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(13 comments) SHARE Monday, February 8, 2010 Globalization Is Killing The Globe: Return to Local Economies
Globalization is killing Europe, just as it's already wiped out much of the American middle class.
Spain and Greece are facing immediate crises that many other European nations see on the near horizon: aging boomer workers are retiring with healthy benefit packages, but the younger workers who are paying for those benefits aren't making anything close to the income (or, therefore, paying the taxes) that their parents did.
(23 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 16, 2017 The Uncanny, Frightening Ways That Trump's America Mirrors Hitler's Germany
How will the heirs of today's GOP/Trump-financing billionaires look back on this era? That's assuming, of course, that any sort of real history of the events of this time survives Trump and Pence's dual assault on our news organizations and net neutrality. Given that the only force that can defeat organized money is organized people, whether our republic will withstand this assault is now in our hands.
(23 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 21, 2009 The Great Tax Con Job
today the uber-rich are spending hundreds of millions to make sure words like "burden" are always associated with the word "tax," and to convince average working people that they should throw out of office any politicians who are willing to raise taxes on the rich.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 22, 2006 The Truth about the Trust Fund-- Destroying Social Security to Destroy the Two Party System
What do you do when you want to screw only the working people of your nation with the largest tax increase in history and hand those trillions of dollars to your wealthy campaign contributors yet not have anybody realize you've done it? If you're Ronald Reagan, you call in Alan Greenspan.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 18, 2009 The Deciding Moment: The Theft of Human Right
From Chapter Six, "The Deciding Moment" of "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights".
There is comparatively little difference in the strength of men; a corporation may be one hundred, one thousand, or even one million times stronger than the average man. Man acts under the restraints of conscience, and is influenced also by a belief in a future life. A corporation has no soul and...
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 11, 2018 How the GOP Used a Two Santa Clauses Tactic to Con America for Nearly 40 Years
Between their tax cut and the nearly-trillion dollar spending increase passed on February 8th, in the first year-and-a-month of Trump's administration they've spent more stimulating the economy (and driving up debt by more than $2 trillion, when you include interest) than the entire Obama presidency.
(12 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 17, 2009 Healthcare: First They Came for the Banksters
We're awake, we're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it any more. Natalie Portman to Matt Taibbi to Arianna Huffington to Bill Moyers represent the span of our four awakened generations; generations who have figured out how the game is played. And don't like it.
(15 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 29, 2017 The Past 5 GOP Presidents Have Used Fraud and Treason to Steer Themselves to Electoral Victory
The Trump and Republican campaign of 2016, Americans are now discovering, was nearly all lies, well-supported by a vast right-wing media machine and a timid, profit-obsessed "mainstream" corporate media. Meanwhile, it seemed that all the Democrats could say was, "The children are watching!" Fraud, treason, and lies have worked well for the GOP for half a century.
(27 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 25, 2012 Globalism is the #1 Risk Facing Humanity
Globalization tears down borders across the planet - giving corporations free rein to move about the world and set up shop in nations wherever governments are the weakest, wherever there's the least amount of regulation, and wherever workers are willing to work for practically nothing. they just move in and take over, enslaving local populations and using local communities as garbage dumps.
(19 comments) SHARE Monday, July 30, 2018 Trump Is in Major Legal and Political Trouble -- His Desperate Attempts to Escape Could Lead America to Catastrophe
Trump thrives on creating crises, and then "solving" the crisis he, himself created. He did it with DACA, with Obamacare, and with North Korea. It seems he's trying the same playbook with Iran and immigration/asylum. Late in the 2016 presidential campaign, and early in the Trump presidency, it was nearly impossible to imagine the things that he would later do and get away with.
(16 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 13, 2013 Snowden's Revelation Paves the Way for Federal Lawsuit Against NSA
Thanks to Edward Snowden, a federal court may finally hear the Electronic Frontier Foundation's case defending our Fourth Amendment rights. Long before the whistle-blower exposed top secret NSA documents, the EFF was fighting to protect our privacy.
(27 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 8, 2010 Thom Hartmann Interviews Book burner pastor Terry jones
It is apparent that Terry Jones, pastor of the Dove World Church is doing Osama Bin Laden's work, doing the Devil's work by burning the Quran. It's tragic, and dangerous.
(12 comments) SHARE Monday, April 4, 2011 Is the Demise of the Tea Party Near?
According to a new CNN poll -- the Tea Party's favorability rating has sunk to an all-time low -- just 32%. Thom talks about the REAL tea party.
(36 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 10, 2011 Democracy Died First in Wisconsin -- Long Live the Oligarchs
The Wisconsin recall election was the first major test of the new era in American politics. That new era began in January of 2010 when the US Supreme Court ruled in "Citizens United v. FEC" that the political voice of We The People was no longer as important as the voices of billionaires and transnational corporations.
The Citizens United election experiment is over, and the oligarchs won. Long live the oligarchy.
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, September 26, 2008 How Wall Street Can Bail Itself out without Destroying the Dollar
Create an agency to fund the bailout, loan that agency the money from the Treasury, and then have that agency tax Wall Street to pay us (the Treasury) back.
It's been done before, and has several benefits.
(33 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 24, 2010 Michael Chertoff, Bend Over, Please"
If we are serious about stopping Middle Eastern zealots from attacking us, instead of blowing up our own Fourth Amendment right to be secure in our persons, let's stop blowing up Middle Eastern countries. Until then, it's just theatre -- with a few millions in profit for Chertoff and his friends.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 6, 2010 Hiding it all from "The Little People"
the amount of oil leaked, the liability of BP are being hidden-- by BP, by Obama... and that sure isn't helping the little people.
(10 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 29, 2012 Conservative Millennials, Boomers & Libertarians All being Conned
As Bill A. Clark put it, "I never bought anybody who wasn't for sale." The Kocks, Waltons & other wealthy parasites were paying attention & who knows, maybe the price of the next election is 561 million dollars.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 26, 2019 Has "Cover-Up General" William Barr Struck Again?
By cherry-picking Mueller's report and handing Trump the talking points he needed, Barr has done it again. The question this time is whether Congress will be as compliant as they were in 1993 and simply let it all go. Both Trump and senior Republican leadership are already calling for a repeat of '93; what remains to be seen is if the press and Democratic leadership will go along like they did back then.
(24 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 28, 2018 We May Be on the Verge of a Human-Made Climate Disaster
It's long past the time we should have done something substantial and worldwide to wean off our addiction to fossil fuels. And as Republican politicians nationwide, supported in part by the Koch brothers' mind-boggling fossil-fuel fortune, continue to deny even the basic science of climate change, things are deteriorating daily.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 20, 2011 Caught? Fake conservative identities re-writing the web?
Earlier this year - ThinkProgress obtained hacked emails from the defense contractor HB Gary Federal - that suggest that - with the help of other security firms - HBGF was working with the Chamber of Commerce to sabotage Progressive organizations like ThinkProgress and the union SEIU.
(10 comments) SHARE Friday, April 23, 2010 Profiling CEOs and Their Sociopathic Paychecks
what part of being a CEO could be so difficult-so impossible for mere mortals-that it would mean that there are only a few hundred individuals in the United States capable of performing it?
In my humble opinion, it's the sociopath part.
(30 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 8, 2015 The Billionaire Hypocrisy of Helping the Poor
If the richest in the US really want to help uplift the most impoverished regions around our own country, they could certainly do it. The business magnates who have made billions from our trade deals can stop outsourcing jobs. They can start reopening factories and build new manufacturing facilities right here in the United States.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, December 19, 2008 Alexander Hamilton's Advice To The Obama Administration
Alexander Hamilton, in 1791, proposed to the United States our first true industrial policy. We adopted it over the next few years, Abraham Lincoln reaffirmed it fourscore years later, and it was again affirmed by every President of the United States until Reagan began his now-28-year "Reagan Revolution" which has disassembled America's industrial base and impoverished our nation.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 30, 2017 How the GOP Tax Cut Will Also Shrink Your Paycheck
With the GOP now getting another Reaganesque tax cut, get ready to see working people's pay start dropping again, just as it did starting in the 1980s after Reagan's tax cut, and in the early 2000s after Bush's. Also get ready to see income inequality grow even worse, as the truly rich see a big boost in their take-home pay and thus their overall wealth, while working people and our nation's infrastructure get screwed.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 11, 2010 The Real Problem is the Professional Right
because of the messaging incompetence of Mr Gibbs in the White House, and the cacophony of voices from the professional right, polls show that fewer than 5% of Americans know the difference between Obama's acutely effective stimulation plan and Bush's insane bank bail out plan.
(10 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 16, 2014 We Better Get Net Neutrality Signed into Law Before Media Mergers Kill the Internet as We Know It
Comcast and Time Warner are two of America's largest internet service providers, providing millions of Americans access to the World Wide Web. If you factor in Comcast's proposed takeover of Time Warner, with last month's ruling on net neutrality, American consumers could be screwed.
Last month, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Obama administration's net-neutrality rules.
(34 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 18, 2008 Three Cups of Tea for Rick Warren
While some consider homophobe Rick Warren to be THE guy with a bullseye on his back for progressives, consider the metaphor of the three cups of tea for a moment.
(40 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 6, 2015 Who Pays Taxes in the US? Everyone but the Super-Rich
After 40 years of corporate America infiltrating and subverting our democracy -- they've grabbed so much power and influence over our politics that they've essentially written themselves out of our tax code. So now -- only the regular working people in the US -- the doctors, plumbers, servers and small business owners -- pay taxes in the US.
(45 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 3, 2017 So Few Americans Understand What the Second Amendment Is Really About -- or Its Dark History
The Second Amendment, which is now used by the weapons industry to justify selling weapons of war to civilians, was originally created, at least in part, to help preserve slavery in the South. You really couldn't ask for a better metaphor for everything that's challenging about America and its history.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 28, 2012 Time for Congress to Impeach Justice Antonin Scalia
So in 1803 Samuel Chase criticized the president for trying to expand voter rights and got impeached. In 2012 Antonin Scalia criticized the president for trying to save young undocumented immigrants from deportation... but there's virtually no chance he'll be impeached. But it goes beyond Scalia's comments on immigration -- the guy has a history of tarnishing the integrity of the Supreme Court.
(19 comments) SHARE Friday, January 23, 2015 Is John Boehner a Traitor, a Criminal?
So, why is Boehner's invitation to Netanyahu such a big deal? First off, it's a huge violation of protocol and massively disrespectful to President Obama and the authority of the executive branch. It is completely unprecedented for the Speaker of the House, or any member of Congress, to invite a foreign leader to come to the US and speak to Congress without getting authorization and/or cooperation from the White House.
(15 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 29, 2009 Two Santa Clauses or How The Republican Party Has Conned America for Thirty Years
This weekend, House Republican leader John Boehner played out the role of Jude Wanniski on NBC's "Meet The Press."
Odds are you've never heard of Jude, but without him Reagan never would have become a "successful" president, Republicans never would have taken control of the House or Senate, Bill Clinton never would have been impeached, and neither George Bush would have been president.
(7 comments) SHARE Monday, December 3, 2012 Goldman Sachs' Global Coup D'etat
Goldman Sachs and its alumni are implicated in all the great economic crises and scandals of the last several years. Their procedure is to create a bubble, while betting against it, then profit handsomely when the bubble bursts. They were in on the American bank bailout of 2008; they engineered the destruction of the Greek economy; now they are working to impose austerity and undermine economies across southern Europe.
(12 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 28, 2011 If Obama Doesn't Want to Lead the Revolution - Young People Will
This is the revolution that Americans hoped for when Barack Obama pledged to "fundamentally change the United States and the world" when he was elected President in 2008. But so far - this pledge has been unfulfilled. Barack Obama was not much of a revolutionary. But ultimately - it was never about him - it was about us - and in particular it was about the young people - because all revolutions originate from the bottom up.
(31 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 15, 2014 American Democracy No Longer Works
Money has taken over our political process. For the first time in American history, a majority of lawmakers in the House of Representatives are millionaires, and a startling number -- at both the federal and state level -- are being bankrolled by billionaires like the Koch brothers. This isn't what the founders had in mind when they founded our once-great nation.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 31, 2011 The Battle to Save Democracy
Opednews is, with author and publisher permission, reprinting Thom Hartmann's essential to read book, Unequal Protection, which explores the history, development and implications of corporate personhood. Thanks to Thom and publisher, Berrett-Koehler. This is the book's Introduction
(24 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 27, 2012 How Can You Plan a Revolution when Big Brother is Watching?
It's increasingly looking like the United States is one generation away from completely forgetting what privacy means. And the consequences of this Great Forgetting will be tragic for our nation. Why? Because without privacy - without the ability to be anonymous - America can't even plan a peaceful revolution or non-violent progressive social change movements - because if big corporations or Big Brother are watching
(29 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 17, 2017 The America I Knew Has Almost Disappeared
There's really very little democracy left in our democracy. Our votes are handled in secret by private, unaccountable for-profit corporations. Our laws are written, more often than not, by corporate lawyers/lobbyists or representatives of billionaire-level wealth. And our media is owned by the same class of investors/stockholders, so it's a stretch to expect them to do much critical reporting.
(53 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 6, 2018 How America Ended Up With Donald Trump
Once the oligarchs get their oligarch -- in this case Donald Trump -- they're going to do everything they can to defend him and keep him in place unless he's no longer useful to them. It shouldn't surprise us when the people who are putting our politicians in office, essentially, by buying the elections, don't give a damn about governance.
(18 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 5, 2019 Why Have No Republicans Turned on Trump?
There is a very simple reason why some Republicans voted for the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon, but none have so far broken ranks against Trump. That reason is a corrupted U.S. Supreme Court.
(57 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 14, 2017 The Trump Story the Media Dare Not Utter
Freedom of the press in America has become as much an economic as a political issue. This is problematic, because no democracy can survive when most of the media has a sole commitment to profit with little consideration for the public good. The Trump presidency is virtually entirely a product of our modern for-profit, highly-consolidated media.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 1, 2012 Hartmann: Imagine life with no water...in America!
A new study by the American Water Works Association reveals that America's underground water pipe infrastructure is rapidly deteriorating - and needs to be revamped to the tune of one trillion dollars. Most water pipes were laid down more than fifty years ago. And today - after more than 30 years of "starve the beast" Reaganomics that didn't invest one dime in our infrastructure - those pipes are past the end of most of their
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 8, 2015 If You Liked the Iraq War, You'll Love the Iran War
This isn't a deal between the US and Iran -- this is a binding international agreement negotiated between six countries, ratified by the United Nations, and supported by the strictest inspection regime ever devised.
And if this deal fails -- it won't be Iran that has gone rogue from the international community.
It will be the United States and Israel.
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, October 10, 2011 Columbus Day - As Rape Rules Africa and American Churches Embrace Violent 'Christian' Video Games
Slavery, apartheid, and the entire concept of conservative Darwinian Economics, have been used to justify continued suffering by masses of human beings.
the Native American word wÃ-' -tiko (pronounced WET-ee-ko) describes the collection of beliefs that would produce behavior like that of Columbus. WÃ-' -tiko literally means "cannibal,"
(6 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 4, 2018 Did Trump Just Announce His 9/11 "Unification" Strategy?
Billionaire Trump and the billionaire-funded Republicans (and their billionaire-owned "news" channel), true to color, are only interested in what will increase billionaire wealth over the short term, regardless of how badly it devastates working people or the nation long-term. The Trump Reality Show, in all its sick horror, is just getting underway.
(12 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 6, 2017 Is America Past the Point of No Return?
While climate change is ravaging the world, the administration of billionaire oligarch Donald Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate change agreement and is rolling back climate-protecting rules on behalf other oligarchs in the oil, coal and gas business so they can continue to use our atmosphere as a sewer.
(16 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 19, 2015 The Wall Street Journal's Attempt to Take Down Bernie Sanders Backfired
It's 5 trillion dollars that we the people will save with Bernie's plan -- and get back -- by adopting an efficient -- and affordable -- single payer health-care for all system. And that would be good for everyone -- and the economy as a whole.
(47 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 22, 2015 Picking Apart One of the Biggest Lies in American Politics: "Free Trade"
President Obama continues to follow his predecessors -- Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush -- in the religious belief that "free trade" will save us all. It's nonsense. "Free trade" is a guaranteed ticket to the poorhouse for any nation, and the evidence is overwhelming.
(20 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 18, 2012 The No Billionaires Campaign
I believe it's time we reconsider the role billionaires play in our economy and our society. In fact, I say it's time we outlaw billionaires by placing a 100% tax on any wealth over $999,999,999. Trust me, we'll all be much better off in a nation free of billionaires.
(12 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 6, 2017 Republicans' Vicious and Immoral Health Care Bill Is Just Part of a Sinister Long Game
While Democrats are jubilant that the GOP passed a terrible healthcare/tax-cut bill through the House, which they think will cause voters to reject the GOP in 2018, it's a very, very premature celebration.
The Republicans are playing a longer game here, one based on a time-tested strategy first explicated by Machiavelli and fully put into place by Goebbels in the early 1930s, then fine-tuned by Reagan through the 1980s.
(33 comments) SHARE Friday, June 26, 2020 Why Is Trump So Enthusiastic About Americans Dying?
Nobody knows why Trump is so enthusiastic about encouraging people to get sick and die from COVID-19, although there are a couple possibly viable theories. He seems hellbent on a crusade to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 8, 2022 Ukraine Again Shows Why Decentralized Energy is Essential
We lost 45 years to the fossil fuel billionaires and their GOP toadies, who've kept us dependent on fossil fuels to keep their profits high - but still they want more, more, more...
(7 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 27, 2015 The Trans-Pacific Partnership Will Sink the Middle Class
Two decades of free-trade deals have eviscerated the middle class and bloodied the "American dream." If President Obama goes ahead and signs us onto another free-trade deal, especially one as destructive as the TPP, that will be like tying a cement block to the feet of a drowning man.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, February 16, 2009 The Ghost of Vice President Wallace Warns: "It Can Happen Here"
Written in 2004, and published by CommonDreams.org, Henry Wallace's quoted article comes into focus ever clearer after the "meltdown" toward the end of GW Bush's 2nd term. Progressives can be advised to save it in their documents after that term finally (!) ended.
(28 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 29, 2016 Here's How We Can Really Protect America
It's time to wake up and realize that we've become the planet's village idiots. Giant transnational corporations and the politicians the Supreme Court has allowed them to own have sold us out. We're the only developed country in the world that doesn't aggressively practice at least some form of protectionism.
(104 comments) SHARE Friday, July 20, 2018 There Are 3 Main Theories That Explain Trump's Approach to Putin and Russia -- Which One Makes the Most Sense?
Businesses are basically serfdoms. The CEO is the king, the board and senior executives are the courtiers and landed gentry, and the workers are the serfs. This has been Trump's experience ever since he inherited his daddy's business, and he's never in his life been accountable to any principle (like "democracy") or to any persons.
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, December 6, 2010 Tax Cut Lies: The Day The News Died
EVERYONE would have gotten a tax cut under the Democrats' proposal. Every single taxpayer in America, from the street-sweeper to Bill Gates. Everyone!
(12 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 18, 2014 Billionaires ... First They Came for the Economy
Over the past 40 years, billionaire oligarchs have slowly but surely taken over just about all aspects of life in America. It's time to end America's oligonomy by rolling back the Reagan tax cuts and enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust act, so that corporations can't amass endless piles of money. As for Washington's ruling oligarchy, we need to roll back Citizen's United, and and say loudly and clearly that money is not speech.
(40 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 22, 2014 The Lost Generation
Before lawmakers in Washington got hooked on Reaganomics and libertarian economics, our country never had a student loan debt crisis. To compound their problem, while millenials are struggling to pay off their student loan debt, they're also struggling to find employment, another consequence of libertarian economics.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 15, 2019 The Right-Wing American Love Affair With One of the Most Disturbing Serial Killers
There's a direct link between a sociopathic killer in 1927 and the GOP's willingness to embrace a sociopathic president like Trump. That link runs through the work of Ayn Rand. When Donald Trump was running for the GOP nomination, he told USA Today's Kirsten Powers that Ayn Rand's raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, "The Fountainhead," was his favorite book. "That book relates to ... everything," he said.
(26 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 11, 2015 Exposing the Republican Party's Sleazy Playbook to Destroy Social Security
It is clear that the GOP plan is to use this unnecessary, manufactured crisis as an opening to "reform" Social Security -- translated: cut and privatize. Thus, forcing Democrats to become the Social Security anti-Santa a different way. Democrats must accept neither the cut to disability payments, nor the entree to Social Security "reform."
(12 comments) SHARE Monday, August 17, 2009 From Thom Hartmann; Dear President Obama: A Modest Medicare Proposal
I understand you're thinking of dumping your "public option" because of all the demagoguery by Sarah Palin and Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich and their crowd on right-wing radio and Fox. Fine. Good idea, in fact.
Instead, let's make it simple. Please let us buy into Medicare.
(20 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 20, 2015 Four Ways Republicans Are Trying to Take Us Back to the Jim Crow Era
During the Jim Crow era, it was pretty much impossible for black people to vote. While the Constitution banned voter discrimination based on race, Southern states got around this ban by using tricks and tests to keep African-Americans way from the polls.
These weren't fair tests, either -- they were designed to make people fail.
(14 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 1, 2015 The True Costs of Corporate Welfare
If we're serious about going after "welfare queens" in the US, to use Ronald Reagan's phrase, then let's start by going after the corporations and industries that use the Walmart business model of paying such low wages that their employees qualify for welfare benefits.
(6 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 16, 2021 The Real Crime General Milley Exposed Laid Bare
If the GOP had the courage of the Senate Republicans in 1974, Milley never would have been in a position to worry that an American president might start a nuclear war just to hang on to power
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 7, 2015 Welcome to the New Corporate Feudalism
For average working people, there is no such thing as a middle class in "natural" capitalism. Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people. Inequality is the default option, just as it was in Medieval Europe under feudalism. Inequality is now at a record high, and the richest 3 percent of the population now controls more than half of all wealth.
(9 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 11, 2017 It Doesn't Cost Billionaires Anything To Oppress You
Republicans will never ever speak out against pollution because the donor class is making money on that, against guns because the donor class is making money on that, against the obscene profits the pharmaceutical industry is making because the Republican donor class is making money off that.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 31, 2006 Killing the Middle Class; How the Corporatocracy Sets the Rules of the "Game" To Create Peons
Always get suspicious when you see the words free market.
One of the most pernicious claims the corporatocracy makes is that business flourishes best in a perfectly "free" market. And when business flourishes, they say, all of society does better. It's the old trickle-down philosophy that inevitably produces a nation of peons.
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Greece - The Eurozone's first colony? Or Where War Begins?
Europe is nearing a tipping point - and it's not so inconceivable that the ongoing financial crisis could descend into all-out war. With a second bailout coming down the pike for Greece - and more austerity - or starvation - on the way for the Greek people - hotter heads are speaking up.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 4, 2017 What America's Founders Would Say to Alabama's Fundamentalist Hustler Roy Moore
Moore's main arguments for keeping a graven image of the Ten Commandments in the Alabama Supreme Court rotunda are, he said, that America is a Judeo/Christian nation founded by Christians, and that the foundation of American law is the Bible and the Ten Commandments. He's repeating these claims in his run for the Senate.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 3, 2019 The GOP's Most Successful Scam Is About to Reboot Itself
When Republicans are in power, run up as much debt as possible, mostly by borrowing and giving that cash to the Republican donor class through tax cuts and corporate subsidies; when Democrats have political power, Republicans suddenly become hysterical about the debt and demand that Dems keep taxes low while cutting social spending.
(9 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 30, 2017 How the Republican Party Has Conned America for Over 30 Years
Ronald Reagan was the first national Republican politician to suggest that he could cut taxes on rich people and businesses, that those tax cuts would cause them to take their surplus money and build factories to make more stuff, and that the more stuff there was supplying the economy the faster it would grow.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 18, 2015 How the Billionaires Bought Justice for Scott Walker
Scott Walker is the perfect example of how billionaires can purchase justice a la carte to protect their pet politicians. Now that's not to say that Scott Walker himself is a billionaire. But he has a well-known relationship with billionaires like the Koch Brothers -- and their assorted front groups.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 17, 2011 How Republicans avoid angry constituents...outsourcing?
Republicans have figured out a way to both make a buck off of doing their public duty of meeting with constituents, and making sure that they never again have to answer an uncomfortable question. Here's how:
(10 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 13, 2015 Why We Shouldn't Look the Other Way on Bush's Iraq War Crimes
Rumsfeld may be distancing himself, but Bush and Cheney are still remorseless and still guilty. Vincent Bugliosi was right -- we need "some courageous prosecutor" to demand justice and to charge George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for their lies and the murders of 4,500 American soldiers and over half a million Iraqis.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, February 19, 2018 We Live in a Country That Has a Totally Corrupted Political System
The NRA's essentially outright purchase of senators like Richard Burr ($6.3 million in 2016), Marco Rubio ($3.2 million in 2016), Roy Blunt ($3 million), and Rob Portman ($2.2 million) -- and Donald Trump ($30 million in the presidential race) -- is so obviously corrupt to many of the students in Parkland that they're furious.
(21 comments) SHARE Friday, January 17, 2014 Company Responsible for Major Chemical Spill Is a Great Candidate for the Corporate Death Penalty
It goes without saying that we need stronger regulations on companies like Freedom Industries whose activities threaten the health and safety of the general public. We need to make sure that corporations know that if they violate the public's trust that they will face serious consequences. It's high time we brought back the corporate death penalty.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 26, 2012 #OWS Arrests Cost US Dearly in Press Freedom
It has been a very tumultuous year for the Occupy movement, and even more so for the reporters and journalists who have covered the movement and it's principles. Throughout 2011 - reporters covering the movement were beaten - arrested and ultimately prevented from reporting on police action against Occupy protestors.
(9 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 24, 2009 The Holiday Gift This Country Needs...
The gift our country needs this Holiday season is an economy that serves us instead of us just serving those who own or control most of the economy.
We need policies that bring our jobs back home and make it possible for us to return to buying American.
(14 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 28, 2015 "Fast Track" Flouts the Constitution
If Congress does give President Obama fast-track power, our elected representatives wouldn't be allowed to make any amendments whatsoever to trade deals like the TPP. Instead, the treaty would be sent right to the floor where it would only have to pass a simple up-or-down vote after debate limited to eight minutes per member.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 14, 2015 The GOP's Food Stamp Hypocrisy
It's actually more expensive to stop poor people from eating shellfish than to just let the food stamp program go on as normal, but Republicans are all on board because it punishes and stigmatizes low-income people. So much for compassionate conservatism in the Republican Party. It was a lie and an oxymoron when George W. Bush promoted the phrase, and it's still a lie today.
(7 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 28, 2011 Thom Hartmann: The Question Republicans Can't Answer
Now is the time that we ask the Republicans a question - a question that I guarantee they can't answer. And that question is" "Can you name one thing - just one thing - that millionaires and billionaires will have to sacrifice in this debt-limit deal as part of a 'shared sacrifice' approach?"
(10 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 5, 2006 Thom Hartmann; Democracy and the Middle Class
A political democracy and an economic middle class is the natural state of humankind. Indeed, it's the natural state of the entire animal kingdom.
To have a democracy we must have a middle class. And to have a true middle class, a majority of the people in a nation must be educated and economically secure and must have full and easy access to real news so they can make informed decisions.
(17 comments) SHARE Friday, October 28, 2022 Could Today's Crises Help America Reject Corporate Personhood?
Economic crises represent social and political transition points, times of great difficulty but also times of great opportunity - We now stand at the edge of one those rare windows in time.
We've reached the point in the United States where corporatism has nearly triumphed over democracy.
(8 comments) SHARE Friday, March 28, 2014 It's Time To Put America First
Republicans are all for forking over billions of dollars to an unelected government in Ukraine, but when it comes to helping out unemployed Americans, they're suddenly screaming about the debt and the deficit. Republican obstruction looks even more ridiculous when you remember that those 2 million jobless people who are still without benefits paid into the unemployment insurance throughout their adult working lives.
SHARE Saturday, January 25, 2020 Lev Parnas is afraid of Bill Barr -- and he should be
Lev Parnas recently told Rachel Maddow that he's more afraid of Attorney General Bill Barr than he is of the mobbed-up foreign oligarchs he has betrayed. Barr, after all, can weaponize our prisons to punish Parnas. Democrats in the House who are considering where to next turn their investigation lens may well find a rich vein to mine in looking at Barr.
(24 comments) SHARE Friday, October 11, 2019 Here's What the Framers of the Constitution Had to Say About Impeachment
There has been much discussion about what the framers of the Constitution thought about impeachment of the president, particularly given the wide range of impeachable things Trump has done, and the debate around whether impeaching him is consistent with the thoughts of the men who wrote the Constitution's impeachment clause.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, August 28, 2006 Thom Hartmann; Reclaiming The Issues: Islamic Or Republican Fascism?
Fascism is again rising in America, this time calling itself "compassionate conservatism," and "the free market" in a "flat" world. The RNC's behavior today eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said:
"In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."
SHARE Thursday, July 28, 2022 Welcome To the Anthropocene - The Age Of Human Die-offs
We are stumbling "- seemingly oblivious "- into the bared teeth of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch driven by humanity itself. We are walking straight into it and pretending it's not here
(8 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 15, 2018 The Trump Administration Is a Government of Billionaires and Their Sycophants
Many members of today's billionaire class think of themselves as "self-made," and so have a sneering disregard for the working people of America who "merely" aspire to the American Dream of being in the middle class with a safe job, good benefits, and a secure retirement. These oligarchs are more concerned with their profits than with the impact of their products or services on our country.
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, September 29, 2008 How Wall Street Can Bail Itself Out Without Destroying the Dollar
We've done it before. We financed the Spanish American War and partially financed the Civil War, WWI, and WWII with STETs. We stabilized our stock market with a STET from the mid-30s to 1966, and other nations are doing it today. It's time to do it again, this time using the STET so tax Wall Street can pay for its own bailout.
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 29, 2011 $7.7 trillion to Wall Street - Anything to keep the Banksters Happy!
while Congress was debating back in 2008 whether or not to bailout Banksters with a $700 billion blank check, Elizabeth Duke, Donald Kohn and Kevin Warsh were just doing it. They were funneling $7.7 trillion to Wall Street under the table - without one constituent phone call - without worrying about one election - without having to give one explanation.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 28, 2015 Bill O'Reilly and America Need to Be De-Programmed
Slavery is gone, but the racial logic that made it possible is still very much with us. So why is that? Why, more than 150 years after the Civil War, do so many people still hold on to the white supremacy death cult? Easy -- Because Republicans have told them it's OK to do so.
(27 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 8, 2015 One Simple Way to Save American Democracy: Get Serious About Taxing the Mega-Rich
The Founders of our republic fought a war against an aristocratic, oligarchic nation, and were very clear that they didn't want America to ever degenerate into aristocracy, oligarchy, or feudalism/fascism. We must uphold their vision of an egalitarian, democratic republic, and a "No Billionaires" tax would be a great start.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, April 30, 2018 Fascists Compete To Own America
Fascism is rising in America, this time calling itself "conservativism." The Republican politicians and their billionaire donors' behavior today eerily parallels that day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."
(10 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 14, 2014 Republicans' Insane Political Strategy: Ruining Our Country Hurts the Democratic Party
The Republicans have their strategy, and they're sticking to it, even though it involves destroying lives and even killing people. When Republicans go on television or radio and talk about how bad the economy is, and how many people are hurting, they are not complaining -- they're bragging.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, June 29, 2012 Watergate: The Hidden History and the 2012 Elections
Finally, we have answers to the most important remaining questions about Watergate: What were the burglars after and why Nixon was willing to risk his presidency to get it? Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA by Lamar Waldron lays it all out in extraordinary detail.
(52 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 6, 2014 The Fatal Flaw With Democracy
What we did with prisons, with voting machines, and with the surveillance state are all things that we've now done with our election system: we've privatized, outsourced, and corporatized it, with similarly disastrous results. The Founding Fathers are rolling over in their graves.
SHARE Wednesday, February 18, 2015 Threat of Deadly Pathogens on the Rise Thanks to Climate Change
Unknown infectious diseases could pop up across the globe thanks to climate change. For example, there are sure to be unknown bacteria and pathogens that have been frozen in Arctic ice for thousands of years. But, if that ice melts, and those never-before-seen pathogens get released into the air, they could start new epidemics that we simply wouldn't be able to fight because we've never had experience with them.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 24, 2015 A CEO Goes to Jail for Killing People
A federal jury sentenced the former owner of the now defunct Peanut Corporation of America to 28 years in prison for his role in one of the largest salmonella outbreaks in US history. But Stewart Parnell wasn't charged with killing or sickening anybody, even though the outbreak was connected to at least nine deaths across five states. No, he was charged for 67 counts of defrauding customers.
(42 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 11, 2014 Why We Need to Prosecute Our Torturers
Dick Cheney is a war criminal and a liar, and should be rotting in a prison cell in The Hague, not giving motivational speeches to Republican lawmakers who're trying to look tough during an election year. The fact that he isn't in jail, though, and the fact that he is making motivational speeches shows how badly we've never come to terms with either the Bush administration or its crimes.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 20, 2015 The Comcastization of MSNBC-- What To Do About It
Comcast's firing of Ed Schultz was a wake-up call to many progressives. The 10 lawsuits against the FCC should be another -- a huge one.
(28 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 25, 2014 Time for the US to Dump the Word "Homeland"
While Germans still won't say it, the word "homeland" is everywhere in the United States. Bush and Cheney rolled it out in a big way after 9/11, and our media managed to completely ignore the dark history of the word. Let's rename the Department of "Homeland" Security, and remove from the United States' self-description this dark, strange and creepy term.
(16 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 20, 2016 What Happens When Neither Political Party Answers to the Bottom 90%? America in Crisis
With both political parties captured almost entirely by the interest of the top 1% (Republicans) and the top 10% (Democrats), the bottom 90% feel they have nowhere else to go. For the past few decades, they've expressed this reality of being unrepresented by simply not voting and not showing up for politics, which they correctly saw as rigged and not working in their interest.
(12 comments) SHARE Friday, March 4, 2016 Why Is Our Government Working for the Private Good Over the Public Good?
If the new chemical safety bill passes into law, cities and schools will be stuck with the bill to clean up Monsanto's cancer-causing chemical, and individuals will be stuck with the bill to treat the cancers that the chemical caused. That's a real possibility, because our government has stopped working for the public good, and now it works mostly to line the coffers of multibillion dollar corporations.
(17 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 15, 2015 The Media Is Ignoring the Most Important Issue of Our Time
The media loves terror porn; keeping people afraid is profitable. However, both common sense, and simple analysis, show that what really keeps most Americans up at night is money, or the lack of it. For the first time in the lifetime of many Americans, the Middle Class now makes up less than half of the US population.
(9 comments) SHARE Monday, March 23, 2009 The Real Criminals Are Neither Lynndie England nor the AIG Traders
...the real criminals of the AIG mess - and the entire financial meltdown that was set up between 1999 and 2006 and crashed starting in 2007 - were Grover Norquist, Phil and Wendy Graham, Tom Delay, and, sadly, Bill Clinton.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 15, 2016 Why Does Trump Survive Scandals? Because Scandals Are Part of His Appeal
Trump is someone who's made billions by hustles and bribes, and he's not going to suddenly change once he becomes president. He'll still be the same privileged bully he's always been. If he brings his corrupt deal-making skills to the White House, expect him and his buddies to get rich and US workers to get the shaft. That's the way it's always been with Trump the businessman; it's the way it'll be with Trump the politician.
SHARE Tuesday, January 19, 2016 One Thing Donald Trump Is Actually Right About When It Comes to America's Economic Problems
During an exchange with his Republican rivals, Donald Trump said, "You can't deal with China without [a] tariff. They do it to us. We don't do it. It's not fair trade." Even the right-wing moderators quickly tried to dispute the Donald, but on this one point, he happens to be exactly right. Donald Trump may be wrong on just about everything, but he's absolutely right about tariffs.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, July 29, 2016 Trump Gets His Talking Points From White Supremacist Twitter Accounts
Even if Trump doesn't believe what these Neo-Nazis think, he's bringing their ideas out in the open by tweeting memes and giving them shout-outs in press conferences. He's not making America great again; he's making US white supremacy acceptable again. Trump is a racist and a crypto-fascist, and the many of the people who actually are paying attention to his policies and still support him are even worse.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 11, 2016 The EPA's Ties to Monsanto Could Be Disastrous for the US
When Nixon authorized the creation of the EPA, there was bipartisan consensus that this country needs a single, streamlined regulatory agency dedicated to protecting our air and water. Now, we're approaching a bipartisan consensus that the EPA is broken. And the fact is, it's been broken for more than 30 years, ever since the Reagan administration turned it into a partner of industry, rather than a regulator.
(23 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 1, 2014 Cliven Bundy's Friends Have Become the Koch Brothers' Useful Idiots
Despite all the milita movement's rage against corrupt government, American decline, and the elites, in the end, the only people who benefit from its fight against "big government" are the same people who are already destroying our country -- the billionaires and the oligarchs. To put it bluntly, the militias are the useful idiots of the one percent.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 22, 2017 So you think You'll Get a Tax Break, or tax cut? Really?
So, you think you're getting a middle-class tax cut? Well, first of all only, about half the middle class might get even a tiny tax cut. The other half of the middle class is going to pay more.
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 21, 2020 Will Trump Step Down?
Every time Trump speaks, the stock market goes down even more and faster. America now gets it. In Brazil, the people are demanding that right wing president Jair Bolsonaro step down because he did the same thing Trump has done in failing to prepare for a crisis that was obviously coming and then lying to his people about it for months.
(13 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 18, 2018 The Fascists Are Coming for Your Social Security and Medicare
Ever since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been working overtime to kneecap institutions that support the American middle class. And, as any working-class family can tell you, the GOP has had some substantial successes, particularly in shifting both income and political power away from voters and toward billionaires and transnational corporations.
(21 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 18, 2016 The Danger With Trump's "Election Rigging" Talk
The real problem with Trump's rigged election talk is that it will give Republican legislatures all across the country a new justification to ramp up their war on young people, people of color and older people voting. The base will want it because Trump will have primed them for it, and so will the party establishment, because they've always worked to suppress the vote.
(78 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 30, 2014 You Don't Know What "Libertarian" Means
Libertarians want to abolish Social Security, screw over working-class Americans, and take all the money that would go towards Social Security and invest it in Wall Street, so that their wallets can get even bigger. There's over $2.5 trillion sitting in the Social Security Trust Fund right now. They don't want to have any responsibility for society. Screw society!
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 20, 2019 What Republicans and Billionaires Really Mean When They Talk About "Freedom"
America -- particularly the Democratic Party -- is engaged in a debate right now about the meaning of socialism. It would be a big help for all of us if we were, instead, to have an honest debate about the meaning of the words freedom and liberty.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, July 6, 2009 Fascism Coming to a Court Near You; Corporate Personhood and the Roberts' Court
Thanks to the Roberts Supreme court, In just a few months, we may again stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. Fascism is rising in America, this time calling itself "compassionate conservatism," and "the free market" in a "flat" world. The point of its spear is "corporate personhood" and "corporate free speech rights."
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, October 8, 2021 The Newest Big Pharma Scam Exposed
Molnupiravir is the new pill that's been all over the news recently because it can cut hospitalizations and deaths of unvaccinated COVID-infected people by as much as half and doesn't require folks to go to the hospital or an infusion center. Just take a pill every day for five days and you're good.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 2, 2015 Who's on Your Side -- Elizabeth Warren or Jamie Dimon?
Today, thanks to the Supreme Court saying that industry can use money to distort politics, our government no longer looks out for average citizens, but instead promotes and protects the interests of the rich and powerful. By and large, corporations and the rich get their way, much as they did over 200 years ago when the British parliament passed the Tea Act.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, July 22, 2011 Thom Hartmann: Final Words of Killer Cannot Be Ignored
America still has a hate hangover, even as the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, Thom brings us the story of a young American who went on a killing spree after 9/11 looking for random Muslims. His last words offer us a look at our own hate and hypocrisy (VIDEO).
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 24, 2015 It's Time for the US to Return to "Socialist" Policies
For 35 years, Reaganomics and tax cuts for the rich have only benefited the rich, at the expense of the middle class and the country as a whole. Americans overwhelmingly want our nation to return to the "radical socialist" policies pioneered by Dwight D. Eisenhower and bring the middle class back again.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 16, 2016 Why Republicans Have Only Themselves to Blame If Trump Wins the Nomination
The Republicans are reaping the not-so-sweet rewards of fighting for more extremism, more political maneuvering and a boatload more money in our political process. If they really want to take on Donald Trump, all they have to do is adopt a few liberal views. I'm sure progressives everywhere are waiting to welcome them into the folds.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 29, 2006 Today's Immigration Battle - Corporatists vs. Racists (and Labor is Left Behind)
The corporatist Republicans ("amnesty!") are fighting with the racist Republicans ("fence!"), and it provides an opportunity for progressives to step forward with a clear solution to the immigration problem facing America.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, July 8, 2011 Thom Hartmann: Republicans ran up the debt & now they don't want to pay the bills
What our nation is faced with today is a mountain of debt run up mostly by 3 Republican Presidents - Ronald Reagan - and the two Bushes. And now today - that very same Republican Party is saying "no way" to Democrats who just want to pay off that pile of Republican debt.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, July 4, 2014 The Crash of 2016 Gets Closer Every Day
Until the corporate elite and our billionaire class are under control, and our working class once again can enter the middle class, we stand at the precipice of a great crash. Without vigorous governmental action to radically reduce student and working family debt, increase wages, and suppress speculation, that crash comes closer to us every day.
(9 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 10, 2017 What the Corporate News Industry Won't Ever Tell Its Audience
When the only metric is profit, everything can be explained by profit. And profit doesn't give a damn about morality or democracy or you or me or even the future of our nation or world. It's essentially a sociopathic business model, which works out really well for sociopathic politicians and the sociopathic polluters who own them -- and the media they lavish billions onto.
(39 comments) SHARE Monday, July 26, 2021 America is Suffering from an Epidemic of Political Bullying
America has a bully problem, and we're not going to solve it by giving in; today's Democrats need to take a lesson from FDR & LBJ and take on the bullies so they can get things done for Americans.
(20 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 22, 2018 Two Simple Laws Could Solve America's Epidemic of Violence
Since the vast majority of mass murders of the 1930s were accomplished with fully automatic weapons, tightly regulating who could buy and own them pretty much removed mass murders from the streets of America. It's time for the NRA to get out of the way, or for American politicians to gather together the courage to stop taking the NRA's money.
(8 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 12, 2015 Jeb Bush Isn't a Moderate, He's a Neocon Extremist
back in the late '90s, Jeb helped found the Project for a New American Century or PNAC, a neocon think tank that called for the overthrow Saddam Hussein and well, pretty much every other government that the US didn't like. Jeb Bush is ultimately as extremist as they come, and if elected president, he'll run this country just like his dad and brother did.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 12, 2020 If You Want a Preview of What Four More Years of Trump Could Bring, Visit Hungary
Now that we've entered an election year, there is a lot of speculation about what America could look like if Donald Trump gets another term, by hook or by crook.
Steve Bannon has said that Hungary's strongman prime minister Viktor Orba'n was "Trump before Trump."
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 2, 2019 If We Want US Democracy Back, We Must Undo Attack on Middle Class Launched by Reagan
So long as the governments of America and other countries are captives of oligarchs and big corporations, and hang onto anti-worker, anti-middle-class neoliberal policies, citizens will continue to drift toward hard-right "populist" politicians.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 7, 2015 Jails Are a Cash Cow for the Rich
Thanks to kickbacks from phone companies, state and local governments have every reason to keep their prison cells filled, no matter what the cost to the rest of society. And, when that money then gets recycled back to the politicians as campaign contributions, it's that much harder to get our elected representatives to reform our screwed-up criminal legal system.
(41 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 4, 2016 Time To Save the World Now
We are rapidly running out of time to stop climate change. We're already in the danger zone, and every single day we keep pumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere just pushes us closer towards total climate devastation. The situation may even be worse than most people realize. Let's get to work before it's too late.
(8 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 18, 2019 How a Trojan Horse Project to Rewrite Our Constitution Could Actually Happen if Trump Wins in 2020
It's often said that if Trump is reelected, it'll be the end of democracy in America. But how could Trump get reelected, and how could democracy get wiped out in the USA? Turns out, there's an actual project to rewrite our Constitution, turning America into a corporate-run oligarchy.
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 15, 2023 Have You Noticed America Is Looking Like a Third World Nation?
America has an entirely new type of slum we haven't seen here since the 1930s, the product of 42 years of the Reagan Revolution. We call them "tent cities" & roadsides lined with old RVs and cars"
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 6, 2015 Welcome Back To the Smoked-Filled Back Rooms
Nobody wants to admit it, but our political process is rapidly going back to the days when cigar-smoking insiders handpicked the nominees, except this time it's not corrupt political bosses choosing who they want to run for president, it's billionaires like the Koch Brothers.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, January 2, 2023 Was the Southwest Airlines Meltdown Impacted
It's time to declare the 42-year Reagan Revolution's neoliberal experiment a failure, and outlaw the stock manipulation that makes CEOs rich and impoverishes the rest of us
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 24, 2017 Will The GOP Tax Scam Crash The Economy?
This is no secret. Any economist can tell you this. High tax rates, high economic growth. Low tax rates, what happens? The country encounters a rough patch and what do we do? We have to stimulate the economy with debt. So now we're 20 trillion dollars in debt. And so now we get a giant cut tax cut in 2017. What's next? I'd say another crash.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 13, 2011 Thom Hartmann: Important! Newt is right about the Supreme Court
The Founders wanted the greatest power to be closest to the people - and Congress is up for election every two years. It's the body in our representative democratic republic that is closest to the people. It's where they wanted most of the power, which is why it's defined in Article One of the Constitution - the first among equals.
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, March 2, 2018 How to Prevent More Billionaires from Happening
The fate of American democracy, and the future of what's left of our middle class, now hangs in the balance. And as both FDR and Sanders/Warren/Pocan have repeatedly pointed out, only the power of organized people can restrain the power of organized money.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 31, 2015 Why the House of Representatives Doesn't Represent the US Public
If more than half of congressional Democrats and way more than half of all citizens support doing things like expanding Social Security and making college free for all, why aren't those policies becoming law? Why, in our democracy, is the will of the people not being heard? The answer is both simple and tragic - we no longer actually live in a democracy. We live in an oligarchy.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, April 17, 2020 How billionaires' short-term greed could upend America and destroy their own wealth
The coronavirus crisis is highlighting how dysfunctional states run by Republicans are. This is a feature of GOP rule, not a bug.
For the past 40-plus years, a group of "conservative" billionaires have been working as hard as they can to reshape our federal government from one that provides education, health care, housing, food and other necessities into one that does nothing more than run the military and fight wars.
(42 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 7, 2022 Why Is the GOP Siding With Putin? - The Hartmann Report
This move toward autocracy in the Republican Party is the biggest threat our democracy faces today
Republicans are increasingly voting with Putin because they hope to turn America into something that looks and works very much like Putin's Russia. It's very comfortable for the morbidly rich oligarchs and their wholly-owned politicians as well.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 23, 2015 The Republican Insurgency Against the Judicial Branch
On January 20, 2009, the night when the Obamas were dancing at inaugural balls and most Americans were out celebrating the end of the Bush years, a group of powerful Republicans was planning the end of Obama presidency before it even got going. At the Caucus Room restaurant in Washington, DC, GOP leaders drew up a plan to intentionally sabotage President Obama at every point possible.
(9 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 6, 2016 Are We Looking at a Mass Extinction Event?
To save human and other life as we know it on this planet, we need to put a price on carbon NOW, and we need to hold those who fund climate deniers accountable for knowing the risks of fossil fuels for decades, and lying to the public about it. Our survival as a species may well depend on it.
(7 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 1, 2019 If Democrats Want to Beat Trump, They Better Not Nominate a "Free Trade" Candidate
The Democratic Party must return to its pre-1992 progressive/protectionist/union roots and steal this issue right out of Trump's mouth, saying that he's not protecting American workers' jobs well enough or fast enough. They should run hard in 2020 on the Progressive Caucus's long-held position that we use protectionist policies, including tariffs, to end our trade deficits and bring back home our jobs.
(29 comments) SHARE Friday, September 26, 2014 It's Time for the US Middle Class to Make a Comeback
We need to get the middle class back on track. That starts by introducing trade policies that protect American jobs, tax policies that even the playing field, adopting policies that make life-saving health care more affordable and education policies that make a college education a reality instead of a pipe dream for millions of Americans.
(8 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 8, 2019 Bring Back the Corporate Death Penalty
Corporations have successfully argued before the Supreme Court that they should have First Amendment rights of free speech, Fourth Amendment rights of privacy, Fifth Amendment protections against takings, and Fourteenth Amendment rights as "persons" to "equal protection (with you and me) under the law," among other "rights of person-hood."
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 4, 2015 What's Good About Guaranteed Basic Income
The next time a conservative tells you about government waste and fraud with Medicaid and food stamps, just remind them. We could eliminate every single social welfare program and streamline our social safety net if we simply set up a guaranteed minimum income based on living wages around the country.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 13, 2014 Is the Koch Brothers' Curriculum Coming to Your Child's School?
The curriculum being taught to North Carolina students is filled with the Koch brothers' libertarian beliefs and ideologies, and a whole lot of misinformation on US history. A great deal of the curriculum focuses on the libertarian love affair with "limited government."
(7 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 8, 2013 The Case Against Billionaires
It's time we as a nation have a serious discussion about outlawing billionaires.
Are billionaires dangerous to democracy?
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 10, 2022 Is Ron DeSantis Our Next Authoritarian Nightmare?
If DeSantis "- an authoritarian who's even followed Il Duce's lead in creating a private police force answerable only to himself "- becomes president, George Washington's nightmare could become true
(8 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 19, 2006 Low Minimum Wage Killing the Middle Class
One in four workers are not paid enough to make it in the middle class.
Becoming middle class in America today is like scaling a cliff. Most middle-- class Americans are clinging to the edge with their fingernails, trying not to fall.
(10 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 12, 2013 It's High Time We Abolished the Department of Homeland Security
Our nation now finds itself at a crossroads when it comes to Constitutional rights and civil liberties. The DHS has become way too powerful, with no checks and balances. In effect, it's created an entire surveillance industry around itself. It is time for a change. Repeal the PATRIOT Act, dissolve the DHS, and let's return to sanity.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 3, 2016 How One GMO Nearly Took Down the Planet
The issue surrounding GMOs isn't just about what these companies are putting into our food and stocking our stores with. What's potentially more devastating for the planet is that genetically modified organisms developed by companies like Monsanto and DuPont can escape into our ecosystems and potentially wreak havoc before they are even tested or approved as safe.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 21, 2016 How a Bank Robber Is Right on Taxes
If policymakers need to raise revenues, they should go to where the money is: Tax the multi-millionaires and billionaires on their net assets, end our insane system of corporate subsidies that funnel wealth from the middle class to the top 1%, and close the tax loopholes that let the top 1% hide their fortunes overseas in places like Panama and Switzerland.
(15 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 25, 2021 It's Time To Blow Up the Maskholes' Sick and Twisted Plan
The United States has reached the point, in many parts of the country, where there are more vaccines available than there are people willing to take them. Most of this so-called "vaccine relucance" is driven by pure politics.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, April 10, 2015 Beware Rand Paul's Bait-and-Switch
When I say Rand Paul supports some unreal right-wing economic policies, I mean really unreal. Not only does he want to do away with Medicare and Social Security, he also supports going back to the "Lochner era," when the Supreme Court banned child labor laws and basically made life a living hell for the US worker. The solution is for the Democratic Party to go back to its progressive roots.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 26, 2018 Billionaire Activist Tom Steyer: You Want Trump Out? Buy Clear Channel.
The billion-dollar-plus cost of iHeartMedia, along with the eye-popping profit numbers and immense political influence of billionaire Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and Wall Street Journal, shows just how powerful and valuable the right-wing media machine has become.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 7, 2017 The Massive Election-Rigging Scandal the Media Ignored
In 2016, the Democratic Party and the American media and American people have wrongly decided that America should not count the votes that were not cast in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and so many other places that determined the presidency of the United States.
(11 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 6, 2021 None Dare Call It Treason And Murder
Did Donald Trump and some of the people around him conspire to have others murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House in order to hold power and conceal his crimes for another four years?
(28 comments) SHARE Friday, March 21, 2014 Reaganomics is a cancer, and we've reached its terminal stage
As it picks up steam, cancer takes on more and more of the body's resources, and starts stealing the body's energy and tissues. Pretty soon, the cancer completely overwhelms the body and, without treatment, the person dies.
Reaganomics has done the exact same thing to our economy and to the American people, and right now, we're on life support.
(20 comments) SHARE Monday, October 25, 2021 Why the GOP Has Enthusiastically Embraced Cruelty
Either our country will continue down the road toward cruel oligarchy and violent fascism, or we'll return to core American values of fairness, compassion, and a society that cares for all
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 5, 2015 Right-Wingers Get Tip from Waitress
Education is the foundation for a better country and a more forward-thinking society. But that, of course, is not how Governor Brownback and the rest of the Republican Party see it. To them, education funding is just another thing to cut to make way for massive tax cuts, tax cuts that in Kansas have been an absolute and unmitigated disaster.
(7 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 1, 2022 Why Canadians Are Warning About the Collapse of American Democracy
Bought-off Republican stooges in Congress and state legislatures - along with their allies on the Supreme Court - are openly trying to bring our country down, to destroy a 240-year-old democracy...
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, May 15, 2020 Can Democracy Survive Bill Barr?
Barr has gone too far in supporting naked treason by a former military official and the politician he served, and will be held accountable by Congress, the Courts and the press.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 30, 2016 Lying About Science for Politics Is Evil
The Democrats have taken a good first step by coming together as a party to call for the Justice Department to investigate what companies like ExxonMobil knew about climate change, when they knew it and whether they misled their investors and the American public.
(8 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 25, 2018 Trump Doesn't Have the Skill to Pull Off His Most Nefarious Plots
Trump will go down as the most dangerously corrupt and tragically incompetent president in America's history, and the most it seems we can hope for is that he won't start World War III or flip America into fascism with his next tweet.
SHARE Friday, December 20, 2019 How America Broke Up With the Democratic Party
The Democratic Party is still locked out of the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House, even after two of the past four presidents who served for eight years each were Democrats.
(8 comments) SHARE Friday, September 3, 2021 Ron Johnson Revealed the Secret GOP Ruthless Con to the World
Conventional wisdom is that the GOP has buried itself up to its eyeballs in Trump's BS and spittle, desperately holding onto the belief that the 2020 election was filled with "fraud!" and Joe Biden didn't really beat His Orangeness by over seven million votes.
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 10, 2006 How the "Cons" Are Screwing Middle Class Children, Parents and Our Nation's Future by Destroying Public Education
One of the primary elements of a true, functioning, democratic republic, like we aim for here in the United States, is that its citizens be well informed.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to his friend J. Correa de Serra and said, "Our liberty depends upon the freedom of the press and that cannot be limited without being lost," he was assuming that Americans knew how to read their daily newspapers.
Not anymore.
(8 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 15, 2009 Time to Restore Accountability
There are three important stories in the news about the Bush administration.
Mass murders in Afghanistan, assassination squads kept secret, by Cheney, from congress, and harsh interrogation techniques.
Together, these decisions have created an atmosphere of kingly power around the presidency - exactly what the Founders wanted to prevent.
President Obama has an opportunity now to shatter these terrible precedents...
(7 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 4, 2023 American Fascists are in an Arms Race
Our media and politicians need to figure out that it's not a slur to call a fascist a fascist. It's merely descriptive.
Roughly a quarter of Americans, according to a recent survey, are authoritarian followers and wannabee authoritarian leaders must compete for their loyalty and votes.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 21, 2012 Republicans Stick the Knife in the Backs of American Workers Again
The u.s. call center industry has lost 500,000 jobs over the last six years thanks to corporations like bank of america, well fargo, and t-mobile outsourcing americans jobs to foreign countries where they can exploit low-wage workers. On tuesday, republicans in the house had a chance to put an end to this giant sucking sound by passing the u.s. call center worker and consumer protection act. But Republicans voted it down
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 19, 2014 The New Fascism: Terms and Conditions
Historically when we talk about fascism we think about Mussolini and his replacement of the elected parliament with corporate representatives. After all, he invented the word "fascism" to describe the merger of corporate and state interests. And today when we talk about fascism, we talk about how corporations are buying off politicians in Washington, and taking control of our democracy.
(9 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 5, 2016 The Mainstream Media's Climate Malpractice
The corporate media in this country need to stop kowtowing to vested fossil fuel advertisers that want to keep the US public in the dark, and they need to start telling people the truth about the connections between extreme weather events and climate change. We can't expect the US public to rally to aggressively address our climate crisis if the mainstream media refuses to talk about the realities of climate change.
(10 comments) SHARE Friday, October 7, 2016 Now, Every Storm Is a Climate Change Storm
We can't stop every extreme storm event from happening, but we can demand that our politicians make our planet's climate crisis their top priority; we can put a price on carbon and start funding efforts to make our cities greener and more resilient; and, we can hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for lying to consumers and investors about the threat that their business model poses to humanity.
(17 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 31, 2014 Time to Rethink American Exceptionalism?
Saying that America is "exceptional" because we actually follow international law and advocate peace is to say that all countries can fit that definition and it sets a good example for the rest of the world. This doesn't make us weaker; it makes us stronger because it reaffirms the same values that make America so special to begin with.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, February 3, 2023 Is SCOTUS About to Put Religion Over Civil Society?
So here we are in 2023 and the real beliefs and plans of the Founding generation "- slaveholders and abolitionists alike "- have dissolved into a blur of BS, Qanon, and fundamentalist religion
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 9, 2015 How About Some Chemical Waste With Your Fish?
Somehow, the food industry and our government are still letting millions of citizens get sick each and every year from completely preventable food-borne illnesses. The fact is that our food safety system is completely out of whack.
SHARE Tuesday, October 29, 2019 How the Supreme Court and the Morbidly Rich Are Ruining Democracy in America
Most Americans want clean air, pure water, and a healthy environment; every administration since Reagan has, instead, cut thousands of corners or even driven roadways through previous laws and regulations protecting us. The majority of Americans want affordable college, strong Social Security, and a livable minimum wage; instead, since 1980, the trend-lines have all been in the opposite direction.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, August 20, 2010 Iceland is Exporting the Truth
After Iceland's near-economic collapse exposed deep-rooted corruption, the country is looking to become a safe haven for journalists and whistleblowers from all around the world.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 28, 2014 If the Law Is Bullshit, You Must Acquit
But however much they try, the authorities will never actually be able to stop people from using their jury nullification powers. That's because the right to nullify is given to us by the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, the same part of the Bill of Rights that gives us the right to trial by jury.
(6 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 3, 2011 Hartmann: Warning To The Gang Of 12
We now know what both sides in the Gang of 12 have on the table to begin negotiations to reduce our nation's deficit. And looking at the Republican and Democratic proposals...we're screwed.
(9 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 31, 2021 Civilization-Ending Climate Change Is Knocking On Our Door
The insect apocalypse is only a leading indicator of what is already a larger disaster for much of humanity and is now beginning to hit the wealthy world hard. Climate change from man-made global warming is here in a way that even fossil fuel billionaires and their paid shills can no longer deny.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 23, 2012 Corporate American has us Hooked on Meth
Right now - in small towns across America - the working poor who've been hit hardest by the second Republican Great Depression - are turning to meth to get by. Either by manufacturing and selling it - or just by using it to escape. It's as though recessions are the harbinger of meth. As soon as an economic downturn hits - meth comes along right behind it.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 19, 2022 Republicans Prepare to Attack America with Santa Claus
This is part of an old GOP strategy "- dating back to the Reagan Revolution "- which worked well for them during both the Clinton and Obama presidencies
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 16, 2022 Dear Millennials & Zoomers: I'm Sorry We Didn't Stop Them
Millennials today hold only 4.6% of the nation's wealth and, along with Zoomers, struggle to own a home & are deeply in debt. What happened? In a word, Republicans"
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 18, 2022 Is America Re-fighting the Revolutionary War?
We must not let right-wing Redcoat/Redhat terrorists "- who have openly proclaimed their goal of Americans killing Americans in an ideological and racialized war "- prevail at this critical time"
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 18, 2022 The Buffalo Terrorist Didn't Shoot Alone
The white supremacy industry in America with a healthy fundraising and publishing arm stood right beside him giving him talking points and a twisted history to justify his rage...
(7 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 26, 2021 Covid Shows How Fragile & Wrong Neoliberal Trade Policies Are
Perot was right & so were Henry VII, Alexander Hamilton, and Deng Xiaoping -- It's time for America to recover our gutted middle class & to ensure our national security
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 2, 2023 Right-Wing Billionaires & the GOP Want a Nation of Uneducated, Compliant Serfs
Republican politicians and the rightwing billionaires who fund them want a nation of uneducated, compliant serfs in their workforce, not a nation of well-educated union-conscious people who are willing to strike to get better pay and benefits.
They're getting their way and now we have the perfect storm...
(16 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 13, 2016 I'm Sick of the So-Called "News"
The corporate media drives viewership and profits by airing personal drama over public policy, and the end result is that viewers turn off the TV at the end of the day as ill-informed as they were when they tuned in. There's no silver bullet for this problem, because this crisis in our media is the result of more than 40 years of conservative policies that have radically altered our news media.
The reality is that we don't have an "Illegal Immigration" problem in America. We have an "Illegal Employer" problem.
(9 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 12, 2021 How Far Down the Road Towards Fascism Has America Gone?
While there's apparently "nothing to see here" when it comes to conservative media outlets and even, in many ways, mainstream media, it's worth asking the question: "How far down the road toward authoritarian oligarchy, or even outright fascism, have we gone?"
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 30, 2023 (16) How Libertarianism is a Poison that's Crept into America (Part 1)
Now that Robert Kennedy Jr. says, "I've always been aligned with libertarians on most issues" let's look at how libertarianism would work out in America, and where it came from in the first place...
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 13, 2022 Is America Blind to Trump's Genocide?
When the media discovered most of the people dying from Covid were Black or Hispanic, not White people - It hit conservative media and Donald Trump like a lightning bolt
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 5, 2015 What the Corporate Media Aren't Telling You About the TPP
The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP as it's more commonly known, is a public health disaster waiting to happen. If if the TPP goes through, real live breathing people (Doctors Without Borders estimates about half a billion of them) will effectively lose affordable access to the medicine they need to survive. And that's just one small provision.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 17, 2016 Go West, Young Man: Bernie Sanders' Path to Victory and Political Revolution
The experts and pundits in the establishment media industrial complex have written Sanders off before, and they've been wrong about pretty much everything this election, so we should take what they say with a gigantic grain of salt. The political revolution wins regardless of whether or not its leader does.
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 11, 2013 Corporate Democrats in DC Already in Freakout Mode That Liz Warren Is a Threat to Their Power
By allowing Baby Boomers to retire early, we would open their jobs to young people struggling to start their careers. At the same time, we would tighten the labor market so much that wages would actually rise, in turn stimulating the economy. The solution to our retirement crisis is clear: take Elizabeth Warren's proposal to expand Social Security and crank it up a few notches.
(28 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 9, 2021 Why Is America Not Holding the COVID Hitman Accountable?
Normally when over a half-million people die from something entirely preventable somebody is held accountable. So far, that hasn't happened in the United States.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 20, 2021 GOP Is Raising the Next Racist Generation of Right Wing Crackpots
Imagine if hard-core crazies like Marjorie Taylor Greene ran most of the school boards all across America. They could raise up an entire new generation of civics-clueless right-wing racist kids, and probably keep much of it well below the nation's radar screen.
(7 comments) SHARE Monday, September 13, 2021 Why Threats of Violence are Epidemic in America
We're witnessing the symptoms of a culture going through the early stages of transition from democracy to oligarchy - it quite literally starts with "average people" randomly behaving like asses
(11 comments) SHARE Monday, August 16, 2021 When Will We Stop Letting Our Presidents Lie America Into Wars?
America has been lied into too many wars. It's cost us too much in terms of money, credibility and blood. We must remember the lies. We can't afford to let this one go down the memory hole, too.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 12, 2023 Does America Die Gradually, Then Suddenly?
January 6th was a rehearsal; they're now planning 2024. Coups quietly build to an explosive tipping point, then suddenly appear as a fait accompli"
SHARE Sunday, June 26, 2016 Here's What's the Matter With Kansas
If we genuinely want to help low-income Americans, if we want to promote small businesses, if we really want to see our states grow, we need lawmakers across the country to reject the failed ALEC-backed "red state model" and to follow the proven model of raising taxes on the billionaire class and investing in the state economy.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 24, 2022 Is Something Called "Narcissistic Collapse" Coming To America?
Trump's Fuhrerbunker moment, his abused-wife-is-leaving moment, his Jim Jones-in-the-jungle moment, when he turns on America, trying to destroy whatever he can in & of this nation, is coming...
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 11, 2017 Right-Wing Billionaires Have a Project to Rewrite Our Constitution, and They Are Shockingly Close to Pulling It Off
The billionaire right's behavior today eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for." It's critical that we call out these economic royalists for what they're doing, and not let them and their minions rewrite our Constitution.
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 4, 2020 COVID Masks: The Latest Faux Conservative Outrage
The bizarre dynamic of putting profits over public health has played over and over again throughout the years. The people promoting all this outrage don't give a damn about you or me; they're just garden-variety sociopaths who only care about how many more millions or billions they can stuff into their already-bulging money bins.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, February 13, 2015 Meet ISIS: Saudi Arabia's Newest Frankenstein
Saudi Arabia, and the other Sunni countries in the Middle East, have been financially and morally supporting the growing and evolving Sunni insurgency against Shias in the region for years. They have intentionally bankrolled groups whose mission it is to wipe out the Shia minority in the region. First they started with al-Qaeda, and then they bankrolled what became ISIS.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 3, 2015 Would You Like Some Crushing Debt With That Degree?
The for-profit college industry is less about teaching anybody anything than it is about creating debt -- debt that then be very profitably sold off in tranches -- and even aggregated into derivatives -- to banksters and wealthy investers. In no other country in the developed world are financiers and scam artists entrusted with managing the education commons.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 14, 2014 Is Congress Guilty of Torture?
The real reason why Republicans are keeping Gitmo open is because they're still concerned about the legacy of George W. Bush, and they know that one of the biggest stains on his presidency are the atrocities and international war crimes that have been committed at Guantanamo Bay. So, Republicans are trying to pass on some of the blame for Gitmo to President Obama.
(9 comments) SHARE Friday, May 17, 2019 The GOP Is on the Road to Mass Lockups for Women Who Have Miscarriages
Georgia just passed a law, signed by Republican Brian Kemp (the man who ran his own election against Stacey Abrams), which puts any woman in that state who has a miscarriage at risk of 30 years in prison or even the death penalty. Other states are in line, and in those states, like Georgia, with the death penalty, many are proposing legislation to put women who have abortions to death.
(11 comments) SHARE Friday, February 25, 2022 Republicans Siding with Putin Loathe Democracy & Honest Elections
Wednesday night as bombs were falling on Ukraine, Sen. Cruz was partying hard with Trump at Mar-a-Lago along with other GOP senators, having already sabotaged Biden's efforts against Putin
(8 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 16, 2009 Obama Drinks Friedman's Kool-Aid
Thom Hartmann discusses Obama's interest in "free trade" solutions and why "free trade" is really a "ticket to the poorhouse."
(10 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 29, 2015 The Big Lie on the War Against Drugs
Nixon wasn't the first to use drug enforcement as a way to oppress minorities in America, but he did step up the racist War on Drugs and sign it into law -- and every president since then has continued and even expanded it. According to the Justice Policy Institute, approximately 500,000 people were serving time for drug offenses in state and federal prisons and jails in 2008.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 24, 2020 Next Death Wave from Coronavirus: Poor, Rural and White
April 7 was the day that America learned that the majority of the people who were dying from Covid-19 were either elderly, black or Hispanic. Not so many white guys, after all.
SHARE Wednesday, November 7, 2018 Medicare for All Will Destroy the GOP -- Because of Voting!
Ever since Jim Crow, racist white "conservatives" have used a variety of means to prevent poor people, people of color, low-income people, students, and older people from voting. Techniques have varied over the years, starting with poll taxes and so-called "literacy tests," and now are carefully calibrated by cutting voting sites, reducing early voting, and even disenfranchising North Dakota's Native American population.
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, October 9, 2020 The GOP Is Pursuing a Strategy of Public Slaughter
Republicans simply don't believe it's part of the job of government to provide for the "general welfare" of the American people; instead, government -- in their minds -- should only run the police and the military, while maintaining a stable currency so business can function.
(30 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 30, 2021 Will America Hold Trump & His Enablers Accountable for 400,000 Unnecessary Deaths?
The scientific research is in, and at a conference convened by the Brookings Institution it's being reported that Donald Trump's criminally incompetent bungling of the coronavirus pandemic killed 400,000 Americans who didn't have to die.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 3, 2015 America: Not the Home of the Brave, but of the Scared Shitless
At the same time as Rand Paul was hamming it up for the cameras last night, the Senate voted to take up the so-called USA Freedom Act. Passed by the House earlier in May, this bill would extend the three parts of the Patriot Act that expired at midnight and make a few minor changes to the NSA's mass surveillance program. Despite its nice-sounding name, the USA Freedom Act is really just more of the same.
(12 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 2, 2016 These Corporations Have Pillaged the Land and Robbed the People
It's time to put a stop to Big Coal's playbook of pillaging the land for short term profits and then robbing workers and retirees of their pensions to pay off Wall Street lenders. And if lawmakers want to be pro-worker, we need legislation that ACTUALLY protects workers' health care and pensions, without holding the environment for ransom.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, January 8, 2018 Time to Overthrow Our Rulers
It's perhaps amusing to well-informed Americans when their friends and relatives spout the billionaire-enabling propaganda that Fox dishes out every day. But there's nothing amusing about a president of the United States believing, based on what he learns in right-wing media, that he can easily get away with breaking the law.
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 27, 2016 We Have All Won an Oligarchy and Lost a Democracy
Since Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine and the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, our media has completely shifted from "news" to infotainment. It's largely fact-free, and the only things discussed are personalities, gotchas and the horse-race claptrap. It's completely free of facts that would give us any information, context or understanding of the role that corporate power plays in our lives.
(8 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 11, 2022 Trump's Sedition: George Washington Warned Us In 1796
Sedition is the word for what we call, during times of war, treason. Trump and his Republican and media allies are in it up to their necks...
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, July 26, 2010 The Importance of a Democrat in the White House...
some are wondering when they're going to repeal the minimum wage and child labor laws, as the last uber-conservative court did about 100 years ago.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 24, 2018 Facebook Turned Our Economy Into a Spying Operation
We need a serious discussion of privacy: what it is, what the appropriate parameters of it are, and the role of government in protecting our privacy from predatory corporate actors. And, at the very least, we need a "transparency in corporate spying" law right now.
(6 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 14, 2021 Is Genocide for Political Purposes Treason?
Trump and the GOP are actively working to sabotage any effort to get the pandemic under control so Democrats will lose next year's elections and in 2024.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, September 6, 2021 The Texas Handmaid's Tale
We don't need to read fiction about "handmaidens" to know what America is capable of when religious fanatics make and enforce law. This actually happened.
(12 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 3, 2015 We're at a Dangerous Climate Crossroads -- Here's How We Can Save the Planet
Even that two degree Celsius benchmark might be not be enough to hold off environmental devastation on a scale we haven't seen in millennia. Two degrees Celsius warming is what the world's climate negotiators have decided is "possible" and "acceptable," but according to former NASA scientist James Hansen, even that little warming is a recipe for disaster. Time really is running out to save the planet.
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 6, 2014 The United States Military Junta
Many believe that the NDAA gives dictatorial powers to the federal government and military, because it allows our military to arrest any American citizen without a warrant, on American soil, and to hold American citizens against their will for an indefinite amount of time without being criminally charged.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, March 8, 2010 Why are we the only stupid industrialized country in the world?
The postal service this week announced it would be cutting as many as 30,000 jobs through attrition - using hiring freezes as workers retire or quit.
According to American Postal Workers Union president William Burrus, cutting the U.S. Postal Service delivery to five days a week would be the beginning of the demise of the Post office. Burrus says it's not true that the postal service has to initiate major changes to survive
(16 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 17, 2016 The United States Needs to Realize FDR's Dream and Adopt the "Nordic Model"
In Nordic countries basic services such as health care, child care and education are free. The economy is heavily regulated to keep corporate greed in check, and unions make up as much as 70 percent of the workforce, guaranteeing livable salaries and sensible working hours. It's time for us to follow their lead, to return to our roots and bring the Nordic model to the United States. It's time to make FDR's dream a reality.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 6, 2021 Why McConnell Is About to Destroy the GOP
Just like he did with the COVID rescue bill a few months ago, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just said that there will not be one single Republican vote in support of President Joe Biden's infrastructure plan. Why would McConnell give away any bargaining leverage the GOP might have?
SHARE Friday, January 11, 2019 Four Reasons the Corporate Media Refuses to Talk About Things That Matter
Watch a few hours of national cable TV media, and -- outside of a very few shows -- odds are you won't hear any detail of actual policy whatsoever. Every issue is instead framed in the horse-race format of "who's going to win this fight -- leaving Americans uninformed about the consequences to themselves of the issues being fought over.
(11 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 2, 2014 Doomsday Trigger for Megadrought?
It's possible that all of the American southwest could soon be seeing the devastating drought conditions that Californians are facing. That's because the largest surge of heat ever recorded moving west to east in the Pacific Ocean, often referred to as a Kelvin Wave, which was supposed to start an El Niño and bring tropical-like rains to the West Coast and southwest, just dissipated.
(13 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 12, 2014 The Dark Money Machine That Beat Eric Cantor
Once you've realized that David Brat wasn't just some random college professor but was actually the hand-picked candidate of the libertarian billionaire class and its army of talk radio hosts, it's easy to see another one of the major reasons Eric Cantor lost.
(14 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 19, 2014 Dick Cheney Should be Rotting in The Hague, Not Writing Editorials
There is no one in recent history who has disgraced our country quite like Dick Cheney has. He lied his way into an illegal war, profited off that war, and shredded the Constitution. He's a war criminal and has the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent people on his hands. Dick Cheney should be rotting in a prison cell at The Hague, not writing editorials for the Wall Street Journal.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 27, 2021 The Ugly Truth: Republicans Want More Poverty & Crime
You can bet that Republicans will continue complaining about the crime that they've created, particularly in the election ads they'll start running next year.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 27, 2020 Because We Don't Have a Right to Vote...
In America, the country that is supposed to be the world's premier democratic republic, citizens do not have an absolute right to vote.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 29, 2020 2020s could turn out to be reincarnation of 1930s
Now that we are again "rediscovering" the lessons of the Herbert Hoover's market crash of 1929, if we don't begin to move manufacturing capacity back into this country we will be, within a few years, far worse off than Americans were in 1932.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 27, 2014 Is It Time for a New Church Committee?
The out-of-control nature of our national security agencies today is our new "national nightmare." And the only way to wake up from that nightmare is to create a new Church Commission, which will investigate the intelligence community, and put in place the reforms that are needed to protect our freedoms and way of life.
(12 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 9, 2022 Unmasked: The Horrible Lesson Rightwing Radicalism has Taught America
If we can't stop this disintegration of trust in America & the ability to reform & make our government work for all people, apathy will turn us over to the hard right, ending the American experiment
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 16, 2021 Life Will Dramatically Change Under Brutal American Oligarchy
Want some racism, sexism, misogyny, blunt and angry nationalism, and good-old-fashioned corruption with your government? We just had an example during the four years of the Trump presidency of how this could change everyday life in America.
(7 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 18, 2021 The GOP Is a Modern-Day Death Cult and Proud Of It
When GOP governors defy simple, common-sense rules like wearing masks or avoiding dense crowds, the only logical conclusion is that they're trying to "thin out the herd," killing off those expensive Social Security/Medicare users and "less productive" disabled, diabetic or obese people.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, July 8, 2016 Climate Denier Marco Rubio Clueless on Florida Toxic Algae
Since 2011, Senator Rubio's accepted more than $800,000 from Big Ag to help agribusinesses pollute Florida's waterways, and he's accepted another $800,000 from the fossil-fuel industry to deny climate science and to help the fossil-fuel industry warm our planet with greenhouse gases, leading to more rainfall and warmer coastal waters, which leads right to this algae bloom.
(7 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 30, 2021 Revealed: The Racist Plot To Tear America Apart
The last thing that should happen in America is that a political party would choose to use racial or religious hatred as a primary tool to win elections, inching America ever closer to more bloodshed
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, July 3, 2015 You, Too, Can Buy a Congressman!
Let's just take our democracy off the market altogether. Because our politicians should be representatives, not investments. Really -- it's time to repeal Citizens United and pass a Constitutional amendment saying that corporations aren't people and buying politicians is bribery, not "free speech."
SHARE Thursday, March 22, 2012 Republican Chickenhawk's New Plan to send Prez Obama Packing
So, guess what's the latest right-wing ploy to crash the economy before the election? War with Iran!
On Tuesday - International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde warned that a military strike on Iran could disrupt oil supplies around the world - causing the price of oil to spike 30%
(36 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 24, 2021 It's Time For Our Freedom Passports!
What red blooded, Nazi-arm-band-wearing, Confederate-flag-waving, Capitol-invading, gun-toting, Trump-humping American patriot could possibly object?
(8 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 16, 2014 How the Defense Industry Bankrolls Pro-War Pundits
Townsend has positions with two investment firms that deal with defense contractor money, and also serves as an advisor for the defense contractor Decision Sciences. Again, is it really a surprise that, given her connections and work history, Ms. Townsend is on CNN saying that the US needs to use more military might against ISIS?
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, January 24, 2022 How America Is Becoming Unraveled
The morbidly rich have taken over politics, nobody trusts anybody, violence is up, gun sales have exploded & our nation experienced its first armed assault from traitors within since the Civil War
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 20, 2016 TiSA" Big Brother and Big Business Together
By far the most sweeping deal that's being negotiated in secret and largely overlooked by activists is the Trade in Services Agreement, also known as TiSA. TiSA will undermine citizens' privacy and governments' sovereignty, and negotiators are hoping to have a deal finalized by the end of this year. It will cripple our democratic republic by making it even easier for corporations to manage or strike down our public laws.
(13 comments) SHARE Friday, August 28, 2020 Is the Trump Death Cult Growing or Shrinking?
Donald Trump just guaranteed more Americans will die. The Center for Disease Control, under pressure from the White House, revised their guidelines to say that you should only be tested if you were physically sick.
(13 comments) SHARE Monday, March 1, 2021 The Fate and Future of American Democracy Hangs On the Minimum Wage
It looks like President Joe Biden is going to cave on the $15 an hour minimum wage, and Chuck Schumer on ending the filibuster. These are disappointing failures to progressives because of the harm they'll do to working people, they're also extraordinarily dangerous to the future of American democracy.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 25, 2009 80 years ago today
80 years ago today, on October 29th, 1929, Wall Street saw the worst day in its history. The shock of "Black Tuesday" came to an end, but the misery of the Republican Great Depression was just beginning.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, October 24, 2011 Why OWS Is The Next Republican Boogeyman
Barring another attack on America before November 2012, or the OWS movement turning violent, Republicans have lost their boogeyman. And so long as Tea Party control of the House of Representatives remains unbroken, Democrats have lost access to their Santa Claus.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 22, 2016 How NRA Dark Money Impedes Gun Control Reform
If we ever do want to see common-sense gun control legislation passed, we need to get money out of politics, we need to overturn Citizens United and we need to get the corrupting influence of corporate lobbyists out of our political system. Because as former President Jimmy Carter has pointed out, we're no longer living in a democracy where US politicians listen to the will of the American people.
(7 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 24, 2021 How Does America Solve Its "Fake News" Crisis?
So if we can't regulate the "news" or even stop foreign trolls from stirring up Americans, how can we activate the "immune system" of democracy?
(9 comments) SHARE Friday, October 12, 2007 Ann Coulter and Justice Antonin Scalia to Synagogue - Jews Are Safer with Christians in Charge
The National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) called on media to stop inviting Ann Coulter as a guest commentator and strongly condemned her comments that Jews should be "perfected" by accepting the New Testament and that America would be better off if Judaism were "thrown away" and all Americans were Christian.
"While Ann Coulter has freedom of speech, news outlets should exercise their freedom to use better judgment,"
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 28, 2011 The Fingerprints of US Right-Wing Christian Terrorism on Norway Killings
More details are emerging now about why Anders Behring-Breivik set off a car bomb next to a government building in downtown Oslo last Friday. It turns out Breivik was taking his orders from the very same right-wingers who are spewing hate here in America.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, August 26, 2016 The Tax Evasion Double Standard: How US CEOs Are Withholding Revenue
We need to rein in companies that put their company's profits ahead of the well-being of the United States and act like paying taxes is a negotiation. Our tax code needs to be fixed to encourage companies to come home and pay their taxes, and to block companies from doing business in the US without paying their fair share.
(43 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 8, 2014 What West Virginia Can Learn From Sarah Palin
It's time for every state to follow Sarah Palin's Alaska model, and put in place state carbon taxes that cycle money back to the people, reduce income inequality, and spur local economic growth. It will reduce poverty and help save us all from global warming -- a definite two-fer!
(6 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 18, 2019 The Big American Bribery Scandal Isn't Felicity Huffman's $15,000
While bribing your child's way into an elite college is pretty bad, it pales in comparison with the millions of dollars in bribes paid every hour in America at the federal and state level so billionaires and big corporations can get the laws they want.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 17, 2021 The Klu Klux Kaucus Will End in Tragedy
Several Southern Republican members of the House of Representatives have proposed a Klu Klux Kaucus that wll adhere to "Anglo-Saxon" values and vigorously resist allowing any more people of color into America under any circumstances.
SHARE Saturday, June 22, 2019 The One Issue That Could Determine Trump's Re-Election Bid
A 2021 return to New Deal Keynesian economics, which rescued America after the Republican Great Depression and built the strongest middle class in history between 1933 and 1980, could return working-class Americans to opportunity, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 26, 2014 Is Rick Scott Guilty of Murder?
Republicans say that they're pro-life, but that's a bald-faced lie, because they refuse to let low-wage working Americans have access to life-saving Medicaid. If Rick Scott and his Republican buddies in the Florida legislature are really the Christians they claim they are, then they're going to burn in hell. Deservedly.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 17, 2017 Why the GOP Sides With the Klan and the Nazis
Trump will threaten North Korea with nukes, but won't even name the terrorists who showed up in Virginia. And it's very, very hard to find an elected Republican (who isn't a presidential wannabe) who will call this what it is: White Christian Racial Terrorism.
(8 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 10, 2014 Fox News Has Finally Yelled Fire in a Crowded Theater
Unfortunately, the media refuses to acknowledge right-wing extremism and domestic terrorism in our country, even though they pose a bigger threat to our national security than jihadists and Islamic extremists. The fact is, right-wing extremism is on the rise, it's dangerous, and it's now a major terrorist force in America.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, July 9, 2021 Oligarchy: When Brutal Capitalism Becomes More Important than Democracy
In an oligarchy, the rich can get away with anything and average people who try to stop harm to themselves and their communities get crushed. We're now there; the question is whether we'll pull back from this horror show, or whether it'll continue its evolution toward a full-blown police state.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 1, 2023 The GOP's Evil Plans for the Little Mermaid & Fascism Have Surfaced
The crisis for any Republican who wants to run against Trump is that they'll have to run to the right of fascism. But what occupies that space? Pure, raw, genocidal dictatorship that ends America...
(16 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 2, 2021 Are Trump & His Cronies Guilty of Mass Murder?
If a half-million people had died - unnecessarily - while Obama was president, you know how the GOP would react: after all, they held 4+ years of hearings over Bengazi and hounded Clinton for years
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 8, 2021 Should America Outlaw Homelessness?
America has a massive homelessness problem. We could solve it in a decade or less with a simple solution that has worked very well in Japan, Denmark, Singapore and even parts of Canada.
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 21, 2020 Will Americans Finally Say Good Riddance?
We have now reached peak Libertarianism, and this bizarre experiment that has been promoted by the billionaire class for over 40 years is literally killing us.
(25 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 11, 2022 Is Donald Trump the Antichrist?
For me, all the proof I need that Trump, if not the biblical Antichrist, is at least a political one, is what he says and does...
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, November 15, 2021 Will You Storm the Capitol if the 2024 Election is Stolen?
We must have a call for a wholesale political and social indictment of Trump's Big Lie, along with every elected Republican politician or media member who knows Trump lost but keeps perpetuating that Lie.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 19, 2023 What the Supreme Did to America When They Legalized Political Bribery
It's hard to overstate how much damage these corrupt rulings by Republicans on the Court "" from Buckley and Bellotti in 1976/1978 to Citizens United in 2010 "" have done to American democracy
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 5, 2020 Trump's Big Lie About COVID-19 vs. Grieving Families and a Dying Democracy
Trump's lies about the coronavirus are encouraging older people who watch Fox and believe what they see to take chances and expose themselves to the virus and, as a result, they are dying all over the country.
(8 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 28, 2022 Have you noticed America has gotten meaner?
"The practice of violence like all action changes the world but the most probable change is a more violent world."
(8 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 27, 2021 The Filibuster Was Grounded in Slavery and Now Threatens All Life on Earth
It's time to end the filibuster and bring democracy to the US Senate. Its only purpose is to block legislation that otherwise has broad popular support but is opposed by racists and big corporate special interest groups.
(7 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 31, 2015 Why Is It Illegal to Research the Impact of Gun Control on Public Health?
Gun violence is a public health crisis. It's a public health crisis because it's an ongoing and substantial threat to the safety of the citizens of this country. No one, I repeat no one, is safe, at least not with the NRA out there spending millions of dollars every election cycle to make sure weapons of war stay on our streets. There are too many guns in too many hands.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, May 6, 2016 Fossil Fuel Billionaires Kill Children
The people who have been making the most extreme predictions about climate change, the so-called "alarmists," have been right all along, and in many cases, even have been too conservative in their predictions. And for millennials, their children and the generation of teens living today: It's past time to be alarmed.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 22, 2021 Were They Traitors or Saviors?
America must get to the bottom of this before these authoritarian "traitors or saviors" let it happen again, perhaps as soon as next November
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 8, 2022 Can America Stand On Her Own Two Feet?
Americans can hold the same idea in two different contexts at the same time: While embracing interdependence at home, we must also embrace self-reliance on the international stage
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 26, 2017 The Coming War on Net Neutrality
Net neutrality doesn't threaten freedom or hold back investment -- net neutrality keeps the Internet the way we've always known it: everyone's online content and services are treated the exact same way as anyone else's, no matter whether the creator is a tech-savvy amateur or a giant multinational like Microsoft.
SHARE Monday, March 12, 2018 Walking Your Blues Away Is a Simple, Effective Therapy
A simple walking technique can allow people to heal from emotional trauma. The following is an excerpt from the book Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being by Thom Hartmann (Park Street Press, 2006), available for purchase from Inner Traditions " Bear & Company,
SHARE Thursday, May 28, 2020 There's Only One Reason Trump and the GOP Don't Want Mail-in Voting
With mail-in voting there is no long drive, bus ride, or wait in line, so Republicans can't rig things to make it harder for people to vote. That particular voting suppression trick -- which conservatives have been running for over a century, particularly in the South -- just doesn't work with mail-in voting.
(14 comments) SHARE Friday, February 24, 2017 The Perennial GOP Tax Scam
With the GOP in power, get ready to see working people's pay start dropping again, as it did starting in the 1980s after Reagan's tax cut and in the early 2000s after Bush's. Also get ready to see income inequality grow even worse, as the truly rich see a big boost in their take-home pay and thus their overall wealth, while working people and our nation's infrastructure get screwed.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 10, 2016 Don't Buy the Hype -- the TPP Won't Secure the US
All this talk about "confronting China" and "preserving American hegemony" is doublespeak aimed at keeping the American people in the dark about the corporate grab bag the TPP really is. When it comes down to it, the TPP is just another neoliberal corporate plan to reduce national sovereignty and strengthen the role corporations play in running the world.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 18, 2016 The Weaponization of Hate
When hate-promoting pastors, priests and imams jump forward to use hate and intolerance to increase their followings; when politicians use these most primal and easily-manipulated emotions to maintain and even build their own power; it's time for all of us to say: No.
Enough. Too much, in fact. We either stand together as a human family, or we die together in misery.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 9, 2010 Globalization Is Killing The Globe: Return to Local Economies
Globalization is the villain here, and one that needs to be taken in hand and brought under control quickly if we don't want to see virtually the nations of the world end up subservient to corporate control, a new form of an ancient economic system known as feudalism.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 3, 2010 Green Jobs here?...or China?
A group of Democratic senators is concerned that the Obama administration's efforts to promote economic stimulus, aimed at financing renewable energy, is creating jobs in foreign countries.
(11 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 9, 2016 The Bundy Boys' Bizarre Anti-Constitutional Agenda
In other words, what we're seeing out in Oregon right now isn't just a fight over federal land; it's also a fight over the fundamental meaning of the Constitution, and Ammon Bundy and his friends are on the wrong side of that fight. Let's hope they learn the error of their ways before anyone gets killed.
(9 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 6, 2021 How Do We Stop Corporations From Shoving Fascism Down Our Throats?
America has a serious fascism problem, but it goes way beyond the kinds of authoritarianism displayed by people like Donald Trump. It goes deep, now, into the very structure of corporate America.
(10 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 25, 2021 Can America Rise Above Racism & Embrace a Higher Vision of a Common Humanity?
At the Founding of America we set two goals: A democratically-run nation and equality for all citizens. We've largely put into place the democracy part over the years; now we must make the "equality" part happen.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 21, 2015 This 4/20 Should Be a Wake-Up Call to End the Racist "War on Drugs"
White people are just as likely, if not more likely, than Black people to use drugs like marijuana. But because of the racist war on drugs, it's Black people who make up the lion's share of marijuana arrests. The war on drugs decimates communities of color, breaks apart families and brings violence into already poverty-stricken neighborhoods.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, September 13, 2019 To Save the Republic, Some of Trump's Allies and Appointees Will Have to Face Federal Prosecution
Trump and his cronies have shown present and future politicians how much corruption the Republican Party and the public will tolerate, and it's a very bad sign for the future of the American experiment. America has never before seen such breathtaking corruption in the Oval Office.
SHARE Wednesday, June 17, 2015 How All 50 States Can Go 100 Percent Renewable by 2050
Stanford researchers released a study just last week that shows how all 50 states can go 100 percent renewable by 2050.
The study shows how each state can adopt its own mix of renewable energy technologies in order to go 100 percent renewable by the middle of the century. It's time to go renewable now!
(6 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 23, 2015 How Apple is Hurting the American Taxpayer
It's the holidays, and whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or anything else, there's one thing that we all have in common. Corporate America wants us all to buy stuff, lots of stuff.
(19 comments) SHARE Friday, December 18, 2015 The Republican Path to the Dark Side
Republicans have always understood that fear works to motivate their white base. Fear appeals to our basic animal instinct to stay safe, and it makes the simplest, inane and most downright evil solutions sound smart. This is great for Republicans because they don't have any real solutions, but it's awful for our democracy and keeps us from having an honest conversation about the things that are really hurting our country.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 16, 2017 Berniecare finally arrives
Conservatives hate bureaucracy. So when will they get behind Bernie Sanders' single-payer plan, which would do away with the paper-pushing waste in our healthcare system once and for all? Berniecare is finally here.
SHARE Saturday, March 10, 2018 The History of Healing Trauma With Hypnosis
Freud and Ben Franklin were among the pioneers of bilateral therapy. Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from the book Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being by Thom Hartmann (Park Street Press, 2006), available for purchase from Inner Traditions " Bear & Company,
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, October 14, 2016 Our Giant Experiment With "Greed Is Good" Has Failed
If we really want to stop other banks from doing what Wells Fargo did, we need to repudiate Reaganomics and the tax structure and business rules that allow it flourish. Start enforcing the Sherman Act and break up the giant corporate monopolies. Raise the top tax rate. And eliminate the corporate deduction for compensating executives with stock and stock options.
(9 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 5, 2021 Abortion: Is the Texas GOP the Dog that Caught the Car?
Republicans are proud of how they're intimidating women in Texas. But could this abortion ban & its vigilantism be the tipping point that activates women & allies to take down the GOP?
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 12, 2015 Fukushima -- Selling Out the Next Generation
Japan has restarted its first nuclear reactor to generate power since 2013. And that's really bad news. Remember what happened in 2013? Why Japan closed all of its reactors abruptly and why we're still tracing the spread of radioactive material across our Pacific Coast and into the atmosphere?
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 22, 2021 Republican Greed Now Dominates Americans' Lives
As long as the money keeps rolling in and their billonnaire patron's taxes remain absurdly low, that's all Republicans care about and are willing to fight for.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 16, 2022 Trump's Secret Plan Was No Secret
When Trump ordered Pence to overturn the 2020 election, he was trying to repeat what Republicans did in 1876. There are things we can do to prevent a third attempt in 2024 and we need to do them now.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, January 30, 2015 Billionaires Won't Be Happy Until the US Becomes Austerity-Ravaged Greece
Billionaires don't need a social safety net, and don't care if working-class Americans are thrown onto the streets to starve. If anything, doing that provides them with cheaper and more desperate labor. Billionaires don't want working-class Americans, or as they like to say, the "riff raff," to be anything but so terrified they'll take any kind of crap wages the big corporations offer them.
(8 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 15, 2015 Don't Count Out the GOP From Trying to Sink Obama's Historic Iran Deal: They've Done It Before
Reagan's treason --just like Nixon's treason -- worked perfectly. The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter's re-election hopes. twice in recent times, Republicans took the White House through naked treason. Makes you wonder what they're planning for next year...and what they're willing to do to keep Tehran wrapped in a blanket of sanctions-silence.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 23, 2021 The GOP Now Stands For Trolls, Vigilantes & Death
All the Republican Party has left, now that they've abandoned any pretense over the past 40 years of supporting working people or even basic infrastructure, is hate, fear and death.
(8 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 1, 2016 Forty Years of Reaganism Behind
Like the crash in Philadelphia last year, this crash was preventable, and we can prevent it from happening again, but to do so, we need to address our nation's infrastructure and public transportation crises. We need to reject Reaganism once and for all, and we need a massive government investment to bring US infrastructure into the 21st century.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, August 14, 2015 Can Mass Extinction Lead to Something Better?
We're headed for a mass extinction event if we continue to pump fossil fuel resources out of the ground and burn them into the atmosphere -- and if we continue to let our oceans acidify and life in the oceans die. Why don't we just avoid the whole debacle and cut fossil fuel subsidies and invest in a clean and renewable future?
(18 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 12, 2014 Another Unarmed Black Teen Shot by Militarized Police
From New York to Los Angeles to Ferguson, Missouri, America's police forces are being increasingly viewed as violent occupying armies, and it's time to change that. It's time to bring the good cops back.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 29, 2021 America Must Awaken From the Big Lie of "Rugged Individualism"
Hunger in the USA - which stalks the lives of 1 in 5 American children - could end with just $25 billion a year, while this year Congress gave the Pentagon $25 billion more than they requested. Why?
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 5, 2022 Treason Is the Most Profitable Business Trump Ever Engaged In
Big money is the cancer that has been eating away American politics ever since the Supreme Court blew up hundreds of good government laws designed to protect our democracy from predators like Trump
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 25, 2015 The Conservative Attempt to Rewrite the United States' Progressive History
There's a really good reason that conservatives are freaking out about what kind of history curriculum is going to be taught in our classrooms. And that's the simple fact that the history of the United States is the history of the continuous progressive transformation of this country. All the great accomplishments of US democracy, from the revolution itself to health-care reform, have been progressive accomplishments.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 22, 2012 Economic Prosperity and the Fiscal 'Speed Bump'
An incredible opportunity is coming for America, starting in just a few weeks. The Bush tax cuts will expire. Pentagon spending will be slashed -- although still hugely larger than it was just a decade ago. And, to make conservatives smile, funding for programs that keep poor and unemployed people alive and healthy will be cut.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 29, 2021 Debt Ceiling: Republican Suicide Bombers Threaten America
They are trying to create chaos the media will blame on the Democrats while making it infinitely more difficult to pass Biden's $3.5 trillion Build Back Better legislation
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 10, 2018 Democrats Should Steal Trump's Thunder on Trade
Under neoliberal policies, we've become the world's largest exporter of raw materials, the world's largest importer of finished goods, and the world's largest debtor. We now export raw materials to China, and buy from them manufactured goods. And we borrow from them to do it. This, by the way, is the virtual definition of a third-world country.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 5, 2022 The Shocking Things the GOP and Trumpians Believe
Is our "reality TV" media up to the task of comparing and contrasting the two political parties, and judging the most likely outcomes of the directions they've chosen?
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 4, 2020 Mad King Trump Angers the Gods
In some distant time, the story will be told of how arrogant King Trump caused the gods to turn against him because of his lies and procrastination, and millions died.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, October 22, 2018 Stop GOP Voter Suppression -- Or Else!
They're using voting suppression to maintain a situation that's so hostile to workers that wages have actually fallen for the bottom half of American workers in the 38 years since Reagan's election in 1980.If we fail to do something large, substantial and dramatic about the scourge of voter suppression, we must all begin learning how to rivet chains.
Those are our options.
(7 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 13, 2010 A Toxic Naked Swap
On the Senate floor, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) lashed out at his own party for its financial reform bill, saying that if they don't fix the "too big to fail" provisions and better regulate credit default swaps, "then shame on us. We have a responsibility here. We cannot claim ever that we have done something about this system."
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 1, 2020 If We Don't Want Another Trump, We Have a Big Job Ahead of Us
Fascists often seem, in the beginning, like nice guys who just want to change the world for the better. They just think that things need to be more orderly and tidy, and that a small number of very smart, very wealthy people need to be in charge to ensure social and political stability. And it always ends the same way: in tragedy.
(9 comments) SHARE Friday, June 25, 2021 Dear Democrats: Don't Negotiate With Terrorists-Lovers
The Republican Party is pushing a few very simple and straightforward messages in advance of the 2022 midterm elections, which they hope will give them control of the House and Senate next year and set them up to take the White House in 2024.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, May 13, 2022 How Minority Rule is Killing America
Republicans not only cling to minority rule, they now want to go to the next step and impose a neofascist Taliban-style government on America run by the morbidly rich and fanatically religious
(8 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 25, 2015 Fox So-Called "News" Is "GOP TV" in the 21st Century
Even though the network has long called itself a source of "Fair and Balanced News," the reality is that the network produces content that is anything but fair or balanced. And it's certainly not news. Because much of the content that Fox puts out is propaganda for the Republican party and the billionaires that own the party.
(6 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 20, 2016 Can Social Media Seize Control of Our Elections?
Thanks to the death of the Fairness Doctrine, the people who are supposed to report the news no longer have any obligation whatsoever to, you know, report the news. As a result, corporate media, especially corporate television media, has become almost completely indistinguishable from "infotainment."
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 21, 2016 Goldman Sachs Is Acknowledging Climate Change. Why Isn't the GOP?
The Republican Party. The so-called Grand Old Party, the party of Lincoln, is the only major political party in the developed world that denies man-made climate change. Despite all the evidence, despite the fact that the past 16 months have been the hottest on record, despite the fact that we're now seeing 1,000-year weather events on monthly basis -- despite all this, the Republican Party still refuses to accept reality.
(28 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 5, 2014 Vast Right Wing Conspiracy
Ever since President Obama was first elected president back in 2007, the "vast right-wing conspiracy" machine that Hillary Clinton first pointed out way back in 1998, has been churning out conspiracy after conspiracy, no matter how bizarre or outlandish they may be, all intended to take down President Obama.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 17, 2021 When Does the Greed Stop?
Our government has been corrupted by greed and the money it brings, and that corruption has spread like a cancer to religion, education and helping professions like healthcare.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 3, 2018 Political Corruption Is Underwriting America's Gun Control Nightmare
While we work as hard as we can to clean up America's gun problem -- and the Parkland activists have given us all a cause and a chance to make real change happen now -- we also need to work to get money out of politics. It was financial corruption, after all, that got us in this gun mess in the first place.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 18, 2016 Will Trump Provoke a Serious Conflict with China?
The so-called "pivot to Asia" that President Obama made the centerpiece of his long-term foreign policy agenda was also predicated in large part on the idea that China is a potential adversary that needs to be countered -- perhaps by force. But is China really our enemy? Or are we just turning them into one? And are we risking nuclear annihilation in the process?
SHARE Wednesday, July 7, 2021 The GOP's "Flood The Zone With Sh*t" Race Strategy
"Be Afraid of Black People" is the GOP's main message to white voters these days, leveraged by lies about an obscure academic pursuit sometimes called Critical Race Theory (CRT). Many white voters, it turns out, are listening.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 21, 2015 The Big Political Issue Shaking Under Our Feet in the Presidential Election
We need a serious discussion in this country about trade. If the media won't touch it, and other candidates don't start seriously engaging in the issue, the Donald may just ride popular disgust (among voters of both parties) to the Republican nomination. Or, as a third-party candidate, pull a Ross Perot and suck up 20 -- or 30 percent or more -- of the vote in the general election.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 13, 2012 Why Republicans don't want you to re-fi your home...
Right now more than 11 million Americans are underwater on their home mortgages - meaning they owe more money than their house is worth. There's an easy solution. But banks don't want to do it and there's one man, bankster shill, Ed DeMarco, who is keeping them from being required to do it.
(13 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 23, 2014 Time to Rethink the War on Terror
Ultimately, war only fuels more terrorism abroad and erodes freedom at home. So let's stop this "War on Terror" business once-and-for-all and start fighting terrorism with law enforcement like sensible people. We're the land of the free and the home of the brave. Let's start acting like it.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 4, 2021 DeSantis' Anti-Mask Order Is Replaying Reagan's Phony "Rugged Individualism"
A gauzy whitewashed history of America is intrinsic to the Republican brand, which is why DeSantis must oppose mask mandates while the GOP continues to promote their "rugged individualism" triumvirate of balanced budgets, personal responsibility and small government.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 8, 2022 Act Two: The Apocalyptic Plot to Go After Voting Rights
Seniors not getting eyeglasses or diabetics getting price gouged on insulin are all bad, but won't signal the death of our republic: the failure to pass meaningful voting rights certainly will
(13 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 30, 2022 The Evil Reason the GOP Will Exploit Every Crisis The World Is Facing
Worldwide Democracy is under threat - not just as a result of Putin's murderous war against Ukraine, but brewing since the 1980s and Reagan's neoliberal revolution
Putin's attack on Ukraine is producing a series of crises which are going to, in all probability, bring a period of great pain and instability to the world and to America in the near future.
Republicans are already working to exploit it.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, June 14, 2021 Trump, Who Corrupted the Highest Office in America, Must Be Prosecuted
Prosecuting Donald Trump and Bill Barr is not a matter of political payback. It has very little to do with Donald Trump or the Republican party, in fact: it's about the future of our republic.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, December 5, 2014 We Need to Start Holding Tax-Dodging Banksters Accountable
Giant corporations like Apple and Google have come under fire in both the UK and the US recently for raking in massive profits, while shifting those profits overseas to avoid taxes. A report by the UK's Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that Apple, Microsoft, Google and Cisco Systems collectively earn interest while avoiding taxes on over $124 billion that's held overseas.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, February 6, 2015 Fox News: PR Department for ISIS
The main thing that Fox News has to sell is fear. It's a giant fear-mongering machine that works really, really well. By airing the gruesome ISIS execution video, Fox News knew that it would be building fears over ISIS in the American people. By airing the video, Fox News became ISIS' new best friend. And by airing the video, Roger Ailes and Fox News are promoting terrorism.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 19, 2021 How Far Will the GOP Go To Steal the 2022 Election?
The corrupt Republican Party, a wholly-owned division of corporate and billionaire America, has dropped all pretense of having any governing ideas that will help or improve America.
(7 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 12, 2021 DeSantis & Abbott : Will They Be Held Responsible for Mass Dying of Adults & Children?
Republican Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have gone all-in on a high-stakes bet, and the example of Donald Trump suggests they may just win it. they're both tenaciously hanging onto their bans on mandated masks in schools.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 9, 2016 Corporate-Managed Trade Deals Screw the US
While Secretary Clinton's views on corporate-managed trade have changed a lot over the years, Senator Sanders' haven't. He opposes and has opposed every single one of the so-called free trade deals we've entered into since the 1980s. He also now says that he would reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, if elected president. This is a big deal, and a sign that a Sanders presidency would do wonders for working Americans.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 14, 2022 A Personal Apology to Young Americans for Failing to Stop Ronald Reagan
This 42-year-long process with Reagan's original massive tax cuts amplified by trillions more in tax cuts for the morbidly rich from the George W. Bush and Donald Trump administrations has produced a $50 trillion transfer of real wealth from the middle class to the top 1%.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 10, 2016 Michael Moore Is Right: Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder Has to Go
Emergency managers appointed by Governor Snyder oversaw the water-switch, which then wasn't appropriately monitored or managed by Snyder's Department of Environmental Quality, and then Governor Snyder personally ignored warnings about the matter from his own chief-of-staff. In other words, no matter which way you slice it, Governor Snyder is ultimately responsible for every single part of this catastrophe.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 12, 2022 Why Republicans Now LOVE the Post Office
Following a 16-year bet Republicans laid down in 2006 to block Postal EVs, DeJoy just told Biden to go screw himself: he's going to buy fossil-fuel vehicles for 90% of the fleet instead of electric
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 28, 2017 Here's Proof Republicans Are Done With Democracy
The families of Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Samuel DeBose, and Sandra Bland (among thousands of others), and increasingly in Trumpworld, anybody who looks Hispanic or Muslim, or even has a Muslim-sounding name like the son of Muhammad Ali, can tell you something about selective enforcement of the law in America. This is not what democracy looks like.
(11 comments) SHARE Friday, February 5, 2016 If You Want to Win, Go Progressive
In 2012 and 2014, truly progressive democrats, like Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, Al Franken and Bernie Sanders easily won their contests. Because they ran as progressives with progressive stances on the issues that impact the United States' disappearing middle class. And voter turnout is high when voters have real progressive candidates and a truly progressive platform to support.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 24, 2021 Trump's Supreme Court Crime Spree
During the confirmation process for Brett Kavanaugh, over 4,500 tips about sexual assault, gambling and other issues came into the FBI, including several now known to have come from highly credible sources. Instead of investigating them, Chris Wray's FBI handed them over to the Trump White House"where they died.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 19, 2015 From "Hope and Change" to "Hope for Change" -- Is the Revolution Back On?
The US is turning to a self-described socialist who regularly talks about his campaign as leading a political revolution and Hillary Clinton is trying hard to frame herself as a real populist. The 2016 political season is starting to get very interesting.
(11 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 21, 2022 Can America Pull Off a Second Reconstruction?
Barack Obama's election in 2008 was the tipping point for millions of racist Republicans trying to maintain over 200 years of legal white supremacy"
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 25, 2021 When Will America Break Free from the Clutches of the Grifters?
Trump just unleashed an unhinged, barely coherent rant about the possibility President Biden might reveal what was going on in the White House on January 6th, the day Trump tried to finally end, once and for all, any possibility of governmental oversight of his ongoing criminal career.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 11, 2015 Leaked Files Reveal New Bankster Scam
Despite laundering hundreds of billions of dollars illegally, helping out some of the world's most notorious killers and drug cartels, allegedly laundering for terrorist groups and moving money for customers in nations that the US has no diplomatic ties with, HSBC got off with a slap on the wrist, and a very light slap at that.
(15 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 19, 2015 Why Ordinary Republicans Vote for Bernie
If Bernie Sanders ends up being the Democratic nominee for president, and it looks more and more every day like he will be, his Republican opponent is going to have a very hard time beating him. And that's because of all the Democratic candidates running, Bernie Sanders has the best chance of capturing Republican votes.
SHARE Wednesday, June 12, 2019 How Fears of Abolition Shaped the Second Amendment
If the antislavery folks in the North could figure out a way to disband those southern militias -- or even just to move the militias out of the states -- the police state of the South would collapse. And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service the slaves of the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery -- and the southern economic and social systems altogether
(8 comments) SHARE Monday, June 20, 2022 Forgiving Student Debt Isn't Giving a Gift - It's Righting a Wrong
Student debt is a crime against our nation, weakening our intellectual infrastructure - Any nation's single biggest asset is a well-educated populace and student debt diminishes that
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 27, 2014 A Carbon Tax Is Absolutely Essential
We need to slow down climate change and global warming, to protect our planet's ability to support human life. A report put out by the Citizens Climate Lobby shows that a $10 carbon tax would cut greenhouse gas emissions by around 28 percent. if we want to save our planet and the human race from the greatest threat we've ever faced, a carbon tax is absolutely essential. It's that simple.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, April 24, 2017 The Bizarre Experience of Watching Cable News in America on Earth Day
Nobody's Talking About How People Are Getting Rich by Destroying the Planet Just exactly what the hell are they afraid of? Are the fossil fuel billionaires, corporations, and lobby really so strong that they can cow entire television networks and newspapers? Not to mention politicians?
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 13, 2021 Death is Their Election Strategy
Letting Americans die to win elections. Is that how low today's GOP has sunk? What other possible explanation could there be?
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 15, 2022 America Has a Militia Problem
Militias don't exist in any meaningful way in any developed country other than the United States. It's time for Congress to step up and restore law and order to America
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, October 30, 2015 We Need to Put a Price on Carbon
Forcing the fossil fuel industry to pay for even a small percentage of the damage it does to our planet would, in turn, give it an incentive to keep carbon in the ground. Emissions would go down and everyone would be better off. This isn't some wild-eyed theory, either. We've seen carbon pricing work wonders right here in the US.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 10, 2014 The Climate Deniers Are Using the Same Tactics as the Tobacco Industry
There are few coincidences in history. The fossil fuel industry today appears to be following the exact same script used by the tobacco industry in the 1990s. It's time to wake up and call out the climate denial industry for what it is, a scam, before it's too late. After all, the future of humanity is at stake.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 10, 2020 How Big Money Controls the Stories the Media Tells
In 1983, 90% of the American media landscape (including magazines, books, music, news feeds, newspapers, movies, radio, and television) was dominated by 50 conglomerates. Just 36 years later in 2019, a mere five conglomerates dominated 90% of the media that Americans consume.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 3, 2014 Why Black Friday Is a Bad Sign for the US
Median household income has fallen by nearly 8 percent since 2000, and, according to the US Census Bureau, the middle class is taking home a smaller share of overall income in the US than ever before. One of the reasons for that is because good jobs and good wages have disappeared.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 8, 2022 How Republicans Abandoned Democracy in 1960
Fifty-four years of Republican presidents using treason to achieve the White House (or inheriting it from one who did) has transformed America and weakened our democracy
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 30, 2014 What Has Greed Cost the United States?
There should be no place for raw, naked greed in in the US. It should be tightly regulated and controlled -- it should be seen as the mental illness and social illness that it is. Greed is not what our country was founded on, it certainly isn't what it was built on, and it's not what's going to make the US great again.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 13, 2016 Bernie's Insurgent Campaign Is Starting to Make the Corporate Democrats Panic
If Bernie Sanders' wildly successful campaign has told us anything, it's that Democratic voters are sick and tired of the DLC-Clintonites running the show. The base of the Democratic Party is still progressive even if the party bigwigs have sold out to the corporatists. Establishment Democrats should be scared. Bernie's campaign is showing cracks in their junta.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 8, 2011 Hartmann: Privatized Prisons...Criminal in a Democracy
Ohio Governor John Kasich made history yesterday - as Ohio became the first state in the history of this country to sell a state-owned prison to a for-profit private corporation.
(15 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 17, 2014 Healthcare: Let's Have People over Profits Once And For All
There are some things in this world that shouldn't be turned into profit-making machines, and healthcare is definitely one of them. There was a time in America when in almost every state health insurance companies and hospitals were required to be non-profits. Americans could actually get the healthcare and treatment they needed at affordable prices. But then Ronald Reagan came to Washington, and everything changed.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 19, 2016 There's No Time to "Debate" Climate Change: We Need Global Transformation
The planet is getting warmer and warmer, and we're setting more and more planetary records with every passing month. And now we're starting to see the front end of runaway climate change and getting a glimpse at the disasters that lay ahead unless we immediately stop burning fossil fuels.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 3, 2016 Bus Drivers Shouldn't Pay More Taxes Than Millionaires
Even though it only benefits about 2,000 people every year, the carried interest loophole costs taxpayers -- you and me -- about $2 billion in lost revenue every single year. Closing it, some studies have found, could bring in as much $18 billion over 10 years.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 20, 2016 Have the Democratic Superdelegates Been Compromised?
If Americans suspect that the Democratic elite have been rigging the nomination process, then Democrats are going to have a hard time harnessing the grassroots energy that they'll need to propel their candidate to the White House. If they want to win in November, it's time that the Democrats make their primaries truly Democratic again.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 26, 2014 Hate Summer? Just Wait Until Global Warming Really Kicks In
According to Michael Mann, one of the world's leading climate scientists, we only have until 2036 to prevent the Earth's temperature from rising 2 degrees Celsius. After that, global warming will lock in with devastating consequences for every single living thing on this planet. Serious scientific bodies are even debating whether or not industrial civilization can survive such a drastic temperature increase.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, July 18, 2016 Thanks to the NRA and Their Lackeys in Congress, It Is Illegal to Study Gun Violence
Even if reporting police violence data were compulsory, there'd still be big obstacles to using that data in any sensible way. That's because thanks to Republicans and the National Rifle Association, it's been illegal for more than 20 years for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct any research on gun violence.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 29, 2016 The US Is a Country, Not a Business
With Reaganomics came the idea that government isn't the solution, it's the problem. But this mantra is the source of many things wrong with this country. By waging war on government, which they call the "problem," Ronald Reagan and his contemporary followers in the Republican Party have sold us out to big business.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 17, 2022 America's Founders Would Have Been Disgusted By Today's GOP & Trump
No matter how hard Republicans try to reinvent the Founders & Framers in the image of their libertarian billionaire patrons, the reality is that America was history's first great liberal experiment...
(8 comments) SHARE Friday, April 5, 2019 Republicans Have Put Our Country on a Path of Warp-Speed Decline -- And They Want You to Think It's Worth Cheering For
Whether it's strengthening environmental regulations, breaking up monopolies, restraining CEO pay, fully funding our public schools, or getting money out of politics -- all things that have been done by most if not all of the fully developed countries in the world -- Republicans tell us we just can't do those things here in America. We're just not that intelligent.
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 5, 2011 The USA shouldn't be a death camp for the elderly!
In another sign of just how bad our nation is treating the working class - a new study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute shows that most Americans today will have to work until their late seventies - before they can think about retiring.
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 12, 2022 It's Time to Nationalize the Fossil Fuel Industry
Squeals of "socialism!" aside, we know how to do this and have done it before, repeatedly. This time it's not just about saving our banks or fighting a war: this time, it's about saving the world"
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 28, 2016 Bernie's R.I. Win is a Rebirth for the Democratic Party
Bernie isn't just winning over a key voting demographic, he's energizing people to participate in the political process as Democrats.
If the Democratic Party were smart, it'd capitalize on Bernie's rapport with independents, as well as young people. An obvious starting point would be adopting Bernie's positions on things like healthcare, Social Security, free college, no more stupid wars, and taking on Wall Street.
SHARE Friday, March 12, 2021 The Real "Cancel Culture" Scheme By Republicans Revealed
Republicans have gone out of their way to try to cancel any sort of assistance to the tens of millions of Americans wiped out or thrown into serious crisis by Trump's incompetence in handling the COVID pandemic.
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, May 9, 2014 Instead of Exploiting the Newest Generation of Americans, Let's Invest in Them
Let's wipe the student loan debt off the books, and end future student loan debt by investing in our intellectual infrastructure like we did in the middle years of the 20th century, when the number of college graduates in America more than doubled and there was virtually no student debt. Instead of exploiting the newest generation of Americans, lets invest in them, by making all public universities and community colleges free.
(10 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 15, 2014 Conservatives Lie About Net Neutrality for Big Bucks
The whole idea behind net neutrality is a free and open internet. It's the notion that we should all have equal access to the internet, and shouldn't be forced to pay more for certain types of content. It's the idea that internet giants like Comcast and AT&T shouldn't be able to charge us more if want to watch a movie on Netflix or a viral video on YouTube.
SHARE Tuesday, May 11, 2021 The Democrats' "Killer App" Against Voter Suppression Unveiled
With all their new "voter suppression" laws in the states, Republicans are working to keep and improve a corrupt system that's put them in power and keeps them in power, despite only representing a minority of Americans nationwide.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 31, 2020 Trump's Racism Kills 1 in 1,000 Americans
April 7th was the day that America learned that the majority of the people who were dying from COVID-19 were either elderly, black or Hispanic. Not so many white guys, after all.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, February 18, 2022 America Needs To Listen to Canada About an "Elections" Agency
The easiest and most efficient way to clean up our elections and make them open and transparent is for Congress to create an "Elections USA" agency as soon as possible
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 14, 2021 The Filibuster: Should America Try Democracy?
Ending the filibuster could be what puts the final nail in the Republicans' coffin. When all Americans finally see their insane proclamations actually put into action, they'll never govern again.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, December 31, 2021 Will America Be Torn Apart Again
Or will we avoid the horrors of Americans killing each other in another futile effort to protect wealth gained by evil and destructive business practices, this time in service of fossil fuels?
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 8, 2015 Let's Call All Terrorists "Terrorists"
Politicians and the media have universally condemned the gunmen as "terrorists" and called their actions "terrorism." And for good reason, too: the killing of unarmed civilians for apparently political or religious reasons is the classic definition of terrorism. But would people be as willing to call the Paris attack "terrorism" if the suspects involved were white or members of a right-wing hate group? I don't think so.
SHARE Thursday, November 1, 2018 Trump and Fox News Have Blood on Their Hands
Trump and Gingrich and Fox are giving all-day, all-the-time coverage to a ragtag band of Central American refugees, mostly women and children, who are traveling together on foot for their own mutual safety, lying that there are Arab terrorists and evil gang members among them. All of it being amped up, day after day, over and over again, by Trump.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 13, 2016 What?! GOP Focus on Heat From Porn Instead of Climate Change"
Rational people are worried about the planet heating up, and climate scientists are worried about the climate melting down, and Republicans are having their own absurd meltdown about "hot" videos online. Republicans are less worried about climate change than they are about tackling pornography, because pornography's "harmful effects, especially on children, has become a public health crisis that is destroying millions."
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 14, 2021 Trump's "Shared Psychosis" Is Destroying the Fabric of Society
So what do we do as a society when confronted with a psychotic former leader who's continuing to spread contagious forms of mental illness among our nation? How do we repair the damage?
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 21, 2015 Thom Hartmann's State of the Union
Thanks to the disastrous Citizen's United decision, the conservatives in the Supreme Court chambers have made it easy for billionaires to flood our democracy with the corporate cash which is slowly destroying the democratic principles that our founding fathers fought and died for. We must get behind the issues that really matter -- and get the US back on the path to success and shared prosperity.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, February 27, 2023 Do Religious Sadists Want To See "Sinning" Women Suffer?
What we're seeing today in these attempts to regulate women's behavior is a simple extension of religious fundamentalism and patriarchy that goes back as far as ancient Samaria...
SHARE Wednesday, July 6, 2016 How the Food Industry Destroys Democracy
the Vermont labeling law is changing the landscape of our grocery stores, and making it easier than ever to know which products contain GMOs. And less than a week later after that law went into effect, that Vermont law is under full-out attack. Monsanto and their bought-and-paid-for toadies in Congress are pushing very legislation to override Vermont's law.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 20, 2021 The GOP Stands Atop an Ocean of Blood
If America is to again be a "shining city on the hill" we must end our gun violence epidemic. We start by calling out the GOP for what they have chosen to become: a death cult committed to violence, bigotry, and the destruction of our planet.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, August 2, 2021 Trump's Shadow Cabinet is Part of his Ongoing Coup
Now, in the Trump shadow-universe he's created a shadow-government for his shadow-fans. It's not as wacky an idea as it seems and suggests Trump's solidifying his control over the GOP going toward 2022 and 2024.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 27, 2010 The Real Conflict Behind Refried Beans & Swastikas...
The conflict over the all encompassing crackdown on illegal immigration in Arizona heated up Monday as vandals smeared refried beans in the shape of swastikas on the state Capitol's windows.
People are upset in America because 30 years of Reaganomics has destroyed the American Middle Class, most of the problem being with Romney-style Private Equity firms buying American businesses, saddling them with debt, stripping them
SHARE Wednesday, August 17, 2016 How to Change Our Pathetic Green Infrastructure
The major reason we lag behind Europe and other developed regions of the world when it comes to embracing green technology is the simple fact that we have oligarchs working hard to ensure that we remain obedient to the status quo. These oligarchs work in tandem with private utility companies, and they are the main obstacle to a greener future here in the US.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 25, 2010 The Right-Wing Crazies Among Us
It's time for us all to call out these Republicans and demand that they repudiate violence and threats, and that they stop encouraging the right-wing crazies in their base, before something really bad happens.
SHARE Friday, January 13, 2023 GOP Treason Is Stalking Democracies Around the World
And it's damn well past time that the people who conceived and ordered and facilitated the execution of this crime against all the rest of us are held to account in a meaningful way
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 9, 2010 Our Infotainment-Based Media and a Mentally ill Cult Leader
The consequence of our infotainment-based media has been that a mentally ill cult leader with only 50 followers has been turned into an international celebrity.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 25, 2016 Why Dying Coral Reefs Will Bring Planetary Instability
We won World War II in four years; we could tackle climate change in an even shorter timeframe just by using technology that's already there. The stakes are as high as they come when it comes to climate change, but it's also an opportunity to fundamentally transform our economy for the better, and create millions of jobs in the process.
SHARE Thursday, December 15, 2022 How To Kill and Get Away With It
I don't know the names of the men who poisoned & killed my father & my brother, but I know where they worked and why they did it. Odds are these killers will never see the inside of a jail cell
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 20, 2021 The GOP Delivers More Crime to America
Inequality causes crime because it destroys social trust, the core fabric of any society: Without social trust, empathy and shared values disintegrate and culture begins to collapse
SHARE Tuesday, July 27, 2021 Hawley's "Love America Act" Is All About Hate
White supremacy, racism & the rest of America subsidizing Red states weren't just realities in 1787: they're alive and well today & Hawley and his white supremacist buddies want to keep it that way.
(9 comments) SHARE Monday, December 20, 2021 Are We Standing On the Edge Of a Grand New Progressive Era?
The GOP has embraced the oligarchic strong-man police-state & the Democratic Party is returning to its progressive & populist roots -- we face a moment of great danger & one of great opportunity
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 13, 2014 Is George W. Bush Responsible for the Death of Tomas Young?
Tomas Young was right. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are guilty of murder, including his. They knowingly sent thousands of young Americans to die in a fight that was a based on a lie, a lie they cooked up to fuel their own political ambitions and to save the finances of Halliburton.
SHARE Wednesday, April 28, 2021 The Hidden Secret Behind the Arizona ballot Counting
Lore has it that Joe Stalin once said, "It doesn't matter who votes; what matters is who counts the votes." Republicans in Arizona are today engaged in an act of political treachery worthy of Stalin's quote.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 23, 2014 Rich rats hijacked our democracy
As the wealthy elite and corporations are profiting off of their investments in Washington, the rest of us are living in a very different America than we had just a generation ago. It's now an America that, despite its great wealth, looks more and more like a third-world country each day.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, August 12, 2022 Can American Democracy Survive the "Fake News" Crisis
So, how should America deal with media that purports to be "news" but, in fact, is offering a healthy serving of spin, misdirection, and outright lies? if you have any additional ideas, what are they?
(6 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 2, 2022 Why Does Everything the GOP Touches Cause Poverty, Disease & Death?
Turns out this is about more than the GOP just embracing policies that lead to disease and death - those same policies also win elections while making their morbidly rich campaign donors even richer
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 22, 2022 How Ron Johnson Almost Got Away with Treason
How did a corrupt senator even find himself in a position where he could've handed two pieces of paper to the VP that would have changed the outcome of our presidential election? The Electoral College
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, July 17, 2015 Back to the Future With Scott Walker
Walker is the strongest Republican candidate out there, and he's backed by a boatload of billionaire money from the Kochs on down. He could very well be our next president, and if he really is on board with this "health and safety" nonsense, then you can kiss the US middle-class goodbye.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, February 1, 2016 Ted Cruz is Too Radical To Be President
It's almost like the media think it's acceptable that someone running for president likes to pal around with Christian extremists and wannabe-theocrats. Well, it's not acceptable; it's a direct threat to our democracy, which is why the corporate media should start taking Cruz and his radical endorsements seriously. The media should do its job and wake the American people up to this before it's too late.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 15, 2014 Is This "American Exceptionalism"?
The US is lagging behind in education and health care, we are leading the world in one thing: violence. According to a study by two New York City doctors, the United States has a staggering 88 guns for every 100 people, and has 10 gun-violence related deaths per every 100,000 people.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 21, 2016 The Most Disingenuous Attack on Bernie Yet
As a candidate running for major office, Hillary Clinton has every right to point out her opponent's track record on key issues. But she should do it honestly. She should do so in a way that enlightens the public instead of confusing it.
If her dishonest attack on Bernie Sanders's CFMA vote is just a preview of where the Clinton campaign intends to take this race, we're in for a long and very distressing primary season.
(6 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 28, 2015 Are We Humans Destroying Our Own Nest?
We need to get serious about cleaning up the environment and addressing runaway climate change, and we need to fundamentally change how we see our place in nature. We need to get serious about living with nature, instead of living at the expense of nature.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, July 12, 2021 Time to Trigger the Nuclear Option
Texas Republicans prepare to pass another massive voter suppression bill. The only remedy available to the American people is for the federal government to use its constitutional authority to regulate federal elections to block what President Biden has referred to as the GOP's "Jim Crow in the 21st century."
(7 comments) SHARE Monday, February 8, 2016 The Battle Between Populist Sanders and Establishment Clinton Is as Old as the Country Itself
The Federalists fought hard to keep "freedom from monopolies" out of the Constitution. And they won. The result was a boon for very large businesses in America in the 19th and 20th centuries, with big companies now even using trade deals like the TPP to expand their monopolies. Our decision in the voting booth may well shape the next 200 years of our nation.
SHARE Saturday, February 26, 2022 Did China Punk Putin?
President Xi has repeatedly asserted that Taiwan is still part of China and will one day reunite with that nation, so it would be quite useful for him to know how the western world will react when a large nuclear power tries to seize and occupy a democratic nation under the rubric of that nation being illegitimate.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 17, 2014 The Middle Class is not "Normal"
Progressive taxation, when done correctly, pushes wages down to working people and reduces the incentives for the very rich to pillage their companies or rip off their workers. After all, why take another billion when 91 percent of it just going to be paid in taxes?
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, February 27, 2006 Thom Hartmann: When Americans No Longer Own America
The Dubai Ports World deal is waking Americans up to a painful reality: So-called "conservatives" and "flat world" globalists have bankrupted our nation for their own bag of silver, and in the process are selling off America.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 18, 2014 Why the Mainstream Media Is Gung-Ho on War and Silencing Antiwar Voices
Why is it that the mainstream media is so gung-ho about promoting war and military intervention, and so quick to silence antiwar voices? It's because we no longer have news in this country. We have infotainment. Infotainment lacks patriotism or humanism - it cares neither about the good of our nation or its people. It's instead exclusively about getting the most eyeballs, and bringing in the most dollars.
SHARE Friday, July 25, 2014 The Rise of the Bankster Landlord
The financial products Wall Street is creating with its new rental empire are basically a re-hashed version of the mortgage-backed securities that crashed our economy five years ago. There's a new bubble in the works, and if we're not careful, we could see another financial crisis sooner than you might think.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 8, 2012 The Secret Group that's about to Swift Boat Barack Obama
As we're heading into the 2012 election - one group is trying to swiftboat President Obama with this new ad - trying to spin President Obama's killing of Osama Bin Laden against him. The group behind that ad is calling itself "Veterans For a Strong America." So what more do we need to know about this group - as it begins its ad assault on the President?
SHARE Friday, December 18, 2020 America's Survival Depends on Bankrupting the Republican Party
Today we have "The Age of Intentional Republican Stupidity." And they don't just embrace it for themselves; they're hell-bent on imposing it on every American, from schoolchildren on up.
(6 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 16, 2023 Will the "Culture War" Fascists Win?
Will democracy survive in this land of its modern birth? Will we take seriously the threat of those who proudly called themselves "Cultural Warriors?"
(13 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 27, 2014 Can Democrats Set Out a New Path?
For several generations, Americans trusted our government's ability to improve living conditions for the working class. As a result, Democrats stayed in power for a long time. Then Reagan happened, and everything changed. The Democratic Party veered way off course while Reagan was president, and abandoned its working-class base.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 9, 2014 How Democrats in the South Will Rise Again
While the demise of the "Southern Democrat" may be historic, it doesn't have to be permanent. Americans across the country, in red states from the Deep South to the Great Plains, favor the progressive ideas and policies that can get our country back on track. Someone just needs to reach out to them.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 14, 2022 Democrats Should "Take On the Swamp" and Mean It
If the Democratic Party wants to win big this fall and in 2024, their best bet is to oppose corruption in all its forms. And then, unlike the Trumpy Republicans, to walk the talk
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 11, 2014 Time to Say Goodbye to Judicial Overreach
Subsidies are a major aspect of Obamacare, and if the conservative justices on the Supreme Court were to rule against them in this case, millions of US citizens will lose the health-care coverage they got under Obamacare. The frivolous nature of this challenge to Obamacare is pretty clear, and you would think that the Supreme Court would recognize that, and would have refused to hear the case.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, March 11, 2016 It's Time to Rid the DNC of DINOs, Starting With the Chair
Debbie Wasserman Schultz isn't the only Democrat-In-Name-Only (DINO) in the Democratic leadership. But as the DNC Chair, she is the highest-ranking DINO in the party. It's time to restore the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, and we should start with the chair.
(13 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 6, 2010 How much should the CEO of WellPoint get?
Angela Braly, the CEO of health insurance giant WellPoint just received a whopping $13.1 million in pay, a 51 percent increase in compensation in 2009.
This at the same time "WellPoint's California subsidiary, Anthem Blue Cross, is seeking a double-digit rate increases for many of its 800,000 members who buy individual policies."
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 4, 2015 Alabama Toughens Rules for Voting While Black
Even if this isn't a targeted effort to suppress minority and low-income votes in the state, the end effect is that it fundamentally undermines our democracy by making it more difficult to register to vote in the counties that just lost their driver's license bureaus. This bald-faced attempt to block minorities from voting should face a Justice Department investigation.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 10, 2021 Why Fox News Claims "They" Are "Taking Down White Culture"
"With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 5, 2017 Trump Lends the Banksters a Hand
Donald Trump just pulled off the biggest bait-and-switch in American history. Back when he was a presidential candidate, Trump said things about the big banks that made him sound like a Bernie Sanders Democrat. In his final ad before Election he blasted the "global power structure" that was robbing the country blind at the expense of working Americans. That ad will go down in history as a con job of epic proportions.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 22, 2022 My Dishwasher Wants to Spy on Me! - The Hartmann Report
It's time to say "No" to Big Tech and "smart" appliances that are, in reality, data thieves attaching themselves to us and our homes like blood-sucking parasites
SHARE Wednesday, July 21, 2021 Can America Go from Empire to "Good Neighbor?"
America needs to define a consistent, honest and public position on foreign aid and foreign interventions. If we fail to do so, we'll continue to produce disasters that have long-term consequences not only for the countries with whom we've interfered but also here in the US.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 26, 2015 The Pope Says Greed Is Not Good
The pope is reminding the US and the world -- that multiple mansions -- the Olympic-sized swimming pools -- the yachts and the private planes -- these are not what we should be paying attention to -- and the people who own those things aren't idols. And he's right -- it's time to orient our principles in a way that uplifts the poorest.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 22, 2022 Americans Used To Understand Public Schools and the Commons
The idea of America as a true "land of opportunity" is anathema to their ideal of a nation of "classes and orders" where every person knows their place and morbidly rich white men are in charge
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 24, 2021 Boulder: Is it Time to End the Second Amendment?
The Second Amendment was never meant to make it easier for mass shooters to get assault weapons, and America needs rational gun policy to join the other civilized nations of this planet who aren't the victims of daily mass killings.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 17, 2022 All the GOP Has Left is Racism & That's a Lie, Too
White supremacy promoted as pseudo-science is a lie, and the racist politics that flow from it are poison in the bloodstream of our republic
(6 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 3, 2014 The GOP War on Workers Has Killed Again
The US is the richest country on the planet, and there's absolutely no reason that working people should be living in poverty. The working class has been and always will be the backbone of the American economy, and conservatives in Washington need to accept that fact. It's time to end the 34-year-old war on working people in the US, and give all Americans an equal shot at success.
SHARE Tuesday, January 17, 2023 House Republicans are Playing with Fire with Our Economy
Anybody who thinks cooler heads will prevail like they did in 2011 doesn't know these Republicans. Buckle up - we're in for a wild ride that could spell worldwide disaster
(6 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 28, 2014 A Rising Tide Only Lifts All Boats When Everyone Has a Boat
Poverty is not a disease, it's not a "culture," and it's not something you can solve just by telling poor people to work harder. Poverty, at its core, is really just a lack of resources. Poor people aren't poor because they're lazy and don't know how to work; poor people are poor because they don't have the resources (aka money) to afford things like housing, food, and education that are essential to living a good life.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, August 9, 2021 Trump's Shadow Cabinet is Part of His Ongoing Attempted Coup
Making sure the coup never ends but keeps rolling on is probably Trump's best chance to avoid going to jail for crimes ranging from rape to bank fraud, sedition and treason.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 6, 2022 Civil Society is Fully in a State of Gun Crisis
Civil society requires that its citizens feel safe in public spaces; destroy that generalized sense of safety and you will radically warp public opinion to the right
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, March 20, 2017 How Republicans Quietly Sabotaged Obamacare Long Before Trump Came into Office
Donald Trump identified the wrong culprit as the person who poison-pilled Obamacare for 2017. That distinction would go to Marco Rubio (and his Republican helpers in the Senate). Democrats should have been screaming bloody murder for the past two years. Maybe they can start now, every time a reporter or Republican says, "Obamacare is failing..."
(9 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 21, 2007 The Ultimate Felony Against Democracy: Privatizing Our Vote
This article is worth a new look.Why have we let corporations into our polling places, locations so sacred to democracy that in many states even international election monitors and reporters are banned?Why are we allowing corporations to exclusively handle our vote,in a secret and totally invisible way?Particularly a private corporation founded,in one case, by a family that believes the Bible should replace the Constitution...
SHARE Tuesday, April 8, 2014 Climate Change Is Real: Just Ask the World Bank
Unfortunately, here in America, things are stalled. Despite the mountains of proof and scientific evidence, Republicans in Washington, and across the country, are continuing to push climate change denial policies and legislation at the behest of their Big Oil, Coal, and Gas "donors."
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 28, 2015 The Deficits Republicans Don't Want to Talk About
Our federal deficit has been slashed by more than two-thirds since President Obama took office, and deficits over the next decade are going to be around $4.7 trillion lower than what the Congress Budget Office estimated just four years ago. Instead of focusing on a federal deficit that's at its lowest point in years, Republicans should instead be focusing on the United States' real deficit problem.
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 16, 2006 Thom Hartmann: Nobles Need Not Pay Taxes
A cornerstone of the cons' movement to consolidate power in the hands of a wealthy corporate elite is the campaign to end corporate income taxes altogether-- and leave the rest of us to pick up the entire tab for corporate use of our institutions and corporation despoliation of our commons.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 12, 2016 The Era of Small Government Is Over
Today's Republicans don't believe in promoting the general welfare. They're ideologues who've been running a gigantic scam on the American people for the past 30 years. They want to destroy government to enrich their wealthy friends and donors. This con worked for decades, but Americans are now starting to figure it out.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 7, 2016 Who's Responsible for CA's Giant Toxic Methane Leak That Has Forced Thousands to Evacuate Their Homes?
This natural gas leak isn't just an environmental disaster; it's an atmospheric catastrophe like we've never really seen before. Thousands of people have been displaced from their homes, their communities forced to scatter and the climate has been put even further in jeopardy, just because a for-profit company wasn't required to replace the safety valve on their aging well.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 1, 2021 Cosby Got Trump's Sweetheart Deal
It's time to end Rich Man's Deals and hold people with well-stuffed money bins to the same level of accountability as the rest of us.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 26, 2021 The Saturday Report
A weekly summary of "The Best of the Rest of the News"
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 10, 2016 Republicans Only Care About Children Before They're Born
if Republicans really cared about kids they'd stop their blockade of Medicaid expansion.
They'd also stop supporting the war on drugs that creates the school-to-prison pipeline. They'd stop turning our schools into profit-making engines for the billionaire class; and they'd stop trying to cut Head Start, food stamps and welfare for single moms. They'd also pass federal funding for Flint, Michigan.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 27, 2010 This So-Called "Banking Reform" Bill
Big banks won big in this... The bottom line seems that, much like the so-called health insurance reform, there are a few really good bones in here thrown to consumers but the power, wealth, and monopoly of the big banks that, as Senator Byron Dorgan said of the US Senate, "They own this place," continue to own the Senate as well as you and me.
SHARE Friday, March 11, 2022 Wannabee Strongman DeSantis Deploys Election Police
Florida is putting into effect the first "election police" in the nation - expect other GOP-run states to jump onboard soon, as the Republican War on Democracy continues apace
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, February 7, 2022 America Must Outlaw Nixon's No-Knock Warrants
Nixon's "War on Drugs" continues to terrorize Americans; it's time to drive a stake through this 50-year-old legal Frankenstein's monster that has killed so many Americans for no good reason
SHARE Wednesday, June 22, 2022 "Hate & Fear" or "Liberty & Prosperity"?
The GOP has planted their flag deeply into the soil of fear and hate, right up to and including a call to repeal the Voting Rights Act of 1965 - this year we must vote as if our future depends upon it
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 16, 2016 A Key Component of US Fascism Is Already in Place
When corporations can buy Congress and use their sheer size and influence to get what they want and box out competition, there is no free market at all. And if you believe the old maxim that there is no freedom without economic freedom, there's no democracy either. Donald Trump is taking us in a very dangerous direction, and thanks to Ronald Reagan, he has fertile ground to work with.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, August 19, 2011 Geeky Science -The Ultimate Spy tool
The journal Science is reporting this week that a super thin electronic patch that sticks to the skin like a temporary tattoo could transform medical sensing, computer gaming and even spy operations.
SHARE Wednesday, March 31, 2021 "Trumpism" Is Simply White Supremacy
Trump is white supremacy. And while white supremacy has been a "feature" of many movements over the centuries, from the Doctrine of Discovery to Nazi-era fascism, it's also its own standalone ideology.
SHARE Thursday, July 20, 2023 Are GOP Governors Killing Their Citizens to Protect Billionaires?
Rightwing billionaires (who pay an average income tax of 3.4 percent) think the world is made up of "makers" and "takers." So what if 45,000 Americans die every year because of this callous attitude?
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 17, 2015 Why Gay Marriage Would Have Been Embraced by Our Founding Fathers
Gay marriage is simply the logical and appropriate extension of the idea that in a constitutionally limited democratic republic, a vital function of government is to protect the rights of minorities. It's called "civil rights." Gay marriage is a civil rights issue, plain and simple, and entirely in keeping with the egalitarian vision of this nation's Founders.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 17, 2020 This Election Was Rigged
It turns out that Donald Trump was right: the election was rigged. He would know, of course, because he and Lewis DeJoy were the ones who rigged it.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, October 17, 2014 The Real Rick Scott Debate Scandal
Because of decisions made during the Reagan and Clinton administrations, our media is now an infotainment mess. This makes us all vulnerable to hustler politicians who've figured out that media that cares about ratings over news will always go with the bright, shiny things - like an argument over an electric fan on-stage -- instead of real issues that affect all of our lives.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 30, 2016 How Do We Democratize Our Media?
There's a reason the framers of the Constitution wrote the press into the First Amendment: Democracy can't thrive without an informed electorate. It's time to democratize the media, and that means it's time to bring back the Fairness Doctrine and to reinstate media ownership rules so a small handful of wealthy right-wingers no longer dictate our daily media diet.
SHARE Friday, July 16, 2021 The Multiracial Democracy Ulysses Grant Was Willing to Die For is in Danger
Prior to 1965, the only American president to have both promoted and presided over a multiracial democracy was Ulysses Grant, the former general in Lincoln's army who became president when impeached Southern slaveowner Andrew Johnson's term expired on March 4, 1869.
SHARE Thursday, October 13, 2022 Why the GOP is No Longer a Legitimate Political Party
The GOP has no unifying philosophy other than hate, fear, and kowtowing to billionaires and their giant corporations; the people who make up its governing class are similarly fractured
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 9, 2014 Time to Get Rid of Racist Policing in the United States
We need to provide more funding for community policing programs that encourage police officers to become members of the community, instead of feared figures. It's time to get rid of the United States' racist policing double-standards.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, April 4, 2014 Should GM Get the Death Penalty for 57 Cent Premeditated Murder?
Many corporations are willing to do just about anything to protect their profits and bottom-line, even if that means "accepting" that a few people might die as a result, whether in a car crash, an oil-rig explosion, or a suicide after a home is foreclosed on.
And even worse, they know that nothing will happen in the way of punishment.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 13, 2013 Thom Hartmann on the News: Warren Resusciatates Glass Steagall, Reid Considers Nuclear
Yesterday, the freshman senator introduced the 21st Century Glass Steagall Act, which would break up the big banks, and rebuild the wall between traditional banking and Wall Street gambling. In a statement, Senator Warren said, "Despite the progress we've made since 2008, the biggest banks continue to threaten the economy."
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, October 9, 2006 Thom Hartmann: Too Important for the Private Sector
Some aspects of government are just too important to hand over to the private sector.
The cons ascribe to a religion of privatization. They have been busy privatizing the most basic features of our government, including the military, the prisons, and our electoral system itself.
SHARE Tuesday, March 25, 2014 Democratizing the Global Food Crisis
The major risks and effects of climate change and global warming are far more immediate then was first thought. And those effects go beyond melting ice, rising temperatures, and threatened species of animals and plants. Right now, climate change is driving everything from droughts and flooding, to war, disease, and hunger.
SHARE Wednesday, July 14, 2021 The GOP's Shameless Plot Against Democracy
Seventeen Republican-controlled states have passed 28 voter suppression laws, even asserting that if elections don't turn out the way the Party likes they can simply change or ignore the results. It's driven Texas legislators, faced with another law like that, to flee the state in a desperate effort to preserve their voting rights.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 8, 2005 You Can't Govern if You Don't Believe in Government
Democracy - and at least several thousand people, most of them Democrats, black, and poor - drowned last week in the basin of New Orleans.
SHARE Monday, January 30, 2006 Alito - It's the Constitution That's At Stake
Joining the likes of Hilter, George W. Bush is the most recent "leader" to claim vast and wide powers during time of war, that those powers trump the constitution, and that the war he has started will go on "for generations" to come.
SHARE Thursday, February 18, 2016 Why Americans Like Socialism
Say what you want about the feasibility of "democratic socialism," but the argument that it's somehow out of step with what the American people want is just flat-out wrong. Americans do want socialism, even if they've been bludgeoned by decades of Cold War era propaganda into believing that it's an affront to our democracy.
SHARE Wednesday, September 22, 2021 A Crime Wave Could Take Down the Democrats in 2022
Democrats need to step up with a big and effective anti-crime program now, or the GOP will eat their lunch next year. Americans deserve to be safe in their homes and communities.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 7, 2014 Economic Terrorism by Paid Goons
It's now harder than ever before to join a union, thanks to the decades-long War on Labor that conservatives have been waging ever since Ronald Reagan came to Washington. And they've been waging that war with help from "right to work laws," which should properly and accurately be called "right to work for less" laws, and from the multibillion dollar-a-year union-busting industry.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, February 21, 2022 Why Trump can't be ignored & must be held accountable
When Trump and his immediate circle are finally held to account and stripped of their status, prestige, and power, the authoritarian movement in America will similarly lose much of its reach and power.
SHARE Thursday, November 10, 2022 Has the Fourth Turning Begun?
Republican policies have already created crises that challenge our very survival as a species - will these crises be solved by Zoomers?
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 13, 2014 Advice for "Meet the Press"
Since the show underestimates its audience, it brings on guests who really can't contribute much to serious debates. Similarly, the show rarely brings on experts on individual issues. Instead, it relies on political pundits, strategists, and analysts who are just reciting either bumper stickers or conventional wisdom.
SHARE Tuesday, February 21, 2023 Why Would Anybody Embrace Fascism?
Is it useful to examine why so many white people, with their built-in white privilege, would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with wannabe dictators like Trump, Abbott, and DeSantis?
SHARE Wednesday, April 6, 2022 How the GOP is Turning Up the Dial on "Hate & Fear"
Strongmen are winning elections, from Putin in Russia, to Orban in Hungary, to Bolsonaro in Brazil, with an anti-LGBTQ agenda: Republicans here are implementing the same strategy
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 24, 2021 Mass Shootings: America needs an Emmett Till moment
In 1955, young Black people like 14-year-old Emmett Till were routinely murdered by white people all over America, usually with no consequence whatsoever.
SHARE Monday, March 29, 2010 A Bow to Money; Supreme Court's Citizen's United Ruling's Impact Extended
In a decision that shows the extended impact of the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down limits on contributions to political groups that spend money to support or oppose candidates.
SHARE Thursday, August 21, 2014 The Ferguson Effect on Our Great-Grandchildren
We must confront America's racism and poverty epidemics head-on and start building a larger and more inclusive middle class, so that communities like Ferguson can leave the stress of poverty behind. At the same time, we need to be creating a safer world, free of major stressors like wars, violence, and militarized police occupations. Basically, we need to be working towards a more nurturing society.
SHARE Tuesday, May 10, 2022 How Will Trump's Deadly Sabotage Of America End?
Because he has not been held to account, Trumpism has spread across the US landscape like metastasized cancer, with GOP politicians who aspire to corrupt strongman status emulating him in every state
SHARE Thursday, April 7, 2016 The Dark Future for America If We Let the Middle Class Disappear
If we don't work to restore the American middle class to the vibrant, robust segment of our nation it once was, we may soon witness the end of small-d democracy as we know it. As history and nature both show us, working for the collective good is essential to a functioning democracy, and the natural outcome of that work is a strong and vibrant middle class.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, November 2, 2015 The Sad Truth of Our Politics: It's Basically Turned into a Competition Among Oligarchs to Own Everything
Fascism is again rising in America, this time calling itself "conservatism." The Republican candidates' and their billionaire donors' behavior today eerily parallels that day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."
SHARE Tuesday, May 24, 2022 Is Trumpism This Generation's Version of the Confederacy?
Today's GOP, under Trumpism, is as real a threat to the survival of our republic as was the 1860's Confederacy and reflects a worldview grounded in the white supremacy of the American south
SHARE Thursday, April 12, 2018 Donald Trump and Paul Manafort Revived Nixon's Race-Based Hate Strategy for the 21st Century
Paul Manafort -- Trump's longtime associate and former campaign manager--has a long history of helping conservative Republican presidential candidates effectively apply Nixon's Southern Strategy. After the notorious political hatchet man Lee Atwater joined Manafort's firm, Atwater masterminded the infamous "Willie Horton" attack ad for George H. W. Bush that doomed Michael Dukakis's race for the presidency.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, March 5, 2012 Is sharing the key to an advanced society?
After we take back our democracy - what sort of new economy do we want to build? What are we going to replace corporate capitalism with?
For an answer to that - we have to look inside ourselves - literally inside ourselves - into our DNA. New research in the journal "Science" pin points one of the main differences between humans and chimpanzees that has let our species dominate the planet. And that is our ability to SHARE.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 15, 2022 Kyrsten Sinema Doesn't Want Black People to Vote?
Are Manchin and Sinema white supremacists? Or doing the work of white supremacists who finance them? Or just cynically using white supremacy to advance their political goals?
SHARE Wednesday, February 23, 2022 Performance Art Is All the GOP Has Left
They offer nothing to improve schools, support families, help small businesses, lower drug prices, rebuild America's crumbling infrastructure, or heal the racial divide - just performance art
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 22, 2014 The GOP Death Panel
According to a new study out of Harvard University, as many as 17,000 people will die in America just this year as a direct result of the GOP's refusal to expand Medicaid. These Republicans should rot in hell -- and probably will. By saying "no" to expanded Medicaid, they've said "no" to the right to life of the people who put them in office.
SHARE Sunday, April 17, 2022 How Do We Break the Cycle Of Political Violence?
When a guy shooting up a subway car is charged with terrorism but a group kills six people trying to end the rule of law in America isn't, something is out of kilter. Congress must act
SHARE Friday, August 12, 2022 The "Share Buyback" Rape of American Business
How CEOs pulled off their coup, ending the Golden Age of growth for the middle class while beginning the current era of the CEO as modern-day superyacht-owning Emperor"
SHARE Tuesday, November 1, 2022 Will the Billionaires' Risky Bet Pay Off?
They're betting no one will notice the GOP is increasing their wealth & lowering their taxes while manipulating white male anger & violence against women, immigrants, liberals, and people of color...
(8 comments) SHARE Monday, February 12, 2007 Repeal the Military Commissions Act and Restore the Most American Human Right
When a demi-tyrant like Vladimir Putin begins lecturing the United States, as he did just a few days ago, on how our various behaviors over the past five years have "nothing in common with democracy," we should pay attention.
SHARE Wednesday, July 16, 2014 Why Do Banksters Get Help but Not Homeowners?
Under the agreement, Citigroup will most likely get a $500 million tax write-off. And in pre-market trading on Monday, Citigroup stocks rose by nearly 4 percent, despite the $7 billion agreement. This is nothing more than a slap on the wrist for Citigroup; basically a cost of doing business.
SHARE Tuesday, May 8, 2012 Welcome to America's biggest spy center
James Bamford, Investigative Journalist/Author joins Thom Hartmann. What will be going on within the top-secret walls of the $2 billion Utah Data Center? The answer...surveillance - but not just surveillance - we're talking the biggest spy center this nation has ever seen. And if you use the Internet, talk on the phone, or check out books from the library - then you should be very concerned with this so-called Data Center...
SHARE Thursday, December 16, 2021 It's Past Time For Democrats To Defy the Supreme Court
Congress should stand up for what's right and "legally bribed politicians" isn't that: it's time to end the bribery & get something done for the people, for a change
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 13, 2014 Does Cliven Bundy Represent the Ugly American?
It should come as no surprise that some of the ATV-riding law breakers in Utah this weekend were members of the Cliven Bundy camp. In an email blast to his "followers," Bundy wrote that, "We need to help the people of Blanding re-establish who is in control of the land. This is your next stand. Will you be there to help them like you helped us?"
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 7, 2014 Is Google the New Sheriff in Town?
Our government doesn't do a great job of respecting the privacy of Americans. But the difference between a private corporation like Google and a government agency like the Post Office is that the Post Office is ultimately answerable to "We the People." We need to have a serious debate about this before the power of tech giants to act like law enforcement gets way out of control.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 27, 2016 Why Insurance Companies Are Nervous About Sanders' Health Care Agenda
Ever since Bernie Sanders announced his campaign for president--and long before, in fact--he has been attacked for his stance on single-payer health care. It's been over 50 years since Medicare was legislated into existence, and it was established with the idea that one day it would be tweaked to become the national single-payer health insurance program for the United States of America. Let's fulfill the promise of Medicare!
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, January 24, 2014 Could a Rand Paul Candidacy Be the Best Thing Ever for Liberals?
Make no mistake about it. Rand Paul being on the Republican ticket for president in 2016 could be the powerful force needed to move the entire Democratic Party, from presidential nominees to state assembly nominees, to the left. What a remarkable outcome that would be.
SHARE Friday, September 18, 2020 Trump's Destruction of America Started with Reagan
If America is to recover from this hellscape that right-wing billionaires and their bought-off politicians have inflicted on us, it's going to require a massive, nationwide awakening and a nonstop multiyear effort.
SHARE Thursday, February 24, 2022 A War Against One is a War Against All
And here we are. This is one of those hinge points in history, a moment people remember other events in the context of "before" and "after" that moment
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, April 8, 2016 The GOP Is Now Bragging About Voter Suppression
Voting, Thomas Paine once said, "is the beating heart of democracy." It's what makes our democracy possible. Without it, Paine said, "man would be reduced to slavery." It's for this very reason, of course, that conservatives have worked since the founding of our republic to make it harder or downright impossible for people who are not part of the political and economic elite to vote.
SHARE Tuesday, April 11, 2006 Democracy Be Damned - Republicans Need Another War
George W. Bush is at it again. This time, reports Sy Hersh in The New Yorker, it'll be Iran. (Those of us who guessed it would have been Syria first apparently underestimated his hubris.) And this time he wants to be able to use nukes.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 8, 2021 Radical Republicans Reach Out From the Grave: Congress Must Expel Some Members and Punish States
To hold Trump and his elected cronies accountable for their traitorous act on that day -- and their seditious attempts since then to change election laws to make it harder for largely Democratic voters to have their votes counted -- we're left with the 14th Amendment.
(14 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 11, 2010 Thomas Jefferson on Student Lending....
Six Democrats have sided with banks, against the Landmark Student Lending Reform. Who are they? Bill Nelson (Fl.), Tom Carper (Del.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Jim Webb (Va.), Mark Warner (Va.) and Ben Nelson (Neb.).
...how do these people sleep at night or look themselves in the mirror?
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, October 23, 2015 Hey Democrats, Don't Pull an NDP -- Run as Progressives
Democrats win elections when they run as progressives. Unfortunately, a lot of establishment Democrats still buy into the right-wing myth that the US is a "center-right nation" when it's anything but. A recent poll by the Progressive Change Institute shows that Americans overwhelmingly agree with progressives like Bernie Sanders on key issues from education and healthcare to the economy.
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 25, 2014 The GOP Is the Pro-Death Party
Despite pretty solid evidence showing that conservative policies drive up suicides, lawmakers like Bobby Jindal are just fine continuing to help big business and the wealthy elite, while screwing over everyone else. It's time to save American lives, and stop the Party of Death.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 12, 2022 Exposed: The Most Toxic & Corrosive GOP Meme Ever
Once citizens believe a nation is "a republic but not a democracy" it's easier for a strongman to limit majority-rule voting so "only the right people" get to vote or have their vote counted
SHARE Friday, August 6, 2010 Learning About Reality From Fiction: "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"
Who owns the news? Who controls the news? What is the importance of independent media in a world where giant monoliths and monopolies have become the norm? And, most important, what is the relationship between news, in a free and open society and democracy?
(33 comments) SHARE Monday, September 24, 2007 Columbia University Shows True American Values
Columbia University, by inviting Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak, has shown confidence in the wisdom and adultness of their students and our republic.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 10, 2010 Has Faux News Far Right-Wing Fear Mongering Paid Off?
Has over a year of Faux News right-wing fear mongering and calling President Obama a socialist finally paid off?
According to one new poll from the Democracy Corps, a majority at 55 percent of likely voters believe that the word "socialist" describes the president either "well" or "very well."
SHARE Sunday, January 2, 2022 Lost Voting Rights: How a "slow motion insurrection" over 2021 has put fascism on the ballot for 2022
When fascism reared its ugly head in Europe and Japan in the 1920s, it signaled a coming war. As a newer and slicker form of that despotism rises here in America, it may well bring the same type of crisis.
We stand on the threshold of momentous change in this nation. While it's rarely discussed in this frame, the next two elections will almost certainly determine what form of government we'll have for at least a generation.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 20, 2014 The End of Choice
It's not just telecom and media companies that are growing into virtual monopolies. Right now, there are 10 giant corporations that control, either directly or indirectly, virtually every consumer product we buy. Kraft, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestle, Proctor and Gamble, General Mills, Kellogg's, Mars, Unilever, and Johnson and Johnson together have a stranglehold on the American consumer.
SHARE Friday, November 27, 2015 Kochs' Push for Criminal Legal Reform Is Aimed at Protecting Corporate Lawbreakers
The Koch brothers don't want to reform the federal criminal code to help average Americans stay out of jail for smoking pot; they want to reform the federal criminal code to protect fat-cat polluters. It really is as simple and dirty as that. Welcome to life in the best democracy money can buy.
(16 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 4, 2006 Thom Hartmann; Lying to the People
American fascists-those who would want former CEOs as pres., vice pres, House majority whip, and Senate majority leader and who would write legislation with corporate interests in mind-don't generally talk to We The People about their real agenda or the harm it does to small businesses and working people. Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and the Jews, they point to a "them" to pin with blame and distract...
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, August 6, 2007 Roll Back the Reagan Tax Cuts
Our bridges are falling apart (among other things), and its Ronald Reagan’s fault.
SHARE Friday, July 8, 2011 Thom Hartmann: Can Murdoch-style infotainment in America be stopped?
Faced with growing public outrage toward his British tabloid newspaper "News of the World" - Rupert Murdoch officially announced today he is shutting the paper down next week.
So what does all this mean for the state of media ownership in America? And now that a tabloid has imploded across the Atlantic - what effect could that have on Murdoch-style infotainment here in America?
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 20, 2006 Reclaim the Issues - "Occupation, Not War"
Every time the media - or a Democrat - uses the phrase "War in Iraq" they are promoting one of Karl Rove's most potent Republican Party frames.
There is no longer a war against Iraq.
It ended in May of 2003, when George W. Bush stood below a "Mission Accomplished" sign aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and correctly declared that we had "victoriously" defeated the Iraqi army and overthrown their government.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 26, 2006 Republicans Give In To Bush, Betray America
Senators John McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham were presented with an opportunity to uphold the fundamental human right known as habeas corpus, or flinch and write a law that would retroactively make sure that George W. Bush could not be prosecuted for violations of habeas corpus in our overseas concentration camps and prisons. It was a contest between protecting the President and protecting the Constitution.
SHARE Sunday, May 22, 2016 Why Is Congress Using Zika to Weaken Truck Safety?
So far in 2016, the members of the House have taken a full week off during every single month of this year, and they've actually been in session for only 59 days. The Senate was only in session for 65 days. considering the fact that every single representative is up for reelection this year, you can be certain that they've been spending their weekends and weeks off hustling campaign donations.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 6, 2016 Trump Gives Terrorism a Boost
The Grand Old Party has been supporting terrorism for decades now, through its policies and its rhetoric and, as Osama Bin Laden pointed out in 1998, that's been a real boon for Halliburton and other members of the Republican's military-industrial complex donors. Donald Trump is just the logical conclusion of that dark, dark trend.
SHARE Thursday, April 14, 2016 Democracy: The Continuing Fight Against Factions
As President Carter pointed out, this isn't a democracy, it's an oligarchy, and it's the complete opposite of what this country was founded on. That's why movements like Democracy Spring and Democracy Awakening are so important. They don't just encourage young people to get active in politics, they also rejuvenate the ideals that made this country's experiment in democracy possible in the first place.
SHARE Saturday, January 2, 2016 GOP Fearmongering Is Taking American Politics to a Dark and Disturbing Place
We have a political system where one party -- the Republican Party -- is totally and completely committed to scaring the crap out of people to get elected so they can have access to money and power for their own purposes. And that is something worth freaking out about, because if history tells us anything, it's that when people are scared, they'll do pretty much anything to feel safe.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 27, 2007 James Madison - "Impeach Bush Over Purgegate!"
According to James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," if a President were to order or allow the "wanton removal of meritorious officers" such as US attorneys, such an action "would subject the President to impeachment and removal from his own high trust." The issue of the firing of people within the Executive branch for political purposes came up during a debate in 1789.
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 17, 2008 Caroline Kennedy as Jimmy Stewart?
The bloviators say that Caroline Kennedy doesn't have enough "experience" in the political world to be a US Senator. "She's not tested," they say. "We don't know her positions."
What they're really saying is that she's not an insider, not part of the old-boy network, and thus not predictable.
Predictability is the key of get-along/go-along politics. Politicians are terrified of anything that may present a risk to them.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 3, 2016 Scalia's Gift To Public Unions
the Supreme Court just issued a split 4-to-4 decision, which means the lower-court ruling protecting unions stays in place for the time being. The case will likely wind up back before the court in the future, but for now, our public unions will have the power to fight another day. And, if the U.S. Senate stops refusing to do their job, President Obama could appoint a new Justice who isn't opposed to our vital labor unions.
(10 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 18, 2009 A Modest Medicare Proposal
We elected you because we expected you to have the courage of your convictions. Here's how. Not the "single payer Medicare for all" that many of us would prefer, but a simple, "Medicare for anybody who wants to buy in."
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 30, 2006 Thom Hartmann; JonBenet Died - And Bush Lied?
I was on the air doing my radio program two weeks ago when the story came down the wire that the killer of JonBenet Ramsey had been captured in Thailand just hours earlier. I opened the microphone and said words to the effect of, "Today there must be something really awful going down for the Republicans. Maybe Rove really will be indicted. Maybe Cheney.
Apparently it was worse than I'd imagined.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 5, 2006 Thom Hartmann; Governing for We The People
Americans stand at a critical moment in history. Do we follow the Founders and say that we want a government of, by, and for We the People, or do we follow the cons and choose a government of, by, and for inherited wealth and the elite of a corporatocracy?
We don't need to speculate about the outcome of either choice for the middle class. History, past and present, offers a clear answer.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 14, 2016 Obama's Last State of the Union and the Myth of Bipartisanship
Being a great president doesn't mean making compromises with the enemies of democracy, who have always existed in this country and this point in time just happen to control the Republican Party. Being a great president means fighting the enemies of democracy head-on, as Lincoln did when he was at his best, and as FDR did the entire time he was in the White House.
SHARE Thursday, August 18, 2011 Does big tobacco have the RIGHT to lie?
corporate law has evolved over the years to the point where there's virtually no risk to CEOs or stockholders, even when their company or product kills people - and even when they lie about it.
SHARE Saturday, September 5, 2009 Climate Change Crunch Time
The Arctic is hotter than it's been in 2,000 years and what's startling is - it should be cooling because of differences in the Earth's orbit that result in the region getting less direct sun.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, August 15, 2005 Jefferson Would Have Stood With Cindy Sheehan
Often history tells us how the future may turn out: Bush Junior isn't the first president to have lied to us about foreign affairs and war, or to use lies to justify eviscerating the Constitution.
SHARE Tuesday, April 5, 2016 Is the Next Taxpayer Bailout the Coal Industry?
Many big coal companies currently facing financial ruin may not be able to afford the cost of cleaning up their mines because they've handed so much money off to their executives and stockholders. If coal companies won't pay to clean up their mines, who will? You and me, the taxpayers, of course!
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 11, 2007 The Problem With a "War" Strategy
The eerie juxtaposition of General Betrayus testifying today before Congress, and it being 9/11 (which helped Bush bring us disasters ranging from the PATRIOT Act to the Iraq War and Occupation) brings an opportunity to re-understand what's been happening here and in Iraq these past six years, and offers an insight into a way forward.
SHARE Sunday, June 4, 2006 Stand Up for Democracy With Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brilliant new article tells how an American politician illegitimately took the office of president by outright theft and fraud. Although such high crimes and misdemeanors have been rumored in previous elections, none in the history of the republic have been so thoroughly documented. George W. Bush is not the legitimate president of the United States.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 11, 2006 Thom Hartmann: Reclaiming The Issues: "Why Is Bush Spying On Democrats?!?"
Bush admits to spying on Americans. Rove claims it's to protect us from terrorists, so most Americans don't care that it happens to be illegal. It's time for the Dems to point out that Bush is spying ON THEM, and that terrorism never was the point of domestic spying. It's all about neutralizing the political opposition.
(6 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 19, 2006 Why Air America Matters
It's a tragedy that for the lack of an investor the size of Rupert Murdoch Air America is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. But its existence and ongoing presence in the marketplace is an essential part of the dialogue that is known as democracy.
(9 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 21, 2006 Rangel and Jefferson Agree on a National Service Program
Many of the world's mature democracies require every high-school graduate to serve a year or two of either military or nonprofit service, as Congressman Charlie Rangel has proposed every year for some time now. At first blush, this may seem like an oppression by government, but history shows it's actually one of the best ways to prevent a military from becoming its own insular and dangerous subculture...
SHARE Thursday, September 21, 2006 Reclaiming The Issues: "Keep George Out Of Jail"
On the surface, it seems the Republicans are having a debate about "wiretapping terrorists" and "harsh interrogation of prisoners."But the real issue is whether Repugs in Congress will trade the principles of democracy and the rule of law to keep Bush and several of his colleagues out of jail, or whether they'll uphold the rule of law and American democracy while abandoning him to face the consequences of his illegal acts
SHARE Sunday, April 30, 2006 Bush Republicans Need (and are probably planning for) Another War
Bush/Cheney/Rove and the Republican cabal lied us into invading Iraq, ginning it up just before the 2002 midterm elections so Republicans could take back the Senate in 2002. The 2003 attack was timed, to improve Bush's chances to win the election of 2004. Now, Bush seems to be ginning up a new war just in time for the 2006 midterm elections and Rove probably has a 2007 war in mind to help swing the 2008 elections.