Weekend Reading

I've written here many times before about the illusion of the unemployment picture in the U.S. Economist and headline writers extol the low unemployment rate and economic boom we've been enduring (yes, enduring) since Bush took office.

In the New York Review of Books James Lardner has written a review of several books on the changing corporate culture towards employees over the past 20 or so years. These books document via general trend observation and anecdotal stories of the "downward mobility" of American workers. It's also noted that this movement downward is no longer limited to blue collar workers. In a key graf Lardner says:

From their different vantage points, Uchitelle, LeRoy, and Bogle are writing about the breakdown of what some have called the postwar social contract, and about the rise of a new "money power" more daunting, in some ways, than that of the late 1800s and early 1900s. To gain their political ends, the robber barons and monopolists of the Gilded Age were content with corrupting officials and buying elections. Their modern counterparts have taken things a big step further, erecting a loose network of think tanks, corporate spokespeople, and friendly press commentators to shape the way Americans think about the economy. Much as corporate marketing directs our aspirations disproportionately toward commercial goods and services, the new communications apparatus wants us to believe that our economic wellbeing depends almost entirely on the so-called free market—a euphemism for letting the private sector set its own rules. The success of this great effort can be measured in the remarkable fact that, despite the corporate scandals and the social damage that these authors explore; despite three decades of deregulation and privatization and tax-and-benefit-slashing with, as the clearest single result, the relentless rise of economic inequality to levels so extreme that since 2001 "the economy" has racked up five straight years of impressive growth without producing any measurable income gains for most Americans—even now, discussions of solutions or alternatives can be stopped almost dead in their tracks by mention of the word government.

This is the process that Thom Hartman of Air American credits with starting during the Reagan administration .... the dismantling of the middle class.

Ironically, these books all note the economic impact of a lost middle class. Sure, the rich get richer but the country doesn't.

It's a good read worth taking a few minutes to give yourself an inside view of the "jobs numbers" extolled by the media and conservatives. It's an amazing feat to cause this wholesale destruction of an blue collar economic base while retaining those same voters with red-herring issues such as immigration, prayer in the schools, Terry Schiavo, and gays.