They got there because of deliberate government policy, primarily, and because of the times second.

There has been a huge rise in inequality and the number of rich and the amount of their wealth in the past 35 years, and it didn’t happen because a whole bunch of really good sperm hit really good eggs andmade genetically superior human beings.

Number one error: attributing major changes in a society to individual decisions.

No doubt the reason most Americans were farmers a hundred years ago and the reason most Americans aren’t now is because all those guys individually decided “gee I hate farmwork!”

(Well, they probably did. But a 100 years ago they would have stayed farmers, along with tons of people who said “gee, I’d love to be rich!”)

To make change of any stripe requires sacrifice. Sacrifice and hard work may bring results. However, sacrifice can often be translated as “taxes.” I would be interested then in looking at where this translation is occuring, why it occurs, and what are countermeasures that progressive people can use to change the frame of the argument?

“A popular backlash against globalisation and the leaders of the world

Naturally, the public should take notice and elect him to do the job.

I would like to hear Edwards speak more to the middle-class about ‘raising all boats’ and the American Dream.

It’s more enticing than only saying ‘Poverty poverty poverty’.

The really wealthy got that way because they are smart, hardworking, insightful and lucky. There is no racket.

I don’t have a problem with rewarding smart, hardworking, and insightful, and I’m sure that some of the really wealthy got that way because they were all three. But last I checked, we taxed the really lucky (lottery winners) pretty heavily. Yet we’re lowering taxes on the really wealthy and reducing or eliminating the “I’m dying filthy rich and I want my kids to die filthy rich too” tax (aka the estate tax).

There most definitely is a racket. The political process is inherently biased toward those with money because money has been declared equal to speech. Corporate personhood has been expanded to give corporations equal Constitutional rights to a real person, meaning that corporations with more money than most countries, and the CEOs and boards of those corporations, have WAY more influence over the political process than most individuals. NGOs like the Sierra Club are adopting the corporatist approach because they have to in order to influence lawmakers, and in the process the individual communities they represent are losing, not gaining, influence.

The courts are wealthy-friendly because the wealthy can afford to hire massive law teams, high-powered lawyers, and tie up “poorer” opponents in the legal system so long that the poorer side usually loses by default when they run out of money to pay their lawyers. And it’s generally worse if you’re a minority of one kind or another.

These are just the two biggest examples I can come up with quickly. If you truly don’t believe that the really wealthy have set up the system so that they stay really wealthy, you’ve either taken their bait hook, line, and sinker, or you’ve got just as much a vested interest in keeping the system the way it is now. The first can be solved with education, and if you keep coming back, you’ll get educated so long as you’re willing to see reality for what is is. But if you’re the second, you’re part of the problem that some of us here are going to solve.

“Beaverbrook. . . used to tell his journalists to always address their readers as if they belonged to the class above the one they actually belonged to.”

Lacking the professional credentials of many of you Scholars and Rogues, I’ve spent much of my working and family life among regular working people (lower-middle to middle-class).

Because of that, as well as spending an inordinate amount of energy trying to figure them out, I pride myself on understanding where they’re coming from. But I see you guys do too!

This inspiring thread is a prime example of why I enjoy commenting at Scholar and Rogues.

Beaverbrook, a major press baron in the UK around the early and middle years of the 20th century, used to tell his journalists to always address their readers as if they belonged to the class above the one they actually belonged to. We have our council house Tories.

That’s an interesting point, actually. How often do you hear someone complaining about illegal immigrants stealing jobs from “hard working” Americans, or how our “hard-earned” tax dollars are being wasted on social programs?

Quite a lot, I’d imagine. Americans have a very schizophrenic attitude about work. We fetishize the idea of working hard, being productive, getting the job done, etc. But yet we venerate the idea of NOT working as the ultimate goal. That comes through in the idolization of CEOs, movie stars, etc., all the way down to unearned income (like capital gains) being more favorably taxed than wages.

It’s that whole Puritanical notion of sacrifice and delayed gratification fused with the anarchocapitalist ideal of profit above all. So the end result is a nation full of angry, frustrated worker bees who focus solely on productivity, and lash out with unfocused resentment when, despite all their efforts, no pot of gold appears for them at the end of the rainbow.

Put more simply, we are a hopelessly dysfunctional nation, and only radical political change combined with social evolution will fix that.

…Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are taking their cues from John Edwards in sharpening their focus on economic issues. So, here’s the question: If Edwards is the clear leader and thinker on these issues, why is he still trailing so far behind in th…

Exactly — most Americans think they’re rich people waiting to happen. When that day comes, they want those tax breaks they don’t resent the rich for, they want no estate tax, the abolition of which they don’t resent the rich for.

When was the last time you heard a person call himself a working person?

John Edward as an issue candidate would get my respect. In this role, he might even get my sympathy vote just to keep other candidates from feeling that they own the show.

For what it’s worth, neocons want the middle class dead because it is from the middle class, rather than the poor, that social change arises.