AH: Yes, well there are plenty of lobbyists undermining the American dream every day.
RK: Yes, now you write in the beginning of this book, "My goal for this book is to sound the alarm so that we never do become third world America" and you say that "if we don't correct our course we could become a third world nation. Think Mexico or Brazil where the wealthy live behind fortified gates, that we could become a place that failed to keep up with history, that we won't be taken down by a foreign enemy but by the avarice of our corporate elite and the neglect of our elected leaders."
That's some scary stuff. And what you do in this book is that you document it in so many different areas of our lives and our nation.
AH: Yeah, what I wanted to do was provide the data, but also to tell the stories because sometimes the data don't really bring the emotion that we need to create a sense of urgency. I can tell you that there is 26 million people unemployed or underemployed, that 3 million homes are going to be foreclosed this year. I can tell you all that, but in the end it's the stories that drive it home. It's writing about Dean Blackburn who grew up in Minnesota, brought up by a single mom who is a teacher, worked hard, got into Yale, had solid jobs in technology for 17 years and lost his job two years ago and can't get another job.
The reason that I started with this story in chapter one is because here is somebody who is educated, who has a job not in a collapsing manufacturing industry but in high-tech and he is in trouble too. So, we see that across the board and yet that sense of urgency that was very present in Washington when we wanted to save Wall Street is not at all present when it comes to saving the middle class.
RK: You've talked about Obama's loss of a sense of urgency particularly with foreclosures it seems.
AH: Yes, well foreclosures are actually a case study for what went wrong and the failure to pass cramdown legislation, which would have prevented over a million families from losing their homes, I mean can you imagine what we're talking about here? And to allow the banks to win that one, after they brought the economy to near collapse, it shows just how dysfunctional and broken our system has become.
RK: You have a couple chapters; you have one chapter on infrastructure that walks us through all the different ways that our system is just breaking down and falling behind. You've got a section called the Flintstones versus the Jetson's describing how America is nickling and diming its way into the future and then you list our water supply, our bridges, our roads, our educational system and how each time we're spending just a fraction of what we need to just to keep things fixed not to improve them.
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