WKAD who killed thom bk

recover note 9/8 thom 3 slow load, shut dn

7 26 new bk

chapters: https://hartmannreport.com/s/sunday-excerpt

https://hartmannreport.com/p/prologue-a-crime-in-plain-sight

https://hartmannreport.com/p/chapter-1-the-scene-of-the-crime

ch 2 sanderson delmas https://hartmannreport.com/p/chapter-2-the-courtroom-showdown

3 https://hartmannreport.com/p/chapter-3-the-triggerman-jc-bancroft

sjf: https://hartmannreport.com/p/chapter-4-the-mastermind-supreme

ch 5 conkling, hist lochner post: https://hartmannreport.com/p/chapter-5-the-seventy-year-legal

Chapter 6: The First Corporate War - by Thom Hartmann

Chapter 6: The First Corporate War

Every American schoolchild learns about the Boston Tea Party, and most also learn it was about “taxation without representation.”

That’s true, but hugely incomplete.

The Boston Tea Party was, in reality, fundamentally a rebellion against raw corporate power. The tea being dumped belonged to the British East India Company, then the world’s largest corporate monopoly. The tyranny being resisted was a new form of corporate tyranny corruptly backed by Company stockholder King George III’s government force.

The Founders of this nation, then, fought a revolution every bit as much against a corporation as against the British military. Understanding this history explains why they would’ve been horrified by the idea of corporate constitutional rights.

The Company That Ruled the World

The British East India Company was not like modern corporations: it was also, essentially, a private army with a corporate charter—a state unto itself.

It had its own military, its own courts, its own laws. It conquered nations, ruled hundreds of millions of people via its own appointed governors, and extracted wealth on a scale that dwarfed the British government itself.

By the 1770s, the Company controlled most of India, ran the opium trade into China, and dominated global commerce, including North America. It was more powerful than most governments. It could—and did—wage wars, negotiate treaties, and legally execute prisoners. It answered to stockholders, the King, and his Parliament, not average citizens or voters.

The Company’s stockholders included members of Parliament, British aristocrats, and the King himself. These conflicts of interest meant Company interests heavily shaped eighteenth-century British policy. When the Company wanted something, Parliament often gave it.

The Company was the original too-big-to-fail corporation. When it faced bankruptcy in 1773, Parliament bailed it out by granting it a monopoly on tea sales in the American colonies, thus outlawing the now-illegal importation of tea by independent merchants and traders.

That was the Tea Act of 1773, which American colonists correctly understood as corporate tyranny enforced by government power.

A Voice from the Revolution

I searched for years to find a firsthand account of what actually happened in Boston Harbor that cold December night in 1773. The participants in the Tea Party were sworn to secrecy for fifty years, by which time most were dead, so most of what they thought and felt was lost to history.

Then, in an antique bookstore in London, I found a treasure. It was sitting on a shelf with a bunch of old books from the early nineteenth century, a part of the store that smelled of dust, wax, and aging paper. When I saw it, I was astonished: I’d been looking for something like it for decades.

I immediately purchased an original copy of Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party with a Memoir of George R.T. Hewes, a Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots Who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbour in 1773, published in New York by S.S. Bliss in 1834.

The book’s author, James Hawkes, interviewed George Robert Twelve-trees Hewes, who was a shoemaker and a patriot. He knew Samuel Adams and John Hancock personally. He was present at the Boston Massacre. And on the night of December 16, 1773, he was one of the men who boarded the Company’s ships.

Hawkes’s interview of Hewes, published sixty-one years after the event, is the only actual first-person account in existence of the Boston Tea Party by a participant.

Most significantly, what Hewes described to Hawkes in this little book wasn’t just a tax revolt: it was an explicit rebellion against corporate power.

The Corporate Monopoly

Many people today think the Tea Act of 1773 simply raised taxes on tea. It did not: it was actually a massive tax cut.

The purpose of the Tea Act was to give the East India Company full and unlimited access to the American tea trade so it could sell the surplus tea it had built up in its warehouses over the previous three years during a pretty severe recession.

It exempted the Company from having to pay taxes to Britain on that tea exported to the colonies, and even gave the Company a tax refund on the millions of pounds of tea it was holding in inventory.

Because the Company no longer had to pay high taxes to England and held a monopoly on colonial tea sales, it could lower its prices to un dercut local importers and the mom-and-pop tea merchants in every town in America. Additionally, it allowed the British navy to intercept tea “smugglers” to the colonies, seize their ships and cargo, and imprison their crews.

It wasn’t “taxation without representation”: it was “tax breaks for giant corporations without representation” and a government-granted monopoly.

This was what specifically infuriated the colonists. They resented their colonies being used as a profit center for a multinational corporation and their small businesses no longer being able to buy tea from “pirates” (private ships bringing tea to the colonies) because the Company had an exclusive, monopolistic right of sale in North America.

“Taxation without representation” meant something specific to that generation: hitting the average person and small business with taxes while giving the most powerful corporation in the world one of the most massive tax breaks in history. It was government sponsorship of one corporation over all competitors, plain and simple.

According to Hewes, colonists were either boycotting Company tea or buying smuggled tea to avoid supporting the Company’s profits. This resistance, he said, had “greatly diminished the importation into the colonies of this commodity.”

Meanwhile, he noted, “an immense quantity of it was accumulated in the warehouses of the East India Company in England. This company petitioned the King to suppress the duty of three pence per pound upon its introduction into America.”

The King granted the petition with the Tea Act, and the Company’s ships set sail for America with their monopoly tea.

The Alarm Goes Out

A newsletter called The Alarm circulated through the colonies. One issue, signed by the enigmatic “Rusticus,” made clear the feelings of colonial Americans about England’s largest corporation:

Are we in like Manner to be given up to the Disposal of the East India Company, who have now the Assurance, to step forth in Aid of the Minister, to execute his Plan, of enslaving America? Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men. They have levied War, excited Rebellions, dethroned lawful Princes, and sacrificed Millions for the Sake of Gain.

The Revenues of Mighty Kingdoms have centered in their Coffers. And these not being sufficient to glut their Avarice, they have, by the most unparalleled Barbarities, Extortions, and Monopolies, stripped the miserable Inhabitants of their Property, and reduced whole Provinces to Indigence and Ruin. Fifteen hundred Thousands, it is said, perished by Famine in one Year, not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but because this Company and their Servants engulfed all the Necessaries of Life, and set them at so high a Rate that the poor could not purchase them.

One and a half million people died, Rusticus wrote, in a single year, not from natural disasters but from corporate greed.

The colonists knew exactly what kind of monster they were facing. They’d seen what the East India Company did to India and were determined it wouldn’t happen to their America.

Another pamphlet, signed “Hampden,” declared: “It hath now been proved to you that the East India Company obtained the monopoly of that trade by bribery and corruption. That the power thus obtained they have prostituted to extortion, and other the most cruel and horrible purposes, the sun ever beheld.”

Philadelphia and New York Resist

The battle began in Philadelphia.

According to Hewes, “those to whom the teas of the Company were intended to be consigned, were induced by persuasion, or constrained by menaces, to promise, on no terms, to accept the proffered consignment.”

In New York, Captains Sears and McDougal, “daring and enterprising men, effected a concert of will between the smugglers, the merchants, and the sons of liberty.” The small businessmen, the entrepreneurs, and the patriots had joined forces. In many cases, like Paul Revere and Sam Adams, they were the same people.

“Pamphlets suited to the conjecture, were daily distributed,” Hewes affirmed, “and nothing was left unattempted by popular leaders, to obtain their purpose.”

The Company’s ships were turned back from Philadelphia and New York. The colonists had drawn a line.

Then the ships arrived in Boston.

The Decisive Moment

“On the twenty-eighth of November, 1773,” Hewes told Hawkes, “the ship Dartmouth with 112 chests arrived; and the next morning after, the following notice was widely circulated: ‘Friends, Brethren, Countrymen! That worst of plagues, the detested TEA, has arrived in this harbor. The hour of destruction, a manly opposition to the machinations of tyranny, stares you in the face. Every friend to his country, to himself, and to posterity, is now called upon to meet in Faneuil Hall, at nine o’clock, this day, at which time the bells will ring, to make a united and successful resistance to this last, worst, and most destructive measure of administration.’”

The colonists gathered. The Company’s local agents were urged to renounce their positions, but they refused and instead took refuge in a nearby British fortress.

A guard was placed on Griffin’s Wharf, near where the tea ships were moored. Messengers stood ready to ride to neighboring towns if the Company made any moves.

Hewes recalls the voices of the Bostonians during a hastily convened meeting in a local pub:

“Why do we wait? Soon or late we must engage in conflict with England. The opposition is formed; it is general; it remains for us to seize the occasion. The more we delay the more strength is acquired by the [British] ministers. Now is the time to prove our courage.”

A local tea seller named Rotch was asked to demand that the Governor permit the ships to return to England. The Governor refused, citing the honor of the laws and duty toward the King.

The meeting erupted. A man disguised as an Indian shouted from the gallery. The crowd dissolved in an instant and rushed to Griffin’s Wharf.

The Tea Party had begun.

That Night in the Harbor

Hewes was there. His account is vivid:

“It was now evening, and I immediately dressed myself in the costume of an Indian, equipped with a small hatchet, which I and my associates denominated the tomahawk, with which, and a club, after having painted my face and hands with coal dust in the shop of a blacksmith, I repaired to Griffin’s wharf, where the ships lay that contained the tea.

“When I first appeared in the street after being thus disguised, I fell in with many who were dressed, equipped and painted as I was, and who fell in with me and marched in order to the place of our destination.”

Between one hundred and one hundred and fifty men gathered at the wharf. They were divided into three parties, one for each ship, and Hewes was appointed boatswain of his group and sent to demand the keys to the hatches from the ship’s captain.

“I made the demand accordingly,” he said, “and the captain promptly replied, and delivered the articles; but requested me at the same time to do no damage to the ship or rigging.”

The captain of a Company ship stood by and watched as the colonists destroyed the Company’s property. He asked only that they not damage the ship itself. He knew which way the wind was blowing. Hewes continued:

“We then were ordered by our commander to open the hatches and take out all the chests of tea and throw them overboard, and we immediately proceeded to execute his orders, first cutting and splitting the chests with our tomahawks, so as thoroughly to expose them to the effects of the water. In about three hours from the time we went on board, we had thus broken and thrown overboard every tea chest to be found in the ship, while those in the other ships were disposing of the tea in the same way, at the same time. We were surrounded by British armed ships, but no attempt was made to resist us.”

Three hundred forty-two chests. Over ninety thousand pounds of tea. Enough to make twenty-four million cups. Worth over two million dollars in today’s money.

All of it destroyed to make a point about corporate power.

No Tea Shall Survive

The participants were absolutely committed that none of the East India Company’s tea would ever be consumed on American shores. Hewes describes what happened to those who tried to pocket some for themselves:

“During the time we were throwing the tea overboard, there were several attempts made by some of the citizens of Boston and its vicinity to carry off small quantities of it for their family use. To effect that object, they would watch their opportunity to snatch up a handful from the deck, where it became plentifully scattered, and put it into their pockets.

“One Captain O’Conner, whom I well knew, came on board for that purpose, and when he supposed he was not noticed, filled his pockets, and also the lining of his coat. But I had detected him and gave information to the captain of what he was doing. We were ordered to take him into custody, and just as he was stepping from the vessel, I seized him by the skirt of his coat, and in attempting to pull him back, I tore it off; but, springing forward, by a rapid effort he made his escape. He had, however, to run a gauntlet through the crowd upon the wharf; each one, as he passed, giving him a kick or a stroke.”

An old man with a large cocked hat and white wig slipped some tea into his pocket. They caught him, threw his hat and wig into the harbor along with the tea, and let him escape with “now and then a slight kick.”

The next morning, considerable quantities of tea were found floating on the water. Small boats rowed out and beat it with oars and paddles until it was thoroughly destroyed.

“We then quietly retired to our several places of residence,” Hewes concludes, “without having any conversation with each other, or taking any measures to discover who were our associates. . . . ​There appeared to be an understanding that each individual should volunteer his services, keep his own secret, and risk the consequence for himself. No disorder took place during that transaction, and it was observed at that time that the stillest night ensued that Boston had enjoyed for many months.”

The War Begins

The British Parliament responded immediately.

The Boston Port Act closed the port of Boston until the citizens reimbursed the East India Company for the tea they’d destroyed.

The colonists refused.

A year and a half later, on April 19, 1775, the colonists would again defy the Company and Great Britain, this time taking on British troops in armed conflict at Lexington and Concord, the “shots heard ’round the world.”

That war, triggered by a transnational corporation and its government’s patrons trying to deny American colonists a fair and competitive marketplace, would last until 1783.

The Declaration of Independence, written in 1776, lists the colonies’ grievances against King George III and specifically mentions taxes, troops, judges, and governors.

It never mentions the East India Company by name, but it didn’t have to. Everyone understood. The King’s tyranny and the Company’s tyranny were the same tyranny. The Company had bought the government, so fighting the King meant fighting corporate power.

The Lesson the Founders Learned

The men who wrote the Constitution had fought a corporation. They’d seen what unchecked corporate power could do. They’d watched the East India Company starve millions in India, corrupt Parliament, and try to monopolize American commerce.

And they were determined it would never happen here again.

The US Constitution contains about 4,400 words. It establishes the structure of government, enumerates powers, and limits authority.

But it never mentions corporations. Not once.

This was not an oversight. The Founders knew about corporations. They had fought one. They deliberately chose not to give corporations constitutional status or protection.

Corporations were creatures of state law, to be kept on a short leash by state legislatures close to the people. They could be chartered, regulated, and dissolved by the states and, at our country’s founding, had no rights whatsoever under the federal Constitution.

The American antipathy toward the East India Company continued even after the Revolution. When the Company tried to resume postwar trading with America, offering clothing, silks, coffee, and spices, the Americans refused. The trade war continued to and through the War of 1812.

The Founders had not forgotten. And they made sure corporate power would never gain the same foothold in America that it had held in the colonies.

Or so they thought.

A century later, a court reporter and a corrupt justice would undo much of their work with a few strokes of a pen.

Chapter 7: What the Founders Knew - by Thom Hartmann

Chapter 7: What the Founders Knew

The colonists who fought the American Revolution and wrote our Constitution knew well who and what were the most dangerous enemies of democracy. It wasn’t just King George III; it was his British East India Company, the most powerful corporation in the world.

This is why the Constitution never mentions corporations and why our nation’s Founders would have been horrified by corporate constitutional rights. Instead of a nation ruled by oligarchs and their businesses, the Founders and Framers of the Constitution envisioned a nation of independent citizens, small farmers, entrepreneurs, and journeymen who owned the fruit of their labor and enjoyed a continually improving standard of living.

Although Hamilton’s vision was more industrial and Jefferson’s more agrarian, both saw a future for our nation, in their own ways, that we today call the American Dream.

The Supreme Court–created doctrine of corporate constitutional rights, however, is the opposite of our Founders’ vision. It now dominates America through economic, political, and legal mechanisms that allow a small, wealthy group of oligarchs to dominate the rest of us. Our Founders fought a revolution to stop—and, moving forward, prevent—exactly that.

The Founders’ Vision of Economic Freedom

The Founders didn’t just fight the Revolutionary War to seize political freedom from the British Crown as it says in most of the history books our kids read; they also wanted economic freedom from the East India Company. They wanted a nation where We the People made the decisions, rather than having them imposed on us by billionaire tech bros and giant corporations.

Thomas Jefferson explicitly wanted a nation of independent yeoman farmers, each owning enough land to support a family, with only a very few dependent on wages from a wealthy employer. This vision was small-d democratic to its core: citizens who owned their own means of livelihood couldn’t be controlled by employers or landlords. With the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, they could vote their consciences, speak their minds, and participate in self-governance as political equals.

Benjamin Franklin, who rose from a penniless apprentice to become one of the most successful businessmen in the colonies, embodied the promise that hard work and talent could lift anyone to prosperity, even in the early republic. His story was the original American Dream, long before that phrase even existed.

This vision of a new, free America required government to limit corporate power. If, like the East India Company, corporations could grow without limit, accumulate mind-boggling levels of wealth, and use that financial power to buy influence with politicians and thus government, they’d essentially recreate the very tyranny the Founders fought the Revolution to overthrow.

Franklin himself warned about what we today call oligarchy (aka rule by the morbidly rich). “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” he wrote. “As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

Two centuries later, Franklin Roosevelt would echo his namesake Ben Franklin’s insight when he famously declared in 1936 that “necessitous men are not free men.” Both of these two men who transformed America understood that economic security was the necessary foundation of political freedom. And they both knew corporate and oligarchic control of our economy and our politics threatened to destroy both.

The Declaration’s Missing Word

The Founders weren’t just starry-eyed believers in democracy; they were also strategic. They framed the American Revolution as a fight for “natural rights” against monarchical tyranny, using a message that played very well in Enlightenment-era Europe (particularly in pre-revolutionary France), where they needed support.

Explicitly calling out the world’s most powerful corporation in the Declaration might have complicated things, so the Founders tried to make sure corporate power would never gain the same foothold in America as it had in Britain, India, and other places across the world that were groaning under the Company’s yoke.

The Constitution’s Silence

In addition to establishing the structure of our government, our Constitution also (following Montesquieu’s advice) divides power among three branches, and limits the authority of each branch.

But even with all that, the Constitution never mentions corporations. Not even once.

This was not an oversight. The Founders knew all about corporations; after all, they’d fought one to establish this nation. Which is why they deliberately chose not to give corporations constitutional status or any sorts of protection whatsoever.

James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and others understood that corporations were useful tools for specific purposes: building a canal, establishing a bank, constructing roads and other essential infrastructure. But they were only tools to be regulated by We the People through our elected representatives, not autonomous entities with their own rights.

The Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate commerce. It gives states responsibility for chartering corporations. But it doesn’t grant corporations any rights whatsoever.

James Madison wrote to his mentor, Thomas Jefferson, on October 24, 1787 (just weeks after they’d finished writing the Constitution), about his concern for possible future corruption by “the representatives of Counties and Corporations in the Legislatures of the States much more disposed to sacrifice the aggregate interest, and even authority . . . ​over the interests of the nation.”

But, because the power to bring corporations into existence and regulate their behavior was left by the Constitution entirely to the states, he didn’t believe America would ever again have to confront a giant monopoly like the East India Company.

“Many illustrations might be given of this impossibility,” he wrote. “How long has it taken to fix, and how imperfectly is yet fixed, the legislative power of corporations, though that power is subordinate in the most compleat manner? The line of distinction between the power of regulating trade and that of drawing revenue from it, which was once considered the barrier of our liberties [by the King and the Company], was found on fair discussion, to be absolutely undefinable.”

When the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution in 1791, it explicitly protected human rights: speech, religion, assembly, due process, and trial by jury. These were what the Founders considered “natural rights” given to us by what the Declaration of Independence calls “Nature’s God” to human beings, not artificial privileges for legal fictions called corporations.

The Founders would have ridiculed—or been horrified by—the idea that a corporation, a piece of paper, a legal abstraction, could ever achieve the same rights as human beings.

Jefferson’s Warning

Thomas Jefferson never stopped worrying about corporate power. In letter after letter, he warned about the danger of “moneyed corporations” becoming a new aristocracy.

In 1816, Jefferson wrote: “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

Jefferson saw it coming, though, during the 1820s, after his presidency, as the country experienced explosive growth and the first steam-powered railroads emerged. Banks, manufacturing corporations, southern plantations, and the New York trading companies were accumulating dangerous levels of power. They were buying politicians, manipulating markets, and acting as if they were above democratic control.

Jefferson’s solution was strict regulation and charter revocation for corporations that violated the public interest. Like every other one of the Founders, he never once suggested corporations should have the constitutional rights he and his peers had put their lives on the line for; that would have seemed insane to him.

Jefferson and his peers understood something that over a century of corporate constitutional rights has caused us to forget: corporations exist solely at the pleasure of the people acting through state governments. We create them. We can constrain them. We can destroy them. They have no inherent right to exist, just the privileges that we grant them.

Madison’s Insights

James Madison, who drafted much of the Constitution, also understood the danger of concentrated economic power, particularly when it was combined with political influence.

In Federalist No. 10, Madison warned about “factions,” groups he defined as having interests “adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” He and his colleagues in the Convention of 1787 designed the Constitution’s checks and balances explicitly to prevent any single faction from dominating our government.

But Madison could barely have imagined corporations as large as modern multinationals. The biggest corporations in 1788 America were tiny compared to the British East India Company, which Madison and the others had seen as a dangerous aberration worth fighting a war against, not a model for the future of their new republic.

Madison’s design of the Constitution assumed that economic power would be relatively dispersed and that governments would control corporations, not the other way around.

Corporate constitutional rights, established in the late 1880s, however, reversed this. Instead of government controlling corporations, a corrupt Supreme Court justice and his court reporter henchman gave corporations the constitutional weapons they’d eventually use to fight virtually any semblance of government control.

The Early State Experience

The first American states took seriously their power to control corporations. In the early republic, state legislatures granted corporate charters sparingly and with extraordinarily strict conditions. Corporate charters were required to specify the purpose of the corporation, and it couldn’t do anything else. They specified how long the corporation could exist, typically twenty to thirty years (none were established in perpetuity). They defined how much capital a company could control, where it could operate, what it could own, who could serve as directors, and what reports it had to file.

Throughout the nineteenth century, state legislatures regularly revoked charters of corporations that violated their terms or acted against the public interest. The corporate death sentence was a real possibility and was frequently invoked.

In the minds of these early politicians, this wasn’t anti-business: it was a new American democracy controlling its own artificial-person creations.

Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other states revoked dozens of corporate charters in the 1800s for various offenses: failure to serve the public interest, corruption, violation of charter terms, or simply because the legislature decided the corporation was no longer needed.

Corporations were simply viewed as tools of commerce, and when a tool broke or became dangerous, you threw it away.

What Changed

Two things destroyed this system of state-level democratic corporate control.

First, after the Civil War, states began competing for the revenue that could be had from corporate charter fees, employment, and taxes on business activities. In response to a challenge to Ohio’s corporate antitrust laws by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, New Jersey pioneered “charter mongering,” offering weak regulations and low taxes to attract corporate charters. Other states followed (including Delaware, where more than half of American corporations are today chartered), and a race to the bottom began during what’s today referred to as the “Chartermongering Era.”

Second, the adoption of the Santa Clara headnote by the Supreme Court in the 1890s gave corporations constitutional rights that made state control much harder. Once corporations could claim due process, equal protection, privacy, free speech, and other constitutional rights, revoking charters became legally complex and, with the largest corporations, extraordinarily expensive.

The combination proved deadly to democracy. Weak state regulations plus corporate constitutional rights brought late nineteenth-century America corporate power and the rise of dynastic wealth, all without democratic accountability.

The Founders had designed a system to prevent exactly this outcome, but Davis’s and Field’s corporate constitutional rights destroyed it.

From the Founders to FDR

The Founders’ vision of economic freedom, of citizens owning their own labor and controlling their own destinies, didn’t die with corporate constitutional rights in the 1890s. It went underground, waiting for the right moment to reemerge.

That moment came in 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in the depths of the Republican Great Depression.

FDR understood what the Founders both knew and proclaimed: that economic security is the foundation of political freedom. “Necessitous men are not free men,” he repeatedly declared. People who are hungry, out of a job, or who can’t afford a doctor or a home, are not truly free, he said, no matter what rights the Constitution guarantees them on paper.

Roosevelt built on the Founders’ vision to create the American Dream in its modern form with a massive collection of nation-changing laws and government agencies he called The New Deal. They included the right to a job that paid a living wage, the right to organize and bargain collectively, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to access a basic social safety net that kept job losses or natural disasters from destroying families.

By 1981, that vision had become reality for two-thirds of American families. A single income could support a family, and you could buy a house for three times your annual salary. College was affordable, even with a part-time job (as I experienced). Healthcare didn’t bankrupt people, and, with Social Security and Medicare, retirement was finally secure.

Most of the Founders would have lauded this new America that FDR brought about and LBJ fine-tuned. Over loud Republican objections to the right to unionize, the minimum wage, Social Security, and pretty much every other New Deal and Great Society program, we finally became the nation of independent, economically secure citizens they’d envisioned, updated for the industrial age.

But corporate constitutional rights remained embedded in the law, a time bomb planted in 1886. Thus, when Ronald Reagan activated it in 1981, the American Dream began to die.

Recovering the Founders’ Vision

The Founders got it right: Corporations can be useful tools, but they must be controlled by democratic governance for the benefit of society as well as their wealthy owners. They’d have no inherent rights, only granted privileges. And when they abused those privileges, they’d be constrained or even destroyed.

The doctrine of corporate constitutional rights Davis and Field kicked off in 1886 turned this vision upside down, giving corporations constitutional weapons first designed exclusively for humans that they could use to fight back efforts at democratic control. It transformed them from servants of the public into our modern-day masters.

Undoing corporate constitutional rights means recovering the Founders’ vision, returning corporations to their proper place as tools of society, not rulers of society. It means restoring the economic freedom and affordability that makes political freedom possible.

It means, in short, rebuilding the American Dream.

But before we can rebuild our nation and our middle class, we first must understand how completely corporate constitutional rights have corrupted our democracy. The story of that corruption reached its climax in 2010, with the Supreme Court’s unscrupulous decision by five on-the-take Republicans on the Court in Citizens United. That decision, more than any others, shows us what happens when the fraud of 1886 is taken to its logical conclusion.

Chapter 8: The Crime Pays Off - by Thom Hartmann

chapter 8: The Crime Pays Off

Davis’s fraudulent headnote of 1886 was just the beginning. Over the next 140 years, corporate lawyers would build an empire of constitutional rights on that foundation of fraud. The progression reached its logical conclusion in 2010, when five corrupt Republican Supreme Court justices—several openly on the take from rightwing billionaires and massive corporations—handed morbidly rich oligarchs the power to buy American democracy outright.

Citizens United wasn’t just about campaign finance rules or the legalization of bribing Supreme Court justices (although it encompassed both): it was the culmination of a 140-year theft. The oligarchs finally had functionally unlimited constitutional weapons to complete what the southern plantation fascists built prior to the Civil War and the railroad barons started in 1886: the destruction of the American Dream and its replacement with an all-American form of oligarchic feudalism.

The Century of Expansion

Between 1886 and today, corporations have systematically claimed every constitutional right that was written to protect human beings.

First Amendment freedom of free speech? Corporations claimed it in the 1970s and 1980s, arguing they had the right to spend money on political campaigns, advertise tobacco to children, and lie in their marketing.

Second Amendment gun rights? Weapons manufacturing corporations claimed it to challenge state and city laws that protected citizens and schoolchildren from gun violence and to help them market their deadly wares.

Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable searches and seizures? Corporations claimed it in Dow Chemical Company v. United States (1986), arguing the EPA couldn’t use aerial photography to detect illegal cancer-causing pollution without a warrant because Dow was a “corporate person.”

Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination? Corporations claimed it to avoid disclosing evidence of crimes and to conceal the dangers of tobacco (which killed my brother), asbestos (which killed my father), and pesticides (among other things).

I still remember my dad coming home from the tool-and-die shop where he worked, smelling of machine oil, talking over dinner about the Machinists Union and how unions were the reason we had a middle-class life, his discussions with my mom about how they’d travel the world with the pension he was earning. Corporate constitutional rights took that all away from me and my family.

Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury? Corporations demanded it to drag things out and increase the costs to government whenever they were facing regulatory penalties.

Seventh Amendment right to a jury in civil cases? Corporations asserted it while simultaneously forcing consumers and employees into mandatory binding arbitration, denying humans the same right.

Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery? Private prison corporations note that the amendment still allows slavery for persons convicted of a crime, so for-profit prison slave labor has become a multibillion--dollar-a-year business that rivals the old Confederacy.

Fourteenth Amendment equal protection and due process? Corporations used these relentlessly to strike down regulations, block taxes, and prevent democratic governance.

The only amendment corporations haven’t seriously claimed is the Third (quartering soldiers in private homes), but give them time. Trump, with his increasing militarization of American cities, may still find a way to use it to make money for his billionaire buddies or install ICE agents in our houses and apartment buildings.

Virtually every constitutional right written to protect human dignity, liberty, and democracy has been converted into a weapon for corporate power.

The Destruction of the New Deal

For nearly fifty years, from 1933 to 1980, the American Dream flourished despite Davis’s corporate constitutional rights headnote. FDR’s New Deal and the regulatory framework that followed it constrained corporate power enough, in fact, to build the largest middle class in world history, the first to exceed half of the nation’s population.

The Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations were able to do this because even with corporate constitutional rights on the books, the political will still existed to regulate corporations, tax the wealthy, protect workers, and invest in public goods. The memory of the Republican Great Depression was still fresh. Thanks to FDR, unions were strong. And the courts, while accepting corporate constitutional rights, hadn’t yet extended it to its logical extremes.

That all changed with the Republican Reagan Revolution of 1981.

Reagan didn’t just cut taxes and deregulate industries: following the advice of the billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation, he activated corporate constitutional rights as weapons against FDR’s New Deal framework. His administration and partisans like John Roberts (then a lawyer in Reagan’s Justice Department) encouraged corporations to challenge regulations in court, claiming their constitutional rights were being violated. His well-funded judicial appointments put corporate-friendly judges on the bench who would expand corporate rights for decades to come.

The assault on America’s democracy and our middle class was systematic. Union busting was justified by corporate property rights. Tax cuts for the wealthy were framed as protecting corporate due process rights. Deregulation was defended as preventing unconstitutional Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment takings of corporate property. Media consolidation was enabled by corporate First Amendment “free speech” claims.

Each piece of the New Deal framework that had built the world’s first widespread middle class and the functioning democracy that supported it came under attack. And corporate constitutional rights provided the legal weapons for that attack.

When states tried to protect workers, corporations sued, claiming their contract rights were being violated. When the federal government tried to regulate pollution, corporations claimed unconstitutional Fifth Amendment takings and Fourth Amendment invasions of their privacy. When communities tried to limit corporate political spending, corporations asserted First Amendment free speech protections.

The fraudulent headnote of 1886 had been a hand grenade sitting with its pin intact for decades. Reagan and his successors pulled that pin, and the American Dream began to die so quickly that by 2015 fewer than half of Americans were still in the middle class, and it took two salaries to get there.

But pulling the pin wasn’t enough. The oligarchs needed real cover. They needed to make sure that as working families watched their security disappear, they’d blame the wrong people.

Enter the deflection playbook: “welfare queens,” “law and order,” “illegal immigrants,” “taxpayers versus takers.” It was a systematic strategy specifically designed to redirect working-class anger away from the morbidly rich and toward the powerless. As I’ll detail later in the book, the same oligarchs who destroyed the American Dream became experts at making sure nobody blamed them for it.

The Democratic Tradition of Keeping Corporations out of Politics

For roughly the first half of America’s history, states understood that corporations had no business meddling in democratic elections. In 1905, for example, Wisconsin passed a law (Section 4489a, Sec. 1, ch. 492, 1905) that explicitly said: “No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer, consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office” (emphasis added).

Make a special note of those words “any political purpose whatsoever.” Wisconsin wasn’t hedging or creating loopholes. It was unambiguously saying that corporations have no role messing around in democracy. They don’t vote, don’t marry, don’t get hungry or sick, and can live forever, so they shouldn’t be allowed to use their economic power to twist our system of governance to their benefit and to the detriment of We the People.

Wisconsin wasn’t alone in those early fights to keep states’ democracies free of corporate control; throughout the Progressive Era and beyond, states across America passed similar laws keeping corporate money out of politics. This wasn’t even controversial back then; it simply reflected common sense and a widespread distrust of the morbidly rich.

Until five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, armed with Davis’s doctrine of corporate constitutional rights, began tearing it down.

The Bellotti Decision

The march toward Citizens United really got underway in 1978 with the Supreme Court’s First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti decision.

Massachusetts had passed a law prohibiting corporations from spending money to influence ballot initiatives unless the initiative directly affected the corporation’s business, arguing that corporate treasuries were so large compared to individual citizens’ resources that allowing corporate spending would drown out human/citizens’ voices.

Basing their argument on Davis’s fraudulent headnote from the 1886 Santa Clara County decision, the First National Bank of Boston—whose CEO wanted to put some of the bank’s money into a ballot initiative to cut taxes—sued, claiming the bank’s First Amendment free speech rights to fund political campaigns were being violated by the law.

As Ciara Torres-Spelliscy noted in 2014:

In the 1970s, Santa Clara was used to justify granting corporations the First Amendment right to spend unlimited corporate funds on ballot initiatives in a case called Bellotti. The Court relied on Santa Clara’s reading when it stated that “[i]t has been settled for almost a century that corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Justice Rehnquist, in his dissent, questioned the wisdom of extending corporations political rights: “[T]hose properties, so beneficial in the economic sphere, pose -special dangers in the political sphere.” Again, Rehnquist could not convince his brethren.

In Citizens United, when the Supreme Court held that political speech is “indispensable to decision making in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation,” they cited Bellotti. Thus, it’s only a hop, skip and a jump from Santa Clara to Citizens United.

In Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, the store chain is claiming that the corporation (and not just its proprietors) has a religious objection to providing certain types of birth control for its workers as required by the Affordable Care Act. Thus, the Court is contemplating expanding corporate constitutional rights to a new logical extreme: First Amendment religious rights. It’s no surprise that Hobby Lobby’s brief relies on Bellotti and Citizens United.

The Supreme Court, in the 5–4 Bellotti decision, sided with the corporations. Justice Lewis Powell (a Nixon appointee in 1972, a year after he wrote the infamous Powell Memo), writing for the majority, held that corporate speech deserved First Amendment protection because “[t]he inherent worth of the speech in terms of its capacity for informing the public does not depend upon the identity of its source.”

In other words, it doesn’t matter whether speech comes from a human being or a corporation. Speech is speech.

This is absurd on its face: in a democracy, the identity of the speaker exercising First Amendment free speech rights matters enormously. When scientists say cigarettes cause cancer, that’s different from when a tobacco corporation says—to protect their profits—that cigarettes are safe.

When citizens go door to door to get signatures for higher taxes to fund schools, that’s different from when a corporation showers cash on politicians and judges to oppose those taxes and thus increase profits. When human beings express a political opinion, we’re exercising conscience, self-interest, and judgment. When a corporation funds a political opinion by purchasing advertising or showering cash on elected officials, however, it’s advancing the financial interests of wealthy shareholders and multimillionaire executives in ways that are often in direct opposition to the public interest.

But Lewis Powell’s majority opinion won, and thus—for the first time since FDR’s presidency—enshrined the corrupt principle that corporate “speech” (in other words, money, since corporations don’t have mouths) has First Amendment protection.

Justice Byron White dissented powerfully in Bellotti: “The State has a legitimate interest in regulating corporate participation in political debate in order to prevent corporate domination of the debate and to minimize the use of corporate economic power as a means of distorting the outcome.”

White understood what was at stake, but the Republican majority either didn’t understand or didn’t care.

Bellotti, then, opened the real floodgates that brought Reagan to power two years later and continue to wash over us with corporate cash today. If corporations had First Amendment rights to influence ballot initiatives (Bellotti), what about general elections for politicians? What about unlimited spending on electioneering? What about functionally purchasing political outcomes with the vast resources found in corporate coffers?

Those questions would be answered in 2010, with Clarence Thomas—himself the recipient of millions in “gifts” from rightwing billionaires—becoming the deciding vote.

Citizens United: The Oligarchs Strike Back

In the election year of 2008, a rightwing advocacy group called Citizens United produced a political hit piece on Hillary Clinton. They wanted to run it in theaters and as video-on-demand during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign to knock her out of the running.

The Federal Election Commission said the movie violated the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, known as McCain-Feingold, which prohibited corporations from using their general treasury funds for “electioneering communications” within ninety days of an election.

Citizens United sued, arguing their (nonprofit) corporate First Amendment right to free speech was being violated by McCain-Feingold.

The case reached the Supreme Court in 2009, and Citizens United’s lawyers first argued narrowly that their specific video should be allowed because the time restrictions were essentially arbitrary.

But the five Republican justices—Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito—saw an opportunity to do something far bigger: with this single case, they could overturn a century of campaign finance law and give corporations and their morbidly rich oligarch owners the unlimited power to spend money on—and thus influence or even control—elections.

The Republicans on the Court thus asked for re-argument on a much broader question that had never been part of the case in the first place: can the government restrict any corporate political spending at all?

As a result, on January 21, 2010, the five Republicans on the Court issued (over the loud objections of the four Democrats) one of the most consequential and destructive decisions in American history.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the five-justice majority, held that the government cannot restrict independent political expenditures by corporations. Spending money to influence elections is “speech” protected by the First Amendment, he explained, and, under the logic of Davis’s headnote, corporations have the same First Amendment rights as human beings.

The Republican justices’ reasoning rested entirely on previous cases grounded in Santa Clara and its progeny. Corporations are persons. Money is the same thing as speech for a corporation, which otherwise lacks a mouth and vocal cords. Persons have First Amendment rights. Therefore, corporations can spend unlimited money to influence elections.

Kennedy, ignoring the fact that the word corporation doesn’t appear even once in the Constitution, wrote: “The Government may not suppress political speech on the basis of the speaker’s corporate identity,” and “The First Amendment does not permit Congress to make these categorical distinctions based on the corporate identity of the speaker.”

Justice John Paul Stevens dissented in a ninety-page opinion that dismantled the majority’s reasoning piece by piece.

Stevens wrote: “Corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their ‘personhood’ often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.”

Stevens understood what the majority refused to acknowledge: corporations are not people, so granting them constitutional rights perverts democracy.

But Stevens was in the four-Democratic-appointee minority, so his dissent had no legal power. The five Republican justices—several clearly on the take themselves at the time—gave the nation’s morbidly rich oligarchs exactly what they wanted: the constitutional right to buy elections.

The Immediate Impact

The impact of Citizens United was both immediate and catastrophic for democracy and has gotten worse every year since.

In the 2010 midterm elections, the first after Citizens United, outside spending by corporations and wealthy individuals more than doubled from the previous midterm. Super PACs, which could accept unlimited corporate money, spent over $300 million. By 2012, outside spending topped $1 billion. By 2020, it exceeded $3 billion, and in 2024 was about $4.5 billion.

So now we can see who were the real “speakers” in these elections: not citizens or even voters. They were almost exclusively wealthy individuals and corporations, many hiding behind layers of anonymity through dark money groups; over 100 billionaire families put over $2.4 billion into the 2024 election alone, with the vast majority going to Trump and the GOP. Corporate PACs kicked in billions more.

Following the logic of Davis’s headnote and Lewis Powell’s memo, America’s oligarchs had been given the keys to corrupt our democracy, and they set about using them with enthusiasm.

The Logical Extension

Thus, it turns out that—predictably—Citizens United was just the beginning. Once corporations got their hands on an unlimited First Amendment right to spend money on politics, other corporate rights followed.

In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), the Supreme Court ruled that closely held corporations have religious freedom rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment. As a result, a non-living soulless corporation could refuse to provide contraception coverage to employees based on its alleged religious beliefs because it was granted religious freedom rights by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented: “In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

The five Republican justices, Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito (the same five from Citizens United), nonetheless gave corporations religious rights. When was the last time you saw a corporation kneeling at a church altar?

McCutcheon and the Continuing Assault

In 2014, in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court took this bizarre logic to its next extreme when it struck down aggregate limits on individual campaign contributions. Those same five Republican justices ruled that preventing corruption wasn’t enough of a justification to level the political playing field by reining in spending.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the First Amendment “is designed and intended to preserve a free and open public discussion of public questions,” and—because money is now a stand-in for “speech”—that contribution limits on his, Thomas’s, and Alito’s morbidly rich patrons infringed this constitutional right to buy politicians and election outcomes.

This is, to use the technical term, nuts, but it’s now the law. When Elon Musk gave a quarter-billion dollars to Trump and his campaign in 2024, it wasn’t “speech” in any meaningful sense. It was an oligarch—the richest man in the world—using his wealth to buy influence, access, and political outcomes that favored his and his companies’ bottom lines.

Justice Stephen Breyer dissented, writing: “Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard,” but he was in the minority, so the rest of us are now being drowned out in virtually every election.

The Oligarch Democracy

We now live in what some political scientists call an oligarchic democracy, a system where wealth—both individual and corporate—determines political outcomes more than votes.

The statistics are damning. According to Princeton professor Martin Gilens, who studied 1,800 policy outcomes, because of this bizarre Republican interpretation of the Fourteenth and First Amendments, “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

In other words, what ordinary Americans want has virtually no impact on what policies get enacted. What wealthy elites and corporations want, instead, almost always determines policy outcomes.

Consider all the issues that score well above 60 percent (and often above 80 percent) on national polling: gun control, free or inexpensive college, a national healthcare system, improved public schools, cheap pharmaceuticals, affordable housing, an absolute right to unionize, the right to vote without your name being purged, a meaningful top income tax rate on the rich, getting climate change under control, breaking up monopolies, and equal rights for minorities and women.

None of these things are happening, and it’s because big-money interests oppose all of them. That isn’t democracy; it’s an oppressive oligarchy pretending to be a democracy.

And it all traces back to Davis’s fraudulent 1886 headnote. Once corporations became “persons” with constitutional rights, this horrible list of outcomes became both predictable and inevitable.

The International Dimension

And these horrors inflicted on us by a series of corrupt Supreme Court decisions and the phony doctrine of corporate constitutional rights they’re based on are no longer limited to whacking democracy in our country. America’s corporate constitutional rights doctrine has also spread into international law through trade agreements drafted with the “help” of America’s largest corporations.

Starting with the Reagan administration, which first negotiated the precursors to NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), multiple bilateral investment treaties now give corporations the right to sue governments in private tribunals whenever government regulations hurt corporate profits. These “investor–state dispute settlement” provisions let corporations trample the will of We the People, and do it in secret.

For example, a Canadian mining company sued El Salvador for refusing to grant a mining permit that El Salvador documented would contaminate its drinking water. A tobacco company sued Uruguay for requiring life-saving health warnings on cigarette packages. An oil company sued Ecuador for regulations protecting its environment.

These aren’t really “trade disputes”: they’re corporations using treaty law—which they gained by financing politicians with their corporate “free speech”—to claim rights superior to democratic governance.

The same logic that gave corporations constitutional rights in America is now giving them treaty rights globally because corporate constitutional rights have gone international.

The world’s oligarchs aren’t just buying American democracy; they’re using our Supreme Court’s 5–4 Republican-only decisions to buy sovereignty itself.

The Court That Sold Democracy

The five Republican justices who decided Citizens United and Hobby Lobby—Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito—will be remembered by history as the Court that sold American democracy to the world’s most toxic and morbidly rich oligarchs.

And they didn’t even bother to do it subtly or incrementally. This power grab was done brazenly, overturning a century of precedent to give corporations and their oligarchs functionally unlimited political power.

These five justices claimed to be “originalists” who’d only interpret the Constitution “according to the Founders’ intent.” But, as history tells us, this nation’s Founders would have been horrified by the entire idea of corporate constitutional rights. They quite literally fought a revolution against corporate tyranny and then deliberately excluded corporations from any constitutional protections.

As I wrote in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, the “originalism” of the Roberts Court is a fraud, just like the headnote in Santa Clara. It’s a convenient fiction used to justify the destruction of our democracy.

History will not judge these justices kindly, nor should it. They’ll be remembered as the men who murdered American democracy at the request of the very oligarchs who paid to have them appointed.

The American Dream, Murdered

For my father’s generation, born during the Republican Great Depression and coming of age with World War II, the American Dream wasn’t just a slogan. FDR’s massive experiment with Keynesian economics worked; it was a reality for two-thirds of American families by 1980. A single income could support a family. You could buy a house for three times your annual salary. College was affordable or free. Healthcare didn’t bankrupt families. Retirement was secure. Children saw better opportunities than their parents.

As mentioned earlier, that reality was built by two Progressive Eras and a series of presidents who worked hard to constrain oligarch and corporate power. The first, from the 1890s through 1920, established the income tax, direct election of senators, women’s suffrage, and the first antitrust laws. The second, from 1933 through 1981, created Social Security, the right to organize unions, the minimum wage, and the regulatory framework that prevented corporate abuse.

But today, as we look at the wreckage of the middle class all around us, we can now see that Davis’s corporate constitutional rights headnote provided Reagan, the GOP, and their oligarch “donors” with the weapons to tear it all down.

Citizens United was the final blow against our democracy, leading us directly to the Trump presidency. Once corporations and their oligarch owners could spend unlimited money on elections, they could finance politicians who’d cut their taxes, deregulate their industries, crush their workers’ unions, and transfer wealth from working families to the oligarchs created by those same companies.

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Chapter 9: The Numbers Don’t Lie - by Thom Hartmann

chapter 9: The Numbers Don’t Lie

Measuring the Death of the Dream

The destruction of the American Dream isn’t just an abstraction; it’s measurable. (See Chart 9.1)

In 1980 when Reagan was elected president, at the peak of the American Dream, fully two-thirds of American families were in the middle class. A single income could support a family, buy a house, take an annual vacation, send the kids to college, and even retire with dignity.

Today, only 43 to 47 percent of Americans qualify as middle class (depending on whose numbers and what criteria you use). And it takes two full-time incomes today to achieve what a single union job gave a family in 1980.

Consider wages. If wages had kept pace with productivity since 1980, the median American individual worker’s income would be over $100,000 today. Instead, it’s around $50,000. With help from the Reagan Revolution, that missing $50,000 has largely gone into corporate profits and executive compensation: in other words, into the money bins of the nation’s oligarchs.

Then there’s housing. In 1980, the median home price was about $47,000, roughly three times the median (single-worker) household income. Today, the median home price exceeds $400,000, while median household (two-worker) income is around $75,000. That’s more than five times the household income, and in many cities it’s ten times or more. People who could have bought a home in their twenties, like Louise and I did in the 1970s, now struggle to do so even in their forties.

The same is true of education. When I attended college in the late 1960s, I paid my tuition working part-time jobs. My mom paid her way through four years at Michigan State in the 1940s working summers as a lifeguard and propping airplanes. Today’s post–Citizens United students graduate with an average of $30,000 in debt, and total American student loan debt exceeds $1.7 trillion. We’re the only developed country in the world where this is true, and an entire generation is now starting life in a financial hole that previous generations never faced.

Or consider healthcare. In 1980, healthcare costs were 8.9 percent of GDP, and most hospitals and health insurance companies were required by state law to be nonprofits. Today, healthcare costs are nearly 20 percent of GDP, and half a million American families declare bankruptcy every year just because someone got sick. Medical bankruptcy like this doesn’t exist in any other developed country in the world. Only in America.

And then there are the under-siege unions. In 1980, about a third of American workers belonged to unions, so those union contracts established the wage floor for another third of American non-union workers. Today, after forty-five years of Reaganomics’ relentless assault grounded in corporate constitutional rights, union membership has collapsed to around 10 percent. When workers can’t organize, they can’t bargain for fair wages, so corporate profits and billionaire wealth soar while workers struggle.

Perhaps most grotesque, check out wealth concentration. In 1980, the top 1 percent owned about 20 percent of all wealth. Today, they own over 35 percent. The top 0.1 percent, one in a thousand Americans, owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent of all Americans combined. Just three white men own more wealth than the entire bottom half of Americans.

This is the economic and political landscape that is today’s America, courtesy of corporate constitutional rights. The RAND Corporation calculated that between 1975 and 2018, fully $50 trillion was transferred from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent, every penny stolen from working families and transferred to the oligarchs created by these corrupt Supreme Court decisions.

That’s not capitalism or even so-called free markets. It’s naked theft, enabled by made-up corporate constitutional rights and protected by a political system that the nation’s wealthiest corporations now control.

These numbers should have sparked revolution. When two-thirds of wealth gains go to the top 1 percent, when working families can’t afford what their parents had, when the American Dream visibly dies, studies and history show that such inequality provokes mass movements that topple oligarchies.

So how did they get away with it? How did they steal fifty trillion dollars in broad daylight without facing a democratic revolt?

They had a strategy that involved deflection, scapegoating, and blaming their victims, making sure the anger went elsewhere.

The Cover-Up and Deflection Scam

As Reagan’s Revolution destroyed the union movement, transferred over $50 trillion from working-class people into the money bins of the top 1 percent, and crushed the middle class, people began to get angry.

They saw their pensions dissolved in corporate bankruptcies, their jobs sent to foreign factories, and their wages essentially frozen for more than four decades. Opportunities faded, education became absurdly expensive, healthcare started bankrupting families, and a simmering rage began to fill America.

Responding to this, the GOP and their oligarch-owned media began a multi-decade campaign to blame the collapse of the middle class first on women and Black people entering the workforce, then on immigrants, and generally on “liberals” and “socialists.”

It’s a strategy that’s worked for fascist regimes in the past: Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, and Orbán all did the same. And it was effective enough to get Trump elected twice.

But the deflection scam and the cover-up it concealed is starting to crack under the scrutiny of a new generation of young Americans. They’re figuring out what happened and how it came about, even if most don’t know the nineteenth-century backstory.

The simple reality is that the American Dream didn’t fade away: it was murdered, and corporate constitutional rights were the murder weapon.

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Chapter 10: The Cover-Up - by Thom Hartmann

Chapter 10: The Cover-Up

How They Pinned the Crime on Scapegoats

Recently, an aficionado of Fox “News” called into my radio program to say that he was “sick and tired of being ripped off by these Somali [Black] welfare cheats.”

I asked him if he realized that from an average taxpayer’s point of view, the amount of federal tax dollars that goes to everyday safety-net programs like SNAP or basic welfare “is about $324 per taxpayer, but direct subsidies and special tax breaks that favor big businesses and industries cost each taxpayer thousands of dollars per year.”

He grunted, as if he didn’t believe me, and hung up the phone. These guys are truly well indoctrinated, which raises the question: how and why did that happen?

Reagan and the oligarchs who funded him were faced with a problem of growing discontent among “the rabble.”

The billionaires and giant corporations had largely accomplished their initial goals by the end of Reagan’s first term, and by Trump’s second, had almost completely subdued the middle class. They’d crushed unions, slashed their own taxes to almost nothing (both personal and corporate), and shipped millions of good-paying jobs overseas to low-wage countries.

They’d turned healthcare from a nonprofit public good (by law in most states) into a $5 trillion-a-year profit center, and hedge funds, big banks, and foreign investors had transformed single-family housing into a virtual casino where the house—themselves—always won. They’d successfully transferred over fifty trillion dollars from working Americans into their own money bins in fewer than forty years.

As planned, the American Dream was dying before average people’s eyes at the same time the oligarchs had become richer than any kings or emperors or pharaohs in world history. Wages stagnated while productivity—and, thus, profits—soared. Young people couldn’t afford to buy their first homes. Medical debt made a fortune for the industry but bankrupted over a half million families every year. Because of all this, the middle class had shrunk from 66 percent to 43 percent in a mere four decades.

This created the problem for oligarch-owned Republican politicians: the result of all this was that people were justifiably angry—seriously pissed off. It was the kind of anger that, throughout history, has toppled oligarchies, brought down governments, and forced the rewriting of constitutions. America had become a boiling pot, and the oligarchs were starting to feel the heat.

So, they did what oligarchs have always done from the days of the Caesars to the Confederacy: they deflected that anger.

Not toward themselves, of course, even though they were the ones actually responsible for the theft of the American Dream. Not toward the corporations that were using ill-gotten constitutional rights to crush workers and capture control of most of our government. And not toward the billionaires whose assets exploded while everyone else’s shrank.

Instead, they deflected the working class’s anger downward, toward the very, very convenient people at the bottom of the ladder, the people with even less power than the tens of millions of struggling workers.

It was a massive cover-up of the theft of human rights, a very specific plan for blaming the victims instead of the perpetrators.

Republicans created, in other words, scapegoats.

Turning Poverty into a Moral Failure

The first move in the corporate oligarchs’ cover-up playbook was to use their political platforms and captured media to make poverty shameful and government help something that everybody should become suspicious of.

Reagan didn’t invent racism or disdain for the poor, of course, but he weaponized both with a fictional character: the “welfare queen.” In speech after speech all across the country and in TV appearances, the Gipper described a woman in Chicago who supposedly had “eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards,” and collected “over $150,000” every year in government benefits. She drove a “big” Cadillac, then a status symbol in the Black community. She was, Reagan told us, living large off us sucker average working-class taxpayers.

The story was almost entirely fabricated. But for Reagan’s purposes, it didn’t need to be true: it only needed to be useful. “Fraud” became the GOP’s favorite word for everything from suppressing the vote to cutting benefits to blaming the death of the middle class on poor and Black people.

And it was devastatingly useful. That single story, told over and over again for eight years, transformed America’s social safety net—so carefully constructed from the New Deal to the Great Society that had lifted millions out of poverty—from a source of security for struggling families into a “scam” that “cheaters” exploited. This victim blaming made poverty a character flaw rather than a product of the GOP’s new system of low wages, union busting, expensive college, unpredictable medical costs, and soaring housing prices.

The “personal responsibility” narrative followed this vilification of poor people as naturally as leaves sprouting in the spring. If poverty was a moral failure, if struggling families were in the straits they found themselves because of “bad choices,” then, Republicans and their conservative media told us, cutting programs that help them isn’t cruelty, it’s tough love. It’s actually doing them a favor by incentivizing better behavior.

I remember how Rush Limbaugh used to tell this joke (one of his favorites when he wasn’t blaming women for the economic problems of white men): “What do you do for a man when he’s down? You kick him! Otherwise, he won’t get up! Hahahaha!”

Notice what this narrative doesn’t mention: stagnant wages, union busting, exploding healthcare and education costs, skyrocketing housing prices, offshored jobs, or any of the actual causes of economic insecurity brought to us by the Reagan Revolution, powered by corporate constitutional rights based on Davis’s headnote. It instead keeps working-class anger focused on other working-class people—the ones getting “handouts”—while the oligarchs quietly pocket another trillion dollars.

It was the old story of the fat-cat corporate CEO sitting at a table with two working men, each with a plate before him. The CEO has a huge pile of cookies, and each of the two workers has a single cookie on his plate. The CEO points to one of them and says to the other, “Look out, he wants your cookie!”

The Southern Strategy and “Law and Order”

That well-known cookie meme also has a variation, where one worker is Black and the other is white. The CEO points at the Black worker and tells the white worker the Black guy wants to steal his cookie.

Reagan’s welfare queen imagery wasn’t racially neutral by a long shot. Everyone knew who Reagan was describing, just like when he’d ask people if they got angry when a “young buck” was in front of them in the supermarket line “buying steak with food stamps while all you can afford is hamburger.”

The cover-up and deflection playbook has always had a racial dimension, but after the legal and political successes of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, explicit racism became politically toxic.

So Republican strategists developed what Nixon called his Southern Strategy, which Reagan cheerfully adopted in his first speech after his nomination in 1980. It was about “states’ rights” near the scene of the Mississippi Burning murder of three civil rights workers.

It was elegant in its simplicity, a deliberate shift from explicit racism to barely coded language that activated the same resentments while maintaining a veneer of plausible deniability that could be used with great indignation in media appearances when Republicans were accused of playing the race card.

Lee Atwater, the Republican strategist who managed George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign and created the infamous Willie Horton ad, explained it with unusual candor in a 1981 interview: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N, n, n.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n’—that hurts you, backfires. So, you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

How This Relates to Today:

In this chapter excerpt we see how the GOP, having basically nothing to offer the average American, has turned to racism and bigotry to fuel their campaigns to get and hold political power.

This strategy, making use of the reality — well known to the Republicans on the Supreme Court — that the vast majority of the morbidly rich are so self-obsessed that they’ll sacrifice our democracy for a tax cut, has been at the core of Republican campaigns since Nixon rolled out his “Law and Order” program to try to disrupt both the anti-war and Civil Rights movements.

Dan Baum chronicled how it works — and why — in 1994 when he interviewed Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, about Nixon’s “war on drugs” effort, and Ehrlichman said:

“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying?

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

”We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Here’s today’s example, posted last night to Trump’s Nazi-infested social media network. Because they’re entirely devoted to making themselves and their billionaire buddies (13 of them in Trump’s cabinet) richer and screwing working class people to do so, their entire message is: “See his brown skin? See her burka? See how different they are from us white ‘Christian’ people?” [PIX OF COUPLES] MAMDANI

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epi

Next weekend, Sunday August 30 at noon ET, 9am PT, we’ll discuss this book, my newest, Who Killed the American Dream. This weekend and next, I’m sharing the final chapter of the book.

Epilogue: What History Will Say About Us

History teaches us that oligarchies are unstable systems of government that typically either collapse from their own internal rot—as happened here in 1929 when the Republican Great Depression brought down the oligarchs of the Roaring Twenties—or get overthrown by their own people, as happened in the 1860s when the fascist system that had taken over the Old South was destroyed by the Civil War.

But when oligarchies don’t collapse or get overthrown, they morph into tyranny, and usually that happens within a single generation.

That’s what happened in Russia. It went from the chaos of the 1990s oligarchy to Putin’s authoritarian state in less than twenty years. It’s also what happened in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán took a newly liberated democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state in less than a decade. It’s also what’s happening right now in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, India, and multiple other countries around the world.

Tyranny doesn’t typically pop up all at once. It comes incrementally, moving step by inexorable step, until it hits a tipping point where it can no longer be stopped. Before that tipping point is reached, most people think the system will correct itself, that once everyone figures out what’s happening, things will go back to normal.

They’re almost always wrong.

America is now in that dangerous zone between oligarchy and tyranny. Our nation’s oligarchs have controlled our politics for a solid forty years. They own the media, have captured the courts, and bought most of Congress. The question for today is whether they’ll be satisfied with their comfortable oligarchy or whether they’ll join Donald Trump’s and the GOP’s push for America’s final transition to tyranny.

Steve Bannon told us what the goal was: “Deconstruct the administrative state.” That’s tyrant-speak for dismantling the institutions that might dare to—or have the power to—constrain oligarchic power.

As a result, we’re in a race against time, and the window for successful action is narrowing. Every year that corporate constitutional rights remain in place, America’s oligarchs tighten their grip. Every election they buy makes the next election easier to purchase. Every judge they install makes the next judge easier to intimidate or buy off.

This isn’t alarmism: it’s the historical pattern, repeated across dozens of countries and thousands of years. Oligarchies either fall or they become tyrannies; there’s no third option.

In 2036, it will be 150 years since Davis wrote that corrupt Santa Clara headnote.

What will America look like?

Will we still be the world’s richest democracy, and return to being a nation founded on the principle that “all men are created equal” and government should work first and foremost for We the People?

Or will we continue the Trump-blazed path of being a nation primarily serving a billionaire president, thirteen billionaires in his cabinet, billionaire media owners, and tech bro billionaires addicting our children to rage for their own profit?

The Dream That Was Stolen

In 1944, as millions of Americans fought fascism overseas, Franklin Roosevelt delivered one of his most important State of the Union addresses. He was too ill to travel to the Capitol building, so he spoke from the White House, his voice carried over this newfangled thing called radio into living rooms across America.

While he referenced the war effort in this speech, the man who’d rescued America from the Republican Great Depression leaned heavily on his proposal—what he called a Second Bill of Rights—to make America into what Jefferson called “a more perfect union.” Its focus was a new set of constitutional rights that would guarantee the American Dream to every citizen.

“We have come to a clear realization of the fact,” Roosevelt said, “that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

FDR’s Second Bill of Rights laid out, as mentioned earlier, the rights to a job that pays well, small businesses to be free from unfair competition by monopolies, housing for all Americans, healthcare for all, and free college.

“All of these rights spell security,” FDR said. “And after this war is won, we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.”

FDR died shortly after that speech, on April 12, 1945, but over the next thirty-five years we came close to achieving that dream.

By 1980, two-thirds of Americans lived it. We had jobs that paid enough to support a family, we could afford to buy a home in our 20s, and healthcare didn’t bankrupt us. We attended college without crushing debt, and for most of us, our retirement was secure. Ever since 1933, each generation had done better than the one before it.

Then Reagan was elected and—like Trump did with Project 2025—implemented the Heritage Foundation’s 1,093-page 1980 “Mandate for Leadership,” telling the oligarchs at the US Chamber of Commerce they should seize control of the media, the courts, America’s universities, and public opinion.

While the Mandate’s two thousand–plus recommendations didn’t specifically cite Lewis Powell’s infamous Memo or Davis’s notorious headnote, it didn’t have to: corporate constitutional rights were the obvious tool to accomplish most goals of the Foundation’s billionaire founders and funders.

Reagan, the GOP, and the biggest businesses in America used corporate First Amendment rights to buy elections and drown out the voices of ordinary citizens. They used corporate property rights to battle every regulation that protected workers, consumers, and communities. They used corporate due process rights to block accountability for corporate crimes.

They crushed the unions that gave workers bargaining power, starting with Reagan’s attack on the air traffic controllers’ PATCO. They wrote the trade deals that would ship millions of good manufacturing jobs overseas. They turned healthcare and health insurance from servants of the middle class into raw profit centers. They transformed housing from a human need into a speculative commodity and loaded young people with debt for education that used to be free.

And they transferred over fifty trillion dollars from the homes and wallets and retirement accounts of working Americans to their own money bins.

FDR’s Second Bill of Rights was never passed, but the dream it represented was real for the generations that watched and lived his expansion of democracy and an economy that increasingly worked for all.

But then Reagan and his “conservative” buddies used BANCROFT- Davis’s corporate constitutional rights headnote to kill even a hope for FDR’s Second Bill of Rights.

See you next weekend for the last half of the Epilogue and our online conversation!

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2ND 1/2 NOT PUBL?

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The Lie That Changed America - YouTube

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