Over the last 40 years we've seen a new oligarchy arise in the United States on the

foundation of Reaganism. We don't talk a whole lot about oligarchy in our day

to day in the writing that we do and even in this podcast but it is very much the same mechanism.

Wealthy people have always done everything they can to hold on to power and to enhance their power and you really do want to solve this problem you are

actually going to have to eat the rich.

From the home offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitch Fork Economics,

with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.

I'm Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

I'm Paul Constant and I'm a writer at Civic Ventures.

Today we're going to talk about oligarchies.

So an oligarch is a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence and joining me today is the host of this podcast Nick Hanauer who is a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence.

How you doing, Nick?

I'm good.

Thank you for pointing that out, Paul.

It's very kind of you.

Well, as our resident oligarch, no, I think I'm really excited today to get to talk to our guest, Tom Hartman.

He's the number one progressive radio talk show host in the US, and as a best-selling author author and he is a new cool book out called The Hidden History of American

oligarchy reclaiming our democracy from the ruling class.

Tom comes at it I think in his book a slightly different way than we do on our podcast generally where we talk in more I think more precise terms about economics but I think we're in agreement with his generalized thesis, which is that absolute

power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, right?

Right.

When you concentrate power in the hands of the few, however you do it, and in a commercial

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