Potemkin prosperity

[Carl Remick]

>From: "Lawrence" <lawrence at krubner.com>
>
>My politics lean to the left but there are some issues where either the 
>left response has been weak or I simply
>haven't read the right books. Why did real wages decline or stagnate from 
>73 to 95? LBO recently pointed out how
>abnormal those decades are compared to the rest of American history. Please 
>don't tell me that wages declined
>because of the right-wing, I doubt the 70s and 80s were more conservative 
>than the 1920s or the stretch 1865 -
>1900, during which real wages rose. The right wing has a good line 
>regarding these decades - that the economy had
>become stifled and over regulated, that Thatcher and Reagan unleashed a new 
>era of creativity, that the boom of the
>90s was dependent on the wave of innovation set in motion by the political 
>changes of the 70s and 80s. What is the
>left argument on these decades?

I can't speak for "the left," but I can say it's hard to know where to begin 
in unscrambling the hocus-pocus of the last three decades.  The one unifying 
theme has been the ever diminishing political power of labor, the continuing 
shrinkage of government's role as a guarantor of social welfare, the rampant 
expansion of reckless deregulation, and the most malignant increase in the 
wealth and power of capitalists in a century.  It has been era where 
billions of dollars have been squandered on follies associated with "paper 
entrepreneurship" ranging from the S&L bailout to the dot-com bubble; an era 
of rampant public stupefaction caused by media consolidation and the rise of 
the "entertainment economy"; an era where self-seeking charlatans like Lee 
Iacocca, Mike Milken, Jack Welch and Bill Gates are hailed as visionaries 
and embraced by a gullible public as heroes.  It has been a time of mass 
hallucination, in short.  Why?  Maybe Nietzsche provides a clue:  "In 
individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, 
it is the rule."

Carl

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