 which I think is the call and response of good morning. So thank you to our hosts for convening this urgent conversation. And let me just say that over the course of today, you will encounter a slew of cogent arguments for taxing the ultra-rich. You've already heard why this is smart economics. You'll hear more about why it is good for racial justice, good for public health, and good for the planet. And you will hear from the polling data how very popular it is, including with Republican voters. But all of this begs the question of why if it is so wise and so widely desired, it will also be so hard to do. In fact, it will not be done without deep power-building and serious structural reform of our politics. I speak then of the elephant in the room, the daunting obstacle to every sound policy idea these days, the corporate capture of our democracy. Many of the best minds in economics and political science and in Congress have exposed how it works. You heard earlier from Paul Krugman, whose columns keep us all informed and sane, not to be underrated. You just heard from Heather Boucher, and you probably know that it was Joseph Stieglitz who first wrote that we have developed a government, and I quote, of the 1% by the 1% and for the 1%. Many of you know the political scientists who have documented however more concentrated wealth is deforming public policy, making it into a veritable wealth defense industry. In books with titles like Winner Take All Politics, Affluence and Influence, Unequal Democracy, The 1% Solution, Billionaires and Stealth Politics was mentioned by Paul, and so many more. Some of you will have read Captured, the Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who witnessed the process in a front row seat. And whether from Jane Mayer's path-breaking articles on the Koch brothers in The New Yorker or her magnificent book Dark Money, nearly all of you know that the fuel that drove this government capture was political spending on the part of billionaires determined to rig the system in their own favor. My own research for Democracy in Chains complements these accounts. But in following the history of the libertarian political economic ideas that were weaponized into a stealth, step-by-step strategy by Charles Koch and his allies, I discovered, you might say, that it's even worse than it looked to Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein. What we are seeing, I learned, is far more than partisan. It is an audacious project, decades in the making, to fundamentally change the relationship between the people and the government, and to do so permanently, in a manner that is designed to pin the proverbial pendulum to the right so that it cannot swing back again. This gambit is being carried out by a vast and determined network of ostensibly separate national bodies, state-level organizations, organizing enterprises, and academic outposts. With George Mason University's Marketus Center and Scalia School of Law, the flagship, but dozens more now in operation. As Charles Koch rightly boasted to a donor summit last year, and I quote, we have made more progress over the last five years than I was able to make over the previous 50. To grasp why having their plan matters, let me quote Koch Industries senior vice president and general counsel, Mark Holden, lately in the news for rebranding the Koch image with criminal justice reform. I'm quoting him as he gloated to a donor summit in late 2015. He said this, we're close to winning. They don't have the real path. They don't have the real path. He was referring to critics of the Kochs. I found that real path in my research, I believe. It starts with gaining control over an ever-growing number of states, 30 now. It then moves through those state legislatures to rig the rules of the political process in each one in a manner that is designed to choke progressive national policy, too. Among the pivotal changes are these, redistricting to enable minority rule to a degree never seen before, hamstringing labor unions, especially teachers' unions, the most powerful and pro-public in today's America, undermining other strong liberal lobbies such as Planned Parenthood. Then, with these core defenders of democracy weakened, and by the way, I witness this up close and personal in North Carolina, a laboratory. With these core defenders of democracy weakened, the strategy moves on to the next phase, with voter suppression, the privatization of public goods to alter power relations, preemption by state legislatures of local progressive wins, gaining control of the judiciary in the states, and more. The ever-strategic co-grantee Grover-Norquist has equated this chokehold on state-level power diminished in the 2018 midterms, yay, but still very strong, with a Roman pillum. That is a spear formidable enough to penetrate any shield and barbed so that it could not be pulled out. He was, I believe, gesturing to what this real path is driving toward. The ultimate rules change, altering the U.S. Constitution and not in the usual open way. The right is building toward the first state-convened constitutional convention since 1787, under the never-before-used provision of Article 5, which allows two-thirds of the states to call such a convention. The goal is to amend the Constitution in a manner that would curtail most of what progressive social movements have accomplished, not just since the 1960s, not just since the 1930s, but since the 1910s, when billionaires first became subject to progressive taxation. This may sound exaggerated, I know, but it's not, it is happening. Common Cause has called the Article 5 convention push, and I quote Karen Flynn, the most serious threat to our democracy flying almost completely under the radar. And consider this, while the eyes of journalists have been fixated lately almost exclusively on the man I've come to think about as the distractor-in-chief, organizations and elected officials funded by the Koch network with Alec in the lead have been quietly lining up the authorizations needed to call such a convention. They now have the backing of 28 of the 34 states needed, six to go, with five Republican-controlled states, by the way. So what kind of a country would the Libertarian Dream Constitution create? We don't have to guess. The attorney and right-wing talk show host, Mark Levin, has spelled out the particulars in the Liberty Amendments, a 2013 book that made number one on all three New York Times bestseller lists without drawing mainstream attention. Over 3 million individuals have endorsed this call for a constitutional convention, including allegedly mainstream Republicans such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. Hans van Sipofsky of the Heritage Foundation, whose name will be familiar to you as a leader in the project of voter suppression, says that these Liberty Amendments offer the prospect and I quote, of reversing the damage inflicted by the progressive movement over the past 100 years. What then does all of this mean for people like us in this room who are taking on the urgent project of taxing toxic concentrations of wealth? It means, quite frankly, that we have to step up our game. We need to develop a long-term integrated strategy of our own to deal with this. Let me highlight a few of the things that I believe that we need to pay attention to in closing because no one in this room, or the people they represent is going to let this thing win, right? It means that taking stands on single issues, even big issues like taxes or jobs or health care is no longer going to work as it once did because our political system has been so captured by the ultra-wealthy. It means, and this points to rather another crucial lesson, which is that democracy itself must become the focus of every progressive work, whatever their main cause is, as must alerting the public to the profound danger democracy is in in America and not just from Donald Trump. As one nurse wrote to me, I see now that this presidency is the tumor, not the cancer. And to get the treatment, the best treatment plan, you need to have a correct diagnosis, she said. So what is the cancer? The cancer is the chronic condition that allowed the Koch strategy to get as far as it has. The concentration of wealth and power among billionaires who guard their advantages by reading the system. The only lasting way out of this acute crisis then is deep structural reform. Reform to break up concentrated wealth, reform to stop the flow of dark corporate money to candidates to bring more voters into participation, and to rebuild countervailing power to extreme wealth, including the power of unions. HR1 was a promissory note from House Democrats on the kind of changes we need to crack down on lobbying that corrupts to reform campaign finance and to ensure voting rights. You'll hear more about it today, I'm sure, but it passed the House unanimously and every Democratic senator has pledged support for it. We also need to work on democracy beyond elections, year-round enhanced organization, especially at the state level, where the losses had such ruinous consequences. To do all of that, we will need to use tax policy to combat the catastrophic concentration of wealth. And to make that possible, we will need to build vast popular power and align as never before as the final panel today will lay out. It's a tall order, to be sure. But here's the kind of fun irony that history is full of. In trying to take away our shared toolkit, a government with the capacity to carry out the will of the people using progressive taxation and corporate regulation, one we have taken so much for granted as not even to think about it. In trying to take away that toolkit, the Koch-led right may have done for the rest of us what we have been so unable to do for ourselves. Make us realize how much we have in common and how deeply we need one another to preserve our shared values and victories and indeed our common planet. As the old adage goes, there is no crisis that is not also an opportunity. And so I will simply end by saying that if we want a healthy fiscal policy, we are going to have to get a healthy democracy. Thank you.