Is the implication of this that America has suffered because American companies have invested in Third World countries? America's wages were recently rising and America was once again at full employment, and this a good 30 or 40 years after people first began to worry about corporations exporting capital from America. Do you have a sense that wages in America would be higher if no corporation was allowed to invest elsewhere? This seems to me unlikely in the extreme. America would have, first of all, no exports if it didn't invest elsewhere.
As to middle class life being a nightmare, there are two understandings of that life. One harks back to a sentimental vision of middle class life in America during the post war boom and tends to enumerate specific things that are part of that life: a car, a house with a big lawn, home ownership, a big TV, perhaps an outdoor pool. Of this kind of life, a reporter once asked Ghandi if he hoped, upon India achieving independence, that it would attain to the standard of living that Great Britain had. Ghandi responded, "It took Great Britain half the world to achieve its standard of living. How many planets would it take India to do the same?" Clearly, Ghandi was not aiming for the kind of middle class life that people in America were soon to begin to expect.
There is another defintion of middle class which is simply mathematical: everyone in the middle quintile of the income range, with very few people in the top or bottom 2 quintiles. This definition of middle class is something I think many socialists worked toward, and I think Ghandi hoped for something similar too.
--lawrence