Screwed the Undeclared War Against the Middle Class (9 page)

Iron, steel mills, and steel products 20%

Agriculture, construction, and mining machinery 20%

Publishing industries 20%

Medical equipment and supplies 20%

Source:
www.economyincrisis.org/congress/foreignownedind.asp
(accessed March 25, 2006).

But it really began in full force here, with Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton, and here is where its fruits are most obvious. For more than two hundred years, America was the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. Today—after nearly three decades of the cons' economics and insane "free-trade" policies—we're the most indebted nation in the history of the world.

We've gone from being—pre-Reagan—the world's largest exporter of finished goods and the world's largest importer of raw materials to being—just over the past decade—the exact opposite. We used to import iron ore, make steel, make cars, and export them all around the world. Now Canadian and Mexican and German companies mine raw materials from mines they own in the United States, ship the ore to their nations or to China, manufacture the finished goods, and sell those goods back to us—with dollars we give them in exchange for another few hundred billion dollars' worth of America every year.

There's no reason to let the cons screw us over. We must not stand by while our democracy becomes a corporatocracy, serving an elite group of billionaire CEOs. There is another way—and we've done it before. Thomas Jefferson knew how to build a middle class. Franklin Roosevelt knew how. We can do it, too. We can recreate the America that built the middle class my dad entered, the middle class in which he raised me.

Every year at Christmastime, millions of Americans watch TV portrayals of Charles Dickens's classic novel
A Christmas Carol
. In the story a regular guy named Bob Cratchit works at the firm of Scrooge and Marley.

Bob works full-time, plus nights and weekends, but even so he has no idea how he'll be able to afford Christmas dinner let alone gifts for his children. He can't afford medical care for his son, dooming Tiny Tim to either death or a lifetime deformity. He puts up with daily abuse from his employer because he lives in terror of unemployment and homelessness.

Bob Cratchit is screwed.

We like watching
A Christmas Carol
because Bob's boss, Ebenezer Scrooge, famously has a change of heart and "donates" Christmas dinner to the Cratchit family as well as health care for Tiny Tim. Yet as we watch the show, we often forget the subtext of the story: without strong worker protections and/or unions, the workplace is not a democracy—it more closely resembles a kingdom, and the worker is the "property" of the employer. (Dickens knew this well—his own father was once thrown into debtor's prison.)

In the seven-thousand-year history of the "civilized" world, most regular folks have been like Bob Cratchit.

Because the history of "civilization" is the history of anti-democratic kings and kingdoms (or theocrats or other despots), most of the average people over the past seven thousand years in "civilized" countries either have been slaves or, if workers like Cratchit, have worked as hard as they could and still had trouble getting by.

For virtually all of recorded history, society has been divided into a small but fabulously wealthy ownership class (who were also the political rulers) and a large but poor slave, serf, and/or working class. Because of this lack of democracy—both in government and in the workplace (a union is democracy in the workplace)—outside of a small mercantilist class and a very few skilled tradesmen who managed to organize into guilds, a middle class has been an aberration.

A middle class can't exist when democracy is weak or absent. It arises only when We the People have a strong say in both our government and our workplace.

Look at history and you will find that the middle class was the creation of liberal democracies. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson did not fight a bloody war to create a country only for wealthy property holders. (See
chapter 4
to fully understand how wrong is the corrosive myth of the "rich Founders.") Our Founders believed that every Bob Cratchit willing to work for his living should be able to earn enough to own his house and support himself and his family. That's what it means to be middle class—and part of why Jefferson put "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" into the Declaration of Independence.

The Founders also knew that the middle class doesn't just materialize out of thin air. That's why, in the preamble to the Constitution, they wrote that one purpose of government was to "promote the general welfare."

Two centuries later, when the middle class was in danger of disappearing during the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt almost single-handedly created a new middle class through his New Deal policies. Roosevelt's success demonstrates that government can and must "promote the general welfare" because only government can create the conditions that make a middle class possible. And FDR was able to do it only because an overwhelming majority of Americans voted for it in a relatively free and open democracy.

Listen to the right-wing pundits—the people I call the
cons
—and they will tell you something completely different. They suggest (and some actually believe) that a middle class will naturally spring into being when the kingdoms of corporate power are freed from government restrictions.

The way to create good jobs, according to the cons, is to "free" the market. When business gets to do whatever it wants, they say, it will create wealth, and that wealth will trickle down to the rest of us, creating a middle class.

The cons' belief in "free" markets is a bit like the old Catholic Church's insistence that the Earth was at the center of the solar system. The free-market line is widely believed by those in power, and those who challenge this belief are labeled heretics—and it's wrong.

Here's a headline for these cons who are masquerading as economists without having studied either economics or history:

There is no such thing as a "free" market
.

Markets are the creation of government
.

Governments provide markets with a stable currency for financial transactions. They provide a legal infrastructure and a court system to enforce the contracts that make the market possible. They provide an educated workforce through public education, and those workers show up at their places of business after traveling on public roads, rails, and airways provided by the government. Businesses that use the "free" market are protected by police and fire departments provided by the government, and they send their communications—from phone to e-mail—over lines that follow public rights of way maintained and protected by the government.

And, most important, the rules of the game of business are defined by the government. Any sports fan can tell you that without rules and referees football, baseball, basketball, and hockey
would be a mess. Similarly, business without rules won't work. In a corporate kingdom—a
corporatocracy
—those rules are made by the businesses themselves and will inevitably screw workers and citizens. In a democracy those rules are made by We the People, both through our elected representatives and through union negotiations with the business kings/lords/CEOs.

The cons believe that what business does is business's business and that government should keep its nose out of it, even when the business is run by Ebenezer Scrooge and leads to centuries of sick Tiny Tims and terrified Bob Cratchits.

Talk-show cons and TV talking-head cons and political cons—both Republicans and "conservative" or "middle of the road" (euphemisms for
corporate connected
) Democrats—say that government just gets in the way of the market. They want to "let the market decide" our economy.

Unspoken is their belief that if economic and social policy are made by the market, we don't need government—the voice and the will of We the People—for most domestic affairs. One of the most vocal cons, Grover Norquist, told National Public Radio's Mara Liasson in a May 25, 2001, interview, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

During the Golden Age of the American middle class, people routinely voted themselves tax increases to invest in new schools, better roads, higher pay for police and firefighters, and a multitude of other infrastructure and public works projects. Hospitals were owned and run by local communities, as were water and sewage systems and, in most of the United States, power plants and other public utilities. Taxes by and large were thought of as investments in civil society and community and were routinely embraced by the
majority of the middle class. Of course, people made jokes about not liking taxes, but they still knew that without taxes there would be no services, and people wanted and needed those services.

Ronald Reagan and his public relations (PR) machine, funded by huge corporations and wealthy people like Joseph Coors, promoted the thought virus—the meme—that taxes are bad and government is bad. Reagan ran as an "outsider" to government (although he was the former governor of California) and even ran for reelection as president "against" government.