THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND: Reports from a Divided Nation
Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan Books
Current Affairs
ISBN: 9780805088403

Politicians and network news anchors delight in reminding us in somber tones that we are a nation “at war.” But somehow they never talk about the domestic economic war being waged in downsized workplaces and foreclosed suburban homes where the casualties are kids who can’t afford to go to college and families left in the lurch with no health insurance and debt exceeding their assets. This is the war Barbara Ehrenreich covers so well.

The news from the front is bad and getting worse by the day. Unless you are one of the 14,000 American families who earn the top 0.01% of income in this country, chances are you have lost the War on the Middle Class, or are about to lose big time. Prepare to kiss your assets goodbye!

In works of reporting such as NICKEL AND DIMED and BAIT AND SWITCH, Ehrenreich has chronicled the struggle of working and middle class Americans to get by and survive in a land where, oh my, Marx got something right: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer of late. And for many, that means the American Dream is slipping away with the morning mist.

THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND is a collection of 62 of Ehrenreich’s short commentaries from recent years. As in all her work, we find her compassion, her sardonic wit and her thirst for social justice. She is the canary singing in our collective coal mine.

For the American middle class, once the mighty economic engine of the world in the years after World War II, something has gone terribly wrong in the early years of the 21st century. The trouble started during the Reagan administration. People know it. Politicians, especially liberal ones, know it but don’t know how to talk about it for fear of being smeared with the red brush of “class war.” But that is exactly what this war has been. And guess what? Our class got clobbered.

Ehrenreich writes, “The middle class, battered by wave after wave of outsourcing and layoffs, scrambled to meet the ever rising costs of health care, fuel, and college education. The traditional working class, already savaged by deindustrialization, took the low-paying service jobs that were left, trading their hard hats for mops and trays. They crowded grown children and grandchildren into their homes, which they refinanced at usurious rates. They faced speedups at work and cutbacks in pay. When their monthly health insurance premiums exceeded their mortgages or rent, they abandoned the insurance and fell back on Advil.”

With little fanfare and little to no coverage from mainstream corporate media, America had entered a Second Gilded Age. The Wall Street Journal noted that the 0.01% of Americans at the top controlled 22.2% of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 90% --- 133 million of us --- got just 4%.

Ehrenreich points out, “In fact, the greatest capitalist innovations of the past decade have been in the realm of squeezing money out of those who have little to spare: taking away workers’ pensions and benefits to swell profits, offering easy credit on dubious terms, raising insurance premiums and refusing to insure those who might ever make a claim, downsizing workforces to boost share prices, even falsifying time records to avoid paying overtime.”

And in the process, America and the ideal of America radically changed. “But somewhere along the line, the ethos changed from we’re all in this together to get what you can while the getting is good.”

This book is in the tradition of good old fashioned journalistic muckraking, something corporate media in their drive for profits and to give us all the latest important news on the Britneys of the world rarely does anymore.

Ehrenreich presents us with the stories we’ve missed. For example, she tells us about Timothy J. Bowers, who robbed an Ohio bank of $80, immediately surrendered to cops and asked the judge for a three-year prison sentence, which would take care of him until he reached social security eligibility. Bowers lost his old job and couldn’t find a new one. The “compassionate conservative” judge obliged him. Bowers thus becomes the Dillinger for our days.

We learn about the disgraceful hypocrisy whereby we are constantly urged to support our troops, but in San Diego, 500 military families a month have to depend on food banks to avoid going hungry. Furthermore, the administration, which put the troops in harm’s way in the first place, once proposed increasing the cost of veteran health care benefits, a move that would have driven 200,000 vets out of the system.

Ehrenreich writes with passion and anger about a health care system where “Florence Nightingale has morphed into Vampira.” There is the “criminalization of illness” where patients who can’t pay their bill have arrest warrants issued on their sick selves, such as the diabetic Illinois man who ran up an outrageous $579 debt and ended up being arrested for it and held on $2,500 bail. That must have helped his condition!

And then there are the statistics: two million Americans fleeing the U.S. to get their prescription drug fix in Canada or Mexico; a million college grads working jobs that do not require a college degree; 18,000 Americans a year who die from lack of health insurance; and, for the first time in 2006, the average household’s debt exceeding its income.

Bad news, you bet. But Ehrenreich has the ability, like the late great Molly Ivins, to write about the bad with a quick, biting wit that makes you smile through the anger.

In 1940, with the Great Depression lingering, Woody Guthrie wrote one of the most famous songs in American history, “This Land Is Your Land.” His purpose was to fight what he considered the complacency of Irving Berlin’s anthem, “God Bless America.” They still sing Berlin’s song at ballparks. But the refrain of Guthrie’s tune lingers on like a ghost in our collective consciousness as well: “This land was made for you and me.”

Was it? Ehrenreich hopes so. She writes, “The looting of America has gone on too long, and the average American is too maxed out, overworked and overspent to have anything left to take. We need a new deal, a new distribution of power and wealth, if we want to restore the beautiful idea that was ‘America.’”

Journalism at its best speaks truth to power. And that is exactly what Barbara Ehrenreich has done in THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND. May she keep doing it for a long time.

    --- Reviewed by Tom Callahan

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