Bücher von Thom Hartmann

America's most popular progressive radio host and New York Times bestselling author Thom Hartmann reveals how and why neoliberalism became so prevalent in the United States and why it's time for us to turn our backs to it. With four decades of neoliberal rule coming to an end, America is at a crossroads. In this powerful and accessible book, Thom Hartmann demystifies neoliberalism and explains how we can use this pivotal point in time to create a more positive future. This book traces the history of neoliberalism-a set of capitalistic philosophies favoring free trade, low taxes on the rich, financial austerity, and deregulation of big business-up to the present day. Hartmann explains how neoliberalism was sold as a cure for wars and the Great Depression. He outlines the destructive impact that it has had on America, looking at how it has increased poverty, damaged the middle class, and corrupted our nation's politics. America is standing on the edge of a new progressive era. We can continue down the road to a neoliberal oligarchy, as supported by many of the nation's billionaires and giant corporations. Or we can choose to return to Keynesian economics and Alexander Hamilton's ''American Plan'' by raising taxes on the rich, reversing free trade, and building a society that works for all.

This book deals with two very large and often amorphous concepts: privacy and surveillance in the context of both government and the marketplace. Both concepts have undergone changes over the millennia of recorded human history, and those changes have dramatically sped up and expanded over the past few centuries, starting with the widespread use of the printing press in the mid- to late-15th century when books and newspapers began to proliferate across Europe and the rest of the ''civilized'' world by the end of the 17th century. The development of radio, television and the internet in the 20th century heightened the need to define more clearly what both concepts meant and how they applied both to governments (the ''public sector'') and individual and corporate players (the ''private sector'')...

Thom Hartmann, the most popular progressive radio host in America and a New York Times bestselling author, looks at the history of the battle against oligarchy in America-and how we can win the latest round. Billionaire oligarchs want to own our republic, and they're nearly there thanks to legislation and Supreme Court decisions that they have essentially bought. They put Trump and his political allies into office and support a vast network of think tanks, publications, and social media that every day push our nation closer and closer to police-state tyranny. The United States was born in a struggle against the oligarchs of the British aristocracy, and ever since then the history of America has been one of dynamic tension between democracy and oligarchy. And much like the shock of the 1929 crash woke America up to glaring inequality and the ongoing theft of democracy by that generation's oligarchs, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has laid bare how extensively oligarchs have looted our nation's economic system, gutted governmental institutions, and stolen the wealth of the former middle class.

Hartmann is perhaps best known for his fierce commitment to Jeffersonian democracy and his steadfast opposition to the corporatization of America. But in these pages you'll also discover his Older and Younger Cultures hypothesis, which identifies the root cause of so many of our social and environmental ills. You'll hear from Hartmann on how to keep our schools from treating children like assembly line products, why attention deficit disorder is not an affliction, what cloudy Germany can teach us about solar energy, and much more. Fascinating as these essays are, they're ultimately meant to inspire you to action. As Hartmann says at the end of every radio program, ''Get out there, get active! Tag, you're it!''

In today's America, only a slim majority of people register to vote, and a large percentage of registered voters don't bother to show up: Donald Trump was elected by only 26 percent of eligible voters. Unfortunately, this is not a bug in our system, it's a feature. Thom Hartmann unveils the strategies and tactics that conservative elites in this country have used, from the foundation of the Electoral College to the latest voter ID laws, to protect their interests by preventing ''the wrong people''-such as the poor, women, and people of color-from voting while making it more convenient for the wealthy and white. But he also lays out a wide variety of simple, commonsense ways that we the people can fight back and reclaim our right to rule through the ballot box.

This is the most important, dynamic book on the cancers of monopoly by giant corporations written in our generation."--from the foreword by Ralph Nader American monopolies dominate, control, and consume most of the energy of our entire economic system; they function the same as cancer does in a body, and, like cancer, they weaken our systems while threatening to crash the entire body economic. American monopolies have also seized massive political power and use it to maintain their obscene profits and CEO salaries while crushing small competitors. But Thom Hartmann, America's #1 progressive radio host, shows we've broken the control of behemoths like these before, and we can do it again. Hartmann takes us from the birth of America as a revolt against monopoly (remember the Boston Tea Party?), to the largely successful efforts of both Presidents Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and other like-minded leaders to restrain corporations' monopolistic urges, to the massive changes in the rules of business starting during the "Reagan Revolution" that have brought us to the cancer stage of capitalism. He shows the damage monopolies have done to so many industries: agriculture, healthcare, the media, and more. Individuals have taken a hit as well: the average American family pays a $5,000 a year "monopoly tax" in the form of higher prices for everything from pharmaceuticals to airfare to household goods and food. But Hartmann also describes commonsense, historically rooted measures we can take--such as revitalizing antitrust regulation, taxing great wealth, and getting money out of politics--to pry control of our country from the tentacles of the monopolists.