The Plot to Destroy America – and What We Can Do to Stop It
by Thom Hartmann, 2014
In January and February, my UUA ministerial pension fund plummeted, so I thought I’d better read Thom Hartmann’s apparently prescient The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America – and What We Can Do to Stop It.
Thom Hartmann not only tells us the recent causes of our dips and surges, but also spans the centuries of American history to reveal its patterns and cycles. It is soon unpacked that “robber barons” refer not only to 19th century corporate plunderers but to 18th century targets of Tea Partiers and 21st century financiers or “Royalists” a word Hartmann uses to link them all. The reader is left hoping for a reincarnated FDR to save the working poor and the foreclosed home-owners, but sees that the bankers have become cleverer at being bailed out while the rest of us fall victim to “the Great Forgetting” of our economic history. In addition, the rich are now storing their wealth, not investing it in the job-creating enterprises the Right declares they will when taxes on them are lowered yet again.
Hartmann wasn’t entirely prescient, as he never guessed that oil would glut as “drill baby drill” never slowed (yet), but the market fell anyway as the price of oil tanked and the “poor” carbon-spewing companies’ stock took a big hit. And he didn’t guess that we’d lose the most conservative of Supreme Court Justices, Antonin Scalia, with the Senate majority refusing to even review an Obama appointment (yet). So a need for cures continues.
Hartmann’s list of cures is long. A few are
- Reverse Citizen’s United with a constitutional amendment to take “personhood” away from corporations (detailed history of this travesty is there).
- Reverse the slant of the Supreme Court with new appointments.
- revealing and undermining the ALEC Shadow Government
- card-check method of creating labor unions
- Create and support coöperatives.
- Medicare for All
- Institute a financial-transactions tax.
- Invest in infrastructure (and thus jobs), even by printing money.
- Eliminate billionaires who don’t need to buy things, and give raises to those people who do need to buy things.
- Invest in renewable non-carbon-burning energy and save the planet.
Please read the book for in-depth revelations and the methodology of democratic resurrection.
Find the book here.
