Thom's Daily Audio

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here:

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

Trump and his Republican partners in the destruction of American democracy really don’t want us to vote this fall or in 2028. And there’s a good reason for it, at least in their minds.

Joyce Vance just pointed out that Howard Lutnick, Trump’s morbidly rich crony Commerce Secretary, claimed this week that they’d found over 24,000 noncitizens who’d illegally voted in the 2020 election.

It’s a lie, of course, and a pretty naked one at that, but this will be the foundation for Republicans establishing even more draconian rules to prevent married women, racial minorities, city dwellers, and low-income people from voting this fall and in 2028.

Also this week, the Center for American Progress released an extraordinarily disturbing fact sheet summarizing an investigation they published that documents fifteen separate, interlocking tactics the Trump administration, Republican governors, and GOP members of Congress are engaging in right now to rig this fall’s election.

Their tactics range from firing the bipartisan Election Assistance Commissions’ commissioners to encouraging Red state voter purges to putting ICE agents outside polling places in clear violation of federal law.

The six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court are also deciding, perhaps this week or next, whether to let Trump’s hand-picked Postmaster General have your mailman refuse to deliver your ballot if you’re not on Trump’s approved voter list.

Trump’s executive order to do this has been blocked twice by a federal judge, noting that the Constitution is clear that only states run elections and the executive branch has no authority whatsoever to even try to regulate them. And now it’s in the hands of six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

And the plain words of the Constitution — which references the “right to vote” six times, including five Amendments that say, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged…” — have never been an obstacle for Republicans on the Court. Just read the plain text of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments and compare that to ICE’s behavior, which the Court is allowing.

Sadly, we need to be ready for anything, because Republicans now have a 58-year-long record of committing crimes and treason to get their men into the White House.

— Nixon sabotaged LBJ’s Vietnam peace deal just before the election of 1968, an event LBJ and Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen called “treason” on a phone call that wasn’t released until decades after Johnson’s death. Because the war continued, Nixon beat Humphrey that year by lying that he had a “secret plan” to end the war, and an additional 20,000+ Americans and over an additional million Vietnamese died.

— Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollah to hold the 52 hostages they’d taken during Carter’s presidency until after the election. Iran kept the deal destroying Carter’s chance in the 1980 election, and for six years Reagan secretly and illegally sold them American-made weapons in violation of the law. We remember that as the “Iran-Contra Scandal.”

— Florida Governor Jeb Bush had 57,000 mostly Black Floridians purged from the voting rolls just months before the 2000 election, which let his brother George W. Bush squeak by with a 537 vote margin. When the Florida Supreme Court, smelling a rat, ordered a recount, five corrupt Republicans — including Bush’s father’s nominee Clarence Thomas — violated the state’s rights Tenth Amendment and blocked the recount, putting Bush into the White House even though a later recount found that Al Gore had won the election. President Jimmy Carter told me on my radio program: “I don’t think that George W. Bush won the election in 2000, and he probably lost Florida and nationwide…”

— And then there was the GOP’s theft of the 2024 election. Greg Palast, a reporter with a masters’ degree in statistics, went through the official state-by-state statistics and found that 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls: 2,121,000 mail were ballots disqualified by Republican challenges, 1,216,000 provisional ballots were thrown away uncounted, 3.24 million new registrations were rejected or never processed, and 585,000 in-person ballots were “spoiled.”

He found Black voters were four times as likely as white voters to have their mail ballot rejected; Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters were more than 3 times as likely as white people to be given provisional ballots that were never counted. Had that voter suppression not worked, he concluded, Kamala Harris would be president and the House and Senate may well be in Democratic hands.

So, here we go again, only this time state-by-state voter suppression — remember when Texas AG Ken Paxton told Steve Bannon on the air that if he hadn’t blocked Houston from sending out mail-in ballots Trump would have lost Texas? — is getting a big boost from the feds under Trump’s control.

— Trump and his lickspittles have fired or pushed out at least 75 career election security officials, gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and removed the Election Assistance Commission’s commissioners so the agency is now functionally dead.

— The Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, now run by an apparatchik devoted to undoing civil rights, has threatened election officials in all 50 states with prison if they make even small errors in running their elections. The DOJ itself has sued more than 30 states trying to seize their voter files.

— The FBI raided the Fulton County elections office with Tulsi Gabbard, then the Director of National Intelligence, standing over the process at the personal direction of Trump himself as agents hauled away hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots.

— Steve Bannon has repeatedly promised — most recently this week — that ICE agents will defy the post-Civil War federal law that bans armed government officials from polling places.

— And Trump has, on multiple occasions, floated declaring a national emergency or state of insurrection to shut down this fall’s elections, either nationwide or in places where Democratic majorities may win.

Back in the old days, Nixon and Reagan at least had the decency to commit their treasonous election thefts in secret.

Trump is now bragging about it, telling Congress that if they pass his voter suppression bill to prevent low-income people and married women from voting, “We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.”

This is Putin-level corruption, right out in the open, and not a single Republican is pushing back as our national press tries their hardest to avoid discussing it.

We’ve suffered through five illegitimate presidencies in the years since Nixon’s 1968 treason largely because our press has refused to investigate or tell the stories and Democratic leadership has been too timid to bring it up. You know how Republicans would be reacting if the shoe were on the other foot.

This time the press can’t claim they just didn’t realize what was going on, as happened in 1968, 1980, 2000, and 2024: Trump and his cronies are doing all this right out in the open, and his advisors like Bannon are crowing about it on TV.

So it’s time for all of us to raise some hell, letting our friends and neighbors know what’s happening, and demand that our elected officials act now to protect our elections. The number for Congress is 202-224-3121 and don’t forget to check your voter registration at vote.org, particularly if you live in a Red state.

We just have a few weeks to go before early voting starts and we have a hell of a lot of work to do to get out the vote and keep it honest. Tag, we’re it!

Louise’s Daily Song: “Same Old Crime”

Comments on Thursday’s Daily Take:Are We On the Verge of a Progressive Revolution Like the New Deal?The vast majority of Americans (who wrongly think they are capitalists) are already indentured to America’s capitalist oligarchs via mortgages, credit card debt, and car loans.~ TomonthebeachFor those of us who pay attention, I …

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here:

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

Do we stand on the edge of a grand new progressive era, with good wages for all, racial and gender equality and justice, and America joining the rest of the developed world with cheap college and healthcare paid for by rational taxes on the morbidly rich? Or will Trump gleefully overthrow American democracy, finish his ongoing project of shuttering or handing to his oligarch partners-in-crime our free press, and imprisoning more of us who object?

When Mussolini put Antonio Gramsci, the founder of Italy’s Communist Party, in prison in 1927, Gramsci wrote from his prison cell that:

“[T]he old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

That interregnum is passing right now here in America, the symptoms are obvious, and change is upon us.

Two forces in American politics are similarly on a collision course today at two levels. Within the Democratic Party, it’s Clinton-era neoliberalism versus Bernie’s progressivism. In the overall political scene, it’s Trump’s and his captive GOP’s neofascism versus the entire spectrum of Democrats (both “corporate” and “progressive”) who, regardless of their differences, still embrace democracy.

The problem corporate neoliberal Democrats, the heirs to Clintonism and Obamaism, face is that a majority of Americans are now clear that it simply doesn’t work. We’re sick of partial, corporate- and billionaire-aligned solutions to large problems that should best be handed by our government as part of the commons.

— Trying to get affordable healthcare to all Americans via Obamacare, for example, is increasingly failing because the massive for-profit insurance industry it depended on is increasingly committed to squeezing every last penny out of us, regardless of how many of us die.

— Trying to lift a majority of Americans back up into their parents’ middle class lifestyle is also failing, largely because the corporate wing of the Democrats dependent on campaign contributions from giant union-hating corporations have “mysteriously” failed in their proclaimed effort to increase unionization and the minimum wage.

— Trying to give all Americans access to a college education without debt has failed because a large handful of big-bank-funded Democrats supported Bush’s bankruptcy “reform” in 2005 that outlawed using bankruptcy to discharge student debt. When Reagan came into office, roughly 80 percent of the cost of college was covered by state and federal money and college endowments; today that’s only around 20 percent; returning to 80% (and, thus, affordable college) is now a big legislative lift when our tax code is so skewed toward billionaires and massive corporations that the money for college is largely gone.

Forty-five years of the Reagan Revolution being maintained by both parties have pretty much proven that neoliberal Democratic policies won’t be enough to either stop Trump’s full-on push to convert America into a fascist state, nor will they address the very real problems most Americans are experiencing today when it comes to being able to afford everything from rent to groceries to healthcare.

Today’s generation of progressive Democrats, therefore, are taking a page from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and proposing genuinely big solutions to the massive problems that Democratic neoliberalism and Republican neofascism have produced.

And they’re winning!

This week’s primary results are just the latest indication that a progressive renaissance on par with the New Deal, or at least the Great Society, may be close to our doorstep.

While media pundits seem baffled, it’s obvious to most of the rest of us that this is being driven by our middle class collapsing from two-thirds of us when Reagan took office in 1981 to around 41 percent of us today (and now it takes two paychecks to get there, whereas a family could be safe with a single wage-earner in 1981).

Fully 60% of Americans now live paycheck-to-paycheck with virtually no savings, numbers we haven’t seen since the 1930s.

— Five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have given billionaires and massive corporations virtual control over our elections as their corrupt Citizens United decision has allowed literally billions in dark money to flood every cycle.

— Our privatized, profitized healthcare system, including the Medicare Advantage Scam, accounts (according to a recent study by Yale) for over 114,000 unnecessary American deaths every year and untold misery and loss of worker productivity.

— While racist Republicans complain that we don’t have enough white babies, young people with college debt can’t afford to buy a house, marry, raise a family, or even start a small business.

— Meanwhile, the top 1% own more wealth than the bottom 93% and one Nazi-saluting trillionaire racist owns more wealth than the entire bottom 50% of Americans, 174 million people.

Our system has been rigged by 45 years of Reagan’s and Clinton’s neoliberalism, as I document in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and The Hidden History of the American Dream, and a clear majority of Americans have finally figured it out.

Inequality has never, ever before been this bad in America, going all the way back to the 1700s. So, no surprise, Democrats who offer real solutions are winning primaries across the country and are poised to make huge electoral gains this fall, unless Trump and his shock troops succeed in pulling off the coup they’re clearly trying to make happen.

While corporate Democrats and Republicans decry “radical,” “far left” and “democratic socialist” candidates (and a desperate Trump is calling them “communists”), opinion polling is explaining the election outcomes that are befuddling op-ed columnists and “middle of the road” candidates.

— American voters tell pollsters they believe it’s obscene that one man (Musk) could have spent $290 million to make Trump president and that roughly one out of every six dollars spent in the 2024 election ($2.6 billion) came from just 100 billionaire families, virtually all of it funding GOP candidates. They want Citizens United overturned and a return to strict campaign finance limits.

— They want healthcare that everybody has access to and everybody can afford, and the only option on the table for that is what most other advanced democracies in the world have: Medicare for All or its equivalent. Fully 90% of Democrats and 66% of all Americans want it, and want it now. We also need to take on drug prices, a battle that pharma-funded corporate Democrats and Republicans have fought against for decades.

The solution to the high prices for everything isn’t just breaking up monopolies to bring back competition and small businesses (although that’s important); it also requires people to earn enough to live.

Only 6% of the private workforce has a union representing them (it was a third of us before Reagan and the GOP declared war on unions in 1981) and the minimum wage FDR gave us as part of his New Deal is stuck at $7.25/hour when if it’d been inflation adjusted since the 1960s it’d be well over $15.

A large part of the challenge average Americans face is because of the so-called K-shaped economy; the top is wide with a handful of billionaires controlling over half our wealth and the bottom is wide because of the impoverishment of our once-thriving middle class.

The answer here is simple: return to the corporate and personal income tax rates from 1933-1981 that built the middle class and prevented the emergence of American oligarchs.

Meanwhile, climate change is literally killing us and it’s beyond obscene that Trump and his Republican toadies lie about it with a straight face just to keep the fossil fuel industry money flowing into their pockets.

Trump’s war on green energy is crippling our ability to grow industry, adding to home electric bills, and jacking up emissions, all because the industry’s fatcats took his deal and gave him millions to get elected.

Foreign wars haven’t helped u…

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe

This Daily Read is just for our subscribers (along with the special Saturday Report, the Sunday Book Excerpt, the ability to comment on posts, reply in email directly to Thom, and the monthly Ask Thom Anything zoom meeting). For the publicly-available 7-day-a-week 1-hour podcast of my radio show, check your favorite podcast application for “Hartmann Report” or click here:

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hartmannreport.com/subscribe