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3 of 3 people found the following review to be helpful:

Practical ideas,  August 28, 2010

By Malvin

"Rebooting the American Dream" by progressive radio and TV host, entrepreneur, activist and author Thom Hartmann proposes how to restore American working class economic and political justice. Suggesting that America's proud industrial past is prologue to the future, Mr. Hartmann discusses the ideas and policies that are known to work if we can only find the wisdom and courage to act. Written with passion, intelligence and wry humor, Mr. Hartmann's accessible and empowering book should be appreciated by a wide audience.

Insprired by Alexander Hamilton's 11-point Plan for American Manufactures, Mr. Hartmann dedicates eleven chapters that touch on critical economic issues including tariffs, taxes, small business, banking, energy, immigration, and more. Mr. Hartmann finds that ever-increasing corporate control of the economy has led to concentrated ownership and wealth at the top while pushing the middle and lower classes of American workers towards the bottom. Drilling into each issue in detail, Mr. Hartmann discusses what policies need to change if we want everyone to participate in the American Dream, not just the few.

For example, Mr. Hartmann contends that stiff tariffs are critical to protecting the kinds of well-paying jobs that can only come from maintaining a strong domestic manufacturing base. On this point, Mr. Hartmann goes against the so-called free trade message that is relentlessly amplified by a media whose multinational corporate sponsors profit handsomely from their exploitation of world labor market disparities. In this light, Mr. Hartmann correctly and forcefully dismisses Thomas Friedman's well-known but erroneous 'flat' earth theory as "nonsense", siding instead with Hamilton and the dozens of other industrial countries around the world today including Germany, South Korea and China who have significantly raised their standards of living by supporting their respective home manufacturing industries.

However, Mr. Hartmann intends to do more than just inform. Trading on his signature radio and television sign-off, "Tag, you're it!" the author hopes that the information conveyed in his book will inspire readers to demand real change in government and accountability from big business. We need more people like Mr. Hartmann.

I highly recommend this book to everyone.

0 of 0 people found the following review to be helpful:

But will Obama read it?,  September 6, 2010

By Cecil Bothwell

Thom Hartmann has delivered another lucid explanation of what's gone wrong in America in recent decades, and, as ever, he is brief and to the point. I read this latest in one sitting and came away with talking points for my own work and a renewed hope that change is possible.

Hartmann is unrelenting in his assertion that Reaganomics and Clintonomics have undone our nation, abetted by corporate interests and the Supreme Court. Globalization has beggared the U.S., crushing the middle class, moving manufacturing and corporate headquarters offshore, and further entrenching the super-rich. CEO pay in this country was at about the world standard before Reagan, some 30 times that of entry-level workers. Now it is routinely 500 times greater than the lowest, and sometimes 5,000 times that level.

The author demonstrates and explains why higher taxes have always raised wages and reduced the size of government and why unions are essential to worker rights. He shows why all of the other developed nations in the world have benefited from universal health care and shows that a simple majority in Congress could make Medicare available to anyone who wanted to join - and that it would be easily and immediately revenue neutral.

Only once does Hartmann slip back into the faith-based thinking that must have been part of his youth when he sideswipes "our belief in the supremacy of science." (He wandered off into magical thinking in one brief stretch of his otherwise thoughtful The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Revised and Updated: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It's Too Late). Blaming "our belief" in science for environmental damage is an unfortunate confusion of cause and effect, for which I nearly bumped this review down to four stars - but Hartmann is otherwise so good that I gave him a pass. We don't "believe" or "disbelieve" in science, or shouldn't. We accept or don't accept the results of repeated experiments, and it isn't science that dumps toxins in rivers or allows genetically modified species to go wild, it is public policy and, often, corporate greed at work.

Elsewise, Thom, good on you. And tomorrow, the revolution.