Trump is the result of decades, decades of us allowing this country to go down a road that had very little to do with democracy and equal rights and what was fair, and very much toward letting the rich, letting corporate America, Wall Street run the show and call the shots.

So, when I say, for instance, that Donald Trump doesn’t care much about democracy and is trying to whittle away whatever he can of what we call our democracy, that’s really, to be fair to him, not really unusual. He’s a CEO. He’s a billionaire. Generally CEOs don’t run their businesses like democracies. They don’t like democracy. That’s not how they live. It’s not how they run their business. And as billionaires, they want to grab as much of the pie for themselves as possible. So they’re not into everybody having a slice of the pie or a fair slice of the pie or a seat at the table. So, he’s really just acting like most people of his class.

You know, I mean, I’ve got to believe if you’re a billionaire, you’ve got to really hate a system that says it’s one person, one vote. Because if we really are one person, one vote, that means there’s 325 million of us and probably less than a thousand of them. Imagine if you were on the other side, if you were one of them. That doesn’t look very good, because it means that 325 million can just suddenly pass laws and tell you what to do.

So the basic concept of our democracy is that, but they know that they’ve been able to run that show because they’ve bought it. They buy the politicians, they buy the elections, and they have most working people in such a box that they know that if they were to protest, if they were to speak out, if they were to whistle-blow, that would be the end of their income.

And starting with Bill Clinton, we began eliminating the safety net when you don’t have an income. And so, we’re now at the point where they’ve got those 325 million right where they want them—scared that they aren’t going to be able to pay next month’s bills. Best statistic I saw recently—maybe you saw it—that the majority of Americans, almost 67 percent, do not have enough money in the bank or in their pocket to, if a loved one passed away tonight, and they lived here in New York, and the loved one was in California, they don’t have the money for the plane ticket to go to California. In other words, they don’t have—the majority of Americans don’t have $400 to $500 available in any form to them at any moment.

That’s the America we live in, and boy, does the billionaire class love that, because that’s when you’ve got them. You don’t ever think about, when you’re in that situation, of complaining about what’s going on, starting a union or taking the day off to go to the funeral of a loved one.

Posted September 25, 2018

Revised September 26, 2018