Book Review: This Land is Their Land

I am in the middle of reading a book that gets my blood boiling. It's called This Land is Your Their Land. It chronicles the recent, ongoing, and purposeful crumbling of the middle class, the slide back into poverty for millions, and the strategic policy making that allows redistribution of wealth upward. From the lack of regulation that caused the 2008 financial collapse, to the Bush Tax cuts, the money is moving upward.

Why is that ok with you?

In the first chapter already, sentences like this make me want to quit my job and run for public office. Well, ok perhaps not that extreme just yet. But it does make me want to share this book, its message, and to do my part to re-estabilish our society as one where everyone can live without fear of hunger and homelessness, while maintaining the right of those who can to create great wealth for themselves. That is the balance we want, we need, and we still have if we work to save it.

"It wasn't just a "shift", of course, governed by impersonal geological forces. The rude hand of human intervention could be felt in 2001...in [a series] of deft upward redistribution of wealth, the adminstration cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans while cutting back on services and programs, such as financial aid, for everyone else. We had never had a gang in Washington as noisily committed to "Christian values," and yet they had managed to stand core bibilical teachings on their head."

and further on...

"There was a connection, as most people suspected, between the massive buildup of weath among the few and the anxiety and desperation of the many. The money that fueled the explosion of gluttony at the top had to come from somewhere or, more specifically, from someone. Since no domestic oil deposits had been discovered, no new seams of uranium or gold, and since the war in Iraq enriched only the military contractors and suppliers, it had to have come from other Americans. In fact, the greatest capitalist innovations of the decade were in the realm of squeezing money out of those who had little to spare: taking away workers' pensions and benefits to swell profits, offering easy credit on dubious terms, raising insurance premiums and refusing to insure those who might ever make a claim, [outsourcing millions of jobs with tax credits to boot], downsizing workforces to boost share prices, even falsifying time records to avoid paying overtime."

I read on, I recommend you read it too. It's not too late for us to restore balance, to temper the greed, to save the middle-class, and for all of those uber-rich, and even the merely affluent like myself, we will save not only our nation, but ourselves.

Buy the book at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805090150?ie=UTF8&tag=washpost-opinions-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0805090150