Re: War on the Middle Class Lou Dobbs
- From: "David R" <ho.ho@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 12:04:59 -0400
so, you read the book ?,
"Jerry Okamura" <okamuraj005@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:46758104$0$30593$4c368faf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Lots of perceived problems, no solutions to how to address the perceived
problem...
"David R" <ho.ho@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Lq4di.4472$bP5.2669@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
time for some truth
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/lou.dobbs.tonight/book.2.html
How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups are Waging
War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back,
In a sweeping analysis, Dobbs looks at every aspect of the decline of the
middle class, from a lack of political representation to America's
corrupt health-care system. He demonstrates that the gap between
America's newest haves and have-nots is not merely financial, but instead
involves the erosion of education, employment, government, and community.
Dobbs proposes a series of measures to resolve each issue and incite
people, whose future is being mortgaged to benefit a powerful few, to
preserve their rights and dreams.
http://bullnotbull.com/archive/dobbs-1.html
George W. Bush claimed through two presidential campaigns that America
has become the "ownership society." I couldn't agree more. America has
become a society owned by corporations and a political system dominated
by corporate and special interests, directed by elites who are hostile --
or at best indifferent to -- the interests of working men and women of
the middle class and their families.
Corporate America holds dominion over the Republican and Democratic
parties through campaign contributions, armies of lobbyists that have
swamped Washington, and control of political and economic think tanks and
media. What was for almost two hundred years a government of the people
has become a government of corporations, and the consent of the governed
is now little more than a quaint rubric of our Declaration of
Independence, honored as a perfunctory exercise in artifice, and
practiced every two to four years in midterm and presidential elections
in which only about half of our eligible voters go to the polls.
We stand on the brink of being judged by future historians as the
generation that failed to heed Abraham Lincoln's call to assure that the
"government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not
perish from the earth."
There is almost no countervailing influence in our society to mitigate,
even at the margins, the awesome and all but total corporate ownership of
our political system. Labor unions are nearing extinction, and those that
survive are in the midst of internal leadership struggles to find
relevance in our economy and our society. Most of our universities are
rarely, if ever, bastions of independent thinking, social scholarship,
and activism. Instead they are dependent and rely upon either the federal
government or the favor of corporations and the wealthy for funding their
very existences. Our churches are in decline and tend to expend their
political energy on issues such as gay marriage and highly amorphous
"family values" rather than on the relevant causes of our time, including
the preservation of our traditional national values of independence,
equality, personal freedom, the common good, and our national interest.
Isn't preserving the American Dream, and fighting back against those
forces that would diminish or destroy it, a worthy cause for our
traditional institutions and to all of us who care deeply about our great
democracy and way of life?
Most alarmingly, our federal government has become so dysfunctional that
it no longer serves well the needs of the people, nor do our elected
officials assert the common good against the power of money and capital.
No one believes more strongly than I do in our free enterprise democracy,
or in the importance of capitalism as the driving force of our economy.
At the same time, I also strongly reject unfettered capitalism, and those
forces that now rampant corporatism has arrayed against our middle class
and those who aspire to be part of it.
The title of this book reflects an evolution in my understanding of our
failed public policies, business practices, and politics over the past
five years, and of their disastrous impact on the single largest group of
people in this country -- our middle class. My understanding has,
admittedly, evolved far too slowly, and occasionally only haltingly,
especially when I consider that the result of those failed policies,
practices, and politics are now so painfully obvious: Middle class
working men and women and their families have been devastated.
In this conflict, the middle class is not collateral damage. Working men
and women are not innocent bystanders in a great national accident. Our
political, business, and academic elites are waging an outright war on
Americans, and I doubt the middle class can survive the continued assault
by forces unleashed over the past five years if they go on unchecked.
Whether the issue is a total lack of border security, an illegal
immigration crisis, taxation, education, or jobs, big business and big
government are unchecked in their attacks on the common good. Most of our
elected officials, whether Democrat or Republican, have been bought and
paid for through campaign donations from corporate lobbyists and other
special interest groups. We've reached a stage where lobbyists no longer
merely influence legislation but write the actual language of what
becomes law.
The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 is
only one such example. Credit card, banking, and other financial
institutions all but wrote this measure. As a law, it now means that many
middle class families cannot turn to the protection of bankruptcy, even
though the leading cause of personal bankruptcy is the medical and health
care costs incurred by catastrophic illness.
In conjunction with the Bush administration's unwavering commitment to
faith-based economics and free trade at any cost, the effect of its
failed public policies has been draconian. Our unrepresentative Congress
has actually cheered on corporate America's business practices --
practices that have destroyed millions of well-paying middle-class jobs,
and continue to do so. We are witnessing something that would have been
unimaginable a quarter century ago: the emergence of a House of
Representatives and a Senate that ignore the will of the majority of
Americans, the middle class. Politicians have become viciously and
vacuously partisan, and contemptuous of their constituencies. These
forces are committed to a world order that views national sovereignty and
borders as inconvenient impediments to trade and commerce, and our
citizens as nothing more than consumers or units of labor in a global
marketplace. That ideology has damaged, perhaps irreversibly, our
manufacturing base as a result of the corporate offshoring of production
facilities and the outsourcing of jobs to cheap overseas labor markets.
Each night, as I conclude my nightly broadcast on CNN, I have the
gut-sick feeling that we have chronicled another twenty-four hours in the
decline of our great democratic republic and the bankrupting of our free
enterprise economy. Almost every night it seems we report on the erosion
of individual rights and individual liberty, on ever bolder attempts by
political and business elites to define what America now means, and on
actions of elected officials, corporate leaders, and special interests
who seemingly are determined to deny millions of Americans the same
economic and educational opportunities that previous generations enjoyed.
.
- References:
- War on the Middle Class Lou Dobbs
- From: David R
- Re: War on the Middle Class Lou Dobbs
- From: Jerry Okamura
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