From Threshold To Takeover? The Prescience Of Thom Hartmann

At some point in the future, historians may write that the point in time when corporatism triumphed over American democracy was this very year, when a rogue corporate Supreme Court threw out a hundred years of judicial precedent, by the narrowest of margins, to turn our electoral system into an auction, Citizens United v Federal Election Commission. Long before China, Bahrain, Russia, the Koch Brothers and other self-interested parties, foreign and domestic, with lots of money to spend and a vested interest in weakening America, funneled millions of dollars into the campaign warchests of conservatives-- including incompetent and clownish imbeciles, from Rand Paul, Sharron Angle and Ron Johnson to Christine O'Donnell, Joe MIller and Ken Buck-- Thom Hartman wrote two brilliant and prescient books on the topic, Unequal Protection-- The Rise of Corporate Dominance And the Theft Of Human Rights (2004) and Threshold-- The Crisis of Western Culture (2009). This is transcribed from the latter.

As a result of a twenty-eight-year-long deregulatory spree, we've reached the point where it's painfully difficult for government to undo the damage done to our economic infrastructure by a few thousand millionaires and billionaires playing Monopoly.

And the destructive shift of power in this shift in cultural assumptions isn't just limited to the economy. We have reached the point in the United States where corporatism has nearly triumphed over democracy. If events continue on their current trajectory, the ability of our government to respond to the needs and desires of humans-- things like fresh water, clean air, uncontaminated food, independent local media, secure retirement, and accessible medical care-- may vanish forever, effectively ending the world's second experiment with democracy. We will have gone too far down Mussolini's road, and most likely will encounter similar consequences, elements of which we have already experienced: a militarized police state, a government unresponsive to its citizens and obsessed with secrecy, a ruling elite drawn from the senior ranks of the nations largest corporations, and war.

Hartmann was optimistic, in 2009, that this could still be reversed. In light of Citizens United v Federal Election Commission I'm less sanguine. As we mentioned in the post just before this one, voters tell pollsters they want the federal government to protect the exact human needs and desires Hartmann delineates above. But they seem on the verge of either voting for the teabaggers who vow to eliminate that possibility or to just sitting home and pouting while fired up, brainwashed teabaggers do the bidding of the billionaires and foreign powers who are behind the curtain of their nihilistic "movement." Conservatives have always known the key to their ultimate success was to wreck public education. In complete control of the Republicans and effective control of the Democrats, they have succeeded in creating a population of morons, whining about protecting Social Security and spending money on jobs while voting for candidates like Rand Paul, Ken Buck Joe Miller and Sharron Angle who insist that kind of activity is unconstitutional. See if you can guess why I've decided to embed this particular Rachel Maddow show on ths particular blog: