Author: Thom Hartmann

The 1970s were a pivotal decade, and not just because it saw the end of the Vietnam War, the resignation of Nixon, and the death of both the psychedelic hippie movement and the very political (and sometimes violent) SDS. Most consequentially, the 1970s were when the modern-day Republican Party was birthed. Prior to that, the nation had hummed along for 40 years on a top income tax bracket of 91% and a corporate income tax that topped out around 50%. Business leaders ran their companies, which were growing faster than at any time in the history of America, and...

Will we be governed by representatives we elect, or people put in office by angry mobs storming capitols? Nations have to figure out how they are to be governed. Most of recorded history tells the story of kings, popes, priests, lords, and barons who ruled through violence and imposed themselves on their people rather than the people selecting them. Ultimately, as we all learned in high school civics, you can have a government chosen democratically with a free and fair vote or you can have a government chosen through brute force and violence. There really are not any other...

Philosophy matters. And philosophy turned into law matters a lot. Particularly in this brave new world of severe climate change. The Jackson, Mississippi crisis of clean water should not surprise any of us. Like Michigan was when Flint’s water supply was crippled, it is a Republican-controlled state and Republicans will always prioritize tax cuts for the morbidly rich over building or maintaining infrastructure. Even in the face of climate-change-driven flooding. Nine of the ten poorest states in the nation are Red states; that is also no surprise. Republicans, after all, have philosophically opposed both unionization and the minimum wage...

The title of Maggie Haberman’s new book about Donald Trump is “Confidence Man” and, truth be told, Trump has been a con man his entire life. Haberman documents it all in excruciating detail. But when you compare Trump’s cons with the $50 trillion that the GOP has conned out of the American working class and given to the top 1 percent since 1980, Trump looks like a piker. He played his role in that GOP con, of course, setting up the very richest Americans to get more billions of dollars a year in tax breaks for the foreseeable future,...

There is a reckoning coming. The kind of oligarchy that neoliberalism has brought to both America and Russia is so unstable it will not hold. Both nations are thus confronting dramatic transitions over the next few years. As Russia has suffered substantial defeats in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin may be looking at the end of his reign. There’s similar tough stuff facing Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and their GOP buddies. As the world watches its 40-year-old experiment with neoliberalism collapse, Republicans in the U.S. and Putin in Russia are facing a crisis they once thought would be an opportunity. Neoliberalism...

Republicans in the Senate killed legislation on September 22 that had passed through the House, which would require “dark money” to be publicly disclosed. Not a single Republican voted for it, although every Democrat in attendance did. Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition, we learned Wednesday, is going to spend $42 million on the midterm elections, focusing on flipping evangelical Hispanics toward the GOP. Leonard Leo, head of The Federalist Society so famous for providing Trump and McConnell with rightwing judges to pack federal courts and the Supreme Court, recently received a $1.6 billion contribution, tax-free. So much money is sloshing around in our political system...