Author: Thom Hartmann

The CEO of America’s largest bank is worried, and for good reason. On June 1, the Fed started something it has not done for quite a while. It started dumping bonds. The Fed has been goosing the economy steadily since the Bush Crash of 2008, buying US and corporate bonds with money it creates out of thin air (only the Fed can “print money” like this by simply willing the dollars into existence). By purchasing and holding those bonds over the past 14 years, the Fed has created and then flushed into our economy $8 trillion in liquid cash....

Republicans believe that Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán has figured out the “secret sauce” to turn a republic into a hard-right oligarchy, and today they’re in Budapest drinking deep from his insights on the fine points of destroying democracy. In two speeches this week, Orbán laid out his Hungarian version of the racist American “Great Replacement Theory,” trashed Jewish financier George Soros as a proxy for Jews around the world, reiterated the importance of having friendly rightwing billionaires seize control of a nation’s media, and attacked societies that allow gay marriage and tolerate trans people as engaging in “gender madness.”...

It is time to talk about what an American fascist government would look like. The word “fascism” gets thrown around a lot, but most Americans have no idea what it would look like or how it would actually play out. It is critical to lay out what a fascist America would look like now because this is what is being envisioned right now by many in the Republican Party, and it might come to pass. They don’t talk about it out loud very much, like Nixon’s man G. Gordon Liddy used to back in the day when he signed memos...

The crisis with the Supreme Court; the racist mass shooter in Buffalo; Republican primary candidates trying to one-up each other on how they will refuse to count all the ballots in the 2024 election; and our hitting 1 million deaths from COVID all derive from the same thing: the destruction of trust. Donald Trump destroyed our trust in our public health institutions for his own political gain, so we have massively more Covid deaths than, for example, Australia. As the New York Times noted this weekend: “If the United States had the same COVID death rate as Australia, about...

President Biden is right. “For God’s sake” and our children’s sake, we must do something about gun violence in America. And we must do it now. Back in 1996, after a few years of mass shootings, Australia experienced a mass slaughter on a scale like we saw yesterday in Texas. Their Supreme Court hadn’t ruled that Australian politicians could be owned by industries, so they passed extensive gun control and a nationwide gun buyback program. It was a turning point, and the mass shootings have since largely stopped. Over at Daily Kos, Walter Einenkel has summarized how many millions...