Author: Thom Hartmann

Beyond Minority Rule: How the quest to obtain unchallenged power is killing America

Minority rule is killing America. This is most obvious in our Senate and Supreme Court, although it is also hurt the credibility of the presidency and is damaging many of our states. It is happening because of two issues dating back to the founding of our republic, which brought us the Electoral College and unequal representation in the US Senate. First, here’s how the Electoral College came about, stripped of all the mythology (hint: it mostly had to do with avoiding somebody like Donald Trump ending up in the White House): After the Revolutionary War, the nation was abuzz...

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Lost to Hate: It is time to stop accommodating racist White fanatics stuck in a past that will not be revived

It is time to stop normalizing and accommodating the White Supremacists among us. They may be a third of America, but they are the lost third, longing for return to a time we will never revisit. Instead of looking forward, they are stuck to a past that will never be revived, no matter how many elections they rig or people they terrorize or kill. The America I was born into and grew up in as a kid was a very different place from today. In the 1950s the country was firmly under the control of straight white men: Blacks –...

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Democracy under threat: When disasters bring instability and those ready to exploit the situation

Putin’s attack on Ukraine is producing a series of crises which are going to, in all probability, bring a period of great pain and instability to the world and to America in the near future. Republicans are already working to exploit it. By the election this fall much of the unity that exists because of today’s Ukraine passion will be exhausted, but the crisis it’s produced will just be beginning. And, just as Putin probably now hopes, it’ll stretch some democracies to the breaking point. Americans think we have stood down Putin, but the forces he represents — strongman...

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A fascination with falsehoods: Republicans are 400% more likely to be banned from Twitter than Democrats

Over on Fox “News,” a recent segment with Tucker Carlson suggested that vaccines are more dangerous than getting COVID. Why do conservatives fall for this kind of nonsense? Multiple recent studies show that Republicans are as much as 8.5 times more likely to both believe and share fake or false “news” with others than are Democrats. The phenomenon is obvious, actually: while as many as half of Republicans believe the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump, there is no similarly disprovable “big lie” embraced by Democrats. And it is not limited to things like elections that are overtly political:...

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The Sabotage of America: Putin would have invaded Ukraine sooner had Trump’s January 6 coup succeeded

Trump unleashed what has become a million U.S. COVID deaths, a war in Ukraine, and an attempted coup against the United States, all while coarsening our politics and ratcheting up hate. And now racist, rightwing politicians who disdain democracy are imitating him all across the nation. What is the impact of all this on America and Americans, and when will he be held to account? Five years ago, Donald Trump broke the law and outed an Israeli spy who’d embedded himself into ISIS. Trump gave the code-word-classified-Top-Secret intelligence to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, when he and Russian Ambassador...

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A Failed Experiment: Cashing in on the collapse of Neoliberalism and a race to embrace authoritarianism

A bit over 40 years ago the UK and the United States, followed within a few years by most of the rest of western Europe, embarked on a radical experiment in governance and economics. “Neoliberalism” was the word invented by a small group of utopian economists at a 1938 meeting in France, and it was turned into a movement at a 1947 meeting in Mont Pelerin, Switzerland. At that time the world had been shaken by the rise of Communism in the Soviet Union (and China) and the disaster Fascism brought to Germany and then all of Europe. The...

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