Practical ideas
“Rebooting the American Dream” by progressive radio and TV host, entrepreneur, activist and author Thom Hartmann proposes how to restore American working class economic and political justice. Suggesting that America’s proud industrial past is prologue to the future, Mr. Hartmann discusses the ideas and policies that are known to work if we may only find the wisdom and courage to act. Written with passion, intelligence and wry humor, Mr. Hartmann’s accessible and endowing book will have to be cherished by a wide audience.
Insprired by Alexander Hamilton’s 11-point Plan for American Manufactures, Mr. Hartmann dedicates eleven chapters that touch on critical economic issues including tariffs, taxes, little business, banking, energy, immigration, and more. Mr. Hartmann finds that ever-increasing corporate control of the economy has led to concentrated ownership and wealth at the top while pushing the middle and lower classes of American laborers towards the bottom. Drilling into each issue in detail, Mr. Hartmann discusses what policies need to alter if we want every one to participate in the American Dream, not just the few.
For example, Mr. Hartmann contends that stiff tariffs are critical to protecting the kinds of well-paying jobs that may only come from sustaining a strong domestic manufacturing base. On this point, Mr. Hartmann goes versus the so-called free trade message that is relentlessly amplified by a media whose multinational corporate sponsors net income handsomely from their exploitation of world labor market disparities. In this light, Mr. Hartmann correctly and forcefully dismisses Thomas Friedman’s well-known but erroneous ‘flat’ world theory as “nonsense”, siding rather with Hamilton and the dozens of other industrial countries around the world today including Germany, South Korea and China who have significantly raised their standards of living by supporting their respective home constructing industries.
However, Mr. Hartmann intends to do more than just inform. Trading on his signature radio and television sign-off, “Tag, you’re it!” the author hopes that the info indicated in his book will inspire readers to demand real alter in government and accountability from big business. We need more humans like Mr. Hartmann.
I highly commend this book to everyone.
High on Specifics…
… a quick read, and yet a little short on inspiration (more on that later). For the past assorted years, I have listened devotedly to Thom Hartmann. Broadcasting out of Oregon to a national audience, Hartmann has tried relentlessly to give voice to the un- and underrepresented in our country; battling corporate personhood and it is unrelenting financial influence it is billions of dollars has on our democracy, and rectify the course our country has traveled over the past thirty years. One thing that I have admired regarding Hartmann is his desire to invite those who disagree with him on his radio program and debate necessary issues (Limbaugh and Beck, are you listening?). So it was with outstanding excitement that I was offered a copy of his most recent book, “Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country”.
On the heels of his last book Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture (honestly, which I wasn’t much inspired to finish), this is a much more practical and real book. Hartmann dissects issues of real importance to our country. Based on the work of Alexander Hamilton, who wrote an eleven step plan for building our country’s industrial base, Hartmann takes his principles and places them in the forefront of our Republican shattered American economy. The introductory chapter alone discusses the hemorrhaging of American jobs due to loop holes and anti-protectionist laws that have opened up the world to American jobs but not American products. Just try and find something in stores that is American made. It’s challenging. Other chapters in the book include rolling back Reagan’s tax breaks on the rich, the rise and domination of corporate media, and the desolating effect of lobbyist influence on Congress. If you are a regular Hartmann listener, none of these topics are new to Hartmann.
Hartmann does an magnificent occupation placing his arguments in an historical context, which personally resonates with me. He also backs up his arguments with facts and stats (that I’m sure conservatives don’t want to acknowledge). His chapters are short and quick reads, packed full of utile data for those of us wanting to challenge the current status quo. However, I got rid of one star for man of the chapters being someone impersonal. In an venture to make his points, now and then Hartmann misses the humane connection in these stories. However, the power of the book lies in the information, and it’s staged clearly.
In fact, I may see using this book as a guide for writing letters to the editor, for blogs, or for anybody wanting to challenging conservative coworkers or family members who have “drank the Kool-Aid” and think that lower taxes for the rich, more tax breaks for oil companies, and now unlimited corporate spending for publicity in elections. Hartmann has opened the battle with a strong book, and I highly commend reading it.
Like a former reviewer said, will anybody in the Obama administration even read it?
But will Obama read it?
Thom Hartmann has delivered another lucid comprehensible statement of what’s gone wrong in America in recent decades, and, as ever, he is brief and to the point. I read this latest in one sitting and came away with talking points for my own work and a renewed hope that alter is possible.
Hartmann is unrelenting in his assertion that Reaganomics and Clintonomics have undone our nation, abetted by corporate interests and the Supreme Court. Globalization has beggared the U.S., crushing the middle class, moving formulating and corporate headquarters offshore, and further entrenching the super-rich. CEO pay in this country was at with regards to the world frequent before Reagan, a lot of 30 times that of entry-level workers. Now it is routinely 500 times more outstanding than the lowest, and from time to time 5,000 times that level.
The author demonstrates and explains why higher taxes have always raised wages and scaled down the size of government and why unions are necessary to worker rights. He shows why all of the other produced nations in the world have benefited from universal health care and shows that a simple majority in Congress could make Medicare available to any individual who wanted to join – and that it would be without apparent effort and without delay revenue neutral.
Only once does Hartmann slip back into the faith-based thinking that must have been percentage of his youth when he sideswipes “our faith in the supremacy of science.” (He wandered off into magical thinking in one brief stretch of his other than as supposed or expected thoughtful The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Revised and Updated: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It’s Too Late). Blaming “our belief” in science for environmental harm is an adverse confusedness of cause and effect, for which I almost bumped this review down to four stars – but Hartmann is other than as supposed or expected so good that I gave him a pass. We don’t “believe” or “disbelieve” in science, or shouldn’t. We receive or don’t receive the results of repeated experiments, and it isn’t science that dumps toxins in rivers or allows genetically modified species to go wild, it is public policy and, often, corporate greed at work.
Elsewise, Thom, good on you. And tomorrow, the revolution.
