Foreword by Greg Palast

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and How to Restore Its Greatness"

The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless. In sum, neoliberalism is the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy, not just in the United States but across the planet, and will be for the foreseeable future. —Noam Chomsky[ii]

Foreword by Greg Palast

Milton Friedman’s feet didn’t touch the floor. This was the University of Chicago 1975 and Prof. Friedman was God. God sat in a chair, the little man’s feet dangling, as he humiliated students who deviated in the slightest from the Gospel of Friedman, what he dubbed, "Neoliberalism."

I kept my head down. Friedman didn’t know I was sent to study with him and his Chicago Boys by the city’s labor leadership. They wanted to know if this Friedman was as dangerous as he seemed. Friedman was the not-so-hidden hand behind the new dictatorship of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet liked to throw dissenters out of helicopters, whatever it took to create what Friedman called, “The Miracle of Chile,” a radical right-wing makeover of the nation’s economy.

Bless Thom Hartmann for exposing the neo-lib Genesis story, the “Miracle” in Chile was a con. Hartmann notes that Chile’s economy went into free fall under the Chicago Boys’ regime; unemployment hit 30%.

Hartmann’s book is a beautiful history of an ugly idea: that greed is good, that uncontrolled greed is even better, even if it leads to mass misery.

Squeezed into this thin volume is a huge amount of “I-didn’t-know-that!” info that’s both horrifying weirdly fun. I didn’t know that George W. Bush’s Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 resulted in the quiet privatization of nearly half of Medicare's services. Yow!

Hartmann’s most original contribution is to posit that the antidote for neoliberalism’s poison is not a new New Deal, but rather Alexander Hamilton’s American Plan. In 1791, at George Washington’s request, Hamilton drafted a guide for strategic tariff protection, government support for jobs and industry, government regulation of products and direct control of banking.

Hamilton’s American Plan made America rich—and China too. Hartmann dismisses the baloney that China’s manufacturing boom was the result of throwing the economy into the free-market soup. Hartmann was studying in China in 1986 when Chairman Deng and Premier Zhao came down on the side of Hamilton after a two-year fight with Friedmanite economists within the Communist Party.

The losing neolibs had wanted China to take “One Big Step” and follow the Soviet Union’s “shock therapy,” that is, jump straight in to the freezing waters of totally rule-free markets, uncontrolled international trade, privatization of industry and shrunken government.

We know what happened: Russia is still in shock—wages and production has shriveled, life expectancy fallen; while China’s government-guided industry now produces one eighth of the planet’s goods and services.

And the US? As Hartmann puts it in a subtitle: “America adopted neoliberalism and all I got was this made-in-China Tee Shirt.”

The neolibs’ useful idiot, New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman, praised de-regulation as a "straight jacket sewn by Margaret Thatcher with buttons attached by Ronald Reagan."

Hartmann, a happy-ending kind of guy, tells us how America can tear off the Tee Shirt, unhook the straight jacket and escape the neo-liberal madhouse.

That’s quite a feat in 170 pages.

— Greg Palast, Los Angeles