Who Stole the American Dream? Read Free

to this point—how we became two such polarized and dissimilar Americas, how the great economic and political divide affects the lives of individual Americans, and how we might, through changed policies and a revival of citizen action, restore our unity and reclaim the American Dream for average people.
    In my first book,
The Russians
, I sought to give American readers an intimate human picture of what Russians were like beneath the veneer of Soviet communism and why they behaved the way they did. In
The Power Game: How Washington Works
, I went inside the American political system and the games politicians played in the era of Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter to describe how power really works in Washington and why some leaders succeed and others fail.
    In this book, I provide a reporter’s CAT scan of the Two Americas today, examining the interplay of economics and politics to disclose how the shifts of power and of wealth have led to the unraveling of the American Dream for the middle class. I tell the story, too, of how we evolved into such an unequal democracy—how we lost the moderatepolitical middle and how today’s polarized politics reinforce economic inequality and a pervasive sense of economic insecurity.
    This is a reporter’s book full of stories of Americans high and low. It portrays the impact of the New Economy and the New Power Game on the rich and the middle—on jobs, incomes, homes, retirement—and on people’s hopes and dreams. Among these people are many Americans I came to know reporting for
The New York Times
, for PBS investigative documentaries, and for this book—leaders like Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; CEOs like Al Dunlap, Bob Galvin, or Andy Grove; and middle-class people like jet airline mechanic Steve O’Neill, loan officer Bre Heller, computer plant technician Winson Crabb, contractor Eliseo Guardado, and small-business owner John Terboss.
    Most still voice a plucky personal confidence. Yet their faith in the American Dream has been sorely shaken. Like others, they want to know what happened to them and to America—what changed the way our economy and our politics work.
Technology and Globalization
    The standard explanation offered by business leaders and political and economic conservatives is that these harsh realities of the New Economy are the unavoidable product of impersonal and irresistible market forces.
    America, they point out, was an unchallenged economic colossus at the end of World War II. It was easier then for the United States to generate middle-class prosperity. But as Europe, Japan, and Russia recovered, America’sshare of world trade shrank from nearly 20 percent in 1950 to less than 10 percent in 1980. In the early 1970s, we began running trade deficits, and as Asia boomed, we imported much more than we sold abroad. As historian Charles Maier put it, the United States morphed from the “empire of production” into the “empire of consumption.” Today, we benefit as consumers, but wepay a heavy price in lost jobs, American jobs lost to foreign imports or because U.S. companies have moved them overseas.
    Business leaders and free market economists tell us that this economic hemorrhaging is an unavoidable cost of progress. It is the price of the inexorable march of technology and free trade. But that seductive half-truth doesn’t fully square with the facts. It ignores the political and economic story that this book tells—the impact of public policy and corporate strategy on how we became Two Americas. It fails to explain why such an overwhelming share of the fruits of technological change and globalization went to a privileged few while the majority of ordinary Americans got left out.
    Few would dispute that technological change and the digital age have shaken up the U.S. economy, forcing change, creating new winners and losers, and disrupting many industries and millions of lives. But if technological change and globalization were