The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier -- Thom Hartmann's Independent Thinker Review

Thom Hartmann is  THE BEST commentator on themes of general economic issues, and especially economic equality and the harmful affects of economic inequality  (as this comment focuses on)!

     That said,  Mr. Hartmann is perhaps too much of a "human nature optimist,"  he tends to 'misunderestimate'  the forces of tribalism and conflict and clan violence, especially when his search for  mythical,  matriarchial, peaceful,  non-violent cultures, of which he claims to have found at least one example in the high desert of ancient (Peru)?   

   Thom, the American Cherokee 'Indians'  tribe right here in North America was/is PROUDLY MATRIARCHIAL - the women, mothers, and wives actually had a _dominant_ role in making tribal decisions, including those involving going to war or making peace - but they were still very much a warrior culture, too!

     A specific example of where Thoms'  "inherently peaceful and cooperative" bias leads to a myopia  (or blinds him to) the close relations between PREDATORY FINANCE and RUTHLESS CONQUEST, SUBJUGATION, and mass-murder  TRIBAL ETHNIC CLEANSING is a relatively modern mass ethnic cleansing, that very much changed the face and nature of America: 

     England, from shortly after in invasion  conquest by William the Conqueror (1066),  was subjugated to ruthless Norman (French "North-men", i.e. Viking conquerors who took over the Normandy part of France) overlords, who displaced - ruthlessly and violently - the predecessor Anglo (Saxon) noblility and overlords. 

   There is even a word for the LEGAL MURDER of  English (Anglo-Saxon) peasants and nobles alike - "Englishry"!   If a murder victim could be proved to have been English (Anglo)instead of Norman,  then  the Shire or county where his murdered body was found  would not be fined by the (Norman) authorities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Englishry

   (Elsewhere there are books written about English which posit that the English language was very nearly displaced by French as a result of the Norman invasion, but the tenacity of the Anglo-speaking peasant class survived and outlasted the brutality, elitism, and French-speaking tendencies of the Norman masters and overlords.)  

    But having been victims of a very organized and persistent ETHNIC CLEANSING at the hands of  (William's Norman)  INVADERS from the European mainland,  the English, as a devloping nation, would focus their well remembered wrath, resentment, and revenge on their own neighbors, namely the Irish, Welsh, and Scots (all three Celtic clans, as opposed to Viking or Anglo/Saxon descent.)

            The most famous movie portraying  this era of English and Anglicized conquest, murder, subjugation, and ethnic cleansing of their Celtic neighbors   is "Braveheart" with Mel Gibson,  but while Gibson shouting "Freedom!" and winning victories  against the armies of  "Longshanks" (King Edward I of England) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_I_of_England  makes for good Hollywood, over the next 600 years the British armies would usually prevail, often at great cost to the local, tribal peoples of the  Scots, Irish, and Welsh kingdoms.  

  Fast forward to the early 19th century, and England - furious over both the Scots and Irish flirting with European powers (especially as the Irish looked for Catholic salvation as the  Spanish Armada bore down, with a huge threat to conquer England and wipe out the entire Protestant population in 1588;  a threat repeated in 1708  when the Scots and  "Bonnie Prince Charles" and other "Jacobite" Scots invited support from French armies to restore a Catholic monarch in the UK)

 ... the English  came up with their own solution to "the Scots" and "the Irish Problem" -  the English would relocate warlike, DISPLACED Scots, those who were Protestant and pledged a degree of loyalty to their English masters,  to Northern Ireland - to ULSTER PLANTATION,  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantation_of_Ulster

 where the intended goal was to set up a Protestant colony loyal to England, that would WIPE OUT, EXTERMINATE, ETHNICALLY CLEANSE the native Irish (who defiantly  remained Catholic).   Doing England's dirty work in Northern Ireland was no picnic, and when the Scots  were given an opportunity to risk life and limb making the often deadly voyage to English colonies in North America, many tens of thousands (now called "Scots-Irish" for living in 'Ulster Plantation,'  Northern Ireland) jumped at the hazardous opportunity.    Some of these displaced, dislocated, looked-down-upon subjects of the English crown would retain their loyalty to England - many thousands of Scots "Loyalists" fled America during and after the American Revolution,  and settled in "Noval Scotia," or "New Scotland" in Canada, forever loyal to the English crown,  after the English army lost the American Revolution in 1788.

   Other Scots-Irish,  including the Jackson family of future president Andrew Jackson,  hated and despised the English for the ruthless overlords they were, and all three Jackson sons volunteered as soldiers in the American revolution, (their father had died of an accident while cutting down trees to clear the family's homestead in the Waxhaws area of Western North/South Carolina), and all three Jackson boys  would be captured by the Redcoats early in the war.  Not only did young Andrew receive a sword-slash across his face by the capturing British officers, but  Jackson's two brothers and mother would perish, probably of  typhoid fever they caught in the English death-ships called Prison Hulks.  Jackson's mother had volunteered as a nurse for her POW sons, and negotiated their release, but the murderous intent of the cruel "Prison Hulks" led to the death of Mrs. Jackson and her two eldest sons on the long walk home after their parole, Andrew the only survivor of the squalor and disease of the prison ships.   

  Meanwhile, back in Ireland, the cruelty and ruthlessness of the English conquest and occupation was actually accelerating!  By the 1840 - a half century AFTER the brutal American revolutionary war - the English had managed to turn ALL of Ireland into a defacto "prison hulk" death ship (or "death island" if you prefer), when the "ENCLOSURES" - the forced "cleansing" and displacement of Irish "tenants" and entire villages  from the Great Estates  wiped out entire communities overnight, and forced the Irish to become subsistence farmers on small potato plots; when the subsistence  mono-crop failed with the potato blight starting in 1845, the result was the GREAT FAMINE (or "the Irish famine" as English and Americans call it),  FAMINE of course historically being THE MOST EFFECTIVE TOOL of Ethnic Cleansing.

  The English Absentee landlords, and their local, Anglicized Irish landlords, would EXPORT GRAIN FROM IRELAND, at the very height of the famine... which KILLED  OVER a MILLION Irish men, women, and children of starvation and related diseases!   In fact, an indication of JUST HOW BRUTAL the English occupation of Ireland was, can be read in that great example  English satire, Jonathan Swift's "A MODEST PROPOSAL" http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html  -  the sheer, relentless ferocity of the English occupation can be understood when you realize that, as atrocious and deplorable as the conditions Swift describes in 1729 are, THEY WOULD GET WORSE for OVER the next hundred years, cluminating in the GREAT FAMINE of 1852!!!!

   Sorry for the little digression into the history of England's  conquest and subjugation of her (Celtic) neighbors,  but getting back to "PREDATORY FINANCE",  from the time  the ROTHSCHILDS bankers  of London and Europe FINANCED THE BRITISH ARMY and Navy AGAINST NAPOLEON, and especially Wellington's victory at the Battle of Waterloo,  the Rothschilds officially became THE MOST POWERFUL BANKERS in London and all  of Europe.

   And the ROTHSCHILDS, and other London banks, SUPPORTED the BRUTAL English policies IN IRELAND,  it was LONDON BANKERS and absentee Landlords who SHIPPED GRAIN FROM IRELAND, AT THE VERY HEIGHT of the Great (Irish) FAMINE!!! 

     Today in America, the radical right-wing try to whitewash Hitler's Nazi regime, by first trying to make the Nazis into LEFT-WING "SOCIALISTS,"  and, slightly more objectively, trying to make the case the Hitler was second best in death toll  victims to Stalin's Communist regime.   But, as horrific as Stalin's GREAT TERROR was (death by prison, torture, and Siberia work camps  for MILLIONS of Russians and "Soviet Union" victims caught up in Stalin's KGB purges),  the majority of Stalin's murderous bodycount came in THE FAMINE YEARS in the Ukraine and elsewhere,   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

where, following practices laid down centuries earlier by the Mongols, the Tartars, the Turks, and other Asiatic conquerors - and the English occupation of Ireland and Spanish Conquistadors in South America - it was STARVATION that was Stalin's most effective tool of persecution and ethnic cleansing.

     So, today in America, the Right-Wing and big finance have NO cause to be LECTURING American "liberals" about  the evils of "socialism" or  Hitler's alleged "socialist" tendencies (Hitler may have promised the German Volk a better life, but his main allies were GERMAN INDUSTRIALISTS, financiers,  and the GERMAN MILITARY, all  RIGHT-WING ORGANIZATIONS, duh.) 

     Stalin was a Central Asian "conquest and subjugation" warlord first, he was a "communist" only in that  he used that ideology as a propaganda tool to industrialize Russia and the satellite states which made up the Soviet Union.  (And, let the record show, Stalin was quite the successful capitalist and  industrialist - by the 1950s Stalin has so "capitalized" Russian science, industry, and military, that the Soviet Union equalled the United States -which had been untouched by the devastation of WWII - in rockets, military, and nuclear firepower, just at the cost of a Russian consumer economy, and tens of thousands upon millions of lives.)   

   So, the bottom line is that PREDATORY WESTERN "CAPITALISM" can be EVERY BIT as MASS-MURDEROUS ruthless and genocidal,  as  any of the great conquerors of history, whether the Mongols against Persian and Chinese towns and cities, the Turks against Armenian, Greek, and other victims,  the Romans against Carthage - take your pick of victims, the "Western," and particularily London based "capitalists"  don't give an inch in the way of ruthless, genocidal ferocity to any of them!  

  When today's "Liberal" and "Democrat" community fails to connect these very simple historical  dots - and, specifically, throw THE MURDEROUS TENDENCIES of BIG FINANCE  back in the face of the Right-Wing commentators - it GIVES  Righty  HATE MONGERS the "Moral Values" HIGH GROUND to fear-whip and demagogue Americans,  

   just as VP Al Gore REFUSED TO GO AFTER  Bush & Cheney's  LONG RECORD OF SCANDALS in  Gore's 2000 presidential campaign;  just as John Kerry REFUSED to make an issue of  Bush & Cheney DOING NOTHING to PREVENT, not one little item to deter a  TERRORIS PLOT that was WELL KNOWN in CIA, FBI,and US counter-terror circles;

   ...just as today the Obama White House REFUSES to PUBLICIZE the  "Health DENIAL" insurance industry's  40%, FORTY-PERCENT REJECTION RATE of CLAIMS  by one huge California insurer - we HAVE "DEATH PANELS" in American health care, they are just RUN BY THE VERY INDUSTRY (the insurance industry) that they ACCUSE Democrats of wanting to set up, but "liberal" and "Democratic" push-back on the Righty talking points FAIL to make the case about JUST HOW MURDEROUS  Right-Wing Big Finance policies can be !!

Thank you!