Author: Thom Hartmann

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...

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...

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...

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...

“Be Afraid of Black People” is the GOP’s main message to white voters these days, leveraged by lies about an obscure academic pursuit sometimes called Critical Race Theory (CRT). Many white voters, it turns out, are listening. The Washington Post reported recently that: “The term ‘critical race theory’ was mentioned just 132 times on Fox News shows in [all of] 2020. In 2021, it has been mentioned 1,860 times, according to a tally using the media monitoring service Critical Mention.” Daily Beast Contributing Editor Justin Baragona noted that on just that one single day of Tuesday, July 6, Fox “News” had...