The Thom Hartmann Reader

An Excerpt From The Thom Hartmann Reader by Thom Hartmann Edited by Tai Moses Published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers The Thom Hartmann Reader Thom Hartmann Edited by Tai Moses Contents Editor’s Note ix Introduction: The Stories of Our Times 1 Part I We the People 7 The Radical Middle 10 The Story of Carl 13 Democracy Is Inevitable 31 An Informed and Educated Electorate 39 Whatever Happened to Cannery Row? 53 Part II Brainstorms 57 The Edison Gene 60 Older and Younger Cultures 78 Framing 88 Walking the Blues Away 103 Part III Visions and Visionaries 115 Life in a Tipi 118 How to Raise a Fully Human Child 122 Starting Salem in New Hampshire 137 Younger-Culture Drugs of Control 145 The Secret of “Enough” 158 viii The Thom Hartmann Reader Part IV Earth and Edges 165 The Atmosphere 167 The Death of the Trees 176 Cool Our Fever 183 Something Will Save Us 198 Part V Journeys 209 Uganda Sojourn 211 Russia: A New Seed Planted among Thorns 221 Caral, Peru: A Thousand Years of Peace 235 After the Crash 251 Part VI America the Corporatocracy 263 The True Story of the Boston Tea Party 266 Wal-Mart Is Not a Person 274 Medicine for Health, Not for Profi t 293 Privatizing the Commons 302 Sociopathic Paychecks 312 Acknowledgments 317 Notes 319 Index 329 About the Author 341 About the Editor 343 PART I We the People t’s hard to pigeonhole Thom Hartmann. He has a unique I synthesis of qualities not oft en found in one person: a scholar’s love of history, a scientist’s zeal for facts, a visionary’s seeking aft er truth, an explorer’s appetite for adventure and novelty. While he advo- cates a return to simpler, egalitarian values of community, he is no dreamy idealist. He is a fi erce 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 Th omas Jeff erson had two and a quarter centuries ago, dreams that Hartmann describes here in “Th e 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 off ers us is a radically diff erent way of thinking. While I was reading through the books, essays, and articles that make up Th om Hartmann’s published body of work, I began to distin- guish 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 defi nes all the others, is this: democracy is the natural state of nature and of mankind. Th e study of democracy is one of the pillars of Hartmann’s life. He spent years immersed in the writings and the correspondence of Jeff erson and the other Founders, researching the family tree of the American democratic experiment. He has studied ancient democracies 7 8 Part I: We the People all over the world, including the Iroquois Confederacy, which inspired Jeff erson. Going back further he read the histories recorded by the fi rst-century Roman senator Tacitus. He has spent time with indig- enous 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 ani- mal studies showing that cooperation, not dominance, is the natural tendency of many species. In his book What Would Jeff erson 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, aft er 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 Th om Hartmann’s themes. Not for noth- ing 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 “Th e Story of Carl,” the “cons” have dam- aged our democracy and weakened our country’s once-vibrant middle class with the policies of Reaganomics: fi nancial deregulation, tax cuts for the richest Americans, the destruction of our manufacturing sec- tor, freezing the minimum wage, and undermining labor laws. Th e 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. Aft er Ronald Reagan revoked the Fairness Doctrine, we saw the rise of right-wing shock jocks on conservative talk radio and the Part I: We the People 9 rapid erosion of the national conversation about politics into scream- ing matches, name-calling, and fl at-out lying. Hartmann further chips away at the Reagan myth by showing how the great communicator was opposed to public education and subverted Jeff erson’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, drift ed 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 fi nd 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 he Founders of this nation represented the first Radi- T cal 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.” Th ey 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. (Th ey ultimately wrote all of these in the Bill of Rights in our Constitution.) Th ey also didn’t want giant transnational corporations dominat- ing their lives or their local economies. Th e 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, “Th ere is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefi nite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by . corporations. Th e power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. Th e growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.” Similarly, John Adams wrote that when “economic power became concentrated in a few hands, then political power fl owed to those pos- 10 The Radical Middle 11 sessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an oligarchy or tyranny.” Th omas 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. Th e 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. Th e commons includes our parks, roads, police, fi re, 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 fi nancially wipe us out.

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