Say, rather, that five things are going on:
1. The rise of a very powerful, successful, exploitative upper class.
2. Further increases in inequality as the tax and transfer system becomes less progressive.
3. Increases in risk that threaten to move middle-class families sharply downward in the wealth distribution.
4. Skill-biased technical change that sharply raises the benefits to education.
5. Holes in the safety net--the fall in the value of the minimum wage, time-limited welfare, and so forth.
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Mr. Sulzberger, Let Krugman be heard! In one sense, there is nothing particularly new in Krugman’s latest column, “Graduates Versus Oligarchs”, as it fits neatly with one of his central themes – the crushing and cruel concentration of wealth within the absolute pinnacle of American society. But the hard numbers tell such a harsh and unjust story that it stuns anew: “. . . . income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent”. Four-Niner-Seven ladies and gentlemen, Four-Niner-Seven. Really wraps a pretty little bow around the Bush and Republican tax polices, doesn’t it?
The column may well be Krugman’s 497th wake-up call, but how well can he be heard behind the New York Times’ subscription wall? Of course, progressive bloggers and even other columnists will pick up the call, but they lack Krugman’s command of the subject matter, his authority and his focus. Inevitably, others picking up Krugman’s column will not so much amplify as distort and dilute it, as they are much given to digressions and ad hominine and long-past relevant attacks on President Clinton. President Clinton may have been riding the rising wave of wealth inequity, but at least he tried to channel some of it off and his tenure was nothing if not prosperous for the country at large. The Republicans, in contrast, have set about pumping wealth ever higher, and are morbidly busy plugging any and all leaks – not one drop, not one cent, to be lost on the inexorable journey to the summit.
Not only does the Times wall-off Krugman behind their pricey and elitist Select scheme, they also drown out his message by continuing to put out and promote the drek that Brooks and Tierney pump out. Bread and circuses have given way to HDTVs and SUVs. Brooks and Tierney work the cultural smoker, fogging up and fouling the air that surrounds Krugman. Tierney today has another cultural fantasy piece, one of a series he and Brooks seem to be running wherein they shapeshift themselves into middle class working moms, explaining everything away in a kind of warmed over Madison Avenue of the Fifties version of momhood and family life for the common folk. It’s more than a little creepy. Brooks, at one point, seemed to edge dangerously close to a sick pathology, when he peeped in on the schoolgirl set’s chatroom banter in “Bondage and Bonding Online”. I’m not kidding, you can link it up. It’s not hard to fathom what motivated Brooks in that particularly disturbing column, but his larger mission is to distract and divide the country with cultural folderol. Brooks blithely explains away the unconscionable siphoning up and off of this country’s hard-earned wealth by attributing it all to the good study habits and clean living of his kind. Brooks’ people aren’t merely guys born on third base thinking they’ve hit a triple; they’re born like they’re white Jackie Robinsons, halfway home down the third-base line with the ball just barely at the release point in the pitcher’s hand.
Never mind the Oligarchy, be afraid of everything else in this world. Be morbidly obsessed with clumps of DNA in strange women’s wombs in every hamlet across America. Go to the Corporate Church of choice. Meanwhile, the working class, the middle class, even the marginally wealthy class are slipping. Everyone knows it and doesn’t want to think about it, no less talk about it. Each of or our ends ends in a bed with a drip, but for those below the Oligarchy, it is a lifetime’s work dripping away through our IVs. No matter no mind. Most Americans are being stalked by debt and healthcare costs and the dimming prospects of our sons and daughters. Boomers are increasingly facing a choice between a reasonably comfortable retirement, or giving the kids at least a puncher’s chance of approaching their parent’s standard of living. You can’t have both.
And the Republican approach to all this is to accelerate the inequity by unconscionable tax breaks for the ultra rich and by trying to pull the plug on the New Deal’s life support. They seem intent on cut-pursing Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare and whatever other safety net the rabble is seen clinging to. What moves them to all-hands-on-deck panic? Not Katrina. What kicks the machinery of Republican activism to adrenaline rush status? Not the prescription drug debacle. No, we’re not sweating those details. Instead, what lights their fire is the awful, unthinkable, nightmarish prospect that the UAE’s ruling Oligarchy might have to forego one small (by their standards) trinket to add to their vast horded wealth. This is what moves the movers and shakers of the Republican Party.
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