GAS PRICES, PRIMARIES, CNN EDITORIAL BIAS AND A DANGEROUS CHASM

Working class hero? You buying that?

The other day a fellow Angelino challenged my assertion that gas costs $4 a gallon here in L.A. Admittedly I use premium (the middle one, not the top one) and that evening I was looking for a station that sold it for only $4.00. Every place I could find was charging more. I found one that was closer to $5/gallon than $4/gallon. By using Mapquest (www.gasprices.mapquest.com) you can type in your zip code and find the cheapest gas stations near you. None of the ones offering gas for $3.86 are either near me or on the way to anywhere I ever go. All the gas stations near me are already over $4.00/gallon. And, according to a CNN poll, 78% of Americans expect $5/gallon gas soon.

When I woke up this morning, CNN was conducting an on air poll, asking viewers if the McCain-McClinton gas tax holiday was sound policy or pure pandering. It shouldn't surprise anyone that 87% of viewers are astute enough to realize it is pure pandering and that only 13%-- probably Fox viewers who had stumbled onto the wrong station-- think it is sound policy. But what was most interesting about the CNN segment I watched was the 3 or 4 letters they read. All of them denounced Obama. parrot-like, as an elitist for keeping them from their savings. Don't you think that particular CNN editor should be fired and packed off to Fox, where that kind of editorial decision making is also considered sound policy?

Today's NY Times marvels at how Hillary Clinton has turned herself-- never mind a little massive help from the corporate media-- into a working class hero. "Mrs. Clinton has accomplished the seemingly impossible in those states. Somehow, a woman who has not regularly filled her own gasoline tank in well over a decade, who with her husband made $109 million in the last eight years and who vacations with Oscar de la Renta, has transformed herself into a working-class hero."

In promoting herself as a champion of ordinary Americans in a troubled economy, Mrs. Clinton has also tried to cast her rival, Senator Barack Obama, as an out-of-touch elitist. She has made her case at all the right stops (an auto-racing hall of fame) and used all the right props (lately delivering speeches from pickup beds).

Although the Times seemed shocked at "how minimally she uses her own biography," John Stewart did mention last night that she had apparently been driving a pickup truck around Wellesley blasting Emily Dickinson poems through the speakers.

Meanwhile, serious observers and analysts of American society have noted that there is a growing income divide between the very rich and the rest of us. It reminds me of what I read about pre-Revolutionary France.

The gap between rich and poor in the United States has widened exponentially over the past three decades. The Congressional Budget Office reports that since 1979, the average income for the bottom half of American households has grown by 6 percent. In contrast, the top 1 percent of earners have seen their incomes shoot up by a 229 percent during that same period. Under the Bush administration, the average income of most Americans has fallen, but the average income of top wage earners (those above the 95 percentile range) has increased from $324,427 in 2001 to $385,805 in 2006. Only one other year has seen a comparable income gap: 1928, the year before the Great Depression. Inequality has not been confined to one region or sector but has spread all across the country.  North Carolina and Indiana, two geographically and economically disparate states whose upcoming presidential primaries have brought them to the forefront of the national media, are no exception. With the average income of the richest 20 percent of families 7.2 and 6.7 times larger than the poorest 20 percent of families, respectively, North Carolina and Indiana are a microcosm of a larger national trend. Both of these states are looking for relief from declining wages, sinking job security, and falling benefits.

Is this something Obama will address? I don't know but I suspect he will. I know for sure that neither Clinton nor McCain will; they never have and neither has ever demonstrated the slightest understanding of any of the problems manifest in these statistics.