitler the news that the War was lost in April of 1945. Armin and I spent several years traveling the world together when we worked as a team back in the 1980s.

Hitler had built a massive ballroom in that nation’s capital, Berlin, called the New Reich Chancellery, with a massive Führerbunker complex under it. It was in that bunker, Armin told me, where he saw how the generals and hangers-on were continuing to lie to Hitler about the state of the war. He was there when Hitler killed himself, wrote a book about it, and dedicated the rest of his life to promoting peace.

Right up to the last day, Hitler was moving little models of troops around maps, and nobody was willing to tell him the truth. They’d been selected by Hitler to be with him under that ballroom, in fact, for that very obsequiousness and eagerness to tell him what he wanted to hear, no matter how fantastical. The movie Downfall tells the story pretty straightforwardly.

The Romanovs were destroyed by a man in their inner circle who became a sole source of what turned out to be false and unrealistically optimistic information. One could argue the last months of Hitler’s reign played out similarly.

And now it’s Trump.

Yesterday’s Reuters and Ipsos polls put Trump’s approval at 33 percent, but that’s apparently not what he’s being fed as he keeps bragging about how much people love him. Odds are Natalie’s only showing him the polls that show he has a 93% approval rating with Republicans who call themselves MAGAts, a rapidly shrinking slice of the electorate.

That’s not unlike Hitler’s only hearing about the few victories his army had in its final days, or the Romanovs being told that the peasants wouldn’t dare revolt. It’s fundamentally dangerous, both to Trump himself, the GOP, and to our nation.

While Hitler probably knew what was really happening and just chose, perhaps in his methadone- and amphetamine-drugged stupor, to pretend otherwise, Tsar Nicholas was apparently blindsided.

Both scenarios are far too on-the-nose for us to ignore today.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Whisperer”

Comments on Monday’s Daily Take:
Trump Revives Herbert Hoover’s Nightmare and Canada Fights Back

Nice work, Repugnicans. You’ve forcefully and convincingly shown the world that we can’t be trusted, now or ever again. Trust is precious, betrayal unforgettable. The damage you’ve done is likely immeasurable.
~ Tom Halstead

Trump and Republicans are insanely intentionally cruel and enjoy inflicting pain with a lawless fascist autocracy created with a criminal insurrection that rejects the rule of law and supports economic and other warfare to steal wealth liberty and happiness from everyone including Americans and people in other countries who are long term allies like Canada.
~ William L Miller

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Trump Revives Herbert Hoover’s Nightmare and Canada Fights Back

Thom Hartmann — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 13:38:36 GMT

Late Friday night, trade talks with Canada collapsed when Prime Minister Mark Carney — the former president of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, a guy whose knowledge of economics and history makes Scott Bessent’s bleatings sound pathetic — said he was tired of Trump bullying his country. He was blunt about the scam Trump’s trade people tried to run on Canada, saying, simply:

“We were attacked.”

And they were. As Dean Blundell documents, Trump was demanding of Canada:

— Control over who Canada trades with.
— Control over Canada’s use of the French language.
— Control over Canadian-made cars.
— Control over what goods the Canadian government buys for its own use.
— And the ability to re-impose tariffs against Canada any time Trump gets irritated, for any reason.

That midnight, in retaliation for Carney refusing to bow to Emperor Trump, the US imposed fifty percent tariffs on about twenty billion dollars’ worth of Canadian goods destined for American consumers.

Young families are being crushed by Trump’s existing tariff inflation, but he made sure that the morbidly rich got their waivers.

Trump exempted items where there are major lobbyists in DC spiffing GOP legislators (fossil fuels, electricity, potash, fish, and critical minerals), leaving the price increases Americans will pay on things the lobbyists don’t care about or would just as soon have tariffed (cars, liquor, dairy, cement, plywood, furniture, clothing, fishing rods, swimming pools, and hockey sticks).

As a result, history, it appears, may be on the verge of repeating itself.

In the last year of Biden’s presidency while Trump was running for a second term, he told Lou Dobbs:

“We have an economy that’s so fragile.... And when there’s a crash — I hope it’s going to be during this next 12 months because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover. The one president I just don’t want to be, Herbert Hoover.”

Say hello to Donald Herbert Hoover Trump. Carney is hitting back with “dollar-for-dollar” reciprocal tariffs, effective in two weeks (September 8th).

Arguably the worst thing Republican President Herbert Hoover did after the stock market crashed on his watch in 1929 and the country slid into the Republican Great Depression over the next three years was signing the Smoot-Hawley tariff legislation.

Most Americans know virtually nothing about Smoot-Hawley other than a vague — and negative — familiarity with the name, mostly because since Hoover left office no American president has used the most dangerous of its provisions. That negative familiarity is probably why Trump’s people are referring to it as “the Tariff Act of 1930.”

When Congress passed it that year, 1,028 top American economists signed a public petition begging President Hoover to veto it, warning it would deepen the Depression. The most powerful banker in America at that time, Thomas Lamont, told a reporter that he almost went down on his knees begging Hoover to kill the thing.

But Hoover caved to his corrupt Party’s demands and the first nation to retaliate was Canada, hitting 16 categories of goods that made up about 30 percent of all of our exports to that country. Trade across the world collapsed by fully two-thirds between 1929 and 1934, and a third of America ended up unemployed as people’s savings were wiped out in bank failure after bank failure all across the country.

When the Supreme Court pointed out that under our Constitution only Congress could authorize tariffs, Trump went looking for old or obscure laws Congress had passed that give the president unilateral tariff authority. He found a doozie in Section 338 of Smoot-Hawley, a provision of that archaic law that — it’s worth emphasizing — no president has used since Hoover.

Section 338 isn’t really even a conventional tariff authorization. If normal tariffs were a hammer to fix trade disputes, Section 338 is a nuclear weapon: it authorizes the president, upon finding and declaring that a foreign country is “discriminating” against American goods, to hit the offending country with a massive 50% tariff and even pull foreign goods off store shelves. As the National Law Review notes:

“If the President determines that the discrimination continues or escalates, he may exclude the country’s products from importation entirely—an embargo power backed by forfeiture of goods imported in violation of the embargo. Proclamations may be suspended, revoked, or amended by the president at any time.”

The word “discrimination” is not defined in the law, so it means whatever Trump says it means, and there are no provisions in this section of the law for any agency or Congress to participate: it’s all in the president’s hands. No investigations needed, no hearings, no Congress, no agency participation. It confers a king-like power.

And that level of overkill is exactly why it’s been on the books for 96 years and not one president since Hoover has ever used that section. Until now.

Back in 1935, FDR’s Tariff Commission ruled that Germany and Australia were “discriminating” against American goods, but Roosevelt wasn’t crazy enough to try invoking Section 338. There are records of the State Department discussing using it against the Japanese before WWII and there’s a 1949 telegram from Dean Acheson wondering out loud if it should be used against China, but that’s it. In the past 77 years, nobody in government has, as anybody can determine, even thought about being stupid enough to use it.

In my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, I shared the history of Alexander Hamilton’s Report on American Manufactures recommending tariffs to President Washington to both fund the government and defend American manufacturing. Washington asked Congress to put them into place and some endure to this day.

But both men — and every president since, except Trump — understood the simple reality that no company and no wealthy industrialist is going to build a factory in America because of a tariff put on the goods he wants to make by an erratic president. Before anybody puts hundreds of millions or billions into land and buildings and machinery, they want to know that Congress has passed a protective tariff, so it’ll be there for the decades it’ll take to recoup their investment.

Trump, on the other hand, has been using tariffs to basically extort gifts and hundreds of millions of dollars out of everybody from Apple’s Tim Cook to the royal family of Abu Dhabi who threw about a half-billion into Trump’s crypto company, most of which ended up in his pocket. Cook got a tariff exemption for Apple in exchange for his gold bar, and Abu Dhabi got high-tech AI chips that had been banned because of their mutual-defense treaty with China.

The Associated Press dug into Trump’s tariff scam and discovered that when Trump or his boys got what they wanted, the tariffs went away, including advanced tech for Qatar and tariff relief for Vietnam. Efforts by Democrats in Congress — most notably Jeff Merkley and Elizabeth Warren — to investigate this naked corruption and similar foreign kickbacks have been systematically blocked by Republicans Mike Johnson in the House and John Thune in the Senate.

Back in 1932, Canada fought back against Hoover’s Smoot-Hawley tariffs by convening that year the Imperial Economic Conference and working out a deal with Great Britain called “Imperial Preference” — a sort of most-favored-nation status — to trade with each other with only minimal tariffs that helped both countries mitigate the damage from the Republican Great Depression. It took President Roosevelt’s efforts to re-normalize our trade relations with either.

Carney, being a student of history (unlike Trump), is following in his predecessors’ footsteps. He announced that the era of America’s global economic leadership is over, created a $25 billion sovereign wealth fund, signed a trade agreement with China, backed a Canada-led defense and resilience bank, started talking seriously about a joint EU and CPTPP trade bloc, and just joined the EU’s SAFE defense financing instrument.

For their part, the EU just provisionally activated its Mercosur agreement and finalized a new free trade deal with India to replace American goods including tech and pharma. And the NATO countries are increasingly planning to defend themselves without us, another international disaster that could easily foreshadow a Trump-caused WWIII.

Basically, the world is rearranging their trade to cut America out because Trump is so erratic and irrational. And the main beneficiary of this destruction of America’s economic power and the impoverishment of the American middle class is Vladimir Putin, who’s openly wanted a weaker, less capable, and poorer America for decades.

Canada was our second largest trading partner and their soldiers have fought beside ours in every major conflict of the last century or this until Trump began bombing countries and killing fishermen in small boats. Their diplomats hid six Americans in their embassy in Tehran in 1979 and smuggled them out with Canadian passports. In just the first half of this year, our trade with Canada has totaled over $375 billion.

But man-baby Trump doesn’t care: Mark Carney had the temerity to call him out and make him look like a fool, so he’ll punish us all just to get his petty revenge. Vengeance, after all, is the oxygen he breathes, consequences for others be damned.

House Democrats have introduced the Repealing Outdated and Unilateral Tariff Authorities Act, which would strip Section 338 out of American law entirely. Call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and demand that your representative and both senators cosponsor it, even if they’re Republicans.

Especially if they’re Republicans, in fact. In 1987, President Reagan gave a radio address pointing out that tariff-based trade wars shrink markets and throw millions out of their jobs. Ontario’s Premiere Doug Ford turned it into an ad that so pissed off Trump that he slapped a new unilateral tariff on Canada.

It’s clear that Trump doesn’t care if we slide into another Republican Great Depression, and, as I’ve written before, such events are seen by the morbidly rich as wonderful opportunities because they can buy up everything that’s not nailed down for pennies on the dollar. Some of America’s biggest fortunes were made during economic crises.

So the job of preventing it falls to us.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Tariff War”

Trump Takes a 58-Year Republican Election Playbook to a Terrifying New Level

Thom Hartmann — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:37:59 GMT

Trump and his Republican partners in the destruction of American democracy really don’t want us to vote this fall or in 2028. And there’s a good reason for it, at least in their minds.

Joyce Vance just pointed out that Howard Lutnick, Trump’s morbidly rich crony Commerce Secretary, claimed this week that they’d found over 24,000 noncitizens who’d illegally voted in the 2020 election.

It’s a lie, of course, and a pretty naked one at that, but this will be the foundation for Republicans establishing even more draconian rules to prevent married women, racial minorities, city dwellers, and low-income people from voting this fall and in 2028.

Also this week, the Center for American Progress released an extraordinarily disturbing fact sheet summarizing an investigation they published that documents fifteen separate, interlocking tactics the Trump administration, Republican governors, and GOP members of Congress are engaging in right now to rig this fall’s election.

Their tactics range from firing the bipartisan Election Assistance Commissions’ commissioners to encouraging Red state voter purges to putting ICE agents outside polling places in clear violation of federal law.

The six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court are also deciding, perhaps this week or next, whether to let Trump’s hand-picked Postmaster General have your mailman refuse to deliver your ballot if you’re not on Trump’s approved voter list.

Trump’s executive order to do this has been blocked twice by a federal judge, noting that the Constitution is clear that only states run elections and the executive branch has no authority whatsoever to even try to regulate them. And now it’s in the hands of six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

And the plain words of the Constitution — which references the “right to vote” six times, including five Amendments that say, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged…” — have never been an obstacle for Republicans on the Court. Just read the plain text of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments and compare that to ICE’s behavior, which the Court is allowing.

Sadly, we need to be ready for anything, because Republicans now have a 58-year-long record of committing crimes and treason to get their men into the White House.

— Nixon sabotaged LBJ’s Vietnam peace deal just before the election of 1968, an event LBJ and Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen called “treason” on a phone call that wasn’t released until decades after Johnson’s death. Because the war continued, Nixon beat Humphrey that year by lying that he had a “secret plan” to end the war, and an additional 20,000+ Americans and over an additional million Vietnamese died.

— Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollah to hold the 52 hostages they’d taken during Carter’s presidency until after the election. Iran kept the deal destroying Carter’s chance in the 1980 election, and for six years Reagan secretly and illegally sold them American-made weapons in violation of the law. We remember that as the “Iran-Contra Scandal.”

— Florida Governor Jeb Bush had 57,000 mostly Black Floridians purged from the voting rolls just months before the 2000 election, which let his brother George W. Bush squeak by with a 537 vote margin. When the Florida Supreme Court, smelling a rat, ordered a recount, five corrupt Republicans — including Bush’s father’s nominee Clarence Thomas — violated the state’s rights Tenth Amendment and blocked the recount, putting Bush into the White House even though a later recount found that Al Gore had won the election. President Jimmy Carter told me on my radio program: “I don’t think that George W. Bush won the election in 2000, and he probably lost Florida and nationwide…”

— And then there was the GOP’s theft of the 2024 election. Greg Palast, a reporter with a masters’ degree in statistics, went through the official state-by-state statistics and found that 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls: 2,121,000 mail were ballots disqualified by Republican challenges, 1,216,000 provisional ballots were thrown away uncounted, 3.24 million new registrations were rejected or never processed, and 585,000 in-person ballots were “spoiled.”

He found Black voters were four times as likely as white voters to have their mail ballot rejected; Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters were more than 3 times as likely as white people to be given provisional ballots that were never counted. Had that voter suppression not worked, he concluded, Kamala Harris would be president and the House and Senate may well be in Democratic hands.

So, here we go again, only this time state-by-state voter suppression — remember when Texas AG Ken Paxton told Steve Bannon on the air that if he hadn’t blocked Houston from sending out mail-in ballots Trump would have lost Texas? — is getting a big boost from the feds under Trump’s control.

— Trump and his lickspittles have fired or pushed out at least 75 career election security officials, gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and removed the Election Assistance Commission’s commissioners so the agency is now functionally dead.

— The Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, now run by an apparatchik devoted to undoing civil rights, has threatened election officials in all 50 states with prison if they make even small errors in running their elections. The DOJ itself has sued more than 30 states trying to seize their voter files.

— The FBI raided the Fulton County elections office with Tulsi Gabbard, then the Director of National Intelligence, standing over the process at the personal direction of Trump himself as agents hauled away hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots.

— Steve Bannon has repeatedly promised — most recently this week — that ICE agents will defy the post-Civil War federal law that bans armed government officials from polling places.

— And Trump has, on multiple occasions, floated declaring a national emergency or state of insurrection to shut down this fall’s elections, either nationwide or in places where Democratic majorities may win.

Back in the old days, Nixon and Reagan at least had the decency to commit their treasonous election thefts in secret.

Trump is now bragging about it, telling Congress that if they pass his voter suppression bill to prevent low-income people and married women from voting, “We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.”

This is Putin-level corruption, right out in the open, and not a single Republican is pushing back as our national press tries their hardest to avoid discussing it.

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We’ve suffered through five illegitimate presidencies in the years since Nixon’s 1968 treason largely because our press has refused to investigate or tell the stories and Democratic leadership has been too timid to bring it up. You know how Republicans would be reacting if the shoe were on the other foot.

This time the press can’t claim they just didn’t realize what was going on, as happened in 1968, 1980, 2000, and 2024: Trump and his cronies are doing all this right out in the open, and his advisors like Bannon are crowing about it on TV.

So it’s time for all of us to raise some hell, letting our friends and neighbors know what’s happening, and demand that our elected officials act now to protect our elections. The number for Congress is 202-224-3121 and don’t forget to check your voter registration at vote.org, particularly if you live in a Red state.

We just have a few weeks to go before early voting starts and we have a hell of a lot of work to do to get out the vote and keep it honest. Tag, we’re it!

Louise’s Daily Song: “Same Old Crime”

Comments on Thursday’s Daily Take:
Are We On the Verge of a Progressive Revolution Like the New Deal?

The vast majority of Americans (who wrongly think they are capitalists) are already indentured to America’s capitalist oligarchs via mortgages, credit card debt, and car loans.
~ Tomonthebeach

For those of us who pay attention, I think this is all true and we will try to make it happen. I worry, though, about those who need this but 1) don’t vote or 2) are persuaded by social media bots and vote MAGA. Living in a red state, I’m constantly discouraged by real voters who just keep voting their own economic suicide but are swayed by the culture wars. Our first step is to regain power in November. Then we must win in 2028 and make this a reality.
~ Laurie

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Are We On the Verge of a Progressive Revolution Like the New Deal?

Thom Hartmann — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 13:56:05 GMT

Do we stand on the edge of a grand new progressive era, with good wages for all, racial and gender equality and justice, and America joining the rest of the developed world with cheap college and healthcare paid for by rational taxes on the morbidly rich? Or will Trump gleefully overthrow American democracy, finish his ongoing project of shuttering or handing to his oligarch partners-in-crime our free press, and imprisoning more of us who object?

When Mussolini put Antonio Gramsci, the founder of Italy’s Communist Party, in prison in 1927, Gramsci wrote from his prison cell that:

“[T]he old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

That interregnum is passing right now here in America, the symptoms are obvious, and change is upon us.

Two forces in American politics are similarly on a collision course today at two levels. Within the Democratic Party, it’s Clinton-era neoliberalism versus Bernie’s progressivism. In the overall political scene, it’s Trump’s and his captive GOP’s neofascism versus the entire spectrum of Democrats (both “corporate” and “progressive”) who, regardless of their differences, still embrace democracy.

The problem corporate neoliberal Democrats, the heirs to Clintonism and Obamaism, face is that a majority of Americans are now clear that it simply doesn’t work. We’re sick of partial, corporate- and billionaire-aligned solutions to large problems that should best be handed by our government as part of the commons.

— Trying to get affordable healthcare to all Americans via Obamacare, for example, is increasingly failing because the massive for-profit insurance industry it depended on is increasingly committed to squeezing every last penny out of us, regardless of how many of us die.

— Trying to lift a majority of Americans back up into their parents’ middle class lifestyle is also failing, largely because the corporate wing of the Democrats dependent on campaign contributions from giant union-hating corporations have “mysteriously” failed in their proclaimed effort to increase unionization and the minimum wage.

— Trying to give all Americans access to a college education without debt has failed because a large handful of big-bank-funded Democrats supported Bush’s bankruptcy “reform” in 2005 that outlawed using bankruptcy to discharge student debt. When Reagan came into office, roughly 80 percent of the cost of college was covered by state and federal money and college endowments; today that’s only around 20 percent; returning to 80% (and, thus, affordable college) is now a big legislative lift when our tax code is so skewed toward billionaires and massive corporations that the money for college is largely gone.

Forty-five years of the Reagan Revolution being maintained by both parties have pretty much proven that neoliberal Democratic policies won’t be enough to either stop Trump’s full-on push to convert America into a fascist state, nor will they address the very real problems most Americans are experiencing today when it comes to being able to afford everything from rent to groceries to healthcare.

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Today’s generation of progressive Democrats, therefore, are taking a page from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and proposing genuinely big solutions to the massive problems that Democratic neoliberalism and Republican neofascism have produced.

And they’re winning!

This week’s primary results are just the latest indication that a progressive renaissance on par with the New Deal, or at least the Great Society, may be close to our doorstep.

While media pundits seem baffled, it’s obvious to most of the rest of us that this is being driven by our middle class collapsing from two-thirds of us when Reagan took office in 1981 to around 41 percent of us today (and now it takes two paychecks to get there, whereas a family could be safe with a single wage-earner in 1981).

Fully 60% of Americans now live paycheck-to-paycheck with virtually no savings, numbers we haven’t seen since the 1930s.

— Five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have given billionaires and massive corporations virtual control over our elections as their corrupt Citizens United decision has allowed literally billions in dark money to flood every cycle.

— Our privatized, profitized healthcare system, including the Medicare Advantage Scam, accounts (according to a recent study by Yale) for over 114,000 unnecessary American deaths every year and untold misery and loss of worker productivity.

— While racist Republicans complain that we don’t have enough white babies, young people with college debt can’t afford to buy a house, marry, raise a family, or even start a small business.

— Meanwhile, the top 1% own more wealth than the bottom 93% and one Nazi-saluting trillionaire racist owns more wealth than the entire bottom 50% of Americans, 174 million people.

Our system has been rigged by 45 years of Reagan’s and Clinton’s neoliberalism, as I document in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and The Hidden History of the American Dream, and a clear majority of Americans have finally figured it out.

Inequality has never, ever before been this bad in America, going all the way back to the 1700s. So, no surprise, Democrats who offer real solutions are winning primaries across the country and are poised to make huge electoral gains this fall, unless Trump and his shock troops succeed in pulling off the coup they’re clearly trying to make happen.

While corporate Democrats and Republicans decry “radical,” “far left” and “democratic socialist” candidates (and a desperate Trump is calling them “communists”), opinion polling is explaining the election outcomes that are befuddling op-ed columnists and “middle of the road” candidates.

— American voters tell pollsters they believe it’s obscene that one man (Musk) could have spent $290 million to make Trump president and that roughly one out of every six dollars spent in the 2024 election ($2.6 billion) came from just 100 billionaire families, virtually all of it funding GOP candidates. They want Citizens United overturned and a return to strict campaign finance limits.

— They want healthcare that everybody has access to and everybody can afford, and the only option on the table for that is what most other advanced democracies in the world have: Medicare for All or its equivalent. Fully 90% of Democrats and 66% of all Americans want it, and want it now. We also need to take on drug prices, a battle that pharma-funded corporate Democrats and Republicans have fought against for decades.

The solution to the high prices for everything isn’t just breaking up monopolies to bring back competition and small businesses (although that’s important); it also requires people to earn enough to live.

Only 6% of the private workforce has a union representing them (it was a third of us before Reagan and the GOP declared war on unions in 1981) and the minimum wage FDR gave us as part of his New Deal is stuck at $7.25/hour when if it’d been inflation adjusted since the 1960s it’d be well over $15.

A large part of the challenge average Americans face is because of the so-called K-shaped economy; the top is wide with a handful of billionaires controlling over half our wealth and the bottom is wide because of the impoverishment of our once-thriving middle class.

The answer here is simple: return to the corporate and personal income tax rates from 1933-1981 that built the middle class and prevented the emergence of American oligarchs.

Meanwhile, climate change is literally killing us and it’s beyond obscene that Trump and his Republican toadies lie about it with a straight face just to keep the fossil fuel industry money flowing into their pockets.

Trump’s war on green energy is crippling our ability to grow industry, adding to home electric bills, and jacking up emissions, all because the industry’s fatcats took his deal and gave him millions to get elected.

Foreign wars haven’t helped us either, with the Afghanistan and Iraq wars Bush and Cheney lied us into having cost around $8 trillion (and thousands of American lives); Trump’s newest illegal war with Iran is costing us a billion a day and crippling our ability to hold off Russia’s and China’s expansionist desires.

Every single one of these issues are on the progressive agenda, whether you call it that or “democratic socialism” or just point out that it aligns with traditional Democratic Party traditions prior to the Clinton presidency.

Every 80 years, it seems, we end up with a new progressive revolution, and we’re overdue for this generation’s. Progressive Democrats are leading the way, but none of it will work unless we all engage.

Double-check your voter registration, throw a few dollars to your favorite candidates (ONLY use their campaign websites; never reply to a text message or email), and show up at your local Democratic Party to volunteer to help out.

And share genuinely progressive and educational media — including this newsletter — with everybody you know. Organized people can overcome organized money as we saw with Angie Nixon’s primary victory in Florida and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s in Michigan.

We can do this. Tag, we’re it!

Louise’s Daily Song: “The New Deal Rising”

Comments on Wednesday’s Daily Take:
Grabbing Them by the Pussy: Trump Continues His Fifty-Year War on Women

How I wish that Kristin Holmes had fired back loudly so everyone in the room could hear, “Well, will Ivanka and Tiffany eventually be sickened and embarrassed by having a father who is so callous and Vindictive?!” She could still do it in a tweet. What’s good for the goose...
~ Jan Feeler

Trump actually has an inferiority complex, and thus requires adulation, deference and obedience. and women who rebuff him, who confront him, they are the his biggest threat.

The hell for Trump would be circled by women, laughing at him, rebuking him, ridiculing him, especially the size of his little mushroom penis.
~ William Farrar

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Grabbing Them by the Pussy: Trump Continues His Fifty-Year War on Women

Thom Hartmann — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 14:38:38 GMT

Image by Patricio Hurtado from Pixabay

Yesterday, the guy Donald Trump had earlier endorsed for the House of Representatives who’d been accused of sexual crimes lost his Republican primary election. But the day before was even worse.

Monday was a rough day for Trump’s ongoing lifelong war against women who dare stand up to him. In the morning, the Supreme Court told him for the second time to take a hike on his appeal of a jury’s finding that he’d raped E. Jean Carroll and had to pay her a bit over $5 million.

In the afternoon, he reprised his disgusting and condescending slams on women, this time against CNN’s Kristen Holmes, calling her a “fake reporter,” saying she was “loud” and “boisterous” when she dared ask him why he’d ordered the military to scale back our exercises with our longtime ally South Korea in deference to the tender feelings of his dear friend Dictator Kim Jong Un.

And then, amazingly, it got even uglier when his staff followed up and went after Holmes’ children. The official Rapid Response called her a “humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession” and spit out the following genuinely disgusting venom because she dared ask about Trump sucking up to the North Korean dictator:

“Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”

Her employer, CNN, responded with quiet dignity, pointing out that she’s one of the most respected journalists covering the White House and that she’d simply done her job by asking a tough, relevant question.

Trump seems to have had a problem with women his entire life. He claimed that his personal Vietnam-era challenge wasn’t getting shot at in a foreign jungle but avoiding STDs from his much-publicized promiscuity. He cheated on each of this three wives, the last including having unprotected sex with (and paying off for their silence) both a porn star and a Playboy bunny.

He particularly seems to prefer women who are immigrants from poverty-stricken countries, presumably because they’re more desperate and easy to control; the only American he married he was basically forced into because he got her pregnant while he was married to Ivana, his first wife, and then dumped her after starting an affair with Melania, who retains her Slovenian citizenship and has passed it along to their son.

And it goes way beyond his personal life. Nine months ago he attacked Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey on Air Force One, snapping “Quiet. Quiet piggy” at her because she’d asked if there was anything serious about him in the Epstein files. Just a few days later it was ABC’s Mary Bruce’s turn to be verbally slapped around when she asked about the murder of Washington Post’s reporter Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia’s MBS, who’d given billions to Trump’s son-in-law.

As the Society of Professional Journalists noted at the time, these weren’t isolated incidents but reflected a consistent and long-term pattern of Trump’s hostility against women. His press secretary tried to paper it over by claiming that Trump was “just being frank,” and claiming that his condescending, insulting language was why people elected him.

Sadly, that observation is probably right-on-the-mark. Trump’s MAGA followers are notorious for their misogyny and bad manners, from “rolling coal” to “fuck your feelings” tee shirts to laughing at his jokes at the expense of women like Kamala Harris.

His hot mic moment with Billy Bush is probably the most revealing self-portrait any American politician has ever given the electorate:

“I moved on her, actually. You know she was down on Palm Beach. … I moved on her and I failed. I’ll admit it. I did try and fuck her. She was married. … And I moved on her very heavily in fact. I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said ‘I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.’ I took her out furniture. I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there, and she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big, phony tits and everything. …
[he sees the attractive young woman who is meeting their bus]
“I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful - I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

And MAGA’s reaction to Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women? A giant shrug. Or perhaps, for many of the men in his base, envy.

In addition to his name appearing in the Epstein files more often than anybody other than Epstein himself, including multiple FBI interviews alleging he’d raped a 14-year-old and beat up a 15-year-old for biting him when he forced her to give him a blowjob, at least 27 women have publicly accused him of sexual misconduct going all the way back to the 1970s.

Jessica Leeds says he groped her on a commercial jet flight, Kristin Anderson testified that he thrust his hand up under her skirt in a nightclub, Jill Harth said he did the same thing at a business dinner with her boyfriend sitting right beside her, and Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos said he tried to force himself on her in a bungalow in Beverly Hills.

For Stacy Williams it was a Trump groping at Trump Tower as Jeffrey Epstein watched, smiling, and his first wife, Ivana, described a night in 1989 when the hair replacement surgeon she’d recommended didn’t work out right so he tore out fistfuls of her hair and raped her (she later recanted).

He went on Howard Stern’s radio program and bragged that when he owned the Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants he’d walk into their dressing rooms while they were naked so he could “inspect” them, proudly adding that he gets away with that sort of thing all the time.

Former contestants agreed, saying he’d ogled them on multiple occasions. Buzzfeed found four women from the 1997 Miss Teen USA pageant he also owned who claimed he’d walked in on them naked, too, when some of them were only 15.

And let’s not forget the anonymous plaintiff who called herself Katie Johnson who said in sworn testimony in a lawsuit that both Trump and Jeffrey Epstein repeatedly raped her at Epstein’s mansion when she was 13 and hoping to become a model. Her lawyer, Lisa Bloom, said she’d been essentially forced to drop the suit because she was terrified by multiple death threats, and it seems she’s been in hiding ever since.

And then there’s the Epstein birthday book that the Wall Street Journal discovered and publicized, which not only discussed Trump and Epstein sharing a “wonderful secret” but also included a page from a Mar-a-Lago member who joked about selling Trump a “fully depreciated” woman for $22,500.

When I was watching Trump attack CNN’s Kristin Holmes, the look on his face and the ferocity of his words, I was reminded of his brilliant niece, psychologist Mary Trump, telling me on my program about how his father Fred was a high-functioning sociopath, a story she also told in her bestselling book Too Much and Never Enough. I could easily imagine Fred talking the same way to a 7-year-old Donald before he sent him off to a military academy to get him out of his hair.

While we don’t know Fred’s opinion of women (other than that his father made his first fortune running a brothel), we do know he was arrested in 1927 at a Klan rally in Queens, and 46 years later the Justice Department charged him and Donald with refusing to rent their apartments to Black people.

Apparently, the lesson young Donald learned in that house was that empathy is a defect leading to weakness, contempt is a way of showing strength, and there’s nothing in the world worse than being a “loser.” Such men typically view women as objects to own rather than human beings, and Donald certainly seems to be acting that out on an astonishingly regular basis.

So, it should be no surprise that he’d put three people on the Supreme Court who’d end women’s constitutional right to control over their own bodies; women have been dying in ER’s ever since, and now MAGA-type woman-hating and abusive men are using everything from abortion bounty laws to Flock cameras to stalk and control the women they think they own.

The most alarming part of all this is that Donald Trump still has 92% support among Republicans who identify themselves as MAGAts, although that cohort of the GOP has fallen to around 60% of the party’s voters.

Dictators are famous for their obsessions with masculinity, and we’re seeing that in spades among Trump and his lickspittles. He tweets pictures of himself as a superhero or a manly-man virtually every day, all while Whiskey Pete Hegseth proposes shooting up our troops with testosterone like he and Bob Kennedy do.

The Tate brothers — who face rape, human-trafficking, and other criminal allegations around the abuse of women — are in tight with members of the Trump family. Justin Waller, a Tate associate, said Andrew Tate has even been giving young Barron “dating advice.”

Whether this is blowback against the Me Too movement or Trump has simply succeeded in bringing the rapists, rape fans, and misogynists out of the woodwork is hard to know, but the damage the role model of this man and his family are doing to a generation of American boys and young men coming up will probably be inestimable.

And where are the few Republicans left who find this a horror show? If they haven’t already joined the Lincoln Project or similar recovering-Republican groups, they appear to be hiding, hoping it’ll all go away soon.

Sadly, it won’t. It’s going to take a generation to clean up America from the damage this sick man has done and is doing.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Grab Them By The Pussy”

Comments on Tuesday’s Daily Take:
Trump Drops “Good Genetics” Bomb and Reopens a Dark Chapter in American History

The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould is a good book that describes how we cherry pick or manufacture data to support our hypotheses
~ Burton Raabe

Yes, we are still a racist, sexist, misogynistic country or at least 33% is. Why women or members of minority groups continue to support these politicians is just frustrating and will lead to a financial/market downfall as greed and incompetence seem to be part of this too. I feel like the Dems are bringing a knife to a gun fight ( and don’t get me started on the stupidity of Biden’s inner circle and Merrick Garland). Maybe Jon Ossoff will be the new Obama.
~ Mitch Moncrief

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