PLUTOCRACY FILM PRO

They were the centers of social life and of commerce. You couldn’t pass a city block without a tea house. It had to be bought from the British East India company and it had to be manufactured in the United Kingdom.īut one of the other things that they had monopolized was tea, and tea was the drug of choice, along with alcohol, in those colonies at that time, all up and down the eastern seaboard. It was, for example, illegal to manufacture fine clothing in the United States. And at that time, England was just starting to come up, and the Netherlands were really much more powerful.Īnd they basically, by the 1770s, had monopolized the trade of most of the world that interacted with Europe, and had very radical laws that had been passed by the British Parliament regulating commerce in the United States. And it was modeled on the Dutch trading companies which had existed for about a century before that. It was the first of what we would today call modern corporations. TH: Queen Elizabeth I signed the charter for the British East India Company on Decemand brought into birth the modern corporation. He spoke online at a Bioneers conference. He has written and spoken extensively about monopoly, while highlighting solutions to restore democracy in books such as The Hidden History of Monopolies. HOST: Thom Hartmann is the number one progressive talk show host in the country and world. THOM HARTMANN: So the American Revolution was triggered by the Boston Tea Party, which was done in response to a tax cut for the largest monopolistic corporation on Earth. In truth, the battle between democracy and plutocracy goes back to the very founding of the United States.

We are not politicians or public thinkers we are the rich we own America we got it God knows how, but we intend to keep it if we can, by throwing all the tremendous weight of our support, our influence, our money, our political connection, our purchased senators, our hungry congressmen, our public-speaking demagogues into the scale against any legislation, any political platform, any presidential campaign that threatens the integrity of our state.

It matters not one iota what political party is in power or what president holds the reins of office. Touch the question of the tariff, touch the question of the income tax, touch the problem of railroad regulation, or touch the most vital of all business matters – the question of general federal regulation of industrial corporations – and the people amongst whom I live my life become immediately rabid partisans. We care absolutely nothing about any other political question, save in as much as it threatens or fortifies existing conditions.

PLUTOCRACY FILM PRO

When we’re discussing pro and con, the relative merits of candidates or the relative importance of political policies, the discussion almost invariably comes down to a question of business efficiency. These were his words, later published in his book The Passing of the Idle Rich.Īmong my own people, I seldom hear purely political discussions. In 1889, Frederick Townsend Martin was known as the “millionaire with a mission.” He had famously turned class traitor, betraying his filthy rich family dynasty. NEIL HARVEY, HOST: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Plutocracy film