Restore the Broken Great Bargain

There have been quite a few books written over the last two years about What. The. Fuck. happened to the economy, and substantially fewer about how to fix it, not to mention how to shove the fix down rethuglican throats.

If you really want to know the details of how Democratic politics and our failure to establish real campaign reform has come just a Paul Ryan away from destroying the nation completely, you can't do better than Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's Winner-Take-All Politics.

But if you want the short - ahem - version from one of the few people who told Barack Obama to his face the truth two years ago about what would happen if he put Wall Street's concerns ahead of Main Street's, then go out right now and get Robert Reich's latest: Aftershock.

By "aftershock," Reich means the ugly consequences of having used only half-measures to hold the economy just short of total collapse two years ago: high unemployment for years to come, but even worse, jobs that pay far less and offer far less in benefits than even the pathetic "work" we have today, not to mention the superb jobs of the Great Prosperity after World War II.

In just 147 pages, Reich covers what happened and why, but goes beyond that to offer solutions that address not superficial issues like the budget but the fundamental break in the great economic bargain that must be restored before anything else will work.

I have chosen instead to base my argument on two tangible threats that such inequality poses to everyone - including even the wealthiest and most influential among us. One is economic: Unless America's middle class receives a fair share, it cannot consume nearly what the nation is capabile of producing, at least not without going deeply into debt.

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The other threat is political: Widening inequality coupled with a growing perception that big business and Wall Street are in cahoots with big government for the purpose of making the rich even richer, gives fodder to demogogues on the extreme right and the extreme left.*

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Unless these trends are reversed, the financially stressed middle class will not have the purchasing power to keep the economy growing. This will hurt even those who are well-off. A political backlash could general a similar result, or worse. Margaret Jones and her Independence Party are ficitions, but the anger on which she bases her appeal is not.

His prescriptions for reversing those trends are not just simple and highly effective, they are all ideas that were mainstream barely 11 years ago. Even among now extinct moderate republicans.

The current self-immolation of the GOP may or may not end in massive victory for Democratic candidates in 2012 - OK, OK, probably won't, given that next year's elections are the Democrats' to lose - but Reich has given us a simple platform on which to start fighting right now:

Restore the Great Bargain.

* Bob: I am myself about as close as anyone gets to a "far left extremist demogogue" these days, but compared to the Reichwingnuts like Paul Ryan and Michelle Bachmann that the Village insists on labelling "centrist," I'm as extremist as Captain Kangaroo.

I remember how you banged your head against the brick wall of Wall Street influence during your stint as labor secretary in the Clinton Administration, Bob, and I know you know the last genuine far left extremist died from assassin's bullets in Louisiana in 1935. So the next time Alfred A. Knopf demands you play false equivalency, tell 'em to fuck off and die. You're a professor at Berkeley, for pity's sake.