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My Experience with the Demise of the Middle Class

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Two years before I was born, my dad bought a brand new house in a pretty development called Norgate in Manhasset, Long Island. He paid $8,000 for it. It was a modest house, about 2,200 square feet, with two and a half baths and three bedrooms on a 5,000-square foot lot—an eighth of an acre.

I enjoyed growing up on that street. The middle class families there were in their child-bearing years, so I had plenty of playmates. My mom didn’t need to work outside the home, what with me and my two siblings to care for, the house to maintain, and the meals to prepare, since my dad’s $12,000 a year salary as an art director for a New York City greeting card company covered our expenses. But since we were just 18 miles from Times Square, and the Long Island Rail Road ran through Manhasset straight into Grand Central Terminal, access to the city, its stores, its restaurants, and its shows were well within reach to keep mom happy and occupied. We had enough money to have a new car every couple of years after the war ended. We were solidly middle class and very happy to be so.

I recently checked the old neighborhood on Google Maps Street View. Everything looks shipshape. The houses are kept up, just as I remember them. It’s such a lovely neighborhood. Then I checked the real estate marketplace. The last time a house on our block sold, it was for a million dollars. Property taxes are now $12,000 a year. There are no middle class families living on that block now, I guarantee. You need to be very, very wealthy to live in the house I grew up in.

Gentrification? No. I don’t think so. It’s the same house. Still 2,200 square feet. Still the same boards and cement. When I lived there, lemme think, what did our neighbors do for a living? Well, Fred was an accountant, Elton was a chemist, Stan was a radio announcer, Jim was in charge of Canada Dry sales in the New York region. John was the captain of a schooner that took tourists on excursions on Long Island Sound. Middle class folks, all. I suspect most of them didn’t earn much more than my dad’s $12,000 a year.

What’s changed is that the percentage of folks who can afford to live in my old neighborhood has shrunk from maybe 60 percent of the population to—what would you say? What percentage of the population today can afford a million dollar house with a heavy property tax bill? Three percent? Two percent?

In other words, the middle class, with its enviable American lifestyle of the 1940s and 1950s, has been gutted, evaporated, extinguished. The money that made America the envy of the world has flowed upstairs to the filthy rich, and then offshore to tax havens in places like the Cayman Islands. Even the modest house in which I grew up is far out of reach of the average American. The average American is now piss poor.

And now here’s a story that’s absolutely true. Not long ago I attended the Napa Valley Wine Auction as a wine journalist. The very wealthy tend to go to this function, and that’s good, because the money raised at the auction goes to support medical clinics for the field workers who tend the vines, harvest the grapes, and work in the wineries.

So I was talking with this guy, and he told me that he just bought $25,000 worth of cult wines to treat a handful of his friends, who he was flying up from southern California for a party. I allowed how that was mighty nice of him, and very extravagant.

He looked at me. And this is what he said: “Look, I have several houses around the world, I have the big boat, I have my own private jet, I have the expensive cars, and every month, millions of dollars go into my bank account. Do you honestly think I give a shit about $25,000 for wine to treat my friends? Get real.”

I liked it better when we were all just nice folks living an idyllic life in the middle class suburbs of Long Island.

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WHY THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS UNAMERICAN

Anyone who thinks clearly about the problems in this country knows that the influx of millions of dollars of partisan money (can you say Koch?) into our political system is corrupting it. That one major reason why Congress is so feckless when it comes to passing environmentally-smart laws, why our regulatory agencies don’t regulate toxic agricultural chemicals, why Big Business is allowed to clank along its destructive way despite the pleas of the citizenry. Everyone knows that Congress is bought and sold by corporate America, with the buying and selling given the full support of the judicial branch of the Federal government with the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

A move has been underway to support a Constitutional amendment that would overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allows unlimited money into the political system.

Yet on September 11—another sad day in American history–every Republican Senator in the U.S. Congress voted against allowing the Senate to vote on that amendment, thus preventing the Constitutional amendment to get money out of politics to move forward.

I’d like to hear some journalists ask the GOP Congressional leadership what its reasoning is. So far I haven’t heard any explanations. But let me guess. The reason is that right wing partisan money flows to the conservative members of Congress, and they vote this way not to protect American democracy, but to protect the right of their sugar daddies to poison the political system in their favor.

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE ON THE INTERNET

It used to be that the ugly side of human nature, when it was portrayed in our arts and media, was done with artfulness: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Richard III, and so on. The art allowed us to look at the down side of human nature and achieve a catharsis. The art redeemed the ugliness.

The internet, however, throws human nature at us in all its unrelieved ugliness, its puerile and disgusting stupidity, its racism, sexism, and sheer hatefulness. You don’t have to delve very deeply into the web to stumble across the most repulsive aspects of the human psyche.

It remains to be seen what holding up a mirror to unrelieved human ugliness and human nobility—devils and angels and everything in between—will create.

Perhaps it will allow the human race to work on overcoming the worst aspects of our nature, now that they are on full display. Or maybe it will be like coming across a bad auto wreck on the highway and not being able to look away. We’ll have to wait and see. The internet is still in its infancy, but it’s a new world.

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GENERAL MILLS BUYS ANNIE’S FOR $840 MILLION

A number of people have asked me what I think about General Mills’ purchase of Annie’s organic foods for $840 million. Here’s my take on it:

General Mills is obviously trying to get a piece of the $40 billion organic market by buying its way in. I think General Mills would have been better advised to spend that $840 million to develop a new line of truly organic foods that could be USDA Certified and designed to give us organic consumers exactly what we’re looking for.

What we’re looking for is NOT an Annie’s whose profits go back to General Mills, one of the biggest corporations in the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the trade organization that has spent lavishly and illegally on lying to people about the terrible consequences of labeling foods that contain GMO crops.

My bottom line: when the fox buys the henhouse, the chickens are not long for this world.

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