I stumbled onto this crime scene by accident. In a dusty Vermont library, buried in the fine print of an old Supreme Court case, I found something that changed everything I thought I knew about America. A single sentence that explained why your wages stopped rising. Why your kids are drowning in debt. Why healthcare can bankrupt a family. Why the American Dream your parents and grandparents knew has become a bitter memory.
This is a whodunit. A political murder mystery that's been hiding in plain sight for nearly 140 years.
In 1886, a corrupt Supreme Court justice and a court reporter conspired to change the course of American history. They granted human rights to corporations over the actual objection and ruling of the Court's majority. Like a hidden grenade, it lay in American law for almost a century until it was turned against the American middle class by the Reagan Revolution.
There's a mastermind. There's a triggerman. There's a conspiracy of wealthy and powerful men who committed a crime so audacious that generations of Americans never even knew they were victims. And there are heirs to that crime walking among us today, collecting the dividends of a fraud that's transferred tens of trillions from working families into their own pockets.
The American Dream didn't die of natural causes. It didn't fade away. It was murdered.
And then the crime continued with a cover-up that goes on to this day. The wealthy and their political supporters scapegoated the victims while hiding from their own responsibility. The perpetrators and beneficiaries of this crime first pinned the blame on welfare recipients and other poor people (“welfare queens,” as Reagan called them), and then (Tea Party and MAGA) on Black Americans, immigrants, “illegal aliens,” health care recipients, “child care cheats,” Somalis, and any other vulnerable group.
Much of the American public fell for this cover-up, and it has dominated American political outcomes since 1980—convicting the victims of the crime while rewarding those who committed and profited from the crime.
It's time we solve the case, bring the killers to justice, end the cover-up, and stop the scapegoating of the victims of the crime.