The Thom Hartmann Reader

by Thom Hartmann

  Applying the lessons of nearly a decade spent in the whirlwind of national and international politics, I wrote Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country, one of my favorite books. In 11 chapters Rebooting follows a model Alexander Hamilton first used to set forth 11 steps we could take to restore and rebuild this once-great nation. Combining my experience and training in psychology and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), I wrote Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America’s Original Vision, a book on political messaging and strategy. And I’ve been watching how the first few years of the Obama administration have not produced the core true changes necessary in our trade, industrial, and fiscal structures. I’m so convinced we’re staring down the barrel of another disastrous Great Depression that I’m working on a book about that right now.

  I once read that wisdom is the result of knowledge tempered and shaped by experience. This year is my sixtieth on this planet, and while I’m loath to call myself wise, over the past decade I’ve begun to understand the concept in a way I never could have when I was younger. Wisdom requires that an arc of history be both superimposed on knowledge and lived. I mention this not so much in my own context but as a universal. The stories you’re about to read cover, roughly, the span of time from 1968 to 2005. While they’re our stories, they’re also stories of our times. They cover the arc of what was, what is, and what could be—much of it as I’ve lived through it or learned directly from those who did, including a great deal of wisdom I found in those older than me. May it be your wisdom now, too.

  Thom Hartmann

  Washington, DC, May 2011

  PART I

  We the People

  IT’S HARD TO PIGEONHOLE THOM HARTMANN. HE HAS A UNIQUE synthesis of qualities not often found in one person: a scholar’s love of history, a scientist’s zeal for facts, a visionary’s seeking after truth, an explorer’s appetite for adventure and novelty. While he advocates a return to simpler, egalitarian values of community, he is no dreamy idealist. He is a fierce critic of the powerful corporate interests that have taken over our culture and corrupted our politics. He is a merciless dissector of our government’s hypocrisies, no matter which party occupies the White House. His dreams for this country are the same ones that Thomas Jefferson had two and a quarter centuries ago, dreams that Hartmann describes here in “The Radical Middle.” In an eloquent, articulate voice, he writes in the hopes of guiding the reader toward increased responsibility and consciousness. He is interested in changing not just our behavior and actions but the thoughts and the attitudes that are at the root of widespread social problems. What he offers us is a radically different way of thinking.

  While I was reading through the books, essays, and articles that make up Thom Hartmann’s published body of work, I began to distinguish several threads that run throughout the work, weaving in and out, and illuminating Hartmann’s unique vision. All of these threads are represented in the pieces that make up this collection, but the most vivid of them, the one that unites and defines all the others, is this: democracy is the natural state of nature and of mankind.

  The study of democracy is one of the pillars of Hartmann’s life. He spent years immersed in the writings and the correspondence of Jefferson and the other Founders, researching the family tree of the American democratic experiment. He has studied ancient democracies all over the world, including the Iroquois Confederacy, which inspired Jefferson. Going back further he read the histories recorded by the first-century Roman senator Tacitus. He has spent time with indigenous and aboriginal peoples, the remnants of what he calls “older cultures,” and observed that they tend to live in egalitarian societies. He has examined how and why democracies fail; he understands the components of peace and the causes of war.

  Investigating the biology of democracy, he has delved into animal studies showing that cooperation, not dominance, is the natural tendency of many species. In his book What Would Jefferson Do?, from which “Democracy Is Inevitable” is drawn, he exploded many of the most entrenched myths about American democracy, making short work of the neocons’ beloved notion that dominance is the natural way of the world, by showing that over time democratic systems will always push out despots and authoritarian governments.

  He is a passionate advocate of the democratic way of life, of cooperation, person to person, on an individual level because democracy is, after all, personal. It supports and nurtures us, and we in turn support and nurture it. Democracy is our most cherished bond, and it is the most cherished of Thom Hartmann’s themes. Not for nothing does the highest law of our land, the US Constitution, begin with the words We the People. But We the People are in trouble today. Our economy no longer works for middle- and working-class Americans. As Hartmann describes in “The Story of Carl,” the “cons” have damaged our democracy and weakened our country’s once-vibrant middle class with the policies of Reaganomics: financial deregulation, tax cuts for the richest Americans, the destruction of our manufacturing sector, freezing the minimum wage, and undermining labor laws.

  The media is also in trouble. In Hartmann’s trenchant analysis of the state of our media, “An Informed and Educated Electorate,” he analyzes how the corporate news media has abandoned its vital public-service mission and caters only to what people want, not what they need. After Ronald Reagan revoked the Fairness Doctrine, we saw the rise of right-wing shock jocks on conservative talk radio and the rapid erosion of the national conversation about politics into screaming matches, name-calling, and flat-out lying. Hartmann further chips away at the Reagan myth by showing how the great communicator was opposed to public education and subverted Jefferson’s intention that every American should have a decent education, free of cost.

  In “Whatever Happened to Cannery Row?” Hartmann uses John Steinbeck’s classic novel as a vehicle to visit the recent past, America before Reagan, “a time of challenge and a time of opportunity.” While the piece is a paean to Hartmann’s parents and a lost era, it also drives home his deeper point: our country has gone off course, drifted off in a “dream-fog of consumerism”; and in 30 short years, America has become unrecognizable, our uniqueness replaced by a vast corporate footprint of chain stores and shopping malls. To find out who we are, we don’t need to completely reinvent ourselves—we just need to wake up and look to the past, salvage what was most precious, and bring it back home.

  The Radical Middle

  From ThomHartmann.com

  THE FOUNDERS OF THIS NATION REPRESENTED THE FIRST RADIcal Middle. Back then they called it “being liberal.” As George Washington said, “As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.”

  They didn’t want King George or his military or corporate agents snooping in their houses, mails, or private matters; preventing them from organizing together and speaking out in public in protest of government actions; imprisoning them without access to attorneys, due process, or trials by juries of their peers; or reserving rights to himself that they felt should rest with the people or their elected representatives. (They ultimately wrote all of these in the Bill of Rights in our Constitution.)

  They also didn’t want giant transnational corporations dominating their lives or their local economies. The Radical Middle has always believed in fairness and democracy and understood that completely unrestrained business activity and massive accumulations of wealth into a very few hands can endanger democratic institutions.

  As James Madison said, “There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by … corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.”

  Similarly, John Adams wrote that when “econ
omic power became concentrated in a few hands, then political power flowed to those possessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an oligarchy or tyranny.”

  Thomas Paine, among others, wrote at length about the dangers to a free people of the massive accumulation of wealth, and following the excesses of the Gilded Age—which led to massive corruption of the American government by corporate and wealth-based interests—laws were put into place limiting the size and the behavior of corporations and taxing inheritance of the most massive of family estates so that a new hereditary aristocracy wouldn’t emerge in the nation that had thrown off the economic and political oppressions of the hereditary aristocracy of England.

  The Radical Middle always believed in the idea of a commons—the things that we all own collectively and administer the way we want through our elected representatives. The commons includes our parks, roads, police, fire, schools, and our government itself; our ability to vote in fair and transparent elections; our military and defense; our systems for protecting our air, water, food, and pharmaceuticals; our ability to retire in safety if we’ve worked hard and played the game by the rules; and the security of knowing that an illness won’t financially wipe us out.

  Regardless of electoral politics (since both of the major political parties often overlook these values, and both have become corrupted by wealth and corporate influence), poll after poll shows that the vast majority of Americans embrace the values of the Radical Middle.

  In recent years America has been hijacked by the Radical Right. Corporations now write most of our legislation. Our elected representatives cater to the interests of wealth rather than what is best for the commons we collectively own or what will sustain that bulwark of democracy known as the middle class. They have, in large part, seized control of our media, wiped out our family farms, and wiped out small, middle-class-owned businesses from our towns and cities. They seek a “merger of corporate and state interests”—a definition Benito Mussolini used for what he called “fascism.”

  The Radical Right has even gone so far as to use sophisticated psychological programming tools, like Newt Gingrich’s infamous “word list,” to paint the Radical Middle as some sort of insidious anti-Americanism.

  We in the Radical Middle are calling for nothing less than a restoration of democracy, of government of, by, and for We the People, in a world that works for all.

  From ThomHartmann.com, © 2007, published by Thom Hartmann.

  The Story of Carl

  From Screwed: The Undeclared War against the Middle Class

  CARL LOVED BOOKS AND HE LOVED HISTORY. AFTER SPENDING two years in the army as part of the American occupation forces in Japan immediately after World War II, Carl was hoping to graduate from college and teach history—perhaps even at the university level—if he could hang on to the GI Bill and his day job long enough to get his PhD. But in 1950, when he’d been married just a few months, the surprise came that forced him to drop out of college: his wife was pregnant with their first child.

  This was an era when husbands worked, wives tended the home, and being a good father and provider was one of the highest callings to which a man could aspire. Carl dropped out of school, kept his 9-to-5 job at a camera shop, and got a second job at a metal fabricating plant, working with molten metal from 7:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. For much of his wife’s pregnancy and his newborn son’s first year, he slept three hours a night and caught up on the weekends, but in the process he earned enough to get them an apartment and prepare for the costs of raising a family. Over the next 45 years, he continued to work in the steel and machine industry, in the later years as a bookkeeper/manager for a Michigan tool-and-die company as three more sons were born.

  Carl knew he was doing the right thing when he took that job in the factory, and he did it enthusiastically. Because the auto industry was unionized, he found he was able to support his entire family—all four sons—on one paycheck. He had fully funded health insurance, an annual vacation, and a good pension waiting for him when he retired. Carl had become a member of the middle class. He may not have achieved his personal dream of teaching history, but he had achieved the American Dream. He was self-sufficient and free.

  Working with molten metal could be dangerous, but the dangers were apparent, and Carl took every precaution to protect himself so that he could return home safe to his family. What he didn’t realize, however, was that the asbestos used at the casting operation was an insidious poison. He didn’t realize that the asbestos industry had known for decades that the stuff could kill but would continue to profitably market it for another 20 years while actively using its financial muscle to keep the general public in the dark and prevent the government from interfering.

  A couple of years ago, Carl tripped on the stairs and ended up in the hospital with a compression fracture of his spine. He figured that fall also caused the terrible pain he’d been experiencing in his abdomen. The doctors, however, discovered that his lungs were filled with mesothelioma, a rare form of lung cancer that is almost always caused by exposure to asbestos. Mesothelioma is terminal, and its victims die by slow and painful suffocation.

  Just because some corporation put profit before people, Carl got screwed.

  I was Carl’s first child.

  An Undeclared Way

  My dad faced a painful death, but at least his job in a union shop left him with health care after retirement. Most Americans don’t even have that reassurance anymore. More than 45 million Americans don’t have health insurance to cover expenses for a serious illness, and 5 million lost their health insurance between 2001 and 2005. And it’s not just illness that worries most Americans today. Americans are working more and making less. It’s getting harder and harder to just get by.

  There’s a reason for the pain Americans are suffering.

  The America my dad grew up in put people before profits. The America he lives in now puts profits before people.

  In my dad’s America, 35 percent of working people were union members who got a living wage, health insurance, and defined-benefits pensions. These union benefits lifted all boats because they set the floor for employment; for every union job, there was typically a nonunion job with similar pay and benefits (meaning roughly 70 percent of the American workforce back then could raise a family on a single paycheck). People who were disabled and couldn’t work could live on Social Security payments, and the elderly knew they would have a safe retirement, paid for by pensions, Social Security, and Medicare. The gap between the richest and the poorest shrunk rather than widened.

  That America is disappearing fast. The minimum wage is not a living wage. Workers are now expected to pay for their own health insurance and their own retirement. Pension plans are disappearing—30,000 General Motors employees lost theirs in 2005—and there’s continued talk of privatizing Social Security. The safety net is ripping apart, and the results are that the middle class is shrinking. The rich are once again getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer:

  ■ The inflation-adjusted average annual pay of a CEO went up from $7,773,000 to $9,600,000 from 2002 to 2004. Meanwhile, from 2000 to 2004, the inflation-adjusted median annual household income went down from $46,058 to $44,389. In other words, ordinary people’s income went down by $1,669 while CEO pay went up by $1,827,000.1

  ■ From 2001 to 2005, America has lost 2,818,000 manufacturing jobs. If you don’t count jobs produced by the military-industrial complex, the number of private-sector jobs created since 2001 has decreased by 1,160,000.2

  ■ Although 67 percent of large employers (more than 500 employees) offer a traditional pension, that is down from 91 percent two decades ago, and it’s dropping fast as more companies freeze pensions and turn instead to 401(k)s.3 Only 6 percent of Americans working in the private sector can rely on a defined pension,4 and 76 percent of Baby Boomers say they don’t think they are very prepared to meet their retirement expenses.5

  You don’t need the numbers because you probably alre
ady know someone who has been forced out of the middle class. Roger, for instance, who once was a vice president of research and development for a software engineering company, lost his job during the dot-com bust and never got it back. After being unemployed for seven years, he’s thinking of getting a job as a “landscape engineer”—that’s a gardener—at a tenth of his former salary.

  Or there’s the case of Bob, a college graduate who has been holding three jobs for the past five years, one full-time as a bookstore clerk, two part-time. Even though he works 60 hours a week, he doesn’t make enough money to rent his own apartment (he rents a room in a shared flat) and he can’t afford health insurance. He hopes his allergies don’t turn into asthma because he can’t afford the medication he would need for that.

  Too many Americans are just holding on. Consider Amy: Divorced from her alcoholic husband, she has gone back to school full-time to become a teacher; she earns a living by catering on the weekends. A single mother, she and her daughter share a studio apartment. Amy has neither health insurance nor child care and no nearby relatives—she relies on neighbors to take care of her daughter. One major illness and Amy would be homeless.

  And then there are most of the rest of us, who have good jobs but still don’t feel secure about the future. Ralph and Sally both get health insurance through their jobs, but their mortgage eats up more than 60 percent of their income, and the clothes and the necessities they buy for their two kids consume whatever might be left after groceries and utilities. They have health insurance but no pension. Their retirement is based on the few thousand dollars a year they can put into their IRAs. They wonder how they will be able to send their kids to college and afford to retire.