Thom Hartmann reminds us in his Friday newsletter that we are currently in an oligarchy. That is rule by the elite, usually the wealthy. He also reminds us the we have been here before, but have so far survived.
Hartmann also notes as we seem to once more be coming to a make or break moment that this has happened approximately every 80 years. This fall’s election will be the single point of the current iteration of choosing which path America will pursue – continued oligarchy or return to democracy.
Hartmann also notes that oligarchy is always a temporary condition leading either to full blown dictatorship or a return to democracy. I will see if I can conjure up a question or two on the subject. Meanwhile – another scary week as the US teeters in oligarchy.
A) What seemingly insane reason did the Trump Administration give for reimposing tariffs across the world?
B) Good work if you can get it. By what percentage has Ashley Hinson’s net worth grown since she has been in congress?
C) The House Judiciary Committee encouraged the DOJ to look into charging what former special prosecutor claiming he lied to congress?
D) In oligarchies of the US’s past, monopolistic practices sanctioned by the British government for what company led to the American Revolution?
E) A man named Daniel Siad died in France last week. Siad had connections with whom that cast suspicions on Siad’s death?
F) A Mexican citizen was killed while fleeing what gestapo like US governmental agency while on vacation in the US?
G) In Hartmann’s cycle of oligarchy 80 years later following the Revolution would be the 1850s. What practice were oligarch’s involved in that led to a major US conflict?
H) What Candidate for Iowa’s Lieutenant Governor was deeply in debt but after he was nominated for the Lt. Gov. job suddenly had access to money to pay his debts?
I) In a proposal that really tests the emoluments clause, Trump is offering for sale early access to what on his Truth Social social media?
J) The Transportation Department is moving to rename NYC’s Penn Station transportation hub in honor of whom?
K) The FDA claimed that lettuce first thought to be contaminated with the cyclospora parasite was actually a what?
L) 80 years following the previous oligarchic ascent in the US, what society changing event took place that led to a reassertion of democracy?
M) According to former ICE leader Greg Bovino, how many illegal immigrants are currently living in the US?
N) Iowa’s own Chuck Grassley made an impassioned speech on the floor of the senate a couple days ago decrying what awful situation?
O) In Texas, AG Ken Paxton is running for the US Senate. Last week it was disclosed that despite making only $153,000 per year he owned how many homes valued at what?
P) We are now over 80 years since the last oligarchic uprising, so we are overdue. What can you do to stop the oligarchs this time around?
Q) Guess we had a battle last week between two what that went rogue?
R) Trump seemed to show signs of dementia as he tried to hijack the celebration by what team that won the World Cup Sunday?
S) Trump announced a 50% tariff on products from Canada because of what offense that Canada perpetrated on the US?
T) What toxic masculinity influencer brothers were arrested in Miami by British agents in connection to sex trafficking charges?
It was communists when I was a kid. Then it was radical Muslims. Then Mexicans. MS13. Then any immigrant. Now we’re back to communists.
They have to have a boogeyman to scare the population so we don’t notice the fact that they’re stealing our democracy and robbing us blind. – FascistFacials
tip of the hat to all-hat-no-cattle.com
Answers:
A) to stop forced labor
B) 5 times.
C) Jack Smith. Buckle your seat belts, this one could get very interesting
D) The East India Company
E) Siad was a “Model Scout” for Jeffery Epstein
F) ICE
G) Slavery in the south
H) Derek Wulf – what a lucky guy, huh?
J) Donald Trump
K) False positive. This change came after the president of Taylor Farms had a meeting (and made a donation?) with the upper echelons of the Trump administration
L) the Great Depression – at that time referred to as the great Republican recession
M) 107 million – which is 1/3rd of the total US population
N) Grassley spoke on Caitlin Clark’s treatment in the WNBA
O) 15 homes valued at $9 million – when asked about them in a news conference, Paxton fled the news conference
P) Throw the oligarchs out through voting and helping to get the vote out
Q) AIs – apparently were doing some kind of test when they went rogue and got in a fight
R) Spain
S) Having smoke from Canadian wild fires cross the US – Canada border
T) Tristan and Andrew Tate – bye, bye boys
WOW. The Trump admin just barred the FBI from investigating cases where DHS officers get into confrontations with immigrants or citizens.
ICE HSI will lead all investigations, yet HSI has no jurisdiction to investigate civil rights violations.
The fox is guarding the henhouse. – Aaron Reichlin-Melnick
tip of the hat to all-hat-no-cattle.com
“Nature doesn’t need us to ‘save’ it. It needs us to stop destroying it. There’s a massive difference.” – earthcurated
Thanks to Chuckles Grassley the citizens of Iowa have really serious existential problems. Grassley and his party a little over a year ago passed a bill that literally took food out of the mouths of children and babies by slashing SNAP benefits in order to give the likes of Elon Musk and mark Zuckerberg bigger, bigger tax cuts.
In that same bill, Chuckles and his compadres slashed medicaid to the bones. Once again this will devastate poor people in Iowa. Grassley and the Iowa Republican caucus in congress will be simply devastating hundreds of thousands of Iowans without so much as a “sorry.” I have never seen such a group of callous, soulless , unempathetic bunch in my life.
Thus the senior member of the US Senate has shown over and over that he cares little if anything about everyday Iowans. For all he cares they can go die – just please do it quietly and away from cameras. But there is something he cares about.
Grassley cares deeply about rough play in the WNBA. Or at least rough play when it happens to Caitkin Clark. And suddenly he wants it to stop – at least against Caitlin Clark.
Caitlin Clark has suddenly found herself to be apparrently some kind of an adopted mrtyr for the extremist right wing Republicans. Following a nasty foul on Clark by a Phoenix Mercury player that was not called at that time observers actually politicized the play. This foul was used as an example of out of control games and it was implied that the black players were attacking white players.
Clark complained as she was right to do, the play was reviewed and a penalty was assessed after the game. Not what is ideal, but it was dealt with.
In this speech in the US Senate Grassley wastes our time and money glorifying Caitlin Clark. I have no doubt some one must have told Grassley this is a really big deal. There is little doubt what Grassley’s mission was to do here – bring out the race wedge without saying certin words.
When this country has citizens starving, people who are priced out of housing, people who are priced out of medical care, an illegal war started by our president blowing through money like there is no tomorrow, incompetence from the county courthouse to the half demolished White House, bribery at all levels of government, income inequality higher than it has ever been and an administration making world wide enemies — a foul on Caitlin Clark is all Grassley can think about? What a waste!!!
Well, Chuck, I hope the country is laughing at you. You really deserve to be laughed at. And then the conversation about you leaving the senate needs to get serious. Trump is showing serious signs of dementia and needs to leave. After this speech, I believe you should start thinking about it also.
If you are concerned about finding something to do after you leave the senate, you kind of answered your own question. The WNBA needs referees – according to you. Put your name in now. I am sure they will have a spot for you next season. One thing to look out for, though. Girls now play 5 player basketball. No one any longer plays the 6 girl variety. All of the girls can now cross the half court line.
Oh and by the way – if you really want to help women, there is a group of women who are dying to get some help from somebody as important as you. They are called the Epstein Survivors. They were raped and had all sorts of abuse when they were under 18. They would really like some help identifying and arresting and bringing to justice the perpetrators.
There seems to lready be some work done on this. Information has been gathered into something called “the Epstein Files.” These Survivors need a powerful governement politico to get that file out in the public, Chuck. Can you help them?
You don’t need to fight Caitlin Clark’s fights. Caitlin Clark can take care of herself. If not her coaches and team hierarchy can help her. But theses Epstein Survivors really need your help. Are you in?
Last week as people wrestled with the idea that eating a fast food taco might drastically sicken them for weeks, they looked for their government for an answer to the very basic questions – what is causing this and how will we stop it? In recent times the US government has been pretty responsive in identifying and then stopping such food born outbreaks.
Through response mechanisms built up in various governmental agencies such as the FDA, the CDC, the Agriculture department and other related agencies constantly gathering and evaluating data were often able to staunch food born outbreaks early and identify the causes and deal with them quickly. While it is not possible to totally prevent such outbreaks, they were very good at limiting damage.
When a contaminated food source was identified it was usually disposed of quickly and fully eliminating the hazard. Companies knew that responding quickly and eliminating any problem was the best for their reputations. When there is a problem the public wants to know that XYZ company will respond with public health in mind.
That is why the response in the recent cyclosporia outbreak was so concerning as the investigation and response broke all the norms. Much as the response to the Covid outbreak of 2020 was fumbled into a massive outbreak with hundreds of thousands dying, the current cyclosporia situation has the makings of being massively fumbled far beyond what it should be.
One of the reasons that Covid was fumbled so badly was that the Trump administration put political considerations above the general welfare. Remember that decisions were made to let Democratic areas such as cities suffer to decrease democratic voter rolls.
This time around, preventative and early warning aparatus were dismantled to free up money to give huge tax breaks to the wealthy. Often some of these tax breaks would return to the MAGA party in the form of “donations.” Thus when the aparatus was needed, it was unavailable.
Also the identifying and tracing operation was far below what it had been, thus delaying the response. And just to add an exclamation point to this whole mess, (for the first time I had ever heard of) declared their testing to have yielded a “false positive.”
Mixed in with all this is what appears to be some “quid pro quo” (this for that) donations from Taylor Farms. Thom Hartmann spells it out in more detail in his Thom Hartmann Report daily substack newsletter:
As I write this, federal investigators are chasing the worst cyclospora outbreak in decades, thousands of people across more than thirty states doubled over with what the CDC delicately calls “frequent and sometimes explosive diarrhea,” and they still can’t tell you for certain which farm it came from.
Over the weekend, after the $7 billion company’s CEO visited the White House, the FDA walked back a positive test on lettuce from Taylor Farms, the largest salad producer in North America, announcing that its own earlier finding of cyclospora had somehow turned out to be a false positive. That leaves thousands of sickened Americans with no confirmed source at all, which is a peculiar place to land in a country that once prided itself on knowing where its dinner came from.
The reason nobody can trace it back isn’t much of a mystery. Back in March of 2025 Trump’s FDA and it’s boss, Bob Kennedy, delayed its new Food Traceability Rule by thirty months, shoving the deadline to track high-risk foods like leafy greens from the field to your plate all the way out to 2028.
Around that same stretch the CDC quietly cut its own foodborne illness surveillance from eight pathogens down to two, and cyclospora was one of the six it stopped watching. The monitoring had always been a hassle for the giant salad makers. And then the big money hit Trump’s bank account, and you’re the one stuck in the bathroom wondering who’s payoff got you.
That’s the whole corrupt Republican machine in a single lettuce field, and what follows is the same story told a couple dozen more times.
So once again we have a Trump regime governing only for their donors and to hell with the rest.
You can almost bet that this time next year we will probably be going through some form of a health crisis that could have been stopped before it became a crisis. I hear that tuberculosis has been identified at an ICE prison in Colorado.
Corruption does have consequences for everyone. Remember that when you vote this fall.
When Mark Divitt voted in the June 2 Democratic primary he noted there was no candidate on his ballot for the Iowa House of Representatives. That led to his decision to run and Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart called a special nominating convention for House District 91 on July 9. About half of district voters live in Iowa County, and half in Johnson County, so the convention was held virtually. Divitt became the nominee.
On Saturday, July 18, Divitt formally launched his campaign in conjunction with the grand opening of the Iowa County Democrats’ campaign office in Williamsburg. In the meanwhile, he has been preparing for the campaign by meeting party officials and other candidates, creating campaign materials, and raising money. Who is Mark Divitt and what does he stand for? He’s a Democrat.
The candidate provided some biographical information as follows.
Born and raised in Northern California, I attended Sonoma State University and earned a B.S. in Computer Science, graduating cum laude. I started my career at Hewlett-Packard, then went on to work with a number of large companies and small startups as a software engineer and architect. Along the way I held numerous leadership roles, where I learned that listening, attention to detail, and hard work are the real keys to success.
I’m blessed to be the father of two successful children and grandfather to six great kids. I’m married to a wonderful woman originally from Benton County, and we moved back to Iowa to be closer to family and build a simpler, more grounded life.
Recently retired from a long tech career, I haven’t slowed down. I’ve been organizing neighbors, researching the regulatory process, and pushing for transparency in the fight against the proposed Morgan Valley Energy Center, a gas-fired power plant that would affect the air and water our communities depend on. That fight led me to found EcoInference.ai (Many Rivers Iowa LLC), where I’m building energy-efficient, privacy-respecting AI technology that runs right on a device you already own, like your phone or your computer, instead of relying on massive, resource-hungry data centers. If EcoInference.ai ever turns a profit, I’ve committed to donating all of it to local charities.
That fight taught me something: the people of District 91 deserve someone who will actually show up, listen, and do the work — not offer platitudes. I’m not a career politician — I’m a plain citizen, same as you, who wants to help. And I believe that’s exactly what our founders intended: neighbors stepping up to serve their communities for a time, then coming home. Iowa built its legislature as a citizen legislature for that very reason. That’s the spirit I’d bring to it, and that’s why I’m running.
Regarding policy, Divitt will seek diverse opinions in his campaign and if elected to the legislature. “I believe in free speech — not just for people I agree with, but for people I don’t,” he said. “Tolerance only means something if it cuts both ways: if you only defend the speech you like, you’re not defending free speech, you’re defending your own opinions.”
Divitt supports public schools, and recognizes the need to fund Iowa public schools first. Iowa’s school voucher system sends tax dollars from the public school system to private schools, and he would change the program. He sees a short-sighted governor who has information about the failure of vouchers in other states, yet “hasn’t lifted a finger to fix Iowa’s program.” Divitt seeks to remedy that.
He believes small to mid-sized farms are the backbone of Iowa County and rural Johnson County. Divitt would support policies that impact these operations. Farming is a way of life in Iowa, he said, and farm families deserve a better regulatory environment to improve earnings.
His statement about water and air quality is straight forward. “I’ll push for transparency and enforceable standards, informed by direct experience fighting the Morgan Valley Energy Center power plant.”
If the topic of data centers and the energy and water they use is something of a moving target, Divitt has been in the fight for data center accountability. He believes ratepayers and rural communities shouldn’t foot the bill for someone else’s power and water demand.
Regarding mental health, Divitt sees the differences between the two counties he would represent. He views the Johnson County GuideLink Center as something that works, and would like to expand the concept to Iowa County and other parts of rural Iowa.
Mark Divitt supports a woman’s right to choose.
To learn more about Mark Divitt, or get involved in the campaign, check out his website at markdivittforiowa.org.
“This cycle crypto is spending more than a third of all corporate super PAC spending. They are on track to spend more than $200 million, just that one industry. Just crypto.” – Ezra Levin, Indivisible co-founder
Ben McKenzie, author of New York Times bestseller Easy Money and maker of the documentary, Everyone is Lying to You for Money, is a guest on this Indivisible podcast. He provides a brief explainer of cryptocurrency in plain terms:
“You’ve heard of the term Blockchain technology. So Blockchain is just a ledger. It’s a way of storing information. In this case recording transactions. These are transactions where a person is sending crypto currency to another person.
All cryptocurrency itself is just the lines of code stored on these ledgers called blockchains. So there is no there there. It’s just lines of code. It’s uncorrelated with any real world asset of any kind and it’s not an actual currency that’s backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, in the case of the U.S. dollar or by other countries’ governments. So it is theoretically, a form of private money, meaning money that’s not issued by a government, but by a corporation. Or by an individual, in this case, Donald Trump – World Liberty Financial is his corporation. So it’s literal corporate money.
What’s important to understand about Blockchain is that it sucks. It’s really old and it’s not used by almost any other businesses outside of the cryptocurrency industry… The reason that companies don’t use it is that it’s 35 years old. It goes back to 1991. It’s not a new technology. It’s been around for a very long time… Blockchain is just not that useful. Part of the reason is that it’s slow. Bitcoin can only do 5 to 7 transactions a second. Visa can do 24,000. So, it doesn’t work very well. And this is a repetitive theme when it comes to crypto.
So to bullet point this – what is it? It’s based on old, bad technology. And number two, it’s not money that’s issued by the government, it’s a form of private money. And if private money meaning corporate money, seems like a good idea to you then okay. But for most people, that seems like a really bad idea for obvious reasons. We don’t want corporations having even more control over our daily lives and God forbid, our monetary system.” – Ben McKenzie
Iowa House District 57 voters, get to know your candidate. Check out the links below if you would like to get involved. Here is his bio from the campaign website ShawnforIowa.com
Meet Shawn Ellerbroek
Shawn Ellerbroek brings his passion for education and community to his campaign for Iowa House of Representatives District 57. With over two decades of experience as a biochemistry professor, Ellerbroek is deeply committed to shaping policies that prioritize water quality, reduce cancer rates, produce a common-sense balanced state budget, protect and improve rural public education, and provide affordable and accessible healthcare for all Iowans.
Shawn is a life-long Iowan who has raised three children in Waverly with his wife, Angie. His service as President of the Waverly-Shell Rock School Board and career in cancer research give him a profound understanding of many of the key issues facing Iowans. The Shawn for Iowa platform emphasizes being present in the community, listening and inclusive governance, and evidence-based decision-making that fosters a brighter, more equitable future for all Iowans.
“Mr. President these people are misleading you if they’re telling you that this can be implemented by November. The only thing that will occur is undermining of the integrity of our elections right now… We couldn’t have got it done with 10,000 election entities if we’d passed it last July. So let’s be honest with the American people…let’s stop the charade. Let’s stop the distraction.. what we’re going to do if we continue down this path is convince the American people that you can’t count on your election results. And that is dangerous. That is irresponsible. – Senator Thom Tillis
Of all the things Trump wants to do, the so-called SAVE Act is the scariest of them all. In this video Republican Senator Tillis is explaining that the logistics of implementation would be impossible; he’s not arguing against it on the basis that it would disenfranchise millions of American voters. He’s just saying it’s too late to implement it.
Senaator Tilllis’ speech is not significant because it means the massive voter suppression bill is dead. It is significant because it means it still could happen. This is the bill that would force married women who have changed their last name to go get a birth certificate before they would be allowed to register to vote, among other preposterous democracy-killing ideas. It was supposed to be DOA in the senate a year ago.
I believe it is never too late for Trump to try to put the squeeze on whoever he needs to in order to get what he wants. DT doesn’t give a crap about proper or timely implementation. With his poll numbers crashing, he just wants to disenfranchise as many voters who do not approve of him as he can – of which there is a majority now. Don’t expect Trump go give it up. He knows he needs it or he’s cooked.
Contact your senators and reps. The “Sabotage the American Voter Act”
must not pass.
The number for the Capitol switchboard is (202) 224-3121 where you will be connected to your senator or representative.
Ryan Cooper at prospect.org has a great analysis of the current cyclosporasis and how the current cuts in long standing public health agencies let the disease start and now spread. Much like the Covid-19 that the first Trump administration blithered into a crisis, keep your eye on this one.
The current Trump administration has no idea what to do. If they are doing anything, most likely they are figuring out how to score big money on it. Remember they have already fostered a measles crisis, screwworms in cattle and now there are reports of tuberculosis in ICE detention centers. The Trump administration is just plain incompetent and don’t care:
By February 2026, USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service had lost 913 staff, while the Food and Nutrition Service lost 564. The agency’s National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection was also axed. All told, more than 20,000 workers left USDA last year.
The damage to American public-health infrastructure has been just as bad. The Centers for Disease Control, whose primary task is understanding and combating disease outbreaks like this one, has lost nearly 3,000 staff under Trump, while the Food and Drug Administration has lost more than 4,000. Food safety inspections have been going undone as a result. In February 2025, FDA Deputy Commissioner Jim Jones angrily resigned from the agency’s Human Foods Program, which monitors food safety, after dozens of his workers were sacked. And in July that year, Kennedy directed the CDC to cut six out of eight pathogens, cyclospora among them, monitored as part of its FoodNet program.
In addition to Trump’s deranged crusade against public health, he has also loudly signaled that big corporations can commit whatever crimes they want. Foxes are in every regulatory henhouse—that is, the ones that haven’t been de facto shuttered, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Are we really to believe that Trump cut numerous programs for disease prevention, tracking, and containment, including some that specifically tracked cyclospora, as well as damaging state capacity across the board, and gravely damaging the morale of the federal workers who haven’t yet been fired, and then the worst cyclosporiasis outbreak in American history happens immediately afterward purely by coincidence? Come on.
Some state health departments are doing what they can. Michigan, notably, has counted 3,762 cases at time of writing, as compared to the CDC’s 1,645, and identified salad greens as a possible—not confirmed!—culprit. But as Katrine Wallace points out at Stat News, most state health departments are not really equipped to collect and compare case information across multiple states. Coordinating national responses to national problems is the most basic responsibility of the federal government, and under Trump it just is not happening. We might not figure out what is going on until cases are seen in Minnesota, whose health department has the best disease investigators in the country. That’s likely the only state that can do the CDC’s job for it and track down disease outbreaks outside its borders.
The MAHA Trots aren’t the only problem caused by Trump’s savaging of the American administrative state. There is a festering screwworm outbreak caused in part by Elon Musk’s destruction of USAID. There is a festering measles outbreak that is both not being contained by RFK’s gutted CDC, and caused in part by him personally, through his yearslong history of spewing anti-vaccine misinformation. Weather forecasts have become notably less accurate due to Trump’s budget cuts grounding half the government’s weather balloons.
The scary thought is that with this administration’s incompetence and attitude, something much worse may be still out there.
On a final note I offer Trump Trots as the name for cyclosporiasis.
Governor Kim Keynolds: (515) 281-5211 U.S. Capitol Switchboard: (202) 224-3121 Iowa Members of Congress - Rep. Randy Feenstra (R) - Rep. Ashley Hinson (R) - Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R) - Rep. Zach Nunn (R) Iowa US Senators - Senator Joni Ernst (R) - Senator Charles Grassley (R)
“This cycle crypto is spending more than a third of all corporate super PAC spending. They are on track to spend more than $200 million, just that one industry. Just crypto.” – Ezra Levin, Indivisible co-founder
Blog For Iowa 