Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class- and What We Can Do About It, Library Edition

Hartmann, Thom

ISBN 10: 1433215144 ISBN 13: 9781433215148

Casa editrice: Blackstone Pub, 2008

Riassunto

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 middle class. When the middle class took a hit, beginning in the post-Civil War Gilded Age and culminating in the Great Depression, democracy-loving leaders like Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower revitalized it through initiatives such as antitrust regulations, fair-labor laws, the minimum wage, social security, and Medicare.

So what happened? Thom Hartmann shows that, over the last few decades, we've witnessed an undeclared war against the middle class. The so-called conservatives waging this war are only interested in conserving-and steadily increasing-their own wealth and power. Hartmann shows how, under the guise of "freeing" the market, they've systematically dismantled the programs set up by both Republicans and Democrats to protect the middle class and have replaced them with policies that favor only the privileged few.

But the middle class is the very thing that makes America great. Thomas Jefferson himself believed that our very democracy depends upon our ability to play referee to the game of business, protecting labor and the public good. It is both our right and our responsibility, Jefferson wrote, to control "overgrown wealth" from becoming "dangerous to the state."

We must not stand by while our democracy becomes a corporatocracy, serving an elite group of billionaire CEOs. There is another way. Thomas Jefferson knew how to build a middle class. Franklin Roosevelt knew how. We've done it before and we can do it again. Following Hartmann's common-sense proposals, we can re-create a prospering middle class that will ensure our public institutions are not turned into private fiefdoms, meet people's basic needs-for education, health care, a living wage-and keep America strong.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Thom Hartmann is a three-time Project Censoredaward winning, New York Times best-selling author of 20 books in print in 14 languages and the host of an Air America radio talk show. Formerly on the Vermont roster of psychotherapists, executive director of a residential treatment facility for severely emotionally disturbed and abused children, and a guest faculty member of Goddard College, he was also CEO of an Atlanta-based advertising agency and an advertising and marketing consultant to corporations and governments on five continents. Trained by Leif Roland, Paul McKenna, and Richard Bandler, he is licensed and certified as a Neuro-Linguistic Programming practitioner and an NLP trainer by the Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and Bandler has written the foreword to one of his books. The father of three grown children, he lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Louise, and their attack cat, Higgins.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Blackstone Pub
• Data di pubblicazione: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1433215144
• ISBN 13: 9781433215148
• Rilegatura: Audio CD