Screwed the Undeclared War Against the Middle Class by Thom Hartmann Read Free Book Online Page A

Street. Our private health-care system has produced a huge cropof multimillionaires and multibillionaires like Bill Frist and his brother and father. One in twenty Americans is now getting tap water from a non-U.S. private corporation that is extracting profits from local American communities and taking those profits overseas. Large swaths of America's electrical infrastructure have been privatized
and
deregulated, leading to rate manipulation, brown-outs in California, and huge profits for utility corporations. CEOs are looking forward to buying more Gulfstreams and nicer yachts, while America's middle class is paying more and more for basic and necessary services.
    Making government smaller
is a nice-sounding phrase in this post-Reagan world, but those who promote it are really pulling what Bernie Sanders 2 calls a "reverse Robin Hood." It's cover for a system that takes from the poor and gives to the rich.
    In his budget proposal for 2007, Bush called for spending that will benefit the biggest U.S. corporations, including money for defense, drugs (under the new Medicare drug benefit), coal mining, and ethanol (that's corporate agriculture to you and me). 3 To pay for this corporate largess, Bush proposed cutting programs for the poorest among us, including the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which provides food to low-income mothers with children. And he proposed further cutting programs that directly affect the middle class, including Medicare, education spending (including funding for arts education, parent resource centers, and education technology grants), and spending on the environment (including a program designed to update aging sewer systems and a $300 million cut to the Environmental Protection Agency). 4
    "Smaller government," it turns out, is not actually smaller government but different government. It's government for the rich instead of government for the rest of us. It's a departure from democracy and a shift toward the old hierarchical systems of kings and kingdoms, with the new kings being named Trump and Cheney and Bechtel and the new kingdoms being their corporations.
     
G OVERNING FOR P ROFIT
     
    In the corporatocracy, politicians are paid by economic interests rather than by We the People. Instead of fighting against this system, Reagan suggested that the problem was not the corporatocracy and its lobbyists but the existence of politicians and government. Reagan was the first American president to actually preach that his own job was a bad thing. His speechwriters once wrote for him: "Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first."
    The Jack Abramoff scandal of 2006 and the pervasive evidence that so many of our elected officials have been willing to trade their votes for cash demonstrates that politicians often act as if Reagan was right. But that's not the way it has to be.
    Men like Thomas Jefferson (D), Abraham Lincoln (R), Theodore Roosevelt (R), and Franklin Roosevelt (D) were drawn to politics out of a sense of idealism, not a desire to advance their own interests. There really was a time when politicians chose politics because they wanted to represent the will of the people.
    It seems that today's cons can't imagine anybody wanting to devote his or her life to the service of the nation. The highest calling in their minds is to make a profit.
    Ronald Reagan certainly couldn't imagine why anyone would want to be in government. He said: "The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away."
    This mind-set—that the only purpose for service in government is to set up the interests of business—may account for why not a single military-eligible member of the Bush or Cheney family enlisted in their parents' "noble cause," whereas all four sons of Franklin Roosevelt joined and each was decorated—on merit—for bravery in the deadly conflict of World War II. There are, after all,