Author: Thom Hartmann

Many Americans have already watched the original and brilliant film on Netflix, “Don’t Look Up!” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, written and produced by Adam McKay and David Sirota. It is being lauded as a metaphor for how we’re dealing with climate change in the face of petrobillionaire- and corporate-funded disinformation campaigns, but it’s so much more than that: “Conservatives” on the Supreme Court don’t want Americans to look up at how they legalized political bribery with their 1970s Buckley and Bellotti and 2010 Citizens United decisions that have turned politicians into shills for the same billionaires and...

“Conservative” columnists in America are bemoaning how coarse, violent, and Third-World-ish the United States has become in the past 40 years. David Brooks, for example, comes right out and says “America is falling apart at the seams.” In that, he is largely quoting data from Matt Iglesias’ substack newsletter Slow Boring, where he wrote: “You’re seeing more killing, which is a subset of the increase in shooting, which in turn is a subset of the large increase in gun-carrying. But traffic deaths are also up. Unruly passenger incidents on airplanes have surged. Schools report more discipline and student safety...

Our vote is the most important part of the American commons. The commons are those realms that we all own and jointly administer through our government. They include our air and water; our roads and skyways; the frequency spectrum we use for communication, radio, and television; our public school system; our military, police, and fire departments; the agencies we use to ensure the safety and quality of our food and medications; the systems and laws that keep people playing the game of business within legal boundaries; our jails and prisons; our oceans and public lands; and our social safety...

The Founders of this nation, and the Framers who wrote our Constitution, created as Ben Franklin famously said a constitutional republic: a government “deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed” through citizens’ right to vote. They referred to this as “republicanism” because it was based on the Greek and Roman republics (then thousands of years in the past but still remembered and idealized), and when put into law they called it “a Republican Form of Government.” Today that form of government in crisis in America, as that core right to vote that defines republicanism is under...