Thom Hartmann Quotes

Traditional English, Dutch, French, and Spanish law didn't say that corporations are people. For America's first century, courts all the way up to the Supreme Court repeatedly said, "No, corportions do not have the same rights as humans."

Both doctrines, corporate personhood and money as speech, were simply invented by corporate-friendly Supreme Court rulings (in... 1819-86... for... personhood, and in 1976-2013... for money as speech). Their combined effect has been to hijack America's democratic experiment, concentrating power in the boardrooms of faceless corporations and the summer homes of reclusive billionaires.

Inequality fuels social problems like crime, homelessness, drug addiction, teen and unwanted pregnancies. The only people it's good for are the Billionaires and morbidly rich. *The greater the distance between the very rich & the very poor, the more unequal a society is... the more, the higher the rates you have of diseases of all kinds, of drug addiction, alcoholism, teenage pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, of unwanted pregnancies, and abortions as well... of crimes of homicide and suicide... high higher rates of mental illness, depression, lower rates of social engagement, lower rates of civic participation, including voting.

This aspect of xenophobic immigrant-hating, along with the insanity of the U.S. allowing AR-15s and other weapons of war on our streets, must be discussed along with the horrors of anti-Semitism. This is all one package brought to us by Trump, and it’s beginning to eerily resemble a previous insecure man with little hands, a single testicle, and a big mouth in the 1930s who warned his people about both immigrants and Jews.

No legislature, governor, or president has ever suggested that corporations should be considered "persons" for the purpose of Constitutional protections, particularly under the 14th Amendment's equal-protection rights.

This legal situation is not only bizarre but also quite the opposite of the vision for this country held by the Founders of the nation and the Framers of the Constitution. They were sufficiently worried about corporate power that they didn't even include in the Constititution the word corporation, intending instead that the states tightly regulate corporate behavior (which the states did quite well until just after the Civil War). The American Revolution... was in fact provoked by the misbehavior of a British corporation; our nation was founded in an anti-corporate-power fury.

A few days after another white terrorist (“history of mental illness,” said the media) with Trump and Fox graphics and slogans all over his van attempted the largest political assassination in U.S. history, we now have the single most lethal attack on Jews in this country’s history—in part because their synagogue supported helping immigrants coming into America. And all of it being amped up, day after day, over and over again, by Trump.

Activism begins with you, Democracy begins with you, get out there, get active! Tag, you're it.

It's a bit difficult for some people to get their minds around the possibility that the Republican Party started out as a reform party that for nearly seventy years... had a strong progressive wing. But it did.

All of these social ills come out of a small group of people... literally just a few thousand people in the United States or a few thousand families in the US owning something like 70 -80 percent of the entire wealth of the country. Three guys owning 50% of the wealth of the entire country... Wealth inequality in the US is worse than it's ever been, even worse than it was in 1929 which brought about the great crash...I think it's a mental illness... these guys have obsessive compulsive disorder, they're hoarders."

Locke is the man whom Thomas Jefferson plagiarized, or was inspired by, when he wrote in the Declaration of Independence that the purpose of... government was to provide for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"... [H]e replaced Locke's repeated and varied mentions of different types of property with "happiness." It was the first time that word ever appeared in the founding documents of any nation.

Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic. As the Free Dictionary notes, fascism/corporatism is “an attempt to create a 'modern' version of feudalism by merging the 'corporate' interests with those of the state.” Feudalism, of course, is one of the most stable of the three historic tyrannies (kingdoms, theocracies, feudalism) that Thomas Jefferson identified as the ones that ruled nations prior to the rise of American republican democracy, and can be roughly defined as “rule by the rich.”

[T]he court has historically almost always sided with the wealthy, the powerful, and the corporate against the poor, the weak, and the individual.
In many cases these decisions have struck down laws passed by Congress and signed by the president... [through] .

No federal or state legislature, no president, and no state governor has ever... suggested that billionaires and corporations have a First Amendment "right" to unlimited political bribery. Congress has instead criminalized such behavior repeatedly.

[T]he Supreme Court determines how wealth can be earned, accumulated, and disposed of; it decides how far the rich can go in exploiting the poor and working people, and whether working people can fight back.