COFFEE BREAK 265

+ updated at 10:20am ESDT on Thursday, March 24, 2011

+ Democracy Journal offers "The 'Hood Robin' Economy" by Ezra Klein, a book review of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob S. Hacker & Paul Pierson. 

EXCERPT 1: "In 1973, if you put the 1 percent of the country that had made the most money in a room and got them to empty out their pockets, you’d see 8 percent of all the money paid out in wages over the last year falling to the floor. If you’d repeated that exercise in 2008, you’d find 18 percent of the economy’s income on the ground. You’d better have a pretty big room."

EXCERPT 2: “It is surely no coincidence,” they write, “that almost all the advanced industrial democracies that have seen little or no shift toward the top 1 percent have much stronger unions than does the United States.”

EXCERPT 3: "As unions weakened, the nonrich lost their loudest voice in Washington. And that meant they became quiet indeed."

EXCERPT 4: What their theory explains, in the end, is not so much why median wages stagnated and income inequality skyrocketed, but why the political system has been so feckless and haphazard about responding. A political system where unions held more clout and politicians weren’t so addicted to the money provided by rich donors would be a political system that would likely have taken some of these problems much more seriously. But what worries me is that even that political system might not have responded effectively. And that’s at least in part because, for all the books written and all the peers reviewed, we’re still having trouble saying just what, exactly, is causing all this—and that makes the problem quite a bit harder to fix.

EXCERPT 5: And finally, we need to recognize that Americans haven’t accepted the status quo. Rather, they’re unaware of it. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely and psychologist Michael Norton recently asked people to estimate wealth inequality in this country. As it happens, most Americans think wealth is distributed vastly more equally than it actually is, and yet they would like something more equal still: When given a choice between various options, they chose the one most closely resembling Sweden, followed by the world in which every quintile has exactly 20 percent of the wealth. Only 10 percent chose our world. But the problem, as Hacker and Pierson point out, is that the political system isn’t listening. It’s time it did. The fact that we don’t quite know how to solve inequality and median-wage stagnation doesn’t make the situation any less urgent.

Read it all.

This is important stuff.  We've got a huge problem here and we need to act.  Or we will face a truly violent Class War down the line rather than the current mocking and mean-spirited political rhetoric which is bad enough.  I think that an important game-changer might be to start blaming Politicians rather than Republicans.  In other words, the Democrats have become enablers of the injustice.  Who knows?  Maybe it will be Republicans who do something about it if and when they respond to more and more voter discontent with the status quo.  If WE THE PEOPLE demand significant policy changes and can demonstrate real ability to get voters out, then politicians of both parties and possibly other parties will get the message and stop pleasing the Plutocrats.  Let us hope and pray for a far more informed and empowered electorate.  Let us continue to work for "Change we can believe in."