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The AI bubble and it’s possible disintegration gives us some pretty grim insights into the question of what happens when the richest people in the world rebuild the economy in a way that it no longer needs working people, but still expects them to pay their bills.

Reuters reported this week that China’s AI and semiconductor stock boom has suffered a sudden and staggering reversal: their STAR50 index of Beijing’s AI and chip champions (like our NASDAQ) has plunged 40 percent in less than four months, wiping out roughly $480 billion in market value.

Their robotics company Unitree, whose IPO just three months ago was oversubscribed 8,000 times by Chinese small investors and has lost half its value. Dong Baozhen, a Beijing fund manager, told Reuters:

“And now we see the bubble bursting.”

The same day (Monday) here in America Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees, about 27 percent of its global workforce, as it’s planning to replace them with AI. And when Anthropic (Claude) filed to go public they disclosed an $80.7 billion net loss and some $657 billion in infrastructure deals with companies including Microsoft, Amazon, and SpaceX; fully $498 billion of that is noncancelable even if the company never uses the computing capacity it’s reserved.

Things got even weirder on Wednesday, when Microsoft and Alphabet reported some striking “earnings” numbers. Alphabet burned through $9.1 billion in free cash flow for the second straight quarter. NPR’s 1A tallied up Monday’s AI deals alone at roughly $235 billion, nearly one percent of American GDP, all in just one single day.

While Wall Street has been pouring massive sums into AI companies, data centers, chips, and power infrastructure, Economist Dean Baker reports at his weekly AI Bubble Monitor that CoreWeave’s debt (the company rents computing power to the AI giants) is now considered so deep in junk bond territory that they’re having to pay 16% interest on their long-term debt to get investors to bite.

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In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore postulated that every two years the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double. Not only was his “Moore’s Law” right, but as the power of digital hardware increases, costs also reliably drop by a similar factor.

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Reporters for MS NOW just broke an extremely troubling story: seven people inside and around the FBI reached out to say that they’re afraid that in the next week they’ll be called upon to illegally seize voting machines or ballots to disrupt our election next week.

They all know that federal law has made it a crime for federal law enforcement officers to enter polling places armed (unless there’s an active crime, like a shooting, going on), and has been since 1865, which has them particularly worried about their own possible legal exposure.

Several also noted that what makes this concern particularly cogent and urgent is that they’ve already watched Trump’s and Blanche’s Justice Department use invented claims of “irregularities” to get a judge to sign a warrant that allowed them to march armed agents into Georgia election offices on national television with little blowback and no consequences.

One former senior agent told the reporters how the Bureau used to handle this:

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His greed seems to have no limits: Trump wants to make more money off his golf courses, and you and your kids may pay for it with your lives. And one lone Republican is standing up to him.

Back in 1974, the year Richard Nixon put into place year-round daylight savings time, Louise and I were living just outside Lansing, Michigan. I remember the sun not coming up that January until nine in the morning; we drove to work in full darkness, kids stood under streetlights to catch the school bus, and eight schoolchildren were killed in traffic accidents in Florida alone.

When Nixon first flipped the switch, 79 percent of Americans supported year-round daylight savings time; by the end of 1974 that had collapsed to 42 percent support. President Gerald Ford signed the repeal that October.

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The biggest force behind this bizarre idea of year-round daylight savings time was the golf course industry. The Englishman who invented the idea of shifting the clocks was an avid golfer named William Willett; the whole idea was to give golfers another hour to play in the evening.

The golf industry told Congress back in 1986 that adding just one more month to the months of daylight savings time would make the industry at least an additional $200 million a year; they got their extension. It was all about the money and had nothing to do with science.

And now, fifty-two years later, Congress is about to repeat the mistake because they’re being leaned on hard by Trump, who reported that just last year he made nearly $395 million from people playing golf at his 16 golf courses.

The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act on July 14 by a vote of 308 to 117, and it’s been sitting in the Senate ever since. The guy blocking it is Senator Tom Cotton, so Trump published Cotton’s personal cell phone number and suggested people convey his message to the Senator, which he posted on his Nazi-infested social media site begging for more money for himself:

“The PGA TOUR, as an example, needs more Daylight in the afternoon in order to finish their Tournaments. Likewise, regular Golfers, Tennis Players, Hunters and, perhaps most importantly, Farmers who want more Daylight to play or work.”

Farmers, for the record, have hated daylight saving time since 1918, because cows don’t read clocks. But golf is another story, and, like the fossil fuel industry, it’s all about the money. This time, though, we have science that was largely unknown (but certainly intuited) back when Nixon was president.

Three weeks ago the Canadian Medical Association Journal published a peer-reviewed analysis by a team of sleep scientists, psychiatrists, and economists who went through the whole body of research. Their conclusion was blunt, as Ralph Mistlberger, the Simon Fraser University chronobiologist who co-authored it, explained:

“Morning light is the primary environmental time cue that aligns our biological clocks to local time. If morning light is delayed, our clocks and all the rhythms they control are delayed.”

It turns out that our bodies don’t run on the clock on the wall; we’re calibrated and recalibrated every day by exposure to sunlight. It resets the cluster of cells behind the optic nerve that then tell every organ in your body what time it is and what they need to be doing about and for it. And daylight savings time pushes that signal back an hour in the winter when we’re already struggling (particularly in the north half of the country) with early-morning darkness.

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The researchers went granular, finding that just within a single time zone, people living on the western edge — where the sun comes up just slightly later than on the eastern edge — sleep nearly an hour less per week. Those living on the western edges of time zones ended up with measurably worse moods, lower productivity and even demonstrably poorer school performance. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine reached the same conclusion back in 2023, as have essentially every other sleep and circadian science organization that’s weighed in since then.

Our kids will pay the steepest price for this boon for the golf industry that the Senate is on the verge of inflicting on us all at Trump’s insistence.

Research done by the online-schooling company K12 found that under permanent daylight savings time fully 94 of the largest 100 school districts in the country would have children leaving for school in the dark every single winter morning. The average large district would see 117 dark commutes a year, compared with 77 under the system we have now and just 35 under permanent standard time.

Russia tried permanent daylight time in 2011 and reversed it three years later. Chile tried it in 2015 and reversed it. We tried it in 1974 and reversed it. Tom Cotton, whatever else you think of him, got this one right when he said:

“No one likes changing the clock, me included, but Congress has enacted permanent Daylight Saving Time multiple times before and repealed it each time once Americans experienced absurdly late sunrises in the winter.”

Pretty much everybody is tired of the twice-a-year clock changes. We have more traffic accidents in the week following the change, as the entire country is experiencing a bit of jet lag.

News for People, Not Power

University of Colorado researchers combed through 22 years of federal car accident data and found that traffic fatalities jump about 6 percent in the week after clocks spring forward. A Michigan hospital study found heart attacks up 24 percent on the morning after the spring change. And a study of over 20 years of injuries in the mining industry found workers got hurt more often and were less productive the day after the change.

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No joke. No foolin’ around. The operation is in place to overturn the results of next Tuesday’s vote in the midterm elections.

President Donald Trump has already put the wheels in motion for a “legal” reversal of the voters’ choice in Texas, Alaska and other battleground states where the US Senate’s control is in the balance.

To understand the first step in their putsch plan, check out Episode 5 of Jim Crow Reloaded, 4 minutes exposing the mass challenge of 800,000 voters:

While America slept, Trump’s vigilante organizations, as we explain in Jim Crow Reloaded, are challenging voters of color. In 2024, the Texas Trump front group True the Vote challenged over three-quarters of a million voters’ registrations. This year, they’re keeping the number secret.

You can bet that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, overseeing his own race for US Senator, will move to disqualify the ballots cast by vigilante-challenged voters. Do the vigilantes have to have proof that the voters are illegal? Nope, they just have to claim they have “reason to believe” voters are illegal. Funny, of the more than one million voters True the Vote and other Trump fronts have challenged over the past two election cycles, not one has been proven to be an “illegal” voter, which is, after all, a felony crime.

Count on Paxton to also challenge absentee ballots. Folks, mailing in your ballot is risky business. For example, the GOP just won a case that if the voter licked the outside envelope shut but did not lick the inside envelope, the ballot can be tossed out. So, “if your tongue ain’t wet, you ain’t counted yet.” There are a million gotcha tricks to disqualify mail-in ballots from “no signature match” (e.g. you signed without a middle initial) to wrong color pen.

And then there’s the provisional ballots. If you’re white, chances are you’ve never seen one of these. According to the official Elections Assistance Commission records, in 2024, MORE THAN 436,000 PROVISIONAL BALLOTS WERE DISQUALIFIED. That alone re-elected Trump.

You never heard of that on US TV? Of course not, white boy. These ballots are given, in overwhelming numbers, to voters of color, especially young men.

Here’s a funny story. Or maybe not so funny. At the Palm Springs Book Festival, I asked if anyone in the audience had ever been shunted to a “provisional” ballot. Only two people in the audience were Black. And only two people raised their hand to say they’d been forced to a provisional ballot. Yep, it was the two Black men.

All the excuses that caused the voter to be shunted to a provisional ballot (ID or signature challenges, registrations missing or challenged) keep those ballots out of the count. Notably, not one of these alleged ne’er-do-wells was charged with the crime of improperly attempting to vote. (Note for statistics geeks: Because half the states don’t report on provisionals rejected, the number of ballots thrown in the dumpster could easily have topped a million.)

If not for disqualifying provisional ballots, Trump would not have been elected in 2024. Nor in 2016 when a whopping 700,000 ballots were disqualififed.

What happened in 2020 to allow Biden’s victory? The number of provisional ballots rejected fell that year by half. How? Our partners in the SaveYourVote.org campaign, Black Voters Matter Fund, and the Transformative Justice Coalition, ran a massive phone-banking operation AFTER the election to get “provisional” voters to go to their county registrar’s office to “cure” their ballots—show new ID—to get their votes counted. As a result, Biden and Georgia Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won.

That was Trump’s fight with Georgia’s Secretary of State. In 2020, Trump told the elections official, “All I want to do is this; I just want to find 11.780 votes,” to flip the race from Biden. What Trump was specifically seeking was for the state, which had already disqualified thousands of votes, to simply disqualify a few more mail-ins and provisionals.

Now, to enforce Trump’s demands in 2026, his FBI director, Kash Patel, can be counted on to literally seize the ballots to go through and “find” votes to disqualify in Texas, Ohio, Michigan and Georgia.

The Certification Game

If the Trump and Patel goons can’t “find” enough votes to overturn the likely victories of Democrats in Texas, Ohio and Alaska, they’ll drop The Big One: stop the certification of the vote, a function normally left to county elections boards.

If they succeed in blocking certifications, ALL of their votes in those counties will be excluded from the count. Expect the Justice Department to seek to block certification of the votes in Travis (Austin, Texas), Harris (Houston), Cleveland, Dayton (Ohio’s Black cities) and all of Alaska or at least its Native-majority (i.e. Democratic) Arctic-zone counties.

Expect the DOJ to say that the voter registries in those minority heavy counties are rife with vigilante-challenged voters and—cover the children’s ears!—alien voters.

Already the DOJ has handed out lists of supposed noncitizen voters to remove from the rolls. How odd: if the Feds know a voter is an alien, then the Feds can and should bust those scheming little foreigners for sneaking into our voting booths. The reason Kash Patel hasn’t convicted alien voters is because there are none. The lists of noncitizen voters are just a bunch of folks with names similar to ICE deportees, names like “Jose Garcia,” a list taken from Homeland Security’s deportation (“SAFE”) lists.

The Trumpsters already have a head start in Ohio. Before Trump’s candidate for Senate, John Husted, was appointed to a vacated seat, he was Ohio’s Secretary of State. He used that post to purge over 800,000 voters from the rolls, a list smelling to High Heaven of racial bias; an ethnic cleansing that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court, wearing Black robes to cover their white sheets, blessed the removal of Black Ohioans.

Now, Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown, although he leads in the polls, has to somehow win with a voter roster bleached whiter than white. But if former Senator Brown does win, look for Justice to try to block certification in those key urban counties.

In Alaska, where Mary Peltola is likely to kick GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan in the patoot, Trump’s Justice attack dogs have ALREADY asked the courts to overturn the election that hasn’t happened yet! Attorney General Todd Blache, Trump’s personal attorney and now his personal election hit man, has demanded a judge reject a Democratic victory because there are two Dan Sullivans on the ballot, a weird artifact of the state’s ranked-choice voting system.

It is one of the weirdest election suits I’ve ever seen. The Trump Administration is saying, if the Republican wins, the vote is legit. If he loses, it isn’t.

Our team is now hopping a plane for Texas to investigate the steal to be. We’re leaving now because the Trump Administration is sending armed agents into the polls in Mexican-American precincts. We are working with the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project and their Latino Mobilization campaign to document the intimidation and theft in progress.

Don’t despair. To paraphrase Lincoln, they can’t steal all the votes all the time.

I’m strictly non-partisan. But unlike Kash Patel, Todd Blanche, Ken Paxton and their orange-stained capo, we at the Palast Fund believe that voters, not vigilantes, and not racist ballot box trickery, should choose our Congress.

If you agree with us, then, for the love of democracy, please please make your tax-deductible contribution to cover our travel, investigation and filming costs, now blowing out my credit card. That’s no joke.

And no matter what, I need you to send on this story, this warning, and a link to our entire Jim Crow Reloaded series at SaveYourVote.org.

As our spokesman, Rev. Edward Ward says, “You can do that. You can do AT LEAST that.”

For 27 years, the Greg Palast Investigative Team has been covering vote suppression for The Guardian, BBC, Rolling Stone, and now The Hartmann Report, the Thom Hartmann Program on SiriusXM and Free Speech TV, and Raw Story.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Saddam’s Cheesecake Factory”

Greg Palast Investigates

Investigative journalist and author of the NY Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse + The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. See my latest film at: https://WatchVigilantesInc.com

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy or the Kindle edition.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

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What happens when “conservatives” would rather destroy their democracy than surrender power? History shows us how that road leads straight to fascism, and Trump is taking America down it.

When I was a kid I once asked my dad, who called himself an Eisenhower conservative, what “conservative” meant. He told me it wasn’t that different from liberalism but instead of favoring drastic or radical change in a society believed that such change should come gradually as the result of careful thought, debate, and incremental processes to minimize disruption to society. He quoted William F. Buckley saying, “A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’”

My dad was a naive idealist who missed entirely the direction his “conservative” movement was heading. Conservatism has always, throughout history and in every country where it’s seized a strong foothold, been the precursor to the destruction of social cohesion (look at “conservative” Macron’s France after 45 years of neoliberalism) and eventually violent fascism.

Today’s American conservative movement began at our nation’s founding with the people who opposed our Revolutionary War, grew through the Old South as the plantation owners rose up and turned that region into a brutal oligarchy and declared war on our democracy, reappeared as Jim Crow and the 1940s’ America First movement, popped up again with Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn, and is now full-blown with MAGA Trumpism and its billionaire backers.

It thrives on fear and resentment while it embraces violence, authoritarianism, and great wealth, the basic hallmarks of fascism.

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Consider how when Abdul El-Sayed was challenged by a paid heckler he turned it into a thoughtful discussion, while in two of Trump’s rallies in the past week he’s encouraged his mob as they beat senseless people who dared challenge him or call for the release of the Epstein files.

Or how Trump’s masked, armed ICE thugs have beaten, imprisoned, and even murdered American citizens with impunity while using terror tactics against dark-skinned non-citizens.

In a 1957 editorial titled Why the South Must Prevail, Buckley laid out explicitly what the foundation of his then-reawakening conservative movement must be.

“Again, let us speak frankly,” Buckley wrote: “The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote. … In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail — that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.”

He asked, rhetorically, if white people in the South are “entitled” to “prevail” over nonwhites even in rural areas of the country or large cities with majority Black populations.

“The sobering answer,” Buckley, the acknowledged godfather of today’s conservative movement, wrote, “is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”

Arguably, following up in April of 2021 the National Review published an article headlined: Why Not Fewer Voters? justifying Republican voter suppression.

While conservativism in all its incarnations around the world has always embraced racism (look at what Modi is doing now in India, for example), it typically ends with iron-fisted fascism.

And it’s here, now, in America.

The Free Press (the original one, not Bari Weiss’ knock-off) just published a report titled Enemies of the State that analyses Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7 (NSPM-7).

It orders the FBI, DHS, Treasury, and the IRS to aim every counterterrorism, tax, and surveillance tool they have at a target defined by nothing more than ideology, which the memo spells out as “anti-Americanism, anti-Christianity, and anti-capitalism.” Yes, the thought police are now here.

Then-AG Bondi’s follow-up memos told federal prosecutors to go after protestors with the highest provable charges, build list of “Antifa-aligned entities,” open a tip line with cash rewards (Trump rolled this out last week under the rubric of “fraud”), and use terrorism as the excuse for the most severe punishments possible.

Its first real test was a July 4th noisy demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE facility in Texas that did about $4,400 in property damage. One of the protestors, Benjamin Song, shot and wounded a police officer he claimed was aiming at an unarmed protestor, and he got 100 years in prison for his offense. Protestor Maricela Rueda got a 70 year sentence for being there and “conspiring” with Song, five others got 50 years in federal prison each, and Rueda’s husband — who wasn’t even at the protest — got a 30 year sentence for helping hide a box of zines.

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But the report’s real warning is what’s coming up next. The FBI now runs a multi-agency NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center drawing on staffers from roughly ten federal agencies looking for people whose opinions may be “anti-American.” The DOJ indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center in April, and in August arrested Heidi Beirich, the woman who spent two decades tracking the Klan and neo-Nazis for them.

Treasury Secretary Bessent is reportedly drafting a plan to strip the tax exemptions of Open Society, SPLC and CAIR, and Homeland Security has investigated more than 150 nonprofits that register voters, claiming they’re nailing these groups to protect “election integrity.” As the authors, Shilpa Jindia and Nora Benavidez, put it plainly:

“It treats speaking out, protesting and civic-engagement activities as ‘evidence of terrorism.’”

— Richard Nixon was the first Republican in the modern era to openly dance with the fascists, welcoming southern white supremacist Democrats into the GOP after LBJ signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. His right-hand man John Ehrlichman laid it out plainly, describing the explicitly fascist intent behind Nixon’s so-called War On Drugs.

— Reagan brought in the morbidly rich and Heritage and laid the foundation for the explosion of rightwing billionaires and their acquisition of our media and social media. He sent surplus military equipment to our police departments, turning them into something that more resembles an occupying army than a “serve and protect” group that Andy Griffiths would recognize.

The reality is they’re not “conserving” anything. They’re instead echoing the thousands of years of modern history of kings and kingdoms where the ruler had absolute, life-or-death power over a nation’s subjects, and citizenship and freedom were both dependent on his whim.

Hierarchy, patriarchy, and a few hundred billionaire families drive today’s Republican effort to defeat our Founders’ liberal democracy and replace it with a Russia-style authoritarian oligarchy and fascism.

There’s no moral core to this so-called “patriotic” movement; just look at Ramaswamy’s despicable attacks on Dr. Amy Acton, Trump saying that “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine; they haven’t been doing much” as the missiles murder civilians, and the GOP’s slanders questioning both Talarico’s sexuality and El-Sayed’s loyalty to America.

It’s all about power and the money associated with it. Corruption is fine, so long as you don’t get caught. We now have more concentration camps in America than Hitler did at the end of his first year, and our wealth disparities are greater than any time in American history.

For hundreds of thousands of years, as I document in The Hidden History of American Democracy, tribal people around the world mostly lived in egalitarian societies (there were exceptions, of course) where the “chief” was actually the servant of the tribe rather than its dictator.

They were the archetype and model for the Founders of our republic and the Framers of our Constitution, a worldview and governing philosophy today being openly challenged by rightwing billionaires from the Trump family on down.

The damage they’ve done to our republic and working class people — from Reagan’s Mandate for Leadership to Trump’s Project 2025 and alliances with Putin — is extraordinary. It’ll take a generation to undo, if America is to recover and become Lincoln’s “more perfect union.”

But there’s considerable reason for hope; change is in the wind worldwide.

The people of Hungary said “no” to fascism in April and turned out Putin’s puppet and Trump’s friend Orbán. The people of Serbia yesterday said “no” to fascism and turned out Putin’s toady and Trump’s friend Vučić. As did Brazilians when they rejected Trump/Putin friend Flavio Bolsonaro.

Will we also say “no” to fascism and turn out the Republican lickspittles who revel in sucking up to Putin’s toady Trump?

That effort begins with us, finally coming down to this week and early next, showing up to vote and continuing to speak out.

Tag, we’re it!

Louise’s Daily Song: “Does Conservatism Always Lead to Fascism?”

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy or the Kindle edition.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

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In response to reports in The Wall Street Journal that Elon Musk personally ordered the deadly slowdown of internet access to Ukraine and that Trump then called and begged him to get it restored, Nobel Prize winning economist and all-around genius Paul Krugman called yesterday for the United States to nationalize Musk’s Starlink/Starsheild array of thousands of satellites providing internet service around the world.

On MS NOW, former Bush speechwriter and columnist (and guest on my show) David Frum echoed the sentiment in an interview with former Bush White House Communications Director Nicole Wallace. And Matt Stoller — often brilliantly on the monopoly beat — is also writing thoughtfully about what to do about this terrible situation.

Senator Adam Schiff framed the issue when he wrote on Musk’s Nazi-infested social media site:

“Either the President was lying or Musk was lying, but the decision to slow down satellite speed and access has life or death consequences for Ukraine. This deserves a full investigation by the Senate. Elon Musk should be compelled to testify before Congress and under oath. National security decisions should be made in our national security interests, and not based on the personal whim of an unstable executive.”

Politico then followed up with an article titled “Dem gavels are coming for Elon Musk” citing both Republican and Democratic members of Congress calling for Musk to be called before Congress under oath. That simple call for a normal political process provoked an imperious and apparently furious Musk to reply with an implied threat:

“Live by the sword, die by the sword. Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets …”

If ever there was a business that merited nationalization, Starlink is it. It only exists because it’s been heavily subsidized by US government contracts and facilities, uses the internet that the US government invented, and — those in favor of nationalization argue — shouldn’t be subject to the whims of an eccentric, ketamine-addled, Nazi-saluting, election-buying CEO whose apparent decision just cost Ukrainian lives.

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There’s even an argument to be made for nationalizing the rocket ship part of SpaceX (which owns Starlink/Starshield) and, like during the years when we first put men on the moon, handing it over to be owned and run by NASA.

But is it even possible? Turns out that American history says an emphatic, “Yes!”

During the crisis of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson nationalized the country’s railroads, phone companies, and telegraph operators.  He did the same with the nation’s radio networks and radio stations.  All were returned to private ownership after the war, but that temporary nationalization helped get America through the crisis.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt did the same during World War II, nationalizing airplane manufacturers, gun manufacturers, over 3,300 mines, the nation’s railroads, dozens of oil companies, Western Electric Co., Hughes Tool Co., Goodyear Tire and Rubber, and even one of the nation’s largest retail outlets, Montgomery Ward (as Krugman brilliantly details). He also nationalized 17 foreign companies doing business in the US.

After FDR died, President Harry Truman continued seizing companies that were using the war as an excuse to jack up profits to the detriment of our nation. He nationalized meatpacking facilities across the country, the Monongahela Railroad Company, the nation’s steel mills, and hundreds of railroad companies.

Like with Wilson’s nationalizations, nearly all were returned to the private sector after the war was over, although it took until 1965 before all were privatized. Many had had their boards of directors and senior management replaced with people who’d put the interests of the nation ahead of their greed for profits.

In the 1970s, in the wake of the collapse of the Penn Central Railroad, President Richard Nixon oversaw the voluntary nationalization and transfer of 20 railroads into the newly created National Rail Passenger Corporation, now known as Amtrak.

In 1974 Congress created another nationalized entity to deal with freight rail, the Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail), which absorbed dozens of failing rail companies.  Conrail was government held until 1987, when it was privatized in the then-largest IPO in American history.

In 1984, when the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company was in a crisis, President Ronald Reagan’s administration oversaw the FDIC nationalizing it by acquiring an 80 percent ownership share in the company; it wasn’t re-privatized until 1991, and was bought by Bank of America in 1994.

Also in the 1980s, after Reagan recklessly deregulated the Savings & Loan industry, bankers made off with billions leaving the wreckage of crushed S&Ls all across the nation. Reagan investigated over 1000 CEOs, dragged some before Congress, and threw many of those bankers into prison.

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When the government agency that insured them, FSLIC, went bankrupt itself in 1987, Reagan and Congress created an umbrella agency — the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) — to nationalize all 747 of America’s S&Ls with assets of over $400 billion. Their assets were sold back into the private market in 1995 as the RTC shut itself down, having averted a 1929-style banking crisis through temporary nationalization.

When George W. Bush was handed the White House by 5 corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, the nation’s airline’s security system was entirely in private hands.

They failed miserably on 9/11, so Bush didn’t even bother with the normal acquisition process that would protect the hundreds of small contractors running security at airports across the nation: he simply nationalized the entire system and created a government agency, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to take over airport and airline security.

President Bush also partially nationalized the nation’s airlines, creating the Air Transportation Stabilization Board that traded around $10 billion in loans to airlines in crisis (air traffic collapsed after 9/11) in exchange for company stock. We (through our government) ended up holding 7.64 million shares in US Airways, 18.7 million shares of America West Airlines, 3.45 million shares in Frontier Airlines, 1.47 million shares in American TransAir, and 2.38 million shares in World Airways.

Congress had deregulated the nation’s banks in 1999 when Republicans pushed through an end to the Glass-Steagall Act and Bill Clinton signed it into law. The resulting banking system crash in 2008 forced the Bush administration to nationalize the country’s two largest mortgage lenders (they held about 40% of all US mortgages), Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

The Bush administration then additionally nationalized a 77.9% share in AIG, a 36% share of Citigroup, and a 73.5% share of GMAC, forcing out GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner, who’d been a particularly terrible manager of that company and was actively lobbying against what Bush thought were America’s interests.

As President Barack Obama came into office in 2009, GM and Chrysler were on the brink of collapse. His administration created a new company, NGMCO, Inc., that nationalized the assets of GM and was 60.8% owned by the federal government.

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Something big is in the wind.

— In Ohio, Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has enlisted the abusive mother of a child rape victim — his opponent Dr. Amy Action — in a pathetic smear attempt that equally pathetic Vice President JD Vance just endorsed.

— In Michigan, after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed explicitly said that he disavows the Muslim Brotherhood — which he’s never had anything to do with in his life — Congressman Mike Rogers (who’s running for the same Senate seat) went on TV and lied, saying that El-Sayed had “refused” to repudiate the organization. He continued the lie even after the host called him on it twice (she, of course, didn’t call it a “lie” because reporters are terrified of using that word to describe Republicans).

— In Pennsylvania, Rep. Scott Perry is putting up ads that purport to be a court document alleging that his opponent, former TV news anchor Janelle Stelson, had once years ago walked into her own backyard naked. The document isn’t a court document at all, just an allegation that a fanatic Perry supporter signed and had notarized so it “looks official.”

— In Texas, Republicans are running ads against James Talarico that feature deep-fake AI images of him in a dress, suggesting he’s gay or at least queer-sympathetic. Trump went to Texas and claimed, “He’s a freaky guy. He’s got something wrong with him.”

It’s easy enough to point out that when you can’t win on the issues, the fallback strategy is to smear your opponent.

George HW Bush did it with his infamous ads against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis featuring Willie Horton (who was let out of prison on a program put into place by the previous Republican governor), and in 2024 Trump did it by claiming that Kamala Harris wanted government-paid gender transition surgery.

But these ads today go far beyond those kinds of smears, and for a good reason: Republicans are at the end of their political rope. Their past is finally catching up with them and it’s not pretty.

Back in 1981, newly inaugurated President Ronald Reagan took the advice of the billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation, which had given him a “Mandate for Leadership” booklet with over 2,000 policy recommendations (an early version of Project 2025).

These billionaires believed they had figured out a bold new way to govern America, which would make them fabulously richer while not damaging America’s middle class too badly.

Well-intentioned politicians of both parties jumped on board, hoping this dramatic new idea could reinvigorate our nation and its economy.

They figured wrong, but because the billionaires were successful at convincing Reagan to redirect the GOP and the American economy, we’ve been living in their experiment for 45 years now.

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What the hell is going on in the Republican Party?

Trump gutted his own Russia sanctions law, cut a diesel deal with Putin, and is now talking about carving up the world with Putin and Xi. Congress has the power to stop him right now: why are Thune and Johnson still on vacation?

Yesterday Donald Trump told reporters he’s ready to sit down with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in Shenzhen next month — apparently, a modern-day Yalta conference to carve up the world — and that Ukraine’s president may not be invited to the meeting that will decide Ukraine’s fate.

That came just three days after he spit on the grave of Lindsey Graham by signing an executive order waiving every operative section of the Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act that both houses of Congress had passed on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis.

Gone are the 500 percent tariffs on Russian goods, the secondary sanctions on Putin’s oil customers, and the requirement that the sanctions stay in place until Russia made peace on terms Ukraine accepted. All destroyed on a Friday night while Congress was out of town. And now he’s publicly, shamelessly defending it and essentially daring Republicans in Congress to do anything about it.

This all came a week after one of Trump’s roughly every-two-weeks-since-he-was-sworn-in phone calls with Putin, presumably to get his instructions on how to destroy American democracy, gut our government, and hand Europe over to the revived USSR that Putin fantasizes about.

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Putin apparently ordered Trump to end diesel sanctions and thus send him billions of dollars to build more drones and glide bombs to kill more Ukrainian children, and Trump said, “Sir, yes sir!”

The Wall Street Journal noted that the same call was where Putin suggested the meeting with Trump and Xi and that a former Russian intelligence officer described it to the paper as a “new Yalta,” three strongmen dividing the planet into spheres of influence.

While Democrats and average Americans are furious, a tiny handful of Republicans have timidly objected.

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As many of us were showing up this past Saturday for our local No Kings marches, with over 3,000 of them underway, the movement’s organizers suddenly found themselves locked out of their Instagram account for hours.

Meta blames it on a software glitch or something close to that, but that episode illustrates exactly the concern progressives and anti-fascists have been voicing for years: that Big Tech and the billionaires behind it have way too much power, and that they are using it to control public opinion to their own benefit.

Then yesterday morning Christiane Amanpour announced that after reporting for CNN for 43 years she’s leaving the network. While she didn’t mention nepo-baby David Ellison who now owns the network, she didn’t have to: back in May at a journalism summit in London she said she was “concerned” about Ellison ownership and how it might bring about the same kind of “ideological realignment” that he’d already imposed on CBS News.

What we’re seeing here with these two companies in microcosm is that the men who own the social media digital square where a near-majority of people get their news, and the people who own the TV networks and papers like The Washington Post, are the same handful of billionaires with political and financial axes to grind that fit nicely with Trump’s vision of a strongman state run by a ruling elite.

Whether it turns out that Meta did something for politics or it was just an error doesn’t change the fact that one company run by one man can switch off a national movement’s megaphone and doesn’t legally owe anybody an explanation.

(The good folks at Indivisible have a shocking list of egregious political insertions and manipulations by Facebook over the years that you can read here.)

Down in Brazil, Facebook deactivated one of lefty Lula’s Facebook pages just before the election, leading a top judge in that country to rule that Meta can’t throttle political content, restrict searches, or remove posts in ways that create a political imbalance. Meta denies bias, but the AP notes they never explained why Lula’s channels were getting beat down on Facebook’s algorithm.

Here at home, after Trump worked out a TikTok deal with an investor group led by Larry Ellison, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said it had “independently confirmed instances” of suppressed content there critical of Trump.

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TikTok says it’s a glitch, but a study published in Nature in May found TikTok’s algorithm had systematically favored Republican content in three swing states during 2024 when the Chinese — who Trump is courting — still largely owned the platform. Another Nature study this year found X’s feed measurably pushes users to the right so quickly that it just takes a few weeks of exposure to happen.

And this is nothing new. Back in 2017, Google rolled out a change to the news and opinion websites they were pointing people to that caused AlterNet, then one of the biggest progressive sites in the country, to lose 40 percent of its search traffic almost overnight, about 1.2 million readers a month, along with progressive sites Common Dreams, Truthout, and a dozen others.

No announcement, no hearing, no appeal.

After throttling comes self-censorship, which I watched Sunday night on CNN as a host gave a warm, friendly interview to a Republican congressman who told several easily debunked naked lies and she never called him on a single one. No memo from Ellison was necessary; Timothy Snyder calls it “anticipatory obedience.”

I’ve lived through this movie before. In late 2006, as Mitt Romney was leaving the Massachusetts governorship to run for president, his company, Bain Capital co-led a $26.7 billion leveraged buyout of Clear Channel, the radio network that carried Air America programming to around 90% of American households.

I helped start the network, wrote its first business plan, and was on its air, regularly beating Limbaugh in the ratings, and we helped get Obama into the White House. But when Bain took it over they started dropping us off their stations until, in 2010, we couldn’t sell enough advertising to stay in business. I can’t prove this was a sneaky trick by Romney or Bain, but that’s the point; we have virtually no rules or regulations to require disclosure to protect our public square.

Why are billionaires so interested in owning our social, on-air, and online media? Because regulating the conversation Americans can see and hear protects everything else they own.

Lewis Powell laid it out for the Chamber of Commerce in his 1971 memo, telling corporate America that television “plays such a predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes and emotions of our people” that business had better take it over.

It took them fifty years, Project 2025, and the internet to finish the job, but here we are.

— Zuckerberg paid Trump $25 million for having suspended his account after the January 6th attempt to end our democracy. Then when Trump came into office again Zuck scrapped fact-checking, and has been a regular visitor to the White House ever since. Common Dreams reports the Justice Department, just by coincidence of course, has since halted a federal probe of Zuck’s company.

— ABC paid Trump $15 million, Paramount paid $16 million over a 60 Minutes edit, and in June Trump approved the Ellisons’ $110 billion merger without demanding a single change. Even Gavin Newsom caved on that one, presumably for fear of offending the billionaires.

— Meanwhile Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, has openly threatened broadcasters’ licenses over coverage of Trump scandals that he calls “news distortions.”

This is not only wrong, it’s ahistoric. From the founding of America, we’ve treated information systems as a public trust. George Washington’s administration, via the Postal Service Act of 1792, subsidized American newspapers with a special one-cent charge to deliver anywhere in the country while a letter could cost a quarter.

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Washington and Madison understood that a republic can’t survive an ignorant or misinformed citizenry.

The result of that act was that between 1783 and 1820 we went from 73 newspapers in America to over 620.

Telegraph lines, also privately owned, were made “common carriers” by legislation that required them to carry everybody’s messages at the same rate.

Radio and television broadcasters got their licenses in exchange for serving what the Fairness Doctrine called “the public interest, convenience and necessity” which was generally enforced as requiring honest news reporting hourly on radio and during primetime on TV. Reagan killed that in 1987 and fast-tracked Rupert Murdoch’s citizenship, paving the way for Fox “News.”

But then the neoliberals got into their deregulation act. Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which erased the national cap of 40 radio stations per company.

Clear Channel exploded from 40 stations to nearly 1,200. In 2017 Trump’s first FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, repealed the rule that kept one company from owning the newspaper and the TV station in the same town, by coincidence the same year Google buried AlterNet.

And Section 230 of that law made it so that while newspaper publishers can still be held responsible for the content of their publications, owners of social media can’t be. At the time, Nigel Peacock and I were making a good living moderating content for CompuServe; all that went away when they no longer needed to care if there were drug sales or human trafficking on their sites.

What’s truly astonishing is that the internet itself was built by our government (DARPA and the National Science Foundation) with our tax dollars; these oligarchs who lord over our content today didn’t build this public square, they simply appropriated it and now insist it’s their private property.

The internet, in fact, is the first vehicle for the widespread dissemination of information since George Washington’s day that hasn’t been subject to any meaningful form of regulation or blocking of monopolies.

John Sherman, when he wrote the antitrust law that bears his name in 1890, put it in words that could have been found on a No Kings sign this past weekend:

“If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life.”

As I laid out in The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream, Robert Bork and the Reagan Justice Department rewrote that law into meaninglessness.

While pre-Reagan we had enormous diversity in media ownership and every downtown and mall was filled with small local businesses, forty-five years later there’s not a single significant industry in America that’s not dominated by a small handful of companies that typically behave like cartels, our media is in a half-dozen hands, and our downtowns and malls are nothing but big national chains.

Sherman’s law being gutted by Reagan and subsequent neoliberals is the only reason the Ellisons, Zuck, Musk, and Alphabet can own so much of our nation’s information system and exercise such extraordinary power over public opinion and elections.

There are some quick and easy solutions:
— Break up the empires with reinvigorated anti-trust laws.
— End Section 230 so social media owners have responsibility for what’s on their platforms.
— Restore the statutory cap on how many news outlets a single company or family can own.
— Require algorithms that manipulate our feeds to be publicly disclosed, and that people can get a non-algorithmically modified feed if they want.

And then there are some truly transformational bigger solutions that America could consider:

— Create a 21st century Digital Postal Services Act that establishes a publicly-owned, publicly financed, independently governed national social network, with no advertising, no billionaire owners, no political manipulation of feeds, and no selling personal information. Call it the United States Digital Postal Social Service, with constitutional protections against government censorship and surveillance.

— Establish a “right to digital exit” where you own all the information about you that the social media sites have collected (followers, contacts, photographs, posts, and social connections), with the power to edit, remove, or take them to a different site. You can change phone companies and still call your friends; why not the same with social media?

— Prohibit advertising based on sensitive personal information and cross-site behavioral surveillance, while still allowing contextual advertising and subscriptions. This could restrict political microtargeting and secret tailoring of messages to different voters.

— Codify a democratic right to reach your own followers, so your messages (other than spam, fraud, threats, harassment, and illegal material) aren’t limited, shadow-banned, or otherwise manipulated by the social media site’s ownership.

— Outlaw government contractors from owning social media sites that they can use to promote their own interests that are, essentially, being funded by our tax dollars.

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We don’t let Elon Musk own the Interstate Highway System, or Mark Zuckerberg own the Postal Service, or Larry Ellison own the streets and sidewalks where Americans gather to protest.

Why, then, do we let them have such extraordinary control over the “digital streets and sidewalks” where Americans increasingly gather, organize, debate, and learn about the world?

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Louise and I went to see Digger this weekend. Don’t believe the negative reviews coming from the rightwingers; this is a brilliant movie about one of the most important issues of our day, climate change, and the fossil fuel industry’s complicity in knowingly destroying our planet and our culture.

That Tom Cruise made the movie at all blew my mind; this guy has spent his entire career being the most apolitical no-issues superstar in Hollywood. Something has shifted when that guy puts on a fat suit and a tangle of white hair to play a Texas oil baron who wrecks the planet.

Digger is directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who made the movie The Revenant that won Leonardo DiCaprio — who is an outspoken advocate for climate action — an Oscar. Now it looks like Cruise has jumped on board, making what’s probably the best movie about climate change in a generation.

There’s been a concerted effort by rightwingers to convince you not to see the movie. Back in July, nearly 3 months before its release, a columnist at American Greatness was already warning Cruise’s “red-state base” that this was “yet another Hollywood feature warning us to treat Mother Nature with care… or else.”

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Two days before it opened, Breitbart’s John Nolte, who in the same column calls climate change a “hoax,” dismissed it as an “attack on those of us who dare to use oil to better our lives” that “shames us for our standard of living, which is a direct result of the oil industry.” (He admits he’s working from other people’s reviews.) And the rightwing bots on social media have been going nuts, calling it “woke.”

It all probably parallels the Meta shutdown of No Kings this weekend, along with the billionaire-owned social media platforms’ refusal to advertise and apparent shadow banning of conversations about the new movies about Musk and Zuck.

For most of the first two-thirds of Digger I was mystified about this loud, deliberately — but still entertainingly — cartoonish satire; I wasn’t sure what kind of movie I was watching, and suspending disbelief was pretty much impossible.

But the shocking last twenty minutes reorganized my entire understanding of what Cruise was doing (I’m not going to give it away) and left me — and the audience in the theater with me, who sat in shocked silence at the end — astonished at how elegantly the entire thing was put together.

The movie in many ways reminded me of Dr. Strangelove and Network (both also criticized by rightwingers): it has that kind of impact and some truly great bits of dialogue that are right up there with Slim Pickens’s character and Peter Finch as Howard Beale.

That’s mostly when the oil baron Cruise plays owns up to everything: the lies, the bought-off politicians, the decades of knowing what they were doing to the atmosphere while lying to all of us about it. But then he turns the accusation around and suddenly the entire audience for his monologue is stunned.

He lays out the fossil fuel industry’s last and best alibi — that they drilled and sold

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Over the next three weeks, Colorado voters will get to vote on an amendment to their constitution giving one single industry the ability to largely prevent any regulation of itself or its pollution. Amendment 82 says that the state would establish a “right” for the natural gas industry to sell its products.

It’ll be the only industry in any state to have a state constitutional right assigned to it.

Things like pollution controls to protect air and water that might reduce consumption would violate that right. So would local communities trying to limit or ban gas wells or pipelines. Even during a dry fire time, an effort to ban gas-fueled camp stoves and outdoor grills or lights would be a violation.

The amendment is being pushed by a dark money group called Advance Colorado; the original donors behind it are hidden, but it’s not hard to guess. And if it passes in Colorado, expect similar amendments and laws to pop up in every state in the union.

This is, frankly, nuts. Instead of increasing the power of the fossil fuel industry and encouraging more consumption of their planet-destroying products, we should be helping Americans tap into nuclear fusion power that’s free, compliments of that giant reactor 93 million miles away that we call our Sun.

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What reminded me of this is that here in cloudy, rainy Oregon we just started, for the first time since April, to buy electricity from our local grid because 3 years ago we installed solar panels and batteries on our home. The summers are free (which includes charging our Ioniq5 electric car) and in the winter I use a tiny fraction of what we used to buy.

So why, Louise wondered out loud when I told her that we’d just bought $6 worth of electricity this week for the first time in months, hasn’t every home in every city in America — particularly those south of the Mason-Dixon line — done the same?

The answer, of course, is that most people can’t afford the up-front cost of the solar installations. But what if there was a way to solarize most of the houses in a community or even a state that didn’t cost the homeowners a penny and left them with free solar electricity from panels with a 20-40 year lifespan?

It’s actually something that’s ridiculously easy to do, if we can just find politicians willing to defy the fossil fuel and for-profit utility industries.

I first understood how this could work for an entire country back in September of 2009, when I was invited to join German Member of Parliament Hermann Scheer as a keynote speaker at a conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Almost a decade earlier, Scheer had shepherded his “100,000 Rooftops” program through the German Parliament and was eager to talk about how it worked and how it could work in Spain. As he laid out the concept to me over lunch, it was simple and elegant.

You can read the details here and here but this is something that American cities, counties, and states could implement an American variation on right now.

First, you pass a law saying that the local or state government will 100% guarantee/backstop 10-year bank or credit union loans up to $40,000 to install solar power and batteries on any home.

If the homeowner defaults, the government will pick up the loan. Because the risk to the bank becomes zero this way, the law can also mandate that the loans are made in the neighborhood of a 1.5% rate, enough to cover processing costs and give the banks a small but reliable profit.

Second, you require the utility to buy surplus electricity from those panels at a multiple of the current going retail rate for the first ten years while those loans are being paid off.

The goal is for each home to generate enough cash every month, or at least averaged over a year, to cover 100% (or something close to it) of the cost of the loan payments. Depending on local power costs, the abundance of local solar, etc., that could run from 1.5 times retail all the way up to a few times retail.

This way, the utility is paying off the loans so the homeowners incur no costs, and the banks are making a small profit. So far, everybody is happy except, apparently, the utility.

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You’d think that the power companies would object to this since they’re the ones paying the premium for electricity for the first ten years, but think of it from their point of view.

Every home that comes online is part of one less power plant, transformer distribution station, or high-tension setup they have to pay to build and/or maintain. (Germany did this to generate enough power to decommission several nuclear power plants.) At the end of a decade they’ll have a reliable source of power that’ll last for many more decades that they can sell to businesses, data centers, apartment buildings, or whomever else wants electricity but isn’t eligible for this program.

For non-profit and community-owned utilities this would be a huge boon. They’d be able to better serve their customers during times the sun isn’t shining, upgrade their existing equipment to a smart grid, and be available to set up other revenue sources like EV charging stations or even data centers.

The picture is a bit dimmer for the for-profit utilities, although even there if the program were rolled out more slowly it could help them by ending the need to build new power plants and deal with the rising costs of fuel. My local power company, Portland General Electric, is for-profit, but they still happily buy electricity from me because that’s less they have to worry about producing.

For-profit utilities, by the way, are only 5 percent of the companies selling electricity in America, although because they’re concentrated in high population areas they serve about two-thirds of Americans.

If this were done nationally, you could even require all electric utilities to be owned and run by nonprofit co-ops or local governments like the other 95% are in America today. It would take some serious political commitment to resist their lobbying pressures, but could be done; Nebraska, for example, hasn’t had a for-profit utility company anywhere in the state for over 80 years.

And under FDR, the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 did this on a regional basis that ended up producing the TVA and the Bonneville dam (now investor owned), which provides much of my region’s electricity.

If we were to revive the 30% federal tax credit (that Trump and the GOP killed with their Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill) for installing home solar and batteries that Louise and I used, and states were to add in their tax credits as many (including Oregon) did recently, it would also go a long way toward making such a program more easily possible.

And it would trigger an economic boom for the whole country. We could build solar panel factories, companies that construct the batteries and control systems, and launch a massive construction/installation revival that would hire millions and could last decades.

There are a few bugs and tweaks that would need to be worked out, not the least being the rate utilities pay during that ten-year “pay off the mortgage on the solar installation” period.

But imagine if the entire cities of Phoenix, Atlanta, Mobile, or Los Angeles — and hundreds of others — could run without having to burn an ounce of fossil fuels.

Electrification is exploding around the world. The majority of cars being sold in China and Europe are electric; both have massive, industrial scale wind and solar installations, as well as hundreds of millions of rooftop solar systems right now.

America is the laggard, largely because the fossil fuel industry owns the GOP, thanks in part to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalizing the bribery and purchase of judges and politicians.

We can change this and build a bright new future for our children and grandchildren. Pass it along.

Louise’s Daily Song: “No More Blood for Oil”

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The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy or the Kindle edition.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

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With virtually no mention or reporting in the corporate press, Republican-run states are again running the voter purge of millions that gave Donald Trump the White House in 2024.

Yesterday morning, Reuters published a special report on the ways the Trump administration could “interfere” with the midterms, noting that a lawyer in Idaho’s Republican attorney general’s office bragged that his state had “taken a leading role in ensuring its voter registration list is purged….”

Yep, they used the word “purged.” They’re not even bothering with the polite terms anymore.

And it’s not like the Republicans really believe the mythology they’re trying to sell the rest of us. The GOP-aligned, billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation spent over a decade doing a deep dive into every state looking for voter fraud and noncitizen voters, examining every American vote since 2000 — more than a billion ballots cast nationwide — and found just 89 cases of non-citizen voters. In more than twenty years!

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The libertarian Cato Institute did a similar analysis specifically on the 2020 election looking for any evidence that Trump’s claims were right that the election was “stolen” from him by “Mexicans” voting in the US election. They concluded the same thing:

“There are likely many problems with America’s voting system and there is no doubt that a non-zero number of non-citizens illegally voted, but there is no good evidence that noncitizens voted illegally in large enough numbers to actually shift the outcome of elections or even change the number of electoral votes.”

Nonetheless, Republicans keep promoting their lie that “illegals are voting” to justify massive purges of legal voters whose only crime is being Black, Hispanic, living in a college town, or being a big city dweller in a Red state. A likely Democratic voter, in other words.

And let’s not forget that hypocrite Trump himself is all in on encouraging voter fraud; at his “midterm convention” in Dallas a few weeks ago he had thousands of people raise their hands and repeat an oath after him:

“I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell...”

And the Reuters story comes three weeks after six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court let Trump’s DHS, run by former plumber Markwayne Mullin, turn an ICE immigration database called SAVE into a bulk voter-purging machine right in the middle of an election.

When Texas ran its registered voters through SAVE they purged thousands of people wrongly flagged as noncitizens; LULAC is suing to try to get these actual citizens voting rights restored.

Which all raises a question that I’ve been asking on the air (and in my book The Hidden History of the War on Voting) for years:

“Why is it that if a Republican governor wants to take away your gun he has to go to court, but if he wants to take away your vote he doesn’t even have to notify you?”

You’ll recall that back in 2008 five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court declared that we all have an absolute constitutional “right” to own a gun, and if any state or city wants to violate that right they have to go before a judge and present evidence that you can contest and even appeal all the way to the Supreme Court itself.

When we have a “right” in America and our government wants to take it away, they have to provide notice, irrefutable evidence, a courtroom and neutral judge, a finding, and a right to appeal. It’s called “due process” and is established by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

And in 1993, Congress passed and Bill Clinton signed a law establishing — without any ambiguity — that your vote is also a “right.” The National Voter Registration Act lays it out clearly:

“[T]he right of citizens of the United States to vote is a fundamental right,” and that “it is the duty of the Federal, State, and local governments to promote the exercise of that right.”

And the phrase “right to vote” also appears five times in the Constitution itself, more than any other right that document names (guns get a single mention).

So, why is it that Republican secretaries of state are bragging about the millions of Americans whose right to vote they’re “purging” from the voting rolls this year? And how are they getting away with using junk-mail-appearing postcards to justify those purges?

In 1981, the RNC sent letters to Black and Hispanic voters in New Jersey to “verify” their voting status; they built a challenge list of 45,000 people and posted off-duty cops at polling places in predominantly Black and Democratic Newark and Trenton to check names to challenge those voters.

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The Democratic Party sued against this practice, called “caging” in the direct mail industry, and won a court order blocking the Republicans from doing it. That consent decree expired in 2018, though, the same year that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court told Ohio Secretary of State John Husted that he could resume the practice, but this time instead of the GOP paying for it the cost of mailing the postcards could be covered by Ohio taxpayers.

Justice Breyer’s dissent pointed out the obvious fraud of it, noting that on average around 4 percent of Americans move their residence every year but:

“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as likely ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because they [allegedly] changed their residences.”

Now the practice has spread to virtually every Republican-controlled state. They send out millions of postcards that look like junk mail and if you don’t return one and skip an election, you’re officially purged. They don’t even have to notify you; you find out when you show up on election day and they either turn you away or give you a “provisional” ballot.

During and after the 2024 election, my radio/TV show’s phone lines were jammed with people — many from big cities in Ohio and Georgia — complaining that this had happened to them and they’d just discovered it when they tried to vote. None had been notified.

And, sure enough, the provisional ballots were the tell that exposes this GOP scam. The Election Assistance Commission’s own survey of the 2024 election found that 1,736,209 Americans were shunted onto provisional ballots that year, and that the single most common reason was that the voter “did not appear on the list of eligible voters.”

Provisional ballots are often not counted at all, unless the voter shows up at the Secretary of State’s office before the final count to certify that they are, in fact, a legal citizen and voter.

Since the Husted decision by the Supreme Court allowing this bizarre practice, Republicans have put their corrupt system into hyperdrive. That same EAC federal survey found that GOP-controlled states sent out nearly 40 million “confirmation postcards” in just the two years between the 2022 and 2024 elections.

As a result, more than 21 million registered voters were stripped from the voting rolls in the months leading up to the 2024 election, and the most common justification was that they failed to return that junk-mail postcard.

Reporter and former statistics professor Greg Palast testified about this in federal court for the NAACP and, here on Hartmann Report, detailed how his team went through Georgia’s purge list person-by-person.

They found 198,351 Georgians who’d been cancelled even though they hadn’t moved and were still (mostly Black) citizens. In Wisconsin, where Harris lost by 29,397 votes, Republicans had purged 166,433 voters from the lists. Pennsylvania had purged 360,132 people, about three times Trump’s margin of victory in that state.

His conclusion was straightforward:

“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.”

In other words, your “right to a gun” is real but your “right to vote” is not, at least as long as corrupt Republicans control the Court and Congress.

Imagine, for example, what would happen if your county sheriff started confiscating guns from people who failed to mail back a postcard. The rightwing press would be hysterical and the Court would strike it down in a New York minute.

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So here’s where we are today. Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger (pronounced “Raff - ens - purger”) cancelled nearly 471,000 registrations last August, 6 percent of the entire state, the majority Democrats according to a Fair Fight analysis.

When Black Voters Matter asked for the records behind the purge, Raffensperger’s office handed over a stripped-down spreadsheet, and they had to sue him to try to get the names. Ohio’s Frank LaRose published a list of 352,389 names for cancellation just this past year, following a 2024 purge in which Ohio Democrats documented more than a thousand wrongly removed voters in Cuyahoga County alone.

Meanwhile Trump’s Justice Department has filed 31 lawsuits against states and the District of Columbia to seize their full voter files, including driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers, so the whole country can be run through his flawed SAVE purging database.

Republicans can’t win elections on their track record of taking away healthcare, gutting the Social Security administration, and handing massive tax cuts to billionaires, so they send postcards into Black and Hispanic neighborhoods and college towns. The only thing that’s changed since Jim Crow, in other words, is the technology.

Democrats in Congress tried to fix this situation in 2022 with the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act. It passed the House and had a majority in the Senate, but every Republican in the Senate joined in a filibuster. If Kirstin Sinema and Joe Manchin hadn’t stabbed us all in the back by voting with Republicans to sustain the filibuster, these crimes against our democracy would be explicitly illegal, as they already are in every other advanced nation in the world.

Fixing this — codifying our “right to vote” per the NVRA from 1993 and with new legislation — has to be right up there with overturning the other most-corrupt action to come from Republicans on the Court aka Citizens United.

But none of that will ever happen if Republicans continue to control the House and the Senate so Trump can further disintegrate our republic and turn us into his beloved Russia before the 2028 election.

So, vote!

And please share this article with your friends in Red states, support independent journalism by subscribing to the Hartmann Report, and pass it on. They can’t purge all of us if we’re all watching.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Erase My Name”

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy or the Kindle edition.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

Before we get into it, please hit that heart button and the little circle above the picture to restack this Daily Take on Notes. Every restack — which is free and you can add comments to — puts this info in front of readers the billionaires’ propaganda machine (whose social media sites have all shadow-banned me) would rather never see it.

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When we think of strongman dictatorships we often imagine tanks in the streets, but those usually come in the later stages of repression (think Tienanmen Square) and often are never even needed (think today’s Russia). Instead, as every dictator on Earth can tell you, you don’t have to silence the entire country; all you have to do is shut up a few strategically-selected people visibly and publicly enough and the rest of the country will get the message and back away.

That’s the message of this week’s raid on Ilhan Omar’s home, and so many other atrocities committed by Trump’s eager fascist lickspittles over the past 21 months. He and his advisors are simply repeating a long and well-trod history.

On the morning of March 14, 1757, King George II ordered Admiral John Byng executed by firing squad on the quarterdeck of the HMS Monarch in Portsmouth harbor. His crime? He’d just lost a battle off the coast of Minorca. Two years later, Voltaire wrote the event into his novella Candide, having the hero of his story watch the execution from the deck of a nearby ship. When a sailor standing with him asks why Byng was killed, his hero replied:

“In this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others. Pour encourager les autres.”

The phrase has been foundational to the rise of every tyrant in history since. Pick a few people, make an example of them, and the fear will spread across the population in a way that’s just as effective as an army of secret police.

The genius, as Voltaire pointed out, is that it costs almost nothing yet, when done right, can have enormous impact on public behavior.

Trump has been running this play since the day he took office, and this week he ran it again, this time on a member of Congress just three weeks before an election.

Reports suggest that Homeland Security Investigations — a division of ICE — raided Ilhan Omar’s house in Washington looking for paperwork her late father filled out when she was a child refugee. She has not been charged with a crime and, as is so common, ICE isn’t explaining what they’re up to here.

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That same afternoon Trump called her “totally crooked” and went off on her that night in Youngstown, Ohio calling the country she came from “one of the worst countries anywhere on the planet” while the crowd chanted “deport.”

Ever since March, this administration has apparently been looking for ways to take down this high-profile and unapologetic critic of Trump and his many criminal and authoritarian acts. Back in March, JD Vance told a rightwing podcaster that Omar had “definitely committed immigration fraud” and that Stephen Miller was working out “how do you go after her, how do you investigate her, how do you build a case.”

As former Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor told me on my radio/TV program when Trump went after him, Comey, and others, the raid itself is the punishment.

To destroy a person financially, to traumatize them emotionally, and to scare the hell out of their colleagues in a way that will make them shut up you don’t need a conviction. Hell, you don’t even need a trial. Just a subpoena, a lawyer letter filled with threats, or a raid can lead to hundreds of thousands in lawyer bills and months of sleepless nights.

This has now — like in Russia — become standard operating practice. And it reaches all the way down to a single mother of two in New Jersey; Joanne Carducci, who posts as JoJoFromJerz on Substack, revealed last month that lawyers for the president and first lady spent the first half of this year sending her letters demanding a retraction, an apology, and money over her online criticism of Melania Trump. She bravely describes in detail how threats left her worrying about her children, her home, and her livelihood.

And that’s one of the most low-profile of the cases; we never would have known if she hadn’t spoken up. How many other authors and commentators have been similarly threatened? Odds are 99% will never write about it, particularly if the threats also contain demands for confidentiality like hers apparently did.

— There’s James Comey, indicted twice now, most recently for putting a photo of seashells on social media. It’s been six months since he was charged, and he won’t even be arraigned until January of next year. And the Justice Department fired his daughter from her job as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan.

— Letitia James, who got a fraud conviction against Trump, was indicted for mortgage fraud last October and after the case was dismissed in November Todd Blanche brought the same case before two more grand juries over two weeks; both still refused to indict her. Now Bill Pulte is going after her.

— Lisa Cook was merely the first Black woman to be a governor of the Federal Reserve, an intolerable situation for this racist, revanchist regime. After the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s efforts to fire her, last week Trump signed an order for her to appear at a closed-door kangaroo court “hearing” on November 5th, two days after the election.

— They went after Senator Adam Schiff, who had to set up a legal defense fund to deal with the consequences.

— Cassidy Hutchison, who at 25 sat in front of the January 6th committee and told her story, has — bizarrely — the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ coming after her.

— When Trump turned his machine against former CIA Director John Brennan, who’s been publicly criticizing Trump, two prosecutors in a row quit so they’ve staffed the case with military lawyers and a former clerk to Judge Aileen Cannon.

— And then there’s Davey Hearn, the three-time Olympian who touched the Reflecting Pool that Trump had hired a donor and friend to re-paint. He was arrested, Jeanine Pirro indicted him for a 10-year felony, and last week his lawyers asked the inspectors general to investigate what they called a “nightmare.” I’m not holding my breath; the arrest for publicly embarrassing Trump was the entire point.

The press is getting the same treatment.

— Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, two Black journalists, were arrested in January at Pam Bondi’s personal direction for covering a protest at a St. Paul church, even though a federal magistrate had already refused to sign the warrant for lack of probable cause. Prosecutors later had to admit the sworn claim that the two were “chanting with agitators” was simply false, but their motions to dismiss the arrest are still pending and racking up legal bills.

— Trump went after George Stephanopoulos and ABC and they stupidly gave him $16 million dollars to make it go away. Instead, though, Trump turned his guns (and his lickspittle, Brendan Carr) on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel.

— And as of Friday, the Justice Department has antitrust demands out to all five networks for briefly suspending pool coverage after the White House banned CNN.

These are just the tip of the iceberg of Trump’s efforts to intimidate and shut down his critics. Reuters reported that the Trump regime has put up a cross-agency task force, meeting since May of last year, to coordinate punishment of perceived enemies.

Their Pulitzer-winning reporting on this issue has counted at least 470 targets of retribution by last November, including 128 federal workers fired and 112 security clearances pulled. The group Protect Democracy has an even more extensive tracker of these efforts to silence dissent and truth.

None of this is new, strategy-wise. In the weeks after the Reichstag fire in 1933, Hitler opened a detention facility at Dachau and threw a few thousand leftwing commentators, politicians, and journalist (among them Carl von Ossietzky) in as a message to the rest of the country.

Stalin exploited the 1934 murder of Sergei Kirov as an excuse for show trials that were really designed to cow every party official and newspaper editor who may think of opposing him.

In 2003, the early days of what has since become his dictatorship, Putin jailed just one billionaire oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and all the rest immediately fell into line. When a few press outlets dared challenge him, reporter Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in her apartment building’s elevator and the Russian press hasn’t spoken up since.

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And it’s been tried here before, too, by the guy who taught this to Trump himself.

Joe McCarthy never succeeded in sending anybody to prison for being a communist, but he didn’t have to. As I point out in The Last American President, he and his chief counsel Roy Cohn very publicly destroyed the careers of a few people and, as a result, thousands of teachers, screenwriters, diplomats, and union organizers quietly shut up. What we’re watching today is the Cohn method with the full weight of the United States Department of Justice behind it.

I’ve even encountered a small taste of this in my career. In the late 1960s and early 1970s I was a reporter and the morning news anchor at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, then the number one station in Michigan’s capital.

One morning a state police officer and a federal agent walked into our newsroom and told us that they were about to make a mass arrest a few miles away at a house full of young people who’d stopped paying their federal taxes to protest the Vietnam War. They asked us, politely, to not report it because, they said, they didn’t want to encourage the movement.

After they left, my news director and I argued about it for several hours. It was ultimately his call, though, and we didn’t run the story. Nobody threatened us, but nobody had to. Two men with badges and the power to make your life miserable had asked a favor, and we gave it to them, and I’ve carried that around for more than fifty years.

If a polite request could do that to a newsroom in 1970, think about what a pre-dawn raid on a congresswoman does to every reporter, prosecutor, professor, and civil servant watching the news this week.

The judges who’ve been about the only force in America capable of stopping Trump have been feeling it the most. U.S. Marshals logged 564 threats against federal judges in fiscal 2025, and Judge John McConnell in Rhode Island — who Trump and his allies called a “monster” and a “lunatic” for blocking a funding freeze — had marshals tell him they’d identified at least six credible death threats.

Judge Esther Salas, who now spends her time warning her colleagues about what his rhetoric produces, knows the power of Trump’s intimidation efforts. In 2020 her only son, Daniel, opened the door of their New Jersey home to a Trump supporter in a delivery uniform who’d written that she was a “lazy and incompetent Latina judge appointed by Obama” and shot Daniel dead. He was twenty.

Trump’s goal is a quiet country. A country where the prosecutor doesn’t bring the case against the powerful donor, the reporter doesn’t file the story, the professor doesn’t sign the letter, the grand juror doesn’t want the hassle, and the judge wonders about her family before she rules.

That’s what the admiral on the quarterdeck was for. You don’t need to arrest a nation to get there. You just need to arrest a few hundred people loudly enough and often enough, and eventually everyone else essentially arrests themselves.

What gives me hope, however, is how the courts have been holding the line.

Three Virginia grand juries looked at Letitia James and said no. A Minnesota magistrate refused to sign the Don Lemon warrant. Judges in Alexandria rebuked prosecutors from the bench. Career lawyers in Florida walked out of the grand conspiracy case rather than put their names on it. The Supreme Court, of all institutions, told Trump he can’t fire Lisa Cook on a whim.

But the lesson history teaches us when we look at how dozens of democracies have been felled by fascist strongmen is that after the legislature and much of the press are cowed eventually the courts will crack, too. The only thing that will prevent that is if Democrats can take power in Congress and use the power of the subpoena to expose this fascist scheme.

Show up for the reporters and the whistleblowers and the Olympic canoeists when they’re in the dock, and don’t let a single one of these cases pass without comment. Show up to vote and bring five friends.

And if this piece was useful, please share it widely and consider supporting independent media by subscribing to the Hartmann Report at hartmannreport.com. They’re counting on our silence. Let’s disappoint them.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Silence is the Prize”

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy or the Kindle edition.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

Before we get into it, please hit that heart button and the little circle above the picture to restack this Daily Take on Notes. Every restack — which is free and you can add comments to — puts this info in front of readers the billionaires’ propaganda machine (whose social media sites have all shadow-banned me) would rather never see it.

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Three weeks from today, California voters will have their ballots tallied on Proposition 40 (and 41 and 42, which would negate 40) that will impose a one-time 5% tax on the assets — the wealth — of the state’s 200+ billionaires.

The money will be used to make up for the massive almost-trillion-dollar cuts to Medicaid, called Medi-Cal in that state, that hits in January because the Republican’s Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill used it to pay for their trillions in tax cuts for billionaires.

The California Democratic Party has formally endorsed Prop 40 along with the California Nurses Association and the state AFL-CIO, and if the state’s Democratic politicians had backed the tax across the board, odds are very high that it would pass and 42 (which is now polling over 50%) would fail.

But Governor Gavin Newsom has come out against it, making an argument that dates back to the Reagan years:

“If you ask the morbidly rich to pay more in taxes they’ll simply leave the state.”

That threat is the beating heart of a bizarre economic and governing philosophy called neoliberalism. I remember the late Milton Friedman hustling this crap back in the 1970s and was horrified when Reagan dusted off its variation in the old Horse and Sparrow economics that Warren Harding had tried in the 1920s, calling it “trickle down.”

Harding told people that if you feed horses [rich people] extra oats, that will pass through into their patties on the road where the sparrows [working class people] can pick them out. He cut the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from 73 to 25 percent, which kicked off the Roaring 20’s and led directly to Black Tuesday and the Republican Great Depression.

It took FDR almost a decade to completely repudiate Harding’s policies and put the nation back together and, with his 90 percent top tax rate on the morbidly rich, create the first middle class to encompass more than half a nation in the history of the world.

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Reagan cut the top rate from 70 percent down to 28 percent and raised taxes on working-class people 11 times, according to his own economic advisor Bruce Bartlett, to partially cover the hole that blew in the nation’s budget (Reagan tripled our national debt in a mere 8 years, a non-wartime record at the time.)

Thus began the destruction of FDR’s vaunted middle class and the explosion of today’s predatory billionaire class.

The “tax burden” (a favorite Republican phrase) moved down the income ladder from the rich to working class people and has kept moving in that direction through every Republican administration since.

But neoliberalism wasn’t limited to America; it swept the democratic world in the 1980s and 1990s, most famously embraced by the French and the British but popping up measurably in virtually all the European nations. The result is today most visible in the student riots that are tearing France apart.

I was listening to The New York Times “Daily” podcast on the topic yesterday and they started out by blaming France’s debt and school crisis on decades of over-spending on social policy without mentioning the revenue (taxes) side of the equation. Interestingly, the top comment (as I’m writing this) on the podcast says:

“Is it any surprise that the neoliberal Times ignored the effect of cutting taxes on the rich & went immediately for France’s social welfare programs? Instead of cutting taxes, France should have raised them. Ask Kansas how trickle-down economics actually works.”

Macron — a neoliberal “conservative” and former investment banker — is still doubling down on tax-cutting neoliberalilsm. This week their legislature, the National Assembly, opens debate on an austerity budget that cuts pensions and freezes wages for public workers.

Young people are in the streets, around 400 high schools have shut down, and the government’s borrowing costs have hit their highest level in at least two decades. And France is probably just the beginning; Bloomberg is warning that the turmoil could and probably will spread across the Eurozone.

France does spend a lot on its people: everybody has healthcare, childcare, college, and a dignified retirement and the trains generally run on time. And those costs are what the neoliberal politicians and press in America are focusing on.

Almost nobody, though, is asking why the morbidly rich in France are paying less and working class people are paying more in the years since the ’80s, just like it’s been here in America since our very own neoliberal Reagan Revolution.

From 1914 through 1986, France’s top income tax rate on the morbidly rich was generally above 60 percent and it’s middle class was steadily growing. Until 1985 its corporations paid a 50 percent tax on profits. Then the neoliberals arrived, and today the top personal rate is 45 percent, the top corporate rate is 25 percent, and, while French billionaires have never had it so good, the French middle class is in crisis.

While total taxes actually climbed from 33.7 percent of the economy in 1965 to 43.5 percent today, the money that used to come from the top tiers of society and business was replaced with flat levies on paychecks and on purchases that everybody buys. As a result, the progressive income tax went from 12 percent of public revenue in 1981 to 6 percent by 2014.

The result is that the effective tax rate on the richest 0.1 percent is 26 percent rather than the 45 percent that an affluent doctor or lawyer might pay, as France’s Institut des Politiques Publiques points out.

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Economist Gabriel Zucman puts it more bluntly, noting that the average French person pays about 51 percent of their income in taxes of all kinds while billionaires pay about 25 percent. Which is why, over that same period, the fortunes of France’s 500 richest people swelled from 6 percent of the country’s GDP to 42 percent.

Demonstrating that old cliché about the definition of insanity, Macron stupidly poured gasoline on the fire his predecessors had started.

He scrapped the country’s wealth tax and cut the corporate rate from 33 percent to 25 percent; France’s own national auditor, the Cour des comptes, concluded that his tax cuts have cost the treasury more than €60 billion a year and produced no savings whatsoever to offset them. (That’s a bit more than a third of this year’s entire French government’s deficit.)

And make no mistake: the French people understand exactly what’s been done to them. When French-American economist Gabriel Zucman suggested France should levy a 2 percent minimum wealth tax (like Prop 40 in California, but smaller and permanent) on family fortunes over €100 million (about 1,800 French households) fully 86 percent of the public supported it, including 92 percent of Macron’s own party.

Nonetheless, Macron’s conservative allies joined up with Le Pen’s hard right to kill it in the Assembly last fall, warning that — wait for it — if it passed, “The rich would flee France.”

So now Macron is trying to extract that money from the nation’s retirees, just like Republicans here in America are right now talking about the need to cut Social Security and Medicare to sustain their tax cuts for Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

France is almost certainly just the first domino to fall from neoliberal stupidity, as I detailed in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America. When you look at income taxes across the developed world in 1981, the average hit to the morbidly rich was 66 percent. By 2013 it had fallen to 43 percent, as the worldwide average corporate tax rate fell from 47 to 25 percent.

When two British scholars looked at 50 years of tax cuts for the rich in 18 wealthy countries, they showed how these neoliberal tax cuts consistently made the rich richer but did nothing measurable for growth or jobs. The sparrows (and us trickle-ees) are still waiting for the oats and drips.

Which brings us back to California and Newsom’s political calculations. Economists Saez and Zucman calculate that California’s billionaires currently pay about 0.2 percent of their wealth in state taxes each year, so even if fully a quarter of them stormed off to Texas or Florida it’d take a century for that lost income tax to equal what this one-time wealth tax would bring in even with only three-quarters of them still there to pay it.

Study after study shows most of them don’t leave anyway, because their homes, their companies, and their friends are where they made their money.

In 2022, for example, Massachusetts voters approved a 4 percent surtax on incomes over a million dollars, and sure enough, billionaires like Patriots owner Robert Kraft and New Balance’s Jim Davis shrilly warned that the rich would flee the state.

Instead, the tax brought in $3.38 billion last year, the third year in a row it’s more than doubled the state’s original estimate. Federal tax data from Massachusetts proves higher-income households were less likely to leave the year after it passed than the year before. And that money is now paying for quality schools, free community college, and low-cost public transit.

Newsome, of course, knows all this. But he also knows that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized billionaires buying our elections, so having access to billionaires’ money could be a big factor in his all-but-announced run for president in 2028.

What the French students are showing the world right now is what happens when politicians with real power across the political spectrum cling to neoliberal low-tax doctrine. The debt piles up, the bond traders start circling like chum-drawn sharks, and pretty soon everybody is talking about “fixing” Social Security, schools, and the rest of the social safety net to “restore fiscal responsibility.”

Meanwhile the morbidly rich see their wealth explode and — in America with this corrupt Supreme Court — their political power rises right along with it, which just accelerates the process.

So, if you live in California, vote “Yes!” on Prop 40 and “No!!!” on 41 and 42. And keep an eye and ear out for potential Democratic contenders for 2028 who — like Congressman Ro Khanna — have the courage to tell the truth about these things.

News for People, Not Power

Louise’s Daily Song: “We Gave It All To The Rich”

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

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy or the Kindle edition.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

Before we get into it, please hit that heart button and the little circle above the picture to restack this Daily Take on Notes. Every restack — which is free and you can add comments to — puts this info in front of readers the billionaire’s propaganda machine (whose social media sites have shadow-banned me and most progressives) would rather never see it.

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Is Putin running America through Trump, is Trump just a “useful idiot” for the Russians, or is he the worst traitor America’s seen since the days of Benedict Arnold?

Yesterday morning, Trump took to his Nazi-infested social media site to announce to the world (and a bit earlier to people who give him $100,000 a month for market-moving information) that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy ceasefire,” telling the world “Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!”

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy responded that the deal was “news for me,” and the Kremlin spokesman said three days earlier that Russia wasn’t interested in any sort of a limited truce like Trump announced. But Trump made an identical announcement back in September, which was also a lie, and the night of his announcement both countries continued to bomb each other’s refineries and power plants.

I’m guessing that Trump’s announcement was designed to shift the news cycle away from reporting on the most nakedly pro-Russia act by any American president in our nation’s history that happened on Friday.

After one of his regular roughly-every-two-weeks-since-he-was-inaugurated phone calls with Putin, Trump announced that he’d just suspended our worldwide sanctions against any country that buys oil or refined products from Russia so that country could put millions of tons of diesel on the world market.

Every past sanction suspension — there have been a few — have lasted just 30 days, but Trump extended this one for six months, giving Russia billions they’re desperate for to keep up their violent, illegal war against our democratic ally, Ukraine.

As if to give Ukraine, Europe, the free world, and every American who believes in democracy instead of naked autocracy the middle finger, Trump stood in front of the White House and told reporters:

“I want to thank President Putin.”

This won’t do a thing for American diesel prices, although Trump is hoping that pissed off truckers and farmers believe it will. Even if every drop of that diesel ended up here — and most of it won’t — it would only cover about nine days of what we burn here.

But in reality this is simply Trump bailing out his mentor, owner, blackmailer, or whatever Putin is. Russia’s diesel output right now is down 30 percent and Putin’s hold on the country is getting shaky, as Terrence Goggin (The West Point History Professor) argues so cogently. With prices this high, this deal will give Putin billions.

Following Trump’s announcement, Putin showed America and the world exactly how seriously he took Trump’s Friday statement: Saturday morning, Russian guided bombs killed at least 20 people, three of them children, in a residential neighborhood in Zaporizhzhia.

Trump’s response that afternoon, instead of calling Putin out, was to blame our diesel prices on Zelenskyy for hitting Russian refineries and to declare:

“I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”

In fact, diesel is high because refinery capacity in the Gulf states has crashed due to being hit over and over again by both Iranian and Houthi missiles. While Ukraine’s strikes are hurting Russian diesel supplies, as Putin noted two weeks ago at his annual Valdai forum in Moscow, that has nothing to do with America; we refine virtually all of our diesel right here at home.

Prices are high here because of scarcity-driven pricing around tight international supplies, and our oil companies are using those international rates to price-gouge American drivers on both diesel and gasoline. The industry that Trump said he’d do anything for if they gave him a billion dollars is now making tens of billions in windfall profits every week.

But this is just the beginning of Trump’s most recent anti-American crime spree.

Remember the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act? It passed and was signed into law a mere three weeks ago and gives the Trump administration until Sunday of this week to begin punishing countries that still buy Putin’s oil.

He’s breaking that law right in front of us all.

And that’s on top of the Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act that flat-out banned all imports of any Russian energy products to the United States. If Trump wanted to issue waivers in a way that would comply with that law — which has been on the books for four years now, dating back to the Biden years — he’d first have to give Congress 45 days advance notice, certify in writing that Russia has withdrawn all of its troops from Ukraine and stopped all bombing, and then wait a full 90 days for Congress to give him a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.

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As Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen noted, Trump and his lickspittles have totally bypassed every one of those requirements; Republican Senator Thom Tillis said yesterday that the deal is both illegal and will put more American lives at risk.

Which provoked former Illinois Republican Congressman Joe Walsh — a frequent guest on my radio/TV program — to say:

“Trump is a traitor to the free world.”

Walsh used to be a lonely voice in his old party, but now he’s rapidly getting company. Mike Pence called the deal a “betrayal” of Graham’s legacy. Senator Lisa Murkowski and Congressmen Don Bacon and Michael McCaul have all condemned it.

Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick has warned Mike Johnson that he’ll use a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill he’s calling the Ronald Reagan Peace Through Strength Act that would block any purchase of Russian oil (even though two other laws already make it illegal).

Which caused Democratic Senator Mark Kelly to ask out loud the question a lot of Americans are wondering:

“Whose side is Trump on?”

I can think of two possible answers, and both are insane.

The first is that Putin is actually steering Trump’s presidency. First, weaken America and gut our military, and then give Putin whatever he wants:

Put an alcoholic B-list weekend TV guy in charge of the Pentagon, a plumber in charge of DHS, a fracking guy in charge of Energy, a wrestling billionaire in charge of Education, a brain-worm-disabled former heroin- and sex-addicted lawyer in charge of our nation’s health, let a ketamine-addled trillionaire rip apart our federal government and destroy our soft power around the world by taking down USAID, shut down our pro-democracy propaganda operations (VOA, etc.), put a weight-loss “miracle pill” hawker in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, a C-list former reality TV star in charge of our airlines, his own criminal defense lawyer to run the coverup of Epstein at the Department of Justice, etc. The list is virtually endless.

The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee documented that Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was also passing internal campaign data to a Russian intelligence officer while running the campaign and the two of them worked on a plan to hand eastern Ukraine to Moscow. Then there was Helsinki where Trump humiliated our intelligence service while all but shining Putin’s shoes on live TV.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s first presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Things were picking up in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

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As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said. (emphasis added)

Then there was the red carpet in Alaska last year, where Russia’s foreign minister showed up in a sweatshirt reading “CCCP,” as if to announce who’d won the Cold War after all. There’s the invitation to Putin, a man under indictment for war crimes and stealing children from Ukraine, to come to Mar-a-Lago for the G20 in December. Historian Heather Cox Richardson walked through that whole history Saturday night and closed by asking “how much more evidence is necessary” before we conclude that this president is working for Russia.

The second possibility is that nobody’s blackmailing or threatening Trump and he’s doing all of this of his own free will because he thinks it’ll make him richer.

The midterms were 25 days off when he made that call, diesel prices are killing Republican candidates, and Trump desperately needed a positive-sounding headline.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that Putin personally pitched Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner at the Kremlin on the sale of Lukoil’s $20 billion in overseas assets to a group led by a Trump megadonor and including business partners of both the Kushner and Witkoff families.

Selling out your country for money and advantage has a name in American history, Benedict Arnold, who offered to hand West Point to the British for 20,000 pounds because — like with Trump and the Nobel Prize — he felt underappreciated.

But Arnold, at least, had been a real patriot before he turned. He’d been shot in the left leg storming Quebec and then had that same leg shattered leading the charge that won the Battle of Saratoga. There’s a monument on that battlefield today, a single carved boot honoring the leg while pointedly leaving off the name of the man it was attached to.

Unlike Arnold, Donald Trump used a diagnosis of bone spurs to stay out of Vietnam that the podiatrist’s own daughters say was a favor to Fred Trump, who just happened to be the doctor’s landlord and patron.

My dad was a Republican activist in Michigan. The Republican Party he loved defined itself by standing up to the Kremlin.

I can’t imagine what he’d make of a Republican president publicly thanking the man in the Kremlin for suggesting that America bankroll his bloody, unprovoked war, or of the Senate’s number two Republican going on Sunday television to defend this insanity.

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US intelligence agencies have determined — and told Trump — that Putin has provided Iran with the satellite data and intelligence that country’s IRGC used to attack our bases and troops in the Gulf, killing at least 21 and sending hundreds of others to the hospital. And now Trump’s handing him billions while cutting off our ally Ukraine from American-made Patriot missile interceptors?

I’ll leave it to the lawyers and the impeachment committees to determine if that fits the definition of treason in the Constitution, which says:

“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

But whatever it is, when a president knowingly breaks his own country’s laws to send billions to a hostile nation’s dictator who’s slaughtering the people of a nation we promised — in writing in 1994 — to protect, most Americans know in their gut what to call it.

Whether Putin is giving the orders or Trump is freelancing to hustle more money into his kids Uday and Qusay’s investments, Ukraine’s children end up just as dead and America’s word and reputation ends up just as worthless.

Congress has the power to find out which it is and to stop it, but only if enough of us make enough noise. Call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your representative to sign Fitzpatrick’s discharge petition the day the House comes back.

Demand that your senators get the written certification from Trump that the 2022 law requires and to insist the Graham Act’s sanctions actually kick in by their October 18th deadline.

Then check your registration at vote.org and show up on November 3 like the country depends on it. And if this piece was useful to you, please share it with friends and family, and consider subscribing to and supporting the Hartmann Report so we can keep doing this work together.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Benedict Arnold’s Ghost”

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Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

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Something stinks.

Astoria is one of my favorites on the Oregon coast, a small town of around 9,000 people with great restaurants and crafts shops. Two of them, a coffee shop and ceramics studio, are owned by a small businessperson, Audrey Long, who’s mailed herself five postcards since August to test the mail. The results have been grim, particularly since Oregon is a 100% vote-by-mail state.

So far, only two of the postcards have arrived, and the first one took more than a month (and Oregon doesn’t even send out ballots until next Wednesday). Across the street from one of her shops the town’s City Hall isn’t getting its mail reliably, either, and the same is true for the tenants of a 40-unit apartment building next door, according to reporting by Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley is looking into it, his office telling OPB’s reporter, “The timing of these issues is especially concerning.”

At first, I figured this was a one-off; something weird or broken in the Astoria post office. But when I mentioned this on the air Monday of this week my lines were flooded with calls from states across the nation saying that they’re having similar problems with the mail. The calls have continued every day since.

Yesterday, an American listener who follows us on YouTube from Germany called in to say that his ballot was mailed out on September 19th (the law requires all foreign-resident ballots to go out by then) and he’s tracking it online but it still hasn’t arrived at his home in Mannheim.

Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order limiting who could get a mail-in ballot, that the Supreme Court knocked down last month. But apparently he’s still working on the Post Office, just in some different ways, many of which are being kept under wraps. But there are some clues.

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Raw Story’s Alexandria Jacobson reports that nearly 1,000 armed private security guards have been deployed to at least 55 postal facilities in places with lots of Democrats like Atlanta, Phoenix, Denver, and Chicago.

Instead of using the Post Office’s own police force, Trump’s people have hired Prosegur, a Spanish multinational armed mercenary force that Norway’s sovereign wealth fund blacklisted in 2024 over what its ethics council called “an unacceptable risk that the company is contributing to serious human rights abuses.”

The company’s also been accused of intimidating union organizers across Latin America, which may be why Frank Albergo of the Postal Police Officers Association worries out loud that nobody from the Postal Service seems to be supervising them. He described the result as “private contractors in and around ballots without any federal control.”

In other words, we’re already partway there: armed men who answer to a foreign contractor and Trump instead of to the public, with no transparency and no clear reason for their being there, are overseeing the buildings our ballots pass through this month.

Then there’s Trump’s wannabe Schutzstaffel of armed, masked, anonymous, unaccountable thugs now equipped with electric gloves that are used for torture in other countries who seems to delight in shooting people — including American citizens like Renee Good — in their cars. Democracy Forward just released 166 pages of internal ICE records they got with a FOIA filing and the result is shocking.

This renegade agency that seems to answer only to Trump and Stephen Miller has now collected 50.6 million voter roll records from the Justice Department.

What the hell is ICE doing with our voter records? And what could their having our personal voting habits possibly have to do with controlling immigration?

But it gets worse: they also got another 48.4 million “voter records” from what the documents call the “independent sources” of election denier Heather Honey, who’s now the Department of Homeland Security’s point person on “election integrity.”

Before 2020, Honey was a private investigator who worked counterfeit-goods cases, with no background or experience in elections or voting machines. She’s an outspoken election denier who still claims Trump won in 2020.

And she’s the source of the false claim that “Pennsylvania counted more votes than it had voters,” which Trump repeated from the stage at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021 which so enraged the mob that then attacked the Capitol, trying to “hang Mike Pence” and ended up causing the deaths of five police officers and the hospitalization of 140 others.

When The New York Times dug into those same documents they found that Homeland Security has already opened investigations into 150 “good government” nonprofit organizations that register voters. The papers show that they’ve considered sending undercover agents into some of these nonprofits to “disrupt activities.”

Trump’s toadies are also seeding the ground with stories that would justify massive intervention in the final moments or subsequent counting days of the election. In July, former plumber and current DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed they’d discovered more than a quarter million noncitizens on the rolls in just four states and threatened to send state officials to jail for even the smallest infractions, if they make any mistakes during this election.

Pretty quickly that number of 250,000 non-citizens on the rolls — widely reported on rightwing media — dropped like a stone. DHS revised their count to claim that there were 185 noncitizens registered in Nevada, one of those four states; when the state investigated, they found that every single one of those 185 people was a lawful citizen.

But if Republicans lose the election this fall, it’s safe to assume Trump will revive that 250,000 number, true or not; he’s never been afraid to tell “truthful hyperbole” (as he calls lying in his book).

Then there are the polling places and the count itself. The Justice Department is dispatching “monitors,” and voting rights groups and local governments are in court right now challenging the administration’s plans to put armed federal agents at the polls and counting operations.

This administration has also joined Russia and Belarus as being the only three countries in the world to refuse to allow in international election monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which has overseen our elections for decades. What are they hiding?

And their arrogance is astonishing: when a federal judge recently told a DOJ attorney he’d require advance notice before a state released its “citizenship lists,” the answer, as Democracy Docket reported, was “If you want to enjoin us, enjoin us.”

In other words, like with the East Wing/Ballroom, reflecting pool, Arch, killing people in boats in the Caribbean, or bombing Iran without congressional authorization (or dozens of other examples), “We’ll do our crimes right in the open and get done what we want and you can sue us and yell about it later. We win anyway.”

Like so many of his crimes that he pre-announces, Trump told the Times earlier this year that he “should have” deployed the National Guard in 2020 to seize voting machines in swing states like Georgia.

— He’s falsely claimed that states are mere agents of the feds when they count votes, so the president can tell them what to do and how to do it.

— He mused to House Republicans about canceling the midterms altogether, said out loud that Republicans should “take over the voting” in at least 15 places, and told NBC he’d only accept the results this fall “if the elections are honest.” We all know what that means when a Putin acolyte says it.

— Asked by TIME about declaring a national emergency around the election, he refused to rule it out.

We should take him seriously: he’s already tried to overthrow our legitimately elected government once before.

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At 2:24 on the afternoon of January 6, already aware that the Capitol had been breached and violent thugs were searching for the electoral college ballots and terrifying members of Congress, he tweeted that Mike Pence “lacked the courage to do what needed to be done.” To defy the results of the election, in other words. His mob surged and began chanting “Hang Mike Pence” as Trump gleefully watched on TV from the White House.

Most concerning, that year there were still lawyers in the White House and the Justice Department who could tell him no. They’re all gone now, replaced by election deniers, neofascists, and lickspittles.

Speaking of neofascists, the two guys who run his MAGA Inc. $415 million SuperPac spent part of the past few weeks helping a Putin-aligned candidate and party win an election in the Balkans. When the rightwing winner was announced, he profusely thanked Putin for his help and future close cooperation.

And it’s not like we haven’t seen Republicans steal elections before. After Jeb Bush purged some 90,000 mostly Black and Hispanic voters from the Florida rolls just before the 2000 election, his brother “won” by 537 votes. The state Supreme Court ordered a recount and, ignoring the 10th Amendment and the Constitution having given voting to the states, five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court halted the count.

A year later a consortium of news organizations finished examining the ballots and found that if every disputed ballot in the state had been counted, Al Gore would have come out ahead. As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”

But that recount didn’t happen because a crowd of Republican congressional staffers — backed up by lawyers Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, and Amy Coney Barrett who’d come to Florida to help out — held their “Brooks Brothers Riot” pounding on the doors and windows of the Miami-Dade canvassing board until it shut down its hand recount.

And then there’s the purging of legitimate voters — by the tens of millions every election cycle — which is where Republicans find their best result. As a Demos report notes:

“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”

Additionally, as I lay out in The Hidden History of the War on Voting, 17 million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.

Given that the most radical purges took place among Black and youth voters in Republican-controlled Red states with large Blue cities, those 8.5 percent and 10 percent “national averages” could well be two or three times that percentage in the states where these purges were concentrated.

The Brennan Center added, most of the purge activity was taking place in former Confederate Red states that — before five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 Shelby County decision — had to have purges double-checked and pre-cleared by the federal government:

“The median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to preclearance [Red states] was 40 percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act [Blue states].”

So we need to be ready for anything from slowed-down mail to bogus lists of alleged noncitizens to Spanish agents with guns overseeing our mail-in ballots.

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That’s all the bad news.

The good news is that none of these strategies — which worked great for Republicans in close elections like 2000 and 2024 — can stop a landslide.

If the count is too large to deny or whittle away, we may be able to turn back Trump’s steady and varied attacks on our democracy and our elections.

So check your registration today at vote.org, and check it again next week. If you vote by mail, track your ballot, return it early, and use an official drop box if your state has them. If it hasn’t arrived when it should, call your county elections office and ask for a replacement.

If you’re an American living overseas and you’re still waiting, like my caller in Germany, you can use the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot as a backup. Then find three people who weren’t planning to vote and get them to the polls.

They’ve told us what they intend to do, and they can only pull it off if the election is close. Please share this article with everyone you know, and if you’re not already a subscriber, join us at hartmannreport.com so we can keep sounding this alarm together through Election Day and beyond.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Something Stinks”

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

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy or the Kindle edition.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

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On Monday night in Grand Island, Nebraska, Donald Trump was trying to convince a tiny rally crowd to vote Republican when, as he is wont to do, he wandered off-prompter into a riff about what Iran could do to two American cities and the crowd cheered:

“They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay and it’s going to be over very soon.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom said:

“Donald Trump’s remarks were dangerous – if not treasonous – putting a target on two of our biggest cities and one of America’s largest naval hubs.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said the remark could compromise her city’s safety, and the Republican running to represent San Diego in the US House, Jim Desmond, said:

“No American city is expendable, and no American family should ever be treated as collateral damage.”

The White House tried spinning it all, claiming Trump only meant that a (fantasy) nuclear-armed Iran would’ve threatened those cities if he hadn’t gone to war against them first. Maybe so. Forbes magazine — nobody’s idea of a lefty outlet — instead reported that it’s unclear whether he was warning about an attack or daring Iran to launch one.

And then Trump repeated his language again last night in Texas, saying:

“And I said it the other day, let them hit a missile into San Diego or Los Angeles on the way. You want to see a horror show? Let them hit San Diego. Let them hit Los Angeles.”

Trying to read Trump’s twisted mind is a dangerous effort, but we can look at what politicians in positions similar to him have done in the past, as well as checking out whether he’s trying to strengthen or weaken our ability to prevent such an attack.

Back in March of 2003, as George W. Bush was about to invade Iraq, I wrote an essay called “When Democracy Failed” detailing how Hitler used the burning of the German parliament building to consolidate his power.

While the history is still debated, historian Benjamin Carter Hett builds a compelling case that the Nazis essentially set up the 24-year-old (perhaps mentally ill) Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe to do it or even started the fire themselves. Hitler, standing in front of the smoldering building, told a British reporter “This is a signal from God,” and by the next day he had his Reichstag Fire Decree pushed through parliament suspending civil liberties across Germany, creating an instant police state.

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It turns out that this meme — a foreign attack that rescues or expands the powers of a political leader — is one of the oldest stories in politics, including American politics:

— President James Polk was incredibly unpopular in 1846 (and since!), so he sent American troops into Mexican territory; when they were predictably fired on, Polk gave a speech to Congress claiming that Mexico had “shed American blood upon American soil.” It was such an obvious attempt to start a war to rescue Polk’s sagging fortunes that freshman congressman Abraham Lincoln introduced his Spot Resolution to try, unsuccessfully, to stop what quickly became the Mexican-American War.

— When the USS Maine blew up in Havana harbor in 1898, most likely from a fire in a coal bunker next to her magazine, newspaper oligarch William Randolph Hearst sent a cable to the artist Frederic Remington at Havana: “Please remain [in Cuba]. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” Within weeks we were at war with Spain, dramatically boosting the popularity of President McKinley and setting the stage for Teddy Roosevelt’s rise to power.

— In 1962 the Joint Chiefs of Staff actually put it in writing. Operation Northwoods proposed the US military covertly blow up an American ship and stage a terror campaign in Miami and Washington, DC so America could blame Castro and invade Cuba; it was only scuttled because President Kennedy said no.

— Two years later Lyndon Johnson and SecDef Robert McNamara claimed an August 4 attack on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin that NSA’s own historian later concluded never happened. McNamara had wanted the war, and some historians even assert he lied about the attack to Johnson for weeks until the war against Vietnam was underway.

— In the summer of 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt froze Japan’s assets and cut off its oil, knowing fully that he was backing Tokyo into a corner. While Republicans claimed he knew the attack on Pearl Harbor would come out of it, the evidence for that is sketchy; nonetheless, it provided the rationalization to enter World War II, which by then Roosevelt had concluded was necessary to save European democracy even though US public opinion was largely against the war (there was a large “America first” political movement that explicitly embraced Hitler and opposed entering the war).

— Two years before 9/11 George W. Bush told his ghostwriter, Mickey Herskowitz, that if he ever got the chance to invade Iraq he wouldn’t waste the political capital a war would give him the way his father had.

A year later the Project for the New American Century, whose founding statement his brother Jeb had signed, published a report arguing that invading Iraq and taking their oil wasn’t politically possible unless “some catastrophic and catalyzing event” like “a new Pearl Harbor” were to happen.

Then on August 6, 2001, while he was vacationing in Crawford, the CIA flew an agent all the way to Texas to hand President George W. Bush a briefing titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” Bush began the longest vacation in presidential history, refusing to return to DC abut also refusing to pull together his team to stop the plot. Five weeks later nearly three thousand Americans were dead, his approval rating zoomed from 51 to 90 percent (the highest Gallup has ever recorded), and he got the war he’d told Herskowitz about.

This “let them attack us and I’ll become the hero against them” strategy works overseas, too.

— Vladimir Putin (Trump’s mentor, who he called yesterday to wish a happy birthday) was an obscure prime minister in September of 1999 when apartment buildings started blowing up across Russia, killing around 300 people. When local police in the city of Ryazan caught Putin’s secret police/FSB agents planting another bomb in a basement, the Kremlin claimed it was just a “training exercise.” Putin used the terror from the Chechen attacks to start a war in Chechnya that he rode straight into the presidency.

— In Israel, the military had Hamas’s battle plan for October 7, a document they code-named “Jericho Wall,” more than a year before the attack. Benjamin Netanyahu’s poll numbers were in free-fall, but the attack and his response of bombing the crap out of Gaza both boosted his popularity and postponed his trial for corruption and bribery, keeping him in office.

Which brings us back to Donald Trump, who’s less than four weeks from a midterm election that looks like it’s going to be a screaming disaster for Republicans. He knows that if Democrats take the House or Senate, his life (and that of Uday, Qusay, and Jared) will become a living hell.

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On September 26, Trump flat-out rejected an Iranian proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days and restart talks; the Wall Street Journal then, shockingly, reported he’d privately told aides that he plans to get his revenge for his war humiliation by bombing Iran again after the election. He said much the same to Time magazine last week, causing some to wonder if he’s deliberately trying to provoke Iran into attacking the US now.

Meanwhile, the people who are supposed to catch Iranian operatives inside the United States have been pulled off the job. Just days before the war began in February, Ka$h Patel fired a dozen agents and staff from CI-12, the specific FBI counterintelligence unit that tracks threats from Iran.

Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi warned that nearly a quarter of the FBI’s agents, and up to 40 percent in the biggest field offices (like LA and San Diego?), were pulled onto immigration duty. This included huge numbers of counterintelligence specialists with deep expertise on Iran, and The Intercept found in May that none have been replaced or put back on Iran/terrorism watch.

And the threat of an Iranian attack on US assets is real. Ten days ago British police arrested five men near RAF Fairford, the base American bombers use to hit Iran. British Prime Minister Andy Burnham says there are “strong indications“ Tehran had a hand in it, although this is an evolving story.

Given all this, Trump has some ‘splaining to do:

— Has Trump been briefed on a specific threat to Southern California, and if he has, what’s being done about it?

— Why were the FBI’s Iran specialists fired or relocated on the eve of a war with Iran, and how many of our top counterterrorism agents are still out rounding up brown-skinned day laborers?

— Why did he turn down an offer to reopen the Strait while, at the same time, provocatively promising more bombing after the election?

— And it’s not like the idea hasn’t occurred to Trump: Back when Barack Obama was running for reelection Trump tweeted on November 29, 2011: “In order to get elected, BarackObama will start a war with Iran.” Two weeks earlier he’d posted a video saying that starting a war with Iran was “the only way he figures that he’s going to get reelected.”

The following July he claimed Obama was “preparing a possible attack on Iran right before November,” and on October 9, 2012, with the election a month away, he told his followers that with Obama’s poll numbers falling they should “watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran.”

The last thing in the world that I’d hope for is that Trump is actually encouraging a massive attack on Los Angeles and San Diego just to rescue himself and his party politically. But having lived through 9/11, the subsequent Patriot Act and Bush lying us into two wars to get himself re-elected in 2004 — and having written these sort of histories for decades — I can’t dismiss it.

Congress can get answers to every one of those questions if enough of us insist. Call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your representative and both of your senators that you want Kash Patel under oath about who’s actually guarding this country, that you want those agents back on counterterrorism now, and that you want a public commitment that no attack — no matter how terrible — will be used to delay or federalize the November 3 election.

Then check your registration at vote.org, make a plan to vote, and bring somebody with you.

If you found this useful, please share it with friends and family, and consider subscribing to and supporting The Hartmann Report. Independent media only survives because readers like you pass it along, and an informed and active citizenry is still the best protection this republic has ever had.

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Louise’s Daily Song: “Would Trump Welcome Another 9/11?”

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

Subscribe to the Commonwealth Report

Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy or the Kindle edition.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

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The 70th anniversary wasn’t noticed in the United States, and was barely reported in the corporate media. But the Germans remembered well that fateful day seventy years ago - February 27, 1933. They commemorated the anniversary by joining in demonstrations for peace that mobilized citizens all across the world.

It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist; the most recent research implies they did not.)

But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation’s leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn’t have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of language - reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he’d joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.

Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn’t know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation’s most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.

“You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history,” he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. “This fire,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion, “is the beginning.” He used the occasion - “a sign from God,” he called it - to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.

Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the leader’s flag was everywhere, even printed large in newspapers suitable for window display.

Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation’s now-popular leader had pushed through legislation - in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it - that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people’s homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.

To get his patriotic “Decree on the Protection of People and State” passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil libertarians, he agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if the national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack was over by then, the freedoms and rights would be returned to the people, and the police agencies would be re-restrained. Legislators would later say they hadn’t had time to read the bill before voting on it.

Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act, his federal police agencies stepped up their program of arresting suspicious persons and holding them without access to lawyers or courts. In the first year only a few hundred were interred, and those who objected were largely ignored by the mainstream press, which was afraid to offend and thus lose access to a leader with such high popularity ratings. Citizens who protested the leader in public - and there were many - quickly found themselves confronting the newly empowered police’s batons, gas, and jail cells, or fenced off in protest zones safely out of earshot of the leader’s public speeches. (In the meantime, he was taking almost daily lessons in public speaking, learning to control his tonality, gestures, and facial expressions. He became a very competent orator.)

Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage. He wanted to stir a “racial pride” among his countrymen, so, instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as “The Homeland,” a phrase publicly promoted in the introduction to a 1934 speech recorded in Leni Riefenstahl’s famous propaganda movie “Triumph Of The Will.” As hoped, people’s hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our land was “the” homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply foreign lands. We are the “true people,” he suggested, the only ones worthy of our nation’s concern; if bombs fall on others, or human rights are violated in other nations and it makes our lives better, it’s of little concern to us.

Playing on this new nationalism, and exploiting a disagreement with the French over his increasing militarism, he argued that any international body that didn’t act first and foremost in the best interest of his own nation was neither relevant nor useful. He thus withdrew his country from the League Of Nations in October, 1933, and then negotiated a separate naval armaments agreement with Anthony Eden of The United Kingdom to create a worldwide military ruling elite.

His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the people that he was a deeply religious man and that his motivations were rooted in Christianity. He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the Christian faith across his nation, what he called a “New Christianity.” Every man in his rapidly growing army wore a belt buckle that declared “Gott Mit Uns” - God Is With Us - and most of them fervently believed it was true.

Within a year of the terrorist attack, the nation’s leader determined that the various local police and federal agencies around the nation were lacking the clear communication and overall coordinated administration necessary to deal with the terrorist threat facing the nation, particularly those citizens who were of Middle Eastern ancestry and thus probably terrorist and communist sympathizers, and various troublesome “intellectuals” and “liberals.” He proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the homeland, consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative agencies under a single leader.

He appointed one of his most trusted associates to be leader of this new agency, the Central Security Office for the homeland, and gave it a role in the government equal to the other major departments.

His assistant who dealt with the press noted that, since the terrorist attack, “Radio and press are at out disposal.” Those voices questioning the legitimacy of their nation’s leader, or raising questions about his checkered past, had by now faded from the public’s recollection as his central security office began advertising a program encouraging people to phone in tips about suspicious neighbors. This program was so successful that the names of some of the people “denounced” were soon being broadcast on radio stations. Those denounced often included opposition politicians and celebrities who dared speak out - a favorite target of his regime and the media he now controlled through intimidation and ownership by corporate allies.

To consolidate his power, he concluded that government alone wasn’t enough. He reached out to industry and forged an alliance, bringing former executives of the nation’s largest corporations into high government positions. A flood of government money poured into corporate coffers to fight the war against the Middle Eastern ancestry terrorists lurking within the homeland, and to prepare for wars overseas. He encouraged large corporations friendly to him to acquire media outlets and other industrial concerns across the nation, particularly those previously owned by suspicious people of Middle Eastern ancestry. He built powerful alliances with industry; one corporate ally got the lucrative contract worth millions to build the first large-scale detention center for enemies of the state. Soon more would follow. Industry flourished.

But after an interval of peace following the terrorist attack, voices of dissent again arose within and without the government. Students had started an active program opposing him (later known as the White Rose Society), and leaders of nearby nations were speaking out against his bellicose rhetoric. He needed a diversion, something to direct people away from the corporate cronyism being exposed in his own government, questions of his possibly illegitimate rise to power, and the oft-voiced concerns of civil libertarians about the people being held in detention without due process or access to attorneys or family.

With his number two man - a master at manipulating the media - he began a campaign to convince the people of the nation that a small, limited war was necessary. Another nation was harboring many of the suspicious Middle Eastern people, and even though its connection with the terrorist who had set afire the nation’s most important building was tenuous at best, it held resources their nation badly needed if they were to have room to live and maintain their prosperity. He called a press conference and publicly delivered an ultimatum to the leader of the other nation, provoking an international uproar. He claimed the right to strike preemptively in self-defense, and nations across Europe - at first - denounced him for it, pointing out that it was a doctrine only claimed in the past by nations seeking worldwide empire, like Caesar’s Rome or Alexander’s Greece.

It took a few months, and intense international debate and lobbying with European nations, but, after he personally met with the leader of the United Kingdom, finally a deal was struck. After the military action began, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the nervous British people that giving in to this leader’s new first-strike doctrine would bring “peace for our time.” Thus Hitler annexed Austria in a lightning move, riding a wave of popular support as leaders so often do in times of war. The Austrian government was unseated and replaced by a new leadership friendly to Germany, and German corporations began to take over Austrian resources.

In a speech responding to critics of the invasion, Hitler said, “Certain foreign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria with brutal methods. I can only say; even in death they cannot stop lying. I have in the course of my political struggle won much love from my people, but when I crossed the former frontier [into Austria] there met me such a stream of love as I have never experienced. Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators.”

To deal with those who dissented from his policies, at the advice of his politically savvy advisors, he and his handmaidens in the press began a campaign to equate him and his policies with patriotism and the nation itself. National unity was essential, they said, to ensure that the terrorists or their sponsors didn’t think they’d succeeded in splitting the nation or weakening its will. In times of war, they said, there could be only “one people, one nation, and one commander-in-chief” (”Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer”), and so his advocates in the media began a nationwide campaign charging that critics of his policies were attacking the nation itself. Those questioning him were labeled “anti-German” or “not good Germans,” and it was suggested they were aiding the enemies of the state by failing in the patriotic necessity of supporting the nation’s valiant men in uniform. It was one of his most effective ways to stifle dissent and pit wage-earning people (from whom most of the army came) against the “intellectuals and liberals” who were critical of his policies.

Nonetheless, once the “small war” annexation of Austria was successfully and quickly completed, and peace returned, voices of opposition were again raised in the Homeland. The almost-daily release of news bulletins about the dangers of terrorist communist cells wasn’t enough to rouse the populace and totally suppress dissent. A full-out war was necessary to divert public attention from the growing rumbles within the country about disappearing dissidents; violence against liberals, Jews, and union leaders; and the epidemic of crony capitalism that was producing empires of wealth in the corporate sector but threatening the middle class’s way of life.

A year later, to the week, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia; the nation was now fully at war, and all internal dissent was suppressed in the name of national security. It was the end of Germany’s first experiment with democracy.

As we conclude this review of history, there are a few milestones worth remembering.

February 27, 2003, was the 70th anniversary of Dutch terrorist Marinus van der Lubbe’s successful firebombing of the German Parliament (Reichstag) building, the terrorist act that catapulted Hitler to legitimacy and reshaped the German constitution. By the time of his successful and brief action to seize Austria, in which almost no German blood was shed, Hitler was the most beloved and popular leader in the history of his nation. Hailed around the world, he was later Time magazine’s “Man Of The Year.”

Most Americans remember his office for the security of the homeland, known as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and its SchutzStaffel, simply by its most famous agency’s initials: the SS.

We also remember that the Germans developed a new form of highly violent warfare they named “lightning war” or blitzkrieg, which, while generating devastating civilian losses, also produced a highly desirable “shock and awe” among the nation’s leadership according to the authors of the 1996 book “Shock And Awe” published by the National Defense University Press.

Reflecting on that time, The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983) left us this definition of the form of government the German democracy had become through Hitler’s close alliance with the largest German corporations and his policy of using war as a tool to keep power: “fas-cism (fbsh’iz’em) n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”

Today, as we face financial and political crises, it’s useful to remember that the ravages of the Great Depression hit Germany and the United States alike. Through the 1930s, however, Hitler and Roosevelt chose very different courses to bring their nations back to power and prosperity.

Germany’s response was to use government to empower corporations and reward the society’s richest individuals, privatize much of the commons, stifle dissent, strip people of constitutional rights, and create an illusion of prosperity through continual and ever-expanding war. America passed minimum wage laws to raise the middle class, enforced anti-trust laws to diminish the power of corporations, increased taxes on corporations and the wealthiest individuals, created Social Security, and became the employer of last resort through programs to build national infrastructure, promote the arts, and replant forests.

To the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice is again ours.

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In a nationwide poll conducted a few weeks ago and reported on by Axios, the majority of all registered voters surveyed said the number one word to describe Donald Trump is “corrupt.” This represents a massive opportunity for Democrats both now and for the next two years.

And the experience of candidates in today’s Democrats’ position around the world validates the argument that this is the best way to both campaign and win elections and political power.

Péter Magyar defeated Viktor Orbán in the Hungarian elections because he ran a Navalny-style playbook, calling Orbán’s and his billionaire buddies’ capture of the media and most other aspects of Hungarian life a “state capture system” grounded in good old-fashioned “corruption.”

From Orban’s son-in-law pulling a Jared and using his government position to become one of the richest men in the country, to his billionaire cronies buying up the media like the billionaire Ellisons are doing here now, corruption was Magyar’s singular through-line message. And it worked, producing an overwhelming turnout and undeniable victory.

It will work here, too!

Democrats are (continuously, it seems) debating what should be their campaign strategy, their main through-line message, for the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Every faction and special interest group in the country is pushing their own idea, but there’s one overarching concept — one word — that can encompass most all of them and do so with a proven political punch: “Corruption.”

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At every level, ever since the Reagan Revolution, the heart of Republican policies has been the naked corruption of our American political and economic systems. Since the 1980s, Republicans have sold their corruption with slogans like, “Government is the problem, not the solution,” and “Let the market decide,” but their real message is, “Turn it all over to the billionaires and their corporations.” The result has been:

— Tax cuts and loopholes for billionaires and big corporations that, in aggregate since 1981, add up to more than our total national debt of $40 trillion (in other words, Republicans borrowed $40 trillion in our names that our kids will repay and gave all of it to the morbidly rich).
— Reagan’s 1983 suspension of enforcement of the anti-trust laws that has caused every industry in America to become a form of monopoly dominated by five or fewer massive corporations, gutting competition and raising prices.
— Five on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court ruling that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as “free speech,” handing our elections over to the highest bidders.
— Virtually every legacy federal regulatory agency being run by industry insiders working on a revolving-door basis.
— Members of Congress and the corrupt Trump regime engaging in insider trading with impunity.
— A GOP-aligned military-industrial complex that’s essentially taken over Pentagon procurement.
— An anti-labor Labor Department; an anti-education Education department; an anti-civil rights Civil Rights enforcement agency; an anti-environment Environmental Protection Agency; etc…
— Trump’s mysterious pardons that always seem to go to people who’ve given him millions of dollars (after Giuliani claimed he and Trump were selling pardons for two million each and splitting the money).
— The wholesale gutting of the Internal Revenue Service enforcement budget and staffing that’s largely ended audits of morbidly rich people and increased audits of working-class people instead.
— The systematic sabotage and privatization of public institutions — from the US Postal Service to public schools to prisons — with virtually every one of the for-profit replacements becoming big GOP donors.
— The explosion of dark money after Citizens United so we don’t even know who’s buying our elections.
— The weaponization of the Federal Communications Commission to loosen media ownership rules while threatening outlets that dare criticize Trump or the GOP.
— Red-state-level voter suppression laws including strict ID requirements, purges of voter rolls, and reduced polling access all to discourage voting by people in demographic groups associated with Democrats.
— The Republican refusal to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices for years and they’re still blocking most efforts.
— The systematic dismantling of campaign finance enforcement, turning the Federal Election Commission into a deadlocked, do-nothing body.
— The use of tax havens and trade policy to encourage offshoring American jobs.
— The Republican normalization of lobbyists literally writing legislation via groups like the Koch-funded ALEC.
— The rewriting of environmental and labor rules to favor polluting industries by GOP appointees who often came from those very industries.
— The strategic packing of the federal judiciary with hardcore rightwing/neofascist judges.
— And now Trump’s pathetic attempts to bribe voters with his $5000 offer backed up by $80 and $500 checks going out this week to people on Medicare and the Affordable Care Act.

Even Republicans understand the power of mobilizing the public’s outrage against the corruption that they themselves have participated in for over 40 years. Astonishingly, cynically, that’s the meta-message to Trump’s main campaign slogan each of the three times he’s run for president:

“Drain the swamp.”

It worked, even though it was an outrageous lie. Democrats, who have actually been trying to do something about corruption for years, need to appropriate the anti-corruption theme as their main message. Because, universally, it works.

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— When working in Russia, I witnessed the way Alexi Navalny came so close to taking down Putin that the Russian dictator ordered him murdered; it was done via Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. It systematically and relentlessly exposed the ways Putin and his cronies were looting their nation’s government while passing out favors to oligarchs willing to align themselves with them.

— In the 1980s, I was working for a German international relief organization in The Philippines when Cory Aquino mobilized an anti-corruption message against the Marcos dynasty; the week Marcos and his wife fled the country I was bumped off Philippine Airlines flights five days in a row because so many of their cronies were appropriating all the seats (the airline was run by a crony).

— When Jair Bolsonaro first successfully ran for president of Brazil it was on a campaign against the corruption “Operation Car Wash” had exposed in the Lula administration. When elected, Bolsonaro, instead of ending the corruption, slid right into the system and expanded it, leading to his own ultimate downfall and current imprisonment.

— In Delhi, activist Anna Hazare’s 2011 anti-corruption hunger strike ignited a nationwide movement that helped spur passage of India’s Lokpal anti-corruption law and led his former allies to found the “clean government” Aam Aadmi Party.

— And, of course, it was the anti-corruption message of the EuroMaidan “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014 that lifted then-comedian and TV star Volodymyr Zelenskyy into the presidency of Ukraine.

From Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Era of the early 20th century to the present, anti-corruption messages have repeatedly proven to be one of the most potent forces in American politics, too.

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— In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt built a foundation of mass support by casting monopolies as a “corrupt alliance” between the morbidly rich and our government, while the exposure of William M. “Boss” Tweed’s graft by Thomas Nast’s biting cartoons helped bring down New York’s Tammany Hall by converting complex examples of corruption into the simple story of “stolen public money.”

— The Watergate scandal turned corrupt abuse of power into a national reckoning that forced Richard Nixon from office and fueled sweeping electoral gains for reformers like Jimmy Carter, while more recent scandals like George Santos’ reinforced “clean government” as a winning local message.

— At the national level, Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” campaign and the “rigged system” critiques advanced by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren show that, across the ideological spectrum, framing political battles as struggle against entrenched, self-dealing elites remains one of the most consistently reliable ways to get energized voters to the polls and win power.

It makes perfect sense that this should be the Democrats’ main strategy: the core philosophy of the GOP that was first made explicit by the Reagan administration — “greed is good” — openly invites corruption. As we’ve seen in virtually every congressional vote over the past decade, Republican politicians are entirely in the pockets of the fossil fuel, health insurance, tax preparation, and weapons industries, among others.

Whether it’s the corrupt collusion between the Kushner and Netanyahu families that helped lead us into an illegal war against Iran, the billions Trump’s family has made in crypto and other schemes, the insider trading on the war, putting industry insiders in charge of regulatory agencies, the DeSantis and Paxton/Abbott corruption scandals, there are vivid examples of Republican corruption laying on the public ground all over the country in plain sight.

There’s a whole panoply of issues Democrats can and should seize on, from privatization to deregulation to climate change to affordability to healthcare and education, but the core — the foundation — of every one of them is corruption.

Every Democrat in America should scan their local horizon for examples of corruption they can use against Republicans. The words “Republican corruption” should be continuously on their lips, whether campaigning, speaking to constituents, or making media appearances.

Hammer these corrupt SOBs with their own crimes against democracy and the middle class, and Democrats will see results like Magyar, Zelenskyy, Aquino, and so many others have achieved.

It’s simple, easy, and powerful: “It’s the corruption, stupid!”

Louise’s Daily Song: “Follow the Money”

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The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy or the Kindle edition.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

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Will the worldwide revolt against oligarchy reach America before the billionaires buy our elections this fall?

Two weeks ago tomorrow, on September 23rd, Madrid’s police had to cordon off a downtown street to carry an 87-year-old woman named María del Carmen Abascal out of the apartment she’d lived in for seven decades. She normally uses a wheelchair, so they carried her out on a stretcher, which provided some truly inflammatory social media video. All because her landlord wanted to raise the rent, which requires a change of tenants.

The pictures of María being carried out of her apartment lit Spain on fire; she’s become the face of the nation’s housing crisis which has seen average rents nearly double in the past ten years. This past weekend tens of thousands marched again, with about a thousand people camped out in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol: one banner read “Looking for an apartment, selling a kidney.”

While the pressure campaign worked on the landlord, who backed down and agreed to let her go home, it didn’t work on the “conservative” politicians who dominate the Spanish parliament. When Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government proposed emergency tenant protections, the conservative opposition parties joined forces to kill them in parliament. As a result, Sánchez has pretty much been forced into taking the gamble of calling a snap election for November 29th.

Spain is the microcosm, but this is happening all across the developed world. France is on fire because students are tired of their schools being starved for resources. Populist movements are sweeping the European continent.

Forty-five years of “conservative” neoliberalism and austerity — all specifically designed to make the rich richer at the expense of working class people — have left average citizens furious.

And that fury is driving two parallel movements; the big question before us is which one will prevail both this fall here and over the next few years worldwide.

One movement is reflected in the encampment in Puerta del Sol where people understand that the landlord, land speculators, and the morbidly rich are the cause of their pain. You could call this the New Deal movement, for shorthand.

The other is seen in the far-right parties that have been topping the polls in Germany, France, and Britain by telling those same frightened people that it’s not the billionaires that are the problem; it’s that brown-skinned immigrant with a funny name or the queer kid who lives down the street.

Whichever side wins the argument over who’s the villain in today’s economic crisis for working people will be the one that ends up running these countries, including America.

We’ve seen this movie before here in America, although most people have no memory of it and could only vaguely recognize a quick telling of history.

The last time the morbidly rich held as much of our nation’s wealth and political power as they do today was the Gilded Age from the 1880s to the late 1920s, and popular rage at the oligarchs led to real progressive change:

— Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, and then progressive Republican Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft used it to break up the railroad and oil trusts along with dozens of others.
— The Tillman Act of 1907 made it a crime for corporations to give money or any sort of support to federal candidates for office.
— The income tax arrived in 1913 and the estate tax in 1916, and by the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt was building Social Security, the right to unionize, and the rest of the New Deal on that simple foundation.
— After World War II, democracies around the world copied FDR’s American New Deal formula, and that tightly regulated capitalism along with high taxes on the morbidly rich produced the largest middle class in history.

Then working class people and progressives got complacent, thinking this would be the new normal forever, with a single paycheck being the entrée into the middle class. The oligarchs, however, were just getting started, just like they did during the Industrial Revolution following the Civil War that produced the first Gilded Age.

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As I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, the counterattack began in 1971 when a corrupt tobacco lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote a memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urging corporate America to step up and use their great wealth to seize control of our courts, campuses, media, low-media-cost low-population states that could be flipped Red, and Congress.

The Heritage Foundation and ALEC followed within two years, as rightwing billionaires started buying radio stations, newspapers, and television networks, while Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan turned the project into government policy.

The regulations and tax rates that had restrained great wealth and political corruption came down, and the money and political power of giant corporations and the morbidly rich have largely controlled both our politics and our economy ever since.

Working people noticed they were getting screwed but by then there was a massive rightwing media infrastructure to redirect their anger, probably the oligarchs’ greatest achievement.

For example, when Bush’s 2008 property- and bank-crash set off real rage at the banks and their oligarch CEOs, Koch-funded front groups organized it into the Tea Party and pointed it at Obama and his attempts to give all Americans healthcare.

It hit its peak of success when Donald Trump came down the escalator in 2015, telling voters he didn’t need anybody’s money because, as he put it, “I’m really rich.” Suddenly it wasn’t the rich who were screwing average Americans: it was the rich who’d save us!

To pull it off, he appropriated New Deal and Great Society language, promising to save and even strengthen Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; this is what con men have done throughout history.

The voters wanted their New Deal back with its middle class security on a single paycheck, but, true to Republican form, what they got instead was trillions in tax cuts for billionaires like Trump and his cabinet, paid for with almost a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid, an experimental program in six states to further privatize Medicare, and threats to cut Social Security.

One of the most interesting laboratories for finding out whether billionaire money can still buy public opinion the way the Kochs did with the Tea Party is Prop 40 in California, the 5 percent one-time tax on that state’s roughly 230 billionaires that will cover the healthcare shortfall the state will experience because of the Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill’s cuts to Medicaid.

A billionaire-backed group has gathered more than $187 million to stop it, while the measure’s backers have only pulled together an estimated $31 million. Google’s Sergey Brin alone has put in over $100 million.

The billionaires’ group even succeeded in getting two decoy measures, Props 41 and 42, on the same ballot, written so that if either one gets more votes than Prop 40, the billionaire tax dies even if a majority of Californians vote for it.

And the ads for the “No on 40” campaign is featuring teachers, firefighters, and the head of the state’s Planned Parenthood affiliates while the “Yes on 40” side says in the official voter guide that actual teachers, nurses, and Planned Parenthood workers support the tax.

It’s the same kind of phony grassroots campaign Reagan used when he promised cutting taxes and killing unions would increase prosperity, and when the Tea Party and GOP warned against “communism” in Obamacare, forcing the end to the possibility of a public option.

This same billionaire and corporate money is now pouring into the Senate races nationwide, using tools the robber barons of the late 19th century could have only dreamed about.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee released a deepfake of Texas Democrat James Talarico in a dress with a disclosure so small and faint that Berkeley digital forensics expert Hany Farid said most people wouldn’t immediately know it was fake. Another group produced a phony “Daisy” ad portraying him as a doctor performing gender surgeries on children.

In Michigan, Republicans greeted Abdul El-Sayed’s primary win with ads built around his full name and the Muslim Brotherhood, and their main super PAC has committed $51 million to that one race. On Sunday, I watched MS NOW play two of the newest deceptive Republican deepfakes, one putting Talarico in a makeup chair and another inventing “terrorists” in El-Sayed’s family.

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Spending just on Senate races is projected to pass $3.4 billion this cycle, and most of the big money is just now starting to hit the airwaves and, thus, tightening the races that had seemed were in the bag for Democrats.

And if the lies don’t work, there’s always the power of our currently-billionaire-run government to insert itself in ways that can spin an election out of control. Last September Trump signed a national security memorandum called NSPM-7 that directs the FBI, the Treasury, and the IRS to go after the networks and funders behind what it calls domestic terrorism, and it lists among the “indicators” of that terrorism:

“anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”

By that standard, María’s Spanish neighbors camped in a public square to protest a greedy landlord could find themselves under investigation. Add the masked, anonymous, trigger-happy ICE thugs already working our streets with their new electric shock gloves, and the machinery of a “papers, please” society is right here right now.

There’s no way this one single election will settle all this. During the first Gilded Age, it took 45 years to go from the Sherman Act to Social Security — with quite a few lost elections along the way —and the people who won that fight went through it never knowing if they’d prevail or not; the biggest intervention was probably the Republican Great Depression.

But this November is a hinge moment in history. A Congress that can check Trump, a billionaire tax passed in the biggest state in the union, and senators like Talarico and El-Sayed who explicitly have run against the Epstein billionaire class would tell every Republican and the oligarchs who own them that their old trick of pointing at immigrants and trans kids has stopped working.

On the other hand, if the deepfakes, decoy ballot measures, massive rightwing media penetration, algorithmic manipulation on billionaire-owned social media platforms, and billions in ads win out instead, they’ll be used in every election from here on.

The easy lesson here is that if Spain’s protesters got an 87-year-old woman back into her home by showing up, we can do the same for our democracy that’s been so badly battered by 45 years of Republican con men and Democratic neoliberals.

The next No Kings day of action is Saturday, October 17th, and “No Kings” has always meant “No Oligarchs,” too.

Check your registration at vote.org, call your members of Congress through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them you want deepfake political ads outlawed, and if you live in California, vote yes on 40 and no on 41 and 42.

Then please share this article with everybody you know, and if you’re not already a subscriber to hartmannreport.com, your support is what keeps this work independent of the very billionaires I’m so regularly writing about.

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Louise’s Daily Song: “The Billionaires See the Revolt Coming”

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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy or the Kindle edition.

”Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich”.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.