Thom Hartmann talking:
we’re actually in this crash. It really started in 2006 when the housing market started falling apart, just like in 1927 when the housing market fell apart. And that crash lasted for quite some time, as Hoover did nothing. Now we have a situation where it’s not just do nothing. Obama was successful in the first few months of his administration at putting enough of a band-aid on it that they’re holding it back with baling wire and bubble gum. But Bush had hoped—he saw this coming. The Bush administration had hoped that they could wait until November of 2008, so it would be after the elections, so it wouldn’t hurt the Republican candidates. He was unsuccessful. The Obama administration is now—because they’re not doing the real structural change necessary, they’re hoping they can push it off to 2016. And that’s why we chose that date. There’s an enormous amount of effort in our government and in the Fed to try to hold this off until after the elections of 2016. Whether they’re going to be successful or not, I don’t know. It literally could happen next week.
royalist conspiracy. We are seeing a repeat of what we saw in the 1920s, what we saw in the 1850s, what we saw in the 1760s and 1770s, which is, basically, very wealthy, very powerful interests rising up and—you know, they’re anti—fundamentally anti-democratic. They’re trying to create an oligarchic form of government, and in many cases succeeding. It’s the war of the rich against the poor and the working—the working people, the middle class, in short summary.
in this generation, you know, we see the Kochs and the Adelsons, and they’re the more visible ones. There are many more who are far less visible. You have—last year on Wall Street alone, you had 10 people who took over $2 billion in income. You’ve got—you know, the president of UnitedHealthcare has taken over a billion dollars in income, Stephen Hemsley. The guy before him, Bill McGuire, took over a billion-and-a-half dollars in income. There’s—there are a number of people, since the rules got changed during the Reagan administration. It was a real—a genuine revolution that set this up, and then the big changes at the end of the Clinton administration that Phil Gramm pushed through, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Since then, these people have basically been unleashed. I mean, in the ’20s it was the DuPonts and the Morgans and the Rockefellers, and now it’s this new bunch. But it’s always the same group.
some of the biggest fortunes in America over the last century were made during the last Great Depression. If you’re cash rich and everybody is desperately selling everything they have for almost nothing, because they—you know, they’re facing tax liens and they’re going out of business and things, it’s an enormous opportunity to get even richer. So, that’s—they’re benefiting—they are and will benefit from [inaudible].
Joe Stack flew—infamously or famously, I suppose—his plane into the IRS—into an IRS building and killed an IRS worker. He was a small businessperson who just got basically eaten by the recession. And we describe him as America’s first suicide bomber. I think that Joe Stack, on the one hand, the Occupy movement, and in some ways the tea party movement, at least at the grassroots where people don’t realize who’s pulling the strings, are all signs of this growing populist rage of a nation that is pregnant with, to paraphrase Jefferson, revolution—I’m not talking violent revolution; as I said, the Reagan revolution was a revolution, the FDR revolution, you know—that there is so much pressure right now to—you know, for something to happen. And we’re seeing this. We’re seeing this in the rise of suicides all across the United States. We’re seeing it in the rise of homelessness.
In in 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt came into office, the White House was occupied. There was an Occupy movement then; it was called the Bonus Army. And literally, from the edge of the White House all the way down to the Potomac River was a sea of people. FDR confronted this enormous occupation. It was the consequence, of course, of three years of the crash not being addressed. I would guess, had he not been able to get this very small stimulus, that stopped us from losing 700,000 jobs a month and took us to kind of a flat level—flat painful, but flat—that there would—you know, that the Occupy movement would have been 10 times larger now, and we’d be looking at something like that.
President Obama is missed the FDR moment. he had that during the first few months of his presidency. And before Scott Brown was put in in the Senate, he had a—I don’t know, I think it was about 13 weeks with a filibuster-proof Senate, and had an opportunity to do these things. But in all probability, he got the same speech Bill Clinton got from Rubin and Summers—or Rubin and Greenspan, rather, when he—when he was installed after running on his “New Covenant” speech, which was a very FDR speech, and then governing as a—as basically an Eisenhower Republican.
On the one hand, it’s fairly easy to blame Obama for that. On the other hand, I don’t think that any president in a long, long time has faced such an implacable wall of opposition. And now, because of Citizens United, Buckley v. Valeo, First National Bank, because of these Supreme Court decisions, these politicians on the right—the Republicans, by and large—are funded massively, massively by these billionaires. And so, I think, much like in the ’30s, much like in the 1850s, much like in the 1770s, it’s going to take a major economic crisis to produce the political will necessary to create the fundamental changes, structural changes in our political and economic system that can make this country work again.
Arnold Toybee—it may be an apocryphal quote, but it’s often attributed to him—said that when the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable, that we remember the glories but not the horrors. And you could say the same of economic disasters, when, you know, we’ve forgotten not only the horrors of the Great Depression, in many ways, but also the lessons that we learned out of them. Every one in the past, every one of these economic disasters, has been followed by a war—the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II. Whether this one is—and each war has been horribly more destructive, because technology improves. Whether this one is is going to depend probably a lot on what is going on around the rest of the world.
there’s what’s referred to in economics as a perverse incentive built into this, just like we see with the private prison industry arguing for longer drug sentences and laws because they want to fill up more beds. Ed Snowden worked for a company, Booz Allen, which was owned at one point in time by the Carlyle Group, which was in part owned at one time, ironically, by the bin Laden family. I mean, figure this one out. And we find that, you know, roughly 70 percent, apparently, of the intelligence budget of the United States has been outsourced. Massive chunks of the Pentagon have been outsourced.
So it’s not just, you know, is there going to be a war like, you know, military conflict, intra-country stuff, but we have an industry in the United States that is so powerful and that the Supreme Court has empowered to behave as if they were citizen lobbyists in ways that were unthinkable in—well, actually, has happened in past, but during Eisenhower’s day would have been much more difficult, and certainly after Nixon, that—I mean, for example, the wealthiest zip code in the United States is no longer Beverly Hills. It’s just north of Washington, D.C., where all the mansions of these defense contractors are.
So, there’s an enormous pressure to do something. And I was surprised that we didn’t go to war with Syria. I think the country has been so badly burned by George Bush’s lies and wars that—and that’s another thing that gives me some hope that this depression, this crash, might not be followed by a war. But we’re going to have to wait and see what happens in the Middle East and what happens with Taiwan and China and all these other things.
IPCC is not talking about right now, but the scientists are, people are hysterical about, is the—or very concerned about, is that there are trillions of tons of methane hydrate, methane frozen up in ice in the Arctic and around continental shelves. If that melts, then there will be a sudden global warming. And when you look at the five past extinctions on the planet Earth, every single one was triggered by one of these methane releases. And that is the worst-case scenario. We’re hopeful that we can avoid it.
NASA right now has an experiment called CARVE, Carbon in Arctic Reservoir Vulnerability Experiment. And in our video, we have Charles Miller, one of—the head researcher. And he pointed out to us that there’s over—they’re quite sure there’s over a trillion tons of methane in the Arctic, maybe as much as two and two and change in the Arctic; worldwide, somewhere between four and seven trillion tons. To trigger an extinction might take as little as one to two trillion tons being released. So, when you do away with the ice sheet, and then you—and the Arctic Ocean is rather shallow, frankly—and then you start running ships through there that are stirring the warm waters in, you’re playing with fire.
To prevent the crash of 2016, we would have to make the fundamental changes that we’re going to have to make afterward. You would have to start enforcing the Sherman [Antitrust] Act again. it was passed in the 1880s, and it says that basically any company that gets so large that they dominate an industry is illegal. And not only the company gets broken up, but people in the company can go to jail, in the Sherman Act. And Reagan, in his second year of his presidency, stopped enforcement of it, functionally, and no president since then has made a serious effort. The last one was Jimmy Carter breaking up AT&T. So, now we have not just the media, but every significant industry in the United States controlled by two, three, four, five at the most, companies. when you look at biological systems, broad and diverse is strong. Top-heavy and narrow is fragile. So, our economy is insanely fragile in that regard.
So, bring back the enforcement of the Sherman Act, thus break up the big banks. Bring back Glass-Steagall, separate commercial banking from gambling banking. Do away with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Phil Gramm took us from virtually no gray or black market in these bets on bets on bets, these CDOs, to $800 trillion worth in 2008. And, you know, his wife Wendy was on the board of Enron. Ken Lay desperately wanted to be able to play these games. Phil Gramm got his legislation in 1999 and 2000. Bill Clinton, I think, had no idea what this would mean, just happily signed it. And that was when this was set. So, if we did these things, we could prevent this. There’s clearly not the political will, which is why I’m asserting that the crash will happen, and that will generate the political will.
What gives me the most hope is the fact that young people are waking up. They’re getting it, particularly—I mean, you see it just on the ground in their student loans, that their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents never experienced, that the predator class in this country is eating everything in its path. And the Occupy movement was a great beginning for that. We’ll see what’s next. And then, on the other hand, you’ve got a lot of boomers who are still very politically active. It’s the people in the middle who are just desperately trying to raise a family and work that are
Because Koch brothers fund so many different pieces of what has become the Libertarian/Republican machine, this notion that government is bad somehow, that Reagan introduced in his first inaugural. The thing that people have to get is, you know, if you don’t like government, that’s fine, but if you take government out of the way, if you take—if you stop administering the commons by the government, there’s an enormous vacuum. And there’s a whole lot of billionaires who are just waiting to step into that vacuum. So, if we don’t have government regulation, for example, of, you know, smokestack things, then the Kochs make more money, but all the rest of us get more cancers.
Their father, you know, cut a deal with Joe Stalin to develop the oil fields in Russia. So—and today—I mean, there was a report a few weeks ago—we haven’t been able to confirm all of it—that if the Keystone pipeline is built, it goes to refineries in part owned by the Koch brothers, that they could make as much as $100 billion. That’s more than they’re actually worth right now.
James Richard Verone, he robbed the bank for one dollar. he couldn’t find a job. He had a growth in his chest. He was concerned about, you know, “Where do I go? What do I do?” And he walked into a bank and gave the teller a—you know, “I’m robbing this bank for one dollar.” And then he sat down and waited to be arrested. And it was because he needed medical care. And he said, you know, “If you don’t have your health, you have nothing. I’d rather be alive and in jail than be dying.” And get healthcare in prison. He got healthcare as soon as he was arrested.
– source democracynow.org
Thom Hartmann, a nationally syndicated radio talk show host of The Thom Hartmann Program. He is the New York Times best-selling author of two dozen books, most recently, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America—and What We Can Do to Stop It.