It's Nice When the Big Guys Notice

What has you worried.

In today's Washington Post an op-ed by Harold Meyerson points to the obvious.

We're leveling down.

snip

With the bankruptcy filing Saturday of Delphi Corp., the largest American auto parts manufacturer, the downward ratcheting of living standards that has afflicted the steel and airline industries hit the auto industry big-time. As Delphi executives tell the tale, they need to reduce the hourly pay of their 34,000 unionized employees from the current $26 to $30 range to a somewhat more modest $10 to $12.


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Henry Ford doubled the daily pay of his workers, saying he wanted them to make enough to buy the cars they produced.

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If Delphi gets its way, its employees will clearly not be able to buy new GM cars. (At the rate things are going, they'll have to save up to buy gas.) In the face of the combined onslaught of globalization, de-unionization and deregulation, the bottom may not be falling out of the American economy, but the middle certainly is.

emphasis added.

There is the key, the professional class is doing well, but the working middle class is dying, and America must have a strong large working middle class to survive.

Those middle-income jobs that still come with benefits attached are increasingly clustered in the public sector, where they are becoming more vulnerable politically.

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In California, whacking public employees has become the primary purpose of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger; it is the goal that underpins his initiatives in the special election he has called for next month.

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We are in the third year of a recovery, but poverty rates and the number of medically uninsured continue to rise, while median household income continues to fall.

Not a very nice picture. A nation where if you are not very rich or a professional you have no hop of even reaching the middle class. A nation where the rich do well, and the rest wonder if they will be able to heat their house this winter.

A change in economic policy and direction is needed, and that change will not come from the leadership of the republican party.