Third World America (29 page)

45
According to
BusinessWeek: Mike Dorning, “College Grads Flood U.S. Labor Market with Diminished Prospects,” 19 May 2010,
www.businessweek.com
.

46
And many workers who have managed
: Laura Bassett, “Same Job, Less Pay: Employees Learn to Swallow Their Demotions,” 7 May 2010,
www.huffingtonpost.com
.

47
Adding insult to injury, a growing number
: Peter S. Goodman, “Cuts to Child Care Subsidy Thwart More Job Seekers,” 23 May 2010,
www.nytimes.com
.

48
And kids were left scrambling
: Heather Hollingsworth, “Cash-Strapped Districts Cutting Summer School,” Associated Press, 23 May 2010.

49
As the
Los Angeles Times
’s
Don Lee put it
: Don Lee, “Consumer Spending Trend Is a Shaky Foundation for Economic Recovery,” 16 May 2010,
www.latimes.com
.

50
According to the Federal Reserve
: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, “H.8 Assets and Liabilities of Commercial Banks in the United States,” 23 Jun. 2010,
www.research.stlouisfed.org
.

51
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s amendment
: “Senate Rejects Credit Card Interest Rate Measure,” Associated Press, 19 May 2010.

52
Or how about payday lending
: Gary Rivlin, “The Payday Lenders Confront Their Mortality,” 17 May 2010,
www.huffingtonpost.com
.

53
It was killed without a vote
: Kay Hagan, “Republicans Object to Considering Hagan Payday Lending Amendment,” 18 May 2010,
www.hagan.senate.gov
.

54
Then there is the Merkley-Levin amendment
: Simon Johnson, “Focus on This: Merkley-Levin Did Not Get a Vote,” 21 May 2010,
www.huffingtonpost.com
.

55
A recent study by Duha Tore Altindag and Naci H. Mocan
: Duha Tore Altindag and Naci H. Mocan, “Joblessness and Perceptions About the Effectiveness of Democracy,” National Bureau of Economic Research, working paper no. 15994, May 2010,
www.nber.org
.

56
especially since one out of every six
: Molly Line, “Job Hunt: Blue Collar Workers Struggle Most,” 23 Mar. 2010,
www.foxnews.com
.

57
Andrew Sum, director of the
: Ibid.

58
Economist Jeff Madrick doesn’t think so
: Jeff Madrick, “Should We Still Make Things?” 11 Mar. 2009,
www.dissentmagazine.org
.

59
According to the Hackett Group
: Patrick Thibodeau, “Survey: One in Four IT Jobs Moving Offshore,” 9 Dec. 2010,
www.computerworld.com
.

60
Linda Levine of the Congressional Research Service
: Linda Levine, “Offshoring (a.k.a. Offshore Outsourcing) and Job Insecurity Among U.S. Workers,” 2 May 2005,
www.fpc.state.gov
.

61
And in a 2006 study
: Booz Allen Hamilton, “The Globalization of White-Collar Work: The Facts and Fallout of Next-Generation Offshoring,” 2006,
www.booz.com
.

62
Accenture now employs
: Julia Hanna, “How Many U.S. Jobs are ‘Offshorable’?” Harvard Business School, 1 Dec. 2008,
www.hbswk.hbs.edu
.

63
A June 2008 Harvard Business School study
: Ibid.

64
Even more troubling
: Booz Allen Hamilton, “The Globalization of White-Collar Work: The Facts and Fallout of Next-Generation Offshoring,” 2006,
www.booz.com
.

65
“The financial sector,” wrote Martin Wolf
: Martin Wolf, “The Challenge of Halting the Financial Doomsday Machine,” 20 Apr. 2010,
www.ft.com
.

66
By 2020, interest alone
: David Brooks, “The Ecstasy of Fiscal Policy,” 1 Apr. 2010,
www.nytimes.com
.

67
That same year, five segments
: Douglas W. Elmendorf, “The Economic and Budget Outlook,” Congressional Budget Office, 13 May 2010,
www.cbo.gov
.

68
A recent report
: John Mauldin, “The Future of the Global Public Debt Explosion,” 2 May 2010,
www.businessinsider.com
.

69
For instance, in Greece
: Bank for International Settlements, “The Future of Public Debt Prospects and Implications,” Mar. 2010,
www.bis.org
.

70
“While fiscal problems need …”
: Ibid.

71
As Mauldin says
: John Mauldin, “The Future of the Global Public Debt Explosion,” 2 May 2010,
www.businessinsider.com
.

72
Mauldin goes on to
: Ibid.

73
Princeton economist Alan Blinder
: Alan Blinder, “Opening Remarks and Consequences of Current Fiscal Trajectory,” 8 Oct. 2009,
www.americanprogress.org
.

74
Historian Arnold Toynbee believed that
: Arnold Toynbee,
A Study of History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 273.

75
Partisanship pop quiz time
: Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 Apr. 1953,
www.eisenhower.archives.gov
.

76
No, it was that unrepentant lefty
: “Civilian Unemployment Rate,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 4 Jun. 2010,
www.research.stlouisfed.org
.

77
Yet today, while America’s economy
: Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Alternative Measures of Labor Underutilization,” Table A-15, 7 May 2010,
www.bls.gov
.

78
We hear endless talk
: Anne Gearan and Anne Flaherty, “War Cost: Obama Wants $33 Billion More for Afghanistan, Iraq,” 12 Jan. 2010,
www.huffingtonpost.com
.

79
Indeed, during his State of the Union speech
: Jackie Calmes, “Obama to Seek Spending Freeze to Trim Deficits,” 25 Jan. 2010,
www.nytimes.com
.

80
According to defense analyst Lawrence Korb
: Lawrence Korb, “Spending Freeze Must Include Defense,” 27 Jan. 2010,
www.thinkprogress.org
.

81
In fact, as Katherine McIntire Peters reported
: Katherine McIntire Peters, “Defense Budget Portends Difficult Trade-offs,” 12 Aug. 2009,
www.govexec.com
.

82
To quote then Illinois
: Barack Obama, “Against Going to War with Iraq,” 2 Oct. 2002,
www.barackobama.com
.

83
fewer than one hundred members
: Joshua Partlow, “In Afghanistan, Taliban Surpasses Al-Qaeda,” 11 Nov. 2009,
www.washingtonpost.com
.

84
According to the
Los Angeles Times: Doyle McManus, “The Kandahar Gambit,” 4 Apr. 2010,
www.latimes.com
.

85
Berkeley professor Ananya Roy
: Robert Greenwald, “Rethink Afghanistan,” video, 21 Apr. 2010,
www.huffingtonpost.com
.

86
And Representative Barney Frank
: Diane Francis, “Knife Military Spending: Kill the Deficit,” 4 Feb. 2010,
www.huffingtonpost.com
.

87
For example, according to the NPP
: National Priorities Project, “Federal Budget Trade-Offs,”
www.nationalpriorities.org
.

1
As
Newsweek’s
Nancy Cook pointed out
: Nancy Cook, “Foreclosures Spread to Middle Class,” 28 Oct. 2009,
www.newsweek.com
.

2
“Amongst the novel objects …”
: Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America
, 8th ed., trans. Henry Reeve (Cambridge: 1848), 1.

3
“Democratic laws,” he noted
: Ibid., 241.

4
“I know it when I see it”: Jacobellis v. Ohio
, 378 U.S. 184 (U.S. Sup. Ct. 1964).

5
“Is a $30,000-a-year doctor …”
: Testimony of Paul Taylor, executive vice president, Pew Research Center, to the Senate Finance Committee, 26 Mar. 2009,
www.pewresearch.org
.

6
According to the Pew Research Center
: Pew Research Center, “Inside the Middle Class: Bad Times Hit the Good Life,” 9 Apr. 2008,
www.pewsocialtrends.org
.

7
But behind this assertion
: Ibid.

8
At the same time, a third of those
: Ibid.

9
For purposes of its research, Pew defined
: Ibid.

10
In dollars and cents, that meant
: Ibid.

11
From 1945 to the 1970s
: Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “Long-Run Changes in the Wage Structure: Narrowing, Widening, Polarizing,” 2007,
www.brookings.edu
.

12
From factory employees to chief executives
: John Cassidy, “Who Killed the Middle Class?” 16 Oct. 1995,
www.newyorker.com
.

13
By the end of the 1980s
: Paul Krugman, “The Great Wealth Transfer,”
Rolling Stone
, 30 Nov. 2006.

14
They had, but rather than Ponce de León
: Ibid.

15
Alfred Marshall, one of the founding fathers
: Alfred Marshall, “Some Aspects of Competition: The Address of the President of Economic Science and Statistics of the British Association,”
Nature
XLII (1890): 497.

16
There is a reason Adam Smith’s
: Amartya Sen, “The Economist Manifesto,” 23 Apr. 2010,
www.newstatesman.com
.

17
Given how close we were in 2008
: David Herszenhorn, “Senate Acts on Credit-Rating Agencies,” 13 May 2010,
www.nytimes.com
.

18
“[The Bush] administration made …”
: Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and Stephen Labaton, “White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire,” 20 Dec. 2008,
www.nytimes.com
.

19
Even Alan Greenspan
: Andrew Clark and Jill Treanor, “Greenspan—I Was Wrong About the Economy. Sort Of,” 24 Oct. 2008,
www.guardian.co.uk
.

20
“Wall Street got drunk”
: Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and Stephen Labaton, “White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire,” 20 Dec. 2008,
www.nytimes.com
.

21
stubbornly refused to dip below thirty-two million
: U.S. Census Bureau, “Table 23. People in Poverty by Nativity: 1993 to 2008,”
www.census.gov
.

22
soup kitchen or food bank hit twenty-six million
: “Who Are the Hungry?”
California Agriculture
48, 7 (Dec. 1994),
www.californiaagriculture.ucanr.org
.

23
with more homeless children
: National Center on Family Homelessness, “Homeless Children: America’s New Outcasts,” 2009,
www.homelesschildrenamerica.org
.

24
In early 1996, after forty thousand AT&T workers
: James Cramer, “Let Them Eat Stocks,”
New Republic
, 29 Apr. 1996, 24–25.

25
their corporate cronies from Enron and Halliburton
: Frank Rich, “All the President’s Enrons,” 5 Jul. 2002,
www.nytimes.com
.

26
“From 1980 to around 1987 …”
: Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “Long-Run Changes in the Wage Structure: Narrowing, Widening, Polarizing,” 2007,
www.brookings.edu
.

27
In 1995, the midway point
: John Cassidy, “Who Killed the Middle Class?” 16 Oct. 1995,
www.newyorker.com
.

28
In contrast, the nation’s top 5 percent
: Ibid.

29
According to a report compiled by Elizabeth Warren
: Testimony of Elizabeth Warren, Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, U.S. Senate, 25 Jan. 2007,
www.banking.senate.gov
.

30
Over the same period, the top 1 percent
: Emmanuel Saez, “Striking It Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States (Update with 2007 Estimates),”
Pathways Magazine
, Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality, Winter 2008, 6–7.

31
And according to a report released in May 2010
: “The State of Metropolitan America,” 9 May 2010,
www.brookings.edu
.

32
Indeed, in a 2008 Pew survey
: Pew Research Center, “Inside the Middle Class: Bad Times Hit the Good Life,” 9 Apr. 2008,
www.pewsocialtrends.org
.

33
It was, according to Pew
: Ibid.

34
In a revised take on the original Misery Index
: Marcus Baram, “The Real Misery Index April 2010: Underemployment Woes Lead to Two-Tier Economy,” 12 May 2010,
www.huffingtonpost.com
.

35
One of the most glaring examples
: Gretchen Morgenson, “Death of a Loophole, and Swiss Banks Will Mourn,” 26 Mar. 2010,
www.nytimes.com
.

36
According to the White House
: Office of the Press Secretary, “Leveling the Playing Field: Curbing Tax Havens and Removing Tax Incentives for Shifting Jobs Overseas,” 4 May 2009,
www.whitehouse.gov
.

37
In December 2008, the Government Accountability Office
: United States Government Accountability Office, “International Taxation: Large U.S. Corporations and Federal Contractors with Subsidiaries in Jurisdictions Listed as Tax Havens or Financial Privacy Jurisdictions,” Dec. 2008,
www.gao.gov
.

38
Even more egregiously
: Ibid.

39
It’s as easy as opening up
: Michael Brostek, “Cayman Islands: Business Advantages and Tax Minimization Attract U.S. Persons and Enforcement Challenges Exist,” United States Government Accountability Office, 24 Jul. 2010,
www.gao.gov
.