Author: Thom Hartmann

Ending political bribery: What Ukraine can teach America about how to deal with our oligarch problem

Viktor Medvedchuk was the Rupert Murdoch of Ukraine. He ran a rightwing television network and owned TV stations across the country, while simultaneously being one of the richest men in that nation. He promoted hate and division, tax cuts for the rich and gutting the Ukrainian social safety net, and supported some of Ukraine’s most toxic politicians. Like many of today’s American oligarchs, he owned hundreds of politicians, who consistently voted in Parliament, state, and local governments to protect his businesses, wealth, and influence. Then came Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who successfully campaigned for president on a Teddy Roosevelt-like anti-corruption platform...

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A broken tax policy: How Corporate America is allowed to subsidize the Communist Party of China

Why are we using tax policy to subsidize giant American corporations in their dependency relationship with the Communist Chinese dictatorship? For 30 years, American corporations have been helping build China into a massive industrial empire while collapsing manufacturing capacity here in the United States. That country now has a stranglehold on things essential to America, from pharmaceuticals to electronics to consumer goods, all because of a neoliberal fantasy that if we helped them become wealthy through trade they would become more democratic. American politicians in the pocket of big business went along with this bizarre plan to increase corporate...

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Polluting streams of news: Why our democracy is unlikely to survive Fox’s mendacious propaganda

Recovering from three years of pandemic, our middle class staggered by 42 years of Reagan’s neoliberalism, rejecting the efforts of Republican neofascists in the mold of Trump, America appears poised on the edge of an egalitarian renaissance. America and much of the rest of the world are awakening. The bitter and angry haters, homophobes, bigots, and misogynists had their four years in the sun with Trump as president, and now grow increasingly loud and outraged as they are pushed farther and farther to the margins of society. A new day appears to be upon us. If only our press does...

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Judicial Authority: When a Billionaire asserts an absolute right to buy a Supreme Court Justice

Clarence and Ginni Thomas want to stay on the Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo gravy trains, and Crow’s lawyers are essentially claiming Thomas has every right to continue to act like a corrupt third-world autocrat who’s accountable to nobody, not even the voters and citizens of the United States or Senator Dick Durbin is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has both oversight of and writes laws relating to the federal court systems of the United States. Using powers given him by the Constitution, Durbin has asked Crow to account for the “gifts” he has showered on...

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The “weathering” phenomenon: Why America is being exhausted by fearmongers who delight in hate

A woman called into my radio program recently, sobbing. She was both terrified and angry about the way the GOP is scapegoating queer youth and the impact it is having on her daughter and her friends. “My daughter is gay and some of her good friends are trans and she’s terrified. She has a friend in Florida who just tried to commit suicide. I just want to tell everybody, please, this is just the beginning. I’ve been saying this since Trump came into power. That it’s just starting. “I don’t feel safe. My kids go out … and the fact...

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A Party of Business: The false Conservative belief that what’s good for the rich is what’s good for America

As predictably as the sun rises and sets, every commentator or politician on the Sunday political talk shows say, without being challenged, that the Republican Party understands and supports business better than the Democrats. All my life, in fact, I have been told by the media that the GOP is the “party of business.” It may have once been true when I was a very young child, but today it is a lie — and has been so in a huge way since the neoliberal Reagan Revolution. Republicans kill economies; Democrats rescue and build them Between 1933 and 2020...

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