The Thom Hartmann Reader

by Thom Hartmann

  Some progressives have suggested that radio needs a “fairness doctrine” where a government panel will determine how much “liberal” or “conservative” programming each station carries and then force the stations to “balance” out any disequilibrium. But who decides what is “liberal” or “conservative”? Is there a checklist of political positions that a government watchdog would have to go through—immigration, taxes, protecting the commons, gay rights, abortion, gun control, foreign policy? It would be a mess, particularly since many of those issues don’t lend themselves to easy pigeonholing.

  A much easier way to balance the playing field is simply to bring into the marketplace real competition by separating syndication companies from local radio stations so that the stations will no longer have an incentive to carry programming because “it’s in the family” and instead will look for shows that can attract and hold an audience.

  Programming in the Public Interest

  We need to return to the notion of “programming in the public interest,” making news back into news. We also need to start enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and use it to break up the large media monopolies that have re-formed since the Reagan and Clinton eras, thus effectively rolling back media deregulation.

  And this isn’t limited to radio and TV. Consumer-friendly regulation almost always has a similar effect in breaking up monopolies when it’s designed to help people get around the monopoly.

  For example, the company that owns the copper wires, cable, G3 or G4 wireless, or fiber-optic cabling going into your house also owns the exclusive right to carry the content that goes over that infrastructure. If you have a cable company supplying your home, it’s probably competing only with the local phone company for your business. Because those two companies (and maybe a mobile provider) are the only ones “competing” for your business, they can easily keep prices—and profits—very high.

  In most other developed countries, however, regardless of who owns and maintains the wires, cable, or fiber, anybody can offer content over it. The rationale for this is that infrastructure of physical wires and the wireless frequencies constitutes a “natural monopoly” that heavily uses public spaces (cables and phone lines go through and along public streets and rights-of-way); and so while a company can make a small profit on that part of its business, the wires and the wireless frequencies are really a part of the commons that can be regulated.

  On the other hand, these developed countries believe that the content delivery should be competitive. After all, this is where most of the innovation comes from: it’s not a matter of the newest, coolest copper wires; it’s the content that draws customers.

  The result of this is that the average citizen in France, for example, pays about $33 per month for what the New York Times described as “Internet service twice as fast as what you get from Verizon or Comcast, bundled with digital high-definition television, unlimited long distance and international calling to 70 countries and wireless Internet connectivity for your laptop or smartphone throughout most of the country.”3

  And that’s all from private companies, with no government subsidies. Why? Because small and new companies are allowed to compete by the government’s requiring whichever company carries the signal (wire, cable, fiber, wireless) to make that signal path available to any company that wants to offer content to consumers.

  Competition—mandated by the French government—has driven the price down and innovation up. The average French citizen is not only paying one-fifth of what the average American pays for such services but is also getting better quality, more variety, and much faster Internet access.

  Breaking up the media monopolies and fostering more competition, innovation, and creativity in the media world clearly has public benefits, especially in ensuring that people have access to information they need to participate in our democracy. An informed and educated electorate would be one major result of such government regulation.

  The same result can also be helped by making higher education more accessible to the average American.

  Access to Higher Education

  Jefferson’s Tombstone

  Thomas Jefferson’s tombstone contains an epitaph he wrote before his death with a directive that not a single word be changed. He had been the president of the United States for two terms and the vice president for one, was a member of the Virginia legislature, and was a famous inventor and architect as well as the author of nearly a million words in various letters, diaries, notebooks, books, pamphlets, and rants. But he chose not to mention any of that on his gravestone.

  Besides the dates of his birth and death, he chose to be remembered for three things that he did in his 83 years of life on earth:

  HERE WAS BURIED THOMAS JEFFERSON

  AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

  OF THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

  AND FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

  Writing the Declaration of Independence was an obvious choice, and declaring forever his opposition to integrating church and state also made sense (although it got him demoted in 2010 in schoolbooks in the state of Texas). But “Father of the University of Virginia” being more important than “President of the United States of America”?

  Jefferson, it turns out, had this wacky idea. He actually believed that young people should be able to go to college regardless of their ability to pay, their station in life, and how rich or poor their parents were. He thought that an educated populace was the best defense of liberty and democracy in the new nation he’d helped birth.

  So the University of Virginia that he started was free.

  Reagan’s Legacy

  Ronald Reagan certainly thought that that was a wacky idea, and he was diametrically opposed to the Jeffersonian ideal. When he took office as governor of California in 1967, he quickly called for an end to free tuition at the University of California and an across-the-board 20 percent cut in state funding for higher education.4 He then argued for a cut in spending on construction for higher education in the state and set up the firing of the popular president of the university, Clark Kerr, whom he deemed “too liberal.”

  When asked why he was doing away with free college in California, Reagan said that the role of the state “should not be to subsidize intellectual curiosity.”

  Reagan further referred to college students who nationwide were protesting the Vietnam War as “brats,” “cowardly fascists,” and “freaks.” Adding that if the only way to “restore order” on the nation’s campuses was violence, that was fine with him. Just a few days before the Kent State shootings, he famously said, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement!”5

  The trend that Reagan began with the UC system continues to this day. During Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s tenure, state funding for education saw drastic cuts and tuition for undergraduate students rose by more than 90 percent.6

  Reagan set a tone as governor of California that metastasized across the nation through the 1970s and became federal policy when he was elected president in 1980. By the time he left office in 1988, federal funding for education in the United States had declined from 12 percent of total national educational spending in 1980 to just 6 percent.7

  Interestingly, to find most of this information you have to dive into recent biographies of the former president or read old newspaper archives that are usually not available online. Not a word of Reagan’s role in slashing the UC funding exists, for example, on the Wikipedia pages for either the University of California or Reagan himself. Conservative foundations have poured millions of dollars into campaigns to scrub the Internet clean when it comes to Reagan’s past (and that of most other right-wingers).

  Yet the reality is that before the Reagan presidency, it was possible for any American student with academic competence to attend college and graduate without debt.

  Even in Michigan in the late 1960s, where education was not free but was hi
ghly subsidized by the state, my wife paid her way through college by working part-time as a waitress at a Howard Johnson’s. To the extent that I went to college (I completed less than a year altogether), I paid my own way by working as a DJ for $2.35 per hour, running my own TV repair business, pumping gas, and working as a cook at a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant on weekends.

  Such a scenario is unthinkable today. Instead public higher education has become a big business and is often totally corporate, costs are through the roof, and if you’re not from a very wealthy family, odds are you’ll graduate college with a debt that can take decades to repay. As a result, the United States is slipping in virtually every measurement of innovation, income, and competitiveness. A highly educated workforce is good for innovation and entrepreneurialism: every one of the top 20 innovative countries in the world—except the USA—offers free or very inexpensive college to qualified students.

  Ireland took a cue from the pre-Reagan University of California and began offering free college tuition to all Irish citizens and a flat-rate registration fee of 900 euros per year for all European Union citizens. The result, decades later, is that Ireland has gone from having a backwater economy that was largely based on agriculture and tourism to becoming one of the high-tech and innovation capitals of the world.

  Ironically, Ireland’s vision—and California’s pre-Reagan vision—of education was at the core of Thomas Jefferson’s hopes for the country he helped found.

  Jefferson’s Vision

  On June 14, 1898, more than 70 years after Jefferson’s death, a new building (then called the Academic Building, now called Cabell Hall) was inaugurated at the University of Virginia. One of the nation’s most prominent attorneys at the time, James C. Carter of New York City, gave the dedication speech.8 Carter noted that when Jefferson retired from public office, he was only 66 years old and still energetic and enthusiastic to do something for his country. That something was founding the University of Virginia.

  Carter noted that Jefferson had laid out, in numerous letters and discussions throughout his life, a broad overview of how education should be conducted in the United States. Jefferson envisioned the division of states into districts and wards with primary schools and the establishment of colleges and universities where deserving students “might acquire, gratis, a further and higher education.”

  Jefferson envisioned the goal of free public education—from childhood through university—to be straightforward. In a report he prepared for a state commission in Virginia, Jefferson laid out the six purposes of education:9

  1. To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business.

  2. To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts in writing.

  3. To improve, by reading, his morals and faculties.

  4. To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either.

  5. To know his rights; to exercise with order and justice those he retains; to choose with discretion the fiduciary of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence, with candor and judgment.

  6. And, in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness, all the social relations under which he shall be placed.

  In other words, a well-educated citizenry can “choose with discretion” the elected representatives who are the holders of our government that protects our rights, and hold those politicians accountable “with diligence, with candor and judgment.”

  Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, promised during his election campaign of 1980 to “eliminate the Department of Education” from the federal government; and he appointed his friend William Bennett, who had campaigned and written extensively about destroying the federal Department of Education, as secretary of education—akin to asking the fox to guard the chicken coop. Between Reagan’s ax hacking at the roots of our educational systems and his tax cuts to “starve the beast” of government, we are now left with the highest illiteracy rate in the developed world and an electorate that is spectacularly vulnerable to demagoguery and cynical political manipulation.

  The experiment of Reaganomics and Reagan’s anti-intellectual worldview are demonstrably disordered and dead; we must put them behind us and build anew our country on the solid Jeffersonian foundation of good and free education for all.

  Combine that with breaking up the media monopolies in this country and fostering competition and its attendant innovation through intelligent regulation of the “natural monopolies” in our nation, and we would have a more informed citizenry with better and faster access to real news and information—including information about our body politic.

  These “radical” concepts of free public education all the way up to graduate degrees, breaking up companies that vertically integrate entire markets (particularly in the media), and requiring infrastructure-owning companies to offer their infrastructure to a wide variety of competitors work quite well in dozens of countries around the world. They can here too.

  From Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country

  by Thom Hartmann, © 2010, published by Berrett-Koehler.

  Whatever Happened to Cannery Row?

  From Buzzflash.com

  ARGUABLY, THERE’S NOTHING POLITICAL ABOUT JOHN STEINbeck’s novel Cannery Row. It chronicles the lives of some of the residents of Monterey, California, in the early twentieth century, before the great ecological disaster (mostly overfishing—it’s still debated) of the mid-1940s that wiped out the sardine harvest and threw the boom-town into bust. There’s Doc, the central focus of the novel, based on a close friend of Steinbeck’s, Edward F. Ricketts, one of America’s most famous marine biologists; and Mack, who’s always trying to do good and never quite making it; and an entire cast of characters who reflect the aura of America in the 1930s.

  On the other hand, one could argue that the book is entirely political, today, because it shows us a slice of America before the Great Corporate Homogenizers got hold of us; before we walled ourselves into our highly mortgaged houses to stare for hours, alone, at our TVs, eating the mental gruel of multinational corporations; when the real American Dream was grounded in community, safety, friendship, and a healthy acceptance of eccentricity.

  In 1968 I hitchhiked from Michigan to San Francisco, lived there for half a year, and then hitchhiked back. Every city and every Main Street was different. Restaurants were locally owned. Hotels and motels had eccentric names. It was fascinating, an exploration in a very literal sense, discovering hundreds of communities that were uniquely different from one another.

  Then came Reagan’s “revolution.” When he stopped enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act for all practical purposes, mega-corporations moved in. For much of the 1990s, I made a living in part as a consultant to a variety of organizations, leading me all around the United States (and the world). I logged more than 7 million miles just on Delta Air Lines. And I saw the quirky, unique, personality-rich cities of America being replaced by chain stores, chain restaurants, chain hotels, and franchises. Today, if you were to parachute randomly into any town or city in America, it might take you days to find a commercial landmark that would uniquely identify the place. In this regard, in that it shows us how different the pre-Reagan America was from the post-Reagan America, Cannery Row is a political book.

  I didn’t go looking for Cannery Row. As I sat with my father in the summer of 2007, helplessly watching him choke and gag on his own blood as he died from asbestos-caused mesothelioma (thanks in part to one of Dick Cheney’s companies) while my brothers and I tried to comfort him, I saw the book beside his bed. He was an inveterate reader—there are about 20,000 books in his basement—and he’d often read and reread his favorites over and over again. After his funeral I picked up Cannery Row and took it with me to read on the plane ride home from Michigan to Oregon.

  What I found in Cannery Row was a time and an Ameri
ca that my parents had often spoken of to me. It reminded me of my mother’s stories about squeezing the last of the toothpaste from the tube in a doorjamb because there was barely enough money for toothpaste or toilet paper much less cosmetics. I was reminded of my dad’s stories of going down to one of Al Capone’s speakeasies as a kid on the South Side of Chicago to get a pail of bootleg beer to bring to his father and uncles as they sat on the stoop in the row houses.

  It was a time of challenge and a time of opportunity. It was America before Reagan.

  In one of my dad’s last e-mails to me, he talked about that era:

  Thank you for the wonderful dedication in Screwed. It made me think of what I did in life other than try to lead a good life and do no harm to others. I’m happy with my life, although it was selfish because I did the things I did with no sacrifice on my part. Then I thought of your mother. She was the one who gave up all her early ambitions and dreams for me and her family.

  She wanted to be a writer—worked her way through college to complete her dreams. I still have many of her early writings (if she hasn’t tossed them), which were very good. She worked at an airport for money and flying lessons, she took care of a family for room and board, plus all summer with a bunch of girls to earn tuition money. After she graduated she turned down a great job working for the oil companies in Saudi Arabia just so she would not leave her mother alone…. After we were married she started to write again. But then you came on the scene…. I have hoped that you could and would write about her as you have about me. I think she deserves it much more. She is the true hero of our family.