thank you so much it's such a pleasure to be back in seattle and back in town hall i love this venue and it's wonderful to see all of you and special thanks to the town hall seattle for helping organize this and especially the alyea bay books for  the message that i want to share with you tonight is a pretty simple and straightforward one and i'm going to try and do it fairly briefly and then we can do some q and a and that is that george washington did not fight the revolutionary war to one you know most of us take this for granted we think that you know this is the history that we know and understand but the fact of the matter is that the supreme court over the last thirty years has asserted that both of those things that i just shared with you are not true the george washington actually did fight the revolutionary war to protect the billionaires of europe and abraham lincoln fought the civil war to free the corporations and you know i always thought he fought the civil war to free the slaves but apparently not if you a consequence of this we are experiencing right now a genuine crisis of democracy in the united states we have you know very very low voter turnout and it turns out you know a lot of people yes them why don't you show up to vote and they say well because you know second a matter you know sometimes they get a little sophisticated in you know well it's you know both parties are bought off or twiddle dallman to it be whatever but really ultimately at the bottom at the at the at the end of the day what they say it is that you know i don't chose to focus is going to matter because it's the top one percent or at the worst the top ten percent who get what they want legislatively it's the special interest groups who get what they want legislatively it's the big corporations are get what they want legislatively it's not me and now or just in the last month or so the first name i think it was nathan yeah i had him on the radio on tuesday for getting his first name but anyhow dr gillan of princeton university just came out with  study where they they went back and they looked at over twenty thousand pieces of legislation over a twenty some odd year period or to those be the legislation over a twenty year period and what they found was that in fact it's true that what the fiftieth percentile wanted what average americans wanted what the tenth percentile wanted what poor people wanted didn't happen i mean you know that it would it would happen or not happen at a rate that roughly corresponded with random chance whereas what the top ten percent wanted or what special interest wanted to or what corporations wanted happened consistently this is not the definition of a democracy a democracy should be you know there's these first name actually know about that we've been here before this is not the first time we've seen a crisis of democracy the last time that this happened was at the end of the last gilded age and we are now in the new gilded age as you probably heard many times passed for example teddy roosevelt the republican president has the tillman act which made it a felony for a federal official to give money to any political candidate for federal office there were laws passed in virtually every state in the united states that made it a crime for anyone to give money to anybody for any political purpose like to have a copy of one of these laws this is this is just incredible this is an actual state law this is from wisconsin  this was on the books i mean this is one that came out of that progressive backlash era and it wasn't taken off the books until the one nine hundred fifty s and here let me just read you a very straightforward no corporation doing business in this sta or contribute or offer consent or agree to pay or contribute directly or indirectly annie money property free service of its officers or into our employees or thing of value to any political party whatsoever organization committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever or for the purpose of influencing legislation of and or to promote promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for the nomination of point or election to any political office and then the p and this this wasn't just a gee wouldn't it be nice there's the penalty phase any office or employee agent attorney or other representative and there is even a lobbyist anybody who sh punished upon conviction by imprisonment in the state prison for a period of not was then one or more than five years and if they mess to corporation may be dissolved and if a foreigner nonresident corporation its right to do business in this state is for we knew how to respond to corruption by big corporations and wealthy individuals and we did it and it wasn't just the tillman act it wasn't just laws like that we had many states washington state is one of them has laws so that we get to elect our senators women got the right to vote this all came out of this i mean there's the and these are by the way those two things were constitutional amendments people say you can't amend the constitution i don't know if you can it's not that difficult and in fact during the last progressive populist revolt when we needed to take back democracy from the whack jobs we did it so you know it and we did it quite quickly actually i mean it was basically it took about a generation it took about two decades our current crisis however is in many ways more severe than that crisis was because back then you didn't have a supreme court saying that george washington fought the since the revolutionary war to protect the east india company and the billionaires in europe and he didn't have a supreme court that said that abraham lincoln fought the civil war to protect the corporations back then you know there was no doctrine that corporations are people or that they were trying to santa clara county nine hundred eighty six and several of the decisions but they really really didn't have corporate power back then like that and there was no idea that money was protected by the first amendment and the corporations were protected by the fourteenth in fact in  different things it was the beginning of the blending of the two but even in that decision they didn't go that far instead they said that money was quote you could money that you could you could regulate money in the political process because you could regulate it and it was a regulation of conduct to regulate money rather and now the supreme court of course says if you try to regulate money in the political process you're regulating free speech and you know i didn't know that money was speech i mean i i just i don't hear that many things coming out of my wallet or out of my pocket it's not that's been quoted forever and i wrote a book about that called an equal protection and it's like the biggest scam that's been forced on the american people but in addition to that we now have you know a whole series  of supreme court decisions since that time that have basically you know ratified that notion that corporations are people and this the modern era virginia a nice soft spoken guy who is actually very gentle he was a southern gentleman but he worked for the tobacco industry and a few years before that a couple of big things that happened one was rachel carlson had published silent spring in the sixty's in the mid sixty's and produced this incredible movement this incredible backlash of people saying no wait a minute you know i want to know what's in my food i don't want these pesticides things so that happened and then on top of that you had ralph nader published a book called unsafe at any speed and about how the car companies didn't give a rat's patootie about us they just wanted to make a profit and that sparked a consumer movement and so suddenly corporate america fell under siege and lewis paul being a tobacco lawyer could see what was going to happen twenty years out the future i mean he could literally see the future but he had a sense of what the way things were going and you know the way things were going was that you know if the we the people were going to come after them so he said here in this memo to to eugene sindoor his next door neighbor and friend at the u s chamber of commerce he said we've got to get politically active the chamber of commerce has to get politically active up until seventy one the chamber of congress of com of commerce had always just been basically a business organization the u s chamber of commerce had not been a political organization prior to that point and so what what he was saying was we have to capture the courts and the judges this led to the creation of a federal society we need to we need to create think tanks to influence public influence or public opin and that led to the creation of the heritage foundation and others we need to take over the schools so now we have colleges all over the united states where right wing foundations and right wing billionaires fund political departments and economics departments and control who gets hired and who allows to who is allowed to teach and what books are used we need to take and we need to take over congress basically we need to own our politicians and then lewis powell three months later richard nixon put him on the supreme court and surprise surprise he you know he helped write the opinions in the buckley case and a year later and first national bank versus bloddy which was the first time in the that the united states supreme court had said that a corporation had political freedom of speech that they conflated the two the first amendment the fourteenth amendment or somehow tied together was railing about the influence of money in politics and calling for the tillman act and for laws like there was constant law that i just read to you said you know we've got to change these things and so and again people are saying but you can't amend the constitution is too big a it takes too much time it's a big hassle but the fact of the matter is that you know we did back then and in fact most recently the twenty six the member of the constitution one hundred seventy one it was proposed in march of one thousand nine hundred one it was ratified in july it took three months three months and eight days the big song that was number one of the billboards that year was barry mcguire's eve of destruction and in that song was a line you're old enough to kill but for voting in the twenty sixth amendment lowered the voting age from twenty one eighteen and it was during the vietnam war and people were upset about the fact that they could they could be drafted but they couldn't vote and so i still think that we can pass a constitutional amendment in three months  thanks and here's the amendment the is proposed this is from move to amend or but there's a bunch of good ones out here but just some very simple straightforward language so this is what we need to say because keep in mind no legislature has ever passed at the state or federal level in the history of the united states no legislature has ever passed a law saying corporations are protected by the fourteenth amendment or people and speech is part and money is protected by the first amendment and it's considered speech it's never passed any legislature in any state or at the federal level ever no governor has ever signed such a law no president has ever signed or even proposed such a law in fact presidents have such laws or such policies the amendment as very very simple language so the rights protected by the constitution of the united states of the rights of natural persons only artificial and have no rights under the constitution are subject to regulation by the people through federal state or local law and section two the judiciary shall not construe the spending of money to influence elections to be speech under the first amendment my main well actually my whole speech i want to talk a little bit about the crash of twenty sixteen because that's theoretically the theory the reason why i'm here but the crash of twenty sixteen is coming about because of what i just shared with you it's coming about because our political process has been so badly corrupted by the corporations and by the billionaires that they've they've ruined our banking structures they've ruined our business structures they ruined our trade structures and our economy just doesn't work anymore for anybody who's not part of the one percent and the crash who really you know what really set it up in a big way it was not just reaganomics and not just free trade policy those guaranteed that america would slide into third world status but what really set up the crash were two pieces of legislation provided by phil gramm whose wife wendy was on the board of enron and these were legislation these were bills that the ken lay wanted asked and the body futures modernization act and what these did is they allowed companies like enron age to become banks because enron was having problems with banks they had eight hundred subsidiary companies they were playing shell games with and the banks didn't like it they wanted to have they want to be their own bank and be they want to be able to gamble within their own bank with commodities specifically energy and randomly it lived to see the day but the banks are still doing it they're still at it and they're doing it in particular with food unoiled in ways that are really really harming their our environment and so we had this crash that started in two thousand and seven with the housing collapse that when a large in two thousand and eight with the with the stock market crash and then president  was came into office and during that brief little nine or eleven month window there between the time that ted kennedy died the time that scott walker scott brown guts sworn in as his replacement out of the six years that the president has been president he's only had a filibuster proof senate for ten or eleven months for less than a year and during that period time he got in and he got like twenty seven piece of legislation passed in both the house and the senate including a massive stimulus act that  those that literally prevented us from sliding into a great depression obamacare and a whole bunch of other really good i mean some good stuff actually happened but these guys are so these republicans are so committed to making sure that this president and for some of them it's just because he's a democrat i mean they felt the same way about bill clinton trying to impeach him but they did actually vote for legislation during bill clinton's presidency but for some of them it's that he's the first black president and they just can't deal with that and they just are so committed to this guy going down in history as the failed president that they're not allowing anything to happen we have the lowest level of legislative activity in the history of the united states literally in the history of the states and it's because if you like that they will vote for it and if he doesn't like it you know it's obviously it's not going to happen so bad but it's like the so it's just it's it's crazy and so the fundamental changes that needed to happen in two thousand and eight when george bush was president in the crash when the banks started falling apart we have a precedent for what to do in  savings and loans and that crash of the savings along is that just you know set up for all practical purposes i mean they're made in navigable frankly made inevitable the idea that there would be  loans he basically said to the stockholders you screwed you guys you're losing your investment stockholders was there when he fired all the senior management he prosecute over a thousand of them were and were were prosecuted over eight hundred of them went to jail charles keating was the most back into the into the public market into the private market and actually made a profit for the government on the crash sweden to the same thing with their banks this is what george bush should have done in two thousand and eight he should've said ok cool break up the banks will take over the banks we can we can run banks it's not a secret there are good people out there enough to run banks they'll do it for a reasonable price jamie dimon hundreds of billions of dollars but george bush chose not to do that instead he in the fed chose to hand literally tens of trillions of dollars to banks toure's and rich people not just in this country but all over the world to try to keep this this crash from happening and when obama came into office there already been  passed there had been basically an amnesty for the bankers and there was no way that he could get congress to go along with with doing what reagan did in eighty six tragically because the diet been kept by george bush in large part and also because they were just committed to straw in the obama presidency and so we still have as a consequence of this a broken financial system and so what they've been doing for the last six years is just reinflating the bubble and it's a bubble economy and and you read the financial times in the papers you know where the rich people talk to the rich people and they're all like you know are you in cash yet you know the stock market yeah it's like you know it's like everybody's just they're walking on eggshells because they know that another crash is coming i suggest two thousand and sixteen because if you look back at the crash of two thousand and eight the bush administration knew in two thousand and six with that crash was coming they knew in two thousand and one the second quarter of two thousand and seven when housing strop starts dropped thirty percent which they had done in one nine hundred twenty seven the numbers were almost identical they knew that when what happened in two thousand and seven happened in two thousand and seven what happened in twenty nine would probably happen within a year and so they were trying to stop one hundred twenty nine crash stock market crash scenarios from happening before november of two thousand and eight before the election because they knew that you know it having a republican going to be election would not be a good thing in the middle of a stock market crash but they couldn't do it they miscalculated they couldn't i mean the forces were just too great there were there were hundreds of trillions of dollars of these derivatives out there and so the market crash happened i see the obama administration doing the same thing and i don't say this out of malice or spite or you know i don't think it's necessarily a bad thing it's politically the smart thing is you know you want your party and in fact i want a democrat to be elected in two thousand and sixteen i would rather the crash did not happen before november of two thousand and sixteen because this is the future of the supreme court is at stake even if it's a even if it's a mediocre democrat i don't care i don't want to republican appointing a bunch of supreme court justices and scully is as late seventy's kennedy's in his mid seventy's you know thomas as late sixty's you got a bunch of these right wingers who are reaching the age of retirement or even possibly not wishing to die on them but you know people do kick off and and so you know they're trying to hold those things off until two thousand and sixteen and i'm not sure they'll be able to do it you know it might happen next week it might not be for two more years but it's not it hasn't happened yet and it will because the the market fundamentals the systems are broken our basic core systems are broken till we fix those systems and frankly i don't think we're going to fix those systems until is a popular outcry and i don't think it is going to a popular uprising till there's a crash and i hate to say that i know a lot of people are very hurt by that crash but the fact of the matter is that a lot of people have been hurt by the  the crash of two thousand and eight and by the republicans for six years trying to make it as painful as possible for people cutting off their unemployment not do it in the about mortgages all these other things and trying to make it as painful as possible for people so that they can so that they can win political advantage in the elections you know this is terrible terrible politics but this is how it's being played out right now in part in large part starting with louis paul's memo so we've got to do something about that we've got to get ready for it and when that happens when that crash happens there will be that populist opportunity there will be that populist moment i see a building right now in the popularity of people like bernie sanders and elizabeth warren you see this and  right frankly with it with the with the tea party what you're seeing is populism you're seeing people saying we're being ignored we're bean's screwed we're not going to put up with it anymore we may not know who's ignoring us or who's screwing us but we're not going to put up with it anymore and so i think that when that crash happens when that moment in time when that opportunity is there we need to be ready we need to have our friends educated of each one of us can we can wake up four or five people tell as many people as possible roosevelt did with social security and w p a and the c c c and and the t v ate all these things we can do this again we don't know how to do it it's not it's not like it's never been done it's not like we've never figured it out so get ready and and there's tremendous opportunity here there's tremendous opportunity here and climate change is of course roiling the waters it's making all of this even worse and here's an opportunity for us also as people are waking up about the dangers of climate change to transition ourselves from a fossil fuel economy to a solar which could be the equivalent for the united states of the industrial revolution of the eight hundred seventy s i mean it could be it could be the biggest thing that ever happened to this country and all we have to do is get the fossils forgive the pun out of the way get got i got to move the fossil fuel industry and some of these old republicans in office and that means again back to what i said earlier i want to say on the radio every day getting message board there's a whole variety of ways to get information to me but if you have a question i'd be glad to answer it sir there seems to be a real poverty of leadership among both parties  what i call the great man three of governance it assumes that you need the right person to lead us and point we look back at history we say wow abraham lincoln thomas jefferson george washington these great men or are they now i'm not a fan of the great man of theory of history i think that what you find is that people step up to situations franklin roosevelt was probably the most classic example franklin roosevelt was the guy was a rich guy he was a privileged guy he had no great compassion for the common man i mean he was not he was not a wild progressive as governor of new york he was a reasonable governor but new yorkers the arguably the most corrupt state the united states is a huge political machine in new york governor roosevelt did nothing about that he ran for president in thirty two on a platform of free trade and you know dropping tariffs and and and slowly continuing the plans that hoover had put into place but when he got into office he had an occupy movement to deal with you know what they had left by the time he got there hoover a bust of the muppet for two years you had people who had camped from the white house all the way down to the potomac you know the bonus army he had a nation every bank in the country failed the week before he won and obviously he became sworn in in march of two thousand nine hundred thirty three and so the time propelled f and that's why you know people call the program they go oh my god we're going to get hillary clinton for president and and my response is i'm no huge fan of hillary i think that she's a very smart woman but you know i all i also know shoes on the board of directors  wal mart back in the day course they were they wanted her husband wanted to become governor of arkansas and that was sort of the dance he had to do but she does not a take names and kick ass and i do believe  about the timing of the circumstances this speaking of timing the time is now and you're absolutely right my name is libby current on the campaign manager for thirteen twenty nine and i the time is very very propitious right now we are at a point where we have to consider hiring paid signature gatherers or for going to make it on the ballot so many of us don't want to do that but i think the majority of us want to be on the ballot because we know the state of washington is at a very important time in history because this is the largest effort of  citizens an issue given the country to date and a lot of states are looking at our state i've gotten calls from eleanor in other places wanting to do this so my question for you is will you help us  as we need exposure now sure and i think the idea is that if we can get the country focused on the state of washington to send us the money that we have got to have to get on the ballot we will then pay it forward to the next state and i think a movement can be created with the momentum that we've started here and it's too hard if we fail now it's really hot i mean we don't want to fail i want to succeed and we could really use your help to six i'm not i'm not standing up here to give them a shirt off my back but i yeah my recommendation is call have somebody for anyone wanting a petition afterwards we'll be outside about three hundred extra petitions for this crowd to care well and here's the other thing let me just encourage every single one of you to become petition gatherers since this is going to be an economic crisis supposedly can you talk a little bit of the benefits of having a state bank system yeah sure very very very straightforward stuff state banks or banks that are owned by the state rather than owned by private corporations or stockholders or billionaires or even communities and there are some community banks around the country typically we call them  the early nineteenth century or the early twentieth century the early one nine hundred and it has served the code a very very well so yeah i'm a big fan of state banks and i would i would encourage you if you want another ballot initiative to get involved with or if you want to start lobbying your members of the state legislature that's a really high priority because i guarantee you washington is billions of dollars that are you know between pension funds and just normal operating funds that are creating millions of dollars in profits for chase and citibank and that's crazy keep the money here in washington electrodes were wired up to the pleasure center of the rats brain which the rat could stimulate by pressing a lever or they could press a different lever to get food what they learned is that a rat will push the pleasure lever continuously ignoring food ignoring water intil the rat i got a shock of recognition from this when i read that some traders say that making a really good transaction is a bigger high for them than sex which to i'm sure they're not all climate change deniers could it be some of them aren't capable of saving their own lives knowing in accepting the scientific consensus on climate change i mean they work for the same moneyed interests that pressure our government to take huge risks with our economy and they want to do that even at our environment and i think this is the most primal problem we face in effecting any real change we obviously need more than just regulation we need to somehow contain let me  step beyond that it's not just the useful idiots like like the guys who come on my radio and t v show and debate climate change although i haven't had one on for about a year i just quit doing it it's like it's not even i'm not even pretending that there's a debate anymore it's just it's but the really what it is in my opinion the rats that you're talking about are the people who are who are doing the modern day scrooge mcduck they are they they are they have obsessive compulsive disorder they have a horrid in disorder if they were middle class people you would see them on t v with a living room full of newspapers all the way up to the ceiling the at the navigate through in a kitchen full of old tin cans but instead they have forty billion dollars in the bank and they're trying to get to eighty billion and you know they don't care what happens to the world they don't care what happens to anybody else you you get this mentality i mean the ugly face of this mentality was on display with mr sterling's comments you know the other day you know i think we have as much as we have a climate change denial problem what's feeding it even larger is to two thousand billion two thousand trillion tons of carbon underground which is on the books of seven big fossil companies and that are controlled by multi millionaires and billionaires who don't want to lose that money and we have a billionaire problem and we've got to do something about that i  after learning of the sterling silver spectacle it seemed that it got immediate results as tawdry as the process of capturing the information that seemed to work sixty percent vote why not publicize these people who voted against this relatively harmless new policy upgrad people giving them a chance to live why not publicized their private lives where do they vacation what do where do they send their children to school that type of thing well you know i don't think that ad homin em you know going after the person attacks are going to be successful first of all but secondly what sterling did was it is it is i mean i'm still chewing on those i'm still trying to figure this out and i'm sure we'll be talking about it on the radio this coming week the rude pundit had a really thought provoking column wherever he publishes his blog i saw it on democratic underground  yesterday and he said you know this sterling guy donald sterling he's been picking on poor black people for thirty five years i mean he's been thrown them out of their houses he's been calling them names his wife is called them names to their faces nobody ever said and it's just you know but they're poor black people i mean there was a lawsuit and he paid some people off to go away but basically his poor black people then he said something about rich black people and see this illustrates the confluence of race and class in our society i keep saying it's not just a race issue it's a class issue as well and and you know sterling took o rich black guys and you can at that point you can take the black out you know he took out he had been trash and he made a billion dollars trashing poor people he trashes some rich people they kicked his house and  so you know i'm not sure what allows him to draw out of that because because it's really kind of disheartening because you know basically what that you know that reinforces guillen's research the rich get what they want the so you know like i said i'm still sort of still chewing that one of my brain and i'll have further thoughts about it next week but i put it out for your consideration i don't know what the solution to this is other than getting money out of politics and so that the average people can get involved again which takes us back to our constitutional memo which takes us back to all of you becoming you know signature gatherers for this ballot initiative and and you know step one get money out of government it's  are you proposing that we somehow solicit millionaires for causes that no billionaire now although you know ralph nader wrote a book two years ago called only the billionaires will save us and and i had ralph on my show and i said ralph are you it and he was like no no seriously you know it's like this the billionaires who are oppressing us and there are a few in life and billionaires out there and we need to and there are i mean i met a couple of them and and i was in fact i was at a retreat in vermont with want to about six months ago which was a very interesting thing you know so the silicon valley guy who's now worth three and a half billion dollars is funding all kinds of really good stuff and and he's not crazy and he's not obsessive and he's not acqui happened to be one of the early guys who invented something that became something you know so he's not your typical billionaire but any relf i think i can't speak for ralph but his newest book is not asking the billionaires to help us anymore so it's this kind of leads into my question which is we know we have this problem with organization and trying to get these issues out there and you know a lot about the constitution we've talked to move we've had direct democracy now we've got this two party system that's institutionalized and we don't have control over it and then you're talking about a progressive a republicans you know taft busted who was followed roosevelt he was a republican to a bust up standard oil roosevelt started taft finished it just like nixon started bus bust up a t and t carter finished it i you know  the the reality is that we don't have a proportional representation system in the united states if the green party gets three percent of votes sorry they're not going to have three percent of the seats in congress were changing the constitution to fix that is something that i think is way too big to lift that requires much more understanding on the person at heart of the average person than just money is screwing up government which this constitutional moment that's all you have to say to people you know money you know let's get money out of government cool or do i sign you know say to people it's a proportional representation so so i think that you know we're stuck with this two party system so i go back to two thousand and ten the concord coalition i think it is maybe it's project whatever it is you can find it online they've got a bunch of you tube so they had these d v r as if they were passing out they were doing a house parties all over the country and they were teaching republican activists tea party activists how to show up at the republican party and take it over and the fact of the match there is and i've been at a few of these and i've had probably one hundred people call the program and in the years since i wrote that book screwed back in two thousand and eight when i first told the story of three people who did this i've had you know at least a hundred people call and say yeah i showed up at the local democratic party and there was like six guys there and they were all in their seventy's and and you know it's and it's basically a social club and so i came back you know the next month when the elections were happening i brought thirty five friends and now we run the local democratic party and this is happening this is this is exactly how the tea parties are going the republican party and this is how i mean the democratic party it's a billion dollar machine if you want to take over n b c good luck you know how much you can you imagine how much money would have to raise to take over a network but you can take over a political party without a penny you just hit the damn show up i mean it's so anyway yes or it turns out you can actually teach the rats to become addicted to punishment teach and they'll become so sorry they'll become addicted to punishment and they'll shock themselves to death it's really sad to watch but my question for you is if if we lose the internet with the end of net neutrality if we can't reestablish can you think of another means by which we can keep in touch and build a movement well i don't think the internet is going to go away it's just going to get more expensive i mean just like you know our car phone service didn't go away i mean cell service i was in germany two weekends ago one of my the best friends had a massive heart attack and and i went over to visit him and you know he's got you know he's got his it's got to he's got a smartphone we did a digital data on it you know just like my i phone my i phone costs one hundred plus month dollars a month his is like i think twenty eight or thirty won or something like that a month why because he can buy it from thirty or forty different providers you know they've got real competition there they actually enforce their anti trust acts there so i don't think that the end of neutrality is going to be the death of the internet i don't think it's going to be you know doom and gloom scenario it's going to be a pain in the ass scenario you know  c and a million bucks a year from you know to it's not a good thing i mean you know that is not a good thing but i but and it's something that's worth being an activist about but i think that the number one thing we have to do not see if we got money out of politics things like tom wheeler agenda post crash you know to get rid of this horrible income inequality that we have in america today right one of you know one of the things that makes actually sense to republicans who are capable of doing math is that if you look at the history of the united states or any other country pick one what you find in modern economy and industrialized economies where you find is that when the top income tax on income over roughly three million dollars a year in whatever the days dollars are when it's over fifty percent that you have long periods of stability in your economy and the reason why is because people take their three million dollars a year and then stop and at that point they put they put the money back in the company they reinvest it they pay their employees well they they provide pensions they do bar and d they but when you when the top income tax drops below fifty percent what happens is what happened when harding dropped from ninety one percent on a twenty five percent in one nine hundred twenty and then roosevelt to go back up to ninety percent thirty four thirty four i think it was but you know what you have the roaring twenties you have a bubble bubble economy and what happened when reagan dropped it down to twenty eight percent one thousand nine hundred seven and you have another bubble economy and we are still in a bubble economy so number one first thing is to get the income tax above the top marginal rate as that has no effect whatsoever on the average person none but you get that top marginal rate above three million dollars and at that point you don't have all this hot money flowing through the system where people are just you know they they didn't they didn't have to work that hard to get it it wasn't it's not that dear to them they're not so worried about it and so they're willing to gamble and things like derivatives and stuff so that's that's a starting point that's just a really good starting point that i'd say look at the entire new deal it's all worth replicating you know and the idea that money is free speech is the supreme court has said apparently i heard a recent bill maher who said wait a minute money isn't free speech money is the microphone in the constitution never guaranteed you giant microphone and i really like that so my question to you is what do you think of  substance and as a radio person what do you think of it as a good quip to kind of get out there and get people thinking about yeah it's a good one bill maher is the master of one liners and that's a that's a particularly good one what i what i what i like is the let me find it again here was the in the buckley case that that money and politics could be regulated because of what you were regulating conduct the money was conduct were buying things you were doing things of body whereas which is different from speech and we can we have a long history of regulating conduct in the united states and we have a long history of respect in the right of freedom of speech so yeah microphone is another form of conduct yeah i'm with you it's jane christiansen poet in your chat room hi jane you know a great you're late but i almost lost faith in you but you showed up i'm so happy  so tom i've been a listener of you for a long time i met louise i was on the argosy cruise for the lunches you know and i'm one of the radicals in your chat room who we kind of lean socialist and communist we to work sometimes i want to know in case i missed it what informs you in your life and in your studies and in your intelligence to believe that we can change capitalism by using capitalism by the methods of now that's a very question i think i think and thank you for that and thank you for being one of the socialists in our chat room because thank you me too back atcha because i'm with you capitalism and i've said this many many times i wrote a book called screwed about it and it's wonderful thomas pekinese book a capital of twenty first century is getting such widespread claim even though seven hundred page home capitalism does not produce a middle class and it does not necessarily produce prosperity capitalism produces victorian era europe you know the world that charles dickens wrote about was the result of relatively unregulated capitalism and it's important to remember that scrooge in a christmas carol scrooge was the middle class the middle class was the small shop owners right scrooge on the two men business the small businessman right he was not a rich guy i mean he was the middle class so you have a small middle class you have a small very wealthy class and then you have a huge class of the working poor and that's the direction we've been moving in ever since reaganomics came in you have to have heavily regulated capitalism and yet they have a strong social component within within the body politic of the body economic which is what we had with f d r nomics the and what we lost with reaganomics and that's why united states is has become more like victorian england and you know we need to i'm not inherently explicitly opposed to capitalism per se i am totally opposed to unregulated capitalism or capitalism as the only economic system within a political body i think that we need a lot more work or co ops which are communalism arguably communism we need we need certainly socialism we need government protecting the commons in a big way we need more  democratic social you look at the countries in northern europe they've got to figure it out so i tom i think that and nation is not considered wealthy by how much the wealthiest  have it's wealthy when the least among you has a certain amount of wealth and i think it's about g d p there so what would you consider a good indicator or index quality of life in a country and the wealth of a country really is not how many bill gates do you have but hollow is the life of the people at the bottom of the economic scale scale and in that regard there are a lot of countries that do a lot better than us the very poor in holland are better off than the working bottom end of the working middle class the united states for example and increasingly this is the case with country after country after country we are no longer number one certainly with regard to our middle class in terms of some way to calibrated or understand it there are a lot of suggestions coefficient has almost doubled since reagan's presidency which is a really bad thing and there's a really good book about this too actually good books about it by richard wilkinson and  pickett two british economists the book published in the u k but they're available in the united states the first is called why inequality matters that came out about eight years ago and the second is called the spirit level which came out about three years ago and they have a website called you equal inequality trust dot org dot u k and you can just easily google inequality wilkerson inequality picket inequality spirit level and you can find all the stuff  at's but but we need you know the really good news in my mind is that we're at we're starting to have a conversation in on the pages of the new york times today whereas the last time we really seriously had that conversation the united states was during hundred sixty s during the great society and it got subsumed by the vietnam war tragically lyndon johnson had he not had the vietnam war i think would have been seen as one of our greatest presidents and and even though i was out even though i got arrested protest