We, the People, cll the award-winning author of 25 books in a dozen languages, Thom Hartmann, to testify on the American oligarchy, and how it has already sabotaged democracy.
Hartmann: The American governmental system has four branches, three in the Constitution, the fourth protected by the First Amendment. ”The media have always been the initial pivot point..for control of public opinion and, through that, control of the government itself ”..telecommunications laws from the 1920s and 1930s kept most newspapers, cable systems, internet providers, and radio and TV stations locally owned to prevent oligarchs from asserting singular control over information and news..”
”That all changed in 1996 ..[with].. the Telecommunications Act..the result of tens of millions of dollars of telecom industry lobbying and thus was supported by bought-out majorities of both parties in the House and Senate..”
“The Act wiped out those protections for local media, turning our nation’s cable systems, internet service providers, newspapers, and radio and TV stations over to a small handful of media oligarchs.
Hartmann”. “.. statins owned by local folks, but they all had local news operations that were enthusiastic about investigating and outing local corruption, and they provided vital public service when there were local emergencies…’
”The broadcasting of actual news was required by the FCC through..the Fairness Doctrine, which required stations to “program in the public interest”..requiring both national and local news at least every hour on radio, and at least one hour [split 50/50 local/national] during prime time on TV
”The Fairness Doctrine also required stations that aired “editorials from the station’s ownership or management to be balanced with “equal time” by an outside source offering an opposing point of view.”
Hartmann: ”The result of these two sets of restrictions was a diversity of viewpoints, basic standards of honesty and fairness for news operations, the strengthening of democracy through an educated and informed electorate, and a local programming focus that served the needs of every community in America.”
”In 1987, Ronald Reagan ordered the FCC to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine, and in August 2011 it was removed from the FCC’s rules by the Obama administration.”…..
”..unprofitable news became very profitable infotainment, and radio and TV stations no longer had to “pay” for their monopoly use of our public airwaves with “programming in the public interest.”
”Clear Channel, a regional owner of a handful of radio stations, went on a buying spree right after Clinton signed that legislation and ended up owning 1,225 stations in 300 cities and towns, dominating the radio markets of the nation’s 112 major media markets.”
”Several other big companies jumped into the fray, with one, Cumulus, owning more than 400 stations across the country, including some of the nation’s largest.”…
”The result is that an entire city can have multiple radio stations with few to no local people actually broadcasting live on the air.”…
Hartmann: ”..a few years back, I met one of the owners of Cumulus in the offices of a U.S. senator, who inquired if the network..would be putting progressive programming on any of their 400-plus stations.”
”No way,” the billionaire network owner told us both. He said he’d never put shows on his stations that were “hostile to business” and wanted “to raise my taxes.”…
”A group of Salem-employee talk hosts, most prominently Dennis Prager and Hugh Hewitt, broadcast daily hard-right-wing shows from coast to coast, and I asked him if he’d consider adding a progressive show like mine.”
”Not a chance,’ he said. ”We’re a Christian company, so we’d never consider a liberal on our airwaves.” When I protested that I was a Christian myself, he said it wasn’t possible for a liberal to be a true follower of Christ.”
Hartmann: ”..in every nook and cranny of America you can tune across your radio dial and find an oligarch-friendly conservative talk show host..”…
”Our TV markets are similarly concentrated, with the most notorious television monoply being Sinclair, which owns more than 200 TV stations across the country. Newspapers are similarly concentrated in ownership, with few local papers of any significance surviving, as are the cable TV and internet service providers.”
Hartmann: ”The outcome of all this corporate ownership of media in nearly all forms is that the story line preferred by oligarchs – many of them media oligarchs – is constantly available to Americans, but the voices that would challenge oligarchy and promote democracy are limited to struggling nonprofit entities like Pacifica Network [radio] and Free Speech TV.”
”Roughly 90% of American media [by viewership, readership, and listenership] is owned by only six companies. A small handful of media executives decide what we’ll see, hear, and read..”..
Hartmann: ”Control of a big enough chunk of the fourth estate, essential to launching and maintaining oligarchy, has largely been accomplished and has been the single greatest factor in the crisis of widespread supoort for pro-oligarch, anti-democracy policies and politicians.
”The next step may be even more ominous, as on May 29, 2020, Trump’s …FCC…authorized any foreign oligarch [or government, via an oligarch] to own any U.S. media, doing away with a previous 25% ownership cap.”…
”In the 2010 U.S.Supreme Court case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissent that he decision “would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by ‘Tokyo Rose’ during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders. More pertinently, it would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans.”…
Hartmann: ”For rule by the rich, aka oligarchy, to really and truly seize control of a nation, that nation must first
Halegalize bribery of politicians by the oligarchs themselves. We are now fully there..”…
Hartmann: ”In 1907, at the urging of Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, Congress passed the Tillman Act, which made it a felony for any corporation to contribute anything of value to any campaign or politician running for federal office. Most states adopted similar laws..”..
”Following the Nixon bribery scandals of 1974, Congress passed a number of “good government” laws limiting the ability of oligarchs or their corporations to fund federal politicians, as well as expanding a 1966 law that provided for public financing of presidential elections.”
Hartmann: ”..most of all that crashed and burned in 1976 and 1978 when, in a pair of decisions known as Buckley and Bellotti [ Buckley v. Valeo and First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti], the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that when American oligarchs owned politicians, it wasn’t corruption or bribery but, instead, First Amendment-protected “free speech” [Buckley] that was also available to corporations [Bellotti].
”Those decisions unleashed a flood of money that in the 1980 election just two years later swept Ronald Reagan into power and kicked off the modern era of American oligarchy.”
”At the state level, a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council [ALEC] was incorporated as a nonprofit in 1975 by conservative oligarchs and the businesses that made them rich. Today it has more than 2,000 state legislators – all but a handful of them Republicans – who meet several times a year with hundreds of corporate lobbyists to take corporate-lobbyist-written “model legislation” that ALEC-funded legislators then introduce into their state legislatures.”
With Justice For All 