Thom Hartmann - The Crash of 2016

All of this Royalist money and organization worked.

It bought a “false remembering” just as the nation was going through a Great Forgetting in the 1970s. And then two generations later, after another Great Crash, it preserved the status quo of Royalist rule.

Unlike Roosevelt’s “first hundred days,” President Obama’s “first hundred” were far from revolutionary.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was a fifth the size of Roosevelt’s first New Deal including the Public Works Administration, passed in 1933. Roosevelt’s Second New Deal in 1935, creating Social Security, was even larger. And the federal spending effort of World War II was larger still.

Despite one of President Obama’s top economic advisers, Christina Romer, pushing for a $1.8 trillion stimulus, the president whittled down his stimulus proposal to get a few Senate Republicans on board. In the end, only a third of the $787 billion stimulus plan was actual stimulus. The other two-thirds was assistance to states to close budget holes to prevent the layoff of public-sector workers and tax cuts that historically have the lowest bang for the buck in stimulus.

It became clear early on that the president really had no intention of being a revolutionary (with the exception of major steps forward for the LGBT community). The signature legislative achievement of the so-called Obama Revolution was the Affordable Care Act—known as “Obamacare”—which was far from revolutionary.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform bill paled in comparison to Roosevelt’s regulations on Wall Street following the crash of 1929. The so-called War on Terror was expanded, Guantanamo remained opened, and extrajudicial killings increased. And the superwealthy in America, who’ve enjoyed unreasonably low taxes since the 1980s, kept their low taxes.

But the nation was still pregnant with revolution, and so they joined the billionaires’ Tea Party.

But what the average Tea Partier doesn’t understand, and what the millionaires and billionaires who fund the movement do understand, is that nature abhors a vacuum. So when Tea Partiers clamor for smaller government—or in some cases, no government at all—something must fill the void. And what’s always filled the void in the past, from the Gilded Age, to the Roaring Twenties, to Reagan’s America, is corporate power and aggregated wealth.

So fast-forward nearly 240 years later after the Boston Tea Party, and today’s Tea Party is rallying on behalf of some of the very biggest transnational corporations in the world—our own East India Companies.

The private health industry directly benefitted from the Tea Party’s assault on the Public Option, and in general “Obamacare.” The polluting oil industry secured another decade of higher and higher profits thanks to the Tea Party’s denial of climate change and the defeat of a new carbon tax or cap and trade law. Simply, the Tea Party rallies on behalf of the monarchists of the eighteenth century, the Robber Barons of the nineteenth century, and the Economic Royalists of the twentieth century.

What the Economic Royalists of the 1930s were unable to do with the Business Plot against FDR—that is, successfully launch a coup d’état—the Koch brothers and the Economic Royalists of today were determined to do against Barack Obama in 2010. This time they would use money instead of an army.

But their coup wouldn’t be complete without one final gift handed down by the Supreme Court.

The day after President Obama’s inauguration, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was called back to the White House. He needed to take care of some unfinished business.

At just past seven thirty that evening, Roberts and President Obama stood face-to-face in the Map Room of the White House. During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt used the room to discuss war strategy with his generals as they pored over map after map of the European battlefield, hence the name given to the room. Today, some of those maps still hang on the walls.

Previous presidents, such as Calvin Coolidge, used the room for billiards, and to this day, with only a red paisley couch and two matching high-back chairs, a low-hanging polished wooden table, and a few delicately crafted desks and end tables placed near the walls, the room is still barely furnished, and there’s more than enough space to drag a pool table into the center of it. The Map Room is now mostly used for interviews and private meetings, but on this night, it was to be used for a do-over of the presidential oath of office.

John Roberts hardly ever makes mistakes, but during President Obama’s inauguration the day before, in front of millions of Americans huddled together on the lawn of the White House and Washington Mall, and hundreds of millions of people watching around the world, Roberts made what was likely the most embarrassing mistake of his life, completely butchering the presidential oath of office. Even though he’d been practicing the oath all morning, and had the words committed to memory, when it came time to swear Barack Obama in as the nation’s forty-fourth president, Roberts fumbled, putting the word “faithfully” out of order of the other words in the oath and then stumbling through the rest of the lines before wrapping it up and congratulating the new president.

Immediately, Fox News jumped on the garbled oath. Hours after the inauguration, talking head Chris Wallace questioned the legitimacy of the president, telling viewers, “We’re wondering here whether or not Barack Obama in fact is the president of the United States,” and then speculating that maybe this is a situation that will ultimately end up “going to the courts.” 124I guess the irony of having Chief Justice John Roberts rule on whether or not he’d legally administered the oath escaped Wallace at the time.

So to quash any Fox News–manufactured controversy from the get-go, the White House legal counsel summoned John Roberts back to the White House the next day to readminister the oath. Roberts obliged, and in front of the fireplace of the Map Room, under the watchful eyes of a portrait of Benjamin Latrobe, the man who oversaw construction of the United States Capitol Building, Barack Obama once again recited the presidential oath of office.

Turns out, the Map Room was the most appropriate place for Roberts and Obama to convene for the constitutionally mandated swearing in, because from that day forward the Economic Royalists, led by John Roberts, would lay siege to the United States and successfully turn our prized democracy into an oligarchy.

That oath would be meaningless because, almost exactly a year later, Barack Obama’s democratic republic would be transformed into a Royalist oligarchy by the Supreme Court.

The Economic Royalists knew the final stage of their coup required the clearing away of all impediments to unrestrained corporate participation in electoral politics. As in, if a corporation likes a politician, it can ensure that he or she is elected every time; if it becomes upset with a politician, it can carpet-bomb his or her district with a few million dollars’ worth of ads and politically destroy the candidate. With that power, the Royalists could essentially handpick lawmakers from that point forward. And with the case of Citizens United , John Roberts knew just how to give the Royalists what they wanted.