Author: Thom Hartmann

Trump and the GOP are trying to provoke a revolution of their own design, although it is not to hold the rich and powerful accountable. It is the opposite, albeit in costume. Sandra Bland gets pulled over for a broken taillight and dies in jail; Trump steals an election by paying off a porn star, then tries to steal a second by launching a violent insurrection, and still walks free while making a million dollars a day fundraising. “Accountability for thee,” is the GOP motto, “but not for me.” The law must bind average working people with accountability, but...

Trump is no longer president, but he and his racism could still be responsible for millions more American deaths from a new pandemic disease. How and why? I will explain in just a moment, but first let’s look at the disease itself. One reason egg prices are so high right now is because a new strain of bird flu — H5N1 — has popped up among egg-laying chickens. The disease has a shocking mortality rate, leading to the death (both from disease and from euthanizing flocks to stop its spread) of almost 60 million domesticated birds in the US alone, so...

What country in its right mind would allow a foreign entity to come into their country, set up a major propaganda operation, and then use it to so polarize that nation that its very government suffers a violent assault and its democracy finds itself at a crossroads? Apparently, the United States.  And we are not the first, according to former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald (the Australian equivalent of The New York Times) Rudd called Rupert Murdoch and his rightwing news operations “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.” “The uncomfortable truth is,” Rudd wrote, “since...

Kevin McCarthy’s House Republicans, in their demand that Democrats gut Social Security and education monies to give more trillions in tax breaks to billionaires, are once again trying the Reaganomics hustle. Only this time with a twist. Boomers and many Gen Xers remember how the media swooned for Art Laffer’s napkin in the 1980s, and then President Reagan turned it into a movement to cut taxes on billionaires because, he lied, it would make average working-class people richer. What most don’t remember — because none of us were alive back in the 1920s or 1890s — is that Laffer and Reagan hadn’t...

Why are America’s plutocrats funding efforts to weaken our democracy and replace it with plutocracy and oligarchy? Is it just about money? Or is there something much deeper that most Americans rarely even consider? An extraordinary investigative report from documented.net tells how morbidly rich families, their companies, and their personal foundations are funding efforts to limit or restrict democracy across the United States. In an article co-published with The Guardian, they noted: “The advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, the powerful conservative think tank based in Washington, spent more than $5m on lobbying in 2021 as it worked to block federal voting rights legislation...