MB Civic

By Harold Meyerson | Thursday, September 27, 2007 | The Washington Post

“…The idea that the economy could revert to its pre-New Deal configuration (in which the rich claimed all the wealth the nation created while everyone else just got by), the notion that the middle class might shrink even as the economy grew: Who, among all our generations and political persuasions, expected that?

Yet that’s precisely what happened. Median family income over the past quarter-century has stagnated. The economic rewards from increased productivity, which went to working-class as well as wealthy Americans from the 1940s to the ’70s, now go exclusively to the rich. The manufacturing jobs that anchored our prosperity were offshored, automated or deunionized; lower-paying service-sector jobs took their place.

It’s no great achievement for a people to recognize that their nation’s economy has tanked, but recognizing that their nation’s class structure has slowly but fundamentally altered is a more challenging task….”…BS

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/26/AR2007092602069_pf.html