Screwed the Undeclared War Against the Middle Class (2 page)

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 more on Marx and Gramsci than on Paine and Jefferson, and otherwise ignoring the unprecedented fire that once lit up the world from our own soil. They have made the grave mistake of seeing slavery and the genocide as so much evidence against the Bill of Rights, when those atrocities prove only that those rights were not revered
enough
by the Americans of yesteryear.

Today the thrilling old duality of "left " and "right" appears increasingly irrelevant—now that the Cold War is a memory—and less meaningful with every passing day as we Americans once more face off against the same ferocious atavistic forces that the Constitution was intended to contain, or thwart, forever: the power-lust of those who would be king, the greed of those who wish they were aristocrats, and the relentless malice of those priest-hoods that would force their creed on everybody else. The luminaries of our revolution understood those dangers thoroughly and knew how best to keep them from subverting proper government and making people mostly miserable.

In short, the time has come for us to turn to them again and once more study both their work and their example. For guidance as we thus try to re-educate ourselves, we certainly can do no better than to read Thom Hartmann, whose understanding of our revolutionary heritage, and whose ability to make that understanding clear, is unsurpassed. If you are one who longs to see this nation once again great with promise, this book will enlighten you—and brace you for the necessary fight.

Carl loved books and he loved history. After spending two years in the army as part of the American occupation forces in Japan immediately after World War II, Carl was hoping to graduate from college and teach history—perhaps even at the university level—if he could hang on to the GI Bill and his day job long enough to get his PhD. But in 1950, when he'd been married just a few months, the surprise came that forced him to drop out of college: his wife was pregnant with their first child.

This was an era when husbands worked, wives tended the home, and being a good father and provider was one of the highest callings to which a man could aspire. Carl dropped out of school, kept his 9-to-5 job at a camera shop, and got a second job at a metal fabricating plant, working with molten metal from 7:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. For much of his wife's pregnancy and his newborn son's first year, he slept three hours a night and caught up on the weekends, but in the process he earned enough to get them an apartment and prepare for the costs of raising a family. Over the next forty-five years, he continued to work in the steel and machine industry, in the later years as a bookkeeper/manager for a Michigan tool-and-die company as three more sons were born.

Carl knew he was doing the right thing when he took that job in the factory, and he did it enthusiastically. Because the auto industry was unionized, he found he was able to support his entire family—all four sons—on one paycheck. He had fully funded health insurance, an annual vacation, and a good pension waiting for him when he retired. Carl had become a member of the middle class. He may not have achieved his personal dream of teaching history, but he had achieved the American dream. He was self-sufficient and free.

Working with molten metal could be dangerous, but the dangers were apparent, and Carl took every precaution to protect himself so that he could return home safe to his family. What he didn't realize, however, was that the asbestos used at the casting operation was an insidious poison. He didn't realize that the asbestos industry had known for decades that the stuff could kill but would continue to profitably market it for another twenty years while actively using its financial muscle to keep the general public in the dark and prevent the government from interfering.

A couple of years ago, Carl tripped on the stairs and ended up in the hospital with a compression fracture of his spine. He figured that fall also caused the terrible pain he'd been experiencing in his abdomen. The doctors, however, discovered that his lungs were filled with mesothelioma, a rare form of lung cancer that is almost always caused by exposure to asbestos. Mesothelioma is terminal, and its victims die by slow and painful suffocation.

Just because some corporation put profit before people, Carl got screwed.

I was Carl's first child.

My dad faced a painful death, but at least his job in a union shop left him with health care after retirement. Most Americans don't even have that reassurance anymore. More than 45 million Americans
don't have health insurance to cover expenses for a serious illness; 5 million have lost their health insurance in the past four years alone. And it's not just illness that worries most Americans today. Americans are working more and making less. It's getting harder and harder to just get by.

There's a reason for the pain Americans are suffering.

The America my dad grew up in put people before profits. The America he lives in now puts profits before people.

In my dad's America, 35 percent of working people were union members who got a living wage, health insurance, and defined-benefits pensions. These union benefits lifted all boats because they set the floor for employment; for every union job, there was typically a nonunion job with similar pay and benefits (meaning roughly 70 percent of the American workforce back then could raise a family on a single paycheck). People who were disabled and couldn't work could live on Social Security payments, and the elderly knew they would have a safe retirement, paid for by pensions, Social Security, and Medicare. The gap between the richest and the poorest shrunk rather than widened.

That America is disappearing fast. The minimum wage—just $5.15 per hour—is not a living wage. Workers are now expected to pay for their own health insurance and their own retirement. Pension plans are disappearing—30,000 General Motors employees lost theirs in 2005—and there's continued talk of privatizing Social Security. The safety net is ripping apart, and the results are that the middle class is shrinking. The rich are once again getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer:

The inflation-adjusted average annual pay of a CEO went up from $7,773,000 to $9,600,000 from 2002 to 2004. Meanwhile, from 2000 to 2004, the inflation-adjusted median annual household income went down from $46,058 to $44,389. In other words, ordinary people's income went
down
by $1,669 while CEO pay went up by $1,827,000.
¹

Over the past four years, from 2001 to 2005, America has lost 2,818,000 manufacturing jobs. If you don't count jobs produced by the military-industrial complex, the number of private sector jobs created since 2001 has
decreased
by 1,160,000.
²

Although 67 percent of large employers (more than 500 employees) offer a traditional pension, that is down from 91 percent two decades ago, and it's dropping fast as more companies freeze pensions and turn instead to 401(k)s.
³
Only 6 percent of Americans working in the private sector can rely on a defined pension,
⁴
and 76 percent of Baby Boomers say they don't think they are very prepared to meet their retirement expenses.
⁵

Today only 60 percent of employers provide health care to their employees. More than 45 million Americans were without health insurance as of 2004, and we can only guess that that number has grown.
⁶

You don't need the numbers because you probably already know someone who has been forced out of the middle class. Roger, for instance, who once was a vice president of research and development for a software engineering company, lost his job during the dot-com bust and never got it back. After being unemployed for seven years, he's thinking of getting a job as a "landscape engineer"—that's a gardener—at a tenth of his former salary.

Or there's the case of Bob, a college graduate who has been holding three jobs for the past five years, one full-time as a bookstore clerk, two part-time. Even though he works sixty hours a week, he doesn't make enough money to rent his own apartment (he rents a room in a shared flat) and he can't afford health insurance. He hopes his allergies don't turn into asthma because he can't afford the medication he would need for that.

Too many Americans are just holding on. Consider Amy: Divorced from her alcoholic husband, she has gone back to school
full-time to become a teacher; she earns a living by catering on the weekends. A single mother, she and her daughter share a studio apartment. Amy has neither health insurance nor child care and no nearby relatives—she relies on neighbors to take care of her daughter. One major illness and Amy would be homeless.