Author: Thom Hartmann

The 9/11 attack was a crime by a small group of criminals, not an act of war by a sovereign state. But we responded to that crime with two war-based assaults, and we won both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in a matter of weeks, not years or decades. Language matters, because it is how we understand what is real and what is a scam or a lie. It is how we share the metaphors, understandings, visions and values of our society. When it comes to crime, war, and occupations of other countries, language can mean life or death. When George...

In an oligarchy, the rich can get away with anything and average people who try to stop harms to themselves and their communities get crushed. We’re now there; the question is whether we’ll pull back from this horror show, or whether it’ll continue its evolution toward a full-blown police state. The Sackler family, whose criminal Oxycontin drug-dealing killed over a half-million Americans and destroyed the lives of millions more, is close to a deal with the states to keep around $10 billion of their ill-gotten gain in exchange for giving the states a bit over $4 billion over a...

A study by the Peace Research Institute in Norway and the University of Aarhus that polled 6,000 adults from the United States, Denmark, Italy, and Hungary found that the COVID pandemic has further eroded faith in government among people all across Europe and the United States. This is the capstone of “conservative” or neoliberal efforts to destroy faith in democratic governance in developed countries, an effort that goes back 50 years. In the 1950s and 1960s Americans had a lot of trust in government — around 80 percent of Americans said they trusted government — as did the citizens...

Former-slave-state Missouri Senator Josh Hawley doesn’t want America’s White children to be exposed to the simple reality that slavery was not only legal at the founding of our country but was, in several places, written into our Constitution. And that the rest of America subsidized the slave-owners’ states and continues to subsidize them to this day. Hawley, of course, is the guy who gave a fist-salute to the armed White Supremacist traitors who stormed the US Capitol on January 6th to assassinate Vice President Pence and Speaker Pelosi. He hopes to ride his White supremacy shtick to the White...

Democrats must stop giving in to grifter bullies. If you don’t take on bullies, they keep going further and further until either they win or you fight back and defeat them. The best political example of this writ large was Hitler. He pushed around most of Europe and they kept giving in or trying to appease him, thinking at some point he’d have gotten enough. Neville Chamberlain thought he could negotiate with a bully and came back from his meetings with Hitler believing he’d achieved “peace in our time.” But, of course, you can never actually negotiate with a...