Big-Name Anger on Behalf of the Little Guy

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.