Thom Hartmann presents The Hidden History of Neoliberalism
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- čas přidán 20. 09. 2022
- In his new book, The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and How to Restore Its Greatness (Berrett-Koehler), progressive radio host 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. While America is at a crossroads regarding its economic future, many of us don't fully understand how we got here. In his powerful and accessible new book, Hartmann demystifies neoliberalism and explains how we can use this pivotal point in time to create a more positive future. The Hidden History of Neoliberalism traces the history of neoliberalism - which applies to a set of capitalistic philosophies favoring free trade, financial austerity, and deregulation - up to the present. Hartmann explains how neoliberalism was sold as a cure for wars and the Great Depression. He outlines the impact that it has had on America, looking at different sectors, including healthcare, unemployment, and education. Hartmann highlights how America can go one of two ways: continue going down the road to neoliberal oligarchy, as supported by the GOP, or choose to return to FDR's Keynesian economics, raise taxes on the rich, reverse free trade, and create a more pluralistic society.
Get a copy of The Hidden History of Neoliberalism here: www.powells.com/book/the-hidd... - Zábava
Reagan was an awful president and I knew it then and I know it now! Thank you for making it clear!
Thom Hartmann thank you for this erudite presentation on neoliberalism, how can we get rid of this biased system which is destroying our society .
Really fantastic discussion! Thank you so much to Powell's for hosting this and sharing it. ❤️ I've been making a real effort to learn more about our history (especially in the US), and Thom has been instrumental in my education. I am so grateful to be able to hear him speak about his research. Just an incredible teacher. So thank you to both Powell's and Thom for doing this. ❤️❤️
One thing he doesn't mention and many neo-liberals also tend to hide is that companies don't need money to make investments. Capitalism has found a solution to that called credit. It's one of the few things about capitalism that I will undeniably consider to be a good thing.
I actually used to be a libertarian, until 2007. I don't see how anyone can be one after that.
I do
Thanks Thom this is amazing history….I spent my academic life buried in anatomy, physiology, pathology,etc as a student doctor and training physician and somehow missed out on all these important happenings , theories and the explanation of why things are so messed up!!!
In Puerto Rico the neoliberal movement is bent on separating the puertoricans from their island and going so far as to denying the fact that it is a country that is a colony per se , and that the invasion of USA was the starting point of our existence. In other words a culture , history of a nation is being wiped out and all for the sake of free business. The PPA have wiped out the island infrastructure and even jails are in private hands. 60 percent of the population is on food stamps, unemployment is double digit. The governing party Is a sham of corruption and fantasies of statehood which they market as the panacea to all our problems. If ever there were a place in heavy jeopardy come a world war it would be PR with 3+ million population and NO agriculture!
I quite enjoy learning about the american governance system...glad you have this channel ..
Great interview, thank you.
Don't forget the Hudson Institute which Deadeye Dick Cheney is a head member
This is a great summary of neoliberalism. Thanks.
I am learning!!
Neoliberalism Defined
4:51 “Neoliberalism is comprised of basically six or seven major points.”
4:57 1. Markets know best.
“The first is the idea that the marketplace is inherently more brilliant, competent, and well-informed than any bureaucrat or politician ever could be.”
Thom pushes back. Economics are just games that we play. Games need rules, and they have to work for the benefit of the people. Social Darwinism. It’s nuts. It’s like saying whichever NFL team has the most money can decide to give themselves more players than all the other teams.
7:32 “The rules of the game should be neutral.”
7:37 2. Deregulation.
“Second, they believed that any kind of interference in the marketplace distorted the marketplace and thus prevented the market from working its ‘magic’. Deregulation was at the top of their list. All government regulation should basically be disposed of. … That was the goal, and they are still working in that direction.”
Example contaminated drugs, quack doctors, no problem.
8:52 3. Labor Unions Can’t Have Real Power
“Another variable that distorts marketplace is labor unions. Interference in the normal functioning of and decision-making of a business by people who work for that business, who should be basically subordinate to the business.”
9:20 “We’ve certainly seen America move in that direction over the last 40 years since Ronald Reagan imposed neoliberalism on the United States in 1981.”
9:28 4. Free Trade.
“Another aspect of the labor consideration of theirs was that corporations should be able to seek the cheapest labor they can find anywhere they can find it. The national borders should not matter. That all corporations should have the ability to be transnational…”
ME - My question in a college honors economics seminar, starting the class session I taught with the question/prompt “Does America’s lifestyle as we know it require a permanent lower economic class of people?” landed to absolute silence from my fellow honor students and professor.
ME again - So neoliberalism (our capitalism) is anti-nationalistic - so it should be rejected in principle by both protectionist of jobs and welcoming of immigrants social democrats, and protection of borders conservatives.
10:34 “So free trade is the fourth aspect of neoliberalism.”
10:40 5. Destroy the Social Safety Net
“The idea that a social safety net should exist was, in their minds, another distortion of the marketplace. They believed that people wouldn’t work if they weren’t frightened.”
11:01 “So their idea was that Social Security should be gone, or it should be turned into a private insurance program…which is something Republicans have been trying to do since the 1930s. Medicare same deal. George Bush did this in 2003…”
13:00 6. Cutting Taxes [on the rich]
“Another provision was the belief that people who had risen to the top, and corporations that had risen to the top of the economy, were, as I said earlier, the darwinian .. clear winners. So they should be the least inhibited in what they do. And one of the great inhibitors of economic activity is taxes. Neoliberalism has created a situation now where the average income tax paid by America’s 700 billionaires is around 3%, whereas the rest of us pay 20-30% in income taxes. More than half of the Fortune 500 companies pay no taxes at all. …
Cutting taxes on the rich.
Raising taxes on the poor. …
Reagan doubled the social security taxes, Reagan increased taxes on working people 18 times.
14:12 7. Privatize Everything
“Privatizing public function. Neoliberals believe that it’s appropriate for government to run the army and the police, but that’s it. Fire departments should be privatized, roads should be privatized …”
14:33 “Anything that the government does should be handed off to somebody who can make a buck off it so that it inserts itself into the so-called free market.
We shouldn’t have government, for example, running electric companies. …Dozens of studies have proven over the years that those cities and counties and states that generate their own electricity by government, do so at a lower cost with better efficiency and greater reliability, but you know their [neoliberals’] theory was that if you put all this in the hands of for-profit corporations they they do it more efficiently and cheaper and therefore everything would be wonderful. IN fact, those corporations have to pay their CEOs multi-million dollar salaries, they gotta show a profit, they’ve got to distribute that profit to their shareholders as dividends, etc.”
15:29 8. Inequality
“Finally, they believed that the existence of great inequalities of wealth.
- For example, right now there are two American men who control more wealth than the bottom half of the entire American population -
And monopolies in business, were actually signs of a properly functioning economy. …
Charles Dickens wrote about unregulated capitalism. …
In unregulated Capitalism you have that kind of situation that Dickens described. You have the top 1% … the big landowners and factory owners.
…a very small middle class, typically 3-5%, which is what Scrooge was…and the middle class is made up of doctors and lawyers and merchants and things like that.
And then you’ve got the 95% who are the working poor who live their entire lives in debt.
That’s the resting state of capitalism. …”
Thank you for the effort you put into this comment on Tom's show. It is an excellent summary and I have copied it so I can study it.
Thank you so very much for your description of neoliberalism!
Socalism policy is why middle class shrunk
Great analysis. I thank you also. So many books to read 📚. It is important. Suggestion, read " The Art of War & Other Classics of Eastern Philosophy." Has anything changed in 2500 hundred years ? 🤔
There is no particular need to define neoliberalism. That too in english.
Given what Thomas Hartmann says is largely true, validated. However it is not the case only with America. After all americans did not invent anything new other than setting up a very faulty empire at best. This condition "Big Brother" or say Totalitarianism is allover the world now. In the mid 1960s FA Hayek (Austrian economist theorist) explained this very well in his epic book - Road to Serfdom. He explained with great care that all states (socialist, capitalist, communist, federalist etc) will turn Big Brother, one way or another. Violence and coercive decision making will be the hallmark of all dysfunctional democracies. One can always divest and trash Big Brother, by simply not using it. Mark Zuckerberg or Donald Trump - Both wicked white capitalist assholx to be precise.
Trickle down economics really works if trickle down is supposed to feel like you're getting pissed on
That was such a good one I'm going to use that
also referred to as tinkle-down economics
i want to send this to every single libertarian i know
He is looking at all these mixes of tyrants and markets and thinking their examples of freedom in the market. Yeah Nixon and Reagan are tyrants, but so are Clinton and Biden. I think this guy is still trapped in the Left / Right paradigm instead of the tyranny / anarchy paradigm.
Polices to End Neoliberalism
35:03 “What are the policies that we should do if we want to end neoliberalism?”
1. Rational Top Tax Rates.
“Number one, we need to go back to rational taxes.
Franklin Roosevelt raised the top tax rate on the morbidly rich to 91%. [1930s]
…Lyndon Johnson dropped that down to 74% (1960s]…
It prevented this massive explosion of inequality. …
36:30 “The average CEO only made thirty times what the average worker made.
Now you’ve got the average CEO making 400 500 in some industries 10,000 times what the average worker makes.”
38:37 1. Top Tax Rate
“So number one, we need to go back to an over 50% top tax rate for the morbidly rich and at least an over 35% tax rate for corporations to incentivize good behavior.”
38:47 2. Return to Labor Unions
“Number two, we need to return labor unions … Elizabeth Warren proposed the National Right to Unionize Act … “
39:19 3. Break up Monopolies
“Number three, we need to start breaking up these monopolies that have formed …
The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1891 [?] …
The Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1927 …
The Anti-Trust Act of 1957 …
But in 1983 Ronald Reagan instructed the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission to stop enforcing the antitrust laws.”
41:16 4. College Cost Covered by State and Federal
“Reagan reversed that. 80% of the cost college was paid for by state and federal government when Reagan came into office in 1980[1]. Now, 80% of the cost of college is paid for by tuition, and only 20% is covered by state and federal.”
41:39 5. Healthcare Access
“We need to give Americans access to healthcare. … down to number 50 in the world in terms of life expectancy. Every single country that has a better life expectancy than us has a national healthcare system. Every single one of them.”
42:13 6. Increase the Minimum Wage
“Finally, we need to increase the minimum wage to something reasonable. At least $15 an hour, so that we no longer have people living in poverty.”
42:23 7. Strengthen the Social Safety Net
“We need to strengthen the social safety net with programs that support food and housing and things like that.”
Book has references and links to backup statements.
The essential selling point is not only to laud the market as the solution, and say government is the problem (and who likes government, it's "coercive"), but that raising taxes, cutting regulations, slashing the social safety net etc. will benefit everyone; that giving more benefits to the wealthy will trickle down to the rest of us, because they are the "job creaters". That's the big come-on; that neoliberalism creates economic growth. They don't mention that it only creates growth for the wealthy. As Rachel Maddow put it so well, "The rich did great! Everybody else? Still waiting for the trickle...." czcams.com/video/z5CCRI1vdwE/video.html How to get all this done? "Politics" says Hartmann. "Vote for progressives". I say, vote Democratic (or Green).
Remember the election leading up to the '37 Presidential Election and during that time FDR lowered the 90% tax rate on the rich causing the mild Roosevelt Recession his Oyster Bay cousin said she rather vote for Hitler than her cousin so his wife Eleanor and his advisors convinced him to put the tax rate back to 90% long story short he's re-elected and told Eleanor that " I don't ever want to speak to that damn woman again"
I believe in ny state if parents make 125,000 or less your child gets tution free college student is responsible for books, housing and food and i think student fee they have to carry insurance..and do sports fee.. its a four year umbrella for suny colleges and student needs to live with parents and after graduation student needs to live in ste for certain amt of years or have to paid back colleges tution.
Being middle class is still possible with so many jobs that never get filled because of uneducated citizens. Carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and steam fitters, welders, etc. An FDR type of program is needed to train the replacement of the retired baby boomers.
Not really. There is no magic that makes those jobs good. It's policies and the power of the capitalists that control it.
It was reported today that you now need a six-figure income to have a shot at owning a home. Hopefully, you've got a buttload of cash saved up and have no debt problems.
Thank you Tom ! I’ve been bitching and warning people about this for decades ! You did SUPERB . I’m not at the end yet . But , I want to make sure you educate people about Zero sum ! About how it creates desperate and opulence . How combined with the Breton woods 1,2. The federal reserve act establishes zero sum that establishes the castes . Supply side gives power to the rich ( supply side) .
Keynes at Versailles wanted to balance it and end debt system . The real limiting factor is natural resources .
Explain it so people can understand please ! Because I’m failing ! You’re doing much better . Please let your next book be Keynes plan to Versailles 🙏🙏🙏❤️
Thank you!
Important work. Well done.
Imperialism, Oligarchism, Neo-Liberalism, British Free Trade, Liberal Imperialism, these are all terms for the same thing. We must return to the Republic of Washington and Hamilton!
Legacy of Jude Wanniski Art Laffer Heritage Foundation , Christopher Rufo's Manhattan Institute
Rather than calling it neo-liberalism, maybe you should call it "British Free Trade", because that is what the American System rejected. That is what should unite us, but there have always been two factions since the founding. Washington, Hamilton, Franklin on the American System and then Jefferson and Madison on the British Free Trade which later became the confederacy and then took over both parties and the federal government and replaced our national bank with the Trickle Down Fed. It is just the modern British Empire.
The hits just keep on coming. Live long and prosper Thom. 😂
Booyakasha! It's good to see Ali G back in the business of interviewing people.
(Not) Funny that your first example of the wisdom of the market was orange juice - stripping the fiber out of healthy fruit to help create a mass epidemic of Type II diabetes…
Thank you.
Thank You!!
Thanks. It's a real good demonstration of a misunderstanding of Austrian economics. And, the great dangers of freedom.
Hartmann mentioned Naomi Klein. There are several other younger authors who nail it on this topic. Entreprenuer Nick Hanauer for one. czcams.com/video/scok7hEexCk/video.html
British journalist George Monbiot: czcams.com/video/jOuzABjrAo4/video.html
41:59
America had the best education quality in the world,
you name the system anything you want, but I would like to keep it that way.
Kudos to Thom for all of his ADHD ideas as well!
It now says we are 60th in life expectancy, only a year later.
If the leader in office would have understood the sense during the pandemic national healthcare is To keep safe theair county.
I always think of Neoliberalism as market worship religion.
Fascism trickles down. Money trickles up. (This aphorism is public domain, use liberally).
As usual, legit.
2:06 Thom.
"Morbidly Rich" ~ ain't that the truth!
Thanks. I disagree skeptically with you more than I agree, but I respect your ethos: your patient attempts to explain your position--often by explaining your opponents' views along with yours. It is refreshing to hear an arguer show enough respect for opposing views by explaining them pretty accurately. Thanks, and happy holidays ro you and your loved ones.
What part did you disagree with
@@davidlangley09 My comment was meant to be genereral rather than specific or 'partial". If it didn't come across that way I apologize. I have listended to Mr. Hartmann over the years and have found him to be informative, but I have never shared his perennial optimism that The State can effectively solve problems through more and more innovative regulation and thus 'socialistic' constraint on society--which he and Dr. Richard Wolff are perplexingly quite enamored with. Which I am not, and will never be, as you might have gathered by now. Govt. has its place, of course (axiomatic), but in my view, the more control a State acquires, in gets inevitably closer to 'total' fat bloated bureaucratic control--for the common good, of course.
Sorry, but I've read to much Orwell and Huxley and Kafka (The Trial is, in my view, underrated and can be construed as an allegory for our time.)
So I'm responding generally, not specifically. Not intending to elicit. These are my thoughts. I'm sure you have yours.
Double speak.
So in other words you prefer to cling to indoctrination that you can neither explain nor defend.
I wish we could better define middle class
Take a trip through West Virginia if you think privatized roads are more "efficient". Be ready to pay a huge TAX as you go, oops I mean toll.
Hello from Kentucky. Put a US flag up, over the whole world, with a picture of Rand Paul on it. Make all of us face the fact that these are the people who we've agreed to labor under and if after seeing that face day after day to confront our complacency, maybe we could have a moment of revolutionary clarity.
Sounds like a really fact-based book
Unfortunately, Thom's account of the history of the rise of neoliberalism is very inaccurate. The legend which Thom recycles is that the neoliberals were largely a small obscure group before the oil crisis of 1973.
However, the neoliberals had started to become a significant political force in the early 1960s when their ideas were adopted by the John Birch Society. Through this the neoliberals began to take over the Republicans so much so that Goldwater, the Republican Presidential candidate in 1964, was a devoted neoliberal and appointed Milton Friedman as his chief spokesman and put other neoliberals in charge of his campaign, economic team etc. Although Goldwater crashed and burned in the election, the neoliberals became a national force with Friedman a household name.
During the 64 Campaign Ronald Reagan was won to their ranks and in 1966 was elected Republican Governor of California on a neoliberal platform. Then Reagan threatened to challenge Nixon for the Republican nomination for the Presidency in 1968. In response Nixon shifted to the right and adopted the neoliberal economic platform. Elected President Nixon started to implement neoliberal policies in 1969 and 1970 but in the face of the 1971 economic crisis did a U-turn and returned to Keynesianism.
The same process happened in the UK. Just before the 1970 election, Ted Heath and the Conservatives adopted a neoliberal economic programme strongly supported by Margaret Thatcher, a new member of his shadow ministerial team. In power, Heath began to implement the programme but facing intense protests and the economic crisis of 1971 did a U-turn back to Keynesian policies.
In the 1970s the UK neoliberals grew in strength with Thatcher winning the Conservative Party leadership in 1975, and Reagan almost winning the Republican Presidential nomination in 1976. Meanwhile, neoliberal policies began to be introduced by both the UK Labour government in 1976 and the Carter Presidency in the late 1970s.
The election of Thatcher's Conservatives to power in 1979 and Reagan in 1980 brought neoliberalism to full flower.
You confirm what I have always elected, That Ronald Reagan was a cretin and those that voted for him were cretins, but this has nothing to do with liberalism. It is Conservative reaction
Would love to see Thom give his thoughts on all the data that has come out about the lockdowns and the Covid injections.
Check out his program. He has covered that somewhere!
Nothing new here. John C Calhoun called it the 'consensus of the plunder of the public purse."
And, as always, no actually reads Darwin.
How did a person like Milton Friedman become such evil personified?
because he IS evil personified.
Darwinism had been misinterpreted massively!
We are still paying the price of that nonsense!
yes, although misinterpreting it was inevitable, because its view of nature was also wrong and damaging.
The anti-vaxxers show us Darwinism is still in full swing. Good Lord, can you imagine how worse Covid-19 would have been with an anti-vaxxer as POTUS?
Lots of fluff. when we run out of stuff its over.
Love you Thom. I wish we could make every person in the US listen to you. But it wouldn't make any difference to Trumpstink's cult.
Nobel Prizes in Economics started in 1969. The U.S. has won 61 times. The next highest number is England with 9. During that almost exact time period there has been, acording to the Rand Center, a "transfer" of wealth of approximately $50 Trillion Dollars from the bottom 90% of people to the top 1%. The people of the United States can't take any more Nobel Prize winners
Tomm consider that nobody wants factories polluting again, so my solution is 3D printing centers in every garage where you can make whatever u need in your own factory. Also natural gas is abundant in the USA and oil can be created out of natural gas. Very clean for the environment.
natural gas is fossil fuels and causes climate change
He kinda had me until he said the Democratic Party wants to keep us as a democracy…lol. 😅
He should still "have you" because he is exactly right. Democracy is on the ballot, and if you want it, vote blue.
Did you know the top 20 most dangerous cities in America are all Democrat run?
@@TheArcturusProject Almost all cities in the USA are run by Democrats. That's just our urban rural demographic split. In fact, more murders and gun violence occur in red states than in blue states that have stricter gun laws. Gun laws work; your cruel deception just causes more mass murders.
You're very naive and Politically uneducated.
"Biden is fighting neoliberalism". One really has to sift around a lot of servile nonsense from this guy, in order to find some valuable remarks.
Hartmann is right. Biden would have reversed neoliberalism a lot further were it not for Sinema and Manchin. Biden specifically stated in his speeches that "trickle-down" has to go. Obama said so too, and even Clinton too. They just couldn't avoid compromising with it in the post-Reagan neoliberal era.
@@eameece You and Harmnam should wipe that Corporate Dem substance from the corner of your lips.
@@DonGonzalito The USA is a reactionary country. To expect utopia here is naive.
@@eameece Biden is still a neoliberal and capitalist lol. What industries has he nationalized?
Isn’t what is being discussed here neoconservatism? Wouldn’t Biden be a neoliberal considering his foreign policy views and the fact his China policy is almost identical to Trump’s?
No, neocons are mostly about US imperialism and militarist foreign policy. Hartmann did not discuss this, no. China adopted a more-protectionist economics policy with government oversight; Trump exaggerated Reagan's neoliberalism with huge tax cuts and deregulation. Besides free trade, neoliberalism mainly concerns empowering "free" markets in any country and lowering regulations and taxes therein.
Only the USA defines liberal in progressive terms. The European definition, and the rest of the world, says the opposite, which is where our confusion comes in.
@@georgeroberts613 I agree. It is puzzling that other nations misuse the term liberal, since it only means "freedom" for business and financial oligarchs to abuse and enslave people, and they know this too. Strange.
You had me up until you used the term “morbidly rich”. I don’t believe wealth is a disease, and if you are vilifying wealth, your entire message lacks integrity.
It's a disease because the wrong people get it. They used it to blackmail the world instead of helping it. Money will always be dirty but the person with it doesn't have to be. But, I guess not in our time anymore.
There should be a limit on how much one person can acquire.
Nonsense. Your "beliefs" don't count as evidence of anything. Nor does your "belief" based assessment of what is integrity.
Seems his thesis is exactly opposite to what he contends. Sly
In Germany only 47% people own homes so Thom Hartmann a liar saying middle class better off in Germany
I heard the economy sucked real bad under Allende too, complete with hyperinflation and shortages, causing many in the Chilean parliament to BEG Pinochet to come to power. He initially didn't want anything to do with politics. Hartmann in this and also on other issues seems to either get his facts wrong or purposely distorts the historical facts. For example, he talks about how the Reagan tax cuts caused the early 80s recession, the mid-80s S and L crisis and the '87 stock market crash. But the tax cut, or at least the most extreme portion, didn't go into effect until '88!
More people in West Virginia drive pickup trucks than in New York, so people in West Virginia must be better off.
I've been googling german home ownership for the past 15 minutes and every single source i come across says its anywhere from 49-53%
So what the heck are you talking about rn?
@@darkranger116 Berlin 15% whoops
@@megaton179 Hmm, ya, that's the denialist twist on things. Pinochet and another general were the CIA's pick when they were beating the bushes for a coup leader. Pinochet ended up on top and alone. Bit it was another CIA mad charge against anything that smelled of socialism, even democratic socialism as in Central America with Iran/Contra where the super patriots went fascist selling arms to Iran and drug to us, hauling them in on military planes after dropping off arms. Loaded both ways, how efficient.
As usual, legit.