There is no shortage of sadness and unease at the state of America today. What happened to our deeply imperfect, yet in many respects, more hopeful and less deeply divided country? While our past is littered with the story of a country flawed by slavery, poverty and injustice, I believed that we also lived with a deeper commitment to do better.
We had a dream. Our heroes called on us to make that dream a reality and upon our individual responsibility to play a role in that pursuit. I miss that call. I miss that possibility. Where did that dream go? Did we lose it or was it taken from us.
I cannot in good conscience believe it was stolen from us without us playing a complicit role. Author Hedrick Smith makes an outstanding case for the forces that aligned to take that dream away and ensured we readily loosened our grip upon it.
What is fascinating about Smith’s book, Who Stole The American Dream? is the complex system that has been assembled and tightly organized over the last 30 to 40 years to overtake and disempower the forces that have historically inspired our dream.
Most who seek to explain how America has become the land of inequality, a country that has fallen beyond all other industrialized nations in virtually all metrics, a place where democracy is a thing of the past, sold to the highest bidder – focus on a handful of evils. Smith takes a tougher route by unraveling the vast collection of influences that have aligned against us with devastating effects.
Smith begins with a little known memo written by Lewis Powell’s for the Chamber of Commerce in the year before he became a Supreme Court Justice. The memo triggered a political rebellion that dramatically altered the landscape of power in Washington from then until today.
Smith weaves together a series of events that have often been viewed as disconnected or innocuous from — the accidental beginnings of the 401(k) plan, with disastrous economic consequences for many; the transfer of $6 trillion in middle-class wealth from home- owners to banks even before the housing boom went bust; how the U.S. policy tilt favoring the rich is stunting America’s economic growth; why Congress ignores public opinion; why moderate politicians got shoved to the sidelines, and how Wall Street often wins politically by hiring over 1,400 former government officials as lobbyists.
From the shifting of our the knowledge economy to India, to the role imported IT workers play in taking U.S. jobs, how the gridlock in Washington actually compounds the wealth gap, and how changes to our bankruptcy laws have wiped out middle class pensions – Who Stole The American Dream? is the most compelling and complete story of how we lost the dream.