"My father never got to tell us what he wanted, and we never really knew how to ask"

 

My father died in stages, the way most people do, and the four of us boys — me and my three brothers, our wives beside us — didn’t know what we were watching. 

He’d had a stroke and couldn’t speak or meaningfully move for the week or so before he died; we didn’t know what he was feeling. We didn’t know what to say, or whether to say anything at all, whether to hold his hand or give him space, whether the grimace on his face was pain or something we were misreading entirely.       

We didn’t know why he’d suddenly seemed so alert for a day, and we didn’t know what it meant when that passed. We were well-educated, reasonably worldly adults with decades of life experience between us, and we stood around that bed like children who’d wandered into a room where the grownups were speaking a language none of us had ever been taught.              

I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. Not with guilt, exactly, though some of that is in there too. Mostly I’ve thought about it as a kind of cultural failure; a thing our society stopped teaching somewhere along the way and never bothered to replace.   

For most of human history, people died at home, surrounded by family and neighbors who’d seen it before, who knew the signs, who understood the arc of it. Death was something a community witnessed together and held together.

Then we moved it into hospitals, handed it over to professionals, and quietly lost the knowledge that ordinary people once carried as a matter of course. Now we’re shocked, disoriented, and grief-stricken in ways that might be at least partly unnecessary, if only someone had thought to tell us what was coming and what it meant.

That’s why a piece published this month in the Washington Post was so meaningful to me. Written by Ashley Abramson, it’s about death doulas, a profession that barely existed twenty years ago and is now growing fast enough that the International End-of-Life Doula Association has trained nearly 6,500 doulas worldwide.

A death doula is a non-medical companion who provides emotional, spiritual, and practical support to people who are dying, and to the families around them. As Kristen Patterson, a death doula and end-of-life planner in Northern Virginia, puts it, a death doula is “a calm, compassionate presence who can be there for dying people and their loved ones in their final moments.”

They can read aloud, play music, advocate with medical providers, help navigate paperwork and final arrangements, and simply stay present in ways that hospice nurses — stretched thin and focused on clinical care — often can’t. People don’t always realize that hospice care isn’t 24/7, Patterson notes; it certainly wasn’t in our case (Dad died at home). A death doula can be there as much as the family needs.

But what I found most valuable in Abramson’s piece wasn’t the description of the role itself. It was the specific things that death doulas, from their long experience at bedsides, have learned about the dying process that most families simply don’t know going in. This is the kind of knowledge that can transform a terrifying experience into something that still holds space for love and even peace.

The first thing the doulas want you to know is that dying can be peaceful. Diane Button, a death doula in Northern California and the author of What Matters Most: Lessons the Dying Teach Us About Living, puts it simply: “Just like the body knows how to be born, it knows how to die.”

For people who’ve been living for months or years in bodies racked by illness, the transition can actually come as a relief. Jill Schock, founder of Death Doula LA, told the Post that many people are relaxed at the end, because dying feels better than continuing to live in a body that’s been suffering. That’s not what most of us picture when we imagine death, but it’s what people who sit with the dying actually see. And Button adds that the most common regrets she witnesses aren’t about things left undone — vacations not taken, money not earned — but about things left unsaid. If you can get to a place of peace with your relationships before that time comes, the dying itself tends to go more gently.

The second thing the doulas want you to understand is that the dying person can still participate in shaping that experience. Even in a hospital room, you can fill the space with what matters: favorite music, beloved objects, the people and even the pets you love.

Erica Reid Gerdes, founder of Waxwing Journeys in Chicago, describes a client whose husband found real comfort in being able to play music from his wife’s favorite musical and read her favorite books to her in those final days. She was unresponsive by then, but as Reid Gerdes says, “We knew she could still hear.” That’s not a small thing. That’s everything.

Third: death doesn’t need to be painful. Many of us carry images of painful deaths we witnessed in earlier generations, but modern hospice care is specifically designed to manage symptoms including pain.

Part of a doula’s job is to make sure the dying person has adequate medication and isn’t suffering unnecessarily. And medication does something else, too — it can calm what’s called terminal agitation, something my family saw with Dad and had absolutely no framework for understanding. When someone is actively dying, the shutting down of organs can affect brain function in ways that cause the person to pick at their clothing, claw at their bedsheets, or seem frightened and restless.

Seeing that in someone you love is alarming, even traumatic, if nobody has told you it’s a known and manageable part of the process. It has a name. It can be treated. You’re not watching your father suffer some unique and inexplicable torment: you’re watching something that happens, that doulas and hospice nurses have seen many times, and that medication can ease.    

Fourth, and this one is critically important: it’s normal, even expected, for a dying person to stop eating and drinking near the end. The body simply needs less energy. Swallowing becomes too taxing. The Post article makes the point explicitly — you don’t need to urge someone who’s actively dying to eat or drink. It doesn’t deprive them the way it would deprive a healthy person. Families often feel guilty about this, or frightened by it, and push food and water when the body is trying to do what it knows to do. A doula can gently explain that letting go of that particular effort is itself an act of love.

And fifth — this is the one I keep returning to when I think about those last days with my father — there’s a phenomenon called terminal lucidity, or an end-of-life rally. In the days just before death, many dying people experience a sudden surge of energy and clarity. After days of not talking much or eating, they perk up. They seem like themselves again. Families often mistake this for improvement, for a turn in the right direction, and the hope it kindles makes what follows all the more devastating. What doulas know, from having witnessed it over and over, is that this rally is often the body’s final gathering before it lets go. It isn’t a sign of recovery. It can be a gift — a last real conversation, a last moment of connection — if you know how to receive it as such rather than as cause for false hope.

I wish someone had told us all of this before we walked into that room. I wish someone had sat us down and said: here’s what’s happening, here’s what to watch for, here’s what it means, here’s how you can be present for him rather than just frightened beside him.

That’s what a death doula does. That’s the knowledge that used to live inside communities and families and has largely been lost, and that a growing number of remarkable people are now working to restore.

INELDA and the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance both maintain directories where you can find certified doulas in your area. Death doulas are generally not covered by insurance, which is a policy failure worth fighting about separately, but the field is having conversations about Medicare reimbursement and pro bono work for those who can’t pay. If the financial barrier is real for you, ask; many doulas offer sliding scales or even volunteer their time.     

But even if you’re nowhere near this moment in your own life, I’d urge you to read Abramson’s piece in the Post, and to have the conversation with the people you love before it becomes urgent. Talk about what you’d want. Ask what they’d want. Write it down. The conversation itself is an act of love, and it costs nothing except the willingness to be honest about the one thing none of us can avoid.

My father never got to tell us what he wanted, and we never really knew how to ask. That’s a quiet regret I carry. You don’t have to carry the same one.

---

If this piece meant something to you, please share it with someone who might need it: a sibling, a grown child, a friend whose parent is aging. And if you’ve had experience with a death doula, or wish you had, I’d love to hear your story in the comments. -Thom Hartmann

    

Musk, GOP's Newest Scam, Payouts to Trump's Loyalists, ICE, Citizen's United Alert, Bob Kennedy

 

— Forty-five years of Reaganomics finally rolled off the assembly line this week with its crowning achievement: the world’s first trillionaire. When SpaceX shares hit the public markets in the largest IPO in human history, Elon Musk’s net worth sailed past one thousand billion dollars, a figure with so many zeroes you need a calculator to count them and a heart of solid granite to defend them. Back in 1981, Reagan promised that if we just showered the wealthy with tax cuts and stopped enforcing antitrust laws, the blessings would trickle down onto the rest of us. 

Forty-five years later, the trickle has arrived: one man now commands more money than most countries while the people who actually build his rockets and bolt together his cars are still scrapping for a living wage and desperately begging for a union. Within hours, calls went up for an aggressive wealth tax, with one campaigner noting that a fortune this size “requires human exploitation, wage theft, wage suppression” as well as a tax code lovingly written by and for the man it enriches. The critics are right that trillionaires shouldn’t exist, and not out of envy: no human being earns a trillion dollars, they extract it, a dime at a time, from everyone standing below them. Musk didn’t break the system to get here. The system performed flawlessly, exactly as Reagan and the GOP’s billionaires designed it. The only question left is whether we keep calling this capitalism or finally admit it’s a just the 21st century version of a feudal estate with modern branding.

— The Trump administration has a bold new idea for Americans who can’t afford their medical bills: borrow the money from the very insurance company that’s already refusing to pay them. Under a White House proposal floated this week, cash-strapped patients would take out loans from their health insurers to cover the bills those same insurers helped inflate. It’s a scheme one Democratic congresswoman warned could “ruin people’s finances” while handing insurers a shiny new incentive to deny your care and then collect a fortune in interest on your desperation. I suppose we should admire the elegance of the GOP’s newest scam: the massive Republican donors win when you get sick, win again when you borrow, and win a third time when you default and they get a court to take away your house to repay your loan. That’s not a healthcare system that any other country in the world would recognize; it’s a payday-loan window with a stethoscope hanging in it. 

And before anyone wrings their hands about how we “simply can’t afford” something humane like Medicare for All, note that the Republican increase in Pentagon spending this year alone dwarfs the entire projected Social Security shortfall for 2034, which is the very “crisis” they keep invoking to justify gutting your retirement. We have bottomless money for missiles and putting Trump‘s name on everything, but not a nickel for Grandma’s knee replacement, and somehow the corporate media never quite finds the column inches to mention it. Forty-five years after Reagan taught us that government was the problem, we’ve finally built a GOP-run government that fulfills his claim.

— It turns out the “Advantage” in Medicare Advantage belongs entirely to the insurance companies. A pair of reports from the HHS inspector general released this week found that the nation’s largest Medicare Advantage plans — UnitedHealthcare, CVS Health, and Humana — rejected prior-authorization requests for long-term and rehabilitative care at rates that, in some cases, sailed past 70 percent. Across the industry, denial rates for long-term care ran anywhere from 8 percent up to a jaw-dropping 80 percent, a spread the inspector general’s office found genuinely alarming, and one University of Pittsburgh health-policy professor called “quite staggering.” Here’s the detail that most clearly shows what a scam this is: when patients actually appealed, the plans reversed their own denials a remarkable 95 percent of the time, meaning that first “no” was wrong almost every single time anyone bothered to take the (considerable) time and effort necessary to challenge it. 

Medicare Advantage plans collect a flat fee per patient from our government and then pocket whatever they don’t spend on your stroke recovery or your shattered hip, which means saying “no” to your care is, quite literally, how they enrich their shareholders and pay their senior executives with their multi-million-dollar-a-year salaries. Nearly 20 million Americans are enrolled with just these three companies, most blissfully unaware that their “coverage” is engineered to refuse first and pay later, if ever. For-profit insurers, the report found, deny more than nonprofits, because of course they do. And all of them deny more than real Medicare, which doesn’t even do pre-clearance so it never denies anybody. This is what you get when you hand Wall Street the keys to Grandma’s hospital room: the corporation always wins, and the patient always loses.

— A federal judge just slammed the brakes — again — on Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund for his violent, murderous cult members. This week, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema extended her block on the grandly titled “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a $1.8 billion pile of your money that Trump’s Justice Department invented to compensate “victims of weaponization,” a category that conveniently sweeps in the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, smeared shit on the walls, and killed four cops while trying to “hang Mike Pence.” 

The whole thing sprang from Trump’s preposterous $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his own tax returns (total tax bill $750), and even congressional Republicans gagged hard enough to force acting Attorney General (and Trump criminal defense lawyer) Todd Blanche to declare “we’re not moving forward with the fund, period.” But hold the champagne. As Reuters reports, Trump’s allies already have a Plan B teed up: funneling payouts to loyalists through the 1946 Federal Tort Claims Act, which lets aggrieved insurrectionists file claims and lawsuits against the government and quietly settle out of court. “At my level, the fund is dead,” shrugged one senior DOJ official, all while leaving the back door propped wide open for the same money to stroll out a different exit. Hundreds of January 6th defendants have already filed their claims. With the Trump Crime Family and their shock troops, the grift doesn’t die; it just files an amended complaint.

— Nothing says “law and order” quite like masked federal agents tackling a man to the pavement at his kid’s preschool graduation while toddlers' scream. That is precisely what unfolded in Baltimore this week, where ICE agents arrested two parents in the parking lot of Commodore John Rodgers Elementary School during a graduation ceremony as witnesses filmed and children wailed. The parents had their kids in the back seat when they were “ripped from the car,” according to Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson, and teachers rushed the children indoors to spare them the spectacle. 

A parent recording the scene can be heard shouting that the agents were on school property, a fact that registered not at all with these masked, murderous thugs who increasingly treat the Constitution as if it were merely a polite suggestion. Baltimore had passed an emergency ordinance barely a month ago barring federal agents from arrests at “sensitive locations” like schools; doing their best imitation of Putin’s secret police, ICE shredded it like confetti while spitting on the graves of the authors of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Mayor Brandon Scott condemned the raid as a “disturbing incident” and made plain this kind of enforcement isn’t welcome in his city, while Governor Wes Moore noted that terrorizing children at their own schools makes precisely no one safer. But safety was never the point for these fascists. The point is the fear: the theater of masked, unidentified, armed, uniformed men snatching parents in front of weeping four-year-olds and broadcasting it as a warning to every family in America. This is what a fascist secret police force looks like in its toddler-traumatizing phase.

— Citizens United Alert! Maine’s Susan Collins — the senator who has elevated the furrowed brow of “deep concern” into performance art all while reliably voting however her biggest donors prefer — is mounting her reelection bid with the backing of nearly 100 billionaires. Her campaign has become an oligarchs’ support group project! Her opponent, Graham Platner, points out that his own operation runs on an average donation of $26 from actual human beings, even as corporate dark money floods into Maine to keep Collins right where the donor class wants her. 

This is the exact world five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court conjured when they ruled 5:4 in Citizens United that money is speech and corporations are people: sixteen years on, a hundred billionaires can simply buy a senator and call the receipt “democracy.” Concerned yet, Susan?

— Strange Alert! Our nation’s heroin addict health secretary, Bob Kennedy, is now actively cheering on clinics that inject autistic children — some as young as 18 months — with umbilical-cord stem cells in unapproved, unproven “treatments” that can run $20,000 a pop, occasionally after sedating the toddler with ketamine first. Desperate parents are promised near-miracles; what the FDA actually documented back in 2021 were reports of “blindness, tumor formation, infections” and worse. 

In sixteen months on the job, Kennedy has fired thousands of health officials, defunded $31 million in autism research, and waged open war on childhood vaccines, all while rolling out the welcome mat for the snake-oil salesmen he apparently regards as colleagues. The quack is coming from inside the house.

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Trump's Next Big Lie

 

The war Donald Trump started with Iran in February is now collapsing, slowly and predictably, into the same theater of fraud he’s run his entire life. So get ready for the next Big Lie: it’s coming as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning.

Three months in, his bombing campaign has done less damage than he claims, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, gas is pushing five bucks a gallon, his own Pentagon admits Iran’s nuclear program was only set back a few years rather than “completely obliterated,” and the negotiations he’s been bragging about in Islamabad are, by Iran’s own foreign ministry’s careful phrasing, simultaneously “very far and very close” to a deal.

Translation: there is no deal and it’s unlikely there will be one anytime soon, at least on terms Trump can honestly defend. And so, just as Wall Street learned to call his serial lies, bluffs, and retreats on tariffs the “TACO trade” — Trump Always Chickens Out — we’re about to watch the wartime version of the same play.

He’ll declare “Total Victory” (complete with the caps), the billionaire-owned right-wing media will trumpet it as the greatest foreign policy triumph since Yalta, and the rest of us will be expected to swallow this newest Big Lie and just shut up about it.

But a brutal reality is still there, even if the White House won’t acknowledge it. Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that Obama signed in 2015, Iran shipped 98 percent of its enriched uranium out of the country, capped enrichment at 3.67 percent (what was needed for their one nuclear power plant), dismantled thousands of its most advanced centrifuges, redesigned the Arak reactor so it couldn’t produce weapons-grade plutonium, and accepted IAEA cameras and inspectors at every nuclear facility on its soil.

The deal pushed Iran’s breakout time back hard and was verified by international inspectors who reported to the world every ninety days. Trump stupidly tore it up in 2018 because Black President “Barack Hussein Obama” had negotiated it, and within three years Iran was enriching to 20 percent and barring inspectors.

Then Trump bombed the sites he himself had freed Iran to build, and now he’s trying to negotiate his way back to something resembling what Obama already had, except he doesn’t have the leverage Obama had, because he’s shown the world he’d rather bomb than talk and he’s already used up so many of our munitions that it’s become a crisis for the Pentagon.

As a result, what he’ll come up with, if he comes up with anything, will be a fraction of the JCPOA dressed up in red, white, and blue bunting and sold to the rubes as a miracle produced by a “true genius.” Just ask any of his Cabinet members, who spend one in every six sentences during their “Apprentice” TV meetings slobbering over how wonderful, strong, and manly Trump is.

On February 29, 2020, in Doha, Trump’s envoy Zalmay Khalilzad signed a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban that excluded the elected Afghan government entirely, freed 5,000 violent Taliban fighters from prison, and set a hard deadline of May 1, 2021, for full American withdrawal.

If Hillary Clinton has put together such as surrender on the Taliban’s terms, we would’ve had hearings for a decade, but the GOP pretended it wasn’t happening. Biden inherited that contract, extended the deadline by a few months, and got blamed for the wreckage Trump had wired to explode.

The pattern’s identical to what we’re watching now with Iran: Trump makes a catastrophic decision, walks away, and either he or his Fox “News” chorus blames the cleanup crew. This time, since Trump’s in the White House instead of Biden, my bet is he’ll find a way to blame Whiskey Pete or maybe his Joint Chiefs.

Now layer NATO on top. While the Iran war drags on and the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, Trump’s been quietly gutting the most successful peacekeeping military alliance in human history. He’s already pulled 5,000 troops out of Germany and is threatening deeper cuts in Spain and Italy.

Most recently, his envoy Alexander Velez-Green told NATO allies behind closed doors that the U.S. will slash its fighter jet commitment to the alliance by a third, withdraw destroyers from NATO’s naval pool, and pull every single American submarine out of European waters. This is a major disaster for the alliance, as these American military assets are irreplaceable over the short term.

The single biggest beneficiary of every one of these moves, without exception, is Vladimir Putin. The Butcher of Moscow now watches the alliance built to contain him hollowed out by an American president whose family business was, according to investigative journalism by Craig Unger, kept solvent through the 1980s and 1990s by what amounted to billions in today’s dollars from Russian organized crime laundering money through Trump real estate after Donald had bankrupted himself repeatedly.

Now he’s bankrupting the rest of us, taking the nation down with him, with economists around the world predicting a severe recession or even a second Republican Great Depression. America is the newest version of Trump University, Trump Steaks, and the Trump Casinos.

We don’t need to draw a complicated chart to see what’s happening, this treason in plain sight, and neither do the leaders of the world’s other countries. Look at the foreign policy moves and ask one question: “Who benefits?”

— An Iran war that goes nowhere and leaves Tehran’s mullahs in charge? Russia and China both win, because the U.S. is bogged down and gas prices spike.
— This insane NATO drawdown? Putin wins, openly and obviously.
— Cruelly abandoning Ukraine? Putin.
— Trashing USAID and creating the conditions for the Ebola outbreak now spreading through East Africa? China expands its influence into the void.
— Killing the Voice of America and shuttering Radio Free Europe? Putin and Xi both throw parties.

Meanwhile the Trump family is taking a $400 million 747 from Qatar, cutting $2 billion crypto deals with the UAE, and pocketing additional billions from the Saudis. Every single move on the international chessboard either lines Trump’s pockets, advances Putin’s interests, or both. This man Eisenhower would have called a traitor and Reagan would have called an obvious Russian asset is now running the country after having seized control of the party those two built.

Most Americans are watching this with a growing sense of helpless horror — the deconstruction of USAID, the killing of Voice of America, the abandonment of allies, the protection rackets dressed up as diplomacy, the construction of hundreds of concentration camps, the lies stacked on lies, the arming and masking of lawless thugs who’re literally killing American citizens, the self-dealing grift — and the Republican Party, the party of Eisenhower and Reagan and even the patrician George H.W. Bush, can’t find ten senators willing to stand up and say “enough.”

Republican senators and members of Congress know what’s happening. They know who Trump is really working for. Many have even said so, albeit before Trump had power. They’ve read the same intelligence we have, but they say nothing because they’re afraid of a primary challenge funded by the same billionaires who’re profiting from the wreckage.

So, get ready. The Big Lie about Iran is coming, and it’s going to be loud. Trump will declare a “total and complete victory” he didn’t win, just as he declared one he didn’t win in 2020. Hegseth will hold a Pentagon presser and tell us, as he already has, that America won “a capital-V victory” and Fox “News” will run the chyron in bright red.

The rest of the press, terrified of Trump’s lawsuits, his FCC, and his street thugs (who he’s now trying to pay off), will increasingly fall in line.

And the truth — that Trump started a war he couldn’t win, lost it, walked away with less than Obama had a decade ago, gutted NATO in the process, and handed Putin his greatest geopolitical prize since the fall of the Berlin Wall — will be told only by writers and reporters operating outside the captured corporate press.

Which is why what you do next matters. Call your senator and your representative through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them you expect them to demand congressional oversight of any Iran deal Trump signs, to defend NATO and stop his military hardware withdrawal, and to investigate the financial ties between Trump’s family and the foreign governments he’s enriching.

Find your state legislators at openstates.org and make sure they’re on record. Register everyone you know to vote at vote.org, because the 2026 midterms are now the firewall. If you can support independent journalism — including this newsletter — please do so, and please share this piece widely. The billionaire-owned media won’t tell the truth about what Trump is about to claim. That job falls to us.

-Thom Hartmann

Help keep billionaires out of newsrooms

Like so many of this newsletter’s readers, Louise and I have children and grandchildren who’ll inherit the consequences of this man’s foreign policy, so when we watch him repeat the same pattern across continent after continent it doesn’t feel like ordinary political disagreement. It feels like watching someone systematically dismantle the country they’ll grow up in.

P.S. Consider Afghanistan. Trump blamed the chaotic exit from Kabul in August 2021 on Joe Biden because Biden was the one in the chair when the helicopters lifted off, but the deal that forced that timeline was Trump’s.

 

"Democracy survives only if ordinary people are willing to defend it"

 

The generations that defeated fascism in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1940s understood something simple but profound: democracy survives only if ordinary people are willing to defend it. Are we today?

The United States and the Republic of China (the official name for Taiwan) — one of the world’s most vibrant and functional democracies — have had a formal defense relationship since 1955. Last week, Donald Trump — who’s been withholding since last year two shipments totaling $25 billion worth of US military hardware Taiwan has purchased — said that relationship is now a “bargaining chip” to get what he, his oligarch friends, and his family want from China.

America was founded on the idea that democracy — a form of government that our Founders discovered functioning well among Native American societies, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living — was our north star, the core concept around which all our actions revolved.

We fought Great Britain to establish democracy, fought against the fascist Confederacy to preserve democracy here in America, and helped fight German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese fascists to preserve and restore democracy in Europe and Asia. After winning each battle, we became a little more democratic, enfranchising women, formerly enslaved people, and even 18-year-olds. We welcomed the diverse people of the world, groaning under oppression and poverty, to share our democracy and the free enterprise system it enabled.

Most of the countries in today’s world, however, have little use for democracy. Certainly, Putin, Xi, and the Middle Eastern sheiks view it as a threat to their wealth and power. Most of the smaller countries across the world are dominated by wealthy families (oligarchy) or violent warlords (autocracy); during the decades I did international relief work, I spent time in many of them.

And yet we always fought for democracy, even though we started out imperfectly. We helped create the United Nations, a democratic institution. We fought and died for European and Asian democracy. We encouraged democracy around the world through foreign aid programs like USAID and through pro-democracy advocacy operations like the Voice of America.

Until Trump.

Today, we have a president who holds democracy and democratic nations in disdain. He openly ridicules our democratic allies while sucking up to and praising autocrats and oligarchs. He gutted USAID, killed Voice of America, and even tried to overthrow our own democracy and will probably try again.

His racist, homophobic, and “poorly educated” followers agree with his disdain for democracy, openly embracing his despotic proclamations because he hates the same people they hate. Republican politicians who once defended American democracy cow before his threats of revenge when, like Senator Bill Cassidy, they don’t join him in embracing Putin and fail to nakedly cheer Trump’s violations of international law.

Foreign billionaires like the Fox “News” Murdochs and the Middle Eastern sheiks who’ve poured billions into Trump’s family are apparently happy to see our democracy under assault. About a hundred domestic billionaire families are enthusiastically willing to trade democracy and the free press it requires for tax cuts and deregulation.

So, what happens if they win? What happens if America finally, fully abandons the alliances we’ve built up over 250 years and instead embraces this autocratic new world order of Putin, Xi, and the corrupt billionaires who run most of the world’s autocracies?

If we formally pull out of NATO or simply, quietly continue the process of abandoning the alliance? If we leave Taiwan, Japan, Australia, and South Korea to the tender mercies of the Chinese Communist Party? If we continue our embrace of “America’s coolest dictator” Bukele in El Salvador and Rodriguez in Venezuela and let their authoritarianism continue to metastasize across our hemisphere?

If the GOP and its billionaire owners manage to muzzle all but a token remnant of our once-vibrant free press, if ICE becomes Trump’s and Vance’s personal Schutzstaffel and throws open their “detention centers” to the “liberal” Americans they’ve already designated as “domestic terrorists”? If they continue to follow Putin’s system of tightly regulating who’s eligible to vote (while corrupting Democrats like Fetterman) so Republicans never lose?

What happens if they win?

Then the wealthiest people on Earth finally get the world they’ve always wanted, from the days they opposed the American Revolution, to fighting against Lincoln, to “America First” billionaires trying to hire Smedley Butler to assassinate FDR, to now supporting Trump:

A world where democracy is weak.
Labor is powerless.
The press is controlled.
Religion is weaponized.
Elections are managed.
Fear keeps people obedient.
And billionaires rule without accountability.

That’s the oligarch’s endgame and has been for millennia. It’s why they bought off Sinema, Manchin, Golden, and Fetterman and are inserting themselves in elections across the nation. It’s why they’re buying our media. It’s why Republicans in Congress keep sending more and more of our taxpayer money to ICE while ignoring Trump’s multiple impeachable offenses from war crimes to emoluments violations to the open betrayal of our democratic allies.

Not “making America great.”
Not patriotism.
Not Christianity.
Not freedom.

Raw power for a small handful of morbidly rich men, enforced by propaganda, corruption, and violence, both committed by agents of the state (against Comey, James, Schiff et al, and soon to be directed against you and me) as well as J6 freelancers Trump is trying to pre-pay with $1.7 billion just in time for this fall’s election.

Roughly every 80 years, it seems, the battle to preserve democracy comes back around and confronts the generation then living. And here it is again. The generations that defeated fascism in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1940s understood something simple but profound: democracy survives only if ordinary people are willing to defend it. Now it’s our turn.

Help to keep up the fight!

-Thom Hartmann

Saturday Report from Thom Hartmann

 

Russia’s main goal for years has been to cripple NATO by getting US troops out of Germany. Putin called Trump this week (we wouldn’t have known except Russian media bragged about it) and apparently gave him his instructions; yesterday the Pentagon announced we’re pulling 5,000 troops out of Germany and putting massive tariffs on EU goods to further weaken NATO member nations. They’re toasting their success with champagne in the Kremlin and planning their strategy to take the Baltic states once the war against Ukraine is over.

Thanks to six corrupt bought-off Republicans on the Supreme Court, Louisiana Republicans are colluding in broad daylight to rig this fall’s election and silence the voices of Black voters. Jeff Landry is one of the most corrupt governors in America, having been accused of accepting free flights and gifts, illegal use of campaign funds, and giving government jobs to top donors, among other things. Now he’s suspending the upcoming primaries (voting was already underway) so he and his cronies in the legislature can re-gerrymander the state to make sure the state will never again send a Black representative to Washington DC. 

Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias noted, “What is happening in Louisiana right now is both a redistricting power grab and a dry run for authoritarian election subversion this fall.” And this is just the beginning; with the six Republicans on the Court okaying new maps that shatter majority-Black districts, the Congressional Black Caucus is bracing for a major loss of members this fall and in 2028. John Roberts and his buddies on the Court claim that they’re not “seeing race” and that the problem of minority voters being victimized by Republican policies is long in the past; in fact it’s very, very real now and their and Landry’s actions prove it. Hypocrites and racist liars…

The Trump regime is the most lawless in America’s history. The War Powers Act of 1973 requires two things: If the United States has come under attack or an attack is imminent, the president may order an immediate commencement of war-making against the attacker; when that happens, he then has 60 days to try to resolve the situation, but after that must seek approval from Congress to continue kinetic action. Trump has already broken that law: Iran represented no immediate threat to the US at all but he bombed them anyway.

And now, as Democrats are joining Republicans in pretending he didn’t commit that crime and so are asking for the 60-day request for war authorization from Congress, Whiskey Pete Hegseth told senators yesterday that because our military isn’t currently shooting or bombing, “the clock is paused” and they don’t need to go to Congress. The law requires a cessation of hostilities within 60 days, and if blockading the Strait of Hormuz isn’t a hostile action then apparently the next step is for the Pentagon to declare that gravity is optional and wars only count when someone bothers to keep score. 

Meanwhile, ICE murders American citizens and ignores the 4th and 5th Amendments, the DOJ ignores court orders, Trump criminally impounds funds Congress had appropriated for Blue states, and the entire regime is in open and blatant violation of the Epstein Transparency Act. Hopefully, Democrats will find their spines and voices and hold these criminals to account once they acquire the power to do so and begin shadow hearings in the meantime to inform the American people of Trump’s and his people’s lawlessness.

Americans of all stripes and political affiliations agree: Data Centers are a plague. Big AI have been buying off politicians across the country, often even getting tax deferrals and free land as they burden local electric and water resources, all to increase the profits of a handful of morbidly rich AI oligarchs. Residents in the areas the tech bro oligarchs are eyeing are getting active, although a few well-placed “contributions” and “tips” to politicians often frustrate their efforts. Maine’s legislature, for example, passed a moratorium on the centers last month by a wide margin but then Governor Janet Mills, apparently feathering her nest for her upcoming retirement, vetoed the legislation. In other states it’s less obviously corrupt, but people are genuinely freaked out as AI transforms not just the physical landscape of America but the employment landscape as well.

In Michigan, The New York Times reports: “In towns across the state, suspicions are still rife, sometimes far-fetched. Residents in different towns expressed worries about effects on fertility. Others worried the centers could end up as military targets, pointing to Iran’s strikes on data center infrastructure in the Persian Gulf. People in Michigan also pointed to two contracts between a data center project in Saline Township and the state’s main electric utility that were so heavily redacted that the state’s attorney general is challenging them in court. A special fast-track process was used to bypass public hearings. Even the signatures are blacked out.”

AI is here and not going away, and Moore’s Law suggests many of these monster data centers will soon be scaled back, perhaps even bursting the AI bubble that keeps driving the stock market regardless of the Iran conflict. Keep an eye on this; it’s going to change the world our kids are inheriting in ways that are still unclear.

The Trump grift is multigenerational. Uday and Qusay…er…Don Jr and Eric just jumped into the defense contracting business, hooking up with three new drone companies. Suspiciously, the companies all are bidding for or just got massive multi-million-dollar contracts with the Pentagon, with more to come. Remember when Republicans screamed about Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy “cashing in on the presidency” by licensing his name to a brand of beer? Or when Republicans held endless hearings, press conferences, and years of Fox “News” reports about Biden’s son making $5 million for sitting on the board of an energy company? They were pikers. The Trump Crime Family is the most corrupt first family in American history and hopefully their reign will be short-lived when Democrats get the power of impeachment back.

Democracy around the world is under assault by right-wingers who get themselves elected and then flip their nations into autocracy and oligarchy. An estimated half of all the world’s democracies are under such an assault — including the United States — and Uganda is the most recent to go all in. President Yoweri Museveni says he wants to sign legislation that’s working its way through the Ugandan legislature that would criminalize opposition politicians, most types of reporting and opinion writing, and any group affiliated with foreign organizations. Russia, through diplomatic outreach and via their massive social media influence operations, has been pushing this sort of thing across the free world, and this bill is a virtual clone of Russian legislation that lets Putin imprison or even execute dissidents and reporters. And Trump, trying to help out his mentor and owner, has shut down Voice of America to make Putin’s job even easier.

Joe Walsh UNLEASHES Tea Party smear machine on a Democrat fighting for us working people. Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh went on his podcast and spewed a vitriolic tirade against Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, calling him “despicable,” a “bullshitter,” even throwing around accusations like “anti-Semitic,” and then said he wouldn’t support him even if it helps keep a Republican in power. This from Joe Walsh, a former Tea Party bomb-thrower who built his career on outrage, division, and some of the ugliest rhetoric of the last decade.

And let’s not rewrite history here: this is a guy who helped normalize the very politics that damaged our democracy. Yet when he decided to rebrand himself, Democrats and progressives said fine, come on in, we believe in a big tent. We gave him grace; I’ve even invited him onto my program several times. And now? Now he turns that same scorched-earth, character-assassination playbook on a real progressive who’s actually connecting with voters on the number one issue in this country, affordability. That’s not principle, that’s hypocrisy dripping with arrogance. Walsh doesn’t want a “big tent,” he wants a tent where he gets to decide who’s worthy.

And when someone comes along with a message that resonates with working people, he panics and goes for the jugular. It’s the same old Tea Party venom, just dressed up in a different jersey. You don’t strengthen democracy by trashing candidates fighting for economic justice, you weaken it. And if that’s where Joe Walsh is going to stand, then he hasn’t changed nearly as much as he wants people to believe and will not be welcome on my show again until he publicly apology.

-Thom Hartmann, The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Thomas, Reagan, Trump

 

People feel like there’s a darkness that’s spread across America in the 15 months since Trump took office a second time. It’s being noticed all over the world, from the Pope to the leaders of our (formerly) allied nations and is being embraced by dictators like Putin and MBS.

The most corrupt Supreme Court justice in history, Clarence Thomas, who’s taken millions from billionaires and then voted to promote their interests, inadvertently helped us all see clearly the source of this depravity that’s permeated so much of our government at all levels. Last week he gave a speech at the University of Texas, Austin, and blamed the ills of the world (and America) on the rise of “progressivism.”

Thomas blamed progressivism for everything from the rise of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao to racial segregation and the eugenics movement that Hitler borrowed from America and Britain to excuse his Final Solution.

In fact, Thomas is following an old tradition that was explained a century ago when arch-conservative propagandist Joseph Goebbels famously said, “Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.” It’s the foundation of the modern saying, “Every accusation is a confession.”

My father fancied himself a conservative back when I was a kid during the Eisenhower and Kennedy era, but in his mind that simply meant that one doesn’t radically or rapidly change society without first thinking through the consequences in detail and then, when you do decide to make changes to the rules of society, you move forward in measured increments. Conservatively.

At least that’s how Dad explained it to me, and how both Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his then-VP Richard Nixon explained it in their own ways.

Eisenhower, writing to his brother in 1954, warned that any party that tried to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, or other social programs would “disappear,” noting that only “a tiny splinter group” believed such a rollback was even possible. Nixon, two decades later, was just as blunt about the need for pragmatic, incremental governance, famously observing in a 1971 message to Congress that “we are all Keynesians now.”

In other words, the conservatism of that era wasn’t about blowing up the New Deal with its programs of Social Security, the minimum wage, labor protections, funding scientific research and education, etc.; it was about tending it carefully, changing it cautiously, and conserving what worked.

Today’s modern conservative movement, though, isn’t conservative at all, and hasn’t been since the Reagan Revolution: it’s reactionary and, through the two Trump presidencies and the Project 2025 embrace of Orbánism and Putinism, has now become fully fascistic.

It all began in a big way when, in 1954, the Supreme Court reversed their 1898 Plessy v Ferguson “separate but equal” decision with Brown v Board of Education, mandating that Black children must participate in racially integrated classrooms.

Petro-billionaire Fred Koch, who’d made his initial fortune in the Soviet Union, was offended and threw major funding into the virulently anticommunist John Birch Society, which was running billboards across America calling for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren over the Brown decision.

While that impeachment never happened, the movement grew (my dad introduced me to the JBS when I was 13, saying, “You should hear what the crazies are saying”) and soon JBS’ morbidly rich funders decided that paying taxes to fund programs that would benefit “poor people” (aka Black people) was also an abomination just as bad as white kids having to sit with Black kids in public school classrooms.

In 1980, Reagan rode that racist message (along with sabotaging Jimmy Carter by cutting a deal with the Ayatollah to hold the American hostages until after the election) to the White House with millions in dark money support from those same petro-billionaires.

Reagan’s first official campaign stop had been to speak at an all-white county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the brutal murder of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, in 1964. The subject of his speech was “states’ rights,” which everybody knew was code for “let the Southern states continue their segregation programs.”

On the 1980 campaign trail, Reagan told the story of the “strapping young buck” in line at the supermarket upsetting all the hard-working white people when he whipped out his food stamps to pay for his “steak and beer”; it was the male complement to Reagan’s Black “welfare queen” myth. Cut off his food stamps, the logic went, and he’ll be forced to look for gainful employment…even if there were no jobs within miles and white employers wouldn’t then hire Black people.

But Reagan didn’t just talk about stopping affirmative action: he took steps to push America back to the white supremacist 1950s. As The Washington Post noted:

“In the 1980s, the Reagan administration began to roll back civil rights protections and legally designated targets for affirmative action hires, thus bringing the politics of reverse discrimination to the White House. Under the now familiar banner of ‘Let’s Make America Great Again,’ Reagan campaigned vigorously against affirmative action in 1980, promising voters he would overturn policies that mandated, in his view, ‘federal guidelines or quotas which require race, ethnicity, or sex . . . to be the principle factor in hiring or education.’”

Clarence Thomas, of course, worked for Reagan back then, doing everything he could to sabotage affirmative action programs. He began hanging out with billionaires in a classic example of, “I’ve got mine, screw you.”

Once the petro-billionaire’s agenda — gut social programs and regulations that protect working class people and children, all to pay for over $38 trillion in tax cuts for themselves — got rolling, other billionaires from other industries jumped on board, funding think tanks, publications, radio and TV stations and networks, universities, and a massive legal effort to pack the courts with Clarence Thomas-type judges and justices.

Because the New Deal — which they were explicitly trying to repeal, root and branch — was so popular, they had to bullshit the American people with an intensity and ferocity that America hadn’t seen since the “Horse and Sparrow” days of the last Gilded Age:

— Tax cuts for billionaires would “trickle down” to workers.
— Unions hurt and rip off their members.
— Regulations stunt economic growth and thus kill jobs.
— Social Security is going broke.
— “Free Trade” will “lift all boats.”
— For-profit schools and prisons do a better job.
— America can’t afford a national healthcare system.
— Corporations are “persons” and should have rights under the Bill of Rights.
— Giving millions to a politician or president isn’t bribery; it’s “free speech.”
— When young people get free college, they don’t value it.
— More CO2 is good for plants and climate change is a hoax.
— Government isn’t the solution to our problems; it is the problem itself.
— Corporate monopolies “increase efficiency” and are thus a good thing.

Once the system got up and running it began to run on autopilot, fueled into hyperdrive by Clarence Thomas’ deciding vote in Citizens United (at the same time he was taking big bucks from the same billionaires the decision freed to bribe judges and politicians). It was spread across America by Limbaugh and an Australian billionaire who made his initial fortune complaining about Black American GIs “raping” white Australian women when US troops were stationed there during WWII.

And now we have a low-IQ nepo-baby psychopath sitting in the White House because he promised a roomful of petro-billionaires and Elon Musk that he’d cut their taxes, kill off green programs, and let Musk dismantle any agency that was investigating him or his businesses. Trump’s so certain of his royal prerogatives that yesterday he posted on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site a clip of Frank Sinatra singing My Way.

Like other conservative/fascist movements across history, from Mussolini to Stalin to Hitler to Putin to Orbán — all grounded in first defining an “other” who must be feared and stopped — today’s GOP has morphed into something that Eisenhower and even Nixon wouldn’t recognize.

And now he’s threatening to start World War III, all because neither he nor his nepo-baby son-in-law nor any of the 13 billionaires in his cabinet know the first thing about how to actually negotiate on the world stage.

Although Pope Leo XIV says his remarks weren’t specifically directed at Trump, his claim that the world is “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants” certainly hits the mark. This is not conservativism, this new “one man above all” ideology that drives today’s GOP. It’s raw, naked evil. And it’s about damn time that Democrats and Americans of good will begin to call it out for what it is.

-Thom Hartmann

Trump Lies

— Trump Moves Toward $20 Billion Iran Deal After Blasting Obama for Far Less. Remember when President Obama signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in 2015 (which ended their uranium enrichment and led to the release of 4 US hostages they held) and part of the deal was to return $400 million of their own money to them that we’d held frozen for years? Trump went nuts, calling a press conference and saying, “Iran was in big trouble, they had sanctions, they were dying, we took off the sanctions and made this horrible deal and now they’re a power. We paid $400 million for the hostages. Such a bad precedent was set by Obama. … What we’re doing is insane.” Well, it appears that insanity is contagious: multiple sources are reporting that the Trump regime is considering giving the Iranian government as much as $20 billion for the uranium they have. After the deal was reported, Trump claimed it was never serious; did he just get caught? Will it go forward anyway? It’s really impossible to know when Mango Mussolini is so desperate for a way out of his insane, illegal war, so seriously mentally ill, and so deeply unstable… — Is Cuba next? Trump has already commenced violent hostilities and war-making — without congressional authority and without provocation — against Iran, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nigeria and Somalia and now it appears that Cuba will be next. The guy revels in blood, be it watching gladiators bloody each other in UFC fights, watching the daily “blow them up” reels the Pentagon gives him of people he’s killing in small boats in the Caribbean and in Iran, or cheering on Netanyahu’s slaughters in Gaza and now Lebanon. He apparently gets joy from pain and death, like every other psychopathic leader in history. Now we learn that the Pentagon is laying the groundwork for an invasion of Cuba. Because, of course, why not? If nothing else, ‘Lil Marco thinks it’ll help his ‘28 presidential chances, and every Republican in the House and Senate except a small handful have given him complete authority to ignore the Constitution and Congress. He said on Monday, “We may stop by Cuba after we’re finished with this,” and last month said he hopes to have “the honor of taking Cuba,” adding that he “can do anything I want with it.” This is Caligula-level hubris. Congress must act to reign this in, and then follow it up by impeaching him. — Trump Eyes Billions From IRS in Stunning Cash Grab. Looks like billions of your and my tax dollars are going straight into Trump’s money bin. An IRS official leaked some of Trump’s tax information to the press years ago, so now he’s suing the IRS for $10 billion for his pain and suffering. Instead of fighting the lawsuit, the agency — which falls under the Executive Branch and is headed up by Trump’s billionaire New York real estate buddy Scott Bessent, who works for Trump — is now “negotiating” with Trump to decide how many millions or billions they’ll give him to make the lawsuit go away. As he said in a moment of cynical candor: “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself. We could make it a substantial amount, nobody would care, because it’s gonna go to numerous, very good charities.” Right. Like the children’s cancer charity he and Eric stole from? Or the phony Trump Foundation that gave a big bribe to Pam Bondi when she began to investigate his phony university back when she was Florida AG, and then was shut down with a court order that all 3 of his children take classes in how to not scam people with nonprofits? Can you imagine the media meltdown if a Democrat had done something like this? They swooned for a week when Obama wore a tan suit… — Is the Grocery Aisle the New Front Line of Economic Crisis? The recession is real: people are using credit to buy groceries. About a third of Buy Now Pay Later users (29 percent) are using these high-interest short-term credit programs to buy groceries, a big spike up from 14 percent two years ago, with 38 percent of Gen Z’ers saying they’ve done the same. Forty-seven percent of them also report they’ve been late making BNPL payments in the past year since Trump began his “Liberation Day” tariffs and took an axe to our economy. Ten of the last eleven recessions happened during Republican presidencies, almost always following massive tax breaks for billionaires and cuts to benefits for poor and middle-class people. GOP policies are designed to impoverish most Americans while creating an elite upper class; they’re just a reboot of a system that Adam Smith characterized in the 1700s in his book A Theory of Moral Sentiments and have been pushed by billionaires or their equivalent in every generation since. Warren Buffett famously said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” He was right. — Did a Trump Megadonor Just Prove ‘America First’ Was Always Optional? One of Trump’s biggest donors — over $50 million — is moving a small musical instrument factory to China, killing 150 jobs in Eastlake, Ohio. This is, of course, what billionaires do; squeeze every imaginable penny out of everything they touch. Billionaire John Paulson could have just continued to operate the factory he bought — which has supplied brass instruments to high school marching bands for generations — but, hey, he could make a few extra bucks by using cheap Chinese labor instead. His MAGA workers are feeling betrayed with one telling a reporter, “I’m starting to regret my vote for Trump.” Nonetheless, the cult runs deep; five of six MAGA workers who’ll now be unemployed tell reporters they’ll continue to vote for Republicans. After all, they all hate the same (Black, Hispanic, Queer) people, right? And that’s what counts the most… — When an 85-Year-Old Gets Detained, What Does It Say About ICE? France is outraged at ICE brutality against an 85-year-old French woman who’d come to America to marry her wartime sweetheart. Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé came here on a tourist visa and forgot to renew it; ICE busted her and threw her into a hellhole concentration camp for weeks. She was released this week after intervention by the French government, which is furious. Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said she was subject to “acts of violence” and the story is all over the French newspapers. She’d married former American GI Bill Ross, who she’d met in the 1950s at a NATO base in France, and the couple reconnected decades later after both were widowed. She’d started the formal immigration process to get a green card, which may be what flagged ICE that she was in the system (some reports suggest her husband’s son, a former cop, turned her in to get more of his dad’s estate). We’re holding at least 70,000 people, including thousands of children, in these brutal camps with no due process. Meanwhile, ICE is hiring people who’ve been fired by police departments and flunked out of police academies in their effort to get as many masked, armed thugs onto the streets as they can before the election this fall. Fourteen months into his chancellorship, Hitler only had 40,000 people in his detention camps; history tells us where this all goes and it ain’t pretty… The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

Dear Marjorie Taylor Greene

Thank you for standing up against unnecessary war, advocating for Epstein’s victims, and for defending the spiritual side of Christianity against Trump’s recent blasphemy. Our mutual friend Congressman Ro Khanna (who you worked with on the Epstein legislation) reached out to you a few months ago about dropping by on my radio/TV program to have a friendly conversation; I haven’t heard back but figured I’d reach out this way to suggest some things we could discuss.

You’re one of the few high-profile Republicans who’s not only disagreed with Trump on policy but has also clearly seen through his con-man façade of competence and, frankly, sanity. Well, done! But let’s go a bit farther and talk policy, including a few areas where we may even agree…

Healthcare

America spends about twice as much as any other developed country in the world on healthcare, yet we have a lower lifespan and poorer outcomes than any other similar nation. 

We spend about $14,885 per person per year, while the average among other developed countries is about $5,967 (according to the OECD). Even Mexico, President Sheinbaum announced this week, will have comprehensive free national healthcare (including drugs) within 2 years.

Some of your Republican colleagues will say our poor outcomes are because we have “too many Black people” (referencing Prudential’s Frederick Hoffman’s old “genetically inferior Blacks” story that dominated healthcare and insurance policy in the 1910-1965 era covered in detail in my book on the Hidden History of American Healthcare). I’ve had several conservatives reference that old canard when they’ve come on my show. But that’s just a racist myth, and the proof is that these numbers hold for poor whites, too; just look at the numbers in overwhelmingly white West Virginia, for example.

As a conservative, I’d guess you’d be outraged by the billions of our healthcare dollars that are being shoveled into the money bins of the insurance and hospital giants. 

Your colleague Senator Rick Scott, for example, ran a hospital chain convicted of the largest Medicare fraud in American history at the time and walked away from it with hundreds of millions in his money bin; it financed his run for governor and senator from Florida. “Dollar Bill” McGuire, the first CEO of United Healthcare, left with over $1.5 billion from his gig (although he had to return a few hundred million to avoid going to jail for fraud).

The Medicare Advantage scam is costing Americans billions a year, and that profit all goes directly to the stockholders and executives of massive insurance companies. 

And now Trump is inserting for-profit insurance companies into real Medicare in 6 states as an “experiment” and Dr. Oz is talking about replacing real Medicare with Advantage plans as the default when people turn 65. Millions of dollars are going into the pockets of politicians of both parties (but mostly Republicans) who support this fleecing of the American people.

If America just did what every other developed country in the world has done, we’d preserve a fortune and save an estimated 68,000 lives and a half-trillion-dollars a year. And, as any EU citizen can tell you, the service will be better! That seems like something a conservative could get behind.

Education

America is the only country in the developed world where a person goes deeply into debt to get an education. 

An advanced degree can create a debt that takes decades to pay off, and is preventing young people from getting married, buying a home, starting a family, and discouraging would-be entrepreneurs like yourself from starting a small business.

When we gave returning GIs from WWII free college, almost 8 million young men and women not only got free tuition from the 1944 GI Bill but also received a stipend to pay for room, board, and books like about half of Europe’s countries do today. And the result — the return on our government’s investment in those 8 million educations — was substantial.

The best book on that time and subject is Edward Humes’ Over Here: How the GI Bill Transformed the American Dream, summarized by Mary Paulsell for the Columbia Daily Tribune: “[That] groundbreaking legislation gave our nation 14 Nobel Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, three presidents, 12 senators, 24 Pulitzer Prize winners, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 17,000 journalists, 22,000 dentists and millions of lawyers, nurses, artists, actors, writers, pilots and entrepreneurs.”

When people have an education, they not only raise the competence and vitality of a nation; they also earn more money, which stimulates the economy. Because they earn more, they pay more in taxes, which helps pay back the government for the cost of that education.

In 1952 dollars, the GI Bill’s educational benefit cost the nation $7 billion. The increased economic output over the next 40 years that could be traced directly to that educational cost was $35.6 billion, and the extra taxes received from those higher-wage-earners was $12.8 billion.

In other words, the US government invested $7 billion and got a $48.4 billion return on that investment, about a $7 return for every $1 invested.

In addition, that educated workforce made it possible for America to lead the world in innovation, R&D, and new business development for three generations. We invented the transistor, the integrated circuit, the internet, new generations of miracle drugs, sent men to the moon and reshaped science. Wouldn’t any rational conservative agree with former Republican President Eisenhower and his Vice President Richard Nixon that that’s a good deal for America? 

I realize the big banks who make billions in profits from all that student debt regularly pour millions into the coffers of your Republican colleagues, but shouldn’t America’s interest and that of hard-working Americans come first?

Taxes

When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, two-thirds of Americans were in the middle class and could get and stay there with a single paycheck. Today it’s only 43 percent of us who qualify for that, and, to add insult to injury, it takes two paychecks to get there. In large part that’s because of Republican “trickle down” economics.

When Reagan came into office, the top tax rate on the morbidly rich was 74% and corporations 50%. That encouraged wealthy people to make tax-deductible donations to charity and stop taking money out of their companies after the first three million or so a year (in today’s dollars) when the top rates began to kick in. Billionaires weren’t even a thing, mostly, at the time; now we have a guy who’s about to become a trillionaire.

CEOs and senior managers often lived in the same neighborhoods as their workers, although their homes were a bit spiffier. Just look at old sitcoms from the ‘50s and ‘60s and you’ll see what I mean. It also encouraged companies to invest their surplus money into R&D, new products and expansion, and better wages and benefits for their workers (all tax-deductions that helped them avoid paying corporate income taxes). Today, instead, since Reagan legalized stock buybacks (it used to be a felony called “stock price manipulation”), CEOs recycle their companies’ money into buybacks to artificially inflate the value of the stock and thus their bonuses.

When Reagan came into office in 1981, the total national debt was about $800 billion — less than one trillion dollars — and had been going down every year since the end of WWII. If you add up the total value of Reagan tax cuts, the GW Bush tax cuts, and both sets of Trump tax cuts — all heavily weighted toward the obscenely rich — you’ll discover that the number is well north of the current $38 trillion of our national debt.

In other words, under those three Republican presidents America borrowed — in your name, my name, and our kids’ and grandkids’ names — $38 trillion and handed it all to the Musks and Zuckerbergs and Bezos of our country so these “Masters of the Universe” could compete to see who could build the largest mega-yacht, shoot themselves highest into outer space on penis-shaped rockets, or build the most elaborately outfitted doomsday bunker.

If we went back to the tax rates we had when Reagan came into office, working class people would see a major tax break, the morbidly rich would have to again pay their fair share, and corporations would once again be incentivized to innovate their products and pay their employees enough to revive the middle class.

Wouldn’t a reasonable conservative think that’s a good deal for America? Eisenhower and Nixon certainly did; even Republican President Jerry Ford agreed and kept the top tax rate at 90%.

There are multiple other issues we could discuss and probably agree on. They include the benefits of:

— Building out public transportation like China, Japan, South Korea, and most of Europe have done.
— Cleaning up our air and water to save lives and slow down these increasingly deadly weather disasters (you do believe in science, right?).
— Protecting our public lands from greedy fossil fuel billionaires.
— Passing Republican James Langford’s immigration legislation to get undocumented people out of the country without brutality while cleaning up our immigration mess going forward.
— Getting off our addiction to fossil fuels and the Middle East.
— And even the “small government” idea of letting queer people and non-Christians simply live their lives in peace and quiet.

We can discuss these things or any issue you’d like; you can also talk directly to my listeners and viewers all across the country. Every week members of Congress come on my show for a full hour to take calls from listeners; you’re welcome to do the same, too, if you’d like. Bernie Sanders did that every week for 11 years. Ro Khanna is one of my regulars and has been for years; he can tell you all about it.

Hoping to hear from you,

—Thom Hartmann