Author: Thom Hartmann

Draining our economic blood: Why America needs to expand Medicare to dislodge the healthcare parasites

Parasites attach themselves to your body and suck your blood to feed themselves. Most, like ticks and mosquitos, while they may provide food for birds, bats and other animals, seem to provide no direct benefit at all to humans. That “no benefit” equation goes double for the latest parasites who have attached themselves to the backs of Americans and are rapidly draining us of our economic blood: health insurance companies. There is quite literally no reason for these corporations to exist, at least when it comes to providing for the health needs of 99 percent of Americans. Virtually every...

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How Confederacy-era superstitions threaten the multiracial Democracy that Ulysses Grant fought for

Prior to 1965, the only American president to have both promoted and presided over a multiracial democracy was Ulysses Grant, the former general in Lincoln’s army who became president when impeached Southern slaveowner Andrew Johnson’s term expired on March 4, 1869. Grant (and Johnson, but grudgingly) saw freed African Americans not only voting but taking political office by the hundreds. It lasted until the day Grant left office, when the Tilden/Hayes election “compromise” of 1876 ended the period known as Radical Reconstruction the following year. During this brief time, more than 600 African Americans were elected to state legislatures...

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A fatal partisan strategy: Letting Americans die to win elections

“A surprising amount of death will occur soon…” But why, when the deadly Delta variant is sweeping the world, are Republicans and their media warning people not to get vaccinated?” – Dr. Jonathan Reiner, CNN Medical Analyst There is always a reason. People don’t do things — particularly things involving a lot of effort and a need for consistency — without a reason. It just doesn’t happen. No matter how bizarre, twisted or dysfunctional the reason may be, there’s always a reason. Dr. Anthony Fauci told Jake Tapper on CNN, “I don’t have a really good reason why this...

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Nation Building: Why America must renovate the country after decades of decline under Reaganomics

America needs to define a consistent, honest and public position on foreign aid and foreign interventions. If we fail to do so, we will continue to produce disasters that have long-term consequences not only for the countries with whom we’ve interfered but also here in the United States. Modern U.S. “foreign aid” policy really began in a big way after World War II with the Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild Europe after the war. Germany was a huge recipient of that aid and it helped turn that nation from a renegade (although defeated) fascist empire into a modern liberal...

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American Greed: How governmental corruption has spread like a cancer to our social institutions

Every aspect of American life has been corrupted by greed. One of the purposes of government is to protect both individuals and society from such corruption, and that means protecting people and institutions from greedy predators. In that simple task, over the past 40 years since America embraced Reaganomics and Reaganism, our government has failed. We once enforced laws that protected small businesses from greedy oligarchs who knew that crushing or buying out competitors and creating monopolies was a fast, although societally destructive, way of getting rich. We saw how John Rockefeller brutally crushed thousands of small businesses on...

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The 40-year con of trickle-down Reaganomics: Why Republican’s toxic class warfare only spreads poverty

America has to reinvent our understanding of economics after 40 years of living under a tax-cutting, austerity-imposing, Republican-promoted trickle-down Reaganomics scam and return to a Keynesian system that still works in those countries like Norway, New Zealand or Denmark that never adopted “austerity.” The core idea of Reaganomics is that if we give huge tax cuts and multi-billion-dollar subsidies to billionaires and giant corporations, that will “incentivize” these “job creators” to expand the economy and raise prosperity all around for everybody. In fact, all those giant corporations and billionaires have done is put all that cash in their money...

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