1. How did we get here, to a lawless and corrupt society? How did Democrats and Republicans, and all of us as citizens, forget what it means to govern? How did we lose our ability to even *see* power? It happened in 1975. Here's the preface to Goliath. promarket.org/how-the-waterg…
2. In 1975, a wave of new Democrats came into Congress. Many were long-haired, aggressive and progressive, and demanded, not just an end to Nixonian corruption, but in retrospect, a wholesale re-gearing of liberal democracy itself. promarket.org/how-the-waterg…
3. “We came here to take the Bastille," said George Miller, who was then 29 years old. He later became a key ally of Nancy Pelosi. This was a TV generation, a computer generation. Not a generation of the depression. They distrusted the Pentagon, not banks.
4. The first thing they did was to target an old Texan former tenant farmer, Wright Patman, the last of a breed of Dems who fought banks and monopolists. But as Toby Moffett, a new congressman, said, Patman was “a terrific fighter,” but “it seemed time to move on.”
5. Behind the scenes, the bankers were manipulating the new freshmen Democrats. But they didn't know it, and to the extent they did, most didn't really care. It was a new caucus, with 40% of the members having arrived in the last six years. In 1976 even more would be elected.
6. Jim Wright, who pleaded with the new members not to “depose the one man who has been our most inveterate, most persistent, most consistent and most outspoken foe of monopoly, exorbitant interest rates, and special privileges of all sorts.” But they did.
7. Patman brought forward a tradition, opposition to concentrated capital, from Thomas Jefferson through Louis Brandeis, and into the New Deal and the 1970s. But now, that tradition had no one to bring it forward.
8. The Watergate babies, as they became known, just had different ideas about the world. Process-oriented, not power oriented. They understood mass media, not mass organizing.
9. Immediately, this new Congress was confronted with a mess of incomprehensible problems. America's economic engine was supposed to produce an endless surfeit of goods and and jobs, automatically. But now it wasn't. Inflation. Oil shocks. The bankruptcy of New York. Recession.
10. They were confused. This wasn't supposed to happen! Their intellectual mentors had taught them that there was no such thing as corporate power, or that it was indistinguishable from government or unions. But there was a group of scholars who had the answers.
11. I noticed as I wrote the book that language itself changed in the late 1970s. People became 'human capital' and bridges became 'infrastructure.' There was a flabbiness, an unwillingness to confront power. It happened right after Patman was dethroned.
12. These scholars promised the new Congress efficiency, progress, and freedom. All they had to do was undo the chains on concentrated power that Patman had spent his lives securing. And so they did. They released the beast of monopoly upon the land. The revolution was here.
13. This generation took over the Democratic Party, and they were in charge in 2009, when the banks crashed our world. They saw banking as a technical area organized by scientists, not a political battlefield. We were consumers, not citizens. promarket.org/how-the-waterg…
14. By 2009, we knew nothing about Patman's tradition, the battle that took place over how our banks and corporations would be run, a battle all over America and the world. How we do business is how we do justice. But we just didn't know it.
promarket.org/how-the-waterg…
promarket.org/how-the-waterg…
15. This is the tradition that, if we had known about it in 2008, would have helped us restore our democracy, or at least given us a shot to do so. And it is the tradition that, if we relearn it, will offer us the chance to regain our liberties. simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/…
