P-Ship Unconditional Endorsee in the LAT

Because the Left Business Observer needs your dollars and I'm wont to cut-and-paste too much of its prose; because I nonetheless often labor at convincing you to rock Doug Henwood's weekly radio broadcasts, let alone his two essential books; because in my line of work one becomes alternately attracted to and repelled by the middle-brow, half-assed but fully-ideological "commentary" pertaining to the financial sector on cable tv; for all of these reasons I am happy to point you towards Doug Henwood and some guy from Slate battling over whether or not Phil Gramm was right to assert that our nation's economic woes are primarily "psychological." Read the whole exchange here, but first dawdle by this choice slab of C. Wright Mills-ish "plain marxism" in the LA Times:

According to research by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez (spreadsheet), the average inflation-adjusted income for the bottom 90% of the U.S. population (households with incomes below $100,000) peaked in 1978 and is down 5% since. Over the same period, the income of the top 0.01% (incomes of $10,000,000 or more in 2005) rose by 240%. The gains are less spectacular as you descend from the mega-rich down through the very rich and toward the upper-middle class. Times are pretty good for tenured professors and economic pundits -- maybe not as good as they've been for the titans of private equity, but still a lot better than they've been for teachers, hairdressers and computer programmers. Sure, the economy has grown over the last five, 10 or 30 years, but that has not translated into growing paychecks for most Americans. Is that what we call "long-run progress"?