“We have to buy our own president”
by digby
Howie wrote a great post yesterday about the last gilded age and the robber barons choosing their own president. It features this fascinating video from the History Channel’s series “The Men Who Built America.” Howie wrote:
Let me introduce the essential video [below] with a tweet from Sen. Bernie Sanders yesterday: “93% of all new income generated between 2009 & 2010 went to the top 1% while the bottom 99% split the remaining 7%.
One of the most memorable moments in the History Channel’s rabidly pro-capitalist series, The Men Who Built America, came when predatory titans John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie decided to make Republican Party hack William McKinley president and destroy the political career of populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan (“the Great Commoner,” his day’s version of Bernie Sanders). J.P. Morgan: “We have to buy our own president.” Watch the video above; you’ll love it. It sums up the real history of the post-Lincoln/pre-Tea Party Republican Party.
Plus ça change and all that jazz.
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