Author Hedrick Smith, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter and editor and Emmy award-winning producer/correspondent, sat down for a one-on-one interview with host Dottie Grover on her LACTV talk show “One Voice At a Time” to discuss his book “Who Stole the American Dream?”
“There’s no short answer,” he said of the book title’s question. “The answer is basically the power elite, the Wall Street banks, the Congress and several presidents, both Democratic and Republican, and the head of the Federal Reserve Board Alan Greenspan.”
Smith said Congress, since the 1970s, has steadily passed legislation that benefits the elite and hurts the middle class.
“Not everything, but the basic trend has been unfavorable to the middle class,” he said. “It’s been going on for three or four decades. The 1 percent has had more now than it has in the past and Citigroup, the bank, said in 2005 that America had the greatest inequality of income of any great power since 16th century Spain. From 1979 to 2011, 84 percent of all the income gains of the entire country went to the top 1 percent.
“How is that possible? Because the other 99 percent lost,” Smith said.
Smith used the example of a large corporation like Caterpillar, which make “4.9 billion in profit. Does it pay that money to workers?” he asked. “No, you freeze workers’ pay and pay the profits to the stockholders.”
Smith said the majority of stock in Walmart, one of the biggest retailers in America, is owned by one family, the Waltons. “They have more wealth than 40 percent of America, one family,” Smith said.
Smith’s stop in Londonderry Monday night came in the midst of a book tour.