Is it time for a revolution? 'La Révolution' I just heard from the control room, thank you Jacob.
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I want to talk about a revolution. I want to talk about, you know, how to use it, how are we going to bring about change in this country? What’s it going to take? How long is it going to take? What kind of effort is going to be necessary? What got me started thinking about this is this piece over at Democratic Underground. It was posted by rateyes, on du. He says, “We've got a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy. We've got a bunch of millionaires and billionaires running the show in Congress, in the Executive and in the Judiciary. ... the middle-class and poor are screwed.” And of course, I wrote a book about this, called “Screwed: The Undeclared War Against The Middle Class and What We Can Do About It”, and lay out where it all came from, and how it happened.
But here, this is the more serious blowback. In my book I’m calling for us all to get involved in the political process and take it back, and do things like, you know, pulling back corporate personhood. But, you know, rateyes here is saying “Congress is going to toss us a bone" and think some of us "will be pacified”, but "revolution is coming". I mean, "it may not be tomorrow. It may not be next year, but ... it’s coming in our lifetimes. Barack Obama won't save us. The Democratic Party won't save us. God (if there is a god) won't save us. We can only save ourselves. And, when "we, the people" finally come to accept that cold, hard reality---we, the people will fight to save ourselves. Revolution is coming. Mark my words."
And I want to say, and I keep saying it on this programme, and I wish other progressive talk show hosts would figure this out, and other parts of the progressive media would figure this out. Because no one else seems to be talking about this, or at least nobody that, there’s only so much media that one can consume in a twenty-four hour cycle. But, the teabag movement is the leading edge of a revolution. And it may well be the leading edge of THE revolution. And what we share in common with the teabaggers is much greater than what we have in our differences from them. Yes, you know, the Lyndon LaRouche people are actually, you know, what they’re doing, the Lyndon LaRouche cultists are doing a very good job of hijacking the teabag movement and nobody even is talking about it. It’s a big problem for the right-wing funders of this thing, that, you know, these signs of Obama with the Hitler moustache, this is from Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouchies are showing up at these things and passing out their literature, and they are having a significant impact on the teabag movement., on the thinking of the people who show up for these teabag events.
We could be too, plus we have our own events, and now ironically, our events don’t get covered. You know, seventy-five thousand or more people, and you know, we’re talking Park Police numbers, real numbers, show up in Washington, DC for a weekend event, to protest “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, and the Defense of Marriage Act, and the whole thing, and you know, in favor of gay rights, and it gets no mention at all on mainstream television, or, if at the very least, just a passing mention or a single story.
Twenty thousand teabaggers, a third that number, twenty thousand, maybe thirty thousand at the most, show up for a Glenn Beck rally, and holy cow, it is a major event, it is covered by all the news media for a week and a half, two weeks. It dominates the news cycle, it’s got a, you know, pundits talking about it. So the right-wing populist outrage is being covered, and the right-wing populist outrage is being exploited by hate radio in ways that are just mind-boggling.
There is a left-wing populist outrage out there, and you know who you are because you're you, it’s us. It’s you and me. We are sickened by the Max Baucus’s of the world who are taking money, millions of dollars, from the so-called health care industry, from the banksters, who are between us and our doctors, handling the money that we would handing to our doctors, who are standing in the middle and taking, and people like Stephen Hemsley of United Health Care with his seven hundred million dollars of, you know, varied sources of income, from United Health Care over a five year period. AARP making hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars with United Health Care. You know, Aetna, Wellpoint, all of these CEOs making millions of dollars in paychecks and in many cases, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred stock bonuses and dividends and stock options. And that’s just the tip of the spear.
You got the banksters, going nuts. Look at this, this is the headline from today’s “Financial Times”. I'm holding it up for the camera for those of you who are watching our live feed over at thomhartmann.com or on Free Speech TV. “Bankers Fury at UK Bonus Supertax”. That’s the biggest headline in today’s “Financial Times”. That’s the lead headline. “Bankers Fury”. What is this story? “Bankers in the City of London reacted with fury to UK government plans to levy an immediate 50 per cent supertax on banks’ bonus pay-outs”. By the way, know how much they’re starting at? Fifty thousand pounds, seventy five thousand dollars. Anything over that, fifty percent tax.
“In his annual pre-Budget report, Alastair Darling", the Chancellor of the Exchequer”, see, he’s England’s Tim Geithner except for the fact that he didn’t used to be the Chairman of the New York Fed, he didn’t used to be good buddy’s with all, he didn’t used to be the protégée of Alan Greenspan. Alastair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, "announced a 50 per cent levy on discretionary bonus pay-outs to curb big bank bonuses that have provoked public anger. He said banks that had been battered by the financial crisis should be rebuilding their capital rather than paying out generous bonuses to their staff".
Gee, what a novel idea. But the banks are saying, 'no, you rebuild our capital by giving us money from taxpayers, and then we’ll give some of that money to our banksters'. “Mr Darling justified the exceptional levy by arguing that banks had generated excess profits as a direct, or indirect, result of the government’s bail-out of the banking system. The windfall tax will apply to all banks and building societies”. Pretty straightforward stuff. The "Treasury estimates the move will raise £550m", that’s eight hundred and ninety million dollars, "and affect 20,000 bankers, although some bankers suggest it could raise up to £4bn", that’s five and a half to six billion dollars, "if – as seems likely – banks press ahead with bonus pay-outs regardless. The first £25,000 of bonuses will be exempt". See, you can get a bonus up to about forty thousand bucks, and after that, fifty percent tax.
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Elizabeth Warren, the woman who is in charge of overseeing the TARP Programme, right, the TARP Programme, the bank bailout, she’s, Congress has put her in charge of this thing. She says, “Can you imagine an America without a strong middle class?” We talked about this last week, but this is, you know, apropos of this point. "Today, one in five", I'm quoting Elizabeth Warren, “Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work.” One in five. "One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings ... and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street".
This is Elizabeth Warren. Now, ok, so the response of Congress, and Barney Frank to his credit, the response of Congress to this has been “Let’s create a commission.” Let’s create an equivalent to the Consumer Protection Act, right. If you buy an electric toaster and you plug it in and it blows up, there’s actually a Federal commission that says, “You know”, to the toaster manufacturers, “you can't do that.” You can’t sell defective merchandise. If you do, you get busted. So why don’t we do the same thing for banks. If a bank sells defective merchandise, they get busted.
It seems pretty straightforward. Ok, well, guess who’s blowing it up. The new Dem coalition. The new Democratic, "Members of the New Democrat Coalition — whose deference to big banks", this from Shahien Nasiripour over at the Huffington Post, "whose deference to big banks is reflected in the massive amounts of money they have taken from the financial services industry since 2008 — temporarily blocked the landmark financial regulatory reform bill from hitting the House floor" yesterday, on Wednesday. This is a regulation that’s going to hit J.P. Morgan Chase, CitiBank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo. “Working on behalf of the big banks, the New Dems were able to extract a compromise that will allow federal regulations to preempt state laws on a case-by-case basis.” In other words, the states want to protect people, which they can do right now to a certain extent by regulating banks. The new Dems want to blow that up. "State regulators have extracted billions of dollars from predatory lenders". Well, the new Dems want to put an end to that. "Because of the comprise, national banks may be able to completely avoid the states consumer protection measures." The 1.5 trillion dollar home mortgage market, for example, and then he points out, it’s not like national banks are better than state banks at what they do.
"Eleven percent of home mortgages held by national banks are delinquent, according to HuffPost's analysis. That's more than double the rate at state banks. Also, seven percent of national banks' credit card loans are delinquent, compared to just five percent at state banks. ... national banks are holding $188 billion in delinquent loans; state banks have less than a fifth of that". The national banks are just not all that good, but they are pouring money.
Members of the new Democratic coalition, this over at thinkprogress excuse me FireDogLake, David Dayen writing, “Members of the new Democratic”, this actually from Congressional Daily, Congress Daily, “Members of the New Democrat Coalition Tuesday warned House leaders they will consider voting against a rule for debate on an overhaul of the nation’s financial regulatory system if Democratic leaders do not allow floor votes on amendments they are backing — ones which make the measure more palatable to K Street." To the lobbyists. There’s a sixty-eight member coalition, the entire coalition will vote no. Barney "Frank accused the New Democrat Coalition of blocking the bill because they are being prodded by big banks to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Agency and to allow major financial institutions to avoid state laws tougher than federal regulations.”
Who’s in charge of the new Democrat coalition? The head of it is Melissa Bean. She is a Congresswoman from Illinois. Melissa Bean, by the way, received $1.4 million from the financial services industry. Number one in Congress for money from that industry. She’s followed by Representative Jim Himes from Connecticut, who collected $1.3 million from the financial services industry. He’s also a member of the new Democratic coalition, and, by the way, he’s a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs. And Congressman Ron Klein, the Democrat from Florida who brought in $1.2 million from the financial services industry. These are Democrats! This is how badly broken our system is, that you’ve got the so-called new Democratic coalition. “The NDC is working to craft and pass legislation, including Permanent Normal Trade Relations with the People’s Republic of China, fast track Trade Promotion Authority.”
Give me a break. I’m telling you, we have, progressives have more in common with teabaggers than we have, you know, there’s a few among the teabaggers who are hysterical that a black guy is President, his middle name is Hussein, and they think he’s from Kenya. Right, there are some. But, that is the veneer. There is a populist rage growing in this country and you see it reflected in the increased ratings over at Fox news, for example, and in these right-wing talk show hosts who are speaking to it, and they are exploiting that populist rage by saying, “You know whose fault it is? It’s the Liberals. It’s Liberals who are trying to take over the world. Climate change, you know. They want to take over health care. They want to regulate every piece of your life.”
And people know something’s wrong. They know something’s broken. They know that our politicians are not acting in our best interests. What they don’t know, is that the big economic interests who are paying off the members of Congress, are the same ones who are pushing this whole right-wing thing.
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Ok, bottom line here for this hour, what I’m saying is, there is going to be change. We need to be part of that change. Now, on the right there is a what started out as a phoney populist movement, the teabaggers who were funded in large part by the anti-health care folks, actually initially the financial services, I mean this all started with Rick what's-his-name, Santinelli [Santelli] or something, on CNBC saying, “We need a teabag, a tea party”, and all of a sudden there were tea parties. This was no accident. This was well organized and well paid. It’s well funded. There’s millions of bucks coming from right-wing, wealthy right-wing donors and right-wing think-tanks and right-wing foundations, to fund this kind of stuff.
But what’s happening is that the people who are showing up on the streets in many cases are freaked out at the fact that they have lost their jobs, freaked out about the fact that their 401(K)’s are worth nothing, freaked out about the fact that this country seems to be drifting, freaked out about the fact that our economy is in the tank, freaked out about the fact that their healthcare is not available. And they don’t know who to blame. And so they’re being told, “There is a black guy in the White House. His middle name is Hussein. It must be the Democrats. You know it’s the Liberals.” And they’re being told to channel their anger in this one particular way, and to scare Congress. In other words, they just basically become an arm, a functional arm of the lobbying industry.
Now, on our side we got a lot of populist groups, you’ve got some really great grass roots groups: TrueMajority.org, pdamerica.org, DemocracyForAmerica.com, MoveOn.org, the BoldProgressives.org. I mean, there’s a bunch of great groups who are actually doing good stuff out there. And a lot of us had hoped, I mean go over to barackobama.com, this would be the movement.
Frankly, I think that many progressives thought the election of Barack Obama as we watched on election night, him and his wife come out on the stage in Chicago, on the waterfront there, whatever it was, with tears in our eyes, thought, OK, this is it, the revolution just happened. Turns out it wasn’t a revolution. It’s better than George Bush, but it wasn’t a revolution. The banksters are still in charge of the Treasury Department. They’re still in charge of Congress. The carbon and fossil fuel industry is still in charge of Congress. The big transnational corporations are still in charge of our trade policy. These credit card laws that were voted for by, you know, people like Joe Biden, by the way, that made it easier for the credit card companies to rip us off, and you know, the Bankruptcy Bill that made it harder for us to get out from underneath. It made it harder for innovation. It made it harder for people to become entrepreneurs. That’s all still there.
The excesses of the Bush administration are still there. The anti-constitutional behavior’s still there. The Obama administration yesterday filed a brief in Federal court saying that John Yoo, the architect of the torture memos, should not be able to be sued, for doing what people were hanged at Nuremberg for doing. No, we didn’t have a revolution.
We, while we need to, while we absolutely need to continue to participate in partisan politics, we need to get even more aggressive in trying to take over the Democratic Party. And we need to do everything we can to empower the Green Party, particularly at the local level. We need movement politics in the United States. And when we were talking with the President of Greenpeace International yesterday, a South African who was there for the South Africans' struggle against apartheid. He said it's movement politics, and it’s not party politics.
The movement needs to be built, and it needs to grow, and we need to help make it happen, and frankly, we need to be reaching across the aisle, as it were, and this is no feel-good stuff. This is, this is, you know, hardball stuff. We need to be reaching out to the teabaggers who are rightfully and justifiably upset that over the last thirty years this country has gone to hell, and they have actually some statistics right, when they talk about things like the Democrats' involvement in the North American Free Trade Agreement, and WTO and GATT, and what not. We need to be reaching out to them and saying, “You know, we know how p.o.'d you guys are, we are too.” And at many other same things. And start getting progressive members of Congress. We need more Alan Grayson’s, we need more Bernie Sanders’s, we need more Dennis Kucinich’s. We need some real progressives in Congress who are willing to stand up and say no to the corporate money. Which is a damn hard thing to do, when it costs two, three, four, five million dollars to win a seat in the House of Representatives, or it costs, you know, upwards of five, six, seven, eight, ten, twenty million dollars to win a US Senate seat, or more. We need to get involved. We can’t sit on the sidelines. We can’t complain. We need to get involved.
Transcribed by Gerard Aukstiejus.
