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

"An intelligent critique of the contemporary plight of the middle class" (Publishers Weekly). "I think many of us recognize that for all but the wealthiest, life in America is getting increasingly hard. Screwed explores why, showing how this is no accidental process, but rather the product of conscious political choices, choices we can change with enough courage and commitment. Like all of Thom's great work, it helps show us the way forward." —Paul Loeb, author of Soul of a Citizen and The Impossible Will Take a Little While

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 like antitrust regulations, fair labor laws, the minimum wage, Social Security, and Medicare.

So what happened? Air America Radio host Thom Hartmann shows that over the last twenty-five years, 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 the 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 commonsense proposals, we can recreate a prospering middle class that will ensure that 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.

"Hartmann's book explains in simple language and with concrete research the details of the Neo-con's war against the American middle class. It proves what many have intuited and serves to remind us that without a healthy, employed, and vital middle class, America is no more than the richest Third World country on the planet." —Peter Coyote, actor and author of Sleeping Where I Fall

© 2025 Berrett-Koehler Publishers (Ebook): 9781605098692

Release date

Ebook: 7 January 2025