Thom Hartmann: The Hidden History of the Oligarchy

to politics tom is the new york times best-selling four-time project censored award-winning author of i think it's 25 books but i hope i'll be forgiven if i'm off by a couple his book attention deficit or disorder a different perception published back in 1993 sparked a national debate on add adhd and neurological difference the last hours of ancient sunlight the fate of the world and what we can do before it's too late was published in 1998 and inspired leonardo dicaprio's film the 11th hour in 2010 tom published rebooting the american dream 11 ways to rebuild our country a book that so inspired bernie sanders that he read from it extensively on the floor of the senate tom now has a hidden history series that includes 11 paramount and timely books breaking down the obstacles um uh today obstacles facing today's society placing them both in historical context and providing real tangible calls to action for individuals and society at large recent entries in the series include 2018's the hidden history of guns in the second amendment 2019's the hidden history of the supreme court and the betrayal of america and 2020's the hidden history of monopolies how big business destroyed the american dream which was the occasion of his last visit to town hall virtually at least about six months ago the latest entry in the series is the hidden history of american oligarchy reclaiming our democracy from the working class and it's the subject of tonight's talk please join me in welcoming back tom hartman thank you where it's uh it's an honor and a pleasure to be back with town hall seattle it's uh it's such a great venue and i'm so pleased to be here and thank you for the for the great introduction and your kind words uh thanks to shane and josh and the folks at elliott bay books who are also on this and everybody at town hall seattle who are working to make this work happen and work um oligarchy the the reason why i started writing this book um which you know i began writing it about a year year and a year and a half ago and it was that i've been watching this trend through uh the last 30 30 to 40 years of my life and with growing alarm and the trump presidency just really brought it into sharp relief and i felt like you know somebody needs to lay out how we got here what the probable outcomes are what the dangers are and what we can do about and uh you know so thus uh the the hidden history of american oligarchy um for some definitions oligarchy you know the last time i was here we were talking about monopoly monopoly is when a small number of actors corporations typically end up dominating a marketplace and and thus pushing out competition oligarchy is like the political equivalent of that it's where a small number of actors typically very wealthy individuals because wealth can translate into political power quite easily it's a very fluid relationship a small number of very powerful political actors seize control of the political marketplace as it were and turn it to their own benefit and very often as a consequence of that to the detriment of everyone else a literal definition well maybe not literal but you know another way of defining oligarchy would be to say that it's when government ceases to work for the people and exclusively works for the very very wealthy or for the for the oligarchs who basically own and control the the political space and that's where we're at right now back and and there's a reason why this is so dangerous oligarchies are inherently unstable and i'll explain that in just a second and and they tend to flip in one of two directions and we'll get to that also but how do we know that we're in an oligarchy right now probably the best uh uh analysis that's been done was uh by two researchers benjamin page and matthew gillins uh they published their work back in 2014 i believe that they were with princeton and northwestern universities uh as i recall it's all in the book and uh they they were looking at and and by the way they're not unique in having done this there have been a number of subsequent studies and there were a few smaller ones that weren't as well circulated prior to their work so you know we can look at this more generally than just through the lens of this one study but basically what they were looking at was what's the relationship between what the majority of people want and what gets turned into legislation into law or public policy because that's the definition of democracy demos the people right what the people want is what the people get and when they looked at the period before the reagan revolution prior to 1980 what they found was that what the majority of people wanted frequently got translated into policy very frequently there's a clear correlation between public opinion polling that showed strong public support for particular issues and those issues and that you know those issues being converted into law and that's how we got medicare and medicaid and the minimum wage well that was in the 30s long-term unemployment payments um food stamps uh housing support uh a whole a variety of pell grant type college supports how we got brand new schools all across the united states brand new hospitals built all across the united states the eisenhower highway system of connecting the united states new new airports i mean you know you could probably complete the list or or add to the list as well as as i could there literally hundreds of programs that you can date back to the nineteen fifties sixties and seventies in particular some many of them to the nineteen thirties and forties as well that because of popular demand got turned into policy after the reagan revolution they looked at the same relationship between what the majority of people wanted and what actually happened and what they found was that that correlation was completely broken by 2000 the relationship between what people wanted in public opinion polls and in some cases strongly wanted and what we got was to quote their study you know the statistical equivalent of random noise of white noise but what the top one percent wanted consistently got translated into public policy you know for example the one major really the only significant legislative accomplishment of the last four years of the trump administration was a two trillion dollar tax cut that principally benefited billionaires and big corporations so what comes out of oligarchy in a situation like this and and and this i believe is why we had donald trump as president among other along with all these other faux populists you know like ted cruz talking about we love the working man and and that kind of stuff is that the people started looking around going you know hey you know i i i don't think that you know we'd like to we'd like to have a national health care system like every other developed country in the world does uh you know get with the program uh you know why do we have to have student debt in the united states literally no other developed country in the world has student in denmark they pay you 400 a month to go to college that's free um why can't we have nice stuff basically or you know why and and you know seniors you know why are they constantly you know why does the social security increase go so slowly that seniors are sliding into poverty why is met 20 of medicare have to come from private companies why is it that in 2005 george bush rolled out this new scam program called medicare advantage that now is is doing serious damage to medicare itself and is endangering the seniors who signed up for it because it's just private insurance and they can kick you off and they can deny coverage and and they routinely do um you don't have the protections that you have with medicare why is that why is that happening and so somebody comes along like donald trump who's who frankly stole parts of bernie's platform donald trump you'll recall campaigned on i'm gonna raise taxes on billionaires remember he said i'm you know these these my friends are gonna hate me i'm gonna get i'm going to get killed with this tax increase i'm going to get uh he said we're going to give everybody in the country medical medical care and it's going to cost a hell of a lot less than obamacare remember that we're going to bring back the jobs we're going to reverse the nafta and gat and and uh wto free trade policies that were negotiated by the reagan administration turned into treaties by the bush events the first bush administration and signed into law by the clinton administration we're going to reverse all that stuff and and the 60s 65 000 factories that have gone overseas in the last 20 30 years they're all going to come back home that's what he that's what he sold people and because people knew the government wasn't working for them when somebody comes along says you know the game is rigged it's pretty seductive call so that's another indicator that we're in oligarchy oligarchies are very vulnerable to to bs populism to fraudulent populism bernie sanders populism was a genuine populism the kind that franklin roosevelt uh you know rode to victory because he actually did what he said he was going to do and it was actually what people wanted uh donald trump's obviously was a phony populism as is that of you know his wannabe successors people like josh hawley and ted cruz and tom cotton etc the reason why oligarchy is so dangerous is because as the people are increasingly cranked up over the fact that they know they're not getting what they want out of government and they're protesting and they're writing letters to the editor and they're calling the members of congress and they're they're showing up at the occasional town hall meeting that that you know and and demanding things and just nothing is happening the the nature of the government typically flips in one of two directions either it either the government fights back the oligarchy which has happened twice in the history of the united states i'll get to that in just a second or the government the oligarchs get together and say we're not going to let go of this we're going to hang on to this oligarchy we're going to continue converting the wealth of this country into our own wealth and these people who are protesting out here we're going to create a police state to control them and that's what you're seeing right now in belarus in russia in um in uh hungary in poland it's happening uh in brazil it's happening in the philippines under duterte we're seeing countries that were democracies even if only for a relatively short period of time some of them long-term democracies that have become oligarchies and then when the oligarchy was challenged instead of flipping back to become being a democracy they instead flipped into becoming police states and we almost did that here in the last 60 days that would have been there's no doubt in my mind that had donald trump succeeded in overthrowing the election and was today the president that you know within a year a lot of people like me would be in jail because that's typically the first thing that that oligarchies do when they become police states they start imprisoning journalists and you'll recall donald trump waged a war on the press for four years they started prison journalists and opinion writers they they've prison opposition politicians look at navali in in russia right now i mean this this is just how they do it they brutally crack down on people so that's why the stakes are so high right now and why i thought it was so important to have this book uh to write this book and i'm i'm so glad that the book is out right now because we're literally on a nice edge if joe biden and the democrats cannot successfully demonstrate to the people of the united states that they can make government work for the people again like it did prior to 1980 prior to the reagan revolution if they cannot demonstrate that then we're going to see situate this whole situation get much much worse which is why i've been begging people to call joe manchin and kirsten cinema and any of the other democratic senators who want to keep the filibuster so that mitch mcconnell can destroy any kind of legislation that the democrats propose if on the other hand you know through through good luck good fortune or a miracle uh president biden and and the and the house and senate can actually pass legislation that's more than just a here you know here's 1400 bucks now now shut up and go away but instead real systemic change if we can wipe out student debt if we can produce a national health care system these are things that have like 70 80 90 popularity among the people stop banks from ripping people off um raise the minimum wage substantially build build an economy that works for everybody put this country back together in a meaningful way get rid of the potholes you know that kind of stuff if they can do that then there's a very good chance that they'll be able to fight back the oligarchs so to put this in a historical context the you know our first battle with oligarchy of course was the american revolution a monarchy is simply one form of oligarchy only it's a it's an oligarchy where instead of a group of wealthy people basically running the show you have one family that is at least the figurehead for the oligarchs and we fought a revolution against that in 1776 the second confrontation we had with oligarchy uh oligarch here the first internal cover confrontation we had with oligarchy in the united states happened as a result of a technological innovation in 1798 a fellow by the name of eli whitney invented a machine called the cotton gin now in the south cotton was the principal product cotton actually produced more wealth for the united states from the from the early 1700s through the mid to late 1800s than any anything else we did it was such a major export and so much of it flowed out of the port of new york and so much of the money went through the banks of new york that when the confederate states seceded from the union and declared war on on the northern part of america on the union the mayor of new york city publicly suggested that new york city should join them that's how you know there was a hell of a lot of money at stake here so the bottleneck in making money on cotton and producing large quantities of cotton was cleaning the seeds out of the cotton the the bowls of cotton uh you know little wads of cotton that grows the is essentially the the remnant of the flower of the cotton plant um have embedded in them these fairly substantial uh seeds that the the cotton fibers are glued to essentially and it it's an enormously difficult job to pick those seeds out of that cotton so what eli whitney invented was this machine that it was like a drum with a screen all the way around it and little hooks long long wires of the hook on the end would go through those screens grab a strand of cotton pull it out and the the seeds couldn't get through the screen and so they were stuck inside and you crank this thing and it would do this thing and and what was amazing was that this machine was able to do the work of 50 enslaved people one machine and so the larger plantations in the south who had the resources eli whitney charged a lot of money for these machines the larger plantations were able to buy cotton gins and as a consequence of this they could increase their cotton production fifty fold and they wiped out their small competitors and and in the process of wiping out their small competitors they bought up the land of the of all these small farms around them turned in many cases the former owners of those small cotton farms into essentially sharecroppers and and uh or or you know employees living on on what used to be their own land and as economic power consolidated this the cotton gin as i said was invented just you know two years before eighteen hundred but it really hit the marketplace in a big way around 1815 and so by 1830 this consolidation in the south was well underway and it on in every single one of the cotton producing southern states which was the majority of them what we saw was the the large plantations getting bigger and bigger and bigger these families getting richer and richer and richer and all of them turning their eye to politics they took over their state governments they were already running a police state in my first book on the hidden history guns in the second amendment the second amendment was written the way it was written to protect the slave patrols in virginia and south carolina which and georgia which were the militias of the day and so they already had a police state infrastructure and the south had become a rigidified oligarchy and they were very upset about the fact that there was still this democracy a very loud noisy democracy going on north of the mason-dixon line and it was infecting people in the south um it was causing rebellions it was causing discontent um you know across the board among enslaved people and among the poor white people who had been pushed off their farms and and uh or lost their farms and had become you know the employees of this oligarchy and so they essentially declared war on us said we don't want a democracy in north america we're going to take you down and they nearly succeeded you know six seven hundred thousand people died but we fought them back we beat them back and we defeated them and we then broke up those giant plantations uh one of the largest louisiana parchment is now the louisiana state prison the uh one of the largest in virginia was that of robert e lee's robert e lee's plantation is now known as arlington memorial cemetery so we put the we put the oligarchs basically back in a bottle then another technological innovation brought about our second confrontation with oligarchy in the united states which reached ahead in 1933 but the second confrontation with oligarchy really began in the 1880s 1890s with the railroad steel and oil and and coal and and all of these industrial dynamite chemicals all these industrial processes that produced a new generation of oligarchs the carnegies and the rockefellers and the morgans and the and uh you know the asters and on it went you know and those oligarchs started getting very politically active reaching out for control of not just individual states but the nation as a whole there was a blip in right after 1901 when mckinley was assassinated and his vice president teddy roosevelt became president roosevelt was a progressive and he tried to take on the oligarchs with the tillman act in 1907 that forbade corporate sponsorship of candidates for political office and by breaking up the big monopolies a job that was actually the the breaking up of standard oil was completed by his successor another progressive republican uh president taft but that kind of fell apart with world war one and uh and then in 1920 and explicitly and um an explicit embrace of oligarchy uh was the campaign slogan warren harding warren harding campaigned on basically two things that his first slogan was called a return to normalcy the top income tax rate at that point in time the top bracket was 91 percent it was a remnant of world war one and harding said we're going to drop that down to 25 percent which he did when he was elected his second campaign slogan was more business in government less government in business in other words privatize deregulate and he did and that kicked off the roaring twenties when the average working person's wages went down and the very rich got explosively rich so much so that they created this teetering edifice of money that crashed in 1929 which opened the space for franklin roosevelt to come in the election of 1932 and directly take on the oligarchs the oligarchs were not pleased with this and in fact a group of of businessmen it's called the businessmen's conspiracy a group of wealthy oligarchs pulled together they got you know put together a deal with a very very right-wing virtually nazi veterans organization veterans from world war one the spanish-american war they had over a hundred thousand volunteers they were going to march on the white house and kidnap or kill franklin roosevelt president roosevelt and put in and install as president a good republican the mistake they made was going to the most famous general in america at the time smedley butler is a marine general he was the most decorated man in the history of the america or the and then modern history of the american military he was the hero of world war one a hero the spanish american war and uh he blew the whistle on and shut that thing down which led to franklin roosevelt in his 1936 speech uh his acceptance speech in philadelphia in uh i believe it was august of 1936 um saying you know the these economic royalists need to be overthrown he literally used the word overthrow we need to overthrow this this this emerging monarchy essentially my word not his is an absolutely brilliant speech i encourage you to to look up and read fdr's 1936 acceptance speech it's mind-boggling because he calls these people out over and over and over again in that speech and declares war on them and he did go to war with them and he put them back into a bomb and they stayed there until the 1980s by and large and what we saw out of that was the fastest growth of the middle class in the history of america we had never seen a middle class grow and nowhere in the world actually in the history of the world nobody we've never seen a middle class grow that the modern oligarchy that we're fighting came out of that and where it started arguably was in 1951 a fellow by the name of russell kirk wrote a book called the conservative mind and this is the book that kicked off the modern conservative movement and in the conservative in the in the conservative mind kirk posited he he went back to the the debate between hobbes and lock in the 1600s hobbs and published leviathan in 1651 in the book that famously said that you know man's original state in in man's original state life would be nasty brutish and short but hobbes also posited that we could govern ourselves locke the next generation house was the tutor to king charles the first as a child locke was the tutor to king james the first as a child um locke about 30 years later in the in the 1670s published the second treatise on government and he said hobbes is wrong the essential nature of humans is not evil it's good and therefore it's even easier for us to govern ourselves we can even more easily govern ourselves and uh that and and along with the writings of john jacques rousseau who was more of a an anthropologist he was looking at the reports that were coming in now to to europe from explorers who were visiting north africa and west and west africa and the east coast of the of the north america and you know central and northern south america and what they were finding were aboriginal indigenous people who were actually living a pretty good life in many cases and didn't have warfare i mean ben franklin summed it up when he brought 34 members of the iroquois confederacy to the opening day of the constitutional convention in philadelphia in 1787 and gave this speech where he said it would be an extraordinary thing if five nations of ignorant savages have been able to forge a union that has that has uh remained that has been that has been an indissolvable bond of peace for a thousand years and 13 colonies of educated englishmen can't do the same so rousseau was writing about this and uh you know this idea that people could govern themselves that we didn't need a monarchy we didn't need a lineage we didn't need the oligarchs really caught fire in the minds of the people who founded this republic so anyhow uh russell kirk goes goes back to the beginning and basically takes hobbes's side of the argument the conservative side of the argument the people are evil and and kirk predicts in 1951 that this growing middle class phenomena that america was then witnessing and at that point in time we were the fastest growing largest middle class ever seen on earth it was a brand new thing he said if this continues if average people being unreliable as they are being greedy as they are being pickpockets and thieves and and shoplifters given a chance as they are if average people continue to get wealthier and wealthier and wealthier and keep in mind in 1951 the top five percent were getting rich more slowly than the bottom 90 percent the bottom 90 percent were growing both in wealth and in income faster than the top five percent and it stayed that way right up until the the end of the 1970s the early 1980s so anyhow kirk says if that happens it's going to be the end of american society now he really believed this and these conservatives really believed this and so you could you could argue that this is you know the the the tragedy of good intentions you know the road to hell is paid with good intentions the kirk said that basically if the middle class got wealthy enough what you would see is that young people would stop respecting their elders that women would no longer know their place that racial minorities would start demanding equality with white people that and and basically that all hell would break loose as a consequence of this and that and that working people would no longer respect their bosses their their their betters and you know when he published the book it had a following among the intelligentsia this was the book that really you know awakened barry goldwater and william f buckley jr i you know i remember as a kid in the 1950s late 1950s early 1960s sitting with my dad and watching william f buckley on tv you know talk about this stuff but nobody really took it seriously in the united states i mean it was talked about academically until around 1963 in 1961 the birth control pill was legalized by 1963 the birth control control pill was in widespread use and it kicked off the women's moon women could now control their reproduction their you know their potential for reproduction and started demanding an equal place in the in the marketplace in the job market by 1965 you had the beginnings of the psychedelic movement and young people starting to by 1966 and 67 certainly pushing back against the war in vietnam saying hell no i won't go you had a civil rights movement led by the reverend dr martin luther king and others that was big and visible and scary to a lot of these white conservatives and by 1967 68 69 you had cities that were on fire as a result of this you had women quote burning bras you had young people burning draft cards you had union workers going on strike in record numbers and at that point the conservatives in the republican party and some in the democratic party looked back at russell kirk's writing and said my god he's right we've got to strip back the wealth of this middle class or this country is going to become a hell hole and and so the uh chamber of commerce uh eugene cinder the director of the champ us chamber of commerce uh talked with his friend and neighbor louis powell a tobacco lawyer in virginia and said give us an outline what should we do how do we deal with this we don't want our society to collapse we're loyal americans we want to have a safe country what do we do and lewis powell outlined it he said okay you know we've got to seize control of all these systems that have kind of fallen apart we've got to get we've got to get our people in the university so that we can start teaching young people a good conservative world view in the political science and economics departments we've got to take over the political space we've got to we've got to pack the courts we've you know we've got to we've got to control the textbooks in the schools we've you know and he just went through this long list that we've got to have our friends buy up the media and consolidate the media he laid out a blueprint for a conservative takeover of america in 1971. the next year richard nixon put him on the supreme court lewis palm and over the next couple of years some very very wealthy people uh in particular people who had been previously like fred koch had previously been funding the john birch society started funding programs like the heritage foundation the cato institute um competitive enterprise institute every single state has a you know the state policy network every single state has a has their own right wing think tank in it that would turn out material for the newspapers op-eds um you know just google any topic that's controversial right now and the top 20 hits that you're going to get are going to be things that either came out of a right wing think tank or were published in a newspaper or a magazine by somebody who was a graduate of a right thing wing think tank i mean they it they've had tremendous influence and then reagan came into power and reagan's number one mandate and oh well actually there's one one more piece to the story in 1976 the supreme court lewis powell now on the court the supreme court changed the rules of the game after the nixon bribery scandals of 73 74 we passed a lot of good government legislation limiting the influence of money in politics it was done under jerry ford's administration by and large but it was good stuff and so in 76 lewis powell and the supreme court looked at these laws and they said you know if a individual billionaire wants to own a politician wants to be the principal patron of a politician the only source for that politician and that politician wants to do whatever that billionaire wants in terms of producing legislation and voting we used to call that corruption we used to call that in fact bribery but we're not going to call it that anymore because what we're going to say is that money is not money giving money to a politician that's not bribery that's not money that is speech and so when a billionaire owns a politician he's exercising his right of free speech which is protected by the first amendment and then two years later another decision that lewis paul actually wrote called first national bank versus belotti the supreme court extended that logic to corporations because you know corporations are people too you know this opened a floodgate of cash now the democratic party really didn't have much interest in all this corporate and billionaire cash that was flooding into the political system because they were really well funded by the unions keep in mind at that point in time a third of americans had a good union job and they were paying union dues and so working people were funding the democratic party through their unions the unions were so awash in cash that a few corrupt union leaders franklin simmons jimmy hoffa were able to skim money off the top in fact jimmy hoffa skimmed a million bucks off the top and used it to bribe richard nix so so the democrats weren't interested but the republicans said cross my palm with cash i'll take whatever you've got and that flood of cash brought ronald reagan into office and reagan's first job was to defund the democratic party destroy the funding base for the democratic party which meant destroy the unions and he declared war on patco in one week he took down one of the only two unions that had actually endorsed him for president they thought they had to deal with and in this he was following the model of his role model margaret thatcher who two years earlier had done the exact same thing with the largest and most powerful union in the world arguably or certainly in the united kingdom which was the coal miners union she destroyed them it was a much longer process but it worked and reagan was so successful in doing this in the twelve years of the reagan bush administration they wiped out of almost half of the union unionization of of america that in 1992 bill clinton had to go hat and hand he and al from created this thing called the dlc so that they could funnel corporate money into the democratic party he had to go hand-in-hand to the bankers and the insurance companies the deal that they came up with that they thought what they would do is we'll take money from the good corporations tech insurance banking you know the good people and we'll leave the dirty industries to the republicans and the result is that we started moving away from democracy neither party was connected to the base any longer neither party was connected to the people now as a consequence of the internet and online fundraising and we we've saw this demonstrated with the obama campaigns the clinton campaign the bernie sanders campaign and most recently the joe biden campaign well and and warnock now we're back to a situation where average people can fund a political candidate for national office and do and so we can the democratic party is rapidly walking back from that kind of clinton obama position dlc position of you know we'll we'll kind of go along with the oligarchs and they're starting to directly confront the oligarchs which is a really good and healthy thing and we need a whole lot more of it but as i said when i started out we're at a very very dangerous time and if the biden administration is not successful in doing the things that the majority of people want and doing them relatively quickly we've got about six months here before the primary season begins and all hell breaks loose and you know a year and a half until the next election or a little more than that so this is such a critical time and it's such an important time for us to be engaged and to be informed to understand what's going on because we're now in our third battle with oligarchy in the united states we won in 1860 we won in 1930 and if we don't win this time get ready because the next republican who becomes president in 2024 the josh hawley or ted cruz or tom cotton is not going to be a bumbling buffoon like donald trump was they're going to get their job done and they're going to flip this country into a police state so with that uh i'm not sure was it josh uh you're going to take questions from the audience and toss them together no um so i'm shane i'm an event manager here at town hall seattle and so now we're going to transition to audience q a so we invite you if you're in crowdcast you can submit your questions down below using the ask a question button if you're watching on youtube you can submit those in the chat and we will make sure to ask those as well um so our first question um comes from a youth viewer actually olga ruminusto sorry if i mispronounced that they ask how easy is it to tax the billionaires well it's a matter of political will you know woodrow wilson raised the top tax rate up to 91 back in the day fdr raised the top tax rate up to 91 percent it stayed that way through the through the entire uh or through the entire rest of franklin roosevelt's administration through the harry truman administration to the dwight eisenhower administration it was ninety one percent through the entire john kennedy administration it was ninety one percent through the through the uh entire london job well actually halfway through the lyndon johnson administration and what we did with that money was we built hospitals and roads and highways and airports and schools and we educated people and we put men on the moon and we did all kinds of amazing things america was just like the envy of the world lyndon johnson lowered that from 91 down to 74 but he closed up so many loopholes that had been drilled in the tax code that it was actually a tax increase on really really rich people that lbj did in 1967 and but but it lowered it theoretically or you know to 74 percent but that was still high enough that when you hit that tax bracket people just stopped taking an income at that point in time uh you know prior to 1980 prior to the reagan revolution the average ceo in the united states only took 30 times what their average employee took in wages because any more than that and it would you know it's confiscatory tax bracket that you'd find yourself in and that stabilizes countries if you look at the most stable countries of the world economically and politically you find that almost all of them have a top tax rate that's well north of fifty percent and uh you know when reagan dropped that down below fifty percent it stayed below fifty percent ever since that then produces the bumper crop of billionaires we now have seven hundred and some odd billionaires in the united states um as a consequence of that so it's a matter of political will but you know again it may also be a matter of confronting the filibuster if we can't get joe manchin and kirsten cinema and maybe a couple of other uh conservative democrats who are trying to protect you know mansions obviously trying to protect the coal law industry and west virginia and cinema is protecting the banking industry um and they think they're you know it's going to work out for them but it's going to be a disaster for this country if we don't take down the filibuster next so our next question comes from barbara and there's sort of a follow-up so i'll get to that in just a moment so barbara asks how can we influence progressive millionaires and billionaires to buy media and help build a progressive media infrastructure and then tying on to that caroline asks or is it possible to have a balanced media and reinstall the fairness doctrine there's a chapter about that in the book and and i wrote an article for the nation magazine that kind of rehashes some of it uh a few months ago in which i suggested and in fact i'd written an op-ed about a year ago maybe year and a half ago when clear channel was in bankruptcy and they were for sale for one point two billion dollars and that was like eight hundred and some odd radio stations and a good chunk of them were running right-wing radio and i wrote an open letter to tom steyer saying you want a place to put your money here's where you should put your money um i'm not sure how to lobby them i've been trying i i i have friends who've been trying i have friends who know billionaires have been trying um no nibbles so far but it's a great idea with regard to the fairness doctrine the fairness doctrine um really didn't do that much uh you know the fairness doctrine um has been wildly exaggerated by rush limbaugh he's turned the fairness over the years he's he turned the fairness doctor into this boogeyman as if you know before the fairness doctrine i couldn't have had a show well it's nonsense the fairness doctrine basically required that radio and television stations quote program in the public interest and the way the fcc interpreted that was that um television had to carry news an hour news in prime time half hour local half hour of national and radio stations carried news at the top of every hour and that and and that was pretty much it and then there had to be quote equal time for opposing points of view but it was only when those points of view that were being opposed were expressed by the ownership or the management of a radio or television station i was working in radio back then one of my first jobs was as a weekend dj in a country western station when i was 16 years old 1967 i guess that would be and and uh you know we had the fairness doctrine and and when chuck chuck drake you know the guy who was one of the three owners of the station i was on would come on and do a little you know two-minute uh opinion piece about the new park you know the the the bond that the city of lansing was floating to pay for potter park we you know my job was to go out and find somebody in the community who'd do it record a two minute rebuttal but that was because he owned the station if rush limbaugh had been on the station and in fact there was opinion talk radio back then in fact the biggest opinion talk radio in the country was alan berg out of a station in denver that was blowing a blowtorch signal over 29 states millions of listeners every day he was a he was a progressive and in the mid 1980s i think was a year or two before limbo i'd have to go back and look they made a movie out of it called talk radio um allen berg was walking out of the studio and a couple of skinheads walked up with machine guns and blew him away killed it assassinated him and that was you know and then there was this pause of a couple of years where there was like basically no national talk radio and then limbaugh stepped into that space um but uh the fairness doctrine has no panacea it's not going to solve you know it'd be nice to have it back because it was a reasonable thing but it's not going to get rid of right wing talk radio what we need to do is build a competing media infrastructure thank you for that so this next question comes from jim who uh commented on youtube and jim asks if you could amend the constitution with one amendment what would it be it would it would well i i would go for a twofer i would say money is not speech and corporations are not people and then uh this question comes from dale also on youtube how important is it to end the filibuster well i i hope i've made it clear what i think the stakes are i i honestly believe that if we don't and the filibuster that the biden administration is going to end up crippled like the obama administration was by mitch mcconnell and mitch mcconnell sitting back there gloating and uh he's got now he's got two democratic senators mansion and cinema just coming right out and saying oh we don't think we should get rid of the filibuster we should you know we should let the minority have a say in things you know when when republicans were in the majority and and and barack obama nominates you know uh merrick garland who by the way obama went to oren hatch the republican senator from utah and said give me the name of a nominee for the supreme court this is when scalia died he said give me the name of a nominee for the supreme court that will be acceptable to republicans i want this to be bipartisan and orrin hatch said well there's this guy he's a republican but he's a good guy his name is merrick garland and he's not you know a crazy so you know he's got a good reputation why don't you take him and so obama put forth married merrick garland thinking that mitch mcconnell would be oh nice a republican you know what kumbaya no no he wouldn't even hold a hearing wouldn't even meet him and and and mansion and cinema think these are the people they're going to do business with they're fools yeah all right so this next question comes from crystal and crystal asks do you know of any grassroots or non-profit organizations who who are advocating against oligarchy specifically how would you suggest we as regular citizens raise our voices or fight for legislation against oligarchy is that even possible um when they buy our representatives yeah well uh move to amend.org it has been working for years on a constitutional amendment that says two things what i said earlier the corporations are not people and money is not speech and it's a great organization and i would check it out progressive democrats of america have been fighting the same fight for a long time um they were the first to endorse uh bernie sanders at you know in the last two primaries and and they've been doing some great work um pdamerica.org is their website movetoamn.org is the other website um in some ways you've got to fight it battle by battle i don't know of a you know move to end oligarchy organization out there um but you know there's there are indivisible is doing great work um i got an email from them today and they were they were saying we need to get this you know hr one the good government law that will get money out of politics and and it actually you know will if it's implemented and they were like if we you know let's get this out here and you know the filibuster not withstanding we'll get it passed well you know that's the kind of thing that you can't pass by reconciliation it's not a budget item so if you want to clean up our elections if you want to stop you know red states from throwing black people off the voting rolls purging the voting rolls like they constantly are doing um if you want to to make mail and voting you know more widespread so that so that a larger number of people can vote if you want to lower the barriers to to entry into politics um we're gonna have to get rid of the filibuster and kind of going back to what we were talking about earlier but um glenda on youtube is asking is there a real chance of reversing citizens united well you would have to reverse not just citizens united but mccutcheon which followed in 2013 which eliminated the number of politicians an individual billionaire could own seriously there was a there was a limit to how many politicians one person could own and they blew that away in 2013. um and you'd have to reverse uh buckley and and uh and first national bank versus pilate and uh yes uh you know that this could be done by constitutional amendment it can also be done by an act of congress and uh i wrote about this at some length in in uh in my book uh the hidden history of the supreme court the whole last chapter um when when reagan was president that the two things that reagan really really campaigned hard on and was elected on were overturning brown versus board of education the anti-segregation and schools supreme court ruling uh he wanted to overturn that and he wanted to overturn roe v wade the the 1973 abortion ruling 1973 and so he hired a young lawyer real smart guy you know very politically active very conservative and installed him in the justice department and said your job is to figure out how we can reverse roe v wade and brown v board without a constitutional amendment because the constitutional amendment requires two-thirds of the house and senate and three-quarters of the states and that ain't going to happen and this guy for worked on this for a year and a half he went back to the founding of the country um next to the last chapter in my book on the supreme court is devoted entirely to this guy and what he laid out and he and he pointed out that article three section two of the constitution article three is the judiciary and section two is the supreme court and article three section two of the constitution in fact i have my constitution right here uh article three section two if i can find it very quickly i wanna quote it exactly correctly here because this is really a critical thing article 3 section 2 says um the supreme court shall have appellate jurisdiction both as to law and fact in other words the final court of appeals it's the this is where the buck stops with such exceptions and under such regulations as the congress shall make period full stop in other words congress can write a law and say we are directing the supreme court that you may not rule on this and in fact this has happened and in fact in the 1980s during the reagan administration there were over a hundred pieces of legislation introduced into the house or senate at various times all by republicans all invoking this clause as a result of the encouragement of this one particular lawyer who worked in the justice department that that said just that almost all of them to overturn roe v wade or brown v board none of them succeeded they could never get a a large enough vote on any of them but it is possible i believe uh the the dean of the of the stanford law school larry kramer wrote an entire book about this called the people themselves and that lawyer by the way that reagan hired his name was john roberts he's now the chief justice of the us supreme court all right thank you so our next question comes from mike again another comment over on youtube mike asks what's the best way to convince someone that they'll never be a billionaire themselves so stop defending them with fears of death taxes etc etc well i don't i don't think we want to shatter people's dreams i i would you know to to those folks who are uh you know what's the old joke you know republicans think of themselves as temporarily distressed multimillionaires republican voters um you know what i would instead talk with and and what i do when conservatives call into my radio show um and what i talk to them about is how do we create a society that works for all of us not just for the billionaires i mean i don't have a problem with somebody getting rich i don't have a problem with somebody getting filthy rich i think their taxes should be higher but you know that's the american way as it were but let's do it in a way that doesn't cause everyone else to get poor since the reagan revolution and according to economic policy institute i believe their number was 12 trillion dollars but there's a definable amount of money that's actually gone out of the pockets of the middle class and into the pockets of the top one percent and had wages followed productivity since 1980 since the beginning of the rebel reagan revolution and they had from 1890 until 1980 as productivity went up with automation things like that wages went up had wages continued to follow productivity the minimum wage right now would be around 25 bucks an hour and over 50 trillion dollars worth of wealth would be in the pockets of the middle class but it's not yeah all right so this next question comes from madeline madeline asks are you confident that the dems are being firm enough to get the policies passed which will help the poor and middle class is there anything else we can do besides calling joe matching it at all yeah that has to be job one because as long as the filibuster is in place anything that challenges oligarchy will be struck down by mitch mcconnell and and i mean it literally takes one senator one republican senator to and and they don't have to stand and speak to do a filibuster all they have to do is send an email to mitch saying i object or just raise their hand and say i object and and at that point it's going to take you know it's going to take 10 republican senators to overcome that filibuster if they join with all the democrats the filibuster by the way just for a little background um john c calhoun was the vice president of john quincy adams um they hated each other it was because the election that election got thrown into the house representatives and then he uh intentionally became the vice president of andrew jackson the the guy who called himself the indian killer and he resigned from the vice presidency he's one of only two vice presidents never resigned from the vice presidency him and spiro agnes he resigned from the vice presidency because a seat in this in the u.s senate had opened up uh representing south carolina which is where john c calhoun was from and so he stepped into the senate and he wanted to uh and at that point the abolition movement was getting really strong in the north really strong and in the house of representatives they had actually passed a law saying that no member of the house of representatives could say the words slavery or abolition on the floor of the house so after john quincy adams uh john adams's son after he le who was very anti-slavery after he left the presidency he ran for the house of representatives massachusetts and won just so every single day that the house was in session he could go on the floor of the house and demand abolition of slavery so that was happening in the house of representatives over in the senate john c calhoun was like this rising powerhouse he was a very dynamic speaker very powerful man he's referred to very often as the father of the confederacy and he got the senate to change their rules so that anytime there was a discussion of abolition or slavery it would require 66 well it wasn't there weren't a hundred senators at that time but it would require us a super majority two-thirds vote to to uh to move you know for a motion to proceed in other words to end the debate and go to an actual vote on anything and that was referred to as the filibuster john c calhoun was the father of the filibuster the filibuster was used exclusively to fight back against the abolition movement up until the civil war and after the civil war and was used from eighteen sixty five until nineteen sixty four the filibuster is used exclusively against civil rights legislation since nineteen sixty four it's been used quite frequently on behalf of the oligarchs on behalf of legislation that would harm the you know basically the ruling class but that's the history of the filibuster it's got nothing to do with democracy i mean you know i i hear you know joe manchin on tv going well you know we've got to worry about the minority you know they should have a say um no as as i said before uh it's a it's a it's a vestigial uh vestigial institution or a an anachronistic institution it's a leftover of slavery and the and the backlash of the south against uh civil rights and it needs to be done away with all right so this is going to be our last question for the evening um gene asks how much do you think that the definition of corporate responsibility that is only be holding to the stockholders than anyone else has factored into what you are explaining it's been huge and these were parts of the reagan revolution when when ronald reagan came into power in in 1981 it was against the law for a corporation to buy its own stock which just artificially inflates the stock price by decreasing the number of shares that are outstanding it was illegal for a corporation to compensate its own senior management with stock because the logic went well if you compensate them with stock and you let the corporation buy back its own stock you know a guy can give himself he can be compensated with a million dollars for the stock he can buy back enough stock to double the value of the stock suddenly he's now got a two million dollar compensation and that's exactly what's happened by the way but reagan decriminalized these things and changed the rules of the game so you know uh really and and elizabeth warren has has proposed a lot of these basically a lot of what needs to be done simply reversing the reagan revolution and then ironically the the marching tune of the reagan revolution was reversing the new deal um you know it seems like we go in these 50-year cycles with regard to politics in america 40 50-year cycles so uh we need to undo those and i'll just add one last bonus answer to that um uh with regard to elizabeth warren's wealth tax um she is suggesting that uh we should have a one percent or two percent wealth tax on uh great fortunes on you know people who have more than a billion dollars sitting around and i think it's important for people to understand what she's talking about i'm a middle-class guy you know i've done fairly well throughout my life but you know i'm basically a middle-class guy and as that as with most middle-class people my largest store of wealth is my home that's true of the vast majority of americans 67 of americans are homeowners and and uh my home being my money my wealth i pay a tax on that every year it's a tax on my wealth it's called a property tax and that wealth tax that i pay as a homeowner pays for the schools the the police the fire the you know the the local infrastructure i mean it sustains life in the community but the principal store of wealth for a billionaire is their money bill i mean it might take a different form if might be stocks or bonds or something wrong but you know i think we can generically call it a money bin why is it that i have to pay as you know four or five percent tax every year i mean literally the entire value of my house i had to pay like four percent of all of it every year as a tax as a wealth tax and the billionaires you know down the street don't have to pay a penny on their damn money bin it just seems and two percent i mean that's lower than most property taxes and property taxes are wealth taxes on property so you know spread the mean please yeah um before we conclude for the evening um we had an audience member asked where they can find the the websites to references that are in the book so can you provide us with additional resources or or whatnot or if you have your own website um yeah the book has yeah here we go uh the book has 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 i think 18 pages of footnotes at the very end and probably two-thirds of them are urls to make it really easy for people to to link into so it's all in the book everything i've said great well thank you tom for being here this evening and thank you all for tuning in if you enjoyed this event you can find many more like it on our website townhallseattle.org we hope you'll consider making a donation as your support will allow us to continue to provide events just like this one if you're interested in purchasing a copy of tom's book the hidden history of american oligarchy reclaiming our democracy from the ruling class please use the link on this live stream page to purchase through our friends elliot bay book company here in seattle and finally thank you again for being here have a great evening everybody thank you shane thank you you

Channel: Town Hall Seattle

Views: 56,003

Rating: 4.787529 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: YibDwEDzU0k

Length: 61min 56sec (3716 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021