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In today's world, you do not have to worry about Citizen Kane being wrong when he said, " Find me the paper and the ink and I'll get you your war, ", and that's the media's purpose today. I sit back sometimes and I watch them even now, after the election has been decided, decisively decided after the safe-haven date has passed, after the slates are done and approved. All we need now is for the action in Congress to transpire, and it's all a done deal. And that's just pro forma, really. Even Mike Pence, his role in it is pro forma. But we're looking at a situation where the media is still giving this man the ability to speak to his 80 million morons.
Paul Jay
Right.
Larry Wilkerson
And that's the media. The media does it every day. It's not just Fox either. They are enabling him, but at the same time, they're criticizing him and almost calling him a phantasmagoric idiot. They are enabling him and they know they're doing that.
Paul Jay
To my mind, this is all part of the decay, not just of the empire, but the extent to which the political powers are so beholden to the politicians, Congress, Presidency, to finance and finance itself has become so decayed, so parasitical, and where the bulk of what they do with their money is now gambling and speculation that-I keep going after BlackRock all the time, because not only is it the biggest of the asset managers and one of the biggest gorilla on Wall Street now. But it also was able to use its power in Congress to be kept out of the, too big to fail legislation-some of the legislation in Dodd-Frank that gave some oversight, not much, but some oversight in the banks, BlackRock wasn't affected by it. These people who have such power and are so parasitical in the way they make their living, mostly, it's a reflection of that, that we're getting such criminality at the level of, certainly federal politics and many elsewise, and from there I jump to-by no means am I suggesting the Democratic Party isn't part of this, but the story I want to pick up on is, it's not just that the Trump and the Trump family are essentially like a crime family that we're able to maneuver themselves, but the Republican Party has just become like this adjunct to this crime family.
Where does this go? Like I said in the opening, you've got the Republican Party caught between Trump and some semblance of rationality, even Wall Street. Are they not losing some confidence in the craziness of these people?
Larry Wilkerson
I think they'd have to be morons not to, but I will say that, I think the most one of the most important movements right now, I don't know if I can classify it as even potentially successful, is a movement in the states to develop an amendment to the Constitution that would, and there are 23 states that have already successfully passed it, and that would essentially obviate Citizens United and thereby get money out of politics in the sense that now corporate money and big money and secret money influences politics like it never has before in our country. I think that's the first step. I think that would be a movement that ought to be supported by everyone.
Obviously, if you look at this in the past when we've done this. The states have built it up to a point where you get to 26 or 27 states and then the Congress gets really concerned and leaps in and takes over the process, because, as you probably know, there are two ways you can amend the Constitution, one is through the states, the other through the Congress.
Congress is not going to want the states to do it because it is not going to have a hand in the way it ultimately reads. And so they're going to jump in when the state total gets to 26 or 27, approaching the 30 plus that is necessary for passage. So it's going to be interesting to see. I think it's going to happen the next five or six years, to see what the Congress does when it suddenly becomes alerted to this, sees the potential that it might pass through the state ratification process, takes it over, and then tries toride it with all of these influences. As I've said, they are a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street and the complex and so forth. So it's going to be interesting to see how Congress deals with this, to try and keep some of the things that have made their power more easily held onto, made their life easier. At the same time, they're trying to deal with what the people from the states have said they want to do with Citizens United, which is to trash it, get rid of it.
Worst decision the Supreme Court has made since Cheney's court, and I think that's right. And I think that's the first step we've got to do, we've got to get the money out of politics, the big corporate money, in particular, out of politics. Otherwise, I don't think we've got any future, really.
Paul Jay
Then you have to look at the success of the Republicans at the state level in this last election.
Larry Wilkerson
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