Attack on the Middle Class!!
First they came for your paycheck. Then your house. 
What's next? 

By James K. Galbraith
Mother Jones
November/December 2010 Issue

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/11/galbraith-social-security-middle-class?page=1 

THE REMARKABLE thing about the American middle class is that
we still have one, given the job losses, housing bust, and
401(k) wipeout of the past three years - and considering that
for 35 years, politicians (and the bankers who own them) have
been hammering away at middle-class institutions. The assault
began in the 1970s, when New York City's fiscal crisis [1]
and California's property-tax revolt [2] marked the start of
a long decline in public services. Next came the recession
and anti-union policies of the early 1980s, whose whip's end
hit the black working class especially hard. (Automakers have
long been among the nation's largest private employers of
African Americans. In the late '70s, one in every 50 African
Americans [3] in the workforce was employed in the industry.)
Thanks to the UAW, the automakers provided good jobs and
pensions for workers who, in many cases, had a high-school
education at best. When Chrysler hit the ropes in 1979,
Congress did pitch in with a $1.5 billion loan guarantee [4]
(I worked on that bill as an economist for the House banking
committee), but the decade that followed still pummeled
autoworkers - as they did all of American manufacturing.

The consequences are still unfolding. Total employment of
manufacturing workers peaked [5] in 1979, and three decades
later, we're in the endgame. Jobs in the sector are down [6]
by about a third since 2000 - some 6 million lost. Most of them
will never be replaced. Nothing can stop the Chinese,
Koreans, Vietnamese, and others from making shoes and ships
and sealing wax at wages we can't compete with. And nothing
will.

For a time in the 2000s, some of those job losses were offset
by gains in the other hard-hat sector: construction. But the
Great Recession put an end to that. Since 2007, a quarter of
construction jobs have disappeared [6], more than 2 million
in all - about as many as were lost in manufacturing, but from
a much smaller base.

Those numbers tell of the next big middle-class tragedy - the
housing bust. Homeownership was a great American success
story. It rose for 60 years [7], peaking around 2004 - and for
most of those six decades it was an honest business, more or
less. But in its last five years, the long boom was kept
alive by the greatest financial swindle in world history. In
the collapse that followed, an enormous amount of middle-
class wealth was wiped out. Homes were once a source of
pride, safety, and collateral. Now they're often a burden - and
homebuilding is at lows not seen since World War II.

Is it a shock that after the Citizens United decision, Target
was among the first companies to write a huge check to a
political campaign?

To read more, go to 
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/11/galbraith-social-security-middle-class?page=1 

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