No, I Wasn’t Kidnapped...

Or arrested and dragged off by ICE...at least not yet...

Image by Buffik from Pixabay

This afternoon, our internet provider (Comcast) lost all functionality for much of the city of Portland for several hours, business service included, and took us entirely off the air about 20 minutes before the end of the show. A few listeners and viewers were freaking out on social media and in comments, wondering if I’d finally been arrested and dragged off by ICE or worse.

And, in fact, I will be gone for a little while and intended to announce it at the end of the show but we crashed before I got to it. Our good friend Jefferson Smith will be filling in for me for the next week. Again, I am not in a detention center! (At least yet.)

What’s going on is that I have a brand new book coming out on July 7, and Louise and I have a bunch of details we must take care of so we’re taking a few days off. But don’t worry, we’ll be back on the air a week from Monday.

Here’s the story about the book (I think it’s one of my best and reads like a murder mystery):

Who Killed the American Dream?
The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told

Publisher’s description:

Every law student in America learns the same story. In 1886, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons under the Fourteenth Amendment, giving them the same constitutional rights as you and me. It’s taught as settled fact. Cited in thousands of court cases. It’s the legal foundation for Citizens United and the corporate stranglehold on our democracy.

There’s just one problem. It never happened.

Thom Hartmann stumbled onto the crime scene on a cold winter day in 2002, standing in a Vermont law library, holding the actual Supreme Court volume in his hands. He read the decision. Then read it again. Something was deeply wrong. The Court hadn’t ruled on corporate rights at all. They did not decide that corporation were persons. They’d settled a narrow tax dispute about fence posts and California property law. But sitting right above that decision, in something called a “headnote,” a single sentence claimed corporations were persons under the Constitution.

Headnotes aren’t law. A local attorney told him as much that afternoon.

So who wrote it? And why? And how did one fraudulent sentence become the legal bedrock of the most powerful nation on earth?

That’s where the investigation begins.

What Hartmann uncovered reads like the greatest true crime story never told. There’s a mastermind, a corrupt Supreme Court justice with an ideology built to serve the ultra-rich. There’s a triggerman, a court reporter who knew exactly what he was writing and why. And behind them both, pulling the strings, railroad oligarchs richer than entire nations who’d spent decades trying to hijack the Constitution and finally found their opening.

They committed the crime in broad daylight. Recorded it in official documents. And buried it in plain sight for 140 years.

But here’s what makes this more than a history lesson. You’re living the aftermath right now.

When Boomers were in their 30s, they held 21.3 percent of the nation’s wealth. Millennials today, roughly the same number of people at the same age, hold 4.6 percent. Your parents bought houses on one income. Your grandparents retired with pensions. That wasn’t luck. That was policy.

And when that fraudulent sentence was weaponized through the Reagan Revolution, that world was methodically picked apart. Wages stagnated. Housing exploded. Healthcare became the leading cause of bankruptcy. Student debt buried a generation. Unions were crushed. Factories shipped overseas.

Every bit of it traces back to that one forged sentence written in 1886.

Hartmann follows the evidence wherever it leads. He names the suspects, exposes the motive, and reconstructs the cover-up that let this crime go unpunished for over a century. He shows how two Progressive Eras proved a different America was possible, how FDR built the largest middle class in world history by reining in corporate power, and how the weapons forged in 1886 were eventually used to dismantle all of it.

And then, finally, he lays out how we solve the case for good.

The American Dream wasn’t lost. It was killed. The suspects are identified. The evidence is on the table.

Now it’s time for justice.

---

1. The crime itself — and the fact that it never actually happened.

Here’s the thing that’ll stop you cold. The Supreme Court never ruled that corporations are people under the Fourteenth Amendment. Not once. What every law school in America has taught as settled constitutional fact for over a century traces back to a single fraudulent sentence written by a corrupt court reporter that directly contradicted the actual decision sitting right below it on the same page. The most powerful legal doctrine in American history is a flat-out lie, and somebody put it there on purpose.

2. The American Dream wasn’t lost. It was deliberately stolen.

We keep talking about the decline of the middle class like it was some kind of weather event, something that just happened to us. It wasn’t. The stagnant wages, the impossible housing costs, the student debt that buries an entire generation before they even get started, the medical bills that bankrupt half a million families every year... none of it was an accident. Corporations used fake constitutional rights as weapons against workers, unions, safety regulations, and democracy itself. More than fifty trillion dollars moved from working Americans into the pockets of a handful of billionaires in less than forty years. That’s not a market correction. That’s a robbery.

3. The Founders knew. They warned us. And we forgot.

The people who wrote the Constitution were so alarmed by corporate power that they left corporations out of it entirely. On purpose. They hadn’t just read about corporate tyranny in a book. They’d lived under the East India Company. They’d fought a revolution over it. Jefferson and Madison understood something we’ve been trained to forget, that corporations are artificial creatures created by law to serve the public good, and the moment they get the rights of citizens, democracy is done. What happened in 1886 wasn’t just a legal crime. It was a betrayal of the entire American experiment.

4. The deflection playbook kept us from ever seeing it.

While the looting was happening, the oligarchs had a problem. People were getting angry. So they built a machine to point that anger somewhere else. Welfare queens. Immigrants. Crime. Culture wars. Voter fraud. Pick your decade and they had a fresh villain ready to go, always someone at the bottom of the ladder, always someone with even less power than the working people being robbed. It’s the oldest trick in the book, going back to the Caesars and the Confederacy. And for forty-plus years it worked like a charm. Working people were so busy being furious at each other that they never looked up to see who was actually picking their pockets.

5. This is fixable. And there’s a real road map to do it.

This isn’t a book that ends with you staring at the ceiling at two in the morning wondering if it’s all hopeless. It’s not. Hartmann lays out exactly what it’ll take, a constitutional amendment that strips corporations of the rights that were never legitimately theirs to begin with. It’s been done before. Two full Progressive Eras proved that when you actually rein in corporate power, the middle class comes roaring back and democracy starts working again. We built the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world once. We can do it again. The road map exists. The only thing missing is enough people who know the truth and are mad enough to do something about it.