#Thom Hartmann

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:

The author of the Declaration of Independence went to great lengths, on numerous occasions (as I detail in What Would Jefferson Do?), to point out that when he and his colleagues started the United States of America they were explicitly rejecting — in favor of democracy — the men (they were all men back then) who drove the “three historic tyrannies”: kings/autocrats, theocrats/popes, and morbidly rich oligarchs. For two thousand years before Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Paine, Adams, Revere, and their colleagues created our checks-and-balances system of republican democracy, every country in the world was ruled by one of those three. Today, of the 167 countries on Earth, only 74 are democracies, and only 24 of those are “fully democratic.”

And now, because of the GOP, America stands on the verge of losing that status.

— Theocrats have seized control of our Supreme Court, gutting the rights of women and religious/racial/gender minorities. — Members of the House and Senate are so terrified of oligarchs funding primary challenges against them that it’s been over 40 years since any major legislation has passed fulfilling the wishes of the majority of Americans. (And now, many say they are worried about physical violence against themselves and their families if they fight Trump.) — And our White House is today occupied by a billionaire who believes himself to be a king.

Trump’s attack on our democracy is an old story, played out repeatedly in various countries by every generation during the past two centuries. It follows an absolutely predictable pattern: You could call it a playbook.

In a democracy, there are four main elements involved in governance: Legislative, Executive, Judicial, and the Press (the Fourth Estate).

While Democrats over the past 50 years or so have focused their efforts on winning elections (Legislative and Executive), the billionaires who own the GOP have directed their attention to using massive amounts of cash to seize control of the unelected branches (Judiciary and Press), a job that can be done with money but doesn’t always require winning elections.

This is a pattern that’s been duplicated in multiple nations that have lost their democracies. Trump and Musk are simply following their instruction manual.

When Viktor Orbán took over Hungary in 2010, he first set out to seize control of the judiciary and the media. He lowered the retirement age for judges, immediately forcing out 57 justices who he replaced with loyalists (an echo of Mitch McConnell’s stealing two Supreme Court seats for Trump).

Then, following the strategy announced last week by Trump and FCC Chair Carr, he sued multiple independent media outlets and attacked the funding of Hungary’s public broadcasting system, shifting control over both into the hands of friendly oligarchs. With dissenting voices silenced in the media and judges willing to overlook his blatant violations of Hungarian election laws (purging voters, gerrymandering, challenging the votes in opposition-friendly districts), Orbán was able to win every election since. Vladimir Putin followed a similar script a few years earlier; once he had control of the judiciary and Russia’s media, he was able to stomp all over that country’s new and fragile democratic institutions and intimidate the Russian parliament (the Duma).

[...]

However, there are two countries of note — and possible examples for America — that tried to go down this path but had it interrupted, throwing them back into democracy: Poland and South Korea.

In Poland, Andrzej Duda’s Law and Justice Party failed to destroy the independent media, even though they’d succeeded in seizing the judiciary and rigged election rules to their favor. Because roughly 70% of Poland’s media stayed in independent hands, his party lost power in the 2023 elections and Poland is now returning to democracy. Similarly, in South Korea their President Yoon Suk Yeol tried to declare a state of emergency and outlaw his opposition Democratic Party. He’d failed, however, to first seize control of South Korea’s independent media, so people showed up in the streets demanding his arrest; he sits in prison today.

Love this column from Thom Hartmann .

[tomorrowusa]

« The simple reality is that Trump has entered the Fat Elvis phase of his career.

He hasn’t grown or developed new routines; he’s just reliving his old hits every day, playing to a nostalgic and mostly elderly audience who fondly remember his glory days. »

— Progressive radio host Thom Hartmann commenting at Daily Kos about the latest stage of Donald Trump's political career.

Poor Elvis!

[contemplatingoutlander]

THOM HARTMANN: Science Explains Why Republicans Can’t Accept Trump’s Guilt (Sept. 12, 2023)

Scientists discovered a fascinating reason why Republicans can’t accept criticism of Donald Trump. Thom explains.

In the above video, Thom Hartmann refers to a Raw Story column by cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian, PhD (shown below):

Here are some excerpts from Azarian's column:

In 2009, a study published in PLOS ONE challenged our understanding of belief systems. Researchers placed participants into the confines of an fMRI scanner and presented them with a mixture of factual and abstract statements. The results were illuminating. Disbelief, it turns out, is cognitively demanding. It requires more mental effort than simply accepting a statement as true. From an evolutionary perspective, this preference for easy belief makes sense; a perpetually skeptical individual questioning every piece of information would struggle to adapt in a fast-paced world. What does all this have to do with Trump supporters? Well, it’s far less cognitively demanding for them to believe anything their leader tells them. Any challenge to what Trump tells them is true takes mental work. This means there is a psychological incentive for Trump loyalists to maintain their loyalty. (I wrote about this phenomenon in a slightly different context in the Daily Beast article "Religious Fundamentalism: A Side Effect of Lazy Brains?") Molding of belief: neuroplasticity at play Now, let's consider the unique predicament faced by individuals who staunchly support Trump and want him to again become president. From the moment Trump began his political career and his social engineering career, his supporters have been exposed to narratives — Trump doesn't lie, Democrats are communists, the media is an enemy of the people — that emphasize loyalty and trust in their political idol. These narratives often steer away from critical examination and instead encourage blind faith. When coupled with the brain's inherent tendency to accept rather than question, it creates an ideal environment for unwavering allegiance. No matter that Trump, time and again, has been revealed to be a serial liar, habitually misrepresenting matters of great consequence, from elections to economics to public health. For example, in the Psychology Today article "Why Evangelicals are Wired to Believe Trump’s Falsehoods," I explain that the children of Christian fundamentalists typically begin to suppress critical thinking at an early age. This is required if one is to accept Biblical stories as literal truth, rather than metaphors for how to live life practically and with purpose. Attributing natural occurrences to mystical causes discourages youth from seeking evidence to back their beliefs. Consequently, the brain structures that support critical thinking and logical reasoning don't fully mature. This paves the way for heightened vulnerability to deceit and manipulative narratives, especially from cunning political figures. Such increased suggestibility arises from a mix of the brain's propensity to accept unverified claims and intense indoctrination. Given the brain's neuroplastic nature, which allows it to shape according to experiences, some religious followers are more predisposed to accept improbable assertions. In other words, our brains are remarkably adaptable and continuously evolving landscapes. For ardent Trump supporters, residing in an environment that prioritizes faith over empirical evidence can reshape the neural circuits within their brains. [color emphasis added]

[edited]

[odinsblog]

What are the commons? Thom Hartmann describes the commons as the idea that certain assets should be in public ownership. Services vital to our collective survival, like water, must remain in the public sector and not be privatized.

[thatstormygeek]

We are literally facing the authoritarian future that John Stormer was warning us about back in 1964. Only instead of “communists” in the State Department, it’s a billionaire president with the avowed goal of ending union rights and locking up or using the Army with live ammunition against those who protest his policies.

Kirk and his followers essentially predicted in 1951 that if today’s “hairdressers and working tallow-chandlers” — college students, women, working-class people, and people of color — ever got even close to social and political power at the same level as wealthy white men, there would essentially be a communist revolution in the US, handing us over to Stalin and his Politburo. ... Wealthy white conservatives freaked out as the morbidly rich promoted the idea that America was experiencing a “moral decline” that could only be fixed by ending the union movement and other “liberal” causes that shared the union movements’ populist goals. They became convinced that they were seeing Kirk’s prophecy play out in real time on their television screens every night: the “communists” — those uppity racial minorities, women who’d forgotten their “rightful place in society,” students who objected to Vietnam, unionized workers, and gender minorities — were on the verge of “taking over” America.

Their plan was to declare war on labor unions so wages could slide back down again, end free college across the nation so students would live in fear rather than be willing to protest, and increase the penalties Nixon had already put on drugs so they could use those laws against their scapegoats, particularly the hippy antiwar protesters and Black people demanding an end to police killings. They also wanted to outlaw abortion, to put women “back in their place.”

Thus, Reagan massively cut taxes on rich people and raised taxes on working-class people 11 times. For example, he put income taxes on Social Security and unemployment payments, and put in a mechanism to track and tax tips income, all of which had previously been tax-free but were exclusively needed and used by middle-class people. He ended the tax deductibility of credit-card, car-loan, and student-debt interest, overwhelmingly claimed by working-class people. At the same time, he cut the top tax bracket for millionaires and billionaires from 74% to 25%. (There were only a handful of billionaires in America then, in large part because of previous tax policies; today’s democracy-destroying explosion of billionaires followed Reagan’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s massive tax cuts on the rich.) Reagan declared war on labor unions, crushed PATCO in less than a week, and over the next decade the result of his war on labor was that union membership went from about a third of the American workforce when he came into office to around 10% at the end of the Reagan/Bush presidencies. It’s just now beginning to recover from its low of 6% of the private workforce.

[arlengrossman]

The Billionaire Coup is Almost Complete and No One Stopped It — Can We Return to Democracy?

How America’s ultra-rich dismantled democracy, one Supreme Court ruling at a time… By Thom Hartmann/ The Hartmann Report/ February 5, 2025 There is one thread that ties together Trump’s destruction of American government agencies, his offer to take the Gaza crisis off Israel’s hands and dump it on our military, and senators’ and representatives’ failure to challenge him: This is how kingdoms…

[lenbryant]

Great take from Thomas Hartmann. Scrub past the ads.

[alicemccombs]

Welcome to the new oligarchy -

Thom Hartmann on Velshi on MSNBC

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[hezigler]

KAMALA HARRIS PICKS VP: TIM WALZ! | Christopher Titus | Armageddon Update

The greatest failure of our democratic republic is that of the fourth estate.

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." John Kenneth Galbraith

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:

Have you heard that Comcast is planning to sell MSNBC? Is Rupert Murdoch planning to buy it? Will America’s media landscape soon resemble those of Hungary and Russia? Without the rightwing media juggernaut, Donald Trump probably wouldn’t be president next year and wouldn’t have won in 2016. That said, the progressive media landscape looks like it might be about to get a whole lot worse. Comcast, which owns NBC and its subsidiaries CNBC and MSNBC (among other media outlets) announced this week that they’ll be spinning off MSNBC (among others) next year. And the consequences are already showing up. It was reported this week that Rachel Maddow just took a substantial annual pay-cut because of the uncertain future of the network. In part, this probably reflects a belt-tightening at Comcast, but is also an indication of how legacy media — which now includes cable properties — are taking a hit from newer digital media, from social media to podcasts to web-based networks and programs.

[...]

While NPR goes to great lengths to avoid political bias in their news (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting even hired last month, “in response to right-wing criticism,” multiple editors specifically to spot and stamp out any progressive perspectives that may creep into their reporting), if they were crippled, it’s safe to assume the roughly 1,500 rightwing hate radio stations in the country stand more than ready and willing to pick up their radio audience. Rightwing billionaires brought us Fox “News,” Sinclair, two other web- and cable-based rightwing TV channels, nationwide networks of hate radio (now also in Spanish), tens of millions of dollars in subsidies to rightwing podcast hosts, and the destruction of about half the nation’s local newspapers. Not to mention an entire network of billionaire-funded hard-right phony “pink slime” newspapers that pop up around the country every election year.

There’s no equivalent politically-tilted media systems on the left; Democratic-leaning billionaires have stayed out of the media space ever since Romney’s company took down Air America.

The closest TV and radio counterparts we have are Free Speech TV (available on the web, Dish, Sling, Roku, AppleTV, and DirecTV) and the Progress Channel on SiriusXM (my daily program is carried on both).

In the print media space, Substack is growing (although they also carry hard-right content) and provides a solid community of progressive publications (like HartmannReport.com), but that’s a drop in a much larger ocean; even The Washington Post and The New York Times don’t come close to the strength of editorial bias found in the Murdoch family’s The New York Post or The Wall Street Journal. Publications like The New Republic, Mother Jones, The Nation, and The Guardian provide solid progressive content, but all have funding bases that are trivial compared to conservative publications supported by rightwing billionaire networks. Ditto for websites like Raw Story, Common Dreams, Alternet, LA Progressive, Democratic Underground, and Daily Kos.

Thom Hartmann wrote a excellent yet frightening piece about how progressive journalism and media has ossified.

[scottguy]

Alternative Media Source

Thom Hatmann

Thom Hartmann is a former teacher and historian who digs into facts and explains how things got the way they are. His opinions are valid because he does the research. He has written many books.

This is the guy who went back and reviewed the original case that the Citizens United case was based upon that supposedly ruled that "corporations are people."

But THAT idea appears nowhere in the full text of the original ruling!

Knowing that busy law clerks often rely on a written summary of a case, instead of rereading the long original decisions, apparently someone was bribed to write the summary inaccurately to the effect that "This case found that corporations have the same rights as people." which, of course, is patently absurd.

Hartmann has a simple way of explaining complex issues rationally. But he does not shy away from the outrage we should all feel in America where oligarchs have twisted the concept of justice into an unrecognizable mess.

Highly recommended.

[contemplatingoutlander]

The Two Santa Claus Theory: Republican Strategy to Dismantle the Social Safety Net | Thom Hartmann Program

It is no secret that the Republicans are working very hard to achieve their goals, their control over congress, the presidency and more is a frightening reminder of the power of working with a strategy in mind. But what exactly is this strategy? It’s being used to dismantle the Democratic party and even the social safety net as we speak and it places Democrats at a choice that seems pretty morbid. The method is called the two Santa Claus Theory.

Starting with Reagan, GOP also plunged the nation into increasing debt. They devised a sinister plan known as The Two Santa Clause Scheme. Recognizing that Democrats were trying to spend tax dollars to help the largest segment of the public, GOP viewed the Democrats as Santa Claus. To combat the Democratic Santa Claus, they constructed their own Santa Claus; the GOP Tax Cut Santa Claus. The scheme was to use the GOP Tax Cut Santa Claus to provide gifts to the taxpayer when a GOPster POTUS was in office. The people loved tax cuts, but the national debt skyrocketed under Reagan, Bush "The Shrub", and Orange Mob Boss. When a Democratic President was in office, the Two Santa Claus Scheme was to rail against the national debt (which GOP's Tax Cut Santa Claus caused) and blame the Democratic Party as the party of profligate spending. This is not a secret. The Debt Ceiling Debacle of the McCarthy House of Horrors is a case in point that this scheme continues. Yet, no one in the Democratic Party; including President Biden, is willing to expose this sinister scheme.

--Arthur J. Montana, comment to a Washington Post opinion column

[gothicvalentine]

Is 2024 the Last Election Women Can Vote If this Plot To Strip Women Of ...

This has some really important info. 

I was not aware that voter ID laws disproportionality affect women. In some states, you can be asked to present your birth certificate alongside your driver’s license, but if your birth certificate doesn’t match your ID exactly, you can be turned away.

Most married women take their husband’s last name and thus would be affected by this. Also, it is apparently required by law to formally change your name with your state even when you’ve been married. It’s technically illegal (this may vary by state) to just start using your husband’s last name. 

Apparently it’s never enforced, but this content creator is concerned that in the states with the strictest voter ID requirements, the states might start enforcing this type of thing in order to keep women from voting. Considering, of course, that women are expected to be the ones who will turn up to vote in droves due to all the anti abortion laws being enacted and the talks of a nationwide ban being the next step in the republican playbook. Because they think those damn women should just shut up and do what they’re told. And it’s not right that some of them can still travel out of state to get an abortion. /s

[thatstormygeek]

The simple reality is that the future of American democracy is as much on the line in this case as it was in 1866. That was completely lost in yesterday’s arguments: it should have been central to them. So, why did even the “liberal” wing of the Court go along with this charade? Was it because, like Mitt Romney said of his Republican Senate colleagues who failed to convict Trump in his second impeachment, they were afraid for their own safety?

[...]

This is how fascists and authoritarians have seized and held power for all the millennia we’ve had what we call civilization: by inducing terror. Just ask Ruby Freeman or Paul Pelosi. Or read Shakespeare or the Bible. Or talk with Alexi Navalny’s wife. Did they never learn in American History class that there was a time, spanning about a generation, when democracy had been replaced by strongman oligarchy in the South and Trump is merely echoing the values and postures of that time? That the 14th Amendment was written to prevent or rescue us from exactly today’s situation?