Hartmann - Screwed: the undeclared war against the middle class--and what we can do about it

SCREWED

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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.
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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 worlds best dad and the finest human being Ive ever known.
19282006

MARK CRISPIN MILLER

Heres a bit of wisdom on which left and right can easily agree: If you let things go, youll have to pay for it eventually; and the longer you dont deal with it, the more youll have to pay. Wait long enough, and youll pay dearlywhen 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, its now a major story sold dramatically by Time, CNN, and Hollywoodand 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, theres no denying it (unless youre 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 mesmerizingand therefore get no pressalthough theyre just as ruinous as ecological destruction (and are in fact inseparable from it).

Just as we have let the worldand America with itheat 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 todaya 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