Author: Thom Hartmann

Nature and economics share some fascinating patterns. One of which explains why Donald Trump became president again, and how the morbidly rich have appropriated over $50 trillion from working-class people since the 1980s. Scientists use something called the Lorka-Volterra equations to explain how predators and prey interact in the wild. These equations show us that animal populations rise and fall in predictable cycles — when there are lots of rabbits, fox populations grow, but as foxes eat more rabbits, the rabbit population shrinks, which then causes fox numbers to drop, allowing rabbits to multiply again. Incredibly, this back-and-forth pattern...

Donald Trump is preparing to crash the American economy. He intends to do it by tearing up vital parts of our American government. He may even hire Elon Musk to pull it off. And from his point of view, this is not going to be a bad thing. The farther the economy crashes, the greater the buying opportunity for billionaires. It all has to do with something called the administrative state. While it is not sexy or even particularly interesting to the average American voter, having a strong administrative state is essential to a high-functioning economy. A strong administrative...

The recent assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, the health insurance company with, reportedly, the highest rate of claims rejections and thus dead, wounded, and furious customers and their relations, gives us a perfect window to understand the stupidity and danger of the Musk/Trump/Ramaswamy strategy of “cutting government” to “make it more efficient, run it like a corporation.” Consider health care, which in almost every other developed country in the world is legally part of the commons — the infrastructure of the nation, like our roads, public schools, parks, police, military, libraries, and fire departments — owned by the...

Russia unleashed one of its most violent missile attacks against Ukraine recently. The United States and at least one other European country have given President Zelenskyy permission to use long-range missiles to attack within Russia. Putin has also brought in North Korean troops, internationalizing the incident as if he wants to turn it into World War III. Europe and the United States both know they must stand against this. And on November 20, Putin presumably launched an ICBM against Ukraine. Ever since the days of the Cold War, the United States and Russia have always notified each other of...

Alexander Hamilton thought he and the others who wrote the Constitution had it all figured out. He and his colleagues never imagined that a group of billionaires would spend 43 years and billions of dollars to seize the U.S. Supreme Court, which would then legalize political bribery. They never conceived of a foreign billionaire family coming to American and building a nationwide media ecosystem that was capable of convincing Americans that up was down, wrong was right, and a convicted fraudster and rapist would be a noble president. They would have laughed at you if you told them that...