Killer Politics Read online

  Killer Politics

  How Big Money and Bad Politics Are Destroying the Great American Middle Class

  Ed Schultz

  This book is dedicated to the great middle class,

  the heart, soul, and backbone of America

  —people I love, support, respect, and admire.

  Contents

  Introduction

  There was Blood

  Chapter One

  From Fargo to 30 Rock

  The Big Ed Story

  Chapter Two

  The Four Pillars

  Let’s Fly Ahead of the Plane

  Chapter Three

  Health Care

  Your Inalienable Right

  Chapter Four

  Rethinking Energy

  Another Fight for Independence

  Chapter Five

  Controlling America’s Borders

  From Melting Pot to Meltdown

  Chapter Six

  The China Dragon

  The Rise of an Economic Superpower and What That Means for Us

  Chapter Seven

  Cleaning Up After Bush II

  How Reckless Fiscal and Foreign Policies Almost Sank Us

  Chapter Eight

  Bad Trade

  Selling Out the American Worker

  Chapter Nine

  Economic Slavery

  How Debt Reductions and Unions Can Help Set You Free

  Chapter Ten

  The Truth About Taxes

  Time for Mandatory Trickling

  Chapter Eleven

  Kick the Messenger

  Become a Wiser News Consumer and a Better Citizen

  Chapter Twelve

  Term Limits and a Third Party

  Stop Big Money from Trumping Your Vote

  Conclusion

  I Must Be Crazy, But I Still Have Hope

  Searchable Terms

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by Ed Schultz

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  THERE WAS BLOOD

  I WAS BLEEDING.

  In 2004, in a make-or-break moment for my career, I launched the Ed Schultz radio show with a bloody nose. Just seconds before I was about to go on the air with my much-publicized effort to challenge the right wing stranglehold on talk radio, my nose began spouting blood like the cannon fodder so many thought I was.

  Throughout the radio industry, the conventional wisdom was that liberal talk just couldn’t work, and New York’s WABC radio general manager Phil Boyce himself, who had launched the career of right wing wonder boy Sean Hannity, said liberal radio didn’t have a chance. Rush Limbaugh called me “that little guy from North Dakota.”

  They were right about one thing. Every liberal talker from Mario Cuomo to Jim Hightower to Alan Dershowitz had failed, but what they didn’t get was that it wasn’t the message—not in a country equally divided between Republicans and Democrats—it was the messengers. These are all fine men, but they were not radio professionals. I understood that you can write all the great lyrics in the world, but if you want people to listen, you need a great singer. I can’t sing, but I damn sure knew I could talk, and that’s why I thought I could succeed. I don’t think I knew just how hard it would be, though. That bloody nose became a fitting metaphor for what is the fight of our lives—a contest for the soul of America.

  The middle class, where the greatness of this nation is rooted, is under siege by an increasingly unethical system, managed by economic vampires who are sucking the lifeblood out of the American family and ripping the heart out of democracy itself. From mortgage scams to credit card predation to health insurance hustles, greed is killing our country.

  Despite that bloody nose and an inauspicious start with just two small radio stations—KNDK in Langdon, North Dakota, and KTOX in Needles, California—signed on to my “national show,” today, The Ed Schultz Show has one hundred affiliates, including XM satellite channel 167. We’re in every major market. And since April 2009, The Ed Show every weeknight on MSNBC TV has given me another platform to tell it like it is. My on-air presence, along with a rising number of liberal-minded websites and bloggers, has helped balance the national debate and helped Democrats to majorities in Congress and to a historic victory in the White House.

  And, of course, we all lived happily ever after.

  Wasn’t that what was supposed to happen? Well, if anything close to a happy ending had occurred, I’d be on a boat getting sunburned with a beer in one hand and a fishing rod in the other. There would be no need for this book.

  Instead, after the inspirational candidacy and election of President Barack Obama, the contest for America’s soul has gotten even more malicious than it was when right wingers had a near monopoly on the airwaves. Reasonable Americans find ourselves pitted in an ideological struggle against an extremist right wing movement that really believes greed is good, that money trumps patriotism. Where is their love of country? There can be no compromise with people like that. I wonder if Americans can ever be united again.

  You can’t just bring those extremists, that corrupt posse, to the White House for a beer summit. You can’t take them fishing. Good Lord, anytime you get them near a trout stream they want to waterboard someone!

  We have to beat them. It won’t be easy. They have the power and ability to intimidate and deceive millions. This fight is not just between Democrats and Republicans. True, the Republican Party has been commandeered by corporate powers, but the Democratic Party has at least been infiltrated. Big money—and the politicians who are swayed by it—play both parties against each other, using this false battle to distract most of us from the real war, which is a war against the American family. For thirty years, starting with Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the biggest heist in history has been going on right under our noses: an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the American middle class into the pockets of the super wealthy. In Eisenhower’s day, the very rich paid 90 percent of their income in taxes. Today who bears the big tax burden? Everyday wage earners. And take a look at the last thirty years: In 1976, the top 1 percent of Americans earned 8.9 percent of the income; by 2005, they earned 21.8 percent. From 1979 to 2005, incomes for the top 5 percent increased 81 percent while incomes for the bottom 20 percent, the American workers, declined 1 percent. And as for net worth? As Inequality.org puts it, “The richest one percent of U.S. households now owns 34.3 percent of the nation’s private wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent.”

  Through jingoism, through attempts to rewrite history, through propaganda and by playing on people’s coarsest emotions and fears, generations of right wing extremists have convinced the vast majority of Americans to vote against their own good. For three decades, a whole bunch of people, especially people in red states, people living paycheck to paycheck, voted for a criminal class who was stealing them blind. I guess we should be grateful the Republicans didn’t legislate for debtor’s prisons. A small percentage of moneyed elites have found a way to hold the rest of us financially hostage—and, as a country, we keep voting them and their henchmen into power. I’d call it Stockholm syndrome, but I can’t because we’re not in Sweden. You’d know if it were Sweden because we’d all have health care and a higher standard of living.

  And I would be a better skier.

  There’s a saying where I come from: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t get the dumb bastard to vote in his own interest.” OK, maybe that saying has been heard only in my immediate family, but it’s still worth saying because it’s what happened.

  THIS BATTLE HAS JUST BEGUN

  In the year just past, the year of the Great Recession, there’s been a glimmer of an awakening. Americans are mad as hell that they were forced to bail out crooke
d Wall Street institutions that were “too big to fail.” Our government privatized corporate/banker profits and socialized corporate/banker losses, passing them right along to us. But a lot of this teabagger anger is misplaced. Bush and Cheney pulled the bank job and left Obama holding the bag—with nothing in it but an $11 trillion I.O.U. Some Americans have short-term memory issues. They forget that Obama and his much-maligned economic team did enough things right to save the economy from a total meltdown.

  I have done my fair share of criticizing the Obama administration. Financial reform has been slow in coming, and the bonuses paid to the executives who have been bailed out are an outrage. But even though the White House spent too much time and money on Wall Street and not enough on Main Street, they got more right than they got wrong.

  In the process, though, many of us have discovered that it is relatively easy to rally support in Washington if it helps out corporations, but any legislation designed to give the average American family a break results in instant gridlock: What the election of Barack Obama and a Democratic majority has revealed, plain as day, is just how entrenched and powerful big money interests have become. A few months into the Obama presidency I began to understand that no matter how transformational this election was, it was not the end of the fight. It was just the beginning.

  We voted for change, but not much changed. Dark forces still lurk. Big money still rules and big money still makes the rules. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) said on my show once, “The senate is owned by the banks.” Or, you could say, it is co-owned by banks, the health care industry, and the oil monopolies. All that big money isn’t going down soon and it isn’t going down easy. Corruption is entangled in the system with cancerous tentacles. We can fight it and win, but it will be a fight that may well last generations.

  If we fail, we could easily end up with these three classes—the rich, the struggling, and the poor. The sainted middle class? A memory, a ghost, a shadow. Gone. Sold down the river by greed. That’s where we’re headed, folks. Compassion? It’s been moved to the back of the dictionary under S for shit out of luck.

  To succeed, we have to reach back and rediscover our greatness. Tom Brokaw had it right when he called our parents and grandparents the Greatest Generation, because it was a generation that understood selflessness and sacrifice. What has the Me Generation sacrificed? Not much. This has been the greediest generation of Americans ever. And what are we leaving behind for the next generation? Debt. Corruption. Pollution. War. Can we allow that to be our legacy to our children and grandchildren?

  We can blame our government and we can blame our political opponents, but in the end we can bring about change only if we are willing to change ourselves and the way we think. If we sit around waiting for someone to get it done, it won’t get done. If we thought one campaign would turn it around, we now know that it won’t.

  “The standard answer is that we need better leaders. The real answer is that we need better citizens,” wrote Thomas Friedman in one of his New York Times op-ed columns in fall 2009. “We need citizens who will convey to their leaders that they are ready to sacrifice, even pay, yes, higher taxes, and will not punish politicians who ask them to do the hard things.”

  Sacrifice is an interesting word. Life requires some sacrifices, and those who are unwilling to sacrifice find themselves paying dearly in the end. You pay now or you pay later with interest.

  I always knew when I was playing football that all those wind sprints we suffered through in August’s sweltering heat would pay off when our superior conditioning helped us win a tight game in October. But what I viewed then as a sacrifice, I realize now was an investment, and that’s what I mean by changing the way we think. We need to be able to see past false choices. Doing the right thing and doing the fiscally responsible thing are often one and the same.

  With an investment in universal health care we can put American businesses back on a level playing field with international competitors. Our investment will come back to us with a reduced trade deficit, more jobs, and a healthier workforce.

  You want energy independence from our colluding faux friends in OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries)? Let’s invest in green energy now, and we won’t be so inclined to send troops into the Middle East in the future. Our environment will be better for it.

  We all know that a well-educated population makes for a stronger economy and a more vibrant democracy. It’s one of Big Ed’s Four Pillars of a great nation (something I cover in one of the key chapters of this book). Let’s invest in our people. No one should be denied the opportunity to learn. How many potential Einsteins and Edisons are we leaving behind?

  We’re better than that. I know we are. I travel the country to town hall meetings hoping to inspire people with the hope I have for the future. But you know what? At every town hall, I find the people who show up, packed houses of them; they inspire me.

  One day Wendy and I got into a taxi after a very hard day. The driver looked back in the mirror and recognized me. There was a pause and then he spoke softly. “Big Eddie. You’re the one speaking the truth. You’re the only one.” That’s all he said—but he touched my heart and lifted me up when I was a little down.

  Most people have their heads and hearts in the right place, but we need a vision and a plan, too. There is a saying among pilots that you have to “fly ahead of the airplane.” In other words, you have to understand where you are and anticipate the dangers ahead. That’s what this book is about.

  We’ll get better government by being better citizens. The change starts when all of us are better informed and have the courage to share what we know. I believe most Americans stand on common ground, and if we demand that our elected leaders become more accountable to us, we can compromise and set aside wedge issues that are used to divide and conquer the American electorate.

  I’m going to take on some other tough topics in this book, too, like immigration, tax policy, China’s bid for economic supremacy, and the media. I’ve given these issues a great deal of thought and have offered some solutions in each chapter. You may have better ones. Super. Call my radio show (1-800-WE GOT ED) and let’s talk. You may disagree. Fine. The open microphone is democracy in action, and your voice is crucial. As long as we have debate in this country, the truth will win out.

  This is no time for complacency. Believe me when I say that you can make a difference. This is it, folks…the moment of truth. The American people voted for change, and now we will see if this is still a democracy or if big money has actually bought and sold everyone in Washington who can make a difference. This is a fight to see who is in charge of this nation, and the early returns are not good: It ain’t us. This will be the moment historians will look back upon and either say it was the moment this great ship of state corrected its course, or the moment it sailed completely away from its democratic ideals.

  CHAPTER ONE

  FROM FARGO TO 30 ROCK

  The Big Ed Story

  PINCH ME. SERIOUSLY. I SEE THE FIRST RAYS OF DAWN RISING OVER the Hudson River, and I am twenty-seven floors up—at the top of the world really—and looking down at New York City. After I shower and shave, Wendy and I will take a short taxi ride to NBC Studios—30 Rock, home of MSNBC, from where the broadcast of The Ed Show originates. The place Saturday Night Live calls home. Legends have walked these halls. Legends still do. Me? I’m still new around here. I still look around with a real sense of wonder and a great appreciation for where I am, how far I’ve come, and who I’ve become.

  You may know me as that guy from North Dakota because that’s where I built my career, first as a television sportscaster and then as a regional radio talk-show host at one of the truly great radio stations in America, KFGO in Fargo. When we launched my national radio show, I took great pride in launching it from North Dakota.

  Eric Sevareid, who came from North Dakota, once said the state was “a rectangular-shaped blank spot on the nation’s consciousness,” and I think North Dakotan
s are a little sensitive about that. This beautiful state and its beautiful people take tremendous pride in hometown boys and girls like Roger Maris, Peggy Lee, Angie Dickinson, Phil Jackson, Louis L’Amour, Lawrence Welk, and others who “made good.”

  Like Teddy Roosevelt, who ranched in the spectacular Badlands and fell in love with the place, I did, too, and was molded by the people and my experiences in North Dakota. We have a small getaway in Mott, in the southwestern part of the state, where pheasant and deer are plentiful. It helps me stay in touch with my adopted home.

  ECHOES OF MY PAST

  I grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, in a middle-class household. My dad was an aeronautical engineer for the government—and my mother was an English teacher who might well have been horrified by my occasional abuse of the rules of grammar in this book. They’re both gone now, but when I look in the mirror I catch glimpses of them in myself. You know, I think the Lord only gives us two parents because we could never go through the loss of a third. After they were both gone, I felt like an orphan.

  I hear their voices in mine from time to time, and I realize that many of my values are things they held dear. When I am faced with a tough decision, I still think about them and what I think they would do. You realize as the years pass how much of them is in you, and it makes you want to do as well for your own children.

  Only time and experience can open your eyes to the importance of family as a stabilizing and guiding force in your life. I had terrific parents, and I didn’t experience the generational schism so many parents and teens wrestled with in those days. Their values became my values. Their work ethic and sense of patriotism became mine. I grew up with a sense that I was required to make a difference.