Note: I submitted this one to The Agonist a few weeks ago. Got a few comments on it there.
Thee Book to read these days is Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty First Century”…, or so I have heard. But my bookcases are all overflowing and I mostly buy books on the Kindle now…, and am just finishing up Michael Hudson’s (highly recommended) “The Bubble and Beyond”…, so I don’t feel the need or desire to tackle Piketty’s “Capital…”. At 700 pages, it seems like a lot of space to tell me what David Michael Green told me on his blog a few years ago…, and that I shared with all The Agonistas around at the time.
Let me make it simple, in case anyone wants to share this essay with their idiotic, Republican (pardon the redundancy) cousin Buford: The story of American politics over the last generation is the story of the transfer of wealth from the people to the plutocrats. If you think there is anything else essential going on here, you don’t get it.
I got it right off. I guess it takes academics like Paul Krugman a few more pages…, say about 700 more…, before they get the point. PK seemed genuinely amazed, on the Bill Moyers show last week, to find out that there are some people getting filthy rich…, while some others are wishing they had the bottom of a barrel to scrape. He admitted that he should have “realized it” himself. I wanted to ask him if he realized that upwards of 90% of the additional Keynesian Stimulus money that he keeps wanting to throw at this Great Recession would go right into the pockets of those same plutocrats that have been sucking it up before it hits the masses for the last 40 years? I’m not sure he really “gets it”.
