The Betrayal of the American Dream

Written by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele

Narrated by Wes Talbot

America's unique prosperity is based on its creation of a middle class. In the twentieth century, that middle class provided the workforce, the educated skills, and the demand that gave life to the world's greatest consumer economy. It was innovative and dynamic; it eclipsed old imperial systems and colonial archetypes. It gave rise to a dream: that if you worked hard and followed the rules you would prosper in America, and your children would enjoy a better life than yours.

The American dream was the lure to gifted immigrants and the birthright opportunity for every American citizen. It is as important a part of the history of the country as the passing of the Bill of Rights, the outcome of the battle of Gettysburg, or the space program. Incredibly, however, for more than thirty years, government and big business in America have conspired to roll back the American dream. What was once accessible to a wide swath of the population is increasingly open only to a privileged few.

The story of how the American middle class has been systematically impoverished and its prospects thwarted in favor of a new ruling elite is at the heart of this extraordinarily timely and revealing audiobook, whose devastating findings from two of the finest investigative reporters in the country will leave you astonished and angry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ascent Audio
• Release date: Sep 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469085456

Reviews for The Betrayal of the American Dream

[miro_4 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In this interesting book Barlett and Steele convincingly show how outsourcing over the last 40 years has removed great swathes of US industry and employment while enriching the top management of politically connected corporations. They gain spectacular profits and incomes while the social costs of unemployment are dumped on the American government along with the consequent trade and budget deficits.They also contrast the attitude to trade and industry of American governments since the 1980´s with those of the US´s main industrial competitors, Germany, China and Japan, saying that these countries all run a trade surplus and pay a lot of attention to nurturing national technological skills, high level training, protecting or developing key technologies and when necessary blocking unrestricted access to their markets.What the authors don´t do is ask some fundamental questions about why US corporations can get away with it.They give some superficial answers based on lobbying and money politics while the real reason (that they don´t consider) may be that a multicultural US governments function in a completely different way from those of Germany, China and Japan. Germany is German and has a clear German national narrative and history with the same applying to Chinese and Japanese.When the Germans, Chinese and Japanese governments make policy there is no question that they are considering the wellbeing of all their citizens who are in it together with the same experiences, customs and traditions (i.e, they are in a sense a family).The authors could have asked some deeper questions about US multiculturalism, especially as the British prime minister and German chancellor recently admitted that it had failed in England and Germany. It seems clear that multiculturalism emphasizes minority interests and identities over a national identity and is a sort of return to the tribalism of the Middle Eastern or African sort where groups try to grab power and put their family and tribal members in key positions to loot their country (e.g. Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Mubarak etc.)If one accepts that the US is multicultural, then Bartlett and Steele could have asked, "Who are the tribes?".The answer would be Europeans 64%, Latinos 16%, Blacks 12%, Asians 5% and Jews 3%, and the next question could have been "Who has the power?"A useful proxy here could be Ivy League university admissions giving the answer that Asians presently have 20% of the enrollment and Jews 25%. Of these, the Jews are far more politically active, so in the "culture wars" it would seem that they are the winners with the main targeted losers being European Americans (the Dead White Males) + their Constitution + their religion. The evidence seems to support this view as recent US governments make highly skewed "Tribal" type decisions. For example they launched the Iraq war on false information and paid for it on credit (see [[ASIN:1932528172 The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel]]which certainly harmed an already weak economy and in the recent 2008 credit crisis Wall Street was bailed out at the expense of the taxpayer with a key player like Goldman Sachs receiving full dollar in exchange for mortgage backed securities that may not have been worth even 20c. The interests of the United States in the latter case were represented by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (ex Goldman Sachs CEO) and it was his Jewish colleagues Robert Rubin (while Treasury Secretary), Larry Summers (while Deputy Treasury Secretary) and Alan Greenspan (while Chairman of the FED) who enabled the junk-mortgage boom with the removal of the enormously important Glass-Steagall Act that had separated investment banking from high street banking since the 1930´s. This created"To Big to Fail" and they also changed the rules to allow 30:1 leverage - but did they care if they took the gains and the US taxpayer carried the risk?The authors needed to consider how multicultural tribalism works in the US and the toxic way that it continues to intereact with an out of control free market ideology.