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Big-Name Anger on Behalf of the Little Guy

By Christopher Lee
Monday, October 30, 2006; A15

WAR ON THE MIDDLE CLASS

How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back

By Lou Dobbs

Viking, 251 pp., $24.95

Lou Dobbs is one of the professional angry men of cable television news.

The host of CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight" has carved a niche as a self-styled former Republican who refuses to sit by while big corporations, Congress and the Bush administration repeatedly take aim at the little guy in America.

On his show and in his book, "War on the Middle Class," the financial reporter-turned-pundit rails against "elites," globalization, illegal immigrants, the outsourcing of U.S. jobs, lobbyists, politicians, health-care costs and exorbitant CEO pay.

"I can't take seriously anyone who takes either the Republican Party or Democratic Party seriously," writes Dobbs, 61, "in part, because neither party takes you and me seriously; in part, because both are bought and paid for by corporate America and special interests. And neither party gives a damn about the middle class."

Dobbs sees an America with failing public schools, increasingly unaffordable health care, timid news media, politicians who serve the interests of lobbyists and corporations, and big companies that pay executives far too much while laying off workers and sending their jobs overseas in pursuit of cheap labor. And don't get him started on the "dysfunctional" federal government's failure to stop the entry into the country of illegal immigrants, whom he views as a threat to American culture, security and wages.

Dobbs details his displeasure in 12 easily digested chapters, each taking on a different subject but all replete with overheated prose.

"Each night, as I conclude my nightly broadcast on CNN, I have the gut-sick feeling that we have chronicled another twenty-four hours in the decline of our great democratic republic and the bankrupting of our free enterprise economy," he writes in a typical passage.

Still, millions of Americans share his anger, and it is not hard to see why. From 1992 to 2004, average pay for corporate chief executive officers rose from $1.8 million a year to $9.6 million. The heads of some bankrupt companies continue to collect millions of dollars in compensation even as workers are sent packing. Big businesses and other organizations spent $2.14 billion -- more than $5.8 million a day -- lobbying Congress and federal agencies in 2004. Ordinary Americans would be forgiven for suspecting that most of those efforts were not to benefit them.

The United States has lost millions of manufacturing jobs in recent decades. Increasingly, companies are shedding U.S.-based software programmers, call-center employees, aircraft maintenance personnel and accountants and replacing them with cheaper labor in countries such as India. Corporate profits have nearly doubled since 2000, while U.S. workers have seen little or no increase in real wages, their pension plans have disappeared, and employers have shifted health-care costs to them.

"[H]ow prosperous a nation are we when working Americans aren't being allowed to share equally in what we glibly call 'prosperity?' " Dobbs asks.

The book is well packaged but does not break new ground. The outrages Dobbs chronicles, such as the influence-peddling of lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the nominal relocations overseas by U.S. companies seeking to evade taxes, have been well documented in the same media that Dobbs complain have "turned away from the hard work and expense of fact-finding and investigation to the reporting of what is easy and convenient."

Speaking of easy and convenient, Dobbs seems to have done no new interviewing and instead quotes most of the people in his book straight from their appearances on his show. Even the book's title is a rip-off of the name of an ongoing series on his broadcast, making it essentially an exercise in brand extension. The inclusion of the full texts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution may be patriotic, but they also add bulk to what otherwise would be a modest volume of 212 pages.

There are a few sloppy errors: "California congresswoman Dana Rorhbacher," a Republican, is, in fact, a man whose last name is spelled "Rohrabacher." Democratic Sen. Byron L. Dorgan is from North Dakota, not North Carolina. And Dobbs's critique of national media organizations as being out of touch with Middle America because they are headquartered in New York and Washington falls flat coming from a man whose television show is based in New York.

Like many pundits, Dobbs is better at identifying problems than at solving them. Urging people to be more engaged in the political process and to vote the bums out is a sensible suggestion, if not a novel one. But if voters drop their party affiliations and register as independents, as he recommends -- and has done himself -- the result will be major-party candidates more tied to the views of the hard-core primary voters who remain.

Dobbs proposes "complete public financing" of federal elections, an idea that would not curtail outside political spending by people such as billionaire George Soros and groups such as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Dobbs would make members of Congress wait five years to become lobbyists, rather than the current one year. But earlier he points out that such waiting periods do not work because former politicians immediately land lucrative jobs advising big firms on lobbying matters anyway.

Dobbs advocates inspecting every cargo container bound for the United States, rather than the 5 percent currently examined, a sound idea from a security standpoint but a policy so logistically difficult and costly that it would probably bring ports to a standstill.

Dobbs would fine employers $50,000 for every illegal immigrant they hire. He would establish a national core curriculum and standards for classroom size and teacher pay, effectively removing schools from the control of the local and state officials -- and taxpayers -- who provide most of the funding.

"No one will give us our country back, not without a fight," he writes.

Dobbs, a well-compensated television personality, is not a member of the middle class that he defends so vigorously. He has the kind of national profile that led his publisher to put his face on the book's cover to sell more copies. While outsourcing, illegal immigration and high CEO pay may be bad for the middle class, they have been pretty good for Lou Dobbs's career.