The war on the middle class.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: The Betrayal of the American Dream - Book review

The Betrayal of the American Dream

by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele

PublicAffairs. 320 pages. $26.99.

Gratifying as it is to listen to Joe Biden and President Obama strike back at Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney and their plans to destroy Medicare and give vast tax breaks to the rich, the Democrats have hardly been reliable allies for the vast majority of Americans.

As best-selling authors and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele explain in their latest book, Democrats and Republicans alike have aided and abetted corporations in rigging the tax code, hollowing out manufacturing, deregulating industry, making it legal for companies to renege on their pension obligations, sending jobs overseas, and bailing out the banks while letting corrupt Wall Street titans go free after they defrauded their customers and destroyed the economy and many people's lives.

Before Paul Ryan got the nod for Vice President, Presidents Clinton and Obama both flirted with entitlement reform.

All of these policies together have led us to where we are today.

For the last four decades, the economic elites in this country have been buying influence and pushing policies, Barlett and Steele write, "that have enriched themselves while cutting the ground out from underneath America's greatest asset--its middle class."

"What is happening to America's middle class is not inevitable," the authors charge. "It's the direct result of government policy, and it can be changed by government action. Look no further than at what the governments of our trading partners do to protect their people and advance the interests of their country. We could do the same."

Barlett and Steele cover a lot of ground in this relatively short, fast-paced book. Their straightforward, impassioned prose is filled with real-life stories of people who are losing their grip on the American Dream.

"Our kids are going to be fluffing dogs and doing toenails while the Chinese are making leading-edge devices," observes Douglas Bartlett, whose father founded the first plant that made circuit boards in the United States, which shut down in 2009 after fifty-seven years. During that time, the United States went from dominating the industry to being shut out, thanks to our benighted trade policies.

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Many of the stories are tragic.

Computer programmer Kevin Flanagan loses his once high-paying, high-status job at Bank of America and then kills himself...