doesn't. it. hello i'm tom hartman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture is donald trump's kleptocratic approach to government the logical conclusion of reaganomics last richard wolffe in just a moment and bloomberg is reporting that the koch brothers are now running p.r.

for the trumpet ministrations plan to cut billionaires taxes is this the kind of outright collusion between white house the white house and the come country's most powerful oligarchy really come out of all with our democracy last brian darling and sam sachs and it's politics and. a former top government watchdog thinks the donald trump is turning our democracy into something that looks less like a democracy and more like a kleptocracy in a new interview with the guardian walter shaab who resigned earlier this month as the head of the office of government ethics so the trumps business ties have created a cloud of suspicion surrounding his entire administration we can't know whether his decisions are motivated by his policy aims or his financial interests shaab says and that uncertainty alone undermines the faith in governmental decision

making and puts a cloud over everything the government does end of quote so is this crony capitalism or is something even worse it's us richard wolffe is it impress professor at the new school co-founder of democracy at work and author of numerous books including capitalism as crisis deepens essays on the global economic meltdown professor richard wolfe welcome back. thank you tom glad to be here great having you with us how do you explain what we're seeing with trump and this slide into kleptocracy does a say more about trump or the current state of american capitalism and for our viewers who are not familiar with the term kleptocracy perhaps you could define that for us. yes basically it comes from the same kind of word that informs the kleptomania it's compulsive stealing basically is the idea in a kleptocracy would be a government whose major activity is stealing whatever isn't nailed down more or

less yes it's clear that mr trump being a billionaire in the first place and being very explicit about not divest himself putting his wealth in the hands of family members whom he sees and interacts with literally every day is opening up the obvious to everybody's view but i tend more to your other a perspective that you articulated this is a symptomatic situation there's a deeper problem of which mr trump as as his election showed is a sign basically here's what i think has been going on for thirty to forty years of the establishments the wealthy business elite at the top of our society in cahoots with the leaders of the two major parties ran a pretty good show they they exchanged governments between republicans and

democrats they all knew each other they all understood each other and they had the mass of the american people pretty much under control or it seemed that way both at home and abroad but over the last thirty or forty years unfortunately those very people use their control of the government to gather more and more wealth into their hands to become bigger and bigger and richer and richer. are powerful capitalists like the koch brothers but many others and sold they lost their hold on the mass of people that's why the old folks turned against the establishment of the republican and democratic parties and gave mr trump the surprise of everybody that he won the election and now he is living out the non-establishment the non polite it's not that he necessarily steals more than others but he's not going to hide it he's actually going to wear it as a badge of his difference and i think it's a sign of

a system in very serious trouble and able to come up with a solution masses of people voted for mr trump out of the notion that the establishment wasn't their friend anymore and wasn't something to rely on and as mr trump proves that he isn't either you're going to see a mass of americans looking elsewhere for how to deal with the deterioration they feel and see around them all the time you know that makes perfect sense is trumps kleptocracy a continuation of neo liberalism and or reaganomics or is a something new and along the same lines as the last question i'd love to hear your definitions of neo liberalism and reaganomics. ok reaganomics has always been a mystery to me. if you listen closely to mr reagan at any point in his life i'm going to try to be polite now his grasp of economics was not his strong suit so i

really don't understand it what it seems to mean is that when he became president he set about deregulating the economy having the government play of smaller role in regulating and turning over government activities to private enterprises for their private profit beyond the deregulation and privatization i have no idea what reaganomics is supposed to mean neo liberalism is a little different media liberalism is the idea that deep down philosophically we should go back to what used to be called less a fair that is the government should play an absolutely minimum role it's really a kind of religion government and economics is bad private enterprise is good it is the literal counterpoint to some kinds of socialism which run it the other way what the government does is good and what private folks do isn't this is childish

extreme logical kind of strange debate of people who boxed themselves into extreme corners most societies if you look at them certainly ours are a complex mixture of private and public and that has been validated and verified by generations back to your first question i do think and i go out a bit on a limb here but i do think that we are in a stage of capitalism where we at least have to ask the question is this system imploding on itself have we had three hundred years of a good run of a capitalism that did achieve a number of goals that did. cheve a number of advances for the human community much as earlier systems did but like those systems it has run its course it is now functioning for such a small slice of folks at the top that it is creating its own internal enemies and

building them up with anger and resentment to the point where the president you know makes money off of his job and has the same kind of added to that is attributed to one of the louise before the french revolution i'm having a good time after me the day lou will come and that mr trump is sort of playing that kind of role remarkable back in one thousand nine hundred four vice president henry wallace warned about the rise of people he called american fascists he described them in a new york times as people who quote claim to be super patriots but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the constitution they demand free enterprise but of the spokesman for monopoly invested interest their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously they may keep the

common man in eternal subjection end of quote do you think that's an accurate description of what trump is up to here. absolutely but i wouldn't limit it to mr trump i think henry wallace had a very clear vision he was a visionary as we know basically looking back on him and he understood especially in a capitalism that has reduced the number of wealth and power holders to a relatively small number the richer the fs minority gets the more urgent it has to control politics less the majority recognizing that it's a majority do what majorities can do and in order to prevent that you have to buy and control the political apparatus that's what the two parties allowed themselves the republicans with enthusiasms the democrats with perhaps some hesitation but in the end they've become beholden to the big box and so they've behaved in

a corresponding way and we are now at the end result of that behavior when the mass of people basically said no we're going to vote for the guy you make fun of mr trump it's like the british working class saying to their establishment we're voting to leave your up basically because you tell us not to and we don't trust you and we don't like you and we're on the way to a country that's going to be split between the minority that controls everything and the majority that feels fundamentally taken advantage of you know the financial times has a piece about factories in today's paper maybe it was first published yesterday but the rise of collateralized loan obligation c.l.o. which are basically the new version of the collateralized debt obligations or c.d.o. that caused the two thousand and eight financial crisis they're bundles of junk wonts that end up getting rated as aaa what is it about our financial system that has lied us to make the same mistakes over and over again. it's basically what i

just said if you if you give private banks who are major creators and dealers in collateralized debt obligations and collateralized loan obligations in the whole world that we call derivatives and so on if you allow them the political power that is the right to use their enormous concentrated wealth to buy and shape politics then you really can't be surprised if they either prevent something like the dodd frank bill from ever achieving what it was set out to do or if they can't prevent it from being passed then prevented from being executed from being really administered which they've been very successful at getting exemptions from the securities and exchange commission and all the other maneuvers then you're going to get what we have now namely a profit opportunity exploited by people who have no internal limits in this process and will blow it up in the future the way they did in two thousand and

eight and the financial times at least has the courage to see it to point to it and to say look before it's too late recognize that the same forces we know are capable of destroying the global capitalist system are doing it again but even if you see it even if the financial times makes it clear as long as the political power that has the decision making is beholden to the big bucks that have concentrated all that wealth we will see it but like people on a train rushing into a stone wall will stay heir and look at our own doom coming down the road toward us you know it's not an encouraging and all areas sign and and the financial times said you know we're right back in two thousand it's remarkable professor richard roth thanks so much for being with us tonight thank you joe coming up as donald trump modes to cut his ties with the institutional recall. again party is

impeachment finally on the table well as brian darling and sam sex and it's politics panel right after the break. there's a real irony going. to play a responsible way to meet people and that's all you saw that's what it was so it's not supposed to. or are you know wholesale surveillance you feel you have no meanwhile those willing to do so since the instructor has used the social media outlet while i always saw this story as a scar a real. i think the average viewer just after watching

a couple segments understands that we're telling stories in our critics can't tell me you know why because their advertisers more let them. in order to create change you would have to be honest you have to tell the truth parties able to do that every story is built on going after the back story to what's really happening out there to the american what's happening when a corporation makes a pharmaceutical chills people when a company in the environmental business ends up polluting a river that causes cancer and other illnesses they put all the health risk all the dangers out to the american public those are stories that we tell every week and you know what they're working. towards an institution that has to. put themselves on the line. they did accept it or reject it. so if you want to use for us. some want to be rich.

too and. that's why the. three of the people. i'm interested in the. question. we may finally have reached the point in donald trump's presidency where impeachment is more than just a liberal pipe dream. but has become a real life possibility for more on that let's turn things over to tonight's politics. with a for the eyes politics panel of brian darling contributor to the conservative review and sam sex co-founder of the district's sentinel thanks guys for being here thank you. so the washington post has revealed that donald trump himself personally

dictated his son donald trump jr's false statement about trump jr's meeting with a russian lawyer during the presidential campaign that statement famously claimed that the trump tower meeting was just about adoption policy something donald trump jr himself later proved was a lie when he made public an e-mail exchange showing that he went to the meeting expecting russian government source dirt on hillary clinton this revelation comes right after trump broke with the institutional republican party by firing spicer and priebus he's also really ticked off with the senate and the house right now and republicans with his tweets he's ticked them off to have we now reached the point where republican dissatisfaction with trump makes impeachment a real possibility it seems to me i mean it seems like his writing down junior's letter to the new york times was obstruction of justice and there's several people out there saying that you know that whether it rises to the level of bill clinton lying about sex with monica lewinsky is up to the house of representatives in the

senate but you know there's that in there i mean it seems like there's at least at least a couple of impeachable offense and on the table added to the list i mean you have the firing of james komi which looks a lot a lot like obstruction of justice added to the constitutional violations of all humans clause that he's violating that he's keeping operation of his business in his business comes back and says oh we're not going to isolate any foreign customers that we get those foreign profits that's in direct violation of the constitution so there's any number of things that you could pursue impeachment republicans are going to do it for obvious reasons and one of one of those reasons is there's not enough democrats calling for in peace. mitt you have the speaker of the house or the former speaker of the house the house minority leader nancy pelosi chiding her members whenever they bring it up so you have a very overly cautious democratic leadership and not wanting to pursue this issue plus you also have a sort of cynical left flank that i include myself partially in this in this flank

that doesn't trust the democratic party to impeach donald trump they want the democratic party to come up with a message that's appealing to workers and they're afraid that hey they're just going to ride we're not like donald trump on the intelligent clinton number one raised his popularity you know the diminishing it and and just nuked the republican party for a while there brian your thoughts on i actually don't think don't trump did anything wrong i really don't i think that when you look at this done junior meeting he was promised information he was told that he was going to get information to prove treason on the part of hillary clinton if i was a staff from the trump campaign i would have taken the meeting too so the existence of the meeting is not proof of collusion between russia in the trump campaign and ultimately that's what congress is supposed to be unless i'm not suggesting it is what i'm saying is that here is a perjury straps that are being set up to try and entrap all of these trump administration officials it has nothing to do with what congress is supposed to be investigating has nothing to do what muller supposed to be investigating all they're trying to do is entrap them just like they did bill clinton probably going

to lie under oath with regard to impeachment on this whole thing it you know. the two signals that i'm looking for are republicans coming out and saying enough and fox news abandoning trump and several of the fox news hosts have already started that process and on the republican side you've got jeff flake coming out with his new book that's just you know taken the bark off trump and there and the republican party it seems because impeachment is really a political not a legal process it's purely political and. it seems to me that from the. republican point of view the calculus the math on this would be at what point does trump become an impediment to us it achieving our goals and you know trump totally blew it with health care from a republican point of view he didn't lobby anybody he didn't use the bully pulpit you know all he did was complain and threaten and you know which is generally not

a way to get things done and i don't think he realizes the power that congress has and then you know looking at it as a democrat i i'm like ok i'm in favor of impeaching him now because he has demonstrated that he's incompetent in a world you build with nuclear weapons and a few crazy people out there like kim jong un who actually i don't think is crazy i think he's crazy like a fox but but he's very very dangerous and he's not the only one but you were probably in favor of impeaching him before you got sworn in i think no actually i was more afraid of mike pence than donald trump and i have changed my thinking on that just in the last month i think that you know it's my pencil do a lot of stuff that i consider really destructive to the united states but i don't think you'll start a nuclear war it wouldn't surprise me at all if we end up at war with with north korea with china you know god forbid with russia you know i mean there are serious nuclear powers out there that he's provoking look the reason why the reason why impeachment is the to me the morally correct option right now is because that's

what it's there for is there for a scenario like this where you have a president that operates in complete disregard of the constitution and is violating laws like i don't know this meeting we don't know much about it on the surface that doesn't concern me firing james komi as he's investigating your associates is it reeks of obstruction of justice and the i'm all human stuff does as well well they haven't made it was this structure of justice he told lester holt i did it because of that because of the rush of i was going to be fired muller tomorrow that still would not be against the law like he's allowed to do that he's actually but you don't impeach people unnecessarily for breaking the law i mean it's. nice rubric they didn't impeach clinton for lying about him you know but sex with they would be a peach because they want to get him out of office as you said it would be a purely political move republicans would have to make a calculation that they think if they're trying to cross anymore i don't think they're at that point they came one or two i would think a vote shot i think there was in the health care within a month of it maybe but there is going to be a much easier for them to pass

a tax reform bill than it was for health care bill probably a infrastructure problems they did that on that i would bet even if it's not the problem if you have ph trump you don't get mike pence mike pence gets wounded in an impeachment proceeding it doesn't help republicans and twenty eighteen so if anything republicans want to ride it out and hopefully get some what remedies i will bring this in and paul ryan as his v.p. and paul ryan becomes the spokesperson for the club and it's so great to see you guys want to overturn a demat democratically elected president but using impeachment to get somebody out not because they did anything illegal obligations on board with that is well beyond that i brian impeachment is part of the democratic process so it's in their constitution it's there for a reason sam i mean you have not this is not anti-democratic i mean i wouldn't point and i asked this of of my friends on the left who are afraid of mike pence and say oh we should impeach him then what would trump have to do that would make him worthy of impeachment i mean if anybody a lot of people can answer that question they can't come up with something he's already done plenty you know that's worth impeachment in my book ok the koch

brothers are all in on donald trump's push for so-called tax reform as bloomberg reports the influential oligarchy are planning to spend millions in support of the president's plan to slash the corporate tax rate their plan includes outright collusion with the trumpet ministration monday the koch's two biggest americans the two biggest groups americans for prosperity and freedom partners host and treasury secretary steven ocean and white house director of legislative affairs mark short at a pro tax cut event here in washington d.c. is this what a healthy democracy looks like oligarchy colluding with a corrupt president to ensure that they get even wealthier well there are just tax cuts would be great. the economy well it's always worked out so well i've been thousand dollars in tax cuts nothing like a twenty three million dollars national debt right as a result of that of reagan and bush's tax cuts how do you offset the tax cuts you cut spending we need to cut spending and so let's let's get rid of social security let's get rid of medicare and i'm going to do reform those programs don't get rid

of the i understand reform means you know throw people off the more we're familiar with the republican lexicon now days i don't i just don't think that the old reagan playbook is going to well this is one of these issues where trump looks more like the republican party that we're used to before trump and that is working with the koch brothers to pass massive tax cuts for their rich buddies and rich donors is something that republicans have been that the koch brothers have been invested in for a while we saw them emerge on to the scene most prominently under obama and they've been agitating for these tax cuts for several years now they have a republican congress a republican. in the white house and the call in their chips exactly what they're calling in their chips ok the future of the planet looks increasingly grim according to a new study published in nature we the nations of the world have just a five percent chance of keeping global warming under two degrees celsius the limit agreed on in the paris climate accords if this is true how is anything less than a world war two style investment in clean energy and renewable infrastructure

acceptable. it's not and i would advise democrats to borrow a page from joel stein this will probably make their heads explode but joel stein has been running for president the last two cycles on a green new deal and i think that's a winning message it takes the issue of climate change which is an issue animating lots of people on the left it's one of the most important the most important issue we face combines that with guaranteed jobs program that people need wages that people need the infrastructure that our country needs it's all encompassing and i think about the message that democrats need to run on and it addresses this issue but. i haven't seen him quite adopt that yet right now don't tell me the world is flattery you know but i am going to tell you that most americans care about jobs and having a job and what i'm talking about government provided job through social engineering you know do you care where your paycheck comes from i don't have a company that are not employed and you really don't if they have never ever made food inspectors should they be ashamed of their no i mean i look if somebody is

a government employee more power to them but i don't think we should go to a commie based on more government i think we should go to with me based on less cover this is not about government this is about whether those one know you could you could you can in so far as the private sector in fact that's absolutely what is going on with carbon taxes and doing things that punish the areas of the economy of the cap and trade program that george herbert walker bush put into place to stop sulfur dioxide created jobs work ended the acid rain problem and made a lot of money for the banks i mean you know what's a republican not to love but i think donald trump made a good good decision to get out of the climate accords of paris climate accords i think it was a good decision because ultimately it would have hamstrung our economy in a way there's nothing binding about the paris clinic that's true you're right but we had we abided by and had congress by we are abiding by we can't pull out of it for another three years well i think that you will probably see congress in you do say it's non-binding about this true but it was it should have been considered by

the senate is a treaty anyway so it is completely non-binding and congress should ignore it well that's you know in this ryan zinke the. scott pruitt world i think that's where that whether the climate is changing or not it is changing according to ninety nine percent of scientists but my friend brought on hundred percent of scientists who don't go to a fossil you are going to take money from fossil fuel companies but my friend brian one accept that but he should accept the fact that a small relatively small compared to the size of our economy one time investment into revolutionizing our energy grid in rebuilding our infrastructure based on clean energy will make us more efficient then. that will reduce medical costs from asthma and all the extra now these caused by fossil fuel burning in the long run we would be so much better off just by making this investment right now and the great example that is nasa you know john kerry said we're going to send a man to the moon and bring him back within a decade we get tangled out of it we did you know we are the lot more than ten and we got internet out of the brand darling sam sachs thank you guys and that's the

way it is tonight and don't forget democracy is not a spectator sport get out there get active tag your. in case you're new to the game this is how it works not the economy is built around core things come from washington washington post media the media. voters elect a businessman to run this country business if. you must it's not business as usual it's business like it's never been done before.

would you have for breakfast yesterday why would you put those two up face your wife. when that was your biggest fear. of a big moment a right wing so let's talk a little bit bored you say a few of the things that but what about. exploring the topic so simple but. now i did give you due to the question more. all the world the straits and all the news companies merely players but what kind of parties aren t. america play r.t. america more r.t. america person. in many ways news landscape just like to be a real news.