Beyond Cuckoo

This morning, as I sipped my coffee, I caught a TV interview with Elizabeth Warren on CBS news. Her book, A Fighting Chance, launches today—a plea for economic fairness for Middle Class America. Much of the discussion was old news for those of us who work for a living. We pay the taxes, fuel the economy, and lose at a game that’s rigged to support the wealthy.

“Special deals for those who’ve already got money, and the ticket gets paid by hardworking families who are barely hanging on,” is how Ms. Warren described it.

As she spoke about her father’s heart attack, my own heart sank. She was twelve when suddenly her family struggled to pay their bills. I was thirty-six when my husband Blake almost died from a major arrhythmia. She describes her ordeal:

“He was sick for a long time, and he was out of work,” she said. “We lost the family station wagon. And we came right to the edge of losing our home. My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close.

“I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.”

I describe my ordeal, as one in which each morning I awoke to the feeling that I was stuck in limbo. Blake’s health continued in an on-again/off-again pattern. Luckily I had health insurance or we would have lost everything. It could all have been gone within a few months. Our finances dwindled and we struggled with debt. I watched as government bailed out huge financial institutions and big business. I wondered who would bail us out. Well, we made it through, but many don’t.

Elizabeth Warren describes it this way in an excerpt from her Prologue:

Today the game is rigged— rigged to work for those who have money and power. Big corporations hire armies of lobbyists to get billion- dollar loopholes into the tax system and persuade their friends in Congress to support laws that keep the playing field tilted in their favor. Meanwhile,hardworking families are told that they’ll just have to live with smaller dreams for their children.

Over the past generation, America’s determination to give every kid access to affordable college or technical training has faded. The basic infrastructure that helps us build thriving businesses and jobs— the roads, bridges, and power grids— has crumbled. The scientific and medical research that has sparked miraculous cures and inventions from the Internet to nanotechnology is starved for funding, and the research pipeline is shrinking. The optimism that defines us as a people has been beaten and bruised.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

A Free Download of the Table of Contents and Prologue of “A Fighting Chance” is available: http://fightingchancebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/AFightingChance-Prologue.pdf

For me the bottom line is that unless the middle class supports senators like Elizabeth Warren, we will continue to live in an economic world that is BEYOND CUCKOO.