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The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

Book by Thom Hartmann · 3 quotes · Economic Illiteracy, Banksters, Class Warfare

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The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It Quotes

“As [President Thomas] Jefferson realized, with no government interference by setting the rules of the game of business and fair taxation, there could be no broad middle class—maybe a sliver of small businesses and artisans, but the vast majority of us would be the working poor under the yolk [sic] of elites. The Economic Royalists know this, which gets to the root of why they set out to destroy government's involvement in the economy. After all, in a middle-class economy, they may have to give up some of their power, and some of the higher end of their wealth may even be "redistributed"—horror of horrors—for schools, parks, libraries, and other things that support a healthy middle-class society but are not needed by the rich.... As Jefferson laid out in an 1816 letter...a totally "free" market, where corporations reign supreme just like the oppressive governments of old, could transform America 'until the bulk of the society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man.”

“With the help of prominent media outlets, the Royalists, now a political minority, would engage in a scorched-earth strategy to defeat a coming Progressive Revolution, even if it meant crashing the United States as we know it. If they were going down, then the rest of the nation was going down with them. Which is exactly what happened.”

“The year Reagan was sworn into office, 1981, the United States was the largest importer of raw materials in the world and the world's largest exporter of finished, manufactured goods. ... Today, things are totally reversed: We are now the world's mining pit, the largest exporter of raw materials, and the world's largest importer of finished, manufactured goods. This has resulted in an enormous trade imbalance, one that has grown from a modest $15 billion deficit in 1981 to an enormous $539 billion deficit by 2012.”