On April 21st, the Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal announced a change in their opinion pages.
We've redesigned them to give you more, and more diverse, commentary on the debates of the day.
And to their credit, they have delivered with a weekly column from none other than What's the Matter with Kansas author, Thomas Frank.
Today the renowned populist commenced (though he did have a preview coulumn a month ago) his weekly foray into heart of capitalist media and the mouthpiece of corporate interests.
Thomas Frank has a must-read column in today's Wall Street Journal, Our Great Economic U-Turn.
In what is hopefully the foundation for columns to come, Mr. Frank asserts that that the American middle class has suffered from the corporate-friendly policies and actions of the last few decades.
This is a man-made catastrophe, a result that proceeded directly from the deliberate beatdown of organized labor and the wrecking of the liberal state.
It is, in other words, a political disaster, with tax cuts, trade agreements, deregulatory measures, and enforcement decisions all finely crafted to benefit one part of society and leave the rest behind.
He cites statistics, drawn from Steven Greenhouse's new book, The Big Squeeze, that are probably familiar to Kossacks, but should be widely known to the electorate as we approach November.
- Median "nonelderly" household income fell consistently through the first half of this decade, despite the solid economic growth enjoyed by the country as a whole.
- Real hourly wages for most workers have risen only 1% since 1979, even as those workers' productivity has increased by 60%.
- The top 20% of households earned more, after taxes, than the rest of the country combined in 2005
- the topmost 1% of the population took home more than the bottom 40%
The "squeeze" on lower and middle class Americans is very real and has tremendous impact on our everyday lives. This should be at the forefront of the political discussion as we move closer to the key elections of this fall. Democrats need to keep the message on point and continually push the proper narrative. Republican economic policies have created a plutocracy - a construct in which our government serves the interests of the wealthy few who maintain power and influence over the masses.
From the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank declares:
I can recall no conservative who trumpeted those long-ago elections... as a referendum on plutocracy.
So let us have one now. Instead of pleasant talk about "change" and feats of beer drinking at the corner tavern, let us hear our candidates address this greatest issue of them all: What kind of country are we to be? A land of equality? Or a bankers' utopia – where the law of the land has achieved mystical oneness with the higher law of classical economics, and devil take the bottom 80%.
If the Democrats succeed in making the November elections a referendum on economic policy, and the debate is framed properly, the results will be very favorable. And, more importantly, this mandate can be the catalyst for policies that bring prosperity to everyone and once again make America "the great middle-class nation".