'BradCast' 7/27/2026 (Thom Hartmann on the Fourth Rise of U.S. Oligarchy and the 2026 Election That Could Begin to End It)

The other day, a senator I knew got a text, a great guy from his wife. And she said, when you get home, I want to have you immediately come up the stairs and make love to me. And he said, I can't do both. You know what? You know? In other words, can't go up the stairs and make love. Does anybody get that way? I thought that was actually pretty good. That was actually the only thing I thought was good in this whole freaking stupid speech that they wrote. That was the only good one, and that went down with not exactly great laughter. Wow. If you thought he's been bombing in Iran, you should have seen the bomb he dropped in D.C. over the weekend. That's why. I got the feeling that something right. No night. I'm so scared in case I fall off my chair. The clouds to let me joke us to the right here I am.

From Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, this is the broadcast. As heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A., 98.7 in Santa Barbara, 93.7 in San Diego, 99.5 FM in Ridgecrest and China Lake. Elsewhere in California, in Red Bluff and Reading on KFOI and Round Mountains, KKRN, up in Oregon on the Central Coast on KYAQ, Cottage Groves, Koso, and Eugene's KEPW. Lanchester, Pennsylvania's W News, Maui, Hawaii's K-A-K-U, in Columbus, Ohio, on WGRN, Palinville, New York's, WLP, Rochester, New York, WRFZ, down in New Orleans on WHIV, out in Gallup, New Mexico, K-N-I-Z, Concord, New Hampshire's WN, Fiatville, Arkansas, K-P-SQ, in Seattle on K-O-D-X, Richmond, Virginia's WR, W-WK, Fairmont, West Virginia's W-E-FR. Jamesville, Wisconsin's W-A-D-R in Minneapolis, St. Paul's, AM-950K, TNF. We also stream coast to coast and around the globe every day on the Internet, on the Progressive Voices Channel, NetRooge Radio, Radio for Humans, Nicole Sandler.com, Radio Free Brooklyn, No Lies Radio, Detour Talk, Del Marva, FM, and most of your favorite podcast sites. Blanketing Planet Earth. I'm Brad Friedman. Your friendly investigative blogger, journalist, troublemaker, muckraker, and all around swell fellow says me from bradblog.com. Thank you very much for joining us. Welcome to the Bradcast, your unofficial bulwark against attempted Trump. Tyranny, where as of today, we are now officially less than 100 days from Election Day 2026. Our critical midterm elections, when the pro-democracy, pro-constitutional, anti-monarchical people of the U.S. will finally have their first official response to the dangerously pathetic failures. of the wannabe autocratic Trump administration. And no, don't worry, we're not going to spend any time on his weekend bomb at the White House Correspondence dinner. Boy, was that an embarrassing stinker, Desi Doyle? Yes, indeed it was. Ouch. But we've got a guest standing by and more important things of note today. We've got a few news items. I hope to get to later on. on the critical upcoming November midterms, but also a reminder to Republicans in South Dakota, where you will want to get out to vote on Tuesday this week in the Republican gubernatorial primary runoff in the state, where Governor Larry Rodin is being challenged by Justin Dodin in a runoff triggered because no candidate received more than 35% in the state's June 2nd primary in that. race, including the sitting governor. That's the threshold, 35 percent required to avoid a runoff under South Dakota law. I believe it's the only race on the ballot on Tuesday. Rodin ascended to the governor's office last year from lieutenant governor, filling the vacancy created by Trump's appointment of the governor at the time, the now-fired DHS secretary, Kristi Noem.

Trump has not endorsed either candidate in Tuesday's GOP gubernatorial runoff as of airtime, though. As soon as he figures out... Who he thinks is going to win, he, well, could issue an endorsement for him at any time. Whoever does win in the runoff and Tuesday will face off against former Democratic State Senator Dan Ayler's this November. Ailers ran unopposed for his party's nomination in June, though the very Republican state of South Dakota has not had a Democratic governor since the 1970s. So... We would really need to see quite the blue tsunami this fall to see something like that happen, I suspect. Next Tuesday, however, August 4, we got a big primary election day in five states, including Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Virginia, and Washington State. If you live in any of those states, now is the time to get out there and get your vote cast, hopefully on a handmarked paper ballot, either at the precinct or... via absentee ballot delivered by hand, if possible. This is not a good time to trust the U.S. Postal Service unless you have no other choice in the matter. I may have a story on that a little bit later this hour. We may get to also opening up our phones later this hour after my very special guest today. Our number, as always, will be 818-985-5735 if time allows. And because, yes, we are now in Fun Drive once again here at KPFK, my flagship station in Los Angeles. You will have to hit button number one to join us on air and button number two to join in with what I believe is, well, I don't know if it's our final drive before the November elections. I know it's going to help us get to November so we could really. use your support here at KPFK. Today, 818985 KPFK or via kpfk.org if you are listening. later on in the day or the night or the next day. As a matter of fact, we will have a special deal for you, a special gift for you that I'll get to later this hour, which includes my guest. But yeah, speaking of American elections in the age of Donald Trump, as our friend, author and longtime beloved progressive radio host Tom Hartman wrote at his Hartmanreport.com website last week, Trump. His billionaire buddies and his Republican lickspittles appear to be setting up a possible massive fraud with regard to this false election. It could signal the end of American democracy.

Not to worry all too much, of course. Tom goes on to correctly note that the billionaire oligarch in the White House has gutted every one of the federal agencies designed to protect this fall's election. Since taking office, Trump has frozen and defunded the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or SISA, and their election security division. He has cut off the threat-sharing network serving 1,300 state and local election officials. He has disbanded the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force. Who needs them? He's gutted the intelligence community's foreign malign influence center. He has shuttered the State Department's Counter-Disinformation Office. Starting to see a pattern here. He has reduced the Justice Department's voting rights section from 30 lawyers to just three. That's the department that enforces the Voting Rights Act, such as we still have one. He has fired the head of the NSA Cyber Command who caught indications of Russian meddling in Trump's previous elections. He left the Federal Election Commission without a quorum. about a year and a half into his second presidency, and earlier in July, he fired every remaining commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission, the EAC, just four months before the midterms. For a guy who claims that U.S. elections are corrupted, he sure has, you know, he's taken a whole lot of actions to gut the very security infrastructure that was built to prevent the interference that he pretends to oppose. pose both foreign and domestic in our elections. In his latest piece, headlined, The Fourth Assault on American Democracy has already begun. This fall decides whether it ends. Tom Hartman goes on to argue, quote, something big is up. And they're not even bothering to be subtle about it. Joining us now is my old friend and colleague Tom Hartman, longtime progressive talk show host and New York Times bestselling author of more books than I could possibly list if I had the whole hour to do it. But most recently, author of Who Killed the American Dream, The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told? And before that, the last American president, a broken man, a corrupt party, and a world on the brink. sounds about right. Both books, by the way, that we will be making available as a thank you gift to KPFK Pledge Drive donors calling into today's broadcast. Oh, Mr. Hartman, sir, it has been too long. Welcome back to the broadcast, my friend. Brad, it has been too long. How are you? I'm doing okay, given everything that's going on. Really appreciate to joining us. Lots of questions for you. Tom, you are actually making a chilling argument in your piece, though there is some hope throughout as we are happily hearing more and more folks' warning of late. I think it's a good thing that people are warning that Trump is up to something that he will somehow try to undermine this year's midter.

even more than he already has with his attempted theft of house seats via midterm gerrymanders, unprecedented. And we will get to that part of your piece in a moment. But I was actually really drawn in, Tom, to the history that you present here, detailing how, in your words, quote, We democracy-loving Americans have fought oligarchy three times on these shores roughly every 80 years. Each time we defeated the morbidly rich and established or re-established popular democracy and a government that puts working-class people ahead of the oligarchs. I want to quickly sort of step through each of these three previous moments you identify in American history, Tom, that you see as parallels. to the moment that we're now in during what Donald Trump describes as his golden age of America. The first moment, of course, is the 1770s and 80s when you describe that while most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were, independents, were in fact wealthy slave owners. You argue that the real oligarchs in America in the 1770s. universally aligned with the British king and hated the idea of democracy and independence. Tell me about that and about what happened to those oligarchs, both during and then after the colonies defeated England. Well, the story of the American Revolution is first and foremost, in my mind, the story of a revolt against corporate power. The most powerful corporation in the world at the time was the British East India company. They ruled India. They owned a large chunk of China. They dominated dozens of other countries, and they basically owned our part of the North American continent. And in 1771, there was a major recession. And so in 1773, the East Indy Company was hurting and they had a couple hundred thousand, maybe a million tons or pounds of tea in their warehouses in England that they had already paid taxes that were destined for North America. And so Parliament gave him a massive tax break, a huge tax rebate, in fact. And it was the largest tax cut in history at the time. And that allowed them to basically dump their tea here in North America, which was threatening to put out of business, the independent tea sellers and the people who were bringing tea in from other countries who were competing with the East India Company. And they also gave the East India Company an exclusive monopoly and started prosecuting the people that were bringing it in. They called them pirates and smugglers. And that provoked the Boston Tea Party. You know, where we threw that, we threw 3484, whatever it was, cases of that tea into Boston Harbor, about a million dollars of the tea. And then that was the thing that, I mean, just a year before that, Jefferson had published a summary view of the rights of British Americans, basically a pamphlet about how to be a good British citizen while you're living in North America. And, you know, six months after the Boston Tea Party, he was like, okay, that's it. We're all for independence now. And that was a major turning point.

You know, and Jefferson, Washington, all, you know, all of those guys, I mean, Hamilton was very middle class. Jefferson and Washington both had large farms, plantations, and benefited from the people that they enslaved there. But they both died in bankruptcy. You know, none of the founders left any kind of major legacy. The richest guy who signed the Constitution or the declaration was John Hancock. and his net worth was about a million dollars in today's money he was these guys were the what you would call today the upper middle class uh-huh the real oligarchs like the johnson family they had this castle up on uh on the uh What was that river that runs up from New York? The Potomac? Yeah. No, not the Potomac. It's, but whatever. The Hudson. The Hudson. That's your side of the country, my friend. Yeah, they have this massive castle on the Hudson. And they were part of a class of people who were genuinely rich. And the roots of their riches were, you know, in England. And they were tightly associated with the... British King and they and and Jimmy Carter wrote a great novel about this about a third of Americans wanted to remain with england and that included all the truly rich people in america about a third of americans just didn't care they just wanted to live their lives and about a third of americans wanted independence and so you ended up i mean the revolutionary war in some ways was also a civil war you had families split apart you had brother killing brother on the on the battlefield um you know people making their decisions which side to join it was it was a wild time and it was basically a revolt against oligarchy interesting and what happened to those oligarchs after uh independence most of them Like the Johnson family fled to Canada. Most of them either fled to Canada or went back to England. Eight years later then, moving clock forward to the 1850s or so, you describe how the, quote, the plantation oligarchs of the Old South had amassed such fortunes by then that only a few hundred families essentially controlled the economy and politics of the entire region. Well, that sounds familiar, Tom Hartman. Yeah, this was the result of a technological revolution. In 1798, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, and around 1812, 1815, he got enough funding to actually bring it to market. And this was a machine that with one horse and this machine could clean cotton, could do the work of 50 enslaved people, pulling the seeds out of the cotton, which is a real challenge. And so it was quite expensive and only the largest plantations could afford it, but it literally made them 50 times more efficient than all of their small competitors. So in about a 25-year period of time from around 1815 to around 1830, or 1840 rather,

These large plantation owners wiped out all their small competitors, turned them into essentially sharecroppers, bought their land from them and then had them work on a basically on a piecework basis for them. And seized control of not just the economy of the southern states, but the politics of the southern states. And by the mid-1840s, late 1840s, early 1850s, it had reached the point where if you voted against them, you could be hanged, even if you were away. mail. If you spoke out again, by 1852, they had shut down all of the, what you might call today progressive newspapers or even legitimate newspapers. All the newspapers in the South by the mid 1850s were, you know, pure fascists. I mean, these guys were genuine fascists. They did not believe in democracy. They did not believe in voting. If you spoke out against them, even if you were white, they would hang you. And a lot of people ended up that way. And most of your you know newspaper people flooded flood to the north and and by 1860 1861 they had absolute control over the south there was no more democracy it was a complete oligarchy essentially a dictatorship wow you know by the rich yeah and uh and then they looked north and they said you know this uh example of democracy in the north is you know represents a threat to us so we've got to take them down too and they declared war on us And we know how that ended and how that oligarchic rise in that case ended. But 80 years later then, moving the clock ahead again by the roaring 20s, Tom, you write, oligarchs had once again seized control of the American economy and government during the so-called gilded age. But you cite, and this is really interesting, you cite President Grover Cleveland's early warning about this to Americans. This is back in 1887, about a decade after. after the fall of the post-Civil War reconstruction in a quote that actually sounds eerily familiar. Quote, as we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations. President Grover Cleveland warned corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people are fast becoming the people's masters. That's 1887, Grover Cleveland. Again, I mean, that was a long time ago, but that quote, frankly, Tom, that could be made today without any edits even. Yeah, that was from his state of the union address. Really? Yeah, yeah, it's 1887 state of the union address. The big issue back then, And that year, by the way, the following election year was tariffs. So, yeah. History wants to say something to us. Yeah. And I was also actually struck when I was reading that in addition to the warning about corporations, which needed to be carefully restrained creatures fast becoming the people's masters. You know, one could substitute artificial intelligence for the word corporations there in that quote and be equally as accurate and, you know, an important warning.

right now. In each of those three prior cases you identify, well, the third one there, what brought us out of that oligarchic rise, the gilded age in the 1920s officially? Yeah, that was the Republican Great Depression. You know, they deregulated the banks and the trading houses and the, you know, the hustlers, the Joe Kennedys of the world. made a fortune and uh and there was a lot of margin buying of stocks and in 28 29 and in october of 29 the whole thing fell apart stock market crashed horribly and uh just wiped out you know by by 1933 march in 1933 when franklin roosevelt was sworn into office um you had fully one third of america well he said it in his in his inaugural address he said one third of america is ill housed ill fed and ill something i forget the third um You know, we had a 35% unemployment rate roughly. And that caused people to say, we would like to try something new. You know, we'd like to try something different. And FDR was informed by the writings of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, who said basically, if you were, and by the way, echoing Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments from 17, well, I don't know, it was 60 something.

that if you want to build an economy, you do it from the bottom up. You build, you build it by empowering and providing wealth to average working people. And they will create the demand that drives economies. You know, the opposite of supply. Supply side is just BS. And, you know, all economies are driven by demand. And Reagan tried to invert that saying, well, if we give enough money to the rich, they'll spend that money. And then, you know, when they build new yachts, they'll have to hire people to build the yachts, that kind of thing. But, you know, it's just never worked that way. So anyhow, FDR said, you know, let's build a middle class. And it had never been done before. He built the first. middle class that was more than half the population of a country in the history of the world. And he did it in 30 years. I mean, he didn't. He didn't. He died in 46, but, you know, his policies did it in 30 years. And with a 90% top income tax rate on individuals, 50% top income tax rate on corporations and strong regulation of monopolies and strong enforcement of the right to unionize. and the creation of social security the minimum wage workers rights the five you know the five day week the eight hour day these were all this was all the new deal and that uh built this middle class that lasted i mean you know by the time reagan when reagan was sworn into office in january of uh of 1981, fully 65% of us were in the middle class with a single paycheck. And I'm using, when I say middle class, I'm using Teddy Roosevelt's definition from his square deal days back in 1912, which is that you could buy a, with a single paycheck, regardless of your educational status, with a single paycheck, you could buy a home, you can buy a new vehicle every couple of years, you can take a vacation every year, you can put your kids through college, and you can afford to retire. And on a single paycheck. And we had that in 1981 for 65% of Americans. Now it's down to around 41 to 45% depending on those numbers you take. And it requires two paychecks rather than just one to get that same goal. So we've seen the, you know, in 81, the pushback against the new deal began. The Republicans have been calling it communism ever since 1933. And now it's kind of. You know, and then they kind of dragged the Democrats into it with the Clinton presidency and starting in 1993, embracing neoliberalism. Is it? Is it fair to say then, Tom, with each of those instances, of course, the revolution, the Civil War, ultimately World War II, we come out of the gilded age with FDR. Is it fair to say that each time, each of those three times, approximately every 80 years or so, pro-democracy forces eventually win over the oligarchic forces, but each time it's sort of accompanied.

With bloodshed, Tom, an uncomfortable thought today to say the least. Well, there's a concept called The Fourth Turning. Neil Howe wrote a book about this with William Strauss. It's called The Fourth Turning back 15, 20 years ago. And in fact, he predicted essentially what's going on right now. And then Strauss died and Howe just. last year published a new book called The Fourth Journey is Here. And these are the guys who wrote the 1990s international bestseller generations in which they identified how generations influence each other. And basically their hypothesis was that there's a four-generation cycle that keeps repeating itself in every country. And so you take a generation that experiences depression and war. like happened in the 1770s, 1860s, the 1930s, that generation then raises, and each generation is about 20 years, that generation then raises children who grow up to be basically the quiet builders. They put the country back together. It was my dad's generation, you know, the greatest generation. And then that generation raises kids who say, my parents work my ass off, work their asses off and have nothing to show for it, you know, other than a house. And, you know, I want to experience something bigger than that. I want spiritual enlightenment. And so that generation goes off in search of transcendental meaning, you know, whether it was the Emerson Thoreau generation or 60s hippies. It's the same thing, right, 80 years apart. And then that generation produces a generation of kids. Now we're on the fourth generation. That generation produces a generation of kids who look around and say, my parents, you know, meditated and gazed at their navel and took LSD and didn't get them anywhere. And screw that, I'm going to get rich. And that fourth generation in their efforts and they're falling all over themselves to get rich, you know, think like Sam Altman, you know. they engage in such wild excesses that they destroy the economy. And the destroyed economy inevitably leads to war. So every 80 years, you see an economic crash followed by a war, followed by an internal battle that produces a reformation. And so far, the last three times, has produced a very positive leap forward for small democracy. Now, the question this time is whether we will make it through or not, whether we will succeed. Yeah, and we will talk about that in a second, speaking with my friend Tom Hartman, who you are probably well familiar with. Yeah, it seems like that 80 years in between is sort of also enough for like a single lifetime plus a few years so that you get to a point where the people making decisions now have forgotten about what happened in World War II and what that happened. Yeah, each time. Yeah, I remember in 1996, I think it was, or was it 99, Phil Graham, the senator from Texas, the Republican senator from Texas, standing up on the floor of the Senate. I still remember watching this, giving this speech where he said, you know, this Glass-Steagall thing that was passed in 1934 has, you know, protected the banks and kept everything stable for all these 80 years. But, you know, we really don't need it anymore. I mean, it's done its job. Let's just repeal it. And, of course, they did, and that led right to the housing crisis of 2008. Yep.

Which is why it's so shameful when you see Donald Trump, who actually is old enough to remember. But he's so twisted, you know, you can't actually go by anything that. Oh, well, he wants to go back to, you know, black entrance in the back of the building. Yeah. He remembers that. He remembers it. He just remembers it favorably is the problem. All of these. So here we are now. We're like 81 years after the end of World War II. The oligarchs have once again seized control of our economy and our government. You write in your peace as they now really have their king in the White House. He's not going down without a fight, as we know from the last time he faced a brutal loss from the American electorate. But somewhat hopefully. perhaps you write Tom quote the problem Trump and his morbidly rich oligarch buddies are facing is that oligarchy including the oligarchy they've reestablished here where the needs of average Americans are gutted as the top 1% are taking deep dives into their money bins is always a transitional form of government oligarchy is a transitional form of government Is it? What evidence you got for that? And if so, if you're right about that, how long does the, how long does it take to transition out of it? If you look at historic oligarchies, whether they are, you know, 18th, 19th century oligarchies or whether they are, you know, the more recent ones like we saw a rise of Hungary, for example, recently. They typically last about a generation or a little less, 20 years or less, 10 to 20 years. And the reason why they're transitional is that... As the government makes the transition into oligarchy, people start to realize that the rich are getting fabulously richer. The powerful, the political powers are no longer responding to the needs of the average person, but instead are responding the needs of the rich. And people get pissed off about it. And they start to protest. They show up in the streets. They start to speak out. At that point, or when that hits a critical threshold, The oligarchs are confronted with the choice. They can either back off and say, okay, okay, you can have your democracy back, which is what happened in 1934. You know, when Franklin Roosevelt said they hate me and I welcome their hatred and he named them and he shamed them and he took them on and they submitted. They said, okay, you can give us a 90% income tax bracket and you can break up our companies and you can, all right, we'll go along with it for the good of the country. Also because we don't want to get tired and feathered, you know, because the mob is out there, right? So you can either make that choice like happened here in the 30s or you can say to hell with this and I'm going to bring down the iron fist.

and crush this this protest movement which is what Vladimir Putin did in russia in 2000 you know in the early 2000s um and what Viktor Orban chose not to do to his credit by the way in hungary yeah when he was voted out and what trump frankly tried to do in on january 6th and 2021 so uh you know they're gonna this election is going to confront america's oligarchs with a choice The odds are the Democrats are going to take power. Odds are the Trump or the Republicans are both are going to try to neuter that power. I mean, the Constitution says that Congress, the House and Senate, do not need to respect elections. Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution, says that the House and Senate alone, and it cannot be submitted to a court. It's non-judiciable. The House and Senate alone will decide who. which members they will seat and which members they won't. And about a dozen times in our history, the House and Senate with a simple majority vote, one or the other, have voted to put the loser of an election into their seat. And so there's a lot of buzz right now. David French wrote a piece about this last Friday for the New York Times, that the Republicans are seriously thinking about this. They're seriously having conversations about doing this, about just ignoring the outcome of the election. and having Mike Johnson say, you know, we're just not going to seat those people because Donald Trump says, you know, that election in Georgia and that election over there in Arizona and that, you know, the ones that gave the Democrats control of the House, we think those elections all had fraud in them. And so we're just not going to seat those people. We're going to seat the Republicans instead. And I think there's a very real possibility of that happening. And at that point, you know, Americans are probably going to show up in the streets. And the actual oligarchs, the, you know, the Jeff Bezos of the world, are going to have to make a decision. They're going to have to make that same decision that they confronted in 1933. I, you know, and that's what I tell people, election day, you know, now just under 100 years, 100 years. It feels like 100 years, 100 days away in November. Keep your eyes, obviously, on that date, November 3rd, but it ain't over till it's over. It's not over till the, you know, till the counting and the certifying happens, and then ultimately the swearing in. So we've still got a long way to go. A lot of people have got to be on their, you know, look out above and beyond just election day. You argue that in your piece this time, the oligarchs are behaving like they believe they can win. And the measures of – and the measures are billionaire oligarch in chief are taking right now. Put every American alert, if not provoke immediate impeachment. Well, we know there's not going to be an immediate impeachment under a GOP rule. But what makes you – other than Trump himself – How do you see the oligarchs behaving as though they believe they can win? Because I'm hearing a lot of alarm bells from, if not the oligarchs themselves, certainly the folks on the right who support and facilitate them who are really worried about what's going to happen in November. Yeah, there is some hand-wringing going on, and Peter Thiel just moved to Argentina. Good. With his family. Good. Does he need a ride to the airport? Happy to help.

Yeah, and they're all, you know, they're all building their, their doomsday bunkers. There's no tomorrow. You know, you look at Elon Musk and the way that he, you know, struts around and promotes, you know, racism and misogyny on his, on his little sewer there on what's left of Twitter. And Jeff Bezos, you know, publishing basically dismissal of these kinds of concerns in the Washington Post and some of the comments he's made recently. And these guys are still fighting unions every step of the way. I don't see many signs of today's oligarchs accepting. the direction things are going. And maybe that they're just keeping their heads down, you know, Mark Zuckerberg sucking up to Trump, showing up the White House for the UFC fight. Accepting the way they're going, meaning towards a loss for Republicans this November? No, no, accepting the way things are going, the Republicans are in power right now. So I'm going to suck up to them. But when they go away, I'll suck up to the next guy. We'll see. You know, that's, I just, you know, I'm not close enough to any of these Algarcs to really measure that. Right. and i'm not sure that anybody who is is is talking and so we'll see i will you know the the the hallmark of these kind of revolutionary moments these 80 year moments is typically an economic calamity, not just an economic crisis, not just a recession, but an actual oppression. And there's a lot of concern right now that all this investment in AI, when it collides with Moore's law. is going to provoke just that, a depression. So we'll see. And does that result, does that redound to the benefit or the detriment of the party in power at that point? I would think that would be very bad for Republicans at that point. That's right. That's right. Just like it was bad for Republicans in 29 when Hoover was president, the economy crashed. Yeah. Before I. I actually find hope, Tom, in sort of three things. There are folks like you and many others who are ringing the alarm bells, putting folks on notice about all of this to what, you know, Trump and minions may try to do if they can get away with it. Also. Two, I don't think the American people, the voters are going to stand for this crap if they do try to do it. I think people will be in the streets. I think they will fight like hell in every way to overcome any of this if he tries anything. And the idea that he's really bad at everything that he tries to do, Tom. He's also a coward, though that also makes him more dangerous. But should we take comfort in any of those things, or am I just wishcasting here?

Well, it's hard to say. I, you know, there's, I think we'd be in much worse shape if the right wing Republican billionaire in the White House was somebody other than Donald Trump. You know, if it was JD Vance or if it was, you know, one of the more competent neo-fascist Republicans, I think that it would be. it would be more of a challenge. On the other hand, I suspect that they would be far more reluctant to use violence. And I think that Trump is... excited about, not just enthusiastic for, but actually excited about using violence against people. Thanks. With that chilly, with that chilly note before I let you go, Tom, since I'm hoping to make your two latest books available to KPFK folks supporters here in Los Angeles or listening anywhere around the globe, real quick before I let you go, Tom, give me the elevator pitch, if you could, on how each of them, the two, who killed the American dream, the greatest political crime ever told, and the last American president, a broken man, a corrupt party, and a world on the brink. How can or should those books sort of inform us as we head into November's election? Well, the last American president covers an awful lot of the territory that we've covered in this conversation. And it talks about Trump and his background and where he came from and how damaged he is. And it ends with basically a progressive prescription for renewing America when it all falls apart. Who Killed the American Dream Book is the history of Citizens United. It's how we got to Citizens United. And it started out with a corrupt Supreme Court. clerk and a corrupt Supreme Court justice who was on the take from the oligarchs of his day and and then you know that led ultimately to where we are right now led to the Reagan Revolution to where we are right now and so it's kind of a history book but it also and a history that most Americans even most lawyers are unaware of and it also contains you know a lot of clear policy suggestions and whatnot to improve things for the country. Tom Hartman, of course, is the longtime progressive talk radio host. I'm sure you all know who he is. Also, New York Times bestselling author and the author of, as you heard, who killed the American Dream and the last American president. We were going to make those available to folks as a thank you gift. But for now, Tom Hartman, thank you. I will point folks towards your excellent piece at HartmanReport.com where there's a lot of great stuff.

And, of course, you can find him at tomhartman.com and listen to him every day. Tom, always great speaking with you, my friend. Let's not wait three or four years this time before we do it again. Indeed, Brad. Thanks a lot for inviting me. It's great talking with you. And support KPFK, people. Come on. Thank you, sir. Greatly appreciated. All right, we're going to take a quick break here. I don't know if we'll have maybe a few minutes for a call or two at 818-985-5735. I do got to get to a fun break here. But as mentioned, we're going to make both of those books available to you. As part of a thank you gift for those pledging, I think it's 175 for both of those, as a thank you gift for both of those books. We'll cover all of that in a moment. We'll come back with maybe your calls, 818-9-8-9-8-5-7-3-5 and some other news of the day. Lots to get to today. Let's take quick break. We'll be right back. I'm Brad Friedman. This is The Brandcast.

Just less, actually, than 100 days until the November 3rd elections this year. When America finally gets to speak out with their thoughts on the second term of Donald Trump. I'll try to get some of your calls in a moment. 818985-5735. Thanks again to Tom Hartman for joining us there. Beyond those 100 days, though, it's going to be important to stay in touch, to pay attention. Hopefully, things go well for the forces of... pro-democracy forces on November 3rd, we will see. But as you heard Tom say, it ain't over until it's over, at least until folks are sworn in after the first of the year in 2027. So we're getting close, but it ain't over. Let me, let's go to take a phone call or two. I do have some news I want to try to get to today, but let me get to a call or two from you. Let me go to Carlos in, where am I? How do these phones work? There we go. Carlos in Thousand Oaks. Hey, Carlos. Welcome to the broadcast. What's on your mind, sir. Hi. Yeah, I'd like to just remind all your listeners what capitalism actually is. What is it? It's something that for consumers, it's capitalism is the competition that forces companies to provide better products at a lower cost and more choice. And Monopoly does just the opposite. And that's why. monopolies are not capitalism. That's why we're not in a capitalistic society today. And socialism is actually a subset of capitalism because it decreases prices and forces corporations to lower profits. Interesting. And that's exactly what capitalism is. And it's interesting, yeah, that you put it that way, because one of my problems is not necessarily with capitalism per se, but it's with doing away with the rules of capitalism. It's doing away with a, you know, we've got an unlevel playing field where the oligarchs and where the corporations themselves who are not human beings. you know, have taken the power. And the rules have gone away. The restrictions that were very much once on corporations just don't exist anymore. So I don't mind capitalism per se, but you need to have rules of the road. And we have slowly gotten rid of the rules of the road, going back to really Reagan and have just whittled away all the... And the competition. We've whittled away at the competition.

That's right. I mean, basically, we've said, oh, go ahead. There is no competition. We're not going to provide these products that will make your life easier and better. For example, they continued with the solar programs established in California in the late 1970s, early 1980s. Then California would be, I mean, we would have blasted off from 2000-something. I used to work at Shell Solar. We were already on a sustainable path, and it's not just electric. It's also manufacturing fuels so that the people who own fuel pays cars don't have to go out and buy a bunch of resources that consume the rest of the resources of the planet needs to survive. Yeah, and what's maddening about it is that these antitrust laws are still on the books. We just don't enforce them. So when you hear the Republicans, you hear Donald Trump talking about law and order, you know, enforcing the law. He don't mean it for a moment. He's fired all of the people within the federal government who actually were trying to enforce law and order. They were just enforcing it on the corporations, and we can't have that. Carlos, really appreciate it. Well, remember that Monsac Fonseca, number four in an industry of 200 tax. avoidance industry law firms in 2016 as Donald Trump Star was rising was hit with the Panama Papers outlining that they had $31 trillion in assets hiding in their little thing. So if all those assets, number four in an industry of 200 means a minimum of $121 trillion hiding from governments around the world to build roads, schools, deal with global warming or whatever. Thanks, Carlos. Really appreciate the call, sir. 818985-5735. If I can get back to those phones, I will. I do want to hit this, though. This is a little bit of good news for our November elections, at least for now. A First Circuit Court of Appeals panel upheld a lower court ruling on Sunday that blocks the federal government from overhauling mail-in ballots and assembling citizenship lists for the 2026. midterms at the federal level. It was just the latest rebuke from the courts for the lawless Donald Trump's efforts to exert unconstitutional executive control over the midterms via executive order. The ruling from the First Circuit keeps in place the lower court ruling putting the brakes on the directive that Trump had signed back in March. The panel was composed of two Biden appointees and one Trump appointee. Judge Joshua Dunlap, the Trump judge, actually dissented from the majority in part, finding that the lower court's injunction was not justified as to the part of the executive order that mandates the creation and distribution of state citizenship lists. He wrote that Trump's executive order, quote, does not order states, including plaintiffs, to take any action.

based on the state citizenship list and merely provide states with, quote, further resources to use in law enforcement. Oh, how nice. Gosh, why was everybody so upset about that? It was only just to help in people, not to block them from voting by mail or anything. Sure, Jan. That's all it was. The majority decision dealt solely with the question of whether the plaintiffs around the half of the U.S. states in this case, whether they have standing to challenge the executive order in the first place, that's what was actually decided over the weekend. The Trump administration has maintained that all of the state's injuries are merely speculative, since the agencies involved have not yet produced final rules. to enforce the order's requirements. The court majority, however, was unconvinced by that argument. Quote, as the district court reasoned, the panel wrote, the executive order lays out a clear set of rapidly approaching deadlines by which states must coordinate with federal officials and comply with new voting procedures, all while the states must also ensure that their officials and the public... understand this evolving set of rules that would govern the upcoming September and November elections. So Trump's order would have mandated, among other things, that states supply lists of their voters. to federal agencies, including the post office. And that then the post office would then not be allowed to deliver ballots from people who were not on those lists. Well, what happens out here where we can, you know, we can register to vote, you know, a week before the election, the day of the election? Those people aren't going to get their ballots delivered, apparently, under this executive order from Donald Trump. Because the post office would, under this order, could read it as saying they will not deliver any ballots at all from states that did not comply in submitting a voter list to the USPS. The district court. had also held that the executive order was unconstitutional. That was the lower court. The government only challenged the part of the district court's finding that the case was ripe for plaintiffs to challenge for standing. So the constitutionality question was actually not before this particular appellate court. It's interesting that the administration... did not take the opportunity to challenge that finding from the lower court, finding that the order was unconstitutional. Now, shortly before airtime today, within the past hour or two, it appears that the Trump administration has taken the case to their friends at the corrupted U.S. Supreme Court, naturally. So we will see where has activist Republican justices stand on this...

fine mess, this intrusion by the federal government into our elections, specifically not the federal government per se, but the executive agency who has absolutely no control whatsoever over elections, at least if you believe in the Constitution. So we will see. What those activist Republican justices think at the Supreme Court soon enough, I suspect. Of course, it has become routine, observes TPM's Kate Riga for Republicans now to fearmonger about the tamperability of absentee voting. That even though Trump votes by mail himself frequently, as you know, the Trump administration has been working to make it harder for voters. who it mostly assumes to be Democrats to vote. by mail, which may be a miscalculation on his part as well. All the while, Trump has been pretending to fume that Republicans in the U.S. Senate won't pass his Save America Act, which would require voters to present documentary proof of citizenship, not just photo ID, as Republicans will like to tell you, but documentary proof of citizenship, a passport, a birth certificate, and it must be presented in person at elections offices. when registering a vote or when changing your registration in some way. That could disenfranchise tens of millions of otherwise perfectly lawful voters. Now, of course, Trump knows that bill can't be passed in the Senate, doesn't even have the Republican votes to pass it. In fact, even if it did pass, it's too late to enact it for 2026 at this point. But, you know, What this is really about is Trump's now got his built-in excuse for why the American people issued such a beating this time to him in November if, in fact, they do. Well, it was all the fraudulent non-citizen voters that done it. You should have passed my save act. And he's also setting up for what Tom suggested, which is the rumblings that there is some, you know, discussion among Republicans that they might decide to try to deny seating those people. Good luck with that, Bubba. Let me get to Mo before we go. Mo before we go. Morris in Long Beach. How are you, brother? Haven't talked to you in a while. Hope you doing well, sir. I'm doing fine, Bradley. Got a little for you and the family. Listen, we've got to do something with that straight of her most. It's going to shut down fertilizer. What is fertilizer? We need that to plant, to farm. Our farmers don't have no fertilizer, Bradley. And if they can't plan anything, they probably don't have any buyers for the products, you know, but they still need fertilizer to plant. Folks don't realize how serious this is. One-third, everybody knows. There's one-third of your fertilizer that goes through that straight. But what they don't know is...

Those transport things, they move as fast as a bicycle. So let's pray that we get some fertilizer. Be nice to Canada. Be nice to Canada, bend down, whatever you got to do. But they can help them. I think it's called Patas. They could help them with something badly. But this is getting kind of serious. It's not on the MSNBC, CNN, Fox News. It doesn't matter. It's getting serious. People are starving around the world. Not over here, but they're going to starve around the world. So appreciate that platform. No, I appreciate that. Mo, thank you for ringing in on that. Of course, a lot of people talking about the gas and oil, not making its way. out of the Strait of Hormuz. I wish to give Desi Doyen some credit. She has been on this fertilizer beat from day one of this Iran war, which was almost six months ago. I know it was just supposed to be an excursion, just a few days, just a few weeks, six months ago. And Desi has been saying over and over again, it's not just the oil and gas. It's also the fertilizer, which is we're going to pay a big price for if we can't grow food in this country. or anywhere else around the world at this rate. Thanks, Mo. I really appreciate that. Good call, my friend. All right, we have got to get out here. Des, did you want to say? I was giving you a round of applause there. I appreciate the round of applause, and yes, it's a very important thing that Morris brings up because with 30% of the world's fertilizer trapped in the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. farmers and farmers around the world, particularly in Asia, are just struggling with these costs. and saying it's going to ripple effect throughout the U.S. economy as our prices rise for both fuel and for food. And, yeah, your food price is going to go up because of lack of fertilizer and lack of diesel. All right, we've got to get out. Thanks again to my friend Tom Hartman. Thanks to our producer, Desi Doyen. Thanks to our board operator, Will. And thanks to all of you for spending a portion of your day or night with us. If you missed any portion of today's program, you can download it for free anytime at bradblog.com. Drop me email if you like. I am Bradcast. at bradblog.com. Always good to hear from you and you will find me on most of the social medias at the Brad blog. See you there. Until we see you here next time. Hopefully tomorrow, I'm Brad Friedman. Good luck world.

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