Les AuCoin Blog

David Sirota’s first book, “Hostile Takeover: How Big Money & Corruption Conquered Our Government — And How We Can Take It Back” may make you want to catch the next plane to Washington and punch out the first politician you see. And find a legislator from the opposite party and clobber that one, too.

Billed as an average citizen’s guide to “decoding corrupt politicians’ lies, myths and half-truths,” Sirota is nothing if not ecumenical. The national commentator tees off on Democratic and Republican predators with equal fury as he describes the U.S. political system as being rigged against Middle America.

Sirota is a progressive populist — not to be confused with a conventional liberal who eschews class-based politics — and his book is a manual for waging a class-based political counterattack against the conservative populist movement that produced Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Bill Bennett and George W. Bush, along with a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top.

Sirota uses extensive research to assert that concentrated wealth, corporate avarice and complicit federal politicians have skewered average American wage earners. This, Sirota asserts, helps explain how wages, in real terms, have hit the lowest level in 50 years while corporate profits reached their highest level in 50 years, and how corporations and the very wealthy have used their ill-gotten wealth to buy the political system to squeeze the rest of us even further.

A less accomplished writer might lose readers in 298 pages (and more than 50 pages of end notes) that attempt to paint a portrait of deceit and double-dealing. In the hands of Sirota, a former congressional aide, a fact-packed page provides riveting exposition.

The declaration by former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan that “the minimum wage does no good,” for instance, sounds like someone scratching a chalkboard when Sirota shows that the minimum wage is nearing a 50-year low when adjusted for inflation, that a full-time worker at the minimum wage earns $5,000 below the official poverty line, and that jobs in the bottom third of the pay scale are growing almost twice as fast as those in the middle. He reveals, in contrast, that corporate CEOs make on average more than $9 million a year, even as corporate interests spend millions of dollars on members of Congress to keep the minimum wage low.

Until I read “Hostile Takeover,” I didn’t realize that in 2004 the credit card industry made $24 billion from penalty fees alone, often using deceptive practices that Congress refuses to outlaw. To increase late fees, for example, some companies hide in fine print that the due date on your bill may not be at the end of a particular day, but at 9 a.m., before that day’s mail arrives.

Sirota argues that such practices are the least of the industry’s sins. In 2005, Congress passed a “bankruptcy reform bill,” seeking to make it harder for people in debt to use bankruptcy to protect their assets. The bill destroyed most of those protections although, according to the book, 75 percent of personal bankruptcies involve not “deadbeats” but individuals who lost health insurance during illness, and that the industry — far from being hurt by bankruptcy abuse — recorded $30 billion in profits in 2004 alone.

As the bankruptcy bill moved through Congress, industry lobbyists and their congressional allies beat back protections for victims of identity theft, soldiers who ran into debt when they left better-paying jobs for service in Iraq and an attempt to cap credit card fees at 30 percent.

Eighteen Senate Democrats who voted against the 30 percent ceiling had supported a tougher 14 percent cap that failed in 1991. What happened between the two votes? As Sirota shows, one thing was that the industry donated $2.3 million to the vote-switchers. He also notes that the author of the bankruptcy bill, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., owned nearly $250,000 of stock in bank and credit card companies that benefited from the bill, according to the nonpartisan watchdog group Public Campaign.

“Hostile Takeover” marches on in this vein — through chapters on taxes, wages, jobs, pensions, health care, prescription drugs, energy, unions and legal rights. Each chapter documents economic setbacks for Middle Americans caused, according to Sirota, by the interplay among monied interests, Congress and the White House. The author uses chapters to name “heroes” and “hacks,” politicians who he says are standing up for you or selling you out. He also lists specific political steps citizens can advocate to insist on a fair shake from their elected leaders.

As a congressman, I was never comfortable with class-based politics. But having witnessed a quarter century of Robin Hood in reverse, I welcome Sirota’s book. It should open eyes to ways to solve problems besetting workaday families and the cozy political arrangements that often create those problems.

One “Hostile Takeover” shortcoming is Sirota’s unfortunate tendency to slip into absolutist rhetoric. It’s incorrect to even imply that all corporations are predatory. Likewise, Sirota’s occasional use of epithets that question the parentage of his foes is unworthy of an author of his considerable ability.

“Hostile Takeover” is packed with indispensable information and insights. It is an important read in this, the 26th year of mostly trickle-down economics, job-outsourcing, relaxed regulation and tsunami-sized waves of political money.