Thom Hartmann - Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country (Bk Currents)

Rebooting the American Dream

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11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country

Thom Hartmann

Rebooting the American Dream

Copyright 2010 by Mythical Research, Inc., and Thom Hartmann.

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First Edition
Hardcover print edition ISBN 978-1-60509-706-0
PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-60509-909-5
IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-60509-943-9

2010-1

Cover/jacket Designer: Ian Shimkoviak/The Book Designers

Interior design and composition by Gary Palmatier, Ideas to Images

Elizabeth von Radics, copyeditor; Mike Mollett, proofreader; Medea Minnich, indexer.

DEDICATION

To our daughters, Kindra and Kerith,
who are coincidentally both back in school
and rebooting their own lives.

May the world you inherit be as rich in wonder and
opportunity as the world into which your parents were born.

Thank you both for being such wonderful, caring,
and honorable human beings, so dedicated to
healing the world one person at a time.

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to William

Charles Jarvis, September 28, 1820

ON APRIL 14, 1789, GEORGE WASHINGTON WAS OUT WALKING through the fields at Mount Vernon, his home in Virginia, when Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress, rode up on horseback. Thomson had a letter for Washington from the president pro tempore of the new, constitutionally created United States Senate, telling Washington that hed just been elected president and the inauguration was set for April 30 in the nations capital, New York City.

This created two problems for Washington.

The first was saying goodbye to his 82-year-old mother, which the 57-year-old Washington did that night. She gave him her blessing and told him it was the last time hed see her alive, as she was gravely ill; and, indeed, she died before he returned from New York.

The second problem was finding a suit of clothes made in America. For that he sent a courier to his old friend and fellow general from the American Revolutionary War, Henry Knox.

Washington couldnt find a suit made in America because in the years prior to the American Revolution, the British East India Company (whose tea was thrown into Boston Harbor by outraged colonists after the Tea Act of 1773 gave the worlds largest transnational corporation a giant tax break) controlled the manufacture and the transportation of a whole range of goods, including fine clothing. Cotton and wool could be grown and sheared in the colonies, but it had to be sent to England to be turned into clothes.

This was a routine policy for England, and it is why until India achieved its independence in 1947 Mahatma Gandhi (who was assassinated a year later) sat with his spinning wheel for his lectures and spun daily in his own home. It was, like his Salt March, a protest against the colonial practices of England and an entreaty to his fellow Indians to make their own clothes to gain independence from British companies and institutions.

Fortunately for George Washington, an American clothing company had been established on April 28, 1783, in Hartford, Connecticut, by a man named Daniel Hinsdale, and it produced high-quality woolen and cotton clothing as well as items made from imported silk. It was to Hinsdales company that Knox turned, and he helped Washington getin time for his inauguration two weeks latera nice, but not excessively elegant, brown American-made suit. (He wore British black later for the celebrations and the most famous painting.)

When Washington became president in 1789, most of Americas personal and industrial products of any significance were manufactured in England or in its colonies. Washington asked his Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, what could be done about that, and Hamilton came up with an 11-point plan to foster American manufacturing, which he presented to Congress in 1791. By 1793 most of its points had either been made into law by Congress or formulated into policy by either President Washington or the various states, which put the country on a path of developing its industrial base and generating the largest source of federal revenue for more than a hundred years.