Lou Dobbs - War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on

First and always, thanks to my wonderful family for their love and support, and for putting up with me. Thanks also to a great team of journalists, who, yes, also put up with me, and each weekday evening produce Lou Dobbs Tonight and work tirelessly and diligently to report the events and issues that are shaping the lives of all Americans.

Together, weve been reporting for the past two years on what has become an undeclared war on the mainstay and bedrock of American society, our middle class. Our great group of journalists has researched and reported on a wide array of events and developments that have appeared to many, including us at the outset, to be independent and unrelated in any way to one another. But over time, those events became social, economic, and political trends that are demonstrably connected and, in many instances, orchestrated by the same forces and groups within our political economy.

Whether the issue is failing public education, corruption in Washington, rampant illegal immigration, the outsourcing of jobs to cheap foreign labor markets, massive U.S. budget and trade deficits, a crumbling national infrastructure, voter fraud, or runaway costs of energy and health care, the principal victim is the same: hardworking, taxpaying middle-class Americans and their families and those who aspire to be part of the middle class. Over time, weve managed to report the relationship among politicians of both parties, corporate and special interests, and lobbyists and the roles they are playing in attacking, often consciously and without conscience, the very people who make up the foundation of our great country, the middle class. Thanks to my colleagues Jim McGinnis, Kevin Burke, Leslie Bella-Henry, Dierdre Hughes, Chris Billante, Deborah Davis, Kitty Pilgrim, Casey Wian, Bill Tucker, Christine Romans, Lisa Sylvester, Louise Schiavone, Peter Viles, Claudine Hutton, Philippa Holland, Adrienne Klein, Rene Brinkley, Nickie Bonner, Jessica Rosgaard, Jill Billante, Tom Evans, David Brandt, Lisa Dilallo, Paul Vitale, Marci Starzec, Kimberly Cardinal, Nicole Duignan, Vandana Agrawal, Jessie Anderson, Angela Ramos, Stacy Curtin, April Harris, Richard Dool, Diane Saltzman, Kaleigh Mountain, and Kathleen Goldrick.

My thanks to CNN News Group President Jim Walton for unstinting encouragement and support, and to Time Warner Chairman and CEO Dick Parsons and President Jeffrey Bewkes for their commitment to world-class journalism.

My thanks also to my friend and counselor Wayne Kabak of William Morris Agency for urging me to write this book, to Vikings Richard Kot, who both encouraged me and skillfully edited the book, and to my friend and compadre H. P. Newquist, whose talent, energy, and humor made this third book in six years possible. My gratitude as well to my colleague Slade Sohmer for editorial research and always helpful suggestions, to Lisa Lee for her research, and finally, to Arlene Forman and Mario Spagnola for their daily efforts to assist me in countless ways, and yes, also for putting up with me.

G eorge W. Bush claimed through two presidential campaigns that America has become the ownership society. I couldnt agree more. America has become a society owned by corporations and a political system dominated by corporate and special interests, and directed by elites who are hostileor at best indifferentto 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 Lincolns 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 relevent causes of our time, including the preservation of our traditional national values of independence, equality, personal freedom, the common good, and our national interest. Isnt 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?