The People, Yes! Let’s Crush the Woke Plutonomy! An Interview + Review Of "The Populist’s Guide to 2020: A New Right And New Left Are Rising" By Krystal Ball And Saagar Enjeti

-by John Siman

As I reread in his book, Hate Inc. Matt Taibbi’s analysis of how the corporate media have worse-than-cynically divided our nation into mutually-despicable but highly profitable demographic silos, and as I await the publication of Thomas Frank’s forthcoming book The People, No!, which will, I believe, be about the grim suppression of Populism in American history, I have been utterly surprised by the sudden appearance-- as if out of nowhere-- of Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti’s delightful YouTube show Rising, which every day now dispenses brilliantly produced, multiple doses of actual Populist conversation. Glenn Greenwald, who Krystal says is one of her heroes, calls it “the super-perky radical trans-ideological 21st-century subversive sequel to the Katie Couric/Matt Lauer morning Today Show in its heyday minus all that unpleasantness.” The People, Yes!

And, mirabile dictu, Krystal and Saagar’s Rising originates from within the most bubblicious confines of the D.C. bubble-- their studio is literally on K Street-- how is this even possible? How, that is, can their show even be permitted to air in the 21st-century USA, where next-level corporate control requires, as Taibbi has explained, the manufacture of media products as strictly standardized and aggressively dumbed-down as McDonald’s food products are, and in an eco-system even more deleterious to the nation’s health?

Perhaps Krystal and Saagar’s new right + new left friendship presages the actual rising up of a new Populist movement in the USA, out of the long-awaited ruins of neoliberal oligarchy. Well, that might be too much to hope for, but in any event their appearance on the political scene is good news coming at a time when I, for one, thought that good news had gone extinct.

And to top it all off Krystal and Saagar have just written a book, The Populist’s Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising. It’s a collection of thirty-nine of their YouTube essays (twenty written by the nominal Democrat Krystal and nineteen by the nominal Republican Saagar; all thirty-nine were broadcast between last July and this January), with some useful updates and analysis added. Their essays are arranged not chronologically, but according to four rather audacious themes:

Core Rot (the ugly result of the elites’ utter betrayal of the American working class)

Media (why most all Americans hate it)

Identity (understood as a woke intersectionalist weapon effecting societal division)

Theories of Change (Krystal and Saagar really are envisioning a working-class revolution)

Each of these four themes is introduced by a short, insightful, jointly-written essay. The whole thing weighs in at a very lively and readable 243 pages, and it’s a remarkable feat of modern publishing that so many of the essays in the printed-on-paper book had so recently been broadcast on the Internet -- about a quarter of them since Thanksgiving. Soon after its launch on February 8, Krystal and Saagar’s book made it into the top ten on Amazon’s list of new releases.

And while their book was selling so briskly on Amazon, their YouTube viewership continued its months-long increase: Rising reached 300,000 subscribers in February. (The now-venerable Jimmy Dore Show has about 700,000 subscribers.) “The runaway success of our show and of so many others on YouTube,” they write, “is a direct indictment of the mainstream media” (p. 82).

So then, if we really are witnessing the risingof a new Populist movement, it seems that it will be characterized by media content of sparklingly high production value and remarkably quick turnaround. Leonidas Lafayette Polk and William Jennings Bryan would be duly impressed.

Indeed Krystal is so TV-polished and camera-ready that when I first saw her electronic image on Rising a few months ago (I had never seen her in the three years during which she was a co-host on MSNBC), I instinctively assumed that she would be just another plastic mouthpiece of official Neoliberal opinion, another “super-perky” (pace Glenn Greenwald) robot for the National Security State. Saagar, similarly, who is a decade younger than Krystal, presents himself as a very cheerful, very well-adjusted, very well-dressed (awesome ties!) D.C. politics nerd and describes himself as a conservative Trump-supporter who vehemently opposes socialism. And yet, when they come together, they write and say things like this: “The old order will die. It is dying before our eyes. The only question is how long before a new order is born” (p. 23).





They are intellectuals, and they are writing from the gut. Here is a sentence from Saagar’s essay, “My Dire Warning for the American Right”: “[W]e need to turn an eye toward our decrepit city in Washington to highlight just how exactly we got to a point where polling indicates that almost half the American public wants to burn our institutions to the ground” (p. 194).

Both Krystal and Saagar, I should point out here, are fascinated with the mechanics of the New Deal, with all the details of how Franklin Roosevelt was able to engineer a revolutionary transformation of the federal bureaucracy. Krystal, in fact, has written a book in which she envisions a new New Deal, Reversing the Apocalypse: Hijacking the Democratic Party to Save the World, and Saagar gave us a mini-lecture about the insider political genius whom he calls “the chief architect of the New Deal,” Thomas “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran. Saagar’s point was to illustrate just how gargantuan a task it is to reinvent government. It’s something he obviously thinks about a lot.

Also salient: Krystal was born and raised and continues to live in-- and to commute to K Street from-- rural King George County, Virginia. She retains the good manners of someone who grew up in the South. Saagar, the son of immigrants, grew up in College Station, Texas. Flyover country. My point here is that they both have, in real life, rubbed shoulders with actual... deplorables.

And so it is altogether fitting that it is from Krystal and Saagar that I have learned the revolutionary word plutonomy. It looks like plutocracy, like a word from Ancient Greek, but it isn’t. It is, as we shall see, more badass than that.

Back in Ancient Athens, when Plato and Xenophon were recalling how Socrates had described the type of regime in which private wealth determines public power, Plato used the word oligarchy and Xenophon the word plutocracy. Two words, but a single outcome: the rich rule and the poor are disenfranchised. And so Plato in The Republic observes the fundamental political failure of oligarchy/plutocracy: it causes a city to be divided against itself, into a city of the rich and a city of the poor, which, though they continue to dwell together in the same spot, continuously plot against one another.

And what then becomes of these disenfranchised poor? In The Constitution of the Athenians Aristotle presents us with a worst-case scenario, but a historical one nevertheless:

[In the time before Solon, Aristotle writes] the Athenian regime was in all respects oligarchical, and the poor and their wives and their children were enslaved to the rich, and they were called Dependents and Sixth-part-sharecroppers, for it was under a sixth-part rent that they farmed the fields of the rich-- all the land was owned by the rich. And if they ever failed to pay their rents, both they and their children were liable to arrest...

So much for economic plight of the disenfranchised poor-- what of the ruling rich, the oligarchs /plutocrats? Well, they get richer and richer of course. And this is why plutonomybecomes for us an essential term of analysis: it denotes the economic arrangements that arise naturally from oligarchic/plutocratic political arrangements.

Plutonomy means that wealth grows only for the wealthy. It’s the economy of a plutocracy. And so plutonomy is not, as we have seen, an ancient word, but a modern portmanteau word, a fusion of plutocracy + economy.

And Krystal and Saagar describe the dynamic of plutonomy with vividness, as in this passage from their book:

Our entire economy has become increasingly oriented around the special flowers of Richard Florida’s so-called “Creative Class” [Thomas Frank uses the term “Liberal Class”; during our conversation Saagar used the term “Cosmopolitan Class,” and Krystal the term ”Professional/Managerial Class”; I am old enough to remember “Yuppie Scum”]. These are the lucky, mostly college-educated, types to whom the entire low-wage service community caters: the ones who came mostly from big cities or were identified as “special” in their small towns and put on the college track. They are the Pete Buttigiegs of the world, whose privilege and particular type of intellect gained them access to the elite world and all the stamps of elite privilege that come with it: the people who expect their sustainable [!] sushi to be available at 2 a.m. and for whom an entire army of exhausted and underpaid workers has been marshaled (p. 22).

Michael Hudson describes plutonomy with statistics: “[A]ll the growth in GDP has accrued to the wealthiest 5 Percent since the Obama Recession began in 2008. Obama bailed out the banks instead of the 10 million victimized junk-mortgage holders. The 95 Percent’s share of GDP has shrunk” (The Democrats’ Quandary-- In a Struggle Between Oligarchy and Democracy, Something Must Give). The rich get richer, and the poor get uninsured gig jobs serving the rich.

Krystal told me that she learned the word plutonomy in the context of Wall Street, from an analyst who communicated the message: “Look. All the money to be made comes from catering to the plutocrats-- with luxury goods, with luxury experiences, with luxury services. That’s where all the money is to be made because no one else has anything.”

She continued: “So our whole economy has become a plutonomy, where you have a small slice of people who are very fortunate, who have their credentials and their ticket to the elite class, and they can get their sushi on demand delivered to them by Uber Eats at 2 a.m., and the whole society is set up to cater to their every whim and desire. And they are the only people who in their workplace and in their life are actually treated like human beings.”

“The Meritocracy,” Saagar interjected.

“The Parasite Class,” I thought to myself.

Krystal resumed: “Which is why I responded so much to Andrew Yang’s message-- the core of his message-- which was very simple: that everyone deserves to be treated with humanity, like a human being. But that is the opposite of how our economy is structured.”

Plutonomy is so bad that Socrates and Plato and Xenophon and Aristotle didn’t have a word for it.

How in heaven’s name then is it being shoved down America’s throat? One way is by its being sugar-coated with a gooey layer of identity politics, of intersectional wokeness. Krystal and Saagar write:

There is genuine racism, sexism and hatred in this country-- bigotry of all kinds. But what animates American politics right now is not a true desire to make America a place free of the systemic legacy of racist and sexist policies: what animates American politics is the desire for elites to cling to power, engage in rent-seeking behavior and hog all the spoils of plutonomyfor themselves. Identity politics is the sop thrown to working class people to keep them in line [italics mine]. It keeps us all running around yelling: “Racist!” and “Sexist!” and “Un-American” at each other rather than noticing the way that we are all united in a shared struggle” (pp. 134-135).

With the phrase “united in a shared struggle” Krystal and Saagarget to the heart of the matter. For the most horrible of the many horrors of identity politics is its rejection of the very possibility of human solidarity. Oligarchy, as Plato described it, was bad enough, for it causes a city to divide against itself, to divide into two hostile factions, but woke identity politics divides and divides again, into as many hostile factions as there are countable identitarian intersections. And so, just as plutonomy arises naturally from oligarchy, so likewise does a truly anti-human viciousness arise from identity politics.

The horrors of identity politics and woke anti-capitalism can perhaps best be fought by means of satire, as Andrew Doyle has been doing with his Twitter character, Titania McGrath, an imaginary “radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice and armed peaceful protest.” He and his colleague Douglas Murray are the two greatest heroes of the war against woke in the UK, and I have often wondered who has risen up to their level of moral and intellectual valor here in the USA. In an important way, Krystal and Saagar’s critique of identity politics is even more powerful than Doyle and Murray’s, for while the two Englishmen write from a sensibility that is at its core literary-- Doyle has a doctorate in Elizabethan literature from Oxford and Murray wrote a major biography of Oscar Wilde while still an undergraduate there-- Krystal and Sagaar have politics in their bone marrow. They are therefore able to analyze the monstrosity that is the woke corporation, to unveil the intersectionof identity politics with plutonomy. “So the big insight I got from your book,” I told them, “is that Woke is the next level of union busting.”

“I agree,” Saagar said, “I think it’s a pernicious attempt... I don’t think it started out this way, [but now] corporations realize that they can buy off key elements of the left by sponsoring critical race theory and identity stuff, and by using that they can basically not answer for any of the structural and economic damage that they have caused to American workers. I don’t think it started out this way... I don’t think these critical race theorists-- [for example] I don’t think the founder of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, was ever like, Yeah, I’m gonna get funded by the Shell Corporation, but, because she thinks that race is the fundamental divide amongst Americans, taking that money is fine... 1619 to me encapsulates all of this: the New York Times telling a bunch of upper-middle-class white liberals that they’re actually fundamentally racist from the very beginning, and that race in and of itself-- and not class-- is the primary dividing line in this country.”

Saagar continued: “And what I would say is: ...This is the worst possible thing you can actually do to a lot people of color in this country … who are disproportionately affected by class-based policies, which destroy unions, which go after wages. I mean, who do you think is affected when we have union-busted jobs or low-wage work, which is fundamentally catering to an upper class, to a Cosmopolitan Class which is diverse in name only?” (The contrived diversity of what Saagar here calls the “Cosmopolitan Class” is one of Adolph Reed’s most insightful observations-- I asked about this, and of course Krystal and Saagar admire Reed’s work, and of course they’ve had him on the show.)

“Yes,” Krystal agreed, “it’s a way to keep the working class divided so they do not accumulate power-- because there’s many more of them than there are of the elites. But the Republican Party uses white identity, and the Democratic Party uses: Look, at least we’re not racists like those guys!-- to be able to keep people in the tent so they can center the party around the interests of the Professional / Managerial Class.”

Krystal paused and continued: “Identity politics to me means taking something that is real... bigotry... and weaponizing it to maintain the status quo.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Back to Krystal: “To say: Look, if we have a gay millennial mayor, we’ve made progress, even when he’s pushing the same status quo politics. Or-- having the first black president. We have made progress. And I don’t want to say that that’s nothing. It is something. It does matter for children to be able to look up and see a black man as our president. But does it really make you feel better if it’s like Kamala Harris prosecuting you as a single parent for your kids being truant or possessing marijuana? Does it matter to you if it’s black woman who did that? No! Personally, my aspirations are much greater than changing the gender ratio or racial makeup of, of...“

“...of the Fortune 500!” Saagar interjected.

“Great!” Krystal said, and we all laughed, “We have our first female CIA torturer. Fantastic!”

Ha! What fun it is to visit K Street! The People, Yes! When, a year or so ago, I met Thomas Frank at a similarly bubblicious location and told him that I had travelled there from West Virginia, he entertained me with an anecdote about a trip he had once made westward across West Virginia: each time he crossed a mountain ridge, he told me, the only station he could pick up on his car radio would be broadcasting the Rush Limbaugh Show. Then he’d be crossing over the next ridge, and the station would fade out … only to be replaced by a successor station broadcasting the same episode of Rush on the same schedule. So up and down, up and down, again and again, over a couple hundred miles, Thomas Frank was able to listen to an entire episode of Rush Limbaugh virtually uninterrupted from a half a dozen or more West Virginia radio stations, operating a sort of aural relay race.

Maybe the Thomas Frank Phenomenon works in reverse too, for as I headed home from the bubble, before I crossed back over the mountain and into West Virginia, I heard a broadcast of a new NSO recording of Dvořák‘s New World Symphony. As I listened I thought of Thomas Frank progressing happily up and down those West Virginia mountains, and then I thought, Yes, I am hearing an intimation of a better post-woke American futureand this future will be like Dvořák‘s music moving seamlessly back and forth between echoes of Beethoven and echoes of old slave spirituals. Dvořák, I was thinking, had seen what could go wrong in America, but he also had seen what could go right: pure beauty set free from social class or caste or race. America was-- is-- the place where that can happen. Maybe, I thought, Dvořák‘s symphony could be the theme song for a new, a rising Populist movement. A half century ago Neil Armstrong took a recording of it to the moon, you know.





Maybe the Thomas Frank Phenomenon works in reverse too, for as I headed home from the bubble, before I crossed back over the mountain and into West Virginia, I heard a broadcast of a new NSO recording of Dvořák‘s New World Symphony. As I listened I thought of Thomas Frank progressing happily up and down those West Virginia mountains, and then I thought, Yes, I am hearing an intimation of a better post-woke American future, and this future will be like Dvořák‘s music moving seamlessly back and forth between echoes of Beethoven and echoes of old slave spirituals. Dvořák, I was thinking, had seen what could go wrong in America, but he also had seen what could go right: pure beauty set free from social class or caste or race. America was-- is-- the place where that can happen. Maybe, I thought, Dvořák‘s symphony could be the theme song for a new, a rising Populist movement. A half century ago Neil Armstrong took a recording of it to the moon, you know.

Grim Reaper by Nancy Ohanian

Will The Reality And Dangers Of Climate Change Sour Big Business On GOP Extremists? Not So Far

Conservatives were wily enough to realize-- long ago-- that democracies are tough ground for them. Campaigning on a platform of basically keeping the social order as it is-- the rich stay rich and powerful and the poor stay poor and powerless-- only works when rich people are the only ones allowed to vote. After working diligently to disenfranchise as many people as they could-- minorities, renters, women, young people, non-white people, ex-felons… anyone who isn't white, wealthy, male and old-- conservatives realized they would have to make common ground with riffraff. Nationalism worked well but that tended to eventually give way to xenophobia, which, quite naturally, led to anti-Semitism and racism. Voilà-- the modern Republican Party. The wealthy vested interests using poorly educated-- and just plain stupid-- paranoids, racists and bigots of every stripe have put together an ad hoc party based on Greed, Selfishness on one hand and Hatred and Fear on the other.

Unfortunately one of the things the unwashed Republican idiots have been taught to hate and fear is anything resembling an effort at ameliorating climate change. The Koch Brothers black bag operation made sure of that. So now respectable businesspeople are scratching their heads and wondering what they're doing on the same side of the aisle as a the flat earth sociopaths.

Yesterday, writing for ThinkProgress' Climate section, Emily Atkin looked at major food conglomerates worrying that Climate Change is threatening their bottom lines. "While politicians continue to bicker over whether or not climate change exists," she wrote, "companies now have no choice in the matter-- they must acknowledge the science and the risk and disclose the reality of that risk to their investors’ pocketbooks. Whether that risk actually manifests itself is another matter, but the fact that companies are increasingly putting climate change on their threat lists speaks volumes to the severity of the problem."

She mentions 8 food companies in all: Chipotle, Keurig Green Mountain, Michael Foods Group, Heinz, Big Heart Pet Brands, Omega Protein, Marine Harvest ASA (formerly Pan Fish), and Coca-Cola. Here's the Coke story:

Coca-Cola’s risk statement about climate change is pretty basic, but it’s simple enough to encapsulate the basic big picture: that the affects of climate change as scientists see them could be bad for profits.

“The growing political and scientific sentiment is that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are influencing global weather patterns,” a company 10-K filing says. “Changing weather patterns, along with the increased frequency or duration of extreme weather conditions, could impact the availability or increase the cost of key raw materials that the Company uses to produce its products. In addition, the sale of these products can be impacted by weather conditions.”

In addition, the company also acknowledges that regulations to curb greenhouse gas emissions imposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency could also negatively impact business. Current regulations have had a “minor” affect on business now, but the filing said that future regulations could “directly or indirectly affect the Company’s production, distribution, packaging, cost of raw materials, fuel, ingredients and water.”

But do the fears of GOP antipathy towards climate science change anything about these companies' political giving? Heinz has a political action committee that contributes hundreds of thousands of donors to politicians. 2012 was their biggest single year so far, contributing $179,322-- 59% to Republicans and 41% to (mostly conservative) Democrats. So far this year Heinz has only spent $59,083, 50% to Democrats and 50% to Republicans. In the House the biggest portion of their contributions are going to virulent and fanatic climate change deniers like Jim Jordan (R-OH), Joe Pitts (R-PA), Dave Camp (R-MI), Tim Murphy (R-PA), and Cory Gardner (R-CO).

2012 was also Coca-Cola Company's biggest contribution year ever. The company PAC handed out $827,076, 59% to Republicans and 41% to (mostly conservative) Democrats. Again, the lion's share of the loot went to climate fanatic change deniers like John Boehner (R-OH), Tom Price (R-GA), Fred Upton (R-MI), Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), John Kline (R-MN), John Fleming (R-LA), Paul Broun (R-GA), Allen West (R-FL), Phil Gingrey (R-GA), Peter Roskam (R-IL), Mike Pompeo (R-KS), Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), Virginia Foxx (R-NC), Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), Scott Desjarlais (R-TN), Rob Woodall (R-GA), Frank Guinta (R-NH), Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), etc. So far this year Coke has handed out $736,249, 53% to Republicans and 47% to Democrats. They are clearly not letting their worries about Climate Change get in the way of their affinity to Republican Party extremists.

Big Heart Pet Brands is a more modest operation than Coca-Cola or Heinz. In 2012 they handed out $14,000-- 57% to conservative Democrats and 43% to Republicans, all climate change deniers) and so far this year they gave away $10,500, 54% to Republicans and 46% to Democrats.

So… no correlations whatsoever between worries about climate change/worries about GOP extremists and political campaign contributions. German industrialists in the 1920s and '30s, miscalculated disastrously by propping up Adolf Hitler and the far right Nazi Party. Without the immense sums Hitler receiver from the German equivalents of the Koch brothers-- say Ruhr industrialist Fritz Thyssen-- he would have died on the vine long before coming to power. German plutocrats at I. G. Farben, Flick, Krupp, Siemens, etc now rewrite history-- they have the money to hire the hacks to do so-- to show that they were only paying "protection money" to the Nazis, utter bullshit and no different whatsoever from the American plutocrats today shelling out millions for Republicans Imagine a history book one day claiming that David and Charles Koch and Sheldon Adelson gave so much to the Tea Party and the GOP because they were afraid!

The German plutocrats thought they could control Hitler; the underestimated him and he eventually made them his slaves and wrecked their world. Will the Tea Party and GOP Frankenstein monster devour the Kochs and Adelsons and the rest of the plutocrats one day? Or drown them in rising oceans?

Michael Moore Brings A New 4-Letter Word Into Mass Consciousness: "Plutonomy"

Yesterday I started my day with a hike in the hills above Los Feliz and my neighbor Cynthia asked why wouldn't just one of the health insurance industry CEOs cut back on their immense compensation packages and set a new course in being serving the public instead of using corporate policies to deny people health care. I told her about commonly used-- albeit bogus-- excuse: the legal ramifications of fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits and likened this class of person to an American aristocracy, as unlikely to give up their fabulous wealth and power as were the French aristocracy in the spring of 1789.

I ended my day with John Amato and Digby at a screening of Michael Moore's phenomenal new film, Capitalism: A Love Story in Westwood, with Moore hammering home the chilling statistic that the richest 1 percent of Americans now have more financial wealth than the "bottom" 95 percent combined. Before we got to see the film, Michael came sauntering down the aisle and told us that the person who was supposed to introduce him hadn't arrived yet and asked if anyone else would like to. A thousand hands went up. Michael picked the wrong one. Oh, the guy was a definite admirer of Michael and his work but, alas, had internalized the expensive and effective propaganda spin that has been deployed to trivialize Moore's incredible work. In the glowing, obviously off the cuff, introduction the speaker referred to the completely bogus CNN and Fox slurs that Moore plays fast and loose with the facts. In fact, he doesn't. As he pointed out, he's still got the $10,000 cash reward he's offered to anyone who could point to an example of a misstatement of fact, something that is woven into the conventional wisdom high priced PR firms have successfully and quite purposefully-- as we have found out from ex-Insurance Industry PR honcho Wendell Potter-- instilled in corporate media talking heads incapable of critical thinking.

Capitalism: A Love Story is certainly Michael's most radical work yet-- and probably his best (Jay Leno thinks so). With heroes like Marcy Kaptur and Jesus Christ and villains like Reagan, Bush, Cheney and many of those surrounding our still revered Little Father he never lets the viewer lose sight of the fact that the real enemy is, and has always been, a system that oppresses everyday working families by putting greed and avarice on a pedestal (or alter).

Moore has no trouble vilifying-- and justifiably so-- Wall Street vultures and working family enemies like Obama lieutenants Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, but he isn't ready to make the leap that the guy whose name on the ballot last year caused him to weep in joy is also nothing more than another handmaiden of the class enemies Moore is so perceptive in identifying and reviling. He did promise us, after the film during a Q&A session, that when if Obama betrays us and chooses Wall Street over the American people-- as though he hadn't already done that by staffing decisions starting with Wall Street gangster Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff)-- his film critiquing Obama would make his analysis of Bush look like a Disney flic. He hopes that day never comes and reminded us that "Obama's all we've got."

On of the most chilling mechanisms he used in the film included memos from Cigna-- about dead peasants insurance policies big corporations take out on their employees-- and CitiGroup, celebrating how the U.S. is now effectively ruled by a "plutonomy," but warning of the dangers of democracy in which mere voters could prevent the plutocrats from getting their way (meaning, essentially, enslaving the rest of us).

Economist Michael Weisbrot penned a glowing OpEd for the Guardian a few days ago, extolling Moore's effective analysis of a system that is broken and needs to be discarded. As he points out, the film doesn't just take cheap shots at the seamy side of the American economy; "he is questioning whether the whole incentive structure, moral values and political economy of American capitalism is fit for human beings."

As an economist who operates in the think-tank world, I have to appreciate this work. He gets the economic story right. How is it that Michael Moore's father could buy a house and raise a family on the income of one auto worker, and still have a pension for his retirement? And yet this is not possible in the vastly more productive economy of today? The answer is not complicated: in the first half of the post-War era, employees shared in the gains from productivity growth; since 1973, most of them have hardly done so at all. (Productivity growth has also slowed.) Moore also explains the structural changes, such as Ronald Reagan's rollback of union and labour relations to the 19th century, that helped bring about the most massive upward redistribution of income in US history. (Moore even includes graphs and charts to back up the main points with data.)

Michael closed his movie with Merle Haggard's awesome cover of the Woody Guthrie classic, "Jesus Christ" (1940). I couldn't find a copy but this original version by Woody comes a lot closer to what Michael was getting at than the more recent version by U2




UPDATE" Moore's Movie Will Tank Dodd's Re-election Chances

This morning CQPolitics reports that Chris Dodd's standing among independent voters is starting to improve. Dodd must also have been buoyed by the turmoil inside the GOP, where the nomination fight has been heating up and Rob Simmons is no longer guaranteed the easy slog the NRSC had promised him. But the film is just devastating to Dodd and while I watched it I kept thinking that it will depress Democratic turnout in Connecticut and kill his re-election bid. I hope he likes the home he bought though. Matt Browner Hamlin effectively answered the film's charges; so will Moore give him the $10,000 he promised for anyone finding factual errors in the movie?