Franklin County Democrats

This will be the final installment from Thom Hartmann’s Rebooting The American Dream – Tag You’re It!

I hope you have enjoyed this series as much as I have.  Thom has a number of great books including one of my favorites “Unequal Protection”, that you may enjoy.

http://www.truth-out.org/conclusion-tag-youre-it67299

As challenging as the task may seem, we’re facing nothing compared with what the Founders took on; and Franklin Roosevelt famously told us that while great wealth may hate him, “I welcome their hatred.” Presidents can lead on behalf of the people, but only when the people demand that they do so.

That’s the biggest lesson of history. It took the excesses of the Tea Act of 1773—cutting to virtually nothing the taxes the East India Company paid on tea so that it could destroy its small colonial competitors—to provoke the colonists to commit the act of anti-corporate vandalism known as the Boston Tea Party.

It took the excesses of the robber barons to provoke Teddy Roosevelt to challenge them. It took the nationwide economic destruction of the Republican Great Depression to motivate the people enough to support and encourage Franklin D. Roosevelt to institute—over three (and a fraction) presidential terms—the New Deal.

Our economy is in tatters, the result of more than 30 years of Reaganomics and Clintonomics. Our democracy is hanging by a thread, the result of 40 years of radical Supreme Court decisions steadily advancing the powers of corporations and suppressing the rights of individuals and their government. And our environment is trembling under the combined assault of the Industrial Revolution and nearly 7 billion bundles of human flesh.

It’s the perfect time. We are clearly at a nexus, a threshold, a tipping point. If the past is any indicator, things will get worse before they get better, but in that tragedy will be both the catalyst and the seeds for a very positive future.

Chapter 11, In the Shadow of the Dragon from Thom Hartmanns, Rebooting the American Dream.   This is a mind-bending look at a new economic model currently in use.  For those of us accustomed to an American perspective this may require a couple of reads to fully understand.  A thought-provoking presentation.

http://www.truth-out.org/in-shadow-dragon67096

This week’s chapter from Thom Hartmann’s Rebooting the American Dream is Wal-Mart is not a Person!  Another fantastic chapter that will expand your view of how we got into the situation this country is in.  Thom mentions his book Unequal Protection which I have read and encourage you to check out at your earliest convenience for an in-depth look at how corporations have been granted all the rights of personhood without actually being a person.  This is at the root of many ills facing this country.

http://www.truth-out.org/wal-mart-is-not-a-person66831

In 2003, after my book Unequal Protection was first published, I gave a talk at one of the larger law schools in Vermont. Around 300 people showed up, mostly students, with a few dozen faculty and some local lawyers. I started by asking, “Please raise your hand if you know that in 1886, in the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons and therefore entitled to rights under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

Almost everyone in the room raised their hand, and the few who didn’t probably were new enough to the law that they hadn’t gotten to study that case yet. Nobody questioned the basic premise of the statement.

And all of them were wrong.

Chapter 7, Cool Our Fever from Thom Hartmann’s Rebooting The American Dream.  In this chapter Thom examines the American relationship with oil and other natural resources.  In particular, different ways to reduce the “strategic value” of oil to the U.S. economy.  What makes this a great read is the real world solutions presented, such as the way a cloud covered Germany has become the world’s #1 producer and user of solar energy.

In 1999 progressives in Germany passed the 100,000 Roof Program (Stromeinspeisungsgesetz),8 which mandated that banks had to provide low-interest 10-year loans to homeowners sufficient for them to put solar panels on their houses. They then passed the Renewable Energies Law (Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz) and in 2004 integrated the 100,000 Roofs Program into it.9 The Renewable Energies Law mandated that for the next 10 years the power company had to buy back power from those homeowners at a level substantially above the going rate so the homeowners’ income from the solar panel would equal their loan payment on the panel and would also represent the actual cost to the power company to generate that amount of power had it built a new nuclear reactor.

At the end of the 10 years, the power company gets to buy solar power from its customers at its regular rate, and it now has a new source of power without having to pay to maintain (and eventually dismantle) a nuclear reactor. In fact, while the reactor would have had a 20- to 30-year lifespan, the solar panels typically have a lifespan of 50 years.

Enjoy the rest of the chapter

This is the third chapter of Thom Hartmann’s new book, Rebooting the American Dream.  This chapter is – Stop Them From Eating My Town.

In this chapter Thom examines how Ronald Reagan helped screw small business in America  – nice “family values”.  This paved the way for mega-corporations like Wal-Mart to dominate an area and along the way force the local businesses into closing.   He also describes how other nations have avoided this trap.  Pasted below are the final two paragraphs which offer solutions, how refreshing!

Now would be a great time to reinvent the SBA from the ground up, making it a place where a person who wants to start an auto repair shop or a small retail store could find the capital to get off the ground. Of course, at the moment that would mean it would be competing with very large and powerful monopolistic banks, so it’s a politically unlikely event until the economy really crashes hard, taking those banks down with it. Nonetheless, the idea is a good one and should be promoted.

As a nation, we need to get our priorities right when it comes to providing incentives or disincentives for businesses: we need to support small, local businesses, which have created most new jobs historically; we also need to discourage or ban major corporations from their mergers-and-acquisitions mania, close the tax loopholes, and stop the tax subsidies for them. These steps, enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act, and moving our personal banking to a local credit union—all are good starts toward keeping our towns from getting eaten up by large, predatory corporations.

Truthout is publishing a chapter each week of Thom Hartmann’s new book, Rebooting The American Dream.  This week is Chapter 2 – Roll Back the Reagan Tax Cuts.

Be prepared to have some of your economic perceptions challenged.  With this chapter alone, you will learn that much of the conventional wisdom is wrong and why we have come to believe it.  Below is a brief excerpt,

Beyond fairness, holding back the landed gentry that the Founders worried about—America had no billionaires in today’s money until after the Civil War, with John D. Rockefeller being our first—in and of itself is an important reason to increase the top marginal tax rate and to do so now.

Novelist Larry Beinhart was the first to bring this to my attention. He looked over the history of tax cuts and economic bubbles and found a clear relationship between the two. High top marginal tax rates—generally well above 60 percent—on rich people actually stabilize the economy, prevent economic bubbles from forming, prevent the subsequent economic crashes, and lead to steady and sustained economic growth as well as steady and sustained wage growth for working people.3

On the other hand, when top marginal rates drop below 50 percent, the opposite happens.

Truthout is publishing a chapter of Thom Hartmann’s “Rebooting the American Dream” every week.  Thom is an award winning author and talk show host that can be heard on XM 167 or seen on Free Speech TV.

http://www.truth-out.org/rebooting-american-dream-chapter-one-bring-my-job-home65127

In particular, compare the last thirty years of economic performance between South Korea and the United States.   Thom documents this and notes that the Korean adoption of Alexander Hamilton/Traditional American trade policy of tariffs to protect domestic industry had allowed them to raise their per capita income from $400 to $32,000 since the 1960′s.  The United States following the Free Trade policy has gone from the world’s greatest creditor to world’s greatest debtor nation while wages have stagnated and purchasing power has declined .  Which system will help rebuild America?