Sherry Chandler

Always a class act

I tracked this from The Sideshow to Hecate to Dependable Renegade and on to the Telegraph:

The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

Mr Bush, whose second and final term as President ends at the end of the year, then left the meeting at the Windsor Hotel in Hokkaido where the leaders of the world’s richest nations had been discussing new targets to cut carbon emissions.

And just to cheer you up further on a Monday, There was a Class War, The Rich Won It:

What happens if there’s a class war and only one side bothers to show up and fight it? That’s what happened over the last thirty years. There was a class war, and the rich won. Period. It’s over, they kicked our knees out from under us, put on their steel toed boots and spent the last thirty years telling us that they were going to trickle on us and we’re going to like it and beg for more.

Seems like hyperbole? It’s just the numbers. The top left shows the manufacturing wage earner’s hourly wages. Not “family income” which includes both of you going to work, but hourly wages. The only reason it’s goods producing is they go back longer, but other charts show the same pattern.

So, if you’re an ordinary slob, you haven’t had a raise in over 30 years. In fact, your real wage peaked over 30 years ago and it’s never recovered.

This would be ok if the US hadn’t been getting richer, getting more productive, ever since then, but I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that, well, actually, productivity and whatnot has kept going up. Yet somehow wages didn’t.

…

So they made themselves rich. They reduced taxation on themselves in a number of ways, they broke union power, they got rid of old New Deal laws that had stopped speculation from getting too bubblicious and they went on a bubble spree - shoving money into various different asset classes, driving them into the stratosphere, taking the profits and then letting the taxpayer eat the loss. They took as much public infrastructure private as they could and they did so for cents on the dollar. They imported manufactured goods from the east to keep goods inflation down and they exported jobs to low cost domiciles to keep wage push inflation down.

They also ran, in most periods, very tight dollar policies, so that there were fewer dollars around than the rest of the world needed. Needing dollars badly, people had to sell to the US cheap. And since everyone from outside the US wanted in on whatever the bubble of the day was, they kept giving the US real stuff (oil, goods) for pieces of paper. Those pieces of paper represented something real, at the end of the day: they represented the future. But the future always seems a long way off until suddenly it’s today.

It was a death bet. And back in the late 70’s and late 80’s it was a good bet. Heck, it was even a good bet for many over the last ten years. If you expect to be dead before the bill arrives, who cares how big the bill is? Tim Russert just won that bet. Reagan won that bet. Jesse Helms won that bet. It was a good bet for a lot of powerful men (and a few powerful women) in their late forties or older.

But some people lose death bets, and most people reading this today will lose this bet. You had your chance to die, now you’re going to get to live and pay. I suppose it’s better than the alternative, but I don’t imagine you’re going to enjoy it much.

All of which leads me back to Hecate’s question: Why? Why? Why Didn’t I Riot In The Streets In 2000? Why? Why didn’t anybody?

The latter also compliments of The Sideshow.

1. And again, it’s class
2. Work Ethic?
3. Remembering the reason for the day
4. Not North/South, Suburbs/Country but Class?
5. It’s the economy…

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