Author: Thom Hartmann

It didn’t happen in some shadowy back alley or under the cover of night. It happened in broad daylight, in the heart of an American courthouse. Federal agents, acting without even the decency of a signed warrant, stormed into Judge Hannah Dugan’s courtroom on April 25 and dragged her away like a common criminal. No warning. No legal process. No respect for the law she had spent a lifetime upholding. But they made sure the cameras were there, so America could see what they were doing. Because this was not about justice. This was about terror. This was a...

Restoring power to the richest, Whitest men in the room. How long can democracy survive under Trump’s iron grip? Welcome to the new Confederate States of America. Much like the old CSA, the new CSA (also known as MAGA America) is devoted to making American as White as possible, stripping women and minorities of political and economic power, gutting workers’ rights, rigging election outcomes, leaders nakedly taking bribes, using a phony veneer of Christianity to justify brutal policies, making queer people invisible, reconfiguring schools for indoctrination, having militias terrorize minorities and their opponents, and maintaining a government of, by,...

Nature and economics share some fascinating patterns. One of which explains why Donald Trump became president again, and how the morbidly rich have appropriated over $50 trillion from working-class people since the 1980s. Scientists use something called the Lorka-Volterra equations to explain how predators and prey interact in the wild. These equations show us that animal populations rise and fall in predictable cycles — when there are lots of rabbits, fox populations grow, but as foxes eat more rabbits, the rabbit population shrinks, which then causes fox numbers to drop, allowing rabbits to multiply again. Incredibly, this back-and-forth pattern...

Donald Trump is preparing to crash the American economy. He intends to do it by tearing up vital parts of our American government. He may even hire Elon Musk to pull it off. And from his point of view, this is not going to be a bad thing. The farther the economy crashes, the greater the buying opportunity for billionaires. It all has to do with something called the administrative state. While it is not sexy or even particularly interesting to the average American voter, having a strong administrative state is essential to a high-functioning economy. A strong administrative...

The recent assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, the health insurance company with, reportedly, the highest rate of claims rejections and thus dead, wounded, and furious customers and their relations, gives us a perfect window to understand the stupidity and danger of the Musk/Trump/Ramaswamy strategy of “cutting government” to “make it more efficient, run it like a corporation.” Consider health care, which in almost every other developed country in the world is legally part of the commons — the infrastructure of the nation, like our roads, public schools, parks, police, military, libraries, and fire departments — owned by the...