• Listen to this segment

My fellow Americans the State of the Union is strong. Its politicians, however, are stupid and bought off by everybody from oil billionaires like the Koch Brothers and Saudi sheikhs to transnational corporations and defense contractors. This is problem One. Our Supreme Court has said that money is the same thing as speech. It’s not. It’s money. Our Supreme Court has also said that corporations are persons. They are not. They are voluntary associations. The Bill of Rights was not written to protect the East India Company, it was written to protect individual people. So we need to amend our constitution to clearly and explicitly say that corporations are not people and money is not speech.

Problem Two is at the core of why we have government. Why did those guys two and a half centuries ago put their lives on the line and fight and die to create the United States? And why have people fought and died over and over and over again in the intervening years to keep this nation alive? Jefferson put it quite simply in the Declaration of Independence, ‘ . . . that governments are instituted among men to secure the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. So the question, ‘Why do we have government? Easy answer: to provide life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Does that mean government should be hysterical about its budget deficit when there is no problem created by that deficit? No, that’s stupid. Does it mean that our government should be hysterical about how much it’s spending when our government is spending about half as much of its GDP as most other developed nations? And our own spending compared to ourselves is at levels lower than most of the past half century. No, that’s stupid too. Those are manufactured hysterias to get our government to do things that will further destroy the middle class and enrich the banksters and billionaires. They have nothing to do with the purpose of government. The purpose of government is to protect the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What the Constitution repeatedly refers to as the general welfare. And, if that’s the purpose, then the real issue government should be laser focused on is obvious. It’s jobs!
– Thom Hartmann

(Listen to Thom’s full State of the Union speech by clicking on the link at the top)

SONALI KOLHATKAR IS ON MATERNITY LEAVE.