Two Possible Futures

Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

In a few hours we’ll meet here on Hartmann Report to discuss this book; next month there will be a new book, Looking Forward by Edward Bellamy. Here’s the final part of the last chapter of Who Stole the American Dream? The Greatest Crime Ever Told.

Two Possible Futures

The two possible futures we face today aren’t just about democracy or corporate power in the abstract. They represent starkly different visions of America: will we become more like FDR’s ideal, or will we continue down today’s road to oligarchic neo-feudalism like Russia and Hungary did?

Future One: Oligarchy Triumphant

In this possible future, the America of We the People fails. The billionaire oligarchs complete their capture of what’s left of our democracy, corporate constitutional rights remain the law of the land, and wealth concentration accelerates until a handful of trillionaires own most of our politicians as well as everything else worth owning.

The middle class shrinks down to around 10 or 20 percent of us as the American economy comes to resemble the Victorian England that Charles Dickens wrote about in almost every one of his many books. Most Americans become permanent renters, never owning homes, never building wealth, and never achieving anything close to financial security. We work multiple jobs for oligarchs and corporations that face no democratic accountability, under conditions that grow steadily worse, for wages and benefits that somehow never keep pace with costs.

Healthcare remains unaffordable, education is financed by debt, and housing fully becomes a speculative playground for private equity and foreign investors. Climate change accelerates as fossil fuel corporations use their constitutional rights to block every attempt at regulation or the construction of alternative energy systems.

Democracy becomes nothing more than theater, like in most of the other oligarchies and tyrannies across the planet. Elections are held, but oligarchs fund all of the viable candidates and use their media and “free speech” to destroy any politicians who dare try challenge the system. The illusion of choice masks total corporate and billionaire control of our society and our governments, while the Constitution is twisted by a corrupt Supreme Court into a vestigial document that only protects their patrons and allies.

If this current trend continues and those of us who remember America before Reagan’s corporate constitutional rights Revolution die out, the American Dream becomes a mere historical curiosity, a quaint, idealized past that young people skeptically read about in history books, a brief shining—but improbable—moment between the old aristocracies of Europe and the new oligarchies of the twenty-first century.

You could call it a new form of feudalism decorated with smartphones and compliant media, and it’s where we’re headed if we do nothing.

Future Two: Democracy Restored

In this future, democracy and the middle class win. The movement to end corporate constitutional rights reaches its tipping point and the Twenty-Eighth (or Twenty-Ninth) Amendment passes, explicitly stating that constitutional rights belong only to human beings.

With corporate constitutional rights stripped away, democracy can function again without corrupt Republican justices on the Supreme Court constantly constraining it. Congress is once again free to pass laws regulating corporate behavior without confronting endless constitutional litigation. States again revoke the charters of corporations that harm the public interest, corrupt executives once again go to prison, and local communities can again care for their people with revenues from taxing the morbidly rich.

Unions will recover and rebuild America as workers regain their bargaining power and union busting is outlawed. Wages rise to match productivity and the cost of living. And the fifty-plus trillion dollars that was stolen by the Reagan Revolution begins flowing back toward the working families whose labor created it in the first place.

Healthcare becomes a right like in every other advanced democracy in the world and ceases to be just another corporate profit center. Higher education becomes affordable again, and our public schools are rebuilt like Eisenhower did back in the day. Housing becomes a human need to be met, and exploiting it as a speculative commodity is outlawed or taxed into nonexistence. Climate change is addressed because fossil fuel corporations can no longer use their “free speech rights” to buy politicians and block regulation.

The American Dream is, in other words, reborn. Not the old dream of the 1950s, with its racial and gender exclusions and limitations, but a new dream for a new century. A dream where hard work is consistently rewarded, where every family can afford a home regardless of where or to whom they were born, where sickness doesn’t bankrupt people, where education opens doors instead of creating debt prisons, and where each generation once again does better than the last.

This is the America we could bring about, and it all begins by exposing Davis’s toxic headnote and using the public outrage to end corporate constitutional rights.

The Story They Could Tell

The newspapers and editorialists of the 2030s could write that in the 2020s people began to wake up.

They could chronicle how researchers dug through dusty law libraries and found the evidence of Davis’s and Field’s crime, revealed that the infamous headnote was a fraud and the oft-quoted Santa Clara decision never said what everyone thought it said. They could explain how, for 140 years, American democracy had been undermined by a lie, and the American Dream had been stolen by corporate oligarchs.

Activists organized. The Move to Amend Movement spread from community to community, educating millions. Towns such as Spokane, Lafayette, and hundreds of others passed ordinances rejecting corporate constitutional rights. States passed resolutions calling for a constitutional amendment.

The stories would document how the oligarchs fought back with everything they had, spending billions on propaganda while purchasing politicians, judges, and airtime. How they used every constitutional right they’d fraudulently acquired to prevent their own disempowerment.

But the people persisted.

Town by town, state by state, year by year, we educated neighbors. We ran for office, organized, and voted. We built a movement that finally broke through.

And in 2030, after decades of organizing, we passed the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, declaring that corporations are not persons and money is not speech.

As in 1865 in the South and 1933 nationwide, a third oligarchic era ended in America, and a new democratic age was kicked off. Corporate charters were revoked for corporations that harmed the public interest, monopolies were broken up, and wealth was redistributed through a return to rational individual and corporate taxation. Workers rebuilt unions, and communities regained control of their futures.

The American Dream, they’ll write, was reborn.

It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t quick. And it certainly wasn’t easy. But it happened because ordinary people refused to accept rule by the morbidly rich—founded on the lie of corporate constitutional rights—as inevitable. Because we understood that the American Dream wasn’t some nostalgic fantasy but a real achievement that had been stolen from us and our children, and we chose, instead of going along any more, to rise up and take it back.

Or the Story, If We Fail

Historians in the 2030s could also write a different story, explaining how in the early twenty-first century the climate catastrophe accelerated, killing millions and creating caravans of climate refugees. The billionaires and tech bro oligarchs tightened their grip on our lives and our news. As a result, what was left of our democracy after Trump’s gilded presidency collapsed under the burden of corporate money and media manipulation. The American Dream became merely a bitter memory.

Some people, they’ll tell us, saw what was happening. Researchers found the evidence of the 1886 fraud, activists tried to organize resistance, and a few communities even passed ordinances. A handful of states called for a constitutional amendment to reverse Davis’s fraud.

But most Americans—struggling just to pay the rent and childcare bills—were too busy, too distracted, too exhausted, or too cynical to care. They knew the system was rigged; they just didn’t believe they could change it, so they didn’t even try.

As a result, the oligarchs won by default. Democracy died with a shrug, a footnote in a back section of the New York Times.

In this scenario, by 2050 America becomes a brutal, iron-fisted tyranny in fact as well as function. By 2075, even the pretense of democracy is abandoned to corrupt, strongman government based on the Russian and Hungarian system. The old US Constitution had become an anachronism, a museum piece from a bygone era when people naively believed in self-governance and dreamed of economic security for all.

The crime that started in 1886 and was kicked into high gear with the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s was never punished, the theft of constitutional rights never reversed, and the American Dream never restored.

The oligarchs won.

Climate collapse made much of the Earth uninhabitable. Billions died. Civilization fragmented. The survivors lived in a world of scarcity, surveillance, and oligarchic control. The historians of 2090, if any exist, would look back at the early twenty-first century as the last moment when change was possible, when people could have acted but failed to.

When the American Dream could have been saved but wasn’t.

Which Story Gets Told?

America’s future now depends on what you do.

Will you read this book and forget it? Or will you act?

Will you share this story? Will you join Move to Amend, Progressive Democrats of America, Public Citizen, or a similar organization dedicated to fighting corporate constitutional rights? Will you attend your local city council meetings and demand your community reject corporate constitutional rights? Will you organize your friends and neighbors? Will you vote for candidates who support the amendment? Will you run for office yourself?

Will you talk to your family about this over dinner? Will you explain it to your friends and acquaintances on social media? Will you help us make it impossible for people to plead ignorance?

Will you persist when it seems hopeless? Will you keep fighting when the oligarchs push back? Will you refuse to give up?

What you do today determines the history they’ll write tomorrow.

A Final Word

Thomas Jefferson knew this day would come. In 1816, he wrote: “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

We didn’t crush it in its birth but instead let it grow for two centuries. Now it’s crushing us.

But it’s not too late.

This bizarre, artificial aristocracy of moneyed corporations and their billionaire oligarchs can still be defeated. The morbidly rich can still be stopped, and democracy can still be reclaimed, restoring the American Dream.

The greatest legal crime in American history was committed in 1886. We’re going to solve it.

We’re going to restore the American Dream.

Join us.

Let us reclaim America’s destiny, as Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. . . . ​The reflection is awful, and in this point of view, how trifling, how ridiculous, do the little paltry cavilings of a few weak or interested men appear, when weighed against the business of a world.”