Author: Thom Hartmann

The GOP’s War on Women: Using the justice system to roll back the clock on legal rights

In about six months, women in thirty Republican-controlled states will probably lose their right to get an abortion. The Supreme Court and the Constitution don’t “grant” or “give” Americans rights: they recognize rights and define the extent to which they can be infringed upon by our government, theoretically balancing private rights against the public good. That said, the Court can take away rights, although throughout their 240+ year history they have only done it in a big way once: in 1896 with their Plessy v Ferguson decision that, until they reversed it in 1954 in Brown v Board, took away...

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Journalism vs. Infotainment: News is too vital for democracy to be left in the hands of corporations

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” — Thomas Jefferson It could have been a coincidence and nothing more. On December 1, 2003 Louise and I were watching the Chris Matthews Show on MSNBC; Chris was interviewing Vermont Governor Howard Dean, who’d recently appeared on the front cover of Time magazine as the front-runner...

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Reaching zero emissions: Local energy self-sufficiency could turn every home into a power plant

Electric vehicle (EV) sales are booming. EV owners are saving a ton of money on their daily commutes, as much as half the cost of gasoline, by just plugging into their homes every night to recharge. But what if that home’s electricity wasn’t generated by a faraway dam or power plant, but from each car owner’s own home’s roof? The savings and convenience would be revolutionary. And there is a way to get there, as the technology is already mature and in use in other countries like Germany: we simply shift from a central-power-plant system to a locally-generated-rooftop-system where...

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A Thriving Southern Strategy: Why the public fails to admit Republican “policy” is naked White Supremacy

For Democrats, there are tons of issues on the ballot. Climate change, free college, expanding Medicare, family leave after giving birth, Pre-K education, middle-class tax cut, child tax credit, the minimum wage, the right to unionize, and literally dozens of other less high-profile ways to expand democracy and rebuild our middle class after 40 years of assault by neoliberal Reaganomics. For Republicans there is really only one issue: race. Or, more specifically, maintaining the dominance of white people over every other racial group in America, and the survival of political and economic white supremacy. Forty years ago, Republicans pretended...

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How a “safety net” prevents personal disasters while “rights of citizenship” is a foundation for society

Senator Joe Manchin, echoing the rightwing billionaire’s think-tanks’ PR and every Republican in Congress, recently said his objection to free college for students and eyeglasses for seniors was that such things created an “entitlement society,” a slur that means “a nation of welfare recipients.” In that, he displays a fundamental ignorance about what governments do and how societies work, as well as the difference between what we usually call the “social safety net” and things people should expect simply as a “right of citizenship” in a first-world country. He also misunderstands the difference between expenses and investments. A “social...

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A Cancer on Democracy: How the Supreme Court poisoned America with its Citizens United decision

If President Biden’s Build Back Better plan goes down in flames, you can blame the U.S. Supreme Court. Their Citizens United decision, in fact, is destroying both American politics and the planet. Case in point: Oil industry executives testified before Congress this week, suffering a barrage of questions, including particularly intense ones from Reps. Ro Khanna, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Katie Porter. The CEOs exhibited the same sort of arrogant insolence Mark Zuckerberg displayed in July of last year when he was hauled before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. It was, basically, a smug,...

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