Thom Hartmann Quotes

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.

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."

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.

GOP & Trump Are Using Fear & Rhetoric Because They Have Nothing Else to Run On - Even republicans know the tax cut is a scam & want Medicare-For-All

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.

[I]n 1803, the Supreme Court set itself above Congress and the president with the power to review, strike down, or rewrite laws based on its own lone interpretation of the Constitution.

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.

American constitutional law is, in many ways, grounded in British common law... [where] there are two types of "persons": "natural persons," like you and me, and "artificial persons," which include governments, churches (and other nonprofits), and for-profit corporations... necessary so that the law (and taxes) could reach them. ...Knowing this, most laws having to do with just human beings used the phrase "natural persons"... The Fourteenth Amendment, however, does not draw any distinction... and twenty years later, corporate lawyers would seize upon that... [S]uch sweeping ramifications never occurred to Thaddeus Stevens or his colleagues who drafted the... Amendment. ...But fate and time and the conspiracies of great wealth and power often have a way of turning common sense and logic on its head...

The Thirteenth Amendment explicitly abolishes slavery... The Fifteenth Amendment explicitly forbids any government within the United States to prevent Blacks from voting... The main goal of the Fourteenth Amendment was to reverse the 1857 Dred Scott... decision, which had excluded African Americans from access to the protections of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights... Given all this context and history, a reasonable person would probably conclude that the ... were designed to grant rights exclusively to human beings. There's no discussion at all of corporations in the Amendment... and nobody in that day would have dared propose that the Civil War was fought to "free" the corporations.

And this is a genuine crisis for America because if President Biden is frustrated in his attempt to pass his Build Back Better legislation (that is overwhelmingly supported by Americans across the political spectrum) — all because business groups, giant corporations and rightwing billionaires are asserting ownership over their two “made” senators — there’s a very good chance that today’s cynicism and political violence is just a preview of the rest of the decade. But this isn’t as much a story about Sinema as it is about today’s larger political dysfunction for which she’s become, along with Joe Manchin, a poster child. Increasingly, because of the Supreme Court’s betrayal of American values, it’s become impossible for people like the younger Sinema to rise from social worker to the United States Senate without big money behind them.... While the naked corruption of Sinema and Joe Manchin is a source of outrage for Democrats across America, what’s far more important is that it reveals how deep the rot of money in American politics has gone, thanks entirely to a corrupted Supreme Court. In Justice Stevens’ dissent in Citizens United, he pointed out that corporations in their modern form didn’t even exist when the Constitution was written...

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."

[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.

Thanks to a century and a half of truly bizarre Supreme Court decisions (never bills passed by the elected legislature)... today's new corporate "person" is... endowed with many of the rights and protections of human beings. The modern corporation... can live forever, doesn't fear prison, and can't be executed if found guilty... It can cut off parts of itself and turn them into new "persons", can change its identity in a day, and can have simultaneous residences in many different nations. ...Nonetheless, today a corporation gets many of the constitutional protections America's founders gave humans ...

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.

Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America: If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.