Plutocracy Now: What Wisconsin Is Really About How
screwing unions screws the entire middle class.
By Kevin Drum
Mother Jones
March/April 2011
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-
inequality-labor-union-decline

IN 2008, A LIBERAL Democrat was elected president.
Landslide votes gave Democrats huge congressional
majorities. Eight years of war and scandal and George
W. Bush had stigmatized the Republican Party almost
beyond redemption. A global financial crisis had
discredited he disciples of free-market fundamentalism,
and Americans were ready for serious change.

Or so it seemed. But two years later, Wall Street is
back to earning record profits [2], and conservatives
are triumphant [3]. To understand why this happened,
it's not enough to examine polls and tea parties and
the makeup of Barack Obama's economic team [4]. You
have to understand how we fell so short, and what we
rightfully should have expected from Obama's election.
And you have to understand two crucial things about
American politics.

The first is this: Income inequality has grown
dramatically [5] since the mid-'70s--far more in the US
[6] than in most advanced countries--and the gap is
only partly related to college grads outperforming
high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our growing
inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes
among the richest 1 percent and--even more
dramatically--among the top 0.1 percent. It has, in
other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at the
very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money
fromeveryone, even those who by ordinary standards are
pretty well off.

Second, American politicians don't care much about
voters with moderate incomes. Princeton political
scientist Larry Bartels studied [7] the voting behavior
of US senators in the early '90s and discovered that
they respond far more to the desires of high-income
groups than to anyone else. <...>

How did we get here? In the past, after all, liberal
politicians did make it their business to advocate for
the working and middle classes, and they worked that
advocacy through the Democratic Party. But they largely
stopped doing this in the '70s, leaving the interests
of corporations and the wealthy nearly unopposed. The
story of how this happened is the key to understanding
why the Obama era lasted less than two years. <...>

Technically, American labor began its ebb in the early
'50s. But as late as 1970, private-sector union density
was still more than 25 percent [13], and the absolute
number of union members was at its highest point in
history. American unions had plenty of problems,
ranging from unremitting hostility in the South to
unimaginative leadership almost everywhere else, but it
wasn't until the rise of the New Left [14] in the '60s
that these problems began to metastasize.

<For the entire article, go to
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-labor-union-decline

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