Probably the most under-reported story of the year has been how Mitch McConnell is holding Americans hostage in exchange for letting big corporations kill Americans without any consequence.

Mitch took you and me hostage back in May, when the House of Representatives passed the HEROES act that would have funded state and local governments and provided unemployed workers with an ongoing weekly payment.

Mitch refused to even allow the Senate to discuss the HEROES Act until or unless the legislation also legalized corporations killing their workers and customers. To this day, he refuses to let it even be discussed in the Senate.

Read more here.

-Thom

Tuesday's Daily Stack

Article: "Mitch McConnell's Liability Shield Is Major Holdup For COVID-19 Deal" by Arthur Delaney, Igor Bobic.

Article: "What's in the House Democrats' $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill?" (Heroes act, passed House May 15, 2020) by Grace Segers.

Article: "House passes $2.2 trillion Democratic coronavirus stimulus bill" by Jacob Pramuk.

Article: "Tyson Foods manager had betting pool for how many workers would get COVID-19: suit" by Ben Feuerherd.

Article: "Invisible hand" by Wikipedia.

Article: "Milton Friedman" by Wikipedia.

Article: "Workers, ACLU sue Hastings meatpacking plant – Omaha, Nebraska" by Omaha.

Article: "15% of college athletes showed signs of heart damage after COVID. Should they sit on the sidelines to be safe?" by Dr. Dave Harrison.

Article: "Three-quarters of adults with COVID-19 have heart damage after recovery" by Brian P. Dunleavy.

Article: "A 'huge wave of evictions' is possible in January" by Anna Bahney.

Article: "'This can't wait.' Why long food lines signal need for more coronavirus stimulus aid" by Lorie Konish.

Article: "White House head of security has lost his lower right leg to COVID and spent three months in the ICU, friends reveal, as they plead for donations towards his 'astronomical' medical bills" by Katelyn Caralle.

Article: "Surprise Billing: Another Healthcare Market Failure" by Joshua Cohen.

Article: "Australia And New Zealand Will Form Travel Bubble In 2021" by Qin Xie.

Article: "More people in the US were killed by Covid than 9/11 yesterday" by Jordan King.

Article: "White House abandoned plan to send 650 million face masks across the U.S. in April, report says" by Hannah Miao.

Article: "How Jared Kushner's Secret Testing Plan "Went Poof Into Thin Air"" by Katherine Eban.

Article: "Trump Adviser Scott Atlas Pushing For 'Herd Immunity' Strategy For COVID-19" by uPolitics.com.

Tweet: "You may want to mute this account for a while because I feel I may have to individually insult every member of the outgoing administration in crude and personal ways" by Hari Kunzru.

Article: "WATCH: Sens. Manchin and Collins hold press conference on COVID-19 relief bill" by AP.

Article: "The Stimulus Bill Subsidizes Defense Contractors While Denying Direct Payments to Workers" by David Sirota, Julia Rock.

Article: "What's in the House Democrats' $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill?" (Heroes act, passed House May 15, 2020) by Grace Segers.

Article: "The Powell Memo or Powell Manifesto".

Case: "Buckley v. Valeo", 1976

Article: "Homunculus" by Wikipedia.

Quote: "And we could have lost more than 2 million people. We could have lost more than 2 million. It could have been much more than that, by the way. We have one that says from 1.6 to 2.2, but it could have really been more than that. But I looked at one in particular - one country in particular that is using the herd mentality, and not working out very well." - Donald J. Trump, April 17, 2020.

Article: "Herd mentality" by Wikipedia.

Article: "Sigmund Freud" by Wikipedia.

Article: "Edward Bernays" by Wikipedia.

Article: "Michael Ratner" by Wikipedia.

Article: "Hamdi v. Rumsfeld" by Wikipedia.

Article: "Hamdan v. Rumsfeld" by Wikipedia.

Article: "War Crimes Suit Filed in Germany Against Rumsfeld, Other Top U.S. Officials over Prisoner Torture" by Democracy Now!

Article: "Trump admin held back phone numbers and addresses that could have reunited separated migrant children with parents" by David Badash.

Hour Two: Conversations With Great Minds: How Should We Deal With Strongmen?
- Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Professor of History & Italian Studies-New York University (NYU) / Historian & cultural critic / scholar on fascism & authoritarian leaders / Author of seven books including her latest, From Mussolini to the Present

Article: "The European leader who created a template for Trump's 2024" by Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

Article: "'I see no need to hide': Putin on his shirtless pics that swept the Internet" by RT.

Article: "Vladimir Putin" (Russia) by Wikipedia.

Article: "Viktor Orbán" (Hungary) by Wikipedia.

Article: "Jair Bolsonaro" (Brazil) by Wikipedia.

Article: "Benito Mussolini" by Wikipedia.

Article: "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer" by Oxford Reference.

Article: "Augusto Pinochet" (Chile) by Wikipedia.

Article: "Francisco Franco" by Wikipedia.

Article: "Beer Hall Putsch" by Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Article: "Donald Trump Has Retweeted Several White Nationalist Accounts And Spread Neo-Nazi Propaganda, Report Finds" by Nathan Francis.

Article: "The Commander-in-Chief a Civilian Officer" by LII.

Article: "Peaceful Protesters Gassed So Trump Can Do a Sacrilegious Bible Photo Op" by Ed Kilgore.

Article: "Robert Gates: Trump Taken Use Of Military As Prop to 'New Level'" by Cathy Burke.

Article: "Trump administration removes senior defense officials and installs loyalists, triggering alarm at Pentagon" by Barbara Starr, Zachary Cohen and Ryan Browne.

Article: "Here's Why DARPA Wants to Borrow a Labyrinth of Underground Urban Tunnels" by Rafi Letzter.

Article: "General Milley Checks on His Troops… On the Streets of D.C." by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos.

Article: "Pentagon's top general apologizes for appearing alongside Trump in Lafayette Square: Gen. Mark Milley apologizes for appearing at Trump photo op" by Dan Lamothe.

Article: "Recep Tayyip Erdoğan" (Turkey) by Wikipedia.

Article: "Abdel Fattah el-Sisi" (Egypt) by Wikipedia.

Article: "How journalists become objects of hate" by Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

Article: "New Calvinism" by Wikipedia.

Article: "'I am the Jesus Christ of politics.' Berlusconi's quips, pranks through the years" by Toronto Star.

Article: "Tom Cotton" by Wikipedia.

Article: "Send In the Troops" by Tom Cotton.

Article: "Trump considers 2024 campaign kickoff on Inauguration Day" by Carol E. Lee, Monica Alba and Kristen Welker.

Article: "Trump news: Will Ivanka Trump run for the Senate in Florida?" by Liam Doyle.

Article: "Christine Lagarde's face while Ivanka Trump tries to speak to world leaders at G20 pretty much says it all" by Sophia Ankel.

Article: "Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner Are Moving To South Florida: Report" by Tiffany Razzano.

Article: "Steve Schmidt: Donald Trump's Republican Party Must "Burn To The Ground"" by Ian Schwartz.

Article: "Meet Robert Mercer, the conservative billionaire who was a megadonor for Trump during the 2016 campaign but is notably absent in 2020" by Debanjali Bose.

Article: "The Man Behind Trump's Facebook Juggernaut" by Andrew Marantz.

Hour Three: Conversations With Great Minds: The Invisible Hand
- Melissa Troutman and Joshua Boaz Pribanic, Directors or the new documentary, INVISIBLE HAND (Executive Producer, Mark Ruffalo) & Co-Founders Public Herald Studios

Movie: "Dark Waters".

Article: "Rights of nature" by Wikipedia.

Article: "Press Release: Grant Township Injection Well Ban Stands, Court Denies 'Collateral Attack' from DEP" by Chad Nicholson.

Article: "Grant Township Forces Pennsylvania to Revoke Injection Well Permit" by Chad Nicholson.

Article: "BREAKING: Gas Company Files Federal Lawsuit To Overturn Small Pennsylvania Township's Rights of Nature Law…Again" by Chad Nicholson.

Case: "Dartmouth College v. Woodward", 1819

Case: "Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad", 1886

Article: "Water to be traded on Wall Street as Futures commodity; joins likes of gold, oil" by India TV Business Desk.

Article: "In Pittsburgh, a community bill of rights helped ban fracking" by Ben Price.

Article: "Lake Erie now has legal rights, just like you" by Sigal Samuel.

Article: "Nature Scores a Big Win Against Fracking in a Small Pennsylvania Town" by Justin Nobel.

Article: "Milton Friedman" by Wikipedia.

Article: "The Doctrine of Discovery, 1493" by Pope Alexander VI.

Article: "Carrying capacity" by Wikipedia.

Article: "What Are Rights of Nature?".

Article: "Thomas Linzey" by cder.

Article: "Injection well" by Wikipedia.

Article: "DOH Continues to Dodge Health Impacts from Oil & Gas Radiation, Passes Study to the University of Pittsburgh" by Public Herald.

Site: Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF)

Article: "Constitutional Amendment Introduced in Pennsylvania" by Chad Nicholson.

Article: "Ohio Legislature Bans Rights of Nature Enforcement" by Tish O'Dell.

Wednesday on The Thom Hartmann Program, 12-3pm ET

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