Author: Thom Hartmann

Collapse of Neoliberalism: Oligarchs in America and Russia face a crisis once thought to be an opportunity

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...

Read More

A Criminal Takeover: How the Supreme Court allowed dark money to overwhelm our political system

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...

Read More

A Toxic Oligarchy: Why Citizens United must be overturned to end the War on American Democracy

The strongman dictator of Russia used 28 “Kamikaze” drones supplied by the theocratic dictators of Iran to attack the democracy of Ukraine’s capitol, Kyiv on October 17. Some of my tragically misguided former colleagues and guests on the left are joining with the most virulent Trump-humpers and Orbán/Putin-lovers on the right in calling for Ukraine to simply surrender a fifth of their country to Russia in exchange for “peace.” As if giving other people’s sovereign land to violent dictators has ever led to peace. What these people on both political sides are missing is the power of democracy itself to prevent...

Read More

Believing the unbelievable: How the science of the “Big Lie” and propaganda works to the GOP’s advantage

Donald Trump is still insisting he won the 2020 election, despite having lost by about 7 million votes and being wiped out in the Electoral College. Science, it turns out, is on his side. Not the science of elections: the science of propaganda. New findings from psychologists at universities in California and Georgia and published in the journal Cognitive Research show that the more often a statement — regardless of its truthfulness — is repeated, the more emphatically it is believed. The researchers noted: “Repeated information is often perceived as more truthful than new information. This finding is known as the illusory truth...

Read More

An Anti-Election Scam: How Republican-controlled states are applying a poll tax by purging voting rolls

Get ready. If you are a Democratic voter, there is a chance you will show up to vote this November and discover you cannot because you are no longer registered. Millions will be blindsided this way, and it could turn elections toward Republicans across the nation. America hates GOP policies of banning abortion, gifting the morbidly rich with trillions in tax cuts, denying climate change and blocking any remedies to it, and filling our cities with guns. So, Republicans know, the only way they can win in many places is to simply prevent people from voting. As Heritage Foundation...

Read More

Enforcing the Constitution: Perhaps it is finally time to ban seditious MAGA Republicans from Congress

Before I even get into the guts of this argument, just ask yourself: if Democratic Members of Congress had engaged in a seditious conspiracy to overthrow our government to put or keep a Democratic president in power against both the popular vote and the Electoral College, and Republicans controlled Congress right now, what would those Republicans be doing? It is time to enforce the Constitution, and a judge in New Mexico just kicked off the process. Democrats need to jump on this with the vigor of Trump crashing a Miss Teen USA dressing room. The 14th Amendment to the...

Read More