This is the Tom Hartman program.

Can America and the world survive the Davos billionaires Woodstock?

And really what it's about is how did we get here. How did we get to the point where, you know,

half of America, well maybe a third of America the GOP are so pissed off about the politics of this

country that they will embrace Vladimir Putin that they will trash another democracy, specifically Ukraine, that they will

embrace an open fascist and convicted rapist, Donald Trump, and a loser.

I mean the guy has lost pretty much every election he's participated in.

I realize he won the electoral college but he even lost that election by 3 million votes,

the largest margin in the history of the United States, for somebody

who also won the Electoral College.

So how do we get here?

And the hypothesis that I put forward in the article is that this all began, as Louise says it'll say on my tombstone when I die, it all started with Reagan.

It all began in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was sworn into office and he took

America out of the classic economic system that we had been operating in from

ever since the 1930s.

Adam Smith economics, John Maynard Keynes economics,

and moved us into Milton Friedman's neoliberal economics

where the power is taken away from government and the people and given to

the very very rich and the corporations that made them rich.

So what happened and the corporations that made them rich.

So what happened was in the years leading up to Reaganism,

from 1946 to 1980, the bottom 50% of America saw their income grow at 129% during that period of time,

...