Ed Schultz - Killer Politics: How Big Money and Bad Politics Are Destroying the Great American Middle Class

THERE WAS BLOOD

I WAS BLEEDING.

In 2004, in a make-or-break moment for my career, I launched the Ed Schultz radio show with a bloody nose. Just seconds before I was about to go on the air with my much-publicized effort to challenge the right wing stranglehold on talk radio, my nose began spouting blood like the cannon fodder so many thought I was.

Throughout the radio industry, the conventional wisdom was that liberal talk just couldnt work, and New Yorks WABC radio general manager Phil Boyce himself, who had launched the career of right wing wonder boy Sean Hannity, said liberal radio didnt have a chance. Rush Limbaugh called me that little guy from North Dakota.

They were right about one thing. Every liberal talker from Mario Cuomo to Jim Hightower to Alan Dershowitz had failed, but what they didnt get was that it wasnt the messagenot in a country equally divided between Republicans and Democratsit was the messengers. These are all fine men, but they were not radio professionals. I understood that you can write all the great lyrics in the world, but if you want people to listen, you need a great singer. I cant sing, but I damn sure knew I could talk, and thats why I thought I could succeed. I dont think I knew just how hard it would be, though. That bloody nose became a fitting metaphor for what is the fight of our livesa contest for the soul of America.

The middle class, where the greatness of this nation is rooted, is under siege by an increasingly unethical system, managed by economic vampires who are sucking the lifeblood out of the American family and ripping the heart out of democracy itself. From mortgage scams to credit card predation to health insurance hustles, greed is killing our country.

Despite that bloody nose and an inauspicious start with just two small radio stationsKNDK in Langdon, North Dakota, and KTOX in Needles, Californiasigned on to my national show, today, The Ed Schultz Show has one hundred affiliates, including XM satellite channel 167. Were in every major market. And since April 2009, The Ed Show every weeknight on MSNBC TV has given me another platform to tell it like it is. My on-air presence, along with a rising number of liberal-minded websites and bloggers, has helped balance the national debate and helped Democrats to majorities in Congress and to a historic victory in the White House.

And, of course, we all lived happily ever after.

Wasnt that what was supposed to happen? Well, if anything close to a happy ending had occurred, Id be on a boat getting sunburned with a beer in one hand and a fishing rod in the other. There would be no need for this book.

Instead, after the inspirational candidacy and election of President Barack Obama, the contest for Americas soul has gotten even more malicious than it was when right wingers had a near monopoly on the airwaves. Reasonable Americans find ourselves pitted in an ideological struggle against an extremist right wing movement that really believes greed is good, that money trumps patriotism. Where is their love of country? There can be no compromise with people like that. I wonder if Americans can ever be united again.

You cant just bring those extremists, that corrupt posse, to the White House for a beer summit. You cant take them fishing. Good Lord, anytime you get them near a trout stream they want to waterboard someone!

We have to beat them. It wont be easy. They have the power and ability to intimidate and deceive millions. This fight is not just between Democrats and Republicans. True, the Republican Party has been commandeered by corporate powers, but the Democratic Party has at least been infiltrated. Big moneyand the politicians who are swayed by itplay both parties against each other, using this false battle to distract most of us from the real war, which is a war against the American family. For thirty years, starting with Ronald Reagans presidency, the biggest heist in history has been going on right under our noses: an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the American middle class into the pockets of the super wealthy. In Eisenhowers day, the very rich paid 90 percent of their income in taxes. Today who bears the big tax burden? Everyday wage earners. And take a look at the last thirty years: In 1976, the top 1 percent of Americans earned 8.9 percent of the income; by 2005, they earned 21.8 percent. From 1979 to 2005, incomes for the top 5 percent increased 81 percent while incomes for the bottom 20 percent, the American workers, declined 1 percent. And as for net worth? As Inequality.org puts it, The richest one percent of U.S. households now owns 34.3 percent of the nations private wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent.

Through jingoism, through attempts to rewrite history, through propaganda and by playing on peoples coarsest emotions and fears, generations of right wing extremists have convinced the vast majority of Americans to vote against their own good. For three decades, a whole bunch of people, especially people in red states, people living paycheck to paycheck, voted for a criminal class who was stealing them blind. I guess we should be grateful the Republicans didnt legislate for debtors prisons. A small percentage of moneyed elites have found a way to hold the rest of us financially hostageand, as a country, we keep voting them and their henchmen into power. Id call it Stockholm syndrome, but I cant because were not in Sweden. Youd know if it were Sweden because wed all have health care and a higher standard of living.

And I would be a better skier.

Theres a saying where I come from: You can lead a horse to water, but you cant get the dumb bastard to vote in his own interest. OK, maybe that saying has been heard only in my immediate family, but its still worth saying because its what happened.

THIS BATTLE HAS JUST BEGUN

In the year just past, the year of the Great Recession, theres been a glimmer of an awakening. Americans are mad as hell that they were forced to bail out crooked Wall Street institutions that were too big to fail. Our government privatized corporate/banker profits and socialized corporate/banker losses, passing them right along to us. But a lot of this teabagger anger is misplaced. Bush and Cheney pulled the bank job and left Obama holding the bagwith nothing in it but an $11 trillion I.O.U. Some Americans have short-term memory issues. They forget that Obama and his much-maligned economic team did enough things right to save the economy from a total meltdown.

I have done my fair share of criticizing the Obama administration. Financial reform has been slow in coming, and the bonuses paid to the executives who have been bailed out are an outrage. But even though the White House spent too much time and money on Wall Street and not enough on Main Street, they got more right than they got wrong.

In the process, though, many of us have discovered that it is relatively easy to rally support in Washington if it helps out corporations, but any legislation designed to give the average American family a break results in instant gridlock: What the election of Barack Obama and a Democratic majority has revealed, plain as day, is just how entrenched and powerful big money interests have become. A few months into the Obama presidency I began to understand that no matter how transformational this election was, it was not the end of the fight. It was just the beginning.

We voted for change, but not much changed. Dark forces still lurk. Big money still rules and big money still makes the rules. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) said on my show once, The senate is owned by the banks. Or, you could say, it is co-owned by banks, the health care industry, and the oil monopolies. All that big money isnt going down soon and it isnt going down easy. Corruption is entangled in the system with cancerous tentacles. We can fight it and win, but it will be a fight that may well last generations.