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A lot of credit for what happened then goes to Thomas Paine, a man we now know about but only because Thomas Edison discovered him in the 1920s and believed he was our most important political thinker. Edison was able to convince the nation's mainstream educational system to include Paine's writings and teach what he had to say. In Paine's The Rights of Man and other works, he supported the notion of a strong middle class and a democratic system of government. Hartmann believes his writings were so important and influential in his day, there might never have been a revolution liberating the nation from the Crown without them.His thinking was profound and included the notion that only people have rights, not governments or corporations, and everyone should be taxed proportionally to income. He also believed inherited wealth needed to be curbed to avoid creating a new feudalism. Otherwise, it would corrupt government because heirs could create dynasties with the power to co-opt a ruling body to use for their own purposes, hurting ordinary people. He felt the best way to build a strong democracy was to provide financial aid for young families with the expense of raising children. In addition, he proposed food and housing assistance for the poor and retirement pensions for people in old age. Further, he was a strong anti-militarist wanting all nations to reduce their armaments by 90% to ensure world peace. Tom Paine was a great and enlightened thinker and a man most educated people know of and respect. He had such great influence in his day we can only wish for someone of his stature to emerge now when the need for it is greater than ever.
Hartmann also briefly mentions what he covered in some detail in his earlier book Unequal Protection. There he explained a little known event in our history that might have changed everything had Thomas Jefferson and James Madison prevailed over Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. Jefferson and Madison were able to add the first 10 amendments to the Constitution we know as The Bill of Rights but wanted two others as well Hamilton and Adams opposed. One was the "freedom from monopolies in commerce" (what are now giant corporations) and the other was the "freedom from a permanent military" or standing armies. Try to imagine how different the country might be today if Jefferson and Madison had prevailed.
The result was corporations got what they long coveted - the same constitutional rights as people, but because of their limited liability status, their shareholders were protected from the obligations of their debts, other obligations, and many of the responsibilities individuals legally have. With this new status, corporations could now win many other favorable court decisions they weren't entitled to before. They also got much regulatory relief, favorable legislation, and all the while, were and are still protected by their limited liability status. More than any other High Court decision, this one gave corporations the ability to increase their power and grow to their present size and dominance.
Think of it. Corporations aren't human, they can live forever, change their identity, reside in many places simultaneously in many countries, but can't be imprisoned for wrongdoing and can change themselves into new persons at will for any reason. Under the Constitution, they have the same rights as people but not the responsibilities. And they got all this because a court reporter gave it to them in his "headnotes," after the fact, in a Court decision having nothing to do with corporate personhood. The result today is that corporations have the right to operate freely and virtually be able to do whatever they choose with impunity. Even when they're caught breaking the law, most every time (with rare exceptions) their executives get off scot-free and the penalty assessed is a small fine that amounts to chump change.
Hartmann then goes on to discuss the business of war and notes what James Madison believed compared to most modern-day presidents. War is big business and a permanent state of it is much bigger, which is why waging many of them is so appealing to those in power today. It's also usually a winning political issue as wartime presidents are more likely to be reelected, and they also have more power than those serving in peacetime. George Orwell knew that democracy was weakest in a state of war, and Hitler used that to his advantage to seize total power after scaring the German people with threats that didn't exist to give him enough of it in the first place. This is what James Madison warned against when he wrote: "Of all the enemies to public safety war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other." He added that "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual war." Benjamin Franklin also spoke out against war and said "There never was a good war or a bad peace." And notable US General Smedley Butler, who was awarded two Congressional Medals of Honor (the nation's highest military honor) for his service and at one time was one of the nation's most distinguished military leaders, later wrote a book called War Is a Racket in which he denounced it in a polemic we can't even imagine from anyone in government service today.
Hartmann, too, sounds the alarm about the dangers of war and where it may lead the nation. It drove Nazi Germany to fascism and all the horrors from it. Today we're at the same dangerous juncture with the nation at war, fascism rising, and doing it behind the facade of "compassionate conservatisim" and an invented "Islamo-fascist" terrorist threat used to scare the public to go along with a rogue president's "long war" without end to combat it. Hartmann tells us we face a clear and present threat to our freedom today and "It's up to us - to We the People - to sound the alarm (to combat it)."
Part III - Governing for We the People - It's a government of, for and by the people and not one serving big corporations and inherited wealth
Throughout the book, Hartmann repeatedly stresses the critical point about whether we want the kind of nation the Founders gave us serving the people or will we allow the cons to get a government in service to the "elite of a corporatocracy" and inherited wealth. A large part of what the cons want is what Hartmann calls "a religion of privatization." In their view, whatever government can do, private business can do better including controlling all elements of the commons that comprise our most essential services like health care, education, parts of the military, prisons and even the electoral system. It's all part of their fraudulent notion of "faith-based economics" that doesn't work. Nonetheless, with government in league with business, it's happening to the detriment of the public welfare.
Most people would be amazed to learn the second largest army in Iraq comes from none of the other nations supplying forces. It's the 30,000 private contractors the Bush administration hired at an enormous cost that's far higher than what we pay those in the military. Why do it this way and spend more? It's another way to transfer billions of dollars from the people to big corporations to enrich them at our expense. Prisons are also being privatized and now are at a level of about 5% of their capacity in about 100 facilities in 27 states and growing. But since private prisons are a business, there's an incentive to fill beds and keep them filled with longer sentences while minimizing services to keep costs low. It makes harsh prison life far more grim for those interned.
Most insidious of all is the privatizing of elections. Hartmann calls this the "ultimate crime." He cites that in 2004 more than 80% of the US vote was counted on electronic voting machines owned, programmed and operated by three large private corporations. So instead of having paper ballots counted by hand by civil servants monitored by party faithful and independent observers, we now have a secretive process that's unverifiable and all controlled by large companies with everything to gain if the candidates they support win. It puts the ugly taint of fraud over the whole process and makes a sham out of the notion of free, fair and open elections. That's impossible if they're run by self-serving private corporations as they now are. Unless this practice is stopped, we've lost what Tom Paine said at the nation's founding: "The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery."
Besides being able to elect their own representatives, the electorate must also be well-informed. Hartmann quotes Thomas Jefferson who said "Our liberty depends upon the freedom of the press (which starts with a literate citizenry, something we're far short of today)." The data on the ability of the public to read varies, but it shows a common pattern. The US Department of Education reports about 20% of the public to be functionally illiterate which means they can't read or write well enough to do such essential things as read a newspaper, understand written instructions, fill out a job application or do basic computational tasks, let alone be able to operate a computer. Hartmann uses other data from the National Center of Education Statistics that breaks the literacy problem into different skill-level categories, but any way it's looked at it shows a nation inadequately able to function the way citizens must be able to do in a modern society.
The quality of education today, particularly in urban schools, has deteriorated so much because of the rise in prominence of service-related industries, many of which require little formal education. There's no incentive to correct the problem, and George Bush's No Child Left Behind Act and stealth plan to privatize public education (along with everything else in the commons that never should be) will only make things worse. The Bush agenda includes so-called school vouchers that mask an intent to end the separation of church and state by allowing vouchers to go mostly to schools where the central mission is (Christian) religious education or training. The fraudulent rationale for doing it is the same one the cons always fall back on - that marketplace competition improves performance. It's not so as in all other areas where private business replaced government-run programs the public ended up getting less and paying more for it. That's how it is with education that's not a commodity for sale and never should be put in the hands of for-profit companies that need to minimize costs to keep their bottom line high.
The same is true for health care that should be a basic right and not a privilege available only to those who can afford the cost. But that's not how it is in the US. This is the only country among the 36 fully industrialized democracies in the world that treats health care as a marketplace commodity. The result is that while the country spends far more on health care than any other one (about $2 trillion in 2005 or about one-sixth of the nation's GDP) it delivers a quality of care mediocre enough for the World Health Organization (WTO) to rank us 37th in the world in "overall health performance" and 54th in the fairness of health care. No one should be denied the right to good medical care, but today nearly 47 million people in the country have no health insurance and millions more are underinsured, thus denying them the essential care they deserve to have, especially when they need it most.
So today with more companies reducing the amount of health insurance coverage they provide employees combined with stagnant wages rising less than the rate of inflation, increasing numbers of people can't afford to buy protection for the most important need they can't afford to do without. It's created a state of social inequality seen in the Economic Policy Institute 2004 report on the State of Working America. It showed the top 1% controls more than one-third of the nation's wealth while the bottom 80% has 16%. Even worse, the top 20% holds 84% of all wealth while the poorest 20% are in debt and owe more than they own. Just released Internal Revenue Service data shows the same imbalance. The IRS reported the share of all income earned by the top 1% of taxpayers rose to 19% in 2004 from 16.8% in 2003 and just below the 20.8% high it hit in 2000 helped by capital gains from the stock market boom of the 1990s. All this shows how unbalanced wealth and income distribution are under an economic model favoring the rich and leaving all others behind. To rectify this, the nation needs a new model that distributes the nation's wealth more equitably and that begins with its tax code. It also needs to provide health care for all its citizens which it already does for its senior ones - a single-payer system administered by the government and allowing people to choose their own providers. But even seniors are in trouble today as the Bush administration wants to move retirees on Medicare into private for-profit plans and thus kill off a system that effectively serves the public. The private operators need to cut costs to grow their profits, but when they do it people most in need are hurt the most.
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