Recent comments
ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer's World
Thom Hartmann has written a dozen books covering ADD / ADHD - Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder.
Join Thom for his new twice-weekly email newsletters on ADHD, whether it affects you or a member of your family.
Thom's Blog Is On the Move
By webmaster
Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
Please follow us across to hartmannreport.com - this will be the only place going forward to read Thom's blog posts and articles.
KEWL! I just went to gravatar.com to add an avatar to accompany my posts here. Then, I came back to do a "test post" to see if it worked, and discovered that I didn't even need to ... my prior posts already display the avatar that I added!
Ain't it swell when things work better than you expect?
High fructose corn syrup has a friend in Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
Thom, I wonder if you've ever heard of a book by Marjorie Kelly, "The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy"? I never finished the book but as far as I got into it, Kelly is proposing another model of corporate structure, one in which the shareholders are relegated to a position below that of the worker. She posits that shareholders are a drain on a corporation and don't deserve all of the worship that they currently receive. I've never heard you mention the book... since I didn't get very far into it, maybe you HAVE read it and there's good reason for never mentioning it. But I thought I'd throw that out there. My son, who's studying political science, recommended it to me. One of these days, I hope to finish it.
Thanks for your show!
Bush One instituted torture programs, engineered Iran-Contra traitorous games, used the U.S. military to secure his economic interests in Latin America, and committed a WAR CRIME when he permitted the retreating Iraq army to be burned alive. If Bush Two is a war criminal, well, he's just a chip off the old block. Like father like son.
Why doesn't anyone want to talk about Bush One's crimes, too?
Just getting old and spending (at least) $250,000 of our high security tax money)every year just to skydive (with a nanny parachutist chained to his waist!), is NOT an excuse for allowing a war criminal to walk, unexposed or unpunished! Just because War Criminal Pinochet got old, the world did not forget his crimes.
OMFG! Thom,
Real property has value; folk are just flesh and blood . . . therefore dead and waiting to die.
Thom criticized Barack Obama yesterday for what he considered caving to right-wing pressure and making a statement in support of the Iranian protesters and critical of the Iranian government for violently repressing them.
Was Thom right?
Thom’s concern was that incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who was declared the winner of the election would use Obama’s statement as an opportunity to blame the unrest on the United States.
Ahmadinejad, of course, immediately used the opportunity to point a finger at the U.S.
But was Thom right?
My impression of Thom’s comment was that he was reacting in fear, that the Iranian people would be turned against us, especially because of America’s intervention in the Iranian affairs from 1953 forward. (We were behind a coup against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq. Then we brought back the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and supported his dictatorial regime until he was overthrown by the Iranian revolution in 1979.)
The Iranian people are well aware of the U.S. involvement in those events and have been suspicious about American intentions toward their country since then. But that was almost 6 decades ago and a lot has happened since then.
Like most societies, Iranian society is very complex. We know that Iranians, especially the young and urban young, as well as the middle class, like American culture and society. They also like Barack Obama.
I think, but I’m not sure, that they may be more sophisticated than you’re giving them credit for. Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader had already begun pointing fingers at the United States. The people protesting the election aren’t likely to fall for the Iranian government’s propaganda. In fact, they may take hope in the fact that Obama has spoken up in their defense.
I’m agnostic on this point, but I don’t know how long the United States, as the sole super power in the world with the claim of being the world’s moral leader, could be expected to remain too low key when the government of an important country is cracking down on its population they Iran is doing now.
I guess we’ll just have to hope for the best and see how things work out.
B Roll,
Oh, yes. I pronounce it kwark (rhymes with "park.")
B Roll,
'Love music, too -- all kinds, but especially folk music from around the world.
B Roll,
How kind of you. Thanks.
I chose "quark" because I love science --- always have. I love challenges and mysteries. I guess I just want to know the things that are still unknown, like how does all this existence really work? What does it mean, if anything? It's amazing the number of areas of interest that covers!
Want to read a fascinating article? If so,please tell me what you think about it.
"Is Quantum Mechanics Controlling Your Thoughts? "
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/feb/13-is-quantum-mechanics-controlling...
Also, what does the "end" of the universe look like? (Is there even such a thing?) And on and on ...
This kind of stuff really gets my adrenolin running! (Along with other areas of science, art, history, literature and language.) I guess I am still just a kid asking "why?"
Webmaster, my "remember password" function never works on this site. Also I am not finding a place to change my password to something I can remember.
The CONSERVATIVES are us.
The folk you keep referring to as conservatives are RECESSIVISTS.
This is about turning America into feudal fiefdoms. This is about eliminating the middle class. This is about creating dynastic economic royalty and reducing the rest to the undeserving poor. STOP CALLING RECESSIVISTS CONSERVATIVE! They aren’t.
Dear Sen. Sanders,
Please talk about how awful the idea of getting our health care from non caring employers is. This is a letter I wrote to Sen Patty Murry and Sen Cantwell.
Telling people to get their health care through their employer is not only forcing people to put themselves in a completly vulnerable position in which a supervisor can take your health care away on a whim, but it is a complete myth for millions of people. Poor people are expected to go to work in jobs without health care everyday in many thousands of types of employment while our leaders smugly pretend that getting health care from an employer is a given, and that it is a given that this is a stable situation that people can depend on.
People lose jobs every day. Make a wrong move, you fired and you have no health care. Get too sick to work, well, it won't be long before you are gotten rid of on some pretext or another. Get pregnant, oh the odds of you doing something unacceptable just went up real real high. Make you supervisor feel threatened accidentally, your health care is threatened....your child's health care is threatened...etc. Multiply this vulnerability by an infinite number of reasons a person could lose a job and health care without warning and you'll begin to get a picture of what it is like to have to depend on flaky supervisors or floundering businesses, or offices full of back stabbers to maintain your and your love one's health.
Pretending to believe that a person can depend on an employer for health care is not only ridiculous; it is based on a lie. Replacing jobs that provide health care is extremely hard and people go for years trying to find an employer that will make this commitment to them. Most employers would rather exercise the many formulas to avoid having to provide health care to employees. I have been sent home from several jobs after paying daycare, transportation costs, and other sundry costs of coming to work only to work an hour and then be told to go home because I was going to have too many hours and my employer would legally owe me health care. This is just one example of how the poor subsidize the rich with their very small resources and their very valuable health. This practice is common and it was done at the community college regularly and that employer was Washington State.
It has been my experience that employers who provide health care also demand huge amounts of unquestioned wage theft. The attitude across the board is that you better be grateful and that means doing a lot of tasks on your own time. I worked for the Community Colleges of Spokane and this problem was rampant. It was horrible and to make it worse my work school site was in a Superfund site that was loaded with heavy metals. The fact that this site was in a Superfund site was hidden from our knowledge and I only found out because I was seriously ill and started paying attention to some info that I was gathering, small bit by bit, from things mentioned in the newspaper. It took me many years to gather enough of this hidden info to successfully research the problem as site names was hidden and addresses placed on unmarked dirt road behind my work site.
To make a long story short, I was exposed to lead, arsenic, chromium 3 & 6, and cadmium. I finally quit work when my employer reduced my hours below the number which made me eligible for benefits. This was SOP for employees who became seriously ill which, of course, happened regularly.
Before all that, I got my best friend a job at the community colleges as my aide. This, of course, before I knew I was asking her to join me to work in a filthy Superfund site. She died June 1, 09 of 5 different kinds of cancers... stomach cancer, intestinal cancer, bladder cancer, gall bladder cancer, colon cancer. She was a 47 year old single mother of three kids.
I am sick of these lies and myths that are killing people. With the lax pollution laws, the secrecy that is enjoyed by polluters, the bomb testing by the US Government, the leaks and pollution from Nuclear Plants like Hanford, Americans deserve Single Payer Health Care. Americans are owed Single Payer Health Care.
Telling people to pretend that getting health care from an employer is a good idea is also a complete lie. It is smothering position for people and it keeps people in jobs that are miserable and is a recipe for employers to exploit employees when it does happen. There are no laws making employers provide health care and they only provide health care to some employees even if they provide any. High deductibles are a given.
Anyone not working to fix this horrible life threatening health care nightmare in America will not be receiving my vote, but will find me fighting for someone that will.
This travesty and exploitation of lower classes is inhumane and not one bit better than segregation by race. Now we have segregation of health care by class. Promoting the phony lie that people should expect health care from an employer is just that, a lie for millions counted and millions more uncounted.
Suggestion for the Webmaster -
For those of us that like to appear literate, is it possible to put an "edit post" button here, accessible ONLY to the person who posted a given message? I've seen that feature on other message boards.
Thanx!
Even if the public option is a resounding success, will it really mean the end of the for-profit insurance providers? I, for one, sincerely doubt it.
Around 40 years ago, when I was entering the labor market, there was only one health insurance provider - the non-profit (at that time) Blue Cross/Blue Shield. There was also a thriving for-profit insurance industry, providing liability coverage for drivers and homeowners, life insurance, etc. Most of the companies that provide Health Insurance today are simply new divisions or subsidiaries of those same companies.
If a very successful and well-run public plan supplants all the corporate providers that are around today, those companies aren't going to go out of business - will simply shut down their health insurance divisions. They'll simply have to find a way survive on the auto/home/life insurance business - JUST LIKE THEY USED TO!
Quark,
You're a good soul. Could you tell me what your screen name means to you, why you chose it and how you pronounce it (i.e., phonetic spelling). Thanks.
Here is the list of the nine Senators refusing to vote for a public option. The list comes from
http://www.billpressmedia.com/?p=3783 The contact information is listed on the Senate site.
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm?Name=...
Lets fill up their voice mail and email boxes.
Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR): (202) 224-6551 Web Form: bennelson.senate.gov/contact-me.cfm
Senator Tom Carper (D-DE): (202) 224-2441 ; web form carper.senate.gov/contact/
Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) (202) 224-3441 Web Form: cantwell.senate.gov/contact/
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) (202) 224-5244 Web Form: wyden.senate.gov/contact/
Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) (202) 224-6551 Web Form: bennelson.senate.gov/contact-me.cfm
Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) (202) 224-5824 Web Form: landrieu.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm
Senator Kay Hagan (D-NC) (202) 224-6342 Web Form: hagan.senate.gov/?p=contact
Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) (202) 224-2043 Web Form: conrad.senate.gov/contact/webform.cfm
Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) (202) 224-2651 Web Form: baucus.senate.gov/contact/emailForm.cfm?subj=issue
Thom,
That's why I always preface my comments to politicians with a brief resume of my activism in the Dem Party --- I want them to know I get involved and am part of their "base."
You can contact members of Congress/Senate and the Whitehouse with the following toll free number from the AMA: 1- 800-833-6354. If you want to contact a senator outside your district you will need a zip code from their district which you can get from their website.
B Roll,
Thanks for your suggestion --- I want to understand others' lives and their highs and lows.
Your comments always leave me with something to ponder or chuckle about!
Paul Krugman today:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/opinion/26krugman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
"Not Enough Audacity "
When it comes to domestic policy, there are two Barack Obamas.
On one side there’s Barack the Policy Wonk, whose command of the issues — and ability to explain those issues in plain English — is a joy to behold.
But on the other side there’s Barack the Post-Partisan, who searches for common ground where none exists, and whose negotiations with himself lead to policies that are far too weak.
Both Baracks were on display in the president’s press conference earlier this week. First, Mr. Obama offered a crystal-clear explanation of the case for health care reform, and especially of the case for a public option competing with private insurers. “If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care, if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal,” he asked, “then why is it that the government, which they say can’t run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical.”
But when asked whether the public option was non-negotiable he waffled, declaring that there are no “lines in the sand.” That evening, Rahm Emanuel met with Democratic senators and told them — well, it’s not clear what he said. Initial reports had him declaring willingness to abandon the public option, but Senator Kent Conrad’s staff later denied that. Still, the impression everyone got was of a White House all too eager to make concessions.
The big question here is whether health care is about to go the way of the stimulus bill.
At the beginning of this year, you may remember, Mr. Obama made an eloquent case for a strong economic stimulus — then delivered a proposal falling well short of what independent analysts (and, I suspect, his own economists) considered necessary. The goal, presumably, was to attract bipartisan support. But in the event, Mr. Obama was able to pick up only three Senate Republicans by making a plan that was already too weak even weaker.
At the time, some of us warned about what might happen: if unemployment surpassed the administration’s optimistic projections, Republicans wouldn’t accept the need for more stimulus. Instead, they’d declare the whole economic policy a failure. And that’s exactly how it’s playing out. With the unemployment rate now almost certain to pass 10 percent, there’s an overwhelming economic case for more stimulus. But as a political matter it’s going to be harder, not easier, to get that extra stimulus now than it would have been to get the plan right in the first place.
The point is that if you’re making big policy changes, the final form of the policy has to be good enough to do the job. You might think that half a loaf is always better than none — but it isn’t if the failure of half-measures ends up discrediting your whole policy approach.
Which brings us back to health care. It would be a crushing blow to progressive hopes if Mr. Obama doesn’t succeed in getting some form of universal care through Congress. But even so, reform isn’t worth having if you can only get it on terms so compromised that it’s doomed to fail.
What will determine the success or failure of reform? Above all, the success of reform depends on successful cost control. We really, really don’t want to get into a position a few years from now where premiums are rising rapidly, many Americans are priced out of the insurance market despite government subsidies, and the cost of health care subsidies is a growing strain on the budget.
And that’s why the public plan is an important part of reform: it would help keep costs down through a combination of low overhead and bargaining power. That’s not an abstract hypothesis, it’s a conclusion based on solid experience. Currently, Medicare has much lower administrative costs than private insurance companies, while federal health care programs other than Medicare (which isn’t allowed to bargain over drug prices) pay much less for prescription drugs than non-federal buyers. There’s every reason to believe that a public option could achieve similar savings.
Indeed, the prospects for such savings are precisely what have the opponents of a public plan so terrified. Mr. Obama was right: if they really believed their own rhetoric about government waste and inefficiency, they wouldn’t be so worried that the public option would put private insurers out of business. Behind the boilerplate about big government, rationing and all that lies the real concern: fear that the public plan would succeed.
So Mr. Obama and Democrats in Congress have to hang tough — no more gratuitous giveaways in the attempt to sound reasonable. And reform advocates have to keep up the pressure to stay on track. Yes, the perfect is the enemy of the good; but so is the not-good-enough-to-work. Health reform has to be done right.
Recommendation to everyone especially Mark
I recommend everyone go to www.democracynow.org and watch today's program.
The program is devoted to the commemoration of the Stonewall Riot which is seen as the starting point of the modern gay and lesbian movement. In the program, you'll hear from people who were involved in the events and from people whose lives were touched by those events.
I recommend the program because many of us who aren't LGBT ( lesbian - gay - bisexual - transgendered) aren't aware of, or tend to forget, the how great the discrimination against LGBT has been and still is.
I recommend this program to everyone. I recommend it specifically to Mark because he has posted comments on this blog that has shown disdain towards LGBT people.
I hope that today's Democracy Now program will help all of us understand the circumstances that LGBT people have lived under and still live under. I really hope Mark takes the time to watch or listen to the show. Maybe he can develop more empathy toward these members of our human family. I know that progressive radio, like Democracy Now and Pacifica Radio has helped me overcome our cultural prejudices against LGBT people.
Quark -
Nope - you were right the first time ... _I_ was wrong, it is tktvr.
Oops. :)
sorry - tvtkr
Here is the list of the ten Senators refusing to vote for a public option. The list comes from
http://www.billpressmedia.com/?p=3783 The contact information is listed on the Senate site.
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm?Name=...
Lets fill up their voice mail and email boxes.
Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR): (202) 224-6551 Web Form: bennelson.senate.gov/contact-me.cfm
Senator Tom Carper (D-DE): (202) 224-2441 ; web form carper.senate.gov/contact/
Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) (202) 224-3441 Web Form: cantwell.senate.gov/contact/
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) (202) 224-5244 Web Form: wyden.senate.gov/contact/
Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) (202) 224-6551 Web Form: bennelson.senate.gov/contact-me.cfm
Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) (202) 224-5824 Web Form: landrieu.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm
Senator Kay Hagan (D-NC) (202) 224-6342 Web Form: hagan.senate.gov/?p=contact
Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) (202) 224-2043 Web Form: conrad.senate.gov/contact/webform.cfm
Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) (202) 224-2651 Web Form: baucus.senate.gov/contact/emailForm.cfm?subj=issue
tktvr,
With your permission, I would like to send your comments re: Jeff Immelt on Charlie Rose to members of congress, along with a link to the video (If it's available online.)
OK with you?