Screwed the Undeclared War Against the Middle Class

SCREWED

Also by Thom Hartmann

The Prophet's Way

Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception

Focus Your Energy

Beyond ADD

Best of the DTP Forum
(edited with Brad Walrod and Don Arnoldy)

ADD Success Stories

Think Fast!
(edited with Janie Bowman and Susan Burgess)

Healing ADD

Thom Hartmann's Complete Guide to ADHD

Unequal Protection

ADHD Secrets of Success

The Greatest Spiritual Secret

The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

The Edison Gene

We the People

What Would Jefferson Do?

Ultimate Sacrifice

Walk Your Troubles Away

THE UNDECLARED WAR
Against the Middle Class

– And What We Can Do About It

THOM HARTMANN

Screwed

Copyright © 2006, 2007 by Thom Hartmann and Mythical Research, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed "Attention: Permissions Coordinator," at the address below.

Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
235 Montgomery Street, Suite 650
San Francisco, California 94104-2916
Tel: (415) 288-0260, Fax: (415) 362-2512
www.bkconnection.com

Ordering information for print editions
Quantity sales
. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the "Special Sales Department" at the Berrett-Koehler address above.
Individual sales
. Berrett-Koehler publications are available through most bookstores. They can also be ordered directly from Berrett-Koehler: Tel: (800) 929-2929; Fax: (802) 864-7626;
www.bkconnection.com
Orders for college textbook/course adoption use
. Please contact Berrett-Koehler: Tel: (800) 929-2929; Fax: (802) 864-7626.
Orders by U.S. trade bookstores and wholesalers
. Please contact Ingram Publisher Services, Tel: (800) 509-4887; Fax: (800) 838-1149; E-mail: [email protected]; or visit
www.ingrampublisherservices.com
/Ordering for details about electronic ordering.

Berrett-Koehler and the BK logo are registered trademarks of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

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
Mobipocket e-book ISBN 978-1-57675-850-2
Amazon Kindle e-book ISBN 978-1-57675-851-9

2007-1

Interior design and composition by Gary Palmatier, Ideas to Images. Elizabeth von Radics, copyeditor; Mike Mollett, proofreader; Edwin Durbin, indexer.

In memory of Carl T. Hartmann, the world's best dad and the finest human being I've ever known
.

1928–2006

M
ARK
C
RISPIN
M
ILLER

Here's a bit of wisdom on which "left " and "right" can easily agree: If you let things go, you'll have to pay for it eventually; and the longer you don't deal with it, the more you'll have to pay. Wait long enough, and you'll pay dearly—when 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, it's now a major story sold dramatically by
Time
, CNN, and Hollywood—and 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, there's no denying it (unless you're 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 mesmerizing—and therefore get no press—although they're just as ruinous as ecological destruction (and are in fact inseparable from it).

Just as we have let the world—and America with it—heat 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 cliché 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 today—a 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
Common Sense
, Tom Paine was somehow
not
a "Founding Father"; that those Founders thought and worked in noble unison, all of them in vague agreement as to basic principles. Such misconceptions were already gaining ground while the United States was still authentically (if far from perfectly) republican. And then there were the later prettifying myths of a great national consensus—even more preposterous yet which we all picked up in grammar school—suggesting that the "Founders" were not merely in agreement with each other but somehow agreed also with "the Puritans" who founded the colonial theocracies, as if the United States were
not
a highly radical experiment in atheistic government.