You Not Wanting To Be Known For Something That You Have Done, Is Not The Same Thing As You Not Having Done It

Rachel Maddow does not play requests. "We will not," she explained, "stop reporting on the political actions, and the consequences of the political actions, of rich and powerful men, even if they send angry letters every time we do it." If you've read much of Thomas Frank's work, you probably have a good idea he's in the same boat. Frank's Salon article this morning, about the deal with the Devil business Republicans made with the racists and crackpots, will probably generate a lot of the same kind of angry letters the Koch brothers sent Maddow. If there was one thing worth reading over the weekend, though, that was it. It may be too dense and subtle for your average right-wing loon to set his hair on fire over, but… well I hope no one ever explains it to my Hate Talk Radio addicted brother-in-law before a family function.

Time was, the only place a guy could expound the mumbo-jumbo of the free market was in the country club locker room or the pages of Reader’s Digest. Spout off about it anywhere else and you’d be taken for a Bircher or some new strain of Jehovah’s Witness. After all, in the America of 1968, when the great backlash began, the average citizen, whether housewife or hardhat or salary-man, still had an all-too-vivid recollection of the Depression. Not to mention a fairly clear understanding of what social class was all about. Pushing laissez-faire ideology back then had all the prestige and credibility of hosting a Tupperware party.

But 30-odd years of culture war have changed all that. Mention “elites” these days and nobody thinks of factory owners or gated-community dwellers. Instead they assume that what you’re mad as hell about is the liberal media, or the pro-criminal judiciary, or the tenured radicals, or the know-it-all bureaucrats.

For the guys down at the country club all these inverted forms of class war worked spectacularly well. This is not to say that the right-wing culture warriors ever outsmarted the liberal college professors or shut down the Hollywood studios or repealed rock ’n’ roll. Shout though they might, they never quite got cultural history to stop. But what they did win was far more important: political power, a free hand to turn back the clock on such non-glamorous issues as welfare, taxes, OSHA, even the bankruptcy laws, for chrissake. Assuring their millionaire clients that culture war got the deregulatory job done, they simply averted their eyes as bizarre backlash variants flowered in the burned-over districts of conservatism: Posses Comitatus, backyard Confederacies mounting mini-secessions, crusades against Darwin.

For most of the duration of the 30-year backlash, the free-market faiths of the economists and the bosses were kept discreetly in the background. To be sure, market worship was always the established church in the halls of Republican power, but in public the chant was usually States’ Rights, or Down with Big Gummint, or Watch Out for Commies, or Speak English Goddammit. All Power to the Markets has never been too persuasive as a rallying cry.

So confidently did the right proceed from triumph to triumph, though, that eventually they forgot this. Inspired by a generous bull market and puffed up by a sense of historical righteousness so cocksure that it might have been lifted from The God That Failed, that old book in which ex-Communists disavowed their former convictions, the right evidently decided in the ’90s that the time had come to tell the world about the wonders of the market.

For all this vast and sparkling intellectual production, though, Americans hear surprisingly little about what it’s like to be managed. Perhaps the reason for this is because, when viewed from below, all the glittering, dazzling theories of management seem to come down to the same ugly thing. This is the lesson that Barbara Ehrenreich learns from the series of low-wage jobs that she works and then describes in bitter detail in her book Nickel and Dimed. Pious chatter about “free agents” and “empowered workers” may illuminate the covers of Fast Company and Business 2.0, but what strikes one most forcefully about the world of waitresses, maids and Wal-Mart workers that Ehrenreich enters is the overwhelming power of management, the intimidating array of advantages it holds in its endless war on wages. This is a place where even jobs like housecleaning have been Taylorized to extract maximum output from workers (“You know, all this was figured out with a stopwatch,” Ehrenreich is told by a proud manager at a maid service), where omnipresent personality and drug tests screen out those of assertive nature, where even the lowliest of employees are overseen by professional-grade hierarchs who crack the whip without remorse or relent, where workers are cautioned against “stealing time” from their employer by thinking about anything other than their immediate task, and where every bit of legal, moral, psychological, and anthropological guile available to advanced civilization is deployed to prevent the problem of pay from ever impeding the upward curve of profitability. This is the real story of life under markets.

The social panorama that Ehrenreich describes should stand as an eternal shrine to the god that sucked: slum housing that is only affordable if workers take on two jobs at once; exhausted maids eating packages of hot-dog buns for their meals; women in their 20s so enfeebled by this regimen that they can no longer lift the vacuum cleaners that the maid service demands they carry about on their backs; purse searches, drug tests, personality tests, corporate pep rallies. Were we not so determined to worship the market and its boogie-boarding billionaires, Ehrenreich suggests, we might even view their desperate, spent employees as philanthropists of a sort, giving selflessly of their well-being so that the comfortable might live even more comfortably. “They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for,” she writes; “they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high.”

These are the fruits of 30 years of culture war. Hell-bent to get government off our backs, you installed a tyrant infinitely better equipped to suck the joy out of life. Cuckoo to get God back in the schools, you enshrined a god of unappeasable malice. Raging against the snobs, you enthroned a rum bunch of two-fisted boodlers, upper-class twits, and hang-em-high moralists. Ain’t irony grand.

Earlier today, we looked at a report that Obama and the Democrats are shifting their emphasis away from economic inequality at the behest of party conservatives. I had left a message for the progressive Wisconsin Democrat, Kelly Westlund, running for Dave Obey's old seat now held by Big Business shill Sean Duffy, asking her for a comment. By the time we touched bases the post was already up. But her comment works just as well in regard to Tom Frank's essay. "The function of government," she asserted, "is to fight inequality. Call it what you want, but we can't address the problem if we're not willing to talk about it candidly. The fact is, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is disappearing. That's not good for anyone."

The Goldman Sachs Resignation Thing, Part II-- Fatally Flawed

Yesterday we took a look at the toxic culture around the resignation of Greg Smith from Goldman Sachs. Recall that one of my financial advisors, in explaining to me why he was leaving a senior VP job at one of the Wall Street bankster operations, said "I'm not moving from one pile of shit to another." Although I didn't identify him, he decided to elaborate on that statement today and I decided to share it.

After 12 years of working with this company, 9 with Citi Smith Barney and the last 3 with the joint venture of Morgan Stanley and Smith Barney, I'm leaving to pursue an opportunity to create a high touch wealth management platform with a smaller boutique international bank.  As we discussed, the culture at this firm has drastically changed since the merger. The company now employees a combined 18K financial advisors straining the resources that we are accustomed to using to best serve our clients. It is now a much less personal work environment where little value is placed on human capital. Senior management is less interested in who works for them and more interested in the bottom line. In order to get from 8% margins to the desired 13-15% that our CEO is stating to the Street we will for certain see more cut backs on resources. In my particular case in dealing with very high net worth clients I have lost the ability to leverage the total relationship through the firm. What I mean by this is now, even at the $100 million in assets level, no attention is paid to give them a comfort level and feel that this is a partnership. I am now viewed as a vendor! Even less attention is paid to the normal clients that have worked hard to build what they have. Now I'm not saying anything is happening to hurt the clients in any was, this is still a top notch firm with high levels of integrity, but we lost the personal touch. My whole business has been built on service and trust and I am now leaving because it feel it is impossible to deliver within this behemoth of a firm. This also goes for the other majors.

OK. I don't think David Korten gives personal financial advise. But I'd like to continue along the lines of what we saw from him yesterday in regard to the financial and economic advise he's giving a different kind of client: society. Again, from Agenda For A New Economy.

The institutional system of the old economy [so what we were dealing with yesterday in the whole Goldman Sachs thing] lacks the ability to self-correct, not only because its most powerful decision makers are insulated from the social and environmental consequences of their decisions but also because their definition of system health and success is itself fatally flawed. They take the rate at which their financial-asset accounts are growing as the measure of success and allocate resources accordingly, wholly unmindful of any connection of their decisions and rising unemployment, family and community breakdowns, collapsing fisheries, and melting glaciers.

They are most exuberant about the economy's performance when a financial bubble is rapidly inflating, a condition of disequilibrium, and respond by feeding the bubble, a path to certain system collapse.

The Keynsian economist John Kenneth Gallbraith called this self-destructive predisposition "irrational exuberance" and demonstrated that it is the condition toward which capitalist systems have consistently self-organized for more than 360 years, with no apparent ability to self-correct or learn from experience.

...Social justice and fairness are foundational underpinnings of a good society. When wealth and income are highly concentrated, the majority of people are denied basic opportunities for personal and social development. A growing body of research suggests that societies that share wealth and work equitably among all their members enjoy great physical and emotional health, stronger families and communities, less violence, and healthier natural environments. They are also more democratic and more resilient in the face of crisis. This is not a coincidence. A significant wealth disparity creates severe psychological and emotional stress and insecurity even for those at the top. Sharing prosperity brings greater health and happiness for all.

So if the system can't self-correct-- in other words, if the banksters at the top can't help but keep the irrational exuberance on full throttle regardless of the consequences to society and to the environment-- where do we turn? Government? Well, that should be the answer. But... well this week Barbara Ehrenreich dealt with why it hasn't been the answer, at least since the election of Ronald Reagan.

We call it “the nation’s capital,” but that’s increasingly a misnomer.  Consider Congress, where as last year ended 250 members, or 47% of our representatives, were millionaires, and the estimated median net worth of a senator was $2.56 million.  Or consider the city of movers, shakers, and lobbyists they live in.  In Washington D.C., “the top fifth of earners in the District make an average of 29 times the income of the bottom fifth.”  In average annual household salary that translates as $259,000 versus $9,100.  For the capital’s top 5%, that number is $473,000, “far above the $292,000 averaged by their counterparts in other large cities.”

Washington as the people’s capital?  More reasonably, it’s the capital of American wealth in a country in which the super-rich, after taking some lumps in the Great Recession, are again outpacing everyone else. [H]alf a century ago Michael Harrington pointed a finger at the world of American poverty, calling it “the other America”-- and that label stuck. Today, in a country where Hispanic and African American wealth was nearly wiped out by the bursting of the housing bubble, the elderly have increasingly seen their savings evaporate, and the poor are ever less “other” and ever more us, a new Harrington might consider labeling the world of the wildly rich, that 1% and their eternal bonuses, as “the real other America.”

It’s all too fitting that the leading Republican presidential candidate is a quarter-billionaire.  He may be running as a Washington outsider, but unlike most Americans, he’ll be right at home in the new Washington.

...In his defense, Harrington did not mean that poverty was caused by what he called the “twisted” proclivities of the poor. But he certainly opened the floodgates to that interpretation. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan-- a sometime-liberal and one of Harrington’s drinking companions at the famed White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village-- blamed inner-city poverty on what he saw as the shaky structure of the “Negro family,” clearing the way for decades of victim-blaming. A few years after The Moynihan Report, Harvard urbanologist Edward C. Banfield, who was to go on to serve as an advisor to Ronald Reagan, felt free to claim that:

“The lower-class individual lives from moment to moment... Impulse governs his behavior... He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot consume immediately he considers valueless… [He] has a feeble, attenuated sense of self.”

In the "hardest cases," Banfield opined, the poor might need to be cared for in “semi-institutions... and to accept a certain amount of surveillance and supervision from a semi-social-worker-semi-policeman.”

By the Reagan era, the “culture of poverty” had become a cornerstone of conservative ideology: poverty was caused, not by low wages or a lack of jobs, but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles. The poor were dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to “defer gratification,” or possibly even set an alarm clock. The last thing they could be trusted with was money. In fact, Charles Murray argued in his 1984 book Losing Ground, any attempt to help the poor with their material circumstances would only have the unexpected consequence of deepening their depravity.

So it was in a spirit of righteousness and even compassion that Democrats and Republicans joined together to reconfigure social programs to cure, not poverty, but the “culture of poverty.” In 1996, the Clinton administration enacted the “One Strike” rule banning anyone who committed a felony from public housing. A few months later, welfare was replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), which in its current form makes cash assistance available only to those who have jobs or are able to participate in government-imposed “workfare.”

In a further nod to “culture of poverty” theory, the original welfare reform bill appropriated $250 million over five years for “chastity training” for poor single mothers. (This bill, it should be pointed out, was signed by Bill Clinton.)

Even today, more than a decade later and four years into a severe economic downturn, as people continue to slide into poverty from the middle classes, the theory maintains its grip. If you’re needy, you must be in need of correction, the assumption goes, so TANF recipients are routinely instructed in how to improve their attitudes and applicants for a growing number of safety-net programs are subjected to drug-testing. Lawmakers in 23 states are considering testing people who apply for such programs as job training, food stamps, public housing, welfare, and home heating assistance. And on the theory that the poor are likely to harbor criminal tendencies, applicants for safety net programs are increasingly subjected to finger-printing and computerized searches for outstanding warrants.

Unemployment, with its ample opportunities for slacking off, is another obviously suspect condition, and last year 12 states considered requiring pee tests as a condition for receiving unemployment benefits. Both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have suggested drug testing as a condition for all government benefits, presumably including Social Security. If granny insists on handling her arthritis with marijuana, she may have to starve.

What would Michael Harrington make of the current uses of the “culture of poverty” theory he did so much to popularize? I worked with him in the 1980s, when we were co-chairs of Democratic Socialists of America, and I suspect he’d have the decency to be chagrined, if not mortified. In all the discussions and debates I had with him, he never said a disparaging word about the down-and-out or, for that matter, uttered the phrase “the culture of poverty.” Maurice Isserman, Harrington’s biographer, told me that he’d probably latched onto it in the first place only because “he didn't want to come off in the book sounding like a stereotypical Marxist agitator stuck-in-the-thirties.”

The ruse-- if you could call it that-- worked. Michael Harrington wasn’t red-baited into obscurity.  In fact, his book became a bestseller and an inspiration for President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. But he had fatally botched the “discovery” of poverty. What affluent Americans found in his book, and in all the crude conservative diatribes that followed it, was not the poor, but a flattering new way to think about themselves-- disciplined, law-abiding, sober, and focused. In other words, not poor.

Fifty years later, a new discovery of poverty is long overdue. This time, we’ll have to take account not only of stereotypical Skid Row residents and Appalachians, but of foreclosed-upon suburbanites, laid-off tech workers, and America’s ever-growing army of the “working poor.” And if we look closely enough, we’ll have to conclude that poverty is not, after all, a cultural aberration or a character flaw. Poverty is a shortage of money.

Someone Called Mukasey A Tyrant Before He Almost Plotzed

Barbara Ehrenreich paints a pretty glum picture of the American workplace in her latest book, a collection of short essays called This Land Is Your Their Land. She talks a lot about the ugliness of the pecking order. She kind of reminded me of the very first Patti Smith indie release, Piss Factory. Tonight, though, I was going through the BBC News and came across a related article, Bad Bosses May Damage Your Heart (which also led me to Work Stress Changes Your Body-- "a stressful job has a direct biological impact on the body, raising the risk of heart disease"-- and Unfair Bosses Raise Blood Pressure-- bosses that people perceive to be unfair not only make your working life a misery-- they can also pose a significant threat to your health." Yesterday's story was about a Swedish study that found a strong relationship between "poor leadership" and serious heart disease among the employees of the poor leaders.

I had just finished reading some right wing kook moaning and groaning because Washington state Judge Richard Sanders had stood up at the Federalist Society dinner last week and yelled "Tyrant! You are a tyrant!" at Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Mukasey was in the middle of defending the Bush Regime's disgraceful detainment practices at Guantánamo and its disregard for its obligations under the Geneva Conventions. Mukasey may have heard Judge Sanders' opinion and that may have caused him to collapse and faint a little while later. Right after his outburst Sanders walked out in protest and Mukasey was still feeding raw meat to the happy little fascistic Federalists.

Sanders did the right thing by speaking Truth to Power. He should be commended. Mukasey didn't die and he can oversee more inhuman detentions, more torture, and other crimes against humanity. I'm far more concerned by the victims of workplace brutality whose tyrannical bosses are shortening their lives in ways that anyone who has ever worked in an hierarchical work situation understands very well. Some say that kind of tyranny is part of human nature. Maybe it is. It's another excellent and compelling reason for strong labor unions.

What The Hell Is EFCA Anyway And Why Is It The Holy Grail?

When Republicans have no answer for why anyone should trust anything they say now that their policies have brought our country to the verge of collapse, they scream "card check." To their Pavlovian base it's like screaming "Better dead than Red" or something about homos recruiting your children or Blacks getting our women or Mexicans taking our jobs. It's the far right's bright shiny objet du jour. But it's also something organized labor has lost it's own mind over.

That's not to say that the arguments in favor aren't 100% correct and that the far right isn't 100% wrong. It is and they are. But all through this past election cycle I kept hearing about how progressive, independent labor unions (so not just toadies like AFSCME) were pouring money into the campaigns of the most reactionary anti-working family nominal Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, proven assholes like Bruce Lunsford (KY) and John Barrow (GA). And every single time I would look into why, it was always that same answer: they had agreed to support EFCA. So what is it that would cause otherwise rational progressives to sell their souls to Satan?

H.R. 800 (and S. 1041), the Employee Free Choice Act could well be the single most important piece of economic legislation winding its way through Congress. The Senate version was introduced by Ted Kennedy and the only Democrats who are not co-sponsors aren't real Democrats anyway-- Ben Nelson (NE), Mark Pryor (AR), Blanche Lincoln (AR) and Ken Salazar (CO). Longtime working family champion George Miller (D-CA) introduced it in the House and there are 234 co-sponsors. A small handful of uber-reactionary anti-labor "Democrats," Dan Boren (OK), Gene Taylor (MS), Travis Childers (MS), Mike McIntyre (NC), and defeated jackasses Don Cazayoux (LA) and Tim Mahoney (FL), refused to sign on, but mainstream conservative Republicans like Frank Lobiondo (NJ), Peter King (NY), Steve LaTourette (OH), Chris Shays (CT), Chris Smith (NJ), Vito Fossella (NY), John McHugh (NY) are also co-sponsors.

OK, so what is it? In broad strokes, the bill seeks to allow working people to use collective bargaining to get better wages, benefits and working conditions by restoring workers’ freedom to choose for themselves whether to join a union. If you thought that was a battle that was one decades ago, think again-- or read Cornell Professor Jefferson Cowie's simple explanation of why this bill is so crucial.

This evening at dinner I was reading from Barbara Ehrenreich's collection of essays, This Land Is YourTheir Land and I came across a chapter on EFCA: "Challenging The Workplace Dictatorship." I felt it was worth transcribing so I could share it with DWT readers.

When the Employee Free Choice Act came up for consideration in the Senate, conservative columnist George F. Will has suddenly developed a tender concern for workers' rights. The act, which would require employers to recognize a union whenever a majority of works sign union cards-- thus bypassing the often prolonged and creaky process of a National Labor Relations Board-supervised secret ballot vote-- has stalled, in part because of critics like Will who complained that it "strips all workers of privacy," and will repeal "a right to secret ballots-- long considered fundamental to a democratic culture." As he sees it, the unions are backing the act out of sheer desperation: since they can't seem to win a fair fight for workers' allegiance, they want government to take away the workers' rights and help herd them into union membership.

OK, now let's leave Will-land and enter an actual American workplace. Are you punched in? Good. The first thing to notice is that you've checked your basic civil rights at the door. Freedom of speech? Forget about it: Some employers bar speech of any kind with your fellow employees. I saw this firsthand at a chain restaurant and a Wal-Mart store. Wanna work? Zip your lips.

How about those privacy rights that Will so concerned about? Nada-- they don't exist outside of Will-land either. You probably had to pee in a cup to get your job in the first place, which constitutes a very intimate chemical invasion of privacy. In most states, your purse or backpack can be searched by the employer at any time; your emails and web activity can be monitored.

Right of assembly? Sorry, you don't have that either. In my experience, most managers see a group of three or more employees talking together as an insurrection in the making. Shut up and get back to work!

Since Will doesn't seem to know what happens before an NLRB-supervised secret ballot vote, here's how it works. During the increasingly prolonged lag between the initial card signing and the actual vote, management uses every means possible to intimidate, isolate, and harass the union's supporters. Most commonly workers are called away from their jobs and required to attend management-run meetings where they are subjected to anti-union harangues and videos. Note: Not only do workers lack freedom of assembly, they lack the freedom to not assemble. If management announces a 2 PM meeting, you better be there. These are called "captive audience meetings" for a reason.

At the meetings, which may take place daily in the weeks leading up to an NLRB election, management lays out a dire picture of what will happen if the union comes in: Workers will lose the right to talk to managers individually (not true); they will see their wages and benefits decline (emphatically not true); they will be stuck paying exorbitant dues (hardly); the company may have to move to Mexico ... Sorry, no questions or comments from the audience.

Most pro-union workers can withstand the company's mass captive audiences. Harder to resist are the one-on-one and small group meetings, where individual workers are grilled about their union allegiance for as many hours as it takes. During one union drive among truck drivers, management confronted workers one by one about personal issues like their credit ratings and family responsibilities. A lot of them finally broke down, and the union drive was defeated.

There's nothing wrong with management voicing its view on unions-- say, in a flyer to workers-- and certainly nothing wrong with secret ballots. The problem lies in the abuse of management power in the period between the initial union card signing and the NLRB-sponsored secret ballot election. If workers are willing to sign a union card-- which is a courageous step all by itself-- that should be enough to signify their choice.

Will calls the Employee Free Choice Act "Orwellian." But Orwell's fascist 1984 is already here and it's called the American workplace. What really scares employers about the Employee Free Choice Act is that it will begin to change that-- and bring the first stirrings of democracy to work.

Good news though-- all the Democrats elected in the Senate are likely to be EFCA supporters, as are almost all the new Democratic House members-- we'll have to see about the 2 right-wingers from Alabama the DCCC wasted so many millions of dollars electing-- and, more importantly, one of the sponsors of the Senate bill is Barack H. Obama. The House already passed the bill 241 to 185 on March 1, 2007. On June 26 the Republicans managed to filibuster the bill to death, 48 Republicans joining in that effort. The only Republican joining the Democrats to end the filibuster was Arlen Specter (R-PA). Tim Johnson (D-SD), a co-sponsor, was in the hospital and couldn't vote. Several of the anti-working families Republicans who joined the filibuster were defeated-- or have retired and been replaced-- by Democrats: Wayne Allard (CO), Elizabeth Dole (NC), Pete Domenici (NM), Gordon Smith (OR), Ted Stevens (AK), John Sununu (NH) and John Warner (VA). If the vote were to take place today there is every indication that it would be 59- 40. That's one short of passage-- and that's why the recount in Minnesota and the re-run in Georgia are both so important. Both Coleman and Chambliss hate working people and will do anything to hold them back. If either one of them is defeated, EFCA will pass. (The alternative is to persuade another Republican senator to come over to the Light-- maybe Olympia Snowe or George Voinovich or Lisa Murkowski.) But the best hope right now: defeat Saxby Chambliss and elect Jim Martin; we know which side each of them is on:

Do You Think Americans Reject The Notion Of Spreading The Wealth?

In his weekly radio address this morning John McCain warned that Barack Obama wants to-- Heaven forbid-- spread the wealth around. He would tax-- at a rate even less than under the Clinton Administration-- multimillionaires like... well, like Cindy McCain who inherited a fortune from her gangster, bootlegger father, and use that money for the benefit of society as a whole. To the right, of course, that is the biggest sin on God's earth. McCain:

My opponent's answer showed that economic recovery isn't even his top priority. His goal, as Senator Obama put it, is to "spread the wealth around."

You see, he believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that help us all make more of it. Joe, in his plainspoken way, said this sounded a lot like socialism. And a lot of Americans are thinking along those same lines. In the best case, "spreading the wealth around" is a familiar idea from the American left. And that kind of class warfare sure doesn't sound like a "new kind of politics."

Class warfare is what the wealthy and their puppets have been waging against the rest of us. One day, if unchecked, it will boil over and the McCains and Bushes and Cheneys of this country will learn what class warfare is-- like the French aristocracy did. Meanwhile, perhaps they could get a glimmer from the introduction to This Land Is Your Their Land, the fantastic new book by Barbara Ehrenreich. She writes that "we'll need a new deal, a new distribution of power and wealth if we want to restore the beautiful idea that was "America."

At the pinnacles of the wealth scale, extravagance reigned on a scale not seen since the late Roman Empire. Freshly fattened CEOs, hedge fund operators, and financiers hired interior decorators for their private jets, slugged backed $10,000 martinis at the Alogonquin Hotel in Manhattan, and, in one case, stage a $2 million birthday party in Sardinia featuring an ice statue of David urinating vodka.

There was a connection, as most people suspected, between the massive build up of wealth among the few and the anxiety and desperation of the many. The money that fueled the explosion of gluttony at the top had to come from somewhere or, more specifically, from someone. Since no domestic oil deposits had been discovered, no new seams of uranium or gold, and since the war in Iraq enriched only the military contractors and suppliers, it had to have come from other Americans. In fact, the greatest capitalist innovations of the past decade have been in the realm of squeezing money out of those who have little to spare: taking away workers' pensions and benefits to swell profits, offering easy credit on dubious terms, raising insurance premiums and refusing to insure those who might ever make a claim, downsizing workforces to boost share prices, even falsifying time records to avoid paying overtime.

Prosperity, in America, had not always been a zero-sum game. Early twentieth-century capitalists-- who were certainly no saints-- envisioned a prosperous people generating profits for the upper class by buying houses and cars and washing machines. But somewhere along the line, the ethos changed from we're all in this together to get what you can while the getting is good. Let the environment decay, the infrastructure crumble, the public hospitals close, the schools get by on bake sales, the workers drop from exhaustion-- who cares? Raise the premiums, reduce the wages, add new mystery fees to each bill, and let the devil take the hindmost. Only when the poor suckers at the bottom stopped buying and defaulted on their mortgages did anyone notice them.

That's how Ehrenreich starts her book, which I began reading today. Yesterday I finally finished Congressman Robert Wexler's Fire-Breathing Liberal and I'd like to juxtapose what we just read by Barbara Ehrenreich with how Wexler ended his book:

Rather than focusing on those issues that mattered to the everyday lives of Americans, the GOP built their political agenda around divisive social issues. The so-called wedge issues. Rather than working on improving our school system, they waged a battle against gay marriage. Instead of working toward universal health-care coverage, they passed legislation prohibiting Americans from playing poker online. Instead of tackling global warming, they rallied pro-life activists around the tragic case of Terri Schiavo. Instead of conducting judicious oversight hearings on the Iraq War debacle, they fought valiantly to protect Christmas.

In political terms, the Republicans moved the middle to the right-- and thus moved the mainstream closer to the conservative position. When Democrats regained the majority, we tried to govern from the middle, believing we could be passionate moderates or triumphant triangulators. This strategy, however, has achieved precious few results with an incorrigible Bush-Cheney White House blocking substantial progress. And it makes you wonder: If Republicans govern from the right and Democrats govern from the middle, when does the left get to govern? As a progressive, I fear my party has become more docile in the majority than we were in the minority.

We're trying to expand our relatively slim majority by being cautious. Instead, we should be galvanizing Americans behind a progressive agenda. The facts favor our side. Rather than blurring the differences between Democrats and Republicans, we should highlight them and fight for our principles.

By the way, you can read more about real class warfare in Ehrenreich's book online, an excerpt from The Nation. Coincidentally, Coleen Rowley sent me this incredible music clip last night from Minnesota singer-songwriter Peter Lang: