Of Growing Concern And Connecting Dots

When the American Conservative agrees with Rolling Stone (pay wall - which isn't working for me right now, goddam hippies) anyway, when those two agree, we may be seeing a monumental shift in political tectonics.

(hat tip = JG)
The American Conservative:

To some degree the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy’s palpable animosity towards public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education “reform” is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than $500 billion dollars in annual federal, state, and local education funding into private hands—meaning themselves and their friends. What Halliburton did for U.S. Army logistics, school privatizers will do for public education. A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie’s is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy.

A book review (LA Times) of The Betrayal of the American Dream, by Don Bartlett and Jim Steele that ran in The San Jose Mercury News:

Since the 1980s, a host of politicos, both Republican and Democrat, have sold their business-friendly reforms to the American people in the name of economic efficiency: Corporate America saves, and we all save! But the real winner, Bartlett and Steele argue, is the American "ruling class." Among other things, the economic elite have quietly, methodically and ruthlessly restructured the tax code on behalf of the wealthiest Americans, the authors say. Tax cuts on unearned income and carried interest allow the richest of the rich to pay less income tax with each passing year.

Put that together with NPR producing a whole segment around it:

"Everyone loves Apple. Apple makes nothing in this country anymore," Bartlett tells NPR's Steve Inskeep as an example. "But then, look over here on the other side and you have Intel, and their plants are massive, and they are good-paying jobs. They continue to invest in this country. And what we need in this country now are more Intels and fewer Apples."

For models of how to boost manufacturing and job growth in the U.S., Barlett and Steele look abroad. "Germany has had a fairly good record in recent years," Steele says. When the global financial meltdown happened, Germany adopted a policy that subsidized companies in order to help them keep employees on the rolls. "It's one of the reasons the German unemployment rate is much lower than in this country," he says.

Is anybody still really wondering why it just feels like there's something wrong goin' on?
 

And that graph is the rather generous way of looking at the disparity of income growth after taxes.  There's plenty of data suggesting Real Income has gone down for a huge percentage of American workers - especially when you look at the number of people who've been shifted into Salaried positions, and who're putting in longer hours and getting no overtime pay for it.

Here's a fun fact:
In 1979, there were more Americans employed in manufacturing - in this country - than there had ever been before or have been since then.

We're gettin' fucked with our pants on, guys.