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SCREWED
THE UNDECLARED WAR Against the Middle Class
- And What We Can Do About It
THOM HARTMANN
Copyright 2006, 2007 by Thom Hartmann and Mythical Research, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 235 Montgomery Street, Suite 650 San Francisco, California 94104-2916 Tel: (415) 288-0260, Fax: (415) 362-2512 www.bkconnection.com
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Berrett-Koehler and the BK logo are registered trademarks of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
First Edition Hardcover print edition ISBN 978-1-57675-414-6 Paperback print edition ISBN 978-1-57675-463-4 PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-57675-529-7 IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-60509-869-2 Mobipocket e-book ISBN 978-1-57675-850-2
2010-2
Interior design and composition by Gary Palmatier, Ideas to Images. Elizabeth von Radics, copyeditor; Mike Mollett, proofreader; Edwin Durbin, indexer. Cover design: Mark van Bronkhorst, MvB Design.
In memory of Carl T. Hartmann, the world s best dad and the finest human being I ve ever known . 1928-2006
CONTENTS
Foreword by Mark Crispin Miller
Introduction: Profits before People
Part I: A Middle Class Requires Democracy
Chapter 1 There Is No Free Market
Chapter 2 How We the People Create the Middle Class
Chapter 3 The Rise of the Corporatocracy
Part II: Democracy Requires a Middle Class
Chapter 4 The Myth of the Greedy Founders
Chapter 5 Thomas Paine against the Freeloaders
Chapter 6 Taxation without Representation
Chapter 7 James Madison versus the Business of War
Chapter 8 FDR and the Economic Royalists
Part III: Governing for We the People
Chapter 9 Too Important for the Private Sector
Chapter 10 Knowledge Is Power
Chapter 11 Medicine for Health, Not for Profit
Chapter 12 The Truth about the Trust Fund
Chapter 13 Setting the Rules of the Game
Chapter 14 The Illegal Employer Problem
Chapter 15 Leveling the Playing Field
Conclusion: The Road to Victory
Afterword by Greg Palast
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
FOREWORD
M ARK C RISPIN M ILLER
Here s a bit of wisdom on which left and right can easily agree: If you let things go, you ll have to pay for it eventually; and the longer you don t deal with it, the more you ll have to pay. Wait long enough, and you ll pay dearly-when you could have done the right thing all along and at little cost.
Take the planet, for example. As every reasonable person and/or group will now admit, this Earth had been gradually heating up since heavy industry began to blacken and enrich the West not long after our founding revolution; and now that trend, for years denied, has started to accelerate, with ever-larger chunks of polar permafrost dissolving into sea, polar bears and penguins vanishing, floodwaters rising everywhere, and the weather going mad. Although for decades the danger was strenuously veiled by lots of corporate and religious propaganda, it s now a major story sold dramatically by Time , CNN, and Hollywood-and an issue of increasing worry even to Shell Oil, General Motors, and a sizeable network of rational evangelicals. If we had been allowed to face the facts not long ago, when scientists first started trying to talk about them, we might not be wondering now how many species have a future here.
Global warming is, at last, a major story, as an overt catastrophe must always be a major story. When it is actually upon us, first of all, there s no denying it (unless you re working in the Bush administration); and, of course, it offers just the sort of stark apocalyptic images that no news outlet can resist (unless they come from places where the scourge in question is our military). Other kinds of long decline are not so mesmerizing-and therefore get no press-although they re just as ruinous as ecological destruction (and are in fact inseparable from it).
Just as we have let the world-and America with it-heat up and otherwise become more poisonous, so have we let things degrade in the civic sphere. Through a sort of continental drift, we have been gradually estranged from our own revolutionary heritage, which these days seems to twinkle dimly at us from the history of some other, better country. That country was a rough republic, where you could either stand up as a citizen or cherish and pursue the right to become one. Ultimately, in that promising republic all were constitutionally free to speak and think and worship as they chose. They were able and inclined to run their government, which had been meticulously structured so as never to devolve into autocracy or oligarchy or mobocracy or any other kind of tyranny. That republic was, or clearly promised to become, government of the people, by the people, for the people. This was not mere soaring rhetoric or a prosaic clich but an ideal both humane and rational and, it is now clear, the only way that we the people will not perish from the Earth (and take the planet with us when we go).
How did America become the place it is today-a quasi-gulag of bright shopping malls and hidden torture chambers, of crumbling schools and sprawling private jails? How did Americans become a people who could let that happen even though, as this fine book makes clear, it has done them nothing but harm? The change did not, of course, occur when Bush Co. took over but gradually overcame us through the Civil War, the World Wars, and especially the Cold War and then through the Great Leap Backward that began in earnest when the Cold War ended and the Red Menace so rudely disappeared.
To grasp that change, in short, would be to comprehend our entire history; but certainly one major reason for the breakdown is the great blackout on our own revolutionary origins and founding ideology. We have too long denied, and have too long been denied, the truth of what America is really all about.
This revisionary process was already under way when the republic was still in its infancy, with the construction of that dazzling apolitical mythology that still impairs our understanding of American history: That our revolution was made not by common men and women sacrificing for the common good but, more attractively (and calmly), by the revered Founding Fathers, of whom the most paternal was George Washington, the Father of his Country, as if we the people were not self-created and self-ruling but merely his glad and grateful child; that, despite the crucial influence of Common Sense , Tom Paine was somehow not a Founding Father"; that those Founders thought and worked in noble unison, all of them in vague agreement as to basic principles. Such misconceptions were already gaining ground while the United States was still authentically (if far from perfectly) republican. And then there were the later prettifying myths of a great national consensus-even more preposterous yet which we all picked up in grammar school-suggesting that the Founders were not merely in agreement with each other but somehow agreed also with the Puritans who founded the colonial theocracies, as if the United States were not a highly radical experiment in atheistic government.
That the early revolutionaries were at odds with one another and that their thinking tended to be highly radical are facts of history that have been whited-out not just by the Establishment. By and large, the left has also minimized our revolutionary heritage although, of course, for very different reasons. In many leftist eyes, America s revolutionaries were not really revolutionaries , as that term has long since been romanticized by close association with the Bastille and the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, The Sayings of Chairman Mao , and the hairy, handsome face of Che Guevara.
Having largely bought the soporific mythos of the Founding Fathers, many leftists have shrugged off our revolution as too stolid and bourgeois to merit any emulation; and, somewhat more understandably, they have condemned the Framers for their tolerance of slavery, for the Indian genocide, and, no less, for having been white Anglo-Saxon males. Thus have U.S. leftists looked primarily to Europe for their intellectual paradigms, relying infinitely mor