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justinspoliticalcorner · 16 days ago

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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 .

#Oligarchy #Thom Hartmann #Musk Coup #Elon Musk #Donald Trump

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posttexasstressdisorder · 4 months ago

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How Trump's billionaires are hijacking affordable housing

Thom Hartmann

October 24, 2024 8:52AM ET

Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump attends the 79th annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York City, U.S., October 17, 2024. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

America’s morbidly rich billionaires are at it again, this time screwing the average family’s ability to have decent, affordable housing in their never-ending quest for more, more, more. Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, and Denmark have had enough and done something about it: we should, too.

There are a few things that are essential to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that should never be purely left to the marketplace; these are the most important sectors where government intervention, regulation, and even subsidy are not just appropriate but essential. Housing is at the top of that list.

A few days ago I noted how, since the Reagan Revolution, the cost of housing has exploded in America, relative to working class income.

When my dad bought his home in the 1950s, for example, the median price of a single-family house was around 2.2 times the median American family income. Today the St. Louis Fed says the median house sells for $417,700 while the median American income is $40,480—a ratio of more than 10 to 1 between housing costs and annual income.

ALSO READ: He’s mentally ill:' NY laughs ahead of Trump's Madison Square Garden rally

In other words, housing is about five times more expensive (relative to income) than it was in the 1950s.

And now we’ve surged past a new tipping point, causing the homelessness that’s plagued America’s cities since George W. Bush’s deregulation-driven housing- and stock-market crash in 2008, exacerbated by Trump’s bungling America’s pandemic response.

And the principal cause of both that crash and today’s crisis of homelessness and housing affordability has one, single, primary cause: billionaires treating housing as an investment commodity.

A new report from Popular Democracy and the Institute for Policy Studies reveals how billionaire investors have become a major driver of the nationwide housing crisis. They summarize in their own words:

— Billionaire-backed private equity firms worm their way into different segments of the housing market to extract ever-increasing rents and value from multi-family rental, single-family homes, and mobile home park communities. — Global billionaires purchase billions in U.S. real estate to diversify their asset holdings, driving the creation of luxury housing that functions as “safety deposit boxes in the sky.” Estimates of hidden wealth are as high as $36 trillion globally, with billions parked in U.S. land and housing markets. — Wealthy investors are acquiring property and holding units vacant, so that in many communities the number of vacant units greatly exceeds the number of unhoused people. Nationwide there are 16 million vacant homes: that is, 28 vacant homes for every unhoused person. — Billionaire investors are buying up a large segment of the short-term rental market, preventing local residents from living in these homes, in order to cash in on tourism. These are not small owners with one unit, but corporate owners with multiple properties. — Billionaire investors and corporate landlords are targeting communities of color and low-income residents, in particular, with rent increases, high rates of eviction, and unhealthy living conditions. What’s more, billionaire-owned private equity firms are investing in subsidized housing, enjoying tax breaks and public benefits, while raising rents and evicting low-income tenants from housing they are only required to keep affordable, temporarily. (Emphasis theirs.)

It seems that everywhere you look in America you see the tragedy of the homelessness these billionaires are causing. Rarely, though, do you hear about the role of Wall Street and its billionaires in causing it.

The math, however, is irrefutable.

Thirty-two percent is the magic threshold, according to research funded by the real estate listing company Zillow. When neighborhoods hit rent rates in excess of 32 percent of neighborhood income, homelessness explodes. And we’re seeing it play out right in front of us in cities across America because a handful of Wall Street billionaires are making a killing.

As the Zillow study notes:

“Across the country, the rent burden already exceeds the 32 percent [of median income] threshold in 100 of the 386 markets included in this analysis….”

And wherever housing prices become more than three times annual income, homelessness stalks like the grim reaper. That Zillow-funded study laid it out:

“This research demonstrates that the homeless population climbs faster when rent affordability — the share of income people spend on rent — crosses certain thresholds. In many areas beyond those thresholds, even modest rent increases can push thousands more Americans into homelessness.”

This trend is massive.

As noted in a Wall Street Journal article titled “Meet Your New Landlord: Wall Street,” in just one suburb (Spring Hill) of Nashville:

“In all of Spring Hill, four firms … own nearly 700 houses … [which] amounts to about 5% of all the houses in town.”

This is the tiniest tip of the iceberg.

“On the first Tuesday of each month,” notes the Journal article about a similar phenomenon in Atlanta, investors “toted duffels stuffed with millions of dollars in cashier’s checks made out in various denominations so they wouldn’t have to interrupt their buying spree with trips to the bank…”

The same thing is happening in cities and suburbs all across America; agents for the billionaire investor goliaths use fine-tuned computer algorithms to sniff out houses they can turn into rental properties, making over-market and unbeatable cash bids often within minutes of a house hitting the market.

After stripping neighborhoods of homes young families can afford to buy, billionaires then begin raising rents to extract as much cash as they can from local working class communities.

In the Nashville suburb of Spring Hill, the vice-mayor, Bruce Hull, told the Journal you used to be able to rent “a three bedroom, two bath house for $1,000 a month.” Today, the Journal notes:

“The average rent for 148 single-family homes in Spring Hill owned by the big four [Wall Street billionaire investor] landlords was about $1,773 a month…”

As the Bank of International Settlements summarized in a 2014 retrospective study of the years since the Reagan/Gingrich changes in banking and finance:

“We describe a Pareto frontier along which different levels of risk-taking map into different levels of welfare for the two parties, pitting Main Street against Wall Street. … We also show that financial innovation, asymmetric compensation schemes, concentration in the banking system, and bailout expectations enable or encourage greater risk-taking and allocate greater surplus to Wall Street at the expense of Main Street.”

It’s a fancy way of saying that billionaire-owned big banks and hedge funds have made trillions on housing while you and your community are becoming destitute.

Ryan Dezember, in his book Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare, describes the story of a family trying to buy a home in Phoenix. Every time they entered a bid, they were outbid instantly, the price rising over and over, until finally the family’s father threw in the towel.

“Jacobs was bewildered,” writes Dezember. “Who was this aggressive bidder?”

Turns out it was Blackstone Group, now the world’s largest real estate investor run by a major Trump supporter. At the time they were buying $150 million worth of American houses every week, trying to spend over $10 billion. And that’s just a drop in the overall bucket.

As that new study from Popular Democracy and the Institute for Policy Studies found:

“[Billionaire Stephen Schwarzman’s] Blackstone is the largest corporate landlord in the world, with a vast and diversified real estate portfolio. It owns more than 300,000 residential units across the U.S., has $1 trillion in global assets, and nearly doubled its profits in 2021. “Blackstone owns 149,000 multi-family apartment units; 63,000 single-family homes; 70 mobile home parks with 13,000 lots through their subsidiary Treehouse Communities; and student housing, through American Campus Communities (144,300 beds in 205 properties as of 2022). Blackstone recently acquired 95,000 units of subsidized housing.”

In 2018, corporations and the billionaires that own or run them bought 1 out of every 10 homes sold in America, according to Dezember, noting that:

“Between 2006 and 2016, when the homeownership rate fell to its lowest level in fifty years, the number of renters grew by about a quarter.”

And it’s gotten worse every year since then.

This all really took off around a decade ago following the Bush Crash, when Morgan Stanley published a 2011 report titled “The Rentership Society,” arguing that snapping up houses and renting them back to people who otherwise would have wanted to buy them could be the newest and hottest investment opportunity for Wall Street’s billionaires and their funds.

Turns out, Morgan Stanley was right. Warren Buffett, KKR, and The Carlyle Group have all jumped into residential real estate, along with hundreds of smaller investment groups, and the National Home Rental Council has emerged as the industry’s premiere lobbying group, working to block rent control legislation and other efforts to control the industry.

As John Husing, the owner of Economics and Politics Inc., told The Tennessean newspaper:

“What you have are neighborhoods that are essentially unregulated apartment houses. It could be disastrous for the city.”

As Zillow found:

“The areas that are most vulnerable to rising rents, unaffordability, and poverty hold 15 percent of the U.S. population — and 47 percent of people experiencing homelessness.”

The loss of affordable homes also locks otherwise middle class families out of the traditional way wealth is accumulated — through home ownership: over 61% of all American middle-income family wealth is their home’s equity.

And as families are priced out of ownership and forced to rent, they become more vulnerable to homelessness.

Housing is one of the primary essentials of life. Nobody in America should be without it, and for society to work, housing costs must track incomes in a way that makes housing both available and affordable.

Singapore, Denmark, New Zealand, and parts of Canada have all put limits on billionaire, corporate, and foreign investment in housing, recognizing families’ residences as essential to life rather than purely a commodity. Multiple other countries are having that debate or moving to take similar actions as you read these words.

America should, too.

ALSO READ: Not even ‘Fox and Friends’ can hide Trump’s dementia

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misfitwashere · 1 year ago

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If You Don't Know Medicare Advantage Is a Scam, You're Not Paying Attention

We’re on the edge of the open enrollment period for Medicare, and the Advantage scammers will be carpet-bombing America with advertisements over the next few months. Don't be fooled about what it is—and who is profiting.

Thom Hartmann

Oct 07, 2023

Common Dreams

President George W. Bush and Republicans (and a handful of on-the-take Democrats) in Congress created the Medicare Advantage scam in 2003 as a way of routing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of for-profit insurance companies.

Those companies, and their executives, then recycle some of that profit back into politicians’ pockets via the Citizens United legalized bribery loophole created by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

Just the overcharges happening right now in that scam are costing Americans over $140 billion a year: more than the entire budget for the Medicare Part B or Part D programs. These ripoffs — that our federal government seems to have no interest in stopping — are draining the Medicare trust fund while ensnaring gullible seniors in private insurance programs where they’re often denied life-saving care.

Real Medicare pays bills when they’re presented. Medicare Advantage insurance companies, on the other hand, get a fixed dollar amount every year for each of the people enrolled in their programs, regardless of how much they spent on each customer.

As a result, Medicare Advantage programs make the greatest profits for their CEOs and shareholders when they actively refuse to pay for care, something that happens frequently. It’s a safe bet that nearly 100 percent of the people who sign up for Advantage programs don’t know this and don’t have any idea how badly screwed they could be if they get seriously ill.

Not only that, when people do figure out they’ve been duped and try to get back on real Medicare, the same insurance companies often punish them by refusing to write Medigap plans (that fill in the 20% hole in real Medicare). They can’t do that when you first sign up when you turn 65, but if you “leave” real Medicare for privatized Medicare Advantage, it can be damn hard to get back on it.

The doctors’ group Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) just published a shocking report on the extent of the Medicare Advantage ripoffs — both to individual customers and to Medicare itself — that every American should know about.

The report, titled Our Payments, Their Profits, opens with this shocking exposé:

“By our estimate, and based on 2022 spending, Medicare Advantage overcharges taxpayers by a minimum of 22% or $88 billion per year, and potentially by up to 35% or $140 billion. By comparison, Part B premiums in 2022 totaled approximately $131 billion, and overall federal spending on Part D drug benefits cost approximately $126 billion. Either of these — or other crucial aspects of Medicare and Medicaid — could be funded entirely by eliminating overcharges in the Medicare Advantage program. “Medicare Advantage, also known as MA or Medicare Part C, is a privately administered insurance program that uses a capitated payment structure, as opposed to the fee-for-service (FFS) structure of Traditional Medicare or TM. Instead of paying directly for the health care of beneficiaries, the federal government gives a lump sum of money to a third party (generally a commercial insurer) to ‘manage’ patient care.”

With real Medicare and a Medigap plan, you talk with your physician or hospital and decide on your treatment, they bill Medicare, and you never see or hear about the bill. There is nobody between you and your physician or hospital and Medicare only goes after the payment they’ve made if they sniff out a fraud.

With Medicare Advantage, on the other hand, your insurance company gets a lump-sum payment from Medicare every year and keeps the difference between what they get and what they pay out. They then insert themselves between you and your doctor or hospital to avoid paying for whatever they can.

Whatever you decide on regarding treatment, many Advantage insurance company will regularly second-guess and do everything they can to intimidate you into paying yourself out-of-pocket. Often, they simply refuse payment and wait for you to file a complaint against them; for people seriously ill the cumbersome “appeals” process is often more than they can handle.

As a result, hospitals and doctor groups across the nation are beginning to refuse to take Medicare Advantage patients. California-based Scripps Health, for example, cares for around 30,000 people on Medicare Advantage and recently notified all of them that Scripps will no longer offer medical services to them unless they pay out-of-pocket or revert back to real Medicare.

They made this decision because over $75 million worth of services and procedures their physicians had recommended to their patients were turned down by Medicare Advantage insurance companies. In many cases, Scripps had already provided the care and is now stuck with the bills that the Advantage companies refuse to pay.

Scripps CEO Chris Van Gorder told MedPage Today:

“We are a patient care organization and not a patient denial organization and, in many ways, the model of managed care has always been about denying or delaying care – at least economically. That is why denials, [prior] authorizations and administrative processes have become a very big issue for physicians and hospitals...”

Similarly, the Mayo Clinic has warned its customers in Florida and Arizona that they won’t accept Medicare Advantage any more, either. Increasing numbers of physician groups and hospitals are simply over being ripped off by Advantage insurance companies.

Not only is the Medicare Advantage scam a screw job for healthcare providers and people who are on the programs and are unfortunate enough to get sick, it’s also preventing Americans from getting expanded benefits from real Medicare.

As the PNHP report notes, for real Medicare to provide comprehensive vision, dental, and hearing benefits to all Medicare recipients would cost the system around $84 billion a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Instead, though, the Medicare system is burdened with at least that amount of money in over-payments to Medicare Advantage providers — over-payments that have no health benefit whatsoever and merely inflate the companies’ profits.

A hundred billion dollars in excess profits can be put to a lot of uses, and the health insurance industry is quite good at it. The former CEO of UnitedHealth, “Dollar” Bill McGuire, for example, made off with over $1.5 billion dollars for his efforts.

And, because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision, some of these companies allocate millions every year (a mere drop in the bucket) to pay off loyal members of Congress and to dangle high-paying future jobs to high-level employees of CMS who have the power to keep the gravy train going and thwart prosecutions.

As PNHP noted:

“Medicare Advantage is just another example of the endless greed of the insurance industry poisoning American health care, siphoning money from vulnerable patients while delaying and denying necessary and often life-saving treatment. While there is obvious reason to fix these issues in MA and to expand Traditional Medicare for the sake of all beneficiaries, the deep structural problems with our health care system will only be fixed when we achieve improved Medicare for All.”

We’re on the edge of the open enrollment period for Medicare, and the Advantage scammers will be carpet-bombing America with advertisements over the next few months. Representatives Pocan, Khanna, and Schakowsky have introduced the “Save Medicare Act” that would ban Advantage companies from using the word Medicare in their advertising.

They made a video about it that’s well worth sharing with friends and family:

youtube

As Schakowsky, Khanna, and Pocan note, “Only Medicare is Medicare.” Don’t be fooled by the Medicare Advantage scam.

And now that you know, pass it on and save somebody else’s health!

#Medicare #health insurance #Youtube

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 1 year ago

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[Daily Don]

* * * *

The Jacksonville, Florida murders of three Black customers in Dollar General Store.

On Saturday, a gunman attempted to enter Florida’s oldest historically Black university—Edward Waters University. When he was turned away from the EWU campus, he went to a Dollar General Store in Jacksonville, Florida, and killed three Black customers. He carefully choreographed the murders to ensure that we would know they were hate crimes directed against the Black population in Florida—a state that has been engaged in a culture war against its Black citizens at the urging of Ron DeSantis.

There is much to unpack in this latest hate crime in Florida. Juliette Kayyem provides the details and analysis in The Atlantic, The Jacksonville Killer Wanted Everyone to Know His Message of Hate. Her article is behind a paywall, but if you have access to The Atlantic, Kayyem’s article is a compelling and disturbing read. She writes, in part,

Much is already known about the gunman who killed three Black customers at a Dollar General shop in Jacksonville, Florida, yesterday. He was in possession of an AR-15-style weapon and a handgun; he left manifestos about his hatred toward African Americans; he was wearing a tactical-style uniform as if going to war. [The gunman’s] actions yesterday were not just a hate crime. They were a performance for all the world to see. This is the age of mass shooting as production. And we misunderstand what is happening if we see this as a play with only one act at a time. [The shooting] occurred on the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the civil-rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Whether the killer knew this doesn’t really matter. African Americans do.

It does not matter whether we can draw a straight line between the killings and DeSantis’s hostility toward Black Floridians, it is enough that he signed a bill allowing permitless carry of handguns and several bills prohibiting the teaching of Black history. DeSantis has created an atmosphere of fear and hate that inevitably encourages deranged people like the Jacksonville killer to act on their delusions. DeSantis’s animosity toward Black Americans is objectively immoral. But it is also singularly disqualifying in his bid for the presidency.

We must do something to stop the carnage and hate. There are many different approaches to stopping gun violence—and we must pursue them all. Thom Hartmann published an essay over the weekend that gave me hope that some solutions are not far from hand. See The Hartmann Report, Well-Regulated Smart Guns Are Here. As Hartmann explains, several technology solutions are fully operational and ready for deployment. Solutions include fingerprint technology to unlock guns and serial imprints on bullets inscribed by the firing pin upon discharge. None of these solutions would stop killers like the Jacksonville neo-Nazi, but they would undoubtedly stop other gun deaths. We must start somewhere.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

#Daily Don #racism #white supremism #Robert B. Hubbell #Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter #hate crimes #incitement

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totallyhussein-blog · 1 year ago

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Rishinomics or Reaganomics. What is next for Britain?

GROWING numbers of workers are being pulled into the red as the rising cost of essentials outpaces wage increases, Citizens Advice has warned.

The charity said the proportion of people in full-time employment it sees with “negative budgets” – having more money going out on essential costs than coming in – has risen from around 27 per cent in early 2019 to nearly 39 per cent by this year.

It added the self-employed have been particularly hard hit, with 58 per cent of those it has helped with debt having had a negative budget, compared with 39 per cent in 2019. Citizens Advice director of policy Matthew Upton said: “Most people expect that if you work hard, you should have enough money to get by."

“Yet our front-line advisers are seeing more and more people in work who can’t make ends meet. This is even after they’ve had specialist advice and done what they can to cut costs and maximise their income."

Following America's 1980's example

As USA Today reported back in 2013, Margaret Thatcher's first official visit to the United States was in 1967 when, as a young member of Parliament, she toured the country as part of a State Department exchange program. Thatcher first met Ronald Reagan one-on-one in April 1975 at the House of Commons in London. Reagan, then the governor of California, wrote a thank-you note to Thatcher, then the Conservative Party's opposition leader in Parliament.

The Ronald Reagan library identifies Thatcher as Reagan's most prolific correspondent among heads of state and notes that they exchanged hundreds of letters, messages and telephone calls. Both worked to dismantle government bureaucracies and deregulate key industries. At one meeting, Reagan and Thatcher had a sharp discussion about U.S. barriers to the denationalization of British Airways.

There's nothing "normal" about having a middle class, wrote Thom Hartmann in the Salon back in 2014. "Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it's a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation's middle class."

"When we had heavily regulated and taxed capitalism in the post-war era, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid working people what would be, in today's dollars, about $50 an hour with benefits. Reagan began deregulating and cutting taxes on capitalism in 1981, and today, with more classical "raw capitalism," what we call "Reaganomics," or "supply side economics," our nation's largest employer is WalMart and they pay around $10 an hour."

But as Peter Lunenfeld also wrote back in 2014; "economists are waking up to the fact that when young Americans enter the workforce burdened with over a trillion dollars in cumulative debt, they become risk averse, unwilling to move, less able to make major purchases, and slower to become homeowners. Not coincidentally, they don’t feel safe enough to register any major protests against the society that’s done this to them."

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frederick-shiels-stuff · 14 days ago

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FROM OUR ARCHIVES BUT STILL RELEVANT BECAUSE...

The silence of Republicans about voter fraud in the 2024 elections is– SURPRISE!– deafening. Also the silence of Democrats about the role of voter suppression in electing Trump and many of his “Class of 2024 boys and girls in the Congress” is equally so. An exception to the latter reality is highlighted by investigative reporter Greg Palast in the Thom Hartmann Report.…

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marktaylor-canfield · 4 months ago

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Nobody's Reporting This! 134 Reporters Killed In Gaza: Thom Hartmann & M...

#youtube #thom hartmann #mark taylor-canfield #usa #gaza #journalism #news #press #press freeedom #democracy

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arlengrossman · 1 year ago

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

By Thom Hartmann/ HartmannReport.com/ September 11, 2023 Today is 9/11, the event that first brought America together and then was cynically exploited by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to have a war against Iraq, following their illegal invasion of Afghanistan just a bit more than a year earlier. Yet the media today (so far, anyway) is curiously silent about Bush and Cheney’s lies. Given the…

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#9/11 #Arlen Grossman #Dick Cheney #George W. Bush #The Hartmann Report #Thom Hartmann

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garudabluffs · 10 months ago

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Don Jr. and Eric Giving Loyalty Tests To Wannabe Trump Staff

Apr 28, 2024 #TYT#TheYoungTurks#BreakingNews

"Donald Trump’s adult sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, are playing a central role in drawing up a list of potential candidates to join a second Trump administration in anticipation of their father’s victory over Joe Biden in November’s presidential election, Axios reports. The brothers are not running the transition team, leaving that responsibility to the Trump campaign’s senior adviser, Susie Wiles, but are instead playing a lead role in vetting prospective officials and staffers on ideological grounds, according to the site."

Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have been tasked with vetting Donald Trump's future cabinet to make sure it's stocked with faithful 'yes' men. Ben Gleib, Jackson White and Brett Erlich discuss on The Young Turks

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______________________________________________unrelated

FYI On Thurs. April 25,2024 i called the Thom Hartmann Show & was told to call back for ANYTHING GOES FRIDAY. Placed in queue 15 min.,:"What's on your mind today,Jerry?" Happy Arbor Day! "That's today? Plant some trees." ME : I have 4 to plant...'To summarize the SCOTUS Hearing, my paraphrase ( of the ridiculous fiasco) "The Pope is INFALLIBLE'; therefore POTUS 45 (ex-President Trump) has ABSOLUTE IMMUNITY." {i failed to say, Exonerated,he's not lying [about having absolute official immunity] --so we have to take him at his word} [[Thom- The court did not mention anything about papal doctrines]]

My other comment is : I've developed program code for a Trump Dial-A-Trial HOTLINE , so people can call-in and LEND their moral support...and if they want to SEND financial support..TRUST ME...I'll be sure he gets YOUR money! THOM "Sorry Jerry, this show doesn't allow solicitations over the airwaves." -Say, Thanks for taking my call (paraphrase). <I wasn't anticipating this response so i was too flustered to speak "i don't know how to write program code, i'm being sarcastic/satirical/facetious - making a joke of Trump's claiming he's above-the-law!> the joke's on me - now public radio audiences thinks like Thom that i am a Republican trying to raise funds for hocus-pocus bogus POTUS 45 !!!!!!!!

#Trump #sycophants #https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqSBoFmgWG8 #Youtube

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scottguy · 11 months ago

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This is the newspaper that is SO concerned with 'balance' that they routinely ignore massively unethical behavior by Republicans in their headlines yet over scrutinize ridiculous things like Joe Biden's age. (As if Trump isn't already senile, unstable , and demented.)

But, when it comes to marginalized groups, the NY Times is fine with bias and shoddy reporting. Where are "both sides" in this debate? What, you couldn't find a SINGLE trans person or advocate for a question or comment? That's not trying very hard obviously.

THIS is why I no longer read or subscribe to the New York Times.

Corporate media is useless!

Corporate media will consistently defend the screwed up status quo in the United States.

Follow progressive media such as:

Media Matters

Democracy Now

Mother Jones

Truthout

Vox

The Huffington Post

Salon

Thom Hartmann

The Best of the Left (aggregates & edits together from various progressive sources by topic)

Common Dreams

Raw Story

Move On.org

The Guardian

That's just a partial list.

Corporate Media sold us all out twenty years ago now. The editors of corporate media now care far more about profit than accurately informing their audience.

#corporate media is useless #boycott corporate media #screw the NY Times

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justinspoliticalcorner · 3 months ago

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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.

#Cable News Media #Liberal Media #Fox News #Media Bias #Legacy Media #Thom Hartmann #Substack #MSNBC #Media Ownership

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posttexasstressdisorder · 5 months ago

Text

Is this the October Surprise?

Thom Hartmann

September 28, 2024 2:20PM ET

U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith makes a statement to reporters after a grand jury returned an indictment of former U.S. President Donald Trump in the special counsel's investigation of efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat, at Smith's offices in Washington, U.S., August 1, 2023. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo

— October surprise?Jack Smith has filed a massive collection of evidence demonstrating Trump’s direct involvement in an attempted coup against the government of the United States, and Judge Chutkan may make it publicly available. The next two to three weeks will decide what we see and when, as Trump’s lawyers first will file their opposition to the release. For anybody who’s been paying attention, we all knew Trump and his buddies were criming against our country during the last weeks of his presidency (apparently Merrick Garland missed that for two years), but the release will probably drive a short news cycle which may inform a few low information voters.

— For the first time ever, Democrats make it rain in all 50 states. Over at Daily Kos, Morgan Stephens is reporting that the DNC is sending money to every state in the union, something we haven’t seen since Howard Dean’s “50 state strategy” back in 2008. This is great news; rightwing billionaires have been funding Republicans, particularly in low population states, for decades and the result has been the Red sweep of rural states and areas. Democrats are going to try to break some Republican supermajorities and help out down-ticket Red state candidates; the Harris campaign has also pitched in $25 million for the effort. Now, if they’d just convince some leftie mega donors to buy radio stations in those Red states (media is cheap in those areas!), we could seriously get about flipping a few purple or even Blue.

— Speaking of radio… Louise and I are in New Orleans where yesterday I was the opening keynote speaker for the Grassroots Radio Conference. Last night we hung out with old friends David Sirota and Sam Seder (who keynoted this morning) and new friend Wajahat Ali at the home of the conference organizers, Dr. MarkAlain Dery and his extraordinary wife Liana Elliott, who also started and run WHIV here in New Orleans. The conference is about and for mostly low-power FM stations that are popping up all around the country (my show is on many of them). This is a very encouraging trend!

— Justice Department sues Alabama for purging voters off the rolls. As I’ve noted in several of my newsletters here, Republicans across America are purging their voting rolls, depriving literally millions of people of their right to vote. Ever since 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court said a state can do this if a voter fails to vote in the last election, they’ve been going whole hog, but in a few cases they’ve been stopped or slowed down. Most recently, the Justice Department sued Alabama for their purges, saying it’s too close to the election. If you live in a state Republicans control, go to vote.gov and double-check your voter registration; if you live in a Blue part of the state and didn’t vote in the midterms, chances are they’ve already removed you from the rolls and you’ll have to re-register to vote.

— Jews and Catholics warn against Trump’s latest attack on religious voters. In two rallies, Trump has told Jewish people that if he fails to win the election it’ll be their fault. He made similar comments in a Truth Social post about Catholics. Now some religious groups are starting to push back by warning their people about political tests for religious people, but they’re massively outnumbered by the thousands of churches and televangelists and religious radio stations that are blatantly and illegally promoting Republican candidates this year. The IRS really needs to enforce the law!

— Will NYC Mayor Adams claim he was just taking tips? Ever since six Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that if a politician does favors for somebody (in this case, the country of Turkey) and then gets paid or spiffed, that’s not a bribe that can be prosecuted but a tip. It’d be a novel defense and its probable that Adams took gifts before he helped out the Turks, so it’ll be interesting to see if his lawyers try this one out. The level of corruption among the six Republicans on the Court is truly breathtaking, and it’s a bad sign for our democracy as they continue to promote a corrupt political culture.

— Once again, the media will refuse to do their damn job and fact-check Republican lies, this time in Tuesday’s Vance/Walz debate. Expect Vance to use the “firehose of lies” strategy, where you throw out a half-dozen or so lies in a single sentence or two, forcing your opponent to burn his time rebutting them. Trump tried it with over 30 lies in his debate with Harris, and the moderators only called him on two of them. Now CBS “News” says they’ll allow Vance to tell all the lies he wants and it’ll be up to Walz to fact-check them because, apparently, facts don’t matter any longer in the American news media culture. Disgusting.

— Crazy Alert! JD Vance is attending an event today with a corrupt evangelist who said Harris uses “witchcraft.” Lance Wallnau is a big-shot in the evangelical world, and he’s doing a tour of swing states this month to encourage people to vote Republican. His efforts, by the way, are being subsidized by your and my tax dollars, as he claims a nonprofit statute. Earlier this month, Wallnau tried out the misogynistic and hateful old “Jezebel” trope against Vice President Harris, saying, “She can look presidential. That’s the seduction of what I would say is witchcraft. That’s the manipulation of imagery that creates an impression contrary to the truth, but it seduces you into seeing it. So that spirit, that occult spirit, I believe is operating on her and through her.” If anybody is channeling evil spirits, in my opinion it’s Wallnau; he’s the embodiment of the people Jesus warned us about.

NOW READ: Comrade Trump isn’t defending capitalism — he’s defending white power

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