Book Review War on the Middle Class Lou Dobbs Viking, 2006 The author is the anchor and

managing editor of the CNN television networks social-commentary program Lou Dobbs Tonight. In that capacity, he has carved out for himself a role as an intelligent, calm, but at the same time articulate and provocative, champion of the American middle class with respect to a number of critical issues. By critiquing a wide range of problem areas, War on the Middle Class broadens the more purely economic discussion contained in his earlier book Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed is Shipping American Jobs Overseas. The mainstream of American societyhistorically the essence of American life has long consisted of a broad middle class. As the books title declares, Dobbs sees an ongoing war against this mainstream. He quotes Warren Buffett (who is not only one of the richest men in the world, [but] also one of the smartest) as agreeing that This is class warfare. Although there is much more to Dobbs discussion, we get an immediate insight into his thesis from the following passage: Ours is becoming increasingly a divided societya society of haves and have-nots, educated and uneducated, rich and poor. The rich have gotten richer while working people have gotten poorer. We must also recognize that our public education system is failing, that there are far fewer well-paying jobs for our workers, that the middle class is hardly represented in government, and that our community and national values are increasingly challenged by corporatism, consumerism, and ethnocentric multiculturalism. For most of the past two centuries, intense social criticism has been voiced in the United States by the Left. The criticism has been a message of alienation. Dobbs differs in the fact that, although he sees a corruption of virtually every facet of contemporary American life, he does not speak from alienation, but from a deep sense of attachment to the main society, which he fervently wants to see preserved. He explains that he has been a liberal Republican who is at one and the same time both a strong believer in free enterprise and someone who rejects unfettered capitalism. A considerable virtue that he brings to his commentary is that he is in no sense a political or ideological partisan. The corruption that he sees is found, he says, in both political parties, in the national media, in the current presidential administration, in Congress and government in general, in big business, and even in the scientific community. His, then, is an ecumenical complaint. In effect, there are abuses, just as Ralph Waldo Emerson observed many years ago, in which all connive. Nevertheless, even though he sees that the decadence is widespread, he pinpoints an especially salient part of Americas current plight: It is the members of this business elite, this new upper class, that pose the greatest danger to our American way of life. It is worth noting that when Dobbs speaks of a war against the middle class, he is including the effects of gross indifference as well as those of outright hostility. He writes of elites who are hostileor at best indifferentto the interests of working men and women of the middle class and their families. Those familiar with the legal concept of gross negligence, also spoken of as willful and wanton disregard, know that it involves

doing something highly dangerous to others while possessing a state of mind of not caring about the potential harm. An example would be firing a rifle into a park without sighting in on anyone, but at the same time knowing that people picnic there. Dobbs traces innumerable policies that demonstrate either hostility toward, or an active unconcern for, the well-being of the average American. There are so many facets to this, as Dobbs sees it, that we can only grasp the whole by considering the cumulative effect of his many points: 1. His book Exporting America dealt with the de-industrialization of the United States, with its outsourcing and offshoring of jobs and capital, and Dobbs doesnt neglect that issue here. He speaks of what he characterizes as the so-called free trade ideology, noting that the various trade agreements the United States enters into are heavily weighted toward opening the door to outsourcing and offshoring while ignoring the need for a balance of trade and for taking into account the vast difference in living standards (and hence costs of labor) between Americans and the peoples of the Third World. It is this ideology, to which he sees the George W. Bush administration as committed at any cost, that has damaged, perhaps irreversibly, our manufacturing base. There is now a trade deficit of $1 trillion a year, and the United States has run trade deficits for thirty years. The United States, he tells us, is no longer the leader in most industriesnot even in technology, which is supposedly Americas trump card. American industry cannot compete against the cheapest manufacturing environments in the world. Why? Because the average manufacturing wage in China is $0.57 per hour, while the average in America is $16.68. At the same time, many countries impose little by way of health, safety, environmental or employee-benefit requirements on firms doing business there, again putting American producers at a systemic competitive disadvantage. In this environment of global capital and labor flows, there is an on-going polarization of income and wealth. Dobbs points out that in the United States during the past thirty years wages have risen only 9 percent while productivity has increased by 80 percent. As a result, the rich have become richer, while the working poor barely survive. The top 1 percent of our population earns, on average, more than $1 million per year, while the bottom 20 percent earn just over $10,000 a year. Over the last twenty-five years, the median family income has risen by 18 percent while the income of the top 1 percent has gone up by 200 percent. Between 1980 and 2005, the average CEOs [chief executive officers] compensation went from being 42 times that of the average bluecollar workers pay to a ratio of 431 to 1, with much of that increase coming since 1990. Dobbs doesnt accept the free-marketeers explanation that executive salaries simply reflect the supply-and-demand for managerial talent, and that the executives must be worth it. Instead, he sees a buddy system of mutual accommodation: The market in this case is made up of the CEOs themselves, the boards they nominate, and the executive search and compensation firms that recruit them and negotiate their pay packages Many corporate boards are comprised of close associates of the CEO. There are plenty of incestuous board relationships where executives have business ties with one another, or sit on one anothers boards. The compensation is unimaginably high even in the face of manifest executive failure: You see the executives of Northwest Airlines increase their compensation by $2.5 million, Dobbs tells us, while the financially beleaguered airline attempts to slash the pay of its pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, and baggage handlers. Kmart provides Dobbs another example: When Kmart announced its bankruptcy filing in

2002, it laid off twenty-two thousand workers without giving any severance pay. At the same time, CEO Chuck Conawaythe man in charge when the company went belly up got a $9.5 million severance package. This astronomical compensation takes place at the same time corporate America suffers from a debilitating lassitude. Dobbs cites the automobile industry: Ironically, foreign car makers have built more new plants in the United States, and hired more American workers, than General Motors and Ford combined. Why have the giants of American automobile-making slipped behind? GM and Ford have fallen behind because of terrible design, a lack of innovation, their refusal to go to the highest-quality production methods and techniques, and their refusal to embrace, across their entire product lines, the same quality assurance demanded by the leaders of the Japanese car companies. 2. Those who have watched Dobbs television commentary know that he is one of the principal voices opposing the flood of illegal immigration into the United States. He favors legal immigration, and in fact supports more of it, but he sees great harm from massive illegal entry. It is no small phenomenon: he observes that each year an estimated twenty thousand illegal aliens cross our border from Canada. Each year as many as three million illegal aliens cross our border with Mexico. The result is that the estimates range from eleven million all the way up to twenty million who now live in this country. He sees the flood as potentially endless, since there are more than five billion people living in poverty in the world. A major reason for the influx, and the condonation of it by powerful forces in the United States, is that its what big business wants. These employers dont face a labor shortagethey want the cheapest labor possible (in effect, a domestic standin for outsourcing and offshoring). A striking fact is that at least half of all farmworkers in Florida are illegal aliens. There is, he says, a massive underground economy using illegal immigrants. How does this relate to the war Dobbs sees as being conducted against the average American? In part, by its effect on wages paid to American workers: A National Academy of Sciences study found that more than 40 percent of the wage losses of lowskilled workers was due to competition from immigrant workers. Other research from the early 1990s found that more than seven hundred thousand low-skill U.S. workers were jobless because of illegal immigration. 3. Dobbs continues, describing a bleak picture involving many areas of American life. Not least, of course, is what he sees as the disastrous conduct of the war in Iraq, both because of Bush administration policies and Congresss failure to provide oversight and leadership. Public education, he believes, has been the bedrock of what has been the American Dream. But even though the cost of education has outpaced every other economic benchmark, the money isnt going into the classroom, but to the bureaucracy. There is high turnover among teachers, who are poorly paid. Math teachers arent adequately prepared in their subjects, and this interacts with the high unemployment existing among American computer and electrical engineers, with the two factors together causing fewer American students to have both the skills and the incentives to go into those high-tech fields. (The high level of joblessness in technical fields is due, Dobbs says, to the outsourcing of such work to other countries where the work is done more cheaply.)

This crisis in education reflects not just the schools, but occurs in the context of general social decadence. Most local school districts must contend with community apathy, teachers union intransigence, a sizable number of poorly trained and educated teachers, administrative incompetence, and too many parents who neither discipline nor nurture their children. It would seem that the incompetence at all levels demonstrated in the aftermath of the hurricane Katrina (an incompetence that reminds us of the Third World) is by no means limited to that episodeand thus is something that tells us much about the state of American society. Our highways, bridges, and dams are literally crumbling. And this isnt because money is lacking: Congress passed the massive Transportation Act of 2005, which any reasonable person would have expected to deal with our critical infrastructure needs. What actually happened, he says, is that $25 billion of the money has gone to funding 6,371 pet projects in a giant pork-barrel spending spree. The venality spreads across many areas, each of which Dobbs discusses: There is a crisis in health care, as health care costs skyrocket. Forty-six million people in the United States dont have health insurance, and employers are increasingly dropping coverage on those who do. In the meantime, trial lawyers reap immense fees, and profits increase for the pharmaceutical companies, HMOs and insurers. Each of these groups has a powerful lobby pressing its interests in the Congress and government. 4. What is perhaps most striking about Dobbs analysis is his emphasis on the corruption of Americas democratic process, a corruption that serves the purposes of almost everyone except the average American, to whom literally no one is responsive. Dobbs describes at length the extent to which lobbying pervades the Congress and executive branch, funding paid trips for Congressmen and officials, paying lucrative speaking fees, and providing a revolving door between public employment and the high remunerations of lobbying. It is to special interests, not to the public, that all this is responsive. This makes the electoral process a sham. I cant take seriously anyone, Dobbs says, who takes either the Republican Party or Democratic Party seriouslyin part because neither party takes you and me seriously; in part, because both are bought and paid for by corporate America and special interests. And neither party gives a damn about the middle class. Even the periodic political campaigns, where politicians ostensibly go to the people, are a charade. Sound bites and carefully selected wedge issues substitute for thoughtful discussion, so that there is rarely a national debate on great issues. One would hope that the national media would offset this, consistently with the ideal of a free press, but Dobbs says that, instead, the media now serves all too frequently as an unobstructed conduit of the agenda of the countrys elites into the lives of the American middle class. Journalism has become lazy, relying on political pronouncements, press releases, and selfserving research, as well as reporting opposing opinions without doing independent research of its own. (Dobbs calls this he says, she says journalism.) And, in addition, over all of Americans discourse stands the incubus of political correctness, backed by academia, the media and the professional-business elite, commanding the use of certain language and imposing taboos that black out entire areas of concern. Dobbs raises much that deserves serious attention. It could be shrugged off if his were the voice of a John Brown or a Savonarolaand if it werent confirmed by manifest experience. Dobbs is one of many books seeking to rally the American people to overcome, as he says, their national ennui, their passive acceptance of the status quo.

Not having abandoned hope, he concludes the book with a chapter entitled Taking Back America in which he lists a number of reforms that he believes could make a difference. Among them are complete public financing of all elections and complete coverage for those who suffer a catastrophic illness. Since there seems to be some disquiet abroad in the land, as evidenced by the most recent election, it may be that the public is beginning to stir. If so, Dobbs will be one of the more important spokesmen for an awakening middle class. Dwight D. Murphey