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"Rebooting the American Dream"
Thom plus logo  Thom Hartmann Here with an excerpt from my book "Rebooting the American Dream: 11 ways to rebuild our country."
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My radio show has a mission statement. We don't say it on the air, as it sounds a bit pompous, but it's the metric against which we measure our work: Saving the world, by awakening one person at a time.

During the 1980s, when I was CEO of an advertising agency10 in Atlanta, our mission statement was to help people communicate, to make better and more open companies. Before that, in 1983, I started a travel company11 that hit the front page of the Wall Street Journal the next year and has conducted around a quarter billion dollars in business since then, and its mission statement was to help people better understand the world by traveling through it. And in 1978 my wife and I started a community for abused children12 in New Hampshire, with a clear mission statement: Saving the world, one child at a time.

For most of American history, businesses-for-profit and nonprofit-had mission statements that were broader than simply serving the interests of shareholders and CEOs and referred instead to the long-term interests of the company, its workers, and its customers.

Economics author Barry C. Lynn noted that "by the 1950s managers were wont to present themselves as 'corporate stewards' whose job was to serve 'stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large."13 In other words, besides the stockholders, there are also the workers, the customers, and the general public, who are crucial to the long-term well-being of the corporation itself. CEOs actually rose through the ranks of the business and felt loyal to the companies they ran.

They'd often started in the mailroom as a 20-year-old and fully expected to retire with a comfortable pension, the company in the good hands of one of their younger prot�g� vice presidents, who was working his or her way to that CEO status.

That corporate mentality and mission was generally true all the way until the 1980s. But in the early Reagan years, something changed dramatically, and it's devastated the American corporate landscape.

First, President Reagan effectively stopped enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, a law that effectively prevented cartels and monopolies and large corporations from dominating the markets.

The Reagan administration's backing off from enforcement of the act led to an explosion of mergers and acquisitions, buy-outs, greenmail, forced mergers, and other aggregations of previously competitive or totally unrelated companies. The big got bigger, the midsized got acquired or crushed, and the space in which small entrepreneurs could start and flourish nearly vanished.

But what followed this was even worse. Starting back in the 1930s, a particularly toxic form of economic thinking-some would argue sociopathic economic thinking-began to take hold, some of it propelled by theories developed at the Chicago School of Economics by Milton Friedman (who would later serve as an economic adviser to Reagan).

By the 1980s that economic thinking had undergone several mutations, and the one that has hit America the hardest is the notion that every business in the nation has a single mission statement: maximize shareholder value and dividends.

Read more here.

-Thom

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The Big Picture (small)
Tonight on The Big Picture on RT TV at 7pm and 10pm... Colonel Wilkerson speaks out on Iran (check your local listings for stations or stream at RT or Free Speech TV, and catch past shows on Youtube)
 
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Need to Know: Colonel Wilkerson speaks out on Iran
- Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell (2002-05)/The College of William & Mary
 
Screwed: New Leak Reveals "TPP Horrorshow"
- Ari Rabin-Havt, The Agenda/SiriusXM Progress 127/The Benghazi Hoax  Twitter  Twitter
- Kevin L. Kearns, United States Business and Industry Council  Twitter  Twitter
 
Best of the Rest: US Troops to Stop Abortions...Really?
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Can Greenpeace Stop Shell?
- Mary Nicol, Greenpeace USA  Twitter
 
Daily Take: Chris Matthews is a Shill for the Insider Machine
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Monday's Daily Stack Daily Stack
Quote: "Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present" -- Albert Camus, French Nobel Prize winning author, journalist, and philosopher (1913-1960).
 
Hour One: Insiders and Outsiders - Democrats
Article: "Hillary Clinton won't answer Keystone XL pipeline question" by Dan Merica and Jeff Zeleny.
Article: "Ken Paxton surrenders, felony indictments unsealed" by Jason Whitely and Tanya Eiserer.
Article: "Joe Biden in 2016: What Would Beau Do?" by Maureen Dowd.
 
Is Chris Matthews Trying To Take Down Bernie Sanders?
Video: "New Covenant speech", October 23, 1991 by Bill Clinton.
Quote: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win". attributed to Gandhi.

Hour Two: Insiders and Outsiders - Republicans
Article: "Fast track (trade) (TPA)" by Wikipedia.
Article: "The People's Budget: A Raise For America" by Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Article: "Rick Santelli: Tea Party Time" by Eric Etheridge.
Video: "I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help'." Ronald W. Reagan.
Event: Aug 03 6:30pm EDT on C-SPAN: "2016 Republican Candidates "Voters First Forum"".
Quote: "It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it's just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being at the essence of getting the nominations for president or elected president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and Congress members. So now we've just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election's over'." - President Jimmy Carter on unlimited money in politics on the Thom Hartmann Program, 28 July 2015.
Article: "Smithsonian Opens Made-in-America Gift Shop" by Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Article: "What Can We Learn from Denmark?" by Sen. Bernie Sanders.
 
Talk Radio News Segment:
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Article: "2015 Lafayette shooting", July 23, 2015.
Site: Governor Free Don Siegelman.
Article: "TRNS News Notes- 8/3" by Victoria Jones.

Hour Three: Why It's Time For A $15/Hour Minimum Wage
- James Sherk, The Heritage Foundation Twitter Twitter
Article: "The great unknown: The $15 minimum wage" by Sean Higgins.
 
In for Thom for the last half hour, progressive commentators Danielle and Shane-O.
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Great Minds P1 - Rev. Barry W. Lynn  Saving Separation of Church & State
Great Minds P1 - Rev. Barry W. Lynn Saving Separation of Church & State

Great Minds P2 - Rev. Barry W. Lynn  "No Jews or Atheists Hired Here"
Great Minds P2 - Rev. Barry W. Lynn "No Jews or Atheists Hired Here"

Great Minds P3 - Rev. Barry W. Lynn  GOP "God Talk"
Great Minds P3 - Rev. Barry W. Lynn GOP "God Talk"

Great Minds P4 - Rev. Barry W. Lynn Millennials Are Better On Evolution
Great Minds P4 - Rev. Barry W. Lynn Millennials Are Better On Evolution

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Full Show 7/31/15: The Religious Right is Wrong on the Constitution
Full Show 7/31/15: The Religious Right is Wrong on the Constitution

In tonight's special hour-long edition of "Conversations with Great Minds" Thom discusses separation of church and state with Rev. Barry W. Lynn, author of the new book "God and Government."

Political Parties are Like the Mafia...
Political Parties are Like the Mafia...

Republicans Use Abortion to Cover REAL Agenda...
Republicans Use Abortion to Cover REAL Agenda...

How the Republican Congress Screwed Puerto Rico...
How the Republican Congress Screwed Puerto Rico...

Native American Children Harassed at Hockey Game...
Native American Children Harassed at Hockey Game...

Why China is Trying to Rewrite Worldwide Internet Rules...
Why China is Trying to Rewrite Worldwide Internet Rules...

Rexdale W. Henry is the Native American Sandra Bland...
Rexdale W. Henry is the Native American Sandra Bland...

Caller: My Kids Gave up Summer Vacation to See Bernie Sanders!
Caller: My Kids Gave up Summer Vacation to See Bernie Sanders!

40th anniversary of Jimmy Hoffa's murder...
40th anniversary of Jimmy Hoffa's murder...
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