Today, I review, link to and embed The Biggest Political Con of the Last Century Unmasked from The Hartmann Report. [Note to readers, I subscribe to the paid version of the Hartmann Report on Substack. It is only $8 a month and is truly worth it.]
All that follows is from the above resource.
The Biggest Political Con of the Last Century Unmasked by Thom Hartmann, May 21, 2025.
Why the destruction of public institutions, the middle class, and government itself may not be a mistake — but the mission…
Here’s the introduction to the article.
Neal deGrasse Tyson makes a very relevant point this week:
“If a foreign adversary snuck into our Federal budget and cut science research and education the way we’re cutting it ourselves — strategically undermining America’s long-term health, wealth, and security — we would likely consider it an act of war.”
Trump’s administration just said you can’t get the Covid vaccine unless you’re over 65 or sick, setting up America for more death and disease. As Noah Berlatsky notes in his great Substack newsletter:
“This is the latest effort by Trump to try to kick start a major US pandemic and degrade the health and welfare of the country. Trump has also rolled back food testing, including testing for bacteria in infant formula. He’s made major cuts at the FAA, leading to fears for airline safety—and a number of dramatic airline safety failures already may be related to the destruction of capacity. Cuts at the NOAA may diminish the ability to warn about dangerous weather events. The Republican proposals for Medicaid cuts are likely to lead to tens of thousands of deaths. And of course Trump’s senseless tariffs are increasing inflation, destroying jobs, and could still easily end us in a recession.“
But why? What the hell is going on here?
Almost two-thirds of us Americans can’t afford the basic necessities of life, according to a new report from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) reported by CBS News. They point out that if unemployment numbers included the underemployed and those stuck in “poverty-wage jobs,” it would be around 24%, not the 4.2% recently reported, leading to an acknowledgement of a widespread misery that’s largely hidden by the way we currently calculate unemployment.
Income for the bottom 60% of Americans, for example, actually declined by 4% in the years 2001 to 2023 while costs — particularly for healthcare, housing, food, and education (college tuition, for example, is up 122% since 2001) — have exploded.
Before the pandemic, half of all homes on the market were affordable to a family earning $75,000 a year; today it’s only one out of five houses that such a family could afford to purchase.
The initial result of this post-Reagan Revolution economy was to kneecap the middle class and working class; now Republicans are using the same strategy they employed to destroy our middle class to dismantle our nation’s government and its core functions to leave us vulnerable to the predation of foreign nations, vulture capitalists, and the morbidly rich.
And nobody’s sure why.
The history of how we got here is shocking. And the place it’s taking us — gutting government functions while handing our role in the world over to China and Russia — is downright scandalous.
At first, it was simply a political strategy to claim the mantle of Santa Claus from the Democrats by “gifting” America with tax breaks. Then it became a program to force Dems to kill off their own social programs by driving up the national debt. And now it’s being used to disassemble the American government itself, abandoning what’s left of the middle class while handing America’s dominant role in the world to China and Russia.
You could call it treason, except that it’s become so normalized and institutionalized that most Americans wouldn’t even understand the reason for the label.
Republican policy weirdness that brought us to this moment began around the national debt in 1981.
