The Talking Dog lets out a first-rate rant. In part he is responding to this article in the Financial Times about the slow economic strangulation of the American middle class. The article profiles a couple of families who are hanging on to their modest homes and their very frugal lifestyles by working multiple jobs, and they are still one missed paycheck away from ruin.

As the article points out, the effects of globalization are hitting the entire industrialized world. But people in the rest of the industrialized world have paid health care, and their unions haven’t gone to rot. That’s softening the blow everywhere but here.

Anyway, the Dog points out that the stressed and worried American middle class doesn’t “have the juice” to take to the streets. Instead, people worry discretely and hide behind a facade of normal.

Ironically, the only people who do have “the juice” to take to the streets are the teabaggers, a mass of rabid lemmings trashing what’s left of the facade on their way to the cliffs.

Sorta kinda related — NPR reported on students at UCLA who manage to come up with the tuition but have nothing left over for room and board. So, they are homeless and hungry. One professor realized students were going without meals, so he set up a free food pantry in a closet. The homeless ones sleep in student lounges and shower in the gym.

Most interesting, the students try to hide their situation from other students. Like the stressed middle-class families, each student seems to deal with his situation alone and struggles to maintain the facade.

Meanwhile — in his most recent column, Bob Herbert talks to some economists who say there have been more lost jobs than can be blamed on the recession. It appears many companies used the recession as an excuse to cut staff and force employees to accept lower pay and fewer benefits.

“They threw out far more workers and hours than they lost output,” said Professor Sum. “Here’s what happened: At the end of the fourth quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go down by $122 billion.”

That kind of disconnect, said Mr. Sum, had never been seen before in all the decades since World War II.

In short, the corporations are making out like bandits. Now they’re sitting on mountains of cash and they still are not interested in hiring to any significant degree, or strengthening workers’ paychecks.

Productivity tells the story. Increases in the productivity of American workers are supposed to go hand in hand with improvements in their standard of living. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work. That’s how the economic pie expands, and we’re all supposed to have a fair share of that expansion.

Corporations have now said the hell with that. Economists believe the nation may have emerged, technically, from the recession early in the summer of 2009. As Professor Sum writes in a new study for the labor market center, this period of economic recovery “has seen the most lopsided gains in corporate profits relative to real wages and salaries in our history.”

Today, Paul Krugman:

Yes, growth is slowing, and the odds are that unemployment will rise, not fall, in the months ahead. That’s bad. But what’s worse is the growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn’t care — that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal.

If Americans of 40 years ago had woken up one morning to today’s economic conditions, there would have been hell to pay. I’m thinking massive strikes, torches and pitchforks, politicians tarred and feathered. But now most people just accept the conditions meekly and hope for the best. No juice.

Have they forgotten? Last night the House debated a bill to provide $4 billion in health care aid to September 11 rescue and recovery workers. A large percentage of those who cleared debris and recovered bodies from the wreck of the World Trade Center have suffered severe health problems as a result, mostly because they were breathing toxic fumes without adequate safety equipment. Some have died, others are dying, they can no longer work and need public assistance. The bill failed to get the needed votes, and Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) was a tad distressed.

I understand it was mostly Republican votes that killed the bill. BTW, I’d love to know how many of those Republicans who voted no to assist the heroes of 9/11 are working their constituents up into a lather over the “Ground Zero mosque”?

In other obstructionist news, Senate Republicans blocked a bill to help get loan money to small business. Now they’ll all go home to their districts and scream that Democrats hate small business.

A new argument for not pulling troops out of Afghanistan arrived in my email inbox just now. The argument is that it would be a nightmare for Afghani women if the Taliban re-took control of most of the country. The email cited a Time magazine story about an Afghani woman whose ears and nose were cut off by the Taliban because she ran away from an abusive husband.

I would point out that this incident happened last year, and the presence of American troops in Afghanistan didn’t stop it. However, the point seems to be that if the troops were completely gone, such incidents would increase many times over.

Another aspect of this story is that the Afghan government is exploring the possibility of negotiating a political accommodation with the Taliban to put an end to the fighting. Afghani women, understandably, view such an accommodation as a betrayal. I question whether any group as irrational and fanatical as the Taliban could be negotiated with, anyway.

The only fix to this problem I can think of is to turn back time to 2002, when the Bush Administration lost its focus (if, indeed, it ever had any focus) in Afghanistan because it was obsessed with Iraq. Which is to say, there are no fixes. This is a terrible situation that should not have been allowed to get this bad, but it was allowed, so there it is. And while the impulse to keep lots of troops in Afghanistan indefinitely to protect women from the Taliban is honorable, it doesn’t seem to me to be possible. How many troops? How long? At what cost? There’s a point at which resources run dry.

If the issue is protecting Afghani women, it seems to me the most practical thing to do is to establish lots of guarded safehouses (I’d be OK with leaving troops in country for that purpose) as well as helping women leave Afghanistan, with their children, and begin new lives elsewhere. Ultimately it’s Afghanistan itself that’s got to find the will and the means to rid itself of the Taliban.

Update: Outstanding response to this issue from Greg Mitchell at The Nation.

Let us be clear: No one at the White House is talking about ending Bush’s tax cuts for those making less than $250,000 year. You can scour news stories and White House announcements all you like, and the Obama Administration’s intentions regarding the Bush tax cuts have been completely clear since the 2008 campaign.

For example, on television last week Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner discussed letting tax cuts expire for those making more than $250,000 a year, which would affect 2 to 3 percent of all Americans. At a press briefing yesterday, Robert Gibbs said “The President said that, as he had committed to in the campaign, he would not allow the tax cuts for the middle class to expire.”

However, if you’re getting your news from the Republican Noise Machine, you wouldn’t know that. You’d think everyone’s taxes will be going up.

Today the Usual Tools on the Right Blogosphere are frantically linking to a new “tax calculator” at the Heritage Foundation website. The calculator is supposed to tell how how much YOUR taxes will go up if the Bush tax cuts expire. In their announcement on the calculator, Heritage uses an example of “a married couple with two children under 17 earning $45,000 a year with no other income” who will, Heritage says, owe an additional $3,002 in taxes next year if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire.

Heritage provides absolutely no evidence for its assertion that the Obama Administration plans to allow all the tax cuts to expire. But of course rightie bloggers assume that what Heritage says must be true, so like good little tools they are properly outraged about “the largest tax increase in United States history.”

(Note: in rightiespeak, “the largest tax increase in United States history” refers to any change in tax code whatsoever, when enacted by a Democratic Congress.)

What’s important to remember is that Heritage speaks for its founders and benefactors, who are (according to Sourcewatch)

* Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
* Scaife Foundations: Sarah Mellon Scaife, Scaife Family, Carthage
* John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
* Castle Rock Foundation
* JM Foundation
* Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation
* Philip M. McKenna Foundation, Inc.
* Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation
* Roe Foundation
* Rodney Fund
* Ruth and Lovett Peters Foundation
* Orville D. and Ruth A. Merillat Foundation
* Bill and Berniece Grewcock Foundation
* Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation
* William H. Donner Foundation
* Walton Family Foundation
* Armstrong Foundation
* John Templeton Foundation
* William E. Simon Foundation

These are foundations set up by families wealthy beyond our imaginations who use rightie think tanks like Heritage to push policies to protect their wealth. The rightie think tank infrastructure exists to push a number of policies that benefit the extremely wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

One of their more successful propaganda strategies is to convince the rubes that tax increases proposed only for the mega-wealthy are really aimed at everyone, including the hypothetical married couple with two children earning $45,000 a year. Thus the rubes can be stirred up into fear and anger about tax increases that will not touch them at all. (See, for example, “GOP Fairy Tales” by Kevin Drum.)

Another organization pushing the propaganda that President Obama intends to raise taxes on lower-income earners is Americans for Tax Reform, headed by Grover Norquist. ATR is an astroturf site established by the following foundations (according to SourceWatch):

* Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
* Carthage Foundation; see Scaife Foundations
* JM Foundation
* John M. Olin Foundation
* Sarah Scaife Foundation; see Scaife Foundations
* R.J. Reynolds
* Philip Morris
* Tobacco Institute

Norquist and his good buddy Jack Abramoff also scammed some Indian tribes into giving money to ATR. Apparently the chiefs were told they had to make the donations in order to have access to President Bush.

BTW, according to Lori Montgomery at WaPo, here’s the reason the Bush tax law was written to expire in ten years:

The cuts were written to expire to allow the bill to pass Congress under fast-track budget rules, known as reconciliation, and avoid a filibuster in the Senate. Just like the final piece of Obama’s health care overhaul, the tax cuts needed only 50 votes to win Senate approval, instead of the 60 required to shut down a filibuster.

Under reconciliation, legislation may not increase the deficit beyond a 10-year “budget window.” Because the tax cuts would have increased the deficit, Republicans had to write them to expire in 2011.

In other words, Congress knew full well that the tax cuts would not magically increase revenue and pay for themselves, although of course no one on the Right was admitting that in public. And never forget that those tax cuts are the single biggest cause of the current federal budget deficit, the same deficit righties shriek about whenever a Democrat proposes any policy whatsoever.

More news that isn’t news — if you were paying attention lo those many years ago (and I know you were) you remember that billions of dollars of money allocated for reconstruction in Iraq were missing. We knew this at least by 2006, if not sooner.

So, this bit just posted at Think Progress isn’t really news —

Yesterday, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) released its findings on how the money was spent from a special Iraq reconstruction fund set up by the Department of Defense (DOD) between 2003-2007. The account used Iraqi oil money to fund the reconstruction of Iraq. SIGIR concluded that 96 percent of the $9.1 billion the reconstruction program cannot be accounted for by the DOD.

Read more at WaPo. Naturally I want to know precisely who in the DoD was responsible for this, and if those persons were military careerists or Bushie civilian appointees.

The big buzz this morning is over a massive release of classified documents on the war in Afghanistan from the website Wikileaks. Wikileaks is a loosely organized association headquartered in Sweden that was “founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa,” its website says. This is according to Wikipedia, as the Wikileaks site is down at the moment.

Via Steve Benen, Michael Crowley’s assessment is that the documents don’t tell us anything new.

It’s never been a secret, for instance, that the Taliban have proven more resilient than anyone expected; that U.S. special forces hunt and eliminate Taliban leaders without the courtesy of a fair trail; that elements within our putative ally Pakistan play a sinister double game with radical Islamists; that our troops kill innocent Afghans on a regular basis. It’s not even a secret, as anyone familiar with the Pat Tillman saga knows, that the military sometimes manipulates facts about the war.

Once again, we’re learning that the days in which one could subdue and pacify an enemy through warfare are over. For the benefit of any rightie who happens to wander into this blog: Nations fight to maintain their territory and their sovereignty, and when that is no longer tenable there is not much left for them to do but surrender and agree to terms. When the enemy is not a nation, but a movement, or hostile organizations not tied to anyone territory and not under the authority of any one government, that’s not the case.

Following up the last post — this is in George Bob Herbert’s column —

The point that Ms. Sherrod was making as she talked in her speech about the white farmer who had come to her for help was that we are all being sold a tragic bill of goods by the powerful forces that insist on pitting blacks, whites and other ethnic groups against one another.

Ms. Sherrod came to the realization, as she witnessed the plight of poverty-stricken white farmers in the South more than two decades ago, that the essential issue in this country “is really about those who have versus those who don’t.”

She explained how the wealthier classes have benefited from whites and blacks constantly being at each other’s throats, and how rampant racism has insidiously kept so many struggling whites from recognizing those many things they and their families have in common with economically struggling blacks, Hispanics and so on.

“It’s sad that we don’t have a roomful of whites and blacks here tonight,” she said, “because we have to overcome the divisions that we have.”

Pretty much what we were saying in the comment thread to the last post.

See also Bernie Sanders at The Nation, “Say No to Oligarchy.”

Update: Unrelated, but it’s too funny not to mention and I don’t want to start another post — word is that Mexican drug cartels have invaded Texas and commandeered several ranches! This is reliable information from a Texas blogger, whom Michelle Malkin calls a “veteran immigration blogger.” Well-trained drug cartel commandos have taken over at least two ranches in the Loredo, Texas, area, and this has been confirmed by a reliable source in the Loredo Police Department.

Or, maybe not. Confederate Yankee called the Loredo Police Department and also the Webb County sheriff’s department and was told by one amused and one irritated law enforcement officer that the rumors were false. And see Tbogg’s take if you need a good laugh.

Apparently what set the rumors off was a gun battle on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. People heard the shots on the U.S. side and called police, who investigated and determined that no violence spilled over into Texas. Little Lulu quotes an AP story —

Frightened people on the U.S. side of the border called emergency dispatchers after hearing the gunfire, Laredo police spokesman Joe Baeza said Thursday. But he said there was no spillover violence.

“We were getting reports from people who live on the river’s edge that they could hear gunfire and explosions from the Mexico side,” Baeza said.

“We didn’t have any incidents on the American side. It’s hard for people to understand who don’t live here,” he added. “They’re not Vikings, they’re not going to invade us, it doesn’t work that way.”

What does he know? A reliable source alerted me to these photos of the invasion.

I’m sorta kinda responding to Melissa McEwan’s response to Jim Webb’s Wall Street Journal op ed “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege.”

Webb’s op ed, very generally, points to the issue of white poverty. Unfortunately Webb begins by framing his argument in terms of white workers losing ground because of affirmative action programs, and I disagree that’s the problem.

However, It’s way out of order, I think, to accuse Webb of merely trying to maintain white privilege. I agree with John Cole, there are whites living in places “where poverty is so deep, so ingrained, that the idea in those regions that there is some sort of ‘white privilege’ is in fact laughable. To them, the privilege of chronic unemployment, life in a tarpaper shack with no medical care, food stamps but no grocery store, and not much of a future doesn’t look like that great of a deal.”

I’d also say that while the issues of racial discrimination and entrenched poverty do overlap, a lot, they aren’t exactly the same. I agree also with John that the real issue is closer to what Shirley Sherrod was saying about class v. race.

But whatever it is, it’s a real issue, and it is not at all helpful to react to discussion of the problems of white poverty with knee-jerk declarations that “This isn’t about white people; it’s about privileged white men.”

No, it’s about white poverty, and about the cultural marginalization of rural whites. I don’t think Webb addressed the topic as well as it needed to be addressed, but I know where he’s coming from, because it’s pretty close to where I came from.

There are whites living out of most people’s sight in Appalachia, the Ozarks, and other sparsely populated areas who are hopelessly locked into poverty. Some of these areas are marginally agricultural, and sometimes there is mining — dangerous, usually non-union, but a paycheck. Where there isn’t farming or mining there are white families whose existence going back four or five generations has depended on a combination of government assistance and sporadic menial jobs, and the children don’t receive the social, cultural, educational, medical, and sometimes even the nutritional support to pull themselves out of that.

In the most isolated areas are people who are barely functional in 21st-century culture. For example, I’ve known very bright people — been related to ’em, in fact — who didn’t, and probably couldn’t, speak standard English. In most of the U.S. an adult whose articulation, syntax and verb conjugation skills signal IGNORANT HILLBILLY is seriously handicapped.

Such places tend to be off the beaten track, out of sight and out of mind. And yes, this a relatively small slice of the white population of the U.S. But it’s not that small.

White impoverished areas I know of didn’t get that way because of affirmative action programs. They were dirt poor before there was such a thing as affirmative action programs. And we really need to get over the idea that giving a hand up to minorities was somehow at the expense of whites, because an economy that makes it easier for everyone to be productive is a healthier economy for everyone. But let’s not forget that people can be left behind for reasons other than race.