Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class -- And What We Can Do about It

by Thom Hartmann

Book Overview

Our founding fathers worked hard to ensure that a small group of wealthy people would never dominate this country--they'd had enough of aristocracy. They put government to work to ensure a thriving... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1576754634
• ISBN13: 9781576754634
• Release Date: May 2007
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.7" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

War on the Middle Class and Constitution

Congratulations to Thom Hartmann on his new book Screwed; The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class. I saw him on Book TV several days ago and purchased the book. This book connects the dots between political, social and economic events in the United States from 1750 through 2006. Most Americans realize that there are grave injustices in our society and much of those injustices are caused by big government, big corporations, and a small group of high ranking politicians. The book carefully describes several fundamentals of good government fought for by our early patriots--especially from 1770 to 1800. The new government born in 1775 and 1776 was a government of "We the People of the United States . . . [to] establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty . . ." [The Constitution of the United States of America, from the preamble.] Without a large, prosperous middle class a democracy will decline and end in tyranny, as it did in the Roman Republic when the Republic became the Roman Empire during the reign of the first Caesar. As he pointed out, the current middle class in the United States: had its roots in the Depression and WWI; was established during 1946 through the 1950s; and started a steady decline around 1981 during the presidency of Ronald Reagan (President, 1981-89.) The US trade deficit hit a high in 2005 of over $700 billion and will probably be at least $700 billion in 2006. To get a street-level idea of those trade deficits consider the allocation of these amounts to 100 million US citizen workers. Multiply $10 by 100 million and the sum is $1,000M or $1 billion. So, a debt of $1B would be equal to 100 million people owing $10 each. Therefore a debt of $700 billion is equal to $10 x $700 for 100 million people, or $7,000 each! In two years that would be $14,000 per person owed to foreigners. Reagan and Reaganomics almost tripled the national debt (already high from the Vietnam War and other deficit years) in only 8 years. It is important to debunk, set straight the Reagan Legacy and expose it as an economic failure. The Privatizing Iraq section on pages 130-35 gives a few reasons why the war in Iraq is almost lost. President Bush gave US tax dollars (through direct taxes and borrowed money) to companies like Bechtel and Halliburton--insuring billions of dollars in profits and denying the Iraqi people control over rebuilding their own country. You may be surprised to learn that while I like the book and voted against Bush in 2004 and against most Republicans in 2006, I am a Republican, conservative Christian, white, middle-class, small business owner. This election in 2006 showed that some of us "right-wing" conservative Christians have caught on about the true nature of the neo-cons. -- Kenneth S. from Texas

A book true conservatives and liberals can love

History repeats itself (mainly when you flunk it) and Hartmann is just the historian to explain the current attempt to overthrow our constitution and democracy in terms of our history. This book is in no more a liberal volume than conservative one. It is a book about the American promise and American dream. The neocons in charge are not true conservatives and I found this easy to read book points to the reason why. True conservatives and true liberals want America to work the way it was founded to work and this book reminds us makes America great. Reading it has made me feel good about America again. We still have a chance to recapture our real values.

Another great book from Thom Hartmann

I've read a few of Thom's books, and I'm about half way through with his latest one, Screwed. As usual with Thom's books, it's great, well written and researched, and the type of book you can't put down. the only down side is that as far as I know Thom didn't put out a Books on Tape version, which I would prefer as I spend more time driving during the day then I have time to read. I'm also a big fan of his radio program, for 3 years now, and I've yet to hear Thom say that "a living wage" would be the equivalant to 18 bucks an hour. He has demonstrated that if you stimulate demand you improve the health of the economy, thus why the unemployment rate has dropped every time we've raised the minimum wage, short of those times when we had serious oil shortages, like in the 70's. Even if we did raise it to 18 bucks an hour, the wage/productivity ratios at your average McDonalds would be still be better than 1:1, meaning McD's would still make a profit. As it is, it's a 1:4 ratio (meaning one week of sales pays for a month of labor), which was the same wage/productivity ratios in domestic industry immediately prior to the Republican Great Depression. For anyone wanting to read a fine book, and to get familiarized with Thom Hartmann and his ideas, this couldn't be a better place to start....although What Would Jefferson Do? is great too.