Free Screwed the Undeclared War Against the Middle Class by Thom Hartmann Page B

schools could fail. A failing school is sanctioned under the act with a loss of funds—so that schools that need the most help get the least. By September 2004, 36 percent of California's schools had already been put on that list. 6 Instead of being a program to improve public education, No Child Left Behind was designed to kill the public school system.
     
A MERICA'S F UTURE
     
    Every generation, it is often said, must relearn the lessons of history. This generation is getting a crash course.
    Education for the few rather than the many, tax breaks for the rich but higher taxes for the middle class, a market where the corporations make all the rules—the last time America looked like this was during the Gilded Age, the era of the robber barons.
    There's nothing wrong with business making money. I've owned seven businesses, and I'm proud to say that I made money at all but one of them. But there is something wrong when hardworking people like Mrs. Flores can't get a full-time job that pays a living wage. There's something wrong when people with collegeeducations can't earn enough money to buy a house. There's something wrong when it's nearly impossible to pay for a college education at all. There's something wrong when almost everyone you know feels screwed.

 
CHAPTER 3
The Rise of the Corporatocracy
     
     
    Walking through a park on a sunny summer day in Portland, Oregon, I stumbled across a stunning example of what has happened to the middle class in the cons' America.
    Thirty or more people were sitting on blankets and lawn chairs under a big oak tree in a semicircle around a middle-aged, suit-wearing woman with a flip chart. Those in the circle wore mostly casual clothes, and the average age seemed to be midforties, although there were a few as young as midtwenties and a few who looked to be in their sixties. Two men in the group—both in their fifties, by appearance—had gone to the trouble of dressing in business suits, although they looked painfully uncomfortable sitting on their lawn chairs in the open park.
    As I walked by, I heard the woman extolling the virtues of "cheerfulness" and rhetorically asking her students, "Would
you
want to hire you?"
    Welcome to the world of those who have fallen out of America's white-collar middle class and are tapping their IRAs, 401(k)s, and overextended credit cards to pay for workshops like this one to figure out how they can get decent-paying jobs to replace the ones they've lost.
    The seminar I heard might help a few of these people—I hope it did—but it won't help America get back on track. The middle class doesn't need a pep talk. Americans are the most dedicated and productive workers in the world. Judging from their appearance, most of the folks in that circle had worked hard and done their best all their lives—and been screwed anyway.
     
T HE N EW F EUDAL L ORDS : T HE C ORPORATOCRACY
     
    How could the American middle class—the greatest middle class in the world—be in so much trouble?
    Consider the biggest pocketbook pincher: health care. Many Americans are falling out of the middle class today because they can't afford health insurance. One bad accident, one serious illness, one really big hospital bill, and that's it—they can't pay the bills, so they lose their car and their home and tumble right out of the middle class.
    Back in my dad's day, that wouldn't have happened. Most working people got health care through their employers. The big health-care insurers—Blue Cross and Blue Shield—were nonprofits, which meant that they just passed on the actual cost of health insurance to employers. The government implemented Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s to take care of all the folks who weren't insured. Although the system worked imperfectly, overall it was pretty decent.
    But then Reagan deregulated hospitals and much of the rest of the health-care industry (along with trucking, travel, and a dozen other industries). Within a decade the system had