Author: Thom Hartmann

The man who coined the term “virtual reality” and helped create Web 2.0, Jaron Lanier, recently told a said that there is an aspect to the internet that could endanger the literal survival of humanity as a species. It is an amazing story, and I believe he is 100% right. Humans are fragile creatures. We don’t have fangs or claws to protect ourselves from other animals that might want to eat us. We don’t have fur or a pelt to protect us from the elements. What we do have, however, that has allowed us to conquer the planet and...

The European Parliament and the U.S. Supreme Court are both ensnarled in major corruption scandals. Each was caused by powerful politicians having no independent legal check on their own behavior. And on “this side of the pond” Congress needs to act as soon as possible. While news coverage of the EU here in the United States is mostly confined to the rarefied pages of financial and diplomatic publications and “international news” in major papers, the European Parliament is in the midst of a major, multinational bribery scandal. Numerous members are accused of taking hundreds of thousands of Euros in cash as...

When will Republican voters figure out how badly they are getting screwed by Republican politicians? Desperate workers struggle with soaring rents (courtesy of Republican-donor hedge funds);  lack of healthcare (12 GOP-controlled states still refuse to expand Medicaid for under-$15,000/year workers) is literally killing Americans; wages have flatlined since Reagan declared war on workers in 1981 while the merely rich have become the morbidly rich; Americans pay 10 times as much as Canadians for some drugs because Republicans block any effort to bring competition to that marketplace; at the same time Trump and his GOP buddies in the House and Senate borrowed $1.7 trillion to fund a tax giveaway to...

Amazingly, it is the second anniversary of January 6th and we are still talking about an ongoing attempt to sabotage the American government. I have argued that the Freedom Caucus members, and their handful of compatriots voting against Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the House, may have been doing so because the rightwing billionaires who back them want to roll back FDR’s “big government” in America. Now comes investigative journalist Dave Troy noting that America’s rightwing billionaires are not the only ones who want the U.S. government to fail. So does Vladimir Putin. And most of those voting against McCarthy not only appear...