TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: A new
analysis by the Associated Press finds that budget cuts imposed this year under sequestration promise to to be far more painful in 2014. Spending is already frozen at 2013 sequestration levels, and the operating budgets of federal agencies could shrink by billions more. The cuts now in place will remain in effect for the next eight years unless Congress acts to change them. Federal funding for food stamps alone could face a nearly $10 billion reduction over the next decade as part of a compromise bill to break a House-Senate deadlock on spending.
Meanwhile, a new
report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds the cuts outlined in the House Republicans’ version of the bill would disqualify some 170,000 U.S. military veterans from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, which provides food aid to one-in-seven Americans. All of this follows the so-called "Great Recession," which began in 2007 and is the longest, deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression of the ’30s. Meanwhile, income inequality is at levels not seen since just before the 1929 Wall Street crash.
Well, our next guest argues in his new book that the country’s past financial crashes—in 1770, in 1856, in 1929—offer valuable insight into how the wealthy have hijacked the government’s response to the most recent crash. Thom Hartmann is the author of
The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America—and What We Can Do to Stop It. He’s written more than two dozen best-selling books. He’s the host of the nationally syndicated show,
The Thom Hartmann Program.
We welcome you to
Democracy Now!, Thom.
THOM HARTMANN: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: And congratulations on the book today. So, the title is
The Crash of 2016. Why 2016?
THOM HARTMANN: Well, 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.
AMY GOODMAN: What’s the royalist conspiracy?
THOM HARTMANN: 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.
AMY GOODMAN: Name names.
THOM HARTMANN: Well, 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.
AMY GOODMAN: And how did they gain by the recession?
THOM HARTMANN: Well, the—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].
AMY GOODMAN: In your intro, you’ve got several interesting stories, like about Joe Stack.
THOM HARTMANN: Yeah. 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 1920—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.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to FDR, his inaugural address in 1933.
THOM HARTMANN: Yes.
PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our great natural resources.
AMY GOODMAN: That was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his inaugural address in 1933. You say President Obama is missing the FDR moment.
THOM HARTMANN: He missed it. I mean, he had—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 basic—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.
The—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.
AMY GOODMAN: You relate crashes in the economy with war.
THOM HARTMANN: Yeah, I do. 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.
AMY GOODMAN: Of course, it was a Republican president, President Dwight Eisenhower, who said in his famous farewell speech to the nation, January 17th, 1961:
PRESIDENT DWIGHT EISENHOWER: My fellow Americans, this evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Three-and-a-half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development, yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
