How Neoliberalism Invaded & Gutted America (Thom Hartmann Interview) 

Reagan was the worst thing to happen to America in the last 100 years.

I like to see a lot more of this type of interview than the non-stop commentary about Donald Trump and Republican outrage.

Thom got me involved with politics when I was younger. He used to have Bernie on weekly for a call in segment. It really changed how I viewed politics and I ended up volunteering for his campaign.

Appreciate you both. "Democracy is not a spectator sport" is firmly seared in my mind thanks to Thom.

Thom Hartmann's knowledge of history is mindblowing. So great to see him here.

Two of my most loved American brethren working together, ya’ll keep it up!

I love when you interview Thom Hartman. I listen to The Hartman Report pod and his RU-vid daily, brilliant guy!

Always great to see Thom Hartmann. Your questions were incredibly insightful and to the point.

More Thom Hartmann please!

I was sent to Washington, D.C. in September, 1980 and was present during the Inauguration of Ronald Regan. I immediately sensed a retrograde action taking place, and warned people to expect us to march backward 30 years. Ironically, many of the Hippies and protesters of the 1970s suddenly jumped ship and landed on the Regan wagon, attracted to the very materialistic Capitalism they opposed in the previous decade. What resulted was a section of the population who lived with blinders on, only seeing their own superficial affluence without recognizing the bigger picture. All this did was create more narrow-minded, superficial people who did nothing but create more problems than solve them.

This is a great interview! So much substance.

This should be taught in schools, I’ve never heard a more accurate summation of society before

Manchin and Sinema assisting the GQP in continuing the Reagan disaster. It would be fascinating to see their text messages over the past five years.

Young David Pakman interviewing Old David Pakman.

Sir, best interview you’ve done so far! The part toward the end about the book “The Conservative Mind” I never knew and explains so much!

Tom Hartman is excellent. Thank you sir!

Thanks for this interview. It was great to see Mr Hartmann again.

I really wish Thom would be invited to the Joe Rogan podcast, just to inject some sanity.

I cannot believe that the BEST content gets so few views while a MTG post gets a shit load - our society is truly diseased as Chris Hedges said

Thom's show on RTV was one of the first progressive shows that I stumbled across. He's awesome!

Thom Hartmann is one of the best personality on a radio and television it's a great person great personality amazing human being

Finally, someone points out some business taxation basics that put the lie to the talking points. Thanks, David.

Whoa... I've got to let my mind marinate in ALL this knowledge! As always, David.. Fantastic interview!!

Such a great interview. I learned so many important things.

I love that word MORBIDLY RICH

One of the real struggles in educating people on these issues is how certain issues become viruses of the mind, and spread like a disease; and so people end up supporting political positions that will undermine their own interests. How can that be penetrated in a way to wake people up to the deeper threats to their own interests? Hartman has great insight; how can his message penetrate where it is most needed? It’s a real challenge. At 78 I’m aware that I am no longer in a real middle class despite a Masters Degree and what would have been a good retirement. My vision of spending my last days in relative comfort has disappeared; I’m now going down the ladder I climbed. I hear a lot of peers expressing the same frustrations. I just hope his message can reach the right ears to help us shift directions.

I love listening to these two, even if much of it is over my head.

Thx david for helping educate ourselves.

Truth and wisdom. This answers some important questions. Why do Republican politicians run the risky strategy of lying more often? Why is racism still a feature of 21st century western politics? Why are women’s reproductive freedoms a point f obsession for some politicians? The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, is this a result of capitalism or does a democracy have a choice over this?

Great interview!

Fascinating and said in a way a layperson can understand, wondering if the book is written that way as well.

Love Thom Hartmann, he, like Bernie Sanders has been fighting the good fight for a long time.

Wow. Excellent interview. Incredibly insightful 👍🏿

Fantastic when we get to hear two smart folks have quality conversations. Have been seeing a lot more of this lately. Finally! Do more of this! Our side, SYNTHESIS. Let the others fight if they wish. Lets have smart conversations like you're doing here.

Why no discussion of Ayn Rand? The prime example that personality disorders can function as ideology. Rand was not nearly as disastrously influential as Reagan and Thatcher, but there are still plenty of highscool students an immature adults who take her seriously.

Wow! Brilliant interview!

If you're not already, I highly recommend becoming a subscriber to the Thom Hartmann Program on RU-vid.

16:48 he make "social chaos" sound really nice.

Nice to hear from Thom. I used to watch his show on RT America.

Awesome convo and interview, cheers

I love to see David and Thom together in this important program!!

Thom Hartman is the goat

I'm a Brit living in Bali and also a regular here at the David Pakman show. I have just been out for a walk along Sanur Beach and discovered that Bali's first hotel built for the mass-tourism era, the Bali Beach Hotel, is currently being demolished to make way for . . . . . a Mayo Clinic hospital. Like the UK, Indonesia has its own state healthcare provision. So who is this new hospital for? It's for rich Asians, in particular rich Indonesians, as an alternative to flying to Singapore, the US or Japan for sophisticated healthcare. Rest assured, few if any of the ordinary local Indonesian people would be able to pay for the Mayo Clinic's services. British readers will remember the promises made by Boris Johnson during the December 2019 election campaign, namely that 40 new hospitals will be built across the country. Yep, you can bet the Tories have plans for 40 new hospitals indeed, perhaps more, but they won't be NHS hospitals, they will be private hospitals like the one the Mayo Clinic is now building here in Sanur, Bali, and if you, like the ordinary local Indonesian people where I live, can't afford to pay then tough, because Liz Truss's new "Conservative" government won't be wasting any time getting rid of the NHS, like the true Neoliberals they really are. Google "Indonesia Partners with Mayo Clinic To Build New International Hospital in Bali, Operational By Mid-2023".

WOW. So much packed in to that few minutes. So eye opening. Maybe "neoliberalism" should be called "pseudoliberalism"?

great interview

Salon 2011 article excerpt: "Carter, not Reagan, pioneered the role of the fiscally conservative governor who runs against the mess in Washington, promising to shrink the bureaucracy and balance the budget. Early in his administration, Carter was praised by some on the right for his economic conservatism. Ronald Reagan even wrote a newspaper column titled "Give Carter a Chance." The most conservative Democrat in the White House since Grover Cleveland, Carter fought most of his battles with Democratic liberals, not Republican conservatives."

Everyone should be required to watch this… wow. Great context for how we got here.

Wow. Just ordered his book. That comparison he made at the end. this is wild.

I live in Sweden. And his point about usa being farther into neoliberalism than uk applies on Sweden also imo. Sweden had a very strong social democracy after the second world war, but in the 80’s neoliberalism started to take a foot here also. And now we basically only have the “far left” who are not neoliberal. Also, regarding england and it’s state neoliberalism, majority of young people are opening up to authoritarianism. Actually to some extend same in Sweden.

Excellent interview,David. I’m going to read this book.

This is awesome

I am soooooo happy that one of my favorite political RU-vidrs brought the OG Thom Hartmann on! I don’t think he gets enough attention from left RU-vid.

Thom is my favorite. Learned so much from him

I am super excited! Great interview as always! I just bought the book I will have it on Tuesday. Thank you David 😀

Thom is the man! Is work on ADHD is great too.

Very informative segment. I will have to read that book.

Great interview, I will read his book.

I could have listen to another hour of this conversation and still felt like it wasn't enough.

Delayed hi from Sweden. Just an FYI: we've had over 30 years of Neoliberalism at this point, it's not pushing hard to get here, it's been the hegemonic system for decades.

David Stockman said in "Triumph of Politics (Over Policy)" that Reagan didn't recognize a distinction between personal and corporate income tax. Reagan was stuck in the Hollywood mindset that actors stop working for the year after two movies to avoid entering a higher tax bracket, and didn't understand that, unlike individuals, corporations can reinvest in themselves to reduce their tax burden.

Thom needs more eyes on his channel! He does great work and really knows the historical context of politics. But his RU-vid channel gets very small numbers.

Very good information. Very good interview

Love Thom Hartmann.

Education will not necessarily help fight the aggressive capitalist ideas (misconceptions and lies) that help support billionaire's greed, considering how much is spent to get those ideas into our minds in the first place!

Epic crossover 🔥🔥🔥

Quick question: where did neo-liberalism actually come from? Didn't we invent it? I thought America was the original neo-liberal country.

Still looking for a definition of neoliberalism that I can understand. It always seemed like an oxymoron to me I have decided that this should have done it but I am just incapable of understanding.

I always associated the term "neoliberalism" as emerging during the mid-late eighties when traditional liberalism kind of hit the skids (think Mondale), people who were wedded to the goals of traditional liberalism, but not necessarily the methods used by traditional liberals. Think Gary Hart or, to an extent, Bill Clinton.

"Richer than the pharaohs". "Taxes encourage investment". Exactly why we used to buy houses back in the days that we could afford them. Income spent on rent is taxable.

I think the period before Reagan and Thatcher perhaps knew some excesses (like strikes paralyzing society for weeks) and a lot of wild grass was cut off and served to feed Neoliberalism for a while. Corporations knew the government was no longer on the side of society but on theirs. This fueled optimism and trust. That's why it worked for a while is my gut feeling (no economist) but one might wonder what other option would have been much better. What was really going on??

Thank you for this.

Pakman and Hartmann, The only two real menn!

This is a very important topic/study system

Good point, corporations are free to go anywhere in the world however Americans are not. To emigrate to another country from the US requires a lot of money to get residency which most Americans do not have, so they are not free to leave.

I’m Canadian so, since we have parties named both “Liberal” and “Conservative,” I find myself having to preface any discussion that involves either of those two terms and their “neo-“ prefixes. A big difference between Canada and the USA is that we find the equation between Liberal and Left inaccurate to the point of being wholly false, whereas in the US, the term “liberal” is almost always associated with socialism (which many low-brows in both counties equate with communism). But one similarity is the fact that conservative parties in both nations have moved so far to the right that they aren’t conservative anymore. Nomenclature isn’t that important in this respect in the USA because the term “conservative” or “Tory” (a term Canadian conservatives proudly call themselves) was shunned as colonially British, and “Republican” replaced them just like “Episcopalian” replaced “Anglican,” the Church of England. Nevertheless, the traditional definition of conservatism is grievously challenged by the shift to the right ever since Reagan kicked off the neo-right “revolution,” culminating in “The End of History,” but finding an aphelion shortly after 9/11 and decline ever since. I call today’s nominal conservative parties “neo-right” because they are not really conservative at all and can’t very well be called, as they once were, “NeoCons.” The concern is that many genuinely conservative voters still don’t get that their respective parties have been usurped by globalizing neoliberalism in service of stateless corporatocracy -that is, out to hobble democratic sovereignty and undermine nations’ capacity to tax and regulate private profit. Many real conservatives are moderate, right-of-centre citizens who have, since the 40-year neo-right arc began, gradually moved away from their nominally-and nominal-conservative parties. Those who remain with the nominal conservative ship as it sails towards the edge of its passengers’ flat earth defensively call the centre-right they’ve abandoned “the left.” We’ve seen how vicious neo-right rhetoric has become as it begins to suffer throes nearing the end of its arc. No sane person wants to be so-targeted, so there’s probably a much bigger faction of erstwhile conservatives who keep quite about their position-and that has the effect of slowing the process of aborting the neo-right movement (I for one consider it irredeemable) and creating a new conservative party that rejects malignant neoliberalism. I’m not conservative myself, but I believe partisan balance is a good thing. We Canadians have bonafide socialist parties in the federal parliament and most provincial assemblies. Most of us (I am a member of the socialist New Democratic Party) laugh when Americans call liberals “socialist” or “left” because, for us, Liberals are centrist and, since the neo-right movement succeeded in moving the entire set of parties rightward on left-right spectrum, have occupied philosophical territory on the centre-right which the Conservative Party of Canada has abandoned as it, just like the tRumpublican party, sails ever closer to the edge. There’s a reason why the Liberals have governed Canada far more times than the Conservatives (the NDP has governed several provinces but never the federal government): it’s called ‘campaigning on the left and governing on the right.’ Today’s federal government is a Liberal minority which must be supported by the NDP (the second such alliance in a row since 2015 when the 9year-old CPC government was defeated). Thus “Dippers” like me rather see Liberalism as a kind of liberal-conservative party (indeed, Canada’s first federal government was so-named) and not liberal in the classic, 19th century sense. But neither is the Liberal Party “neoliberal” because of its longstanding parliamentary relationship with the NDP (the NDP was created in 1961 and supported two Liberal minorities in the early 60s, the alliances implementing in universal public healthcare). But Liberal voters-who, btw, are very loyal-don’t mind just as long as the party is united (the post Jean Chrétien Liberals effectively punched themselves out of the running in a massive schism which allowed the CPC to govern by default, its first two governments being only minorities and its only majority being its last. This happened because many Liberal voters simply stayed home until it got sorted-and the CPC was soon after defeated). Many Dippers disapprove of the general shift rightward-of their own party, that is. Well, near’s I can tell, we’ve moved, at most, into centre-left territory the Liberals have abandoned as they pursue CPC-abandoned territory right of centre. But we’re still essentially a leftist party, pro-worker, pro-union, pro-public services, and pro-important public enterprises. Politically involved people are getting so sensitive these days. The confusion on both sides of the border is about what is conservative, not what is liberal or socialist (even if Americans tend to get the Canadian left and centre-left wrong). Thing is, we all know what conservative is supposed to be and many can see what the dilemma is for the partisan-right at this time. The problem, I think, is that a lot of moderate Tories don’t see it yet -or at least are in denial that their veteran parties have been ruined by globalizing neoliberalism-or the “neo-right.” Everything from now on will deal with this -uh-let’s just call it a “transitional phase.” Pray that it ends sooner than later. We all got big challenges that need all hands on deck.

Let me recover from what I just heard "a higher tax rate is an incentive to invest, because business expenses are tax deductible". And then Hartmann agreeing with it.

I'd be more interested to know how Hartman proposes taxing investment wealth, since an income tax wouldn't have much effect. It's also simplistic to say that billionaire's "don't buy more jeans" so don't benefit the economy. Doesn't their investment provide the capital that helps the economy grow?

Critical Thinking. It's like nails on a chalkboard to a conservative. Turn it up!

If taxes are too high then how did these billionaires pile up billions in assets? It is a simple question but just try to get a billionaire to give that question a straight answer.

Reagan just employed a CIA PSYOP that was first rolled out in Argentina under Nixon and called it “supply side economics.” To this day there is a major spread in economic equality in Argentina !!!

The term neoliberasm is confusing because I see Orban and Reagan as more like authoritarian monopolistic corporatism. We could get better representation if we could get rid of gerrymandering.

I hope you don't take this wrong David, but the reason I like your channel is that I view you as a younger, less learned version of Thom. And I'm hoping you keep doing what you do and keep learning, to someday carry on that torch (That torch being, informed and honest commentary with a liberal dose of integrity)

The answer to why the markets are not just falling apart at all the bad news from fed and economy now is psychological. Anyone who has had a bad marriage know the feeling these people losing the goose that laid the golden egg spread her wings and fly away. No matter it was ill gotten gains or she cheated on you or you cheated on her in the marriage or the pet project you had going became a bad venture, you just could not let go as your insides became a world of pain and anguish. So now those ones who profitted greatly are going to have to come back to earth. It is denial floating the markets. Next when reality hits and they do lose all they hoarded at our expense, great sorrow and regret as the truth sinks in while these fake markets sink no longer able to stand under the great weight of corruption it has operated under. We can all win if we let party lines go and fight for the truth. We cant win if we stay divided and let those continue to use us like sheep to be fleeced. If we stay this or that and cannot come together under truth and honor we will crash and burn with them

Thom Hartmann is spot on as usual.

Hamilton's trade policy was from the Tudor plan adopted after Sir Thomas of Wales took out Richard the 3rd which begat Tudors and protestantism from UK to USA.

Spot on

Fascinating how the Chicago School Of Economics invaded the U.S. through horrible Reagan. I loved Naomi Klein’s book on the extent people suffered world wide from the plot to apply such politico-economic policies: “The Shock Doctrine.”

The inflation we're seeing now is a direct result of the soaring oil prices. In this civilization oil is the key commodity. Now, the environment cannot take much more co2, and remain habitable for us. It's almost as if we're at a tipping point on a number of fronts. These problems could all be solved with a transition to renewable energy - solar, and wind.

Bucky Fuller suggested we would become s leisure nation

Tax them at 99%.

I lived in England I didn't know Reagon was that bad.

Neoliberalism is almost as bad as “neoconservativism”. Low taxes is conservatism. Claiming that diversity is a goal (rather than a natural outgrowth of focusing on equal opportunity and excellence) and deciding that prejudice is the most central issue through which the entire world must be viewed is a big problem.

it hasnt worked out well in New Zealand,

Why do I get the feeling Thom and David could be father and son?

I watch you both and thanks for covering the news That typically makes me want to vomit.

Mesterpiece! Thanks Thom.

Technology may not be as agnostic as your guest might think. In fact, it might be responsible for many of the problems we face to today because 'neo liberalism' can be built into Technology, and Technology can be used reinforce neoliberalism either through data , infrastructure or the products themselves. The rise of the new right couldn't have happened without Technology and the use of big data. IBM once again playing a proud role in this.

The neoliberalism dynamic is interesting, but the real reason for the decline in the middle class in the US, jobs being shipped overseas, is that labor in the US was opened up to international competition in the 1970s, as were companies and management on a hyper scale. US labor productivity in general was lower than overseas, so the jobs went to the cheapest source as a free economy would dictate. Labor unions just made the work force more rigid and accelerated that move. However, companies and management greeted the global challenge and excelled in a few markets creating the global leaders that exist today. Unions are not a panacea for labor, and probably actually hurt laborers with the way the unions are set up now. To replace unions, companies could be forced to provide a reasonable share of stock to employees, who are creating the economic value, and then let the employees decided representation on the boards, etc.

Unfortunately, the people that should read Thom's book or even listen to this video are not going to...

Shouldn't Thom Hartmann be President?