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| The Rise and Fall of the American Middle Class: A Faulty Foundation. | 06/19/2006 - 8:28 PM |
| While the New Global View (NGV) that took form at Breton Woods during the closing days of World War II was very far sighted, there was a blind spot in the visionaries’ eyesight. …
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More – read the rest of the story at the URL above. _______________________________________________________ |
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| The Rise and Fall of the American Middle Class: The Big Idea. | 06/19/2006 - 10:38 AM |
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| There are a large number of hidden processes at work today that become visible from time-to-time through their effects. The recent Dubai ports flap, the apparent lack of interest in protecting our borders against illegal invasion, the wholesale off-shoring and outsourcing of American production, research and jobs are just some examples.
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More – read the rest of the story at the URL above. _______________________________________________________
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| The Rise and Fall of the American Middle Class: The Seeds of Destruction.
| 06/20/2006 - 11:26 AM |
| So the economic standard envisioned for the New Global View (NGV) by the planners and seers of the day was naturally expected to be more like some kind of trade-off between the roaring twenties and the great depression of the thirties, which was the only life experience they had to draw upon.
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Unfortunately for the American middle class, today’s power elite sees them as an obstacle to leveling the playing field in a way that is advantageous to it.
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More – read the rest of the story at the URL above. _______________________________________________________
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| The Rise and Fall of the American Middle Class: American Dream a Global Nightmare?
| 06/22/2006 - 9:50 AM |
| About 1980 or so, a new crop of leaders here in America, heirs to that unique and tremendously successful accomplishment that is the American middle class, began to inherit the charge from their forbears to move forward with the New Global View (NGV). They were of a more recent generation and, unfortunately, of a much smaller caliber of leadership. Most of them had never been tested in the crucible of war or economic hardship. They were found wanting in wisdom, if not lacking in the inherited influence and wealth to nevertheless play with the levers of power.
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More – read the rest of the story at the URL above. _______________________________________________________ |
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| 06/26/2006 - 2:53 PM | |
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The solution that our present “leadership” in this country has hit upon is to level the playing field, not by realizing the American dream globally, but by eliminating the American middle class by putting it in the poor house.
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More – read the rest of the story at the URL above. _______________________________________________________ |
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| The Rise and Fall of the American Middle Class: Epilogue – A World View
| 07/03/2006 - 4:29 PM |
| The Economist came out with a Special Report: Inequality in America.
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“After 2000 most people lost ground, but, by many measures, those in the middle of the skills and education ladder have been hit relatively harder than those at the bottom.”
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The prognosis is not good in the view of The Economist. “Whichever explanation you choose for the signs of growing inequality, none of the changes seems transitory. The middle rungs of America's labour market are likely to become ever more squeezed.”
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Not to panic, however. Our elite leadership is safe. Their boat is floating ever higher. “The one truly continuous trend over the past 25 years has been towards greater concentration of income at the very top. The scale of this shift is not visible from most popular measures of income or wages, as they do not break the distribution down finely enough. But several recent studies have dissected tax records to investigate what goes on at the very top. “The figures are startling. According to Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Thomas Piketty of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the share of aggregate income going to the highest-earning 1% of Americans has doubled from 8% in 1980 to over 16% in 2004. That going to the top tenth of 1% has tripled from 2% in 1980 to 7% today. And that going to the top one-hundredth of 1%—the 14,000 taxpayers at the very top of the income ladder—has quadrupled from 0.65% in 1980 to 2.87% in 2004.” It seems that “The fruits of productivity gains have been skewed towards the highest earners, and towards companies, whose profits have reached record levels as a share of GDP.” The average middle class salaryman and wage-earner are running harder in place while the Big Boys turn up the speed on the productivity treadmill. O O O
More – read the rest of the story at the URL above. _______________________________________________________ |
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