Thom Hartmann Has A New Book

Thom Hartmann decided to publish his entire new book, Rebooting The American Dream: 11 Ways To Rebuild Our Country, chapter by chapter, week by week at Truthout, which is where this introduction comes from. We've been commenting on his last book, Threshold, since it came out and after reading this blurb from his publisher we were rarin' to get going on the new one: "Hamilton looked at the nation and determined what needed to be done to rebuild the country after the Revolutionary War had devastated it and subservience to England's Tudor Plan 'free trade' policies had left Americans without any significant domestic industrial base. In the same tradition, this book goes through 11 steps we can take today to rebuild our country in the wake of the devastation of 30 years of Reaganomics, and how we can recover the industrial base we've lost to the 'free trade/flat earth' idiocy of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era."

Hartmann starts with a quote from a Thomas Jefferson letter that progressives disappointed in last week's election, which saw so many ignorant extremists and bigoted Know Nothings sent to office, should keep in mind:

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

He then gets into the story about how Washington couldn't find a suit of clothing made in America for his inauguration because of British trade policies that kept the colonials dependent on England for manufactured goods.

When Washington became president in 1789, most of America’s personal and industrial products of any significance were manufactured in England or in its colonies. Washington asked his first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, what could be done about that, and Hamilton came up with an 11-point plan to foster American manufacturing, which he presented to Congress in 1791. By 1793 most of its points had either been made into law by Congress or formulated into policy by either President Washington or the various states, which put the country on a path of developing its industrial base and generating the largest source of federal revenue for more than a hundred years.

Those strategic proposals built the greatest industrial powerhouse the world had ever seen and, after more than 200 successful years, were abandoned only during the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton (and remain abandoned to this day). Modern-day China, however, implemented most of Hamilton’s plan and has brought about a remarkable transformation of its nation in a single generation.

...Chapter 1, “Bring My Job Home!” covers how economies work and why we need to heed Alexander Hamilton’s advice. It points out that simply moving money around or creating a service economy (“Do you want fries with that?”) doesn’t produce long-lasting wealth in a country; only manufacturing does. Political economist Adam Smith pointed out that it’s the application of human labor to raw materials-- his example was turning a tree branch into an ax handle-- that fuels a growing economy. We’ve gone from more than 20 percent of our economy being based on manufacturing before Reagan to around 11 percent now. This has left us in the precarious position of being unable to make a missile or an aircraft carrier that we may need if we have to defend Taiwan from China without parts from the communist dictatorship of China. These “free trade/flat earth” policies are stupid on national security grounds as much as anything else, but their major impact has been to dismantle the American middle class and consequently put our democracy itself at risk.

Enough to make you want to go out and pick up a copy? I hope so. I certainly intend to be quoting from it as much as I did from Threshold! Here's Thom interviewing Ralph Nader on populism, freedom and concentrated corporate power from about a week ago: