>> We are very excited to be joined once again on the program by the host of the Thom
Hartmann program as well as the author of the just released The Hidden History of American Oligarchy
Thom Hartmann, welcome back to The Damage Report. >> Hey John, it's great to be here with you.
Thank you so much for inviting me. >> Always glad to have you here. This
is the latest in a series of books that you've written and if people are interested in seeing
our talks, on previous instalments we've covered the last several
but this time you're taking on not guns of the Supreme Court.
You're going for American oligarchy seems pretty relevant right now. How did you choose
the topic for this most recent book? >> Well, it's sort of the book end,
the last book that I wrote was the the Hidden History of Monopoly in the United States.
And monopoly is where economic power is concentrated in a very small number of hands,
which is very much how our economy is run now.
The political equivalent of monopoly is oligarchy where political power is
concentrated in a small number of hands, typically very, very wealthy hands and
we also have that. And in fact, I would argue, as would Matthew Guillens and Benjamin Page of
Princeton and Northwestern universities who did a study on this, that basically in the
last 20 years or so our form of government has morphed from small d democracy into oligarchy.
They did this survey, which is fairly well known now, where they found that prior to
the Reagan revolution, what public opinion polls showed the majority of Americans wanted
as legislative policy actually happened, Medicare, Medicaid, civil rights, voting rights,
long term unemployment insurance, clean up the air, clean up the water.
Control predatory corporations, have a good strong minimum wage, all that stuff in the 40s 50s 60s
70s and early 80s actually got made into law. And then Reagan came along and said, screw that we're
gonna dance to the tune of the rich people, and in part because of a couple of Supreme
Court decisions and 76 and 78, the legalized billionaires and corporations owning politicians.
And so when you look at the exact same metrics in the 1990s, mid 1990s right through today,
their study was actually in 2014, but up to then what they found was the probability of what
average people want like over 70% of what average people want, being translated into legislation
is roughly equivalent to random noise, there is no longer any correlate.
But what the top 3% watch is routinely, well over 50 or 60%, routinely translated
into legislation. Whether it's Trump's tax cuts, or whether it's the so called
penal system reform, the judicial, I forget the exact phrases that they use. Criminal
justice reform, I think it was, which actually just incorporated this Mense
REA thing to make it harder to prosecute CEOs when their companies kill people.
I mean, that was the essence of it. So well, it's a mess.
>> And I look obviously I want to talk about the current state how we've got to here but
the part that kind of surprises me a little bit is so prior to the Reagan revolution,
were the rich having a difficult time getting what they wanted out of politics?
I mean, I get that it's getting worse, but it seems like why was it more difficult for
them then? I mean, many of our presidents and and elected officials themselves are very wealthy. Is
it more of a thing where just the interests of the poor working class middle class are dropping off?
Or was it prior to there it actually difficult for the rich to get, for instance,
decreases in taxes, those sorts of things? >> Right. It was a combination of law
and societal norms. When Richard Nixon ran against Jack Kennedy and
and lost back in 1960 and did his, you won't have me to kick around anymore.
The infamous Checkers speech, he pointed out that his wife doesn't own a fur coat,
she wears a cloth coat. And the little dog that they have was given to them. In other words,
he was saying, I'm not rich. I don't serve the rich. That was
what people wanted from politicians, it's what they expected from politicians.
The Tillman Act, which Teddy Roosevelt passed in 1907, was still being aggressively enforced.
It made it a federal felony for any person in any corporation on behalf of the corporation to give
any money or other thing of value to any political campaign for federal office. And so you had law
constraining giant corporations and the rich, as well as this cultural norm plus the top tax rate,
when Nixon was around and throughout the Nixon administration, throughout
the Ford administration, throughout the Carter administration, it was 91%.
And that's why the average CEO prior to the 1980s took about at the maximum 30 times what their
lowest paid employee did, because beyond that, they'd move into a tax bracket where it was
basically confiscatory. So, they left the money in their companies, they paid their people well,
and also during that period from 1940 until 1982 the middle class was growing
faster in terms of both wealth and the accumulated sum of everything they owned,
their home, their car, their whatever it is, and income was growing faster than was the top 5%.
The top 5% was still doing fine but they were actually not getting richer as fast as the
middle class was, Reagan completely flipped that upside down when he dropped that top tax rate
from the 74% that LBJ had set it at 1967, he dropped it down to 25% and all hell broke loose.
And then on top of that four years earlier, the Supreme Court had legalized political bribery
in the Buckley case. And then corporate bribery in the Baladi case in 76 and 78, as I mentioned.
And that produced this avalanche of money, this tsunami of money
that helped bring Ronald Reagan to office in 1980 and continues to haunt us to this day.
The court doubled down on that with citizens united in 2010, unanimous among conservatives
unanimously opposed by the liberals on the court. >> That's really interesting because obviously
you're tying this back to a particular time and you've identified some of the tools.
I sort of vaguely remember the study that you refer to the 2014 study.
Is this a thing where we can see significant differences in how those things have affected
the Republican party as opposed to the Democratic party? Or are we largely
seeing similar trends on both sides? >> That's a brilliant question. And
the answer is really rather remarkable.
In 1976 and 78, when the Supreme Court said, okay, fine, it's okay to own politicians.
The Republican Party said great, we'll take the money, give us the rich people give us
the corporations. They've always been kind of in bed with them, but it was more of the mainstream
businesses, in fact Republicans used to refer to them as mainstream politicians to themselves. But
the GOP said, okay, we'll take all this money and like I said that brought Reagan into power.
The Democratic Party ignored him. And the reason why is because at that point of time
a third of American workers were unionized
and through their union dues American working people were supporting the Democratic party,
the Democratic party was awash in cash in 1976, 78. And it was almost all union cash.
In fact, there was so much union cash that a few corrupt union officials like Frank Fitzsimmons
and Jimmy Hoffa were able to syphon it off, Hoffa used some of that to bribe Richard Nixon.
So, Reagan's first job when he became president in 1981 was to destroy the funding source for
the Democratic Party, that his animus against unions, I mean, there's a guy who used to be
the president of SAG, the actors union, he didn't have a specific animus against unions themselves.
But unions were what funded the Democratic Party and so Reagan set out to destroy that,
his first target was PADCO. He took them down in one week In August of 1981. And then he
generalized that and he put an anti-union guy in charge of the Department of Labor, Ray Donovan.
The Supreme Court went along with him over a couple of decisions.
And so by 1992 the union money could no longer support a presidential campaign
for Democrats. And so Bill Clinton and Al Fromm got together and created this
thing called the DLC the Democratic Leadership Council as basically a
vehicle to bring money from billionaires and corporations into the Democratic Party.
And the compromise that they made was okay, we've got to go to these people to get this money.
But we'll leave the dirty industries to the Republicans, they can be funded by steel and
oil and coal and you know, nuclear waste and stuff like that. We're gonna take the clean industries,
we'll take insurance, we'll take banking, we'll take tech, and we'll clean this way.
And Clinton basically sold out the soul of the Democratic Party,
but the truth is that Reagan and put him in a position where he had no choice
arguably because they didn't have the ability to crowdsource money now. So now what Obama proved
and Hillary Clinton proved and Bernie Sanders in particular proved and now Joe Biden doubled down
and improved again is that working people can once again fund a political party.
And so now thank God about half of the Democratic Party are now in the Progressive Caucus and have
now committed to not taking, you know, giant pack money donations from billionaires and
giant corporations, and the other half of the Democratic Party is quickly trying to catch up,
learning the lesson that Joe Crowley versus Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.
So I'm quite optimistic actually about the future of both the Democratic Party and the possibility
that we can go back to some of those reforms of the 70s that followed in the wake of the
Nixon bribery scandals that the Supreme Court blew up in 76 and 78. There are
ways around Citizens United, but they require congressional action.
>> Well, that's certainly one of the areas we're going to be watching for.
And anyone watching this that would like to find out a lot more about this process
the book is The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, reclaiming our democracy from the
ruling class. As always, Thom Hartmann, we appreciate you taking time out to join us.
>> John it's always honored and very happy to be
on your program. Thanks so much for the invitation. Thank you.