Summary:

Dr. Jim lays out what the next generation of candidates must commit to if they want to earn public trust and break the cycle of lesser-evil politics.

Dr. Jim argues that the country is too deep into wealth inequality, corporate capture, and institutional rot for voters to keep settling for “electable” candidates with weak agendas. He makes the case that the next wave of political leaders needs to come in with bold, explicit commitments around economic justice, accountability, court reform, and taxing concentrated wealth.

Chapters:

00:00 – Why Voters Need Higher Standards

05:15 – Why Today’s Crisis Is Even Worse

09:48 – The Second Test: Never Let This Happen Again

12:22 – The Fourth Test: Tax and Prosecute the Billionaire Class

14:00 – Why Boldness Matters Now

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Music Credit: Good_B_Music

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Left in Exile Outro

Left in Exile Intro

[00:00:09] Voters need to be extremely explicit on what their expectations are in terms of the next batch of candidates. We have to get away from the electability politics that have. Brought us into a decades long cycle of the lesser of two evils.

[00:00:46] And to understand what the new generation of candidates need to bring to the table, we need to actually take a look back at other points in history, which represent economic scenarios that are as bad as [00:01:00] what we're facing today.

[00:01:28] You're looking at roughly a period of time between the 1870s and the 1890s. There's a little wiggle room on either side of that, but that generally captures what the Gilded Age represents. So some of the things that you need to pay attention to during the Gilded Age that's relevant to what we're facing today is that that was a period of massive economic expansion.

[00:02:09] And what's interesting about that era is that you had a distinct two class society.

[00:02:47] And some of the technological advancements during that era made it easy for people who already had the resources to expand their spheres of influence and dominate the economic and business [00:03:00] landscapes. With the advent of the telephone and the advent of the railroads, it became much easier for businesses to expand beyond their regional sphere of influence and take it to a national and sometimes international scale.

[00:03:32] When you're thinking about Carnegie, Rockefeller, chase, Morgan Mellon, Vanderbilt, and others, these were the robber Baron class. These were the people that had enough resources to begin with and decided to accelerate that thanks to the advancement of technologies and gobbled up and created effective monopolies across multiple industries.

[00:04:23] So when you think about why wealth and inequality existed to that to the extent that it did during that time period. It is largely because of the unequal distribution of wealth across society. You had a handful of people at the very top consuming all of the resources and then everybody else in survival mode, and

[00:05:13] In US history,

[00:05:39] At the same time that that's happening, you have roughly 4,000 billionaires across the world that are actively and aggressively doing what they can to buy off whoever and whatever they can so that they can continue to consume as many resources as possible, and some of them. Want to become [00:06:00] the world's first trillionaire.

[00:06:40] So what would I be looking for in that next generation candidate that would automatically guarantee that I would. Be inclined to support them. The first thing that I'm most interested in is a commitment to justice. And when I say commitment to justice, it has to be economic justice first, because [00:07:00] only if you have economic justice can you have social justice.

[00:07:09] You have a handful of people at the very top, along with a handful of large companies that are dominating the employment landscape and are dominating the resource consumption landscape. You have most of the. Fortune 500 guilty of consolidation to a degree where they're operating in a monopolistic fashion.

[00:08:01] The central pillar of that economic justice needs to be a commitment to breaking up these monopolies across all sorts of industries. When you think about who controls what companies across the US. We have the illusion of choice and the illusion of competition because only a handful of companies control everything. So all of that needs to be broken up into smaller pieces so that you can have a truly competitive and market economy.

[00:09:02] So. That next generation candidate needs to level the playing field from an economic justice perspective, and then they need to level the playing field from an accountability perspective, so that every single person that stole from the citizen pays a price and it needs to be a steep price. Every single company that funded that theft needs to pay a price and it needs to be a steep price. That's how you pair economic justice and social justice together. So that's the number one criteria that I'm looking for in that next generation candidate. What we need is a combination of Teddy Roosevelt. And FDR. That's the level of readjustment that's necessary.

[00:10:32] Because what we've seen today is that everyone in the Trump orbit. Is wetting their beak. Everyone from the Trump orbit is benefiting and profiting to a degree that we've never seen before in history, with the exception of maybe Andrew Jackson. That's the level of grift and theft that's happening in this regime. So we need to make sure that the financial interests of every political candidate is exposed and [00:11:00] transparent so that we can make. Voting decisions based on who's least likely to steal from the public coffers.

[00:11:40] When you look at rulings like Citizens United, Roe v, Wade getting overturned, the presidential immunity ruling, and any number of other rulings that have come down from this particular court. The reason why we're seeing that is because this court has been compromised by right wing billionaires [00:12:00] who have skirted ethics laws and paid off these justices to rule in the way that benefits those businesses. The next generation of candidates need to not only expand the courts, but they need to commit to impeaching the justices on this court who have deeply problematic financial relationships with the billionaire class.

[00:12:45] right now between Citizens United.

[00:13:14] You are taxed at higher and higher increments. I would love to see a scenario where if you have a net worth above 30 million, you're taxed at 95%. And when it comes to the right type of taxation that needs to exist, we need to focus on wealth. Because what we've seen is that all of the billionaire class have high paid accountants that can take advantage of all of the tax loopholes and hide their wealth and hide their income. That needs to be eliminated and there needs to be an absolute cap on what you can earn both from active income and passive wealth,

[00:14:25] We need to have candidates that are speaking from the perspective of pushing forward bold initiatives that take courage to implement and determination to execute. Because if we don't do that, you're looking at decades of struggle in fixing the damage that's been caused in the second iteration of the Trump regime.