Our founding fathers worked hard to ensure that a small band of wealthy people could not dominate this nation. They’d had enough of aristocracy. They put government to function to ensure a thriving middle income. When the middle class took a hit, beginning in the post-Civil Battle Gilded Age group and culminating in the fantastic Depression, democracy-loving market leaders like Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower revitalized it through initiatives such as for example antitrust rules, about Screwed: The Undeclared Battle against the Middle Class-and What We Can Do about It fair-labor laws, the minimum wage, social security, and Medicare.

So what occurred? Thom Hartmann demonstrates, over the last few decades, we’ve witnessed an undeclared battle against the center course. The so-called conservatives waging this battle are only thinking about conserving-and continuously increasing-their own prosperity and power. Hartmann displays how, beneath the guise of “freeing” the marketplace, they’ve systematically dismantled the applications create by both Republicans and Democrats to safeguard the middle course and have changed them with plans that favor just the privileged few.

But the middle income is the very thing which makes America great. Thomas Jefferson himself thought that our extremely democracy is dependent upon our capability to play referee to the overall game of business, safeguarding labor and the public good. It is both our right and our responsibility, Jefferson wrote, to control “overgrown prosperity” from becoming “dangerous towards the state.”

We must not the stand by position while our democracy becomes a corporatocracy, portion an elite group of billionaire CEOs. There is certainly another way. Thomas Jefferson understood how to build a middle class. Franklin Roosevelt knew how. We’ve carried out it before and we can repeat. Pursuing Hartmann’s common-sense proposals, we can re-create a prospering middle income that will make certain our public establishments are not converted into personal fiefdoms, satisfy people’s basic needs-for education, health care, a living wage-and maintain America strong.