Letters to the Editor
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Since 1982
That's when Michelle Obama turned 18, became an adult. Only Americans with invested fortunes have better lives since 1982, and many of them even are worse off. Most hard-working, well-educated Americans have been through multiple down-sizings and buyouts since 1982.
And, compare the great things that happened before 1982 with what has come since. Then balance the good with all the post-1982 tragedies and disgraces.
Michelle is right. Kristol seems to be a twerp. He did not have to write this, but he could not think before writing, just couldn't hold back. Because he is a twerp.
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Stupidity, idiocy, and anything written or said by Kristol
Bill is simply the stupidest guy in American letters today. I have long protested his inclusion in the Diane Rehm Friday news hour, since he is not a journalist. He is a political hack who writes.
I have called programs that he is on, and revoked his pundit's license. If you, O Gentle Reader, hear Kristol on a call-in show, call up and revoke his license. We the public are not asked about these public "intellectuals" and so when they expose their flank, I say we must rear back and give them a mighty sound kick.
If Kristol is on the air, you get on his case.
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Yup... Michelle Obama's experience corresponds with mine
Dating from 1982, Michelle Obama's experiences are like mine.
My dad, who had a great union scale blue collar job (The Phone Company, aka Ma Bell), spent the mid 80s living through the Bell System divestiture... watching the company he loved and had spent his life in fall apart.
I'm two years younger than Michelle Obama, so fast-foreward a bit to 1984 for me.
I got a degree and started work in 1988. While I consider my career something of a success, my resume looks like a patchwork quilt. The longest I've ever stayed at any company is seven years. The shortest is two. My career is peppered with downsizing, layoffs, a corporate bankruptcy, and more downsizing. My record since 2000 is 14 for 2. That is, 14 rounds of layoffs dodged, two hits. The only way I can steer clear of a personal bankruptcy is by being hyper-aware of what is going on around me at all times, and being ready to jump ship at the next whiff of financial weirdness.
It would be awfully nice to have anything to depend on in my work world, but I don't.
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True enough,
but let's remember what we're talking about.
Yes, real incomes have been dropping since about 1973, but what we must remember is that they should never have been there in the first place. World War II totally destroyed the industrial infrastructure of the world, except ours which it improved markedly. Massive government spending on war industries upgraded capital plants across the country, and the military training of millions of young men made them ideal for factory work. Beginning in 1945, U.S. industry had no international competition, so the world became our market. The Marshal Plan made sure the world had the money to buy our goods. No wonder the world was flooded with everything from U.S.-made cars to Hollywood movies. No competition meant that unions in this country were free to flourish and provide good wages to men with only a high school education. Those were prosperous times, but Europe and Japan had caught up by 1973 when Nixon abrogated the Bretton Woods agreement.
The lack of competition plus war spending drove wages and prices to unnaturlly high levels. That could not be sustained, and the fact that real wages and our nation's life style have been descending slowly ever since is due not to perfidy on the part of Dems or Reps but to the nature of capitalism. It's a race to the bottom because competition between firms forces them to seek ever-lower wages, hence capital flight to China, India, etc.
For those of us who were born and grew up after WWII, this comes as somewhat of a surprise, but it shouldn't. The decades from 1945 to about 1975 were completely aberrant in the history of capitalism. Look at what we were like in, say, 1900, or England 50 years before that, and you'll see what capitalism is really like, and it ain't pretty.
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Small problem
"Almost every" does not equal every. One metric was cited which does not refute the original statement. Unless there are several (at minimum) instances to be cited, the person punk'd is Mr. Leonard who deserves a bad grade in basic reading comprehension and math.
Further if you read what Kristol wrote and what Mrs. Obama stated, they are two different generalizations. Mrs. Obama mentions "regular folks" with no real definition. Are men with only a high school degree the regular folks? I don't know. Then, Kristol mentions "American lives" which is even more general since it likely includes the proverbial regular folks and everyone else. So, if you merge the graphs shown in the link, have all American lives gotten better in the last 25 years? It seems that this could be the case.
So, why attack Kristol on a point where he cannot reasonably be shown that he is wrong? I would give Rodrik and Leonard F's if I were their teacher.
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By the numbers
When calling out neocons for compulsive lying, it's useful to have published federal statistics. Kristol makes up his own to suit his lying neoconservative propaganda.
I got mine here:
U.S. Department of Labor
Bureau of Labor Statisticshttp://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cesbtab4.htm
Series Id: CES0500000049
Seasonally Adjusted
Super Sector: Total private
Industry: Total private
NAICS Code: N/A
Data Type: AVERAGE HOURLY EARNINGS, 1982 DOLLARSThese statistics clearly show that the average US wage was at a maximum in January, 1973, at $9.08 per hour, in constant 1982 dollars, and that in the last month available from the BLS, December, 2005, it was at $8.20/hour, in constant 1982 dollars.
That's a decrease of 9.7%.
In the meantime, labor productivity more than doubled, meaning that the average US worker got their pay cut for doing more than twice as much work. All the benefit of that increase in productivity went to Cheap-Labor Conservatives - and so did the proceeds from the pay cut.
Kristol's job is to persuade weak-minded gullible wingnuts that they're not getting ripped off by Cheap-Labor Conservatives.
A fool and his money are soon parted, although, as Gordon Gecko observed, sometimes they don't even manage to get together in the first place.
Cheney: "Suckers!"