An eye-opening BradCast today, at least for me. [Audio to full show follows this summary.]
Late last week, my friend — and our guest on today’s show — THOM HARTMANN, longtime progressive talk-show host, historian, and prolific author, posted a piece at his Hartmann Report website that made a few things click for me.
Essentially, he explained, every 80 years in the U.S., beginning with its inception, has seen the rise of an oligarchic class — usually through unrestricted corporate monopolies — that begins to strip both rights and money from the rest of the nation. The good news: each time it happens “we defeated the morbidly rich and established or re-established popular democracy and a government that put working class people ahead of the oligarchs,” Thom wrote.
The somewhat grimmer news, as he and I discuss today, is that each time the oligarchy is put down by the forces of democracy, it tends to be accompanied by some sort of bloodshed. In the 1770s, it took a revolution to put down the corporate monopolies favored by the King (that’s what the whole Boston Tea Party was about); 80 years later, it was a handful of plantation oligarchs in the South who grew to such wealth they began to strip voting rights, took over newspapers and ruled as “genuine fascists” (You know how that one ended, right?); 80 years later, the cycle culminated again with the rise of the Gilded Age in the Roaring 20s, only to come crashing down along with the stock market and to be restored by FDR’s progressive New Deal and the advent of WWII.
“FDR said, ‘Let’s build a middle class.’ It had never been done before,” Thom explains. “He built the first middle class that was more than half of the population of a country, in the history of the world. With a 90% top income tax rate on individuals, a 90% income tax rate on corporations. Strong regulation of monopolies. Strong enforcement of the right to unionize. Creation of Social Security, the minimum wage, workers’ rights, the 5-day week, the 8-hour day. This was all the New Deal. That built this middle class that lasted. By the time Reagan was sworn into office, fully 65% of us were in the middle class with a single paycheck.”
And here we are, 80 years after WWII and the oligarchs are on control again, after years of dismantling the programs that built the middle class, beginning with Reagan.
“The hallmark of these revolutionary moments, these 80-year moments, is typically an economic calamity. Not just an economic crisis, not just a recession, but an actual depression,” Hartmann tells me, warning that the ongoing AI bubble could turn into exactly that. On the upside, he agrees, it won’t be good for the Republicans in power when and if it happens.
Now it’s Donald Trump’s “Golden Age for America”. Though it is only golden, at best, for a smaller and smaller number of more and more powerful oligarchs at the top.
This November, Thom argues, Americans will decide whether “the fourth assault on American Democracy” begins to end.
The oligarchs will not go down without a fight, he warns. Trump has already cleared the way to make it as easy as possible for the election to be meddled with by dismantling the institutions that previously served to protect it. As Thom summarized in his piece, titled “The Fourth Assault on American Democracy Has Already Begun. This Fall Decides Whether It Ends,” Trump has:
- Frozen and defunded the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) election security division,
- Cut off the threat-sharing network serving 1,300 state and local election officials,
- Disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force,
- Gutted the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center,
- Shuttered the State Department’s counter-disinformation office,
- Reduced the Justice Department’s voting rights section from 30 lawyers to 3,
- Fired the head of the NSA Cyber Command who caught indications of Russian meddling,
- Left the Federal Election Commission (FEC) without a quorum,
- And this month fired every remaining commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) just four months before the midterms.
“This election is going to confront America’s oligarchs with a choice,” Hartmann predicts. “Odds are that the Democrats are going to take power. Odds are that Trump or the Republicans or both are going to try to neuter that power. The Constitution says that Congress — the House and Senate — do not need to respect elections. Article I, Section 5, and it is non-justiciable. The House and Senate alone will decide which members they will seat and which members they won’t,” he tells me. “Republicans are seriously thinking about this. They are seriously having conversations about doing this, about just ignoring the outcome of the election, and having Mike Johnson say, ‘We’re just not going to seat those people because Donald Trump says the ones that gave Democrats control of the House, we think those elections all have fraud in them, so we’re not going to seat those people, we’re going to seat the Republicans instead.’ I think there’s a very real possibility of that happening.”
“At that point,” he says, “Americans are probably going to show up in the streets. And the actual oligarchs — the Jeff Bezoses of the world — are going to have to make a decision. They’re going to have to make that same decision that they confronted in 1933.”
To that end, Thom suspects “Something big is up, and they’re not even bothering to be subtle about it.” We’ll see soon enough. Election Day is 99 days away.
We discuss all of that and much more, including why this happens like clockwork about every 80 years, and whether Americans have the will to turn back the brutal cycle yet again.
ALSO TODAY… A few listener calls, and some good news over the weekend regarding another Appeals Court lost for Donald Trump and his Administration. This time, blocking his Executive Order from March, unconstitutionally ordering the U.S. Postal Service to restrict the delivery of vote-by-mail ballots in states that refuse to play by Trump’s unlawful rules. Today, the Administration appealed that ruling to the corrupted U.S. Supreme Court…
Can’t wait to hear to this one! I listen to Thom’s show almost every day. Both of you guys are amazing!
By the way… Great interview with Lisa Graves recently. I’m reading her book. She was right in the middle of everything involving the demise of our court system. Important information!
Thanks, Larry! I agree. She’s fantastic. For those who didn’t hear that interview, it’s right here.