Thom Hartmann: And welcome back, Thom Hartmann here with you and there’s a, Terrence McNally wrote a great interview piece with Thom Geoghegan who has been on this program a couple of times, who has this new book out called, “Were You Born On The Wrong Continent?” that’s Thom Geoghegan’s book. And this article is you know why Germany has it so good and why America is going down the drain.

And Geoghegan starts out his book where he talks about he was in, he was actually, it’s a long story, he was on his way to Russia to visit a girlfriend and the Soviet Union had just fallen and his clothing, and all the flights were cancelled and the closest he could get was Zurich, Switzerland. So here he is in Zurich, Switzerland, this journalist, and he’s walking around going, well this is incredible, the train station is like you know modern and spiffy and the trains are really fast and you know he walks into the city and the streets are clean and the buildings are fresh and there’s no homeless people begging for things, it’s not like you know downtown DC or Manhattan or you know fill in the blanks, Los Angeles, San Francisco, it’s where are all the poor people, what has happened, why is there no poverty. And it’s not like you know in the 3rd world countries where you see people and you know they’re toothless and you have beggars on the ground who are limbless or you know like you’d find all over India. And he’s like you know what’s the deal here? How did Europe get to be so good? How is it that it got so healthy, how is this possible?

Let me just share with you some of the stats from this. The European Union, the EU, this is 27 countries in the EU, in the European Union. These 27 member nations, they represent a half a billion people. Now the United States, we’re a little over 300, excuse me, half a billion people. That’s 500 million. We’re a little over 300 million here in the United States, I think we’re in the neighborhood of 320 now, 330, something like that. And so it’s just a little bit larger than the United States. And the EU, as a block, has their equivalence of Mississippi. They’ve got a few states that are you know, having a little bit of a hard time. Mostly the ones who are the recent joiners of the EU, relatively recent, from the fall of the Soviet Union, they’re still economically behind. But they’re using this common currency and this common, the Euro, and these comon kind of trade laws and the European Union now is home to more Fortune 500 companies than the United States.

Say what? I’ll bet you thought the Fortune 500 was the 500 largest American companies. The headquarters of more Fortune 500 companies are located in Europe than in the United States. The output of this trading block, of the European Union, of these 27 nations, has, it produces nearly a 3rd of the world’s economy. They outdo the US and China combined. Their universal healthcare systems, and they vary from country to country, but pretty much every state, every country in the European Union, in order to be a member of the European Union, one of the principles of the EU is that healthcare is a right and not a privilege. So if you want to join the EU you’ve got to have a national healthcare system.

And on average they cost anywhere from a third to two thirds of what the United States healthcare system costs but the EU in aggregate, all these, these 27 countries, from rich to poor, all of them, in aggregate, combined, the average of their healthcare is about half the cost of the United States. And the average of their outcomes are dramatically better. Their life span is better, their infant mortality is better, their teenage pregnancy rates are lower, their infectious disease contagions are lower, their hospitals work better, their, I mean just take any index you want. The EU is kicking our ass. At half the price. Why? Because there is not a single executive in any of those 27 nations who, like Stephen J. Helmsley of United Healthcare is making 470 million bucks for five years work, or Bill McGuire at United Healthcare making 1.7 billion dollars for five years work by saying to people no we’re not going to cover your child’s procedure, I’m sorry, your kid is too sick we’re just going to kick them off the plan. Because there’s not a single country in the European Union that allows for-profit health insurance companies to offer basic health care. It’s against the law.

In fact there’s not a single developing country in the developed world, in the OECD countries, the 34 OECD countries, not a single one that allows that, as T. R. Reid so brilliantly documented in both his documentary for NPR and his book. So they’ve got better healthcare, they’re producing more industrial output. We, well the European healthcare systems are, you know as an aggregate are rated in the top and most of the European countries are in the top five, ten, you know, they’re right up there. Number one in the world, in aggregate. We are number number 37 in the world, in healthcare.

The average European consumes 1/7 as much fossil fuel and ½ as much total energy as the average American. But here’s where it gets really interesting. The average American works the equivalent of nine extra weeks a year compared to the European average. Now most Europeans, it varies from country to country, some require three weeks of vacation a year, some require four weeks of vacation a year. Some require six weeks of vacation a year. On average, Europeans take six weeks of vacation a year. So how do Americans work nine weeks, full 40 hour weeks more than the average European? It’s because the average American isn’t working a 40 hour week anymore. The average American is working a 50 hour week or a 60 hour week.

So we’re working harder, we’re poorer, our healthcare doesn’t work, our industrial output is not as great. How does this, you know how do you connect all this stuff? It’s not China that is the most dynamic economy in the world although they’re doing very well. It’s Germany. So what’s the difference?

Now let me juxtapose this with a Tea Party voter’s poll. The, Bloomberg is reporting on a new national poll, the headline was “Deep Economic Gloom.” On this new national poll, just of people who identify themselves as Tea Party members. And when you look just at the people who identify themselves as Tea Party members, they say they have no confidence that they’re going to have a good retirement. The average age of Tea Partiers is in their 50s. So they’re looking at their 60s and 70s going I can’t live on social security.

Now in Europe, the pension programs, the social security, the European social security, pretty good. You can actually have, you can retire in Europe comfortably and be productive for society. You can retire, and you, at the age of 60 in France. I mean Sarkozy wants to take it up to 62. But the very, very early 60s, late 50s, that’s pretty much the European average, you can retire comfortably. And you can care for your grandchildren, you can… We had a women yesterday who called and said that she’s an artist and if she didn’t have to work she would be doing art and volunteering for the schools and contributing for society. In Europe they do that.

So tea partiers are worried about their retirement and they’re worried about the fact that their children are not going to do as well as they did. I did better than my dad, my dad did better than his, than my grandfather, I mean that’s the American dream, right? But the baby boomer generation which mostly makes up the tea partiers, they’re concerned that their kids aren’t going to do as well. But in a bizarre twist, those anxieties have been taken by people like Dick Armey and the Koch brothers and the tea party movement and the PR firms and the Republicans that run the tea party or who set this thing up. And they said to these people if you want to make sure that you have a safe retirement and if you want your kids to do better, then let’s privatize social security. Let’s do away with any kind of healthcare for the country and just leave each person on its own. Let’s have more individual responsibility which is code for leave the billionaires alone. Let’s have lower taxes and fewer services. Do you sense a disconnect?

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Thom Hartmann: So a real simple question. Right, just a real simple question. How is it that Europe has the European dream? How is that Europe has the American dream and here in the United States we’re losing the American Dream? The dream of being in the middle class, the dream of having good healthcare, the dream of having a decent retirement.

It’s a really simple equation. After World War II, Europe was in ruins. Most of their countries were rebooting from scratch, basically. You know with the exception of maybe the United Kingdom, they were writing new constitutions, they were coming up with new forms of government, they were, you know they had to start over. Germany in particular. And so Harry Truman sent people over to say you know let us help you write your constitution.

Now keep in mind, this was you know ’46, ’47 and here in the United States in the election in 1946 the Republicans took control of both the house and the Senate. We had just hit the peak of the union movement in the United States in 1946. 35% of all Americans were union members. Highest it’s ever been in the history of this country. And so that when the Republicans took control of the house of Senate, two really interesting things happened.

The first was they passed this thing called the Taft Hartley Act which said individual states don’t have to follow federal union laws. You can have what they called “right to work states.” In other words, states where workers don’t have basically the right to organize a union or if they do have that right they’ve got to jump through so many hoops that it’s functionally irrelevant. And a bunch of southern states said hey you know we understand slave labor, we’ve been doing it for a hundred years. Taft Hartley is just what we need. And so you saw wages start to collapse across the south after ’47, after Taft Hartley.

Taft Hartley, by the way, was vetoed by Harry Truman but there was such a large Republican majority in the Senate they were able to override his veto. In ’47 Harry Truman also proposed a national single healthcare program. A national single payer healthcare program. It was Medicare for, now Medicare didn’t even exist at the time. Medicare came into being during LBJ’s Great Society. Tell that to the tea partiers who say keep your government hands off my Medicare. That was part of LBJ’s Great Society, Medicare.

But in any case, in ’47, Harry Truman said you know there’s a lot of people in America who have no access to medical care. This was before Nixon proposed laws requiring hospitals to take you into the emergency room regardless of your ability to pay. That didn’t happen until the ‘70s. Prior to that, prior to the Nixon administration, who was a liberal by today’s Republican standards, prior to the Nixon administration it was not at all uncommon that poor people would show up at hospitals, particularly poor people of color, and just be thrown out. There was nothing. And they literally died in the streets or went home and died in their beds.

So Harry Truman said this isn’t right, we’ve got to do something about this. And so in 1947 Harry Truman proposed a national single payer healthcare system, paid for by a federal tax. He wanted to raise the federal income tax a couple of percentage points and give everybody in the country free healthcare. Just like they have in France. Harry Truman proposed that. He couldn’t even get it voted on in the Senate because of the Republican control in the Senate. Sound familiar? This is 1947.

We have won World War II, we are reindustrializing America. We’re at the top of our game and people are already starting to buy into the Republican propaganda machine. Oh don’t worry, we’ll take care of it, you know those Democrats this social security thing that’s socialism. Harry Truman he’s going to take you down the road right to Russia, or right to the Soviet Union, he’s another Joe Stalin. I mean literally that was the propaganda of the day. I have seen those old newspapers and listened to those old radio ads and many of you have as well, you know what I’m talking about. There’s probably even a few of you old enough to remember. I’m not but some of our listeners might be.

So Harry Truman couldn’t do it in the United States. He couldn’t get the right to unionization be considered a right in the United States. Taft Hartley blew that up, it’s no longer a right, it’s a privilege. And he couldn’t get healthcare as a right in the United States. He couldn’t even get a vote on it in Congress. So when Germany was putting together their constitution, Harry Truman’s guys said to the, said to the Germans, you know what might be a real interesting, and the Japanese by the way, this is also true of the Japanese. You know what would be a really, and keep in mind Japan after World War II was devastated. Average annual income was under $100 a year. It was devastated by World War II.

So Harry Truman said to these two countries when you guys are writing your constitutions, why don’t you put into your constitutions that healthcare is a right, and the right of workers to organize in the workplace is a right. Not a privilege but a right. And both countries did that. In Germany every corporation has to have at least half its board of directors come from the ranks of organized labor working in that company. Japan has a national healthcare system, Japan has the right to unionize. Germany has a national healthcare system, Germany has the right to unionize. And the same is true of pretty much every other country in the European Union.

And you wonder why are they doing so well, why are they getting rich as a country. Now their billionaires aren’t as rich as our billionaires. And they don’t have as many billionaires as we have, and they don’t have as many millionaires as we have on a per capita basis. But they’ve got nothing like the poverty we have in the United States. We’ve got 40 million people in the United States living at or near the poverty line. You got 1 in 7 children in the United States living in an environment where they don’t know if they’re going to have enough to eat, where at least one week out of the month they’re experiencing what the federal government calls “food insecurity.” In other words, they go to bed hungry. It doesn’t happen in the European Union by and large, or where it does it is very, very limited. What are the lessons that we have to learn from the Europeans. And why don’t the tea partiers figure this out? Well I’ll tell you why. It has to do with the media. Back with your thoughts on this.

Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.