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Trump is now officially allocating federal resources based on whether people voted for or against him: any other president in recent history would’ve been impeached for this.

One of the most visible differences between authoritarian and democratic governance is how the government treats parts of the country based on their politics.

This is not a new idea in American politics. From Andrew Jackson’s spoils system to Boss Tweed (the morbidly rich oligarch who ruled 19th century’s New York with an iron fist) to the nakedly authoritarian rule within the Confederate states between 1835 and 1865, we’ve had more than our fair share of autocrats who’ve corrupted or even paused democracy to the benefit of themselves and their friends.

But now Trump and his reichwing lickspittles have turned this form of occasional/historical corruption into an entire philosophy of governance.

Imagine, for a moment, if either Presidents Clinton or Obama had announced that they were only going to send government subsidies, emergency aid, and funding to states that voted for them in the previous presidential election. The outrage would have come fast and furious, and the media reaction would have been explosive.

This is purely a thought experiment, though, because no president of either party in the modern era ever had the temerity to try such a nakedly corrupt misuse of government funds.

Until Trump.

The Trump administration cancelled billions in green energy grants over the past months, and, it turns out, with a single exception all of the cancelled grants were in Blue states.

The New York Times caught it in a one-day story that was barely mentioned by the rest of our corporate media; when forced to tell the truth in a lawsuit, the general counsel for the Department of Energy (DOE) came right out and said, explicitly:

“With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing Senators (‘Blue State’ grants). …

“DOE accepts that the inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State.” (emphasis added)

The filing came after Energy Secretary and fracking oligarch Chris Wright lied under oath to Congress that the cancellations had no political bias in the roughly $7.5 billion gutted across 223 projects in 16 states.

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(While Republicans are claiming that Jack Smith “lied to Congress” and should therefore go to prison, there’s no such similar call for consequences for Wright, either from Republicans or our flaccid Democratic leadership.)

On top of that, we now also find that this administration is passing out FEMA disaster funds based on how states voted for or against Trump, as the hard-right CATO Institute documented from the first Trump administration; he’s now back at it again, and this time 25 states and DC are suing.

Additionally, Trump is blocking a billion dollars in Medicaid payments to Blue states, claiming there’s “fraud” there. This as he pardoned over 70 people convicted of healthcare fraud including a $1.3 billion theft from Medicare.

This is how Vladimir Putin rules Russia. How Erdoġon runs Turkey. How Modi is administering India. And how pretty much every third-world tinpot dictatorship in the world works: “Give us your loyalty and we’ll shower you with gifts; stand against us and you’ll be punished.”

And it’s not just the Trump administration that’s ripping up the idea of equal protection and representation under the law that the 5th and 14th Amendments proclaim; Republican-run states across the nation are enthusiastically defying their own citizens just to enrich the oligarchs and industries that feather their nests:

— In Oklahoma, voters expanded Medicaid themselves by ballot initiative in 2020, so Republican Governor Kevin Stitt answered on Memorial Day weekend 2025 by signing SB 1027, which caps the signatures any single county can contribute at 11.5 percent of that county’s last gubernatorial turnout for statutory measures and 20.8 percent for constitutional ones, effectively locking out the millions of Oklahomans who live in the dark blue Oklahoma and Tulsa counties.

— In South Dakota, Republicans passed a bundle of restrictions in 2025 that closed the petition window by moving the filing deadline from May to February, and then put the oligarch-supported Amendment L on the ballot for this November, which would raise the bar for amending the constitution from a simple majority to 60 percent of votes cast.

— In Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and the GOP-run legislature passed HB 1205, which let county elections officials redefine the “actual cost” of validating each signature and jack the fee up to $4.57 per petition in a county like Palm Beach, from under a dollar before: the result was exactly what they wanted, with all 22 active citizen initiatives failing to qualify for the 2026 ballot.

— In Missouri, working people had killed the GOP’s phony “right to work” law by 67 percent in August 2018 and won paid sick leave with 58 percent of the statewide vote in November 2024. So, Republican Governor Mike Kehoe signed the repeal of both eight months later, and voters now face Amendment 4 on the August 4 ballot, which would require a citizen-initiated amendment to win a majority in every one of the state’s eight congressional districts while leaving the Republican-controlled legislature’s own amendments free to pass on a simple statewide majority.

Over the short-term, this sort of corruption works to the advantage of the party using it, and to the detriment of any party that refuses to play the game. As a result, the Democratic Party — which hasn’t endorsed such corruption since the days of Boss Tweed — is effectively bankrupt with a debt of around $2 million as we head into the most important election in our lifetimes.

But the Republican Party — which openly embraces such crude, bare-assed corruption — is sitting on $130 million (almost entirely from oligarchs and giant corporations) and Trump has a SuperPAC with over $400 million (ditto).

None of this could have happened if five corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court hadn’t completely altered the rules of our politics with the Bellotti and Citizens United decisions, both based on a complete lie told by a wealthy conservative Supreme Court clerk over 140 years ago (as I document in detail in Who Killed the American Dream?).

It’s as if they’re trying to create a new Civil War here in America. Seriously: history tells us that corruption and regional/political favoritism is one of the leading forces causing civil unrest and often signals or provokes the end of democracy in a nation.

— The 1971 civil war and genocide in Pakistan that resulted in Bangladesh forming and splitting away was caused by a corrupt Pakistani government reducing to as little as 20 percent of central development spending monies for the eastern part of the country — which held 60 percent of the population — keeping the rest for themselves in the west.

— In Northern Ireland, thirty years of killings were provoked by unionist-run councils allocating public housing and municipal jobs by party loyalty, as Britain’s own Cameron Commission concluded in 1969.

— When Nigerian politicians unfairly allocated that nation’s oil revenue it led to a famine that killed three million people and led to Biafra splitting away as a separate republic.

— Sudan’s ruling clique similarly ran the national budget as a spoils system for its own region and lost a third of the country to South Sudan (I was there during the civil war).

Research published in the American Political Science Review found that while a generalized rich-versus-poor inequality can tear a society apart, regional inequality is the number one predictor of social and political upheaval and the consequent destruction of democracy in a nation.

The “winning” side begins to more aggressively rig the system to protect their own privileges and keep themselves out of jail, while the “losing” side mobilizes to protest the inequality.

As both double-down on their positions and word spreads about how some regions are being screwed while others get rich, the body politic is thrown into turmoil.

Like we’re seeing right now in America.

A federal judge has already ruled that stripping these billions of green energy dollars exclusively from Blue states is a clear violation of the Fifth Amendment, but Wright and Trump did it anyway and are making no apologies or corrections.

We must put a stop to this now; while these cancelled green energy, Medicaid, and FEMA projects are merely three examples of increasingly widespread Trump and GOP corruption, they should still become a national scandal if for no other reason than that they feed this deadly process of regional resentment and political alienation.

Call your member of Congress and your senators and demand to know what they’re going to do about these clear, corrupt, and dangerous violations of our Constitution and the political norms that democracy requires. The number for the Congressional switchboard is 202-224-3121.

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Chapter 8: The Crime Pays Off

Davis’s fraudulent headnote of 1886 was just the beginning. Over the next 140 years, corporate lawyers would build an empire of constitutional rights on that foundation of fraud. The progression reached its logical conclusion in 2010, when five corrupt Republican Supreme Court justices—several openly on the take from rightwing billionaires and massive corporations—handed morbidly rich oligarchs the power to buy American democracy outright.

Citizens United wasn’t just about campaign finance rules or the legalization of bribing Supreme Court justices (although it encompassed both): it was the culmination of a 140-year theft. The oligarchs finally had functionally unlimited constitutional weapons to complete what the southern plantation fascists built prior to the Civil War and the railroad barons started in 1886: the destruction of the American Dream and its replacement with an all-American form of oligarchic feudalism.

The Century of Expansion

Between 1886 and today, corporations have systematically claimed every constitutional right that was written to protect human beings.

First Amendment freedom of free speech? Corporations claimed it in the 1970s and 1980s, arguing they had the right to spend money on political campaigns, advertise tobacco to children, and lie in their marketing.

Second Amendment gun rights? Weapons manufacturing corporations claimed it to challenge state and city laws that protected citizens and schoolchildren from gun violence and to help them market their deadly wares.

Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable searches and seizures? Corporations claimed it in Dow Chemical Company v. United States (1986), arguing the EPA couldn’t use aerial photography to detect illegal cancer-causing pollution without a warrant because Dow was a “corporate person.”

Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination? Corporations claimed it to avoid disclosing evidence of crimes and to conceal the dangers of tobacco (which killed my brother), asbestos (which killed my father), and pesticides (among other things).

I still remember my dad coming home from the tool-and-die shop where he worked, smelling of machine oil, talking over dinner about the Machinists Union and how unions were the reason we had a middle-class life, his discussions with my mom about how they’d travel the world with the pension he was earning. Corporate constitutional rights took that all away from me and my family.

Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury? Corporations demanded it to drag things out and increase the costs to government whenever they were facing regulatory penalties.

Seventh Amendment right to a jury in civil cases? Corporations asserted it while simultaneously forcing consumers and employees into mandatory binding arbitration, denying humans the same right.

Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery? Private prison corporations note that the amendment still allows slavery for persons convicted of a crime, so for-profit prison slave labor has become a multibillion--dollar-a-year business that rivals the old Confederacy.

Fourteenth Amendment equal protection and due process? Corporations used these relentlessly to strike down regulations, block taxes, and prevent democratic governance.

The only amendment corporations haven’t seriously claimed is the Third (quartering soldiers in private homes), but give them time. Trump, with his increasing militarization of American cities, may still find a way to use it to make money for his billionaire buddies or install ICE agents in our houses and apartment buildings.

Virtually every constitutional right written to protect human dignity, liberty, and democracy has been converted into a weapon for corporate power.

The Destruction of the New Deal

For nearly fifty years, from 1933 to 1980, the American Dream flourished despite Davis’s corporate constitutional rights headnote. FDR’s New Deal and the regulatory framework that followed it constrained corporate power enough, in fact, to build the largest middle class in world history, the first to exceed half of the nation’s population.

The Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations were able to do this because even with corporate constitutional rights on the books, the political will still existed to regulate corporations, tax the wealthy, protect workers, and invest in public goods. The memory of the Republican Great Depression was still fresh. Thanks to FDR, unions were strong. And the courts, while accepting corporate constitutional rights, hadn’t yet extended it to its logical extremes.

That all changed with the Republican Reagan Revolution of 1981.

Reagan didn’t just cut taxes and deregulate industries: following the advice of the billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation, he activated corporate constitutional rights as weapons against FDR’s New Deal framework. His administration and partisans like John Roberts (then a lawyer in Reagan’s Justice Department) encouraged corporations to challenge regulations in court, claiming their constitutional rights were being violated. His well-funded judicial appointments put corporate-friendly judges on the bench who would expand corporate rights for decades to come.

The assault on America’s democracy and our middle class was systematic. Union busting was justified by corporate property rights. Tax cuts for the wealthy were framed as protecting corporate due process rights. Deregulation was defended as preventing unconstitutional Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment takings of corporate property. Media consolidation was enabled by corporate First Amendment “free speech” claims.

Each piece of the New Deal framework that had built the world’s first widespread middle class and the functioning democracy that supported it came under attack. And corporate constitutional rights provided the legal weapons for that attack.

When states tried to protect workers, corporations sued, claiming their contract rights were being violated. When the federal government tried to regulate pollution, corporations claimed unconstitutional Fifth Amendment takings and Fourth Amendment invasions of their privacy. When communities tried to limit corporate political spending, corporations asserted First Amendment free speech protections.

The fraudulent headnote of 1886 had been a hand grenade sitting with its pin intact for decades. Reagan and his successors pulled that pin, and the American Dream began to die so quickly that by 2015 fewer than half of Americans were still in the middle class, and it took two salaries to get there.

But pulling the pin wasn’t enough. The oligarchs needed real cover. They needed to make sure that as working families watched their security disappear, they’d blame the wrong people.

Enter the deflection playbook: “welfare queens,” “law and order,” “illegal immigrants,” “taxpayers versus takers.” It was a systematic strategy specifically designed to redirect working-class anger away from the morbidly rich and toward the powerless. As I’ll detail later in the book, the same oligarchs who destroyed the American Dream became experts at making sure nobody blamed them for it.

The Democratic Tradition of Keeping Corporations out of Politics

For roughly the first half of America’s history, states understood that corporations had no business meddling in democratic elections. In 1905, for example, Wisconsin passed a law (Section 4489a, Sec. 1, ch. 492, 1905) that explicitly said: “No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer, consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office” (emphasis added).

Make a special note of those words “any political purpose whatsoever.” Wisconsin wasn’t hedging or creating loopholes. It was unambiguously saying that corporations have no role messing around in democracy. They don’t vote, don’t marry, don’t get hungry or sick, and can live forever, so they shouldn’t be allowed to use their economic power to twist our system of governance to their benefit and to the detriment of We the People.

Wisconsin wasn’t alone in those early fights to keep states’ democracies free of corporate control; throughout the Progressive Era and beyond, states across America passed similar laws keeping corporate money out of politics. This wasn’t even controversial back then; it simply reflected common sense and a widespread distrust of the morbidly rich.

Until five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, armed with Davis’s doctrine of corporate constitutional rights, began tearing it down.

The Bellotti Decision

The march toward Citizens United really got underway in 1978 with the Supreme Court’s First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti decision.

Massachusetts had passed a law prohibiting corporations from spending money to influence ballot initiatives unless the initiative directly affected the corporation’s business, arguing that corporate treasuries were so large compared to individual citizens’ resources that allowing corporate spending would drown out human/citizens’ voices.

Basing their argument on Davis’s fraudulent headnote from the 1886 Santa Clara County decision, the First National Bank of Boston—whose CEO wanted to put some of the bank’s money into a ballot initiative to cut taxes—sued, claiming the bank’s First Amendment free speech rights to fund political campaigns were being violated by the law.

As Ciara Torres-Spelliscy noted in 2014:

In the 1970s, Santa Clara was used to justify granting corporations the First Amendment right to spend unlimited corporate funds on ballot initiatives in a case called Bellotti. The Court relied on Santa Clara’s reading when it stated that “[i]t has been settled for almost a century that corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Justice Rehnquist, in his dissent, questioned the wisdom of extending corporations political rights: “[T]hose properties, so beneficial in the economic sphere, pose -special dangers in the political sphere.” Again, Rehnquist could not convince his brethren.

In Citizens United, when the Supreme Court held that political speech is “indispensable to decision making in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation,” they cited Bellotti. Thus, it’s only a hop, skip and a jump from Santa Clara to Citizens United.

In Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, the store chain is claiming that the corporation (and not just its proprietors) has a religious objection to providing certain types of birth control for its workers as required by the Affordable Care Act. Thus, the Court is contemplating expanding corporate constitutional rights to a new logical extreme: First Amendment religious rights. It’s no surprise that Hobby Lobby’s brief relies on Bellotti and Citizens United.

The Supreme Court, in the 5–4 Bellotti decision, sided with the corporations. Justice Lewis Powell (a Nixon appointee in 1972, a year after he wrote the infamous Powell Memo), writing for the majority, held that corporate speech deserved First Amendment protection because “[t]he inherent worth of the speech in terms of its capacity for informing the public does not depend upon the identity of its source.”

In other words, it doesn’t matter whether speech comes from a human being or a corporation. Speech is speech.

This is absurd on its face: in a democracy, the identity of the speaker exercising First Amendment free speech rights matters enormously. When scientists say cigarettes cause cancer, that’s different from when a tobacco corporation says—to protect their profits—that cigarettes are safe.

When citizens go door to door to get signatures for higher taxes to fund schools, that’s different from when a corporation showers cash on politicians and judges to oppose those taxes and thus increase profits. When human beings express a political opinion, we’re exercising conscience, self-interest, and judgment. When a corporation funds a political opinion by purchasing advertising or showering cash on elected officials, however, it’s advancing the financial interests of wealthy shareholders and multimillionaire executives in ways that are often in direct opposition to the public interest.

But Lewis Powell’s majority opinion won, and thus—for the first time since FDR’s presidency—enshrined the corrupt principle that corporate “speech” (in other words, money, since corporations don’t have mouths) has First Amendment protection.

Justice Byron White dissented powerfully in Bellotti: “The State has a legitimate interest in regulating corporate participation in political debate in order to prevent corporate domination of the debate and to minimize the use of corporate economic power as a means of distorting the outcome.”

White understood what was at stake, but the Republican majority either didn’t understand or didn’t care.

Bellotti, then, opened the real floodgates that brought Reagan to power two years later and continue to wash over us with corporate cash today. If corporations had First Amendment rights to influence ballot initiatives (Bellotti), what about general elections for politicians? What about unlimited spending on electioneering? What about functionally purchasing political outcomes with the vast resources found in corporate coffers?

Those questions would be answered in 2010, with Clarence Thomas—himself the recipient of millions in “gifts” from rightwing billionaires—becoming the deciding vote.

Citizens United: The Oligarchs Strike Back

In the election year of 2008, a rightwing advocacy group called Citizens United produced a political hit piece on Hillary Clinton. They wanted to run it in theaters and as video-on-demand during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign to knock her out of the running.

The Federal Election Commission said the movie violated the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, known as McCain-Feingold, which prohibited corporations from using their general treasury funds for “electioneering communications” within ninety days of an election.

Citizens United sued, arguing their (nonprofit) corporate First Amendment right to free speech was being violated by McCain-Feingold.

The case reached the Supreme Court in 2009, and Citizens United’s lawyers first argued narrowly that their specific video should be allowed because the time restrictions were essentially arbitrary.

But the five Republican justices—Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito—saw an opportunity to do something far bigger: with this single case, they could overturn a century of campaign finance law and give corporations and their morbidly rich oligarch owners the unlimited power to spend money on—and thus influence or even control—elections.

The Republicans on the Court thus asked for re-argument on a much broader question that had never been part of the case in the first place: can the government restrict any corporate political spending at all?

As a result, on January 21, 2010, the five Republicans on the Court issued (over the loud objections of the four Democrats) one of the most consequential and destructive decisions in American history.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the five-justice majority, held that the government cannot restrict independent political expenditures by corporations. Spending money to influence elections is “speech” protected by the First Amendment, he explained, and, under the logic of Davis’s headnote, corporations have the same First Amendment rights as human beings.

The Republican justices’ reasoning rested entirely on previous cases grounded in Santa Clara and its progeny. Corporations are persons. Money is the same thing as speech for a corporation, which otherwise lacks a mouth and vocal cords. Persons have First Amendment rights. Therefore, corporations can spend unlimited money to influence elections.

Kennedy, ignoring the fact that the word corporation doesn’t appear even once in the Constitution, wrote: “The Government may not suppress political speech on the basis of the speaker’s corporate identity,” and “The First Amendment does not permit Congress to make these categorical distinctions based on the corporate identity of the speaker.”

Justice John Paul Stevens dissented in a ninety-page opinion that dismantled the majority’s reasoning piece by piece.

Stevens wrote: “Corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their ‘personhood’ often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.”

Stevens understood what the majority refused to acknowledge: corporations are not people, so granting them constitutional rights perverts democracy.

But Stevens was in the four-Democratic-appointee minority, so his dissent had no legal power. The five Republican justices—several clearly on the take themselves at the time—gave the nation’s morbidly rich oligarchs exactly what they wanted: the constitutional right to buy elections.

The Immediate Impact

The impact of Citizens United was both immediate and catastrophic for democracy and has gotten worse every year since.

In the 2010 midterm elections, the first after Citizens United, outside spending by corporations and wealthy individuals more than doubled from the previous midterm. Super PACs, which could accept unlimited corporate money, spent over $300 million. By 2012, outside spending topped $1 billion. By 2020, it exceeded $3 billion, and in 2024 was about $4.5 billion.

So now we can see who were the real “speakers” in these elections: not citizens or even voters. They were almost exclusively wealthy individuals and corporations, many hiding behind layers of anonymity through dark money groups; over 100 billionaire families put over $2.4 billion into the 2024 election alone, with the vast majority going to Trump and the GOP. Corporate PACs kicked in billions more.

Following the logic of Davis’s headnote and Lewis Powell’s memo, America’s oligarchs had been given the keys to corrupt our democracy, and they set about using them with enthusiasm.

The Logical Extension

Thus, it turns out that—predictably—Citizens United was just the beginning. Once corporations got their hands on an unlimited First Amendment right to spend money on politics, other corporate rights followed.

In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), the Supreme Court ruled that closely held corporations have religious freedom rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment. As a result, a non-living soulless corporation could refuse to provide contraception coverage to employees based on its alleged religious beliefs because it was granted religious freedom rights by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented: “In a decision of startling breadth, the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

The five Republican justices, Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito (the same five from Citizens United), nonetheless gave corporations religious rights. When was the last time you saw a corporation kneeling at a church altar?

McCutcheon and the Continuing Assault

In 2014, in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court took this bizarre logic to its next extreme when it struck down aggregate limits on individual campaign contributions. Those same five Republican justices ruled that preventing corruption wasn’t enough of a justification to level the political playing field by reining in spending.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the First Amendment “is designed and intended to preserve a free and open public discussion of public questions,” and—because money is now a stand-in for “speech”—that contribution limits on his, Thomas’s, and Alito’s morbidly rich patrons infringed this constitutional right to buy politicians and election outcomes.

This is, to use the technical term, nuts, but it’s now the law. When Elon Musk gave a quarter-billion dollars to Trump and his campaign in 2024, it wasn’t “speech” in any meaningful sense. It was an oligarch—the richest man in the world—using his wealth to buy influence, access, and political outcomes that favored his and his companies’ bottom lines.

Justice Stephen Breyer dissented, writing: “Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard,” but he was in the minority, so the rest of us are now being drowned out in virtually every election.

The Oligarch Democracy

We now live in what some political scientists call an oligarchic democracy, a system where wealth—both individual and corporate—determines political outcomes more than votes.

The statistics are damning. According to Princeton professor Martin Gilens, who studied 1,800 policy outcomes, because of this bizarre Republican interpretation of the Fourteenth and First Amendments, “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

In other words, what ordinary Americans want has virtually no impact on what policies get enacted. What wealthy elites and corporations want, instead, almost always determines policy outcomes.

Consider all the issues that score well above 60 percent (and often above 80 percent) on national polling: gun control, free or inexpensive college, a national healthcare system, improved public schools, cheap pharmaceuticals, affordable housing, an absolute right to unionize, the right to vote without your name being purged, a meaningful top income tax rate on the rich, getting climate change under control, breaking up monopolies, and equal rights for minorities and women.

None of these things are happening, and it’s because big-money interests oppose all of them. That isn’t democracy; it’s an oppressive oligarchy pretending to be a democracy.

And it all traces back to Davis’s fraudulent 1886 headnote. Once corporations became “persons” with constitutional rights, this horrible list of outcomes became both predictable and inevitable.

The International Dimension

And these horrors inflicted on us by a series of corrupt Supreme Court decisions and the phony doctrine of corporate constitutional rights they’re based on are no longer limited to whacking democracy in our country. America’s corporate constitutional rights doctrine has also spread into international law through trade agreements drafted with the “help” of America’s largest corporations.

Starting with the Reagan administration, which first negotiated the precursors to NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), multiple bilateral investment treaties now give corporations the right to sue governments in private tribunals whenever government regulations hurt corporate profits. These “investor–state dispute settlement” provisions let corporations trample the will of We the People, and do it in secret.

For example, a Canadian mining company sued El Salvador for refusing to grant a mining permit that El Salvador documented would contaminate its drinking water. A tobacco company sued Uruguay for requiring life-saving health warnings on cigarette packages. An oil company sued Ecuador for regulations protecting its environment.

These aren’t really “trade disputes”: they’re corporations using treaty law—which they gained by financing politicians with their corporate “free speech”—to claim rights superior to democratic governance.

The same logic that gave corporations constitutional rights in America is now giving them treaty rights globally because corporate constitutional rights have gone international.

The world’s oligarchs aren’t just buying American democracy; they’re using our Supreme Court’s 5–4 Republican-only decisions to buy sovereignty itself.

The Court That Sold Democracy

The five Republican justices who decided Citizens United and Hobby Lobby—Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito—will be remembered by history as the Court that sold American democracy to the world’s most toxic and morbidly rich oligarchs.

And they didn’t even bother to do it subtly or incrementally. This power grab was done brazenly, overturning a century of precedent to give corporations and their oligarchs functionally unlimited political power.

These five justices claimed to be “originalists” who’d only interpret the Constitution “according to the Founders’ intent.” But, as history tells us, this nation’s Founders would have been horrified by the entire idea of corporate constitutional rights. They quite literally fought a revolution against corporate tyranny and then deliberately excluded corporations from any constitutional protections.

As I wrote in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, the “originalism” of the Roberts Court is a fraud, just like the headnote in Santa Clara. It’s a convenient fiction used to justify the destruction of our democracy.

History will not judge these justices kindly, nor should it. They’ll be remembered as the men who murdered American democracy at the request of the very oligarchs who paid to have them appointed.

The American Dream, Murdered

For my father’s generation, born during the Republican Great Depression and coming of age with World War II, the American Dream wasn’t just a slogan. FDR’s massive experiment with Keynesian economics worked; it was a reality for two-thirds of American families by 1980. A single income could support a family. You could buy a house for three times your annual salary. College was affordable or free. Healthcare didn’t bankrupt families. Retirement was secure. Children saw better opportunities than their parents.

As mentioned earlier, that reality was built by two Progressive Eras and a series of presidents who worked hard to constrain oligarch and corporate power. The first, from the 1890s through 1920, established the income tax, direct election of senators, women’s suffrage, and the first antitrust laws. The second, from 1933 through 1981, created Social Security, the right to organize unions, the minimum wage, and the regulatory framework that prevented corporate abuse.

But today, as we look at the wreckage of the middle class all around us, we can now see that Davis’s corporate constitutional rights headnote provided Reagan, the GOP, and their oligarch “donors” with the weapons to tear it all down.

Citizens United was the final blow against our democracy, leading us directly to the Trump presidency. Once corporations and their oligarch owners could spend unlimited money on elections, they could finance politicians who’d cut their taxes, deregulate their industries, crush their workers’ unions, and transfer wealth from working families to the oligarchs created by those same companies.

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— Is this going to be Trump‘s and the GOP’s strategy this fall? New York Times columnist David French published a truly alarming op-ed yesterday, pointing out a strategy that Republicans are apparently considering as we approach this November’s election. In Article I, Section 5, the Constitution says that both the House and Senate will decide who they’ll seat as members: “Each house shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members.” In other words, if the House — which right now is in Republican hands — determines that they want a Republican who lost an election for the House or Senate to a Democrat this fall to be the person seated as a member of Congress rather than the duly elected Democrat, they can make that happen with a simple majority vote. They can literally overrule or simply ignore the results of any election for any House or Senate seat if they don’t like it. Of course, to give the process a patina of legitimacy they’d probably point back to some squealing Laura Loomer-type back home in the state to claim that there were “irregularities,” but they can do it and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. In fact, it’s been done over a dozen times in this country’s history, and the Supreme Court itself has, as French points out, in a 1972 case called Roudebush v. Hartke, ruled that, “Which candidate is entitled to be seated in the Senate is, to be sure, a nonjusticiable political question.” In other words, No court can rule on this; there is no possible appeal. They’d probably only try to pull this off it the election is close and control of either body is hanging in the balance; that’s the circumstance that’s provoked such an action in the distant past. This is one more solid reason — in addition to overcoming the GOP voter suppression efforts I wrote about yesterday — why the ultimate and arguably only solution we face this fall to preserve our democracy is to show up in such overwhelming numbers that nobody can deny the results.

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— Bernie Sanders explains the appeal of democratic socialism to a Fox “News” reporter. I’ve told the story before about how, in 2016, when Louise and I lived on a boat in a marina in Washington, DC surrounded by lots of Navy and Coast Guard Republicans, most all of them were debating whether to vote in the primaries for Trump or Bernie, either being preferable to Clinton or any of the mainstream Republicans running. At least since 2000, I believe Americans have been looking for real change, a break with the neoliberalism that Reagan rolled out and Bill Clinton embraced, and both Bernie and Trump promised that change. But Trump has failed to deliver real change, so the question still hangs over our electoral processes. Which is why probably a lot of ears perked up when a Fox “News” reporter caught up with Bernie in the halls of the Capitol and asked if democratic socialism would hurt Democratic candidate chances this fall. Bernie was blunt: “The American people are disgusted with an economic system in which one guy on top, Elon Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom half of American society. They’re tired of a situation where 60% of our people live paycheck-to-paycheck... they are tired of a corrupt political system in which billionaires buy elections.” Amen! Hopefully a lot of those Fox-watching Republican-voting guys who lived in boats around us were watching…

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— Affordability is tanking under Trump. When it rains, it pours. American families were still reeling from the price increases on imported goods caused by Trump’s early tariffs when he let Netanyahu talk him into stupidly — and illegally — attacking a country that had not attacked us. The war of aggression against Iran led to the closure of the Gulf of Hormuz which spiked oil and gasoline prices early on and again over the past week. And now, after the Supreme Court told Trump that the Constitution says only Congress can impose tariffs, he’s gone and done it again, this time using the excuse that Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and around 80 other countries are using forced or slave labor in their factories to hit them with 10% to 12.5% tariffs. One immediate result was a jump in bond yields, meaning that home and car loan rates will soon be rising; mortgage rates could easily hit 7 percent in the near term. And there’s even speculation that Kevin Warsh, the guy he put into the Fed to replace Jerome Powell, will oversee an increase in the Fed-determined interest rates in coming weeks. This is all bad news for Republican candidates, which probably explains why the Trump administration is threatening to jail election officials and strip FEMA funds from states that won’t go along with their latest voter suppression efforts.

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— Republicans want legislation to force people to work in deadly heat if that’s what their employers demand. The Biden administration proposed OSHA rules that would prevent employers from forcing people to work under dangerous circumstances, including extreme heat events (the rule was dropped when Trump came into office). But leave it to Republicans, presumably responding to big lobbying money from the ag industry, to go an extra step to screw the workers. The Heat Workforce Standards Act, introduced by Indiana Republican Congressman Mark Messmer, passed the House Education and Workforce Committee in a straight party-line vote this week. The proposed new law would ban OSHA from putting into place any sort of national heat protections for working people. These guys don’t care who lives or dies, they just want to be sure they can cash the oligarchs’ checks.

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— “Explosive Trumparreah” spreads across the US, along with measles, while Bob Kennedy says, “Everything’s under control.” An estimated 11,500 cases of Cryptosporidiosis have now shown up in 41 states, but ever since the CEO of Taylor Farms gave Trump a million dollars and visited him in the White House last week the CDC continues to play dumb. Bob Kennedy says the outbreak is “under control,” although this is the guy who got a brain worm from eating roadkill and has no medical background whatsoever. Meanwhile, because of the MAHA-spread skepticism of immunizations, America is now experiencing the largest number of deadly measles cases since the disease was declared eradicated from America two decades ago. These Republicans sure know how to run a public health service, eh?

— The Social Security reckoning will become a BFD as the trust fund runs low. Until Reagan’s “reform” of the Social Security system, it had always operated on a simply pay-as-you-go system; the money coming in from FICA taxes funded the money going out to retirees and people on disability. Seeing the baby boomer generation’s retirement coming down the road, Congress increase the FICA tax to essentially double-tax the boomers to build up a massive ~$2.5 trillion trust fund to deal with this “rabbit through the python” problem; the idea was that the boomers would have all retired by the time the fund was exhausted and Social Security could go back to pay-as-you-go. Reagan also put an income tax on Social Security earnings, slowed the cost-of-living-adjustments (COLAs), and raised the retirement age to 67. None of those things, however, have worked and now the trust fund will run out of money within the next six years, long before the last of the boomers are dead. The solution to the problem is simple: right now people only pay Social Security taxes on the first ~$180,000 of their income, so millionaires and billionaires pay a tiny fraction of their income into the fund compared to average work people. Lifting that cap so everybody pays the same percentage would make the program solvent for the next 70 years (the maximum the government can calculate) and even allow for a $2000/year increase in benefits across-the-board for everyone. But Republicans hate the idea of taxing the morbidly rich even a tiny bit, so they’re floating a bunch of other suggestions, including privatizing the system and giving it to the big New York banks, raising the retirement age to 70 or even 72, and cutting benefits by as much as 20%. Keep an eye on this one, as most younger people don’t really understand the system so the GOP’s hustle is still working. It’s going to take all of us to educate our friends and neighbors to the simple realities of the situation.

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— Forever chemicals may be causing ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, and colorectal cancer in young people. A new peer-reviewed study just published in the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology looked at mother-child pairs from birth through age 11 and found a clear association between gut inflammation and PFAS exposure. These chemicals are popping up everywhere; they’re used in everything from paint and pesticides to processed foods and coffee cups. They’re most commonly used to make paper waterproof, so those carry-home food containers and the carry-out coffee cup are likely lined with them. It appears this is a good candidate for answering the questions about why so many young people are now coming down with these GI-related diseases, particularly cancers, that typically only used to hit older folks. Beware.

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Trump, his billionaire buddies, and his Republican lickspittles appear to be setting up a possible massive fraud with regard to this fall’s election. It could signal the end of American democracy.

We democracy-loving Americans have fought oligarchy 3 times on these shores, roughly every 80 years. Each time, we defeated the morbidly rich and established or re-established popular democracy and a government that put working class people ahead of the oligarchs.

This time, the oligarchs are behaving like they believe they can win, and the measures our billionaire oligarch-in-chief are taking right now should put every American on alert, if not provoke immediate impeachment.

First, some background.

While the Founders like Jefferson and Washington had large plantations and exploited the labor of enslaved people, they weren’t the truly rich, the oligarchs, of their era. Both those men, in fact, died in bankruptcy or its near-equivalent. The richest man to sign the Declaration of Independence was John Hancock, whose “fortune” was only worth about a million dollars in today’s money; like every other Founder, he left no fortune or family dynasty.

But there were real oligarchs in American in the 1770s, universally aligned with the British king, and they hated the idea of democracy and independence.

In The Rise of American Civilization, historian Charles Beard’s most famous work, he notes that on the banks of the Hudson River:

“From mansions that were castles, the Johnsons ruled in the Upper Mohawk Valley with a sway that was half feudal and half barbaric, relying on numerous kinsmen, armed Negro slaves, trained bands of Gaelic retainers, and savage allies from the dread Iroquois to maintain their sovereignty over forest and plain.”

It was the wealthiest families of the colonies who most strongly opposed both the Revolutionary War and the Constitution, because both endangered the stability of their fortunes, which were grounded in trade or relationships with England. Thousands of these families fought for and with the British, and fled the colonies after the Revolutionary War, both to England and Canada.

In the 1780s, we defeated oligarchy and established a fledgling, albeit imperfect, democracy, the world’s first at that scale.

Eighty years later, the plantation oligarchs of the Old South had amassed such fortunes that only a few hundred families essentially controlled the economy and politics of that entire region.

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By the early 1850s they’d outlawed democracy, rigging elections, imprisoning or killing pro-democracy newspaper writers and publishers, and turning their slave patrols against even white men who dared challenge their power.

In 1861, after declaring their independence from the United States, they turned their guns on the rest of America in an effort to finally end democracy on this continent. Abraham Lincoln defeated them and reestablished (a still-imperfect) democracy in America.

Eighty years after the end of the Civil War, oligarchs had once again seized control of the American economy and government during the part of the gilded era known as the Roaring 20s.

President Grover Cleveland had pointed to its early stages, warning Americans:

“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

The oligarchs’ excesses, though, crashed the economy leading to the Republican Great Depression and the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. He challenged his era’s oligarchs head-on, saying, “They hate me, and I welcome their hatred.”

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With his New Deal and his 90% top income tax rate he broke them, and both reestablished our democracy as well as building the first middle class in world history that was more than half of a nation’s population.

So here we are now, eighty-one years after the end of World War II, and the oligarchs have once again seized control of our economy and our government. As President Jimmy Carter told me ten years ago on my radio program:

“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery… So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors...”

And now we learn that the billionaire oligarch in the White House has gutted every one of the federal agencies designed to protect this fall’s election in 102 days, as if embracing the mentality of the old Confederate oligarchs who’d essentially outlawed voting by anybody who may have opposed them.

Since taking office, Trump has:

— Frozen and defunded the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) election security division,
— Cut off the threat-sharing network serving 1,300 state and local election officials,
— Disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force,
— Gutted the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center,
— Shuttered the State Department’s counter-disinformation office,
— Reduced the Justice Department’s voting rights section from 30 lawyers to 3,
— Fired the head of the NSA Cyber Command who caught indications of Russian meddling,
— Left the Federal Election Commission (FEC) without a quorum,
— And this month fired every remaining commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) just four months before the midterms.

Something big is up, and they’re not even bothering to be subtle about it.

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Yesterday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergy Lavrov in the Phillipines; Trump’s been having hour-plus-long phone conversations with Putin on average every two weeks since his inauguration; and FBI director Ka$h Patel is planning a trip to Russia a month before the election.

Russia, of course, intervened massively in the 2016 election, Trump’s “Russia, Russia, Russia” attempts at minimizing their role notwithstanding.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump criminally trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

Robert Mueller’s two-volume report found that Russia had attacked the 2016 election in what he called a “sweeping and systematic fashion,” through the Internet Research Agency’s social media operation and the GRU’s hacking of Democratic emails, and that the Trump campaign “expected to benefit from the stolen material.”

The second volume laid out roughly ten episodes of criminal obstruction of justice committed by Trump, and Mueller only declined to prosecute Trump because Justice Department policy barred indicting a sitting president, writing that while the report doesn’t conclude the president committed a crime, it also doesn’t exonerate him.

Along the way his team criminally charged 34 individuals and three Russian companies, including 26 Russian nationals and six former Trump advisers, and won eight convictions or guilty pleas from Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, Alex van der Zwaan, and Richard Pinedo, with five of them sentenced to prison. Trump later pardoned five of those eight.

The problem Trump and his morbidly rich oligarch buddies are facing is that oligarchy — including the oligarchy they’ve reestablished here, where the needs of average Americans are gutted as the top 1% are taking deep dives into their money bins — is always a transitional form of government.

Throughout centuries of modern history, oligarchy has rarely lasted more than a single generation. When people realize that the oligarchs have taken over their government and are bleeding average working people dry, they push back hard.

Which forces the oligarchs and the government they control to choose one of two options: give in and revert back to democracy, keeping some or much of their riches but allowing a middle class to re-emerge, or come down hard on the people with an iron fist and crush the opposition.

In Hungary this year, that oligarchy chose the former path, as did the oligarchs in America in 1933. In Russia, Putin chose the latter path, as did Egypt’s el-Sisi and Turkey’s Erdoğan (among others).

In apparent preparation, Trump is building a massive masked secret police force worthy of the Shah’s SAVAK, he’s building detention centers as fast as humanly possible, he’s identified people who “oppose” “traditional American views” as “domestic terrorists” along with anybody he labels “Antifa,” and is now openly calling Democrats communists and has suggested some should be deported or imprisoned.

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Yesterday, Republicans (with the help of 13 turncoat Democrats: Reps. Kathy Castor, Henry Cuellar, Don Davis, Jared Golden, Vicente Gonzalez, Josh Gottheimer, Marcy Kaptur, Susie Lee, Jared Moskowitz, Chris Pappas, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Darren Soto, and Derek Tran) passed legislation out of the House that would make it wildly more difficult for millions of low-income Americans and married women who’ve changed their names to vote.

Reporter and statistician Greg Palast has documented — using nothing but official government figures — that the 2024 Republican voter suppression efforts prevented around 4 million American citizens from either voting or having their votes counted; had that GOP effort been unsuccessful, Kamala Harris would today be president and Democrats would control the House and probably the Senate.

This time, it appears, they’re trying to disenfranchise millions more, and given the flaccidity of Democratic leadership’s response it appears they’ll pull much of it off. Those same Dem leaders, after all, allowed all that suppression to happen in 2024 — over loud objections by people like Stacy Abrams who were documenting it in real time — with nary a peep in the press.

Imagine how Republicans would have reacted if the documentary evidence actually showed Democrats had stolen a national election from them!

Which leaves it to us. The only way out of this will be for us to show up this fall in massive numbers, to refuse to be intimidated or frightened away from the polls, and to support folks like Marc Elias who are fighting voter suppression every step of the way.

Pass it along. This may be America’s last chance to preserve the democracy we’ve shed so much blood and treasure to gain and keep these past two-and-a-half centuries.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Fourth Assault”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

In his 1961 Farewell Address to the Nation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said:

“America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.”

Apparently “dreadful fear and hate” have won. A new Lloyd’s Register (the institution dates back to the 1760s) Global Risk Poll of citizens of 140 countries around the world found that one-in-ten (10%) Americans say that politics represents the biggest risk in their lives (above disease and accidents, even).

The average across the other 139 countries was around 1 percent of people who worried politics could harm them (there were a few exceptions; 5 percent of Russians said the same).

And, indeed, our politics can harm us.

There’s the fear of physical violence if you go out in public with a “F*ck Trump” tee shirt or cap or similar bumper sticker, the fear of losing your healthcare this November when the Republican Big Beautiful Bill cuts to Medicaid kick in, the fear of losing your Medicare as the GOP works to strangle and privatize the system with their “Medicare Advantage” scam, the fear of Republicans killing or “reforming” Social Security so they can hand it off to the big banks that own them.

Not to mention the GOP-led campaign to turn our environment over to the fossil fuel industry, our forests over the lumber industry, our streams and water over to the chemical industry, our farms over to the pesticide industry, our children over to the radical Christian school industry, and our economy over to the crypto industry.

Our Republican politicians and the billionaire-owned media that supports them are also constantly telling us who to hate and fear.

If it’s not Willie Horton it’s migrant caravans, Muslim bombers, murderer/rapist “illegals,” or, in 2024, trans people. For this election cycle, Trump, Rubio, Vance, and Miller are telling us we should hate and fear the guy mowing your lawn as well as democratic socialists and “communists.”

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Politics is supposed to help and support us, not rip us off, terrify us, or exploit us, but ever since the Reagan Revolution that’s pretty much all that’s happened.

Republican opposition to real reforms has kept student debt sky-high, housing in the hands of Wall Street hedge funds, health insurance rates out of reach for many, child-care unaffordable, and even caused the national system of gleaming new hospitals and public schools that Eisenhower and Kennedy established across America with their 90% top income tax rate to deteriorate or even shut down.

But why? And what can we do about it?

The era from the 1930s to the 1980s was the most prosperous either America or the world had ever seen. Our top 90% income tax rate on the morbidly rich and 50% income tax rate on corporations paid down our national debt from WWII to a mere $800 billion (less than $1 trillion!) when Reagan came into office, all while funding massive programs across America.

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They included power systems like the TVA and Hoover Dam, public schools, the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, Public Broadcasting, Head Start, food stamps, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, housing projects and VA home loans, hundreds of new airports and train stations, and thousands of smaller efforts. '

The American middle class was the first in world history to reach half the population of any nation; because of FDR’s New Deal, when Reagan came into office fully two-thirds of us were in it, most with a high school diploma and a single paycheck. (Today it’s around 45 percent of us, and it takes two full-time paychecks and a college degree to get there.)

But the morbidly rich self-described “Makers” chafed at having to pay all those taxes to support programs for the working class “Takers” of society, so when Lewis Powell gave them a plan in 1971 to rise up and crush the New Deal and Great Society and turn America into an oligarchy with them in charge, they leaped at it.

They created networks of influential think tanks like Heritage and American Enterprise, media monsters with rightwing TV networks and over 1500 rightwing radio stations, funded universities and seminars, brought corporations and legislators together with ALEC and others, founded and/or funded the Libertarian Party and the Federalist Society, and set out to seize control of the GOP.

It took a few decades, but their bet paid off; several of America’s billionaires are today richer than any human being who’s ever walked on planet Earth, from the days of the Pharaohs to the kings of the 17th century.

The problem the billionaires and the Republicans they own faced, though, was that most Americans loved what those oligarchs called “socialism.” We embraced Social Security, unionization, and the minimum wage with a gusto. We sent our kids to free colleges across the country. We cheered when LBJ got Medicaid and Medicare passed into law over the majority opposition of the GOP in the Senate.

And when oligarchs like David Koch ran for Vice President in 1980 on a platform of ending all of those programs and even shutting down our public school system, all to pay for tax breaks for his billionaires and corporations, they failed. Koch only got about a million votes that year.

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So, when Reagan took office they decided that since Americans wouldn’t vote for oligarchy but instead really only wanted “socialism,” the best solution was to so terrify Americans of our neighbors that hate and fear would overwhelm self-interest.

It worked 45 years ago when Reagan railed against “hippie brats“ and “that young buck ahead of you in the grocery line buying steak with his food stamps,” and they’re still doing it!

As Axios reported last week, “Republicans admit the GOP’s midterm forecast is bleak.” But they’re clinging to two goals; suppress the vote with the SAVE Act, all while whipping up voters’ fear and loathing of Democrats:

“‘It’s going to be a hate election,’ a Republican tied to President Trump’s political operation told Axios. ‘Voters have to hate the Dems more than they hate us. And we have material to work with.’”

The simple fact is that since 1981, when the Reagan Revolution kicked off, there hasn’t been even one single piece of major legislation passed through the US Congress that was written by Republicans and passed by a majority of Republicans and signed by a Republican president whose major beneficiary was the average American.

Seriously, not one in 45 years. I know, because for the past 23 years I’ve run a contest on my radio show for anybody who can identify any such Republican legislative unicorn, and none have won.

The problem is, though, that with so much of our media and intellectual atmosphere controlled by billionaires and their money, most Americans don’t know this. They think that Republicans — because they’re so tight with billionaires and big business — must know how to run an economy, even though ten of the last 11 recessions happened on Republican presidencies, most following giant tax cuts for billionaires, and those high-end tax cuts by Reagan, Bush, and Trump have collectively added over $34 trillion to our national debt.

So how do we dial back the hate and fear, particularly when the GOP is openly bragging to reporters that it’s worked so well for them in the past that they’re going to double down on it this year?

Expose them.

When they try to use hate, label it: “That’s hate-mongering. It’s beneath you.” Tell them you’re disgusted by their efforts to divide us by gender identity, race, religion, region, and nationality. Point out that they’re promoting bigotry, and history tells us that never ends well.

Inform people.

Show them how, since 1933, Democrats have written into law every major federal protection or benefit for working Americans, from Social Security, the minimum wage, and the right to unionize to Medicare, Medicaid, workplace safety, environmental and consumer protections, civil and voting rights, food assistance, Pell Grants, the Affordable Care Act, and beyond.

Without Democratic (and Eisenhower’s) legislative efforts over the past century, there literally would not be an American middle class of any consequence.

And quote Republican President Eisenhower — the last honest Republican president since the Reagan Revolution handed the party to the billionaires — when he wrapped up the last sentence of his farewell address with a prayer:

“We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.”

Louise’s Daily Song; “Fear Factory”

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Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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We have a lot of metaphors for it; the camel’s nose under the tent, the foot in the door, where there’s smoke there’s fire, and the handwriting on the wall, among others. Every police state in history started this way. As the White House declared last week in a press release:

“Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

First, they built the infrastructure based on what the public widely perceived as a real public safety and economic problem.

People had been pouring into the United States for centuries, looking for economic opportunity and a new life. Some were criminals, and Trump and the GOP highlighted their presence as the reason why it was so imperative to “build the wall” to seal the border and then begin aggressive mass deportations.

The majority of Americans (81% of Republicans and 49% of Democrats) rated border security as “important” in 2016, so Trump began by building his wall and expanding the detention centers that pre-existed from Reagan’s 1981 opening of them to detain Black Haitian refugees. (CoreCivic got its first immigration detention contract in 1981, GEO Group was founded in 1984.)

The story Trump campaigned on and used as an excuse to massively expand arrests and detentions was the widely popular notion that they were hunting down and imprisoning “the worst of the worst.” Even many Hispanics voted for him thinking he would clean up their neighborhoods of criminals.

Trump rarely referenced immigrants without including words like “rapists” and “murderers”: he kicked off his 2016 campaign with such a speech after coming down the escalator at Trump Tower.

Then came the first policy turn that showed the lie and exposed what may have been their plan all along. Instead of arresting immigrants who’d committed crimes (or were even accused of having committed crimes), they went after Jose the gardener and Maria the maid.

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Quickly, with encouragement by Supreme Court Justice Brett “Beer Bong” Kavanaugh, the system turned into a mass arrest and deportation program for people with brown and black skin rather than genuine “bad guys.”

This was the first point where Democrats began to publicly back away from the policy as white supremacist Republicans and racist independents embraced it more vigorously.

Then came the second policy turn, taking Trump, Vance, and Miller the next step toward their ultimate goal of turning America into a modern police state. In March 2025 during Trump’s second term, ICE agents began to mask up to conceal their identities and started using explicit and deadly violence against not only people of color suspected of being undocumented immigrants but also against anyone demonstrating against Trump and his ICE.

In the sixteen months since, ICE officers have shot at least 30 people, killing at least 8 that we know about, and as of last month at least another 50 people have died in ICE custody. There have been no meaningful investigation of any of them and no prosecutions of ICE officers whatsoever for these “routine” actions.

And routine is exactly what they’ve become.

Which brings us to the next step, their third turn in the road: arresting and imprisoning legal immigrants for their words rather than their actions.

The Guardian reported yesterday that Salah Sarsour, the president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque, a green-card-holding business-owning legal permanent resident of the United States for over 30 years with six US citizen children and nine citizen grandchildren, was arrested by ICE and held in a brutal detention center for 80 days where he lost 30 pounds and was denied monitoring for his diabetes:

“On 30 March, he was on his way to see his elderly mother when he was surrounded, he said, by at least 10 unmarked vehicles and armed agents in civilian clothing and whisked away, first to a detention center near Chicago and later miles away at a facility in Indiana. …

“When Sarsour, who has no criminal record in the US, was first detained, he thought the agents had mistaken him for someone else. When they tried to get him to sign paperwork agreeing to being deported, he refused.

“‘I was very confused,’ he said. Only as his ordeal protracted into days did he realize he had been targeted for his activism. ‘That really shocked me, to be honest,’ he said.”

Sarsour was only released because US district judge James Patrick Hanlon concluded he’d been held because of his outspoken support of Palestinian rights and not because of any crime he’d committed, immigration status or otherwise. He faces another court proceeding today in Chicago that may result in his being fully freed or re-imprisoned.

But now Trump’s concentration camps have officially been used to hold people whose views the administration dislikes.

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Trump’s September 25th National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” identified as potential “domestic terrorist” threats those Americans who espouse:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

It was used last month to indict 15 protestors in Minneapolis. And now Secretary of State Marco Rubio has essentially declared that it’s a loaded gun pointed at anybody who opposes Trump or is even a progressive member of the Democratic Party. The excuse/weapon they’re apparently planning to use is Cuba.

For Rubio, it’s a two-fer. He wants to run for president and thinks taking Cuba will get him there…but needs an excuse. And that excuse will also provide Trump, Vance, Miller, et al with a fine opportunity to start rounding up American progressives.

Labeling Cuba as “The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” Rubio issued a 140-page document which claims that that poverty-stricken island nation:

“…has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.”

He claimed, to an audience including representatives from 66 countries and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon:

“The Cubans devoted themselves to recruiting, cultivating and mobilizing a global coalition of activists, intellectuals, and political groups around this cause, building a sprawling revolutionary network that shaped a disproportionate share of America’s most famous and influential extremist movements, from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground through to Antifa.

“Today, that network continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.”

The document names American citizens, just as the new White House website is now naming individual American reporters, who are essentially accused of being communist/“leftist” collaborators.

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They include my colleagues David Pakman and Amy Goodman, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, influencer Hasan Piker, and nineteen others, including two other members of Congress.

The 20 organizations named include the Amazon Labor Union, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America, the National Lawyer’s Guild, and “Antifa.”

So now the architecture is in place. ICE has billions to expand their concentration camps, they’ve spread their secret police across every corner of America, they’re tied into Flock cameras and Palantir’s databases on pretty much every American citizen, and they’ve demonstrated they’re invulnerable to local law enforcement and can abuse or even kill people who resist them at will.

And now the Trump regime, like Putin and Hitler before them (among dozens of others), have identified “the enemy within” who must be purged and separated from society.

It might be good time to reach out to our elected officials and demand action. The phone number for Congress is 202-224-3121 but don’t forget your local officials, too, as it appears they’ll soon be dealing with ICE or ICE-affiliated federal goons coming for the “domestic terrorists” who defy “traditional American views.”

Louise’s Daily Song: “First They Came For”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available in bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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As I write this, federal investigators are chasing the worst cyclospora outbreak in decades, thousands of people across more than thirty states doubled over with what the CDC delicately calls “frequent and sometimes explosive diarrhea,” and they still can’t tell you for certain which farm it came from.

Over the weekend, after the $7 billion company’s CEO visited the White House, the FDA walked back a positive test on lettuce from Taylor Farms, the largest salad producer in North America, announcing that its own earlier finding of cyclospora had somehow turned out to be a false positive. That leaves thousands of sickened Americans with no confirmed source at all, which is a peculiar place to land in a country that once prided itself on knowing where its dinner came from.

The reason nobody can trace it back isn’t much of a mystery. Back in March of 2025 Trump’s FDA and it’s boss, Bob Kennedy, delayed its new Food Traceability Rule by thirty months, shoving the deadline to track high-risk foods like leafy greens from the field to your plate all the way out to 2028.

Six days after that delay went public, Taylor Fresh Foods, the parent company of Taylor Farms, cut a million dollar check to Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC, part of the $2.2 million it has steered to Republican committees this cycle.

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Around that same stretch the CDC quietly cut its own foodborne illness surveillance from eight pathogens down to two, and cyclospora was one of the six it stopped watching. The monitoring had always been a hassle for the giant salad makers. And then the big money hit Trump’s bank account, and you’re the one stuck in the bathroom wondering who’s payoff got you.

That’s the whole corrupt Republican machine in a single lettuce field, and what follows is the same story told a couple dozen more times.

Americans would like to breathe air that isn’t giving their kids asthma and shortening everybody’s lives. The fossil fuel industry has hated the government’s clean air authority for decades. And then, after oil executives were asked for a billion dollars at a Mar-a-Lago dinner and the industry poured at least $75 million into electing Trump, his EPA moved to repeal the “endangerment finding,” the legal foundation underneath every clean air rule we’ve got. The money hit the GOP’s account, and the rules that keep the air breathable started disappearing.

You’d like the option of a clean, cheap electric car that never has to visit a gas station, the kind of thing that saves you money at the pump and doesn’t cook the planet your grandchildren have to live on. Detroit’s old guard and the oil patch preferred you keep buying gasoline forever. And then the same oil money that bought the air rules bought the car rules too, and the tax credits that made electric vehicles affordable, along with the tailpipe standards that were finally cleaning up our cities, were thrown straight into the shredder by the GOP.

Most of us would like to drink a glass of tap water without wondering about the forever chemicals that now even show up in the blood of newborn babies. And then the chemical industry hit the GOP’s bank account, and the first federal limits ever set on those PFAS compounds got weakened and pushed off into the distance before most people had even heard they existed.

Anybody who’s stood at a pharmacy counter would like their medicine to cost what it costs in every other wealthy country instead of three or four times as much. The drug industry spends more money lobbying Washington than any other business on Earth. And then all that money hit the GOP’s accounts, and the price relief that was finally within reach kept getting whittled down toward nothing.

Working families would like health coverage they can afford and actually keep. And then the money landed in the GOP’s money bin, the big beautiful bill took an axe to Medicaid, the subsidies that made marketplace insurance affordable were allowed to lapse, and millions of people who did absolutely nothing wrong lost their doctor.

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We’d all like the government to keep funding the research that cures cancers and catches the next pandemic before it becomes one. And then the checks to Republican politicians from billionaires who don’t want to pay their damn taxes cleared, the National Institutes of Health got gutted right alongside the disease trackers at the CDC.

Anybody with an aging parent would like to know the nursing home has enough staff on the floor to answer the call button before dawn. And then the private equity firms that have been gobbling up elder care hit the GOP’s bank account, and the first federal minimum staffing rule for nursing homes, the one that would have guaranteed a real nurse was actually in the building, got killed.

The people who cut and pack our meat would like to keep all ten of their fingers, and their children would like to stay out of the slaughterhouse. And then the giant meat packers wrote their checks to Republicans, the line speeds got cranked up faster, and the worker protections that were already threadbare got thinner still.

After a train hauling toxic chemicals derailed and poisoned East Palestine, Ohio, the folks in every town along the tracks would like the trains rolling through to be a little bit safer. And then the railroad lobby hit the GOP’s bank account, the bipartisan rail safety bill that came straight out of that disaster died quietly in Congress, and the industry went right back to running ever longer trains with ever fewer inspectors.

A person working full time would like to earn enough to cover the rent. And then the restaurant and retail lobbies hit the GOP’s checking account, and the federal minimum wage sat frozen at $7.25 an hour, exactly where it’s been since 2009, worth a little less with every year that passes.

Workers would like a fair shot at forming a union without getting fired for trying. And then the big corporate money poured into the GOP’s money bin, the National Labor Relations Board was stripped of the members it needs to so much as hold a vote, and the one referee working people had — the NLRB — was pulled off the field.

Young people would like an education that doesn’t come with a mortgage-sized debt hanging over them for the next thirty years. And then the for-profit college operators and the loan servicing big New York banks threw money at the GOP, the student debt relief got strangled in the courts, and the rules meant to stop predatory diploma mills got loosened all over again.

Regular taxpayers would like the morbidly rich to chip in something close to their fair share. But then the billionaires hit both Trump’s and the GOP’s bank accounts at once, the giant tax bill tilted even harder toward the top, and the IRS enforcement money that was finally going to audit the yacht and private jet crowd got stripped right back out, so they can go on not paying.

People who paid into Social Security their entire working lives would like it to be there, with the phone answered by an actual human being, when they finally retire. And then the big banks’ money landed in Republican campaigns, the Social Security Administration got hollowed out, field offices and phone lines went dark, and the same crowd that swears it’s protecting the program made it harder to reach someone at SSA than it’s been in generations.

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A young person with a good idea would like to start a small, local business without a trillion dollar monopoly crushing them like a bug. And then the biggest corporations on Earth lined up to fund Trump’s inauguration, his new ballroom, and his library, and the antitrust cops who might have protected the little guy suddenly discovered they had somewhere else to be.

Ordinary investors would like a financial cop on the beat to guard against the next Ponzi scheme and the next collapse that wipes out their savings. And then the crypto industry assembled a war chest north of $193 million and became the single biggest corporate spender for Republicans in our elections as it made billions for Trump and his boys, and the SEC promptly dropped its fraud cases against Coinbase and Ripple while the GOP-controlled Congress rushed the industry’s own wish list into law.

You’d like some say over whether artificial intelligence takes your job, tracks your every move, and answers to nobody at all. And then the tech billionaires launched a hundred million dollar super PAC aimed at erasing the AI safety laws that thirty eight states had already passed, and Republicans in Washington got to work writing exactly the rules Silicon Valley ordered up.

We’d like our national forests and Arctic refuges to still be standing for our grandchildren. And then ConocoPhillips handed a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration and got expanded drilling in Alaska for its trouble, and the public land that’s supposed to belong to all of us got auctioned off to whoever could cover the entrance fee.

Parents would like every kid, not just the wealthy ones, to have a good public school right down the street. And then the voucher and privatization money hit the GOP’s account, the Education Department got gutted, and public dollars started flowing to private and religious schools that answer to no one.

Americans once had a public broadcasting system and a genuine range of voices on the radio dial. And then the rightwing billionaire’s money landed in GOP pockets, Congress clawed back the funding for PBS and NPR, and the handful of billionaires who already own most of the rest of the media got a little less competition from the stations that were actually free.

This is supposed to be a country where the government doesn’t get to pick your religion for you. And then the hard-right so-called “Christian” dark money network that spent years quietly buying the federal courts hit its stride, and now the Ten Commandments are being ordered onto the walls of public school classrooms and somebody else’s faith is getting written into your children’s curriculum.

Women would like to make their own decisions about their own bodies, right down to whether and when to build a family through something like IVF. And then the same small circle of rightwing misogynist billionaires who bought the six Republicans on the Supreme Court got the ruling they’d paid for, and a right that had stood for half a century was simply gone.

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Every American would like a fair shot in business and in the military based on what they can actually do, not on who they happen to know or the color of their skin. And then the white supremacist billionaire bigots’ money hit the GOP’s account, “diversity” got turned into a slur, and the programs that had pried open doors for people long locked out of them got purged from one end of the government to the other.

Underneath every last one of these sits a single machine. Americans would like their policies decided by voters, by actual human beings casting actual ballots, and not by whoever writes the fattest check.

And then, back in 2010, Clarence Thomas cast a deciding vote in Citizens United, the ruling that let unlimited corporate cash flood our politics, and the family of the Nazi-memorabilia-collecting billionaire who’d been quietly showering him with luxury vacations for years went and increased their own political giving by 862 percent.

That money didn’t just hit one bank account. It bought the very door through which all the rest of it walked.

Every item on this list was a choice various Republicans made in exchange for money.

None of it was weather or fate or the natural order of things falling into place. Each time, a big majority of Americans wanted the better outcome, and each time a very small number of enormously wealthy people wanted the worse one, and each time the wealthy won, because six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court turned dollars into speech and corporations into people.

The saving grace is that a check still isn’t a vote, at least not yet, and there are a great many more of us than there are of them.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Trump Delivers”

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Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Here are two ways an American can make a citizen.

• 1. Take your partner out for a nice dinner and a romantic dance.

• 2. Once home, with no light but candles, remove unnecessary clothing, and let Nature guide you.

• 3. Roughly nine months later, a citizen arrives…

…OR,

• 1. Spend $75 online to set up a Limited Liability Corporation in Delaware.

This would be a damn funny joke if it weren’t true.

According to Supreme Court dicta in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that $75 is all you need to make an American a person under the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution.

We know that the 2010 Citizens United case claimed that corporations are people, too. They can donate to political candidates, that is, purchase elections. There’s no other way to put it.

But there are two problems with the corporations-are-people assertion:

• 1. I’ve never heard of a corporation that lost its legs in Vietnam

• 2. Corporate citizenship is a complete fraud.

Thom Hartmann, the historian and talk show host, has put on his Sherlock Holmes’ deerstalker hat and discovered that the Citizens United decision was based on the fraudulent reporting of a key Supreme Court case way back in 1886. A corrupt clerk working for the Supreme Court combined with a dodgy Justice to falsely state that corporations are “people.”

That is NOT what the Justices decided in the 1886 case But in 2010, the corporate bum-lickers on the Court cited this fraudulent “precedent” of corporate citizenship — and put America’s elections up for sale.

Hartmann’s newly-released book, Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told (Barrett Koehler 2026) is a rippin’ detective story whose power is in its hard history. Hartmann explains, and he’s on solid ground here, that Citizens United is based on an entirely fabricated reading of the Supreme Court’s 1886 decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company.

Before you run away screaming that Hartmann’s story suggests too much legalese, in fact, he’s written a film-worthy, gripping, horrific story which is, in its weird way — think The Sting with a bad-guys-win ending — very entertaining.

The plot line kicks off with this: Hartmann’s in a law library (the kind of the thing he does) and looks up the case on which Citizens United was based. He opens the Southern Pacific Railroad case and finds a head-scratcher: There is NOTHING in the opinion which grants corporations human-hood.

Nothing. Citizens United and the other crazy corporate citizenship cases are based on…nothing. Well, not nothing. There is what’s called a “head-note,” something written by the official court reporter that asserts it is a fair summary of the case.

In 1886, the Court Reporter had, in cahoots with a wily Justice, Stephen Field, monetarily greased by railroad interests, simply made it up. That is, “summarized” the Santa Clara case in a way that ignored the actual written conclusions of the court.

This is a big deal. A REALLY BIG deal. The corrupt court reporter wrote:

“The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.”

Corporations are persons?!? Lots of corporations have been convicted of felony crimes — but I’ve never seen a corporation breaking rocks on a chain-gang.

OK, a little legalese is needed here. Every case has a head note drafted by a (hopefully) honest court reporter. But the head note has absolutely ZERO legal weight. It’s just an easy blurb for paralegals in a hurry. Like an old TV Guide summary of an episode of Gray’s Anatomy.

But, the court reporter, J.C. Bancroft Davis, working with his railroad buddies and the under-handed Justice Field, concocted a head note that granted personhood to these fictional entities known as corporations. I think Bancroft and Field would have made Tinkerbell a citizen, but Disney hadn’t made the movie yet.

The effect of Citizens United has been devastating to say the least. Now corporations can pull out their checkbooks and swamp your vote with millions of dollars in “donations.” Who do you think a politician will listen to: you with your one puny vote or Daddy Warbucks with a wallet thicker than a Big Mac?

The header granting corporations personhood was, like any Big Lie, repeated and cited often enough that it simply became the law of the land.

And the consequences are nothing short of evil. Corporations are, under the 2010 Citizens United decision, treated the same as people — people made out of flesh and bones.

Under former law, convicted murderer Charles Manson could not donate to a political campaign from prison…but under Citizens United, Charles Manson & Co. could write big checks to buy a pardon.

In 2011, I discovered a donation to support Republican Mitt Romney’s run against Barack Obama through Restore Our Future PAC came from a limited liability corporation called “F8 LLC.” The company only showed $87,000 in sales for the year but managed to donate a cool million dollars to the Republican campaign, Who is behind this million dollar payment? Investigators with the Campaign Legal Center dubbed the executive “John Doe.” Want to know who’s behind the GOP? Ask Mr. “Doe.”

Under Citizens United, Al Qaeda Inc. may donate as well as Putin & Sons. In the 2010 argument over Citizens United, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg asked how Americans can tell if the government of China is funding candidates via incorporated front groups in the US. Chief Justice Roberts said that would be up to Congress — that is, the very politicians bought by a Chinese front or “F8 LLC.”

How odd, Trump has argued that kids born in the US to immigrant parents aren’t Americans, but Corporations born in the Cayman Islands and registering in Wyoming have citizenship rights.

So, RBG’s question suggests a solution that’s less of a heavy lift compared to Hartmann’s call to amend the Constitution. Congress can allow corporations to donate if they certify and prove they have no foreign owners. That would be a bit of a problem for Citibank. Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding just bought $450 million of Citibank stock and more is controlled by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Would the Saudis try to influence American elections? Does a bear….?

Under current law, I can’t give to a candidate without stating my name and address. We don’t need a Constitutional Amendment to require that corporations that donate to campaigns list all their shareholders.

Right now, I’m completing my film about how the Brothers Koch stole $6 billion in oil from the Osage Nation. They bought their way out of a criminal indictment by literally purchasing themselves a new Congress through a corporate shell called “Triad.” At the time, corporate donations were a go-to-jail felony, but the Kochs slithered away until Citizens United, when their fake corporate front was legalized.

So what’s the problem with corporate cash in campaigns? This: Wise men have said, “Corporations have neither bodies to kick nor souls to damn.” Corporations are artificial creatures that feel no pain but can inflict it. And they do.

And what truly should make you ill is, as Hartmann lays out, the legal case for Citizens United was a fraud, a scam, a con, a bamboozle.

Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is out now and available from Amazon, on Kindle, and wherever good books are sold.

Greg Palast is an investigative journalist. His not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund is launching a series of 6 reports on vote suppression — and how we can reverse it — in coordination with our partners at Black Voters Matter Fund, the NAACP of Georgia, Transformative Justice Coalition and the late Rev. Jesse Jackson’s RainbowPUSH. From the 14th Amendment to the 10th ring of voting hell, he and his colleagues expose the arrow in the heart of democracy.

They are in real need of your tax-deductible donation RIGHT NOW to get these films and reports out. Journalism done right is not journalism done cheap. And that’s why we have such impact. As CK Hoffler, attorney with RainbowPUSH says, “We rely on the work of Greg Palast and his team.”

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