Trickle down economics such as has been practiced and preached here in the US since Ronald Reagan became president in 1980 is a scam. Well marketed, and cleverly sold to the vast majority of us, but a scam nonetheless. While going on and waxing rhapsodic about that "City on a Hill" that was America, President Reagan and the GOP was putting a fix in. Now, some 25 years on, the whole thing's come full circle. FDR instituted a new (for the time) social compact. Reagan began the systematic dismantling of that compact. He made it okay for companies to walk away from their commitment to their employees. He made this myth of "rugged individualism" seem cool and our heroes were these sudden, overnight "millionaires" that just happened to be really, really lucky in the stock market. That wasn't most of us. But these "special" ones were held up to the rest of us as role models, somehow deserving of their status and the money that came with it. There was this huge delusion pushed across to us, and we bought it. One key element of that delusion was that if we didn't have houses or lifestyles that looked like "Miami Vice", it was somehow our own fault. If we didn't make that kind of money, it was our own fault. Nothing about income equity being eroded via changes in the tax code and the new corporate culture that worshipped profit and was hell bent on divesting itself of "cost" at any cost was ever mentioned.

I'm glad we're talking about this. Our current situation has a backstory and it's high time we examined it closely. Now, I'm not sure we can go back to the time of the New Deal. Things have changed too much. But the social compact needs to be fundamentally re-imagined so that people get to play on a level field instead of just accepting the stacked deck we've been handed most of the last 30 years. I personally believe it has to start with correcting this income disparity that we're seeing here. When incompetence from our CEOs is rewarded with multi-million dollar severance packages, and regular workers only get 2-4 weeks severance, something's beyond wrong. We can no longer accept this kind of imbalance, nor is it sustainable.

You speak to precisely my point.

There is a systemic unfairness that I believe we are now seeing with older and wiser eyes. And all of the things you mentioned can be fixed. It will take time, but it can be done.

It will take all of us and it will take far better leadership than we've had the last decade and perhaps before that. Apparently, even in the Clinton era, incomes for the rich went up at a much faster rate than they did for everyone else even though more people did better. So the basic trickle-down hoax was never really addressed. President Clinton might have gotten to that if he'd not been distracted by his own obsession with chasing skirts, and by the various manufactured scandals of the GOP. President Gore might have gotten to address it had he been allowed to actually serve as President. That we are seriously behind the curve with Dubya is obvious and needs no further comment.

What would be interesting is if someone here could talk about how he/she managed to succeed DESPITE the lie that's been foisted on us. That would be uplifting.

The Wright story goes on for WEEKS. Barack Obama has to fall on his sword for comments that are absurd and arguably paranoid. Comments that black people understand even if they don't completely agree with them.

McCain is NEVER EVEN ASKED to repudiate his mad shamans for statements that are more insane, more hateful, more outrageous by several orders of magnitude than Rev. Wright's will ever imagine being. The story is covered for less than a day. It's a blip.

McCain's whack-job houngans are NEVER EVEN ASKED to clarify their rhetoric. People roll their eyes and move on. And the MSM gets bigger ratings, which equals more money.

There is a double standard.

It's a racist double-standard.

Either the MSM holds McCain to account, or the Wright issue is a whole lot less of a story. Don't tell me the media is "fair and balanced" unless one of those things happens.