Looks like JP Morgan is going to find that room they needed

[elfs]

After having admitted, in public no less, that between 2000 and 2008 the 1.3% "net improvement in profit margins is explained by reductions in wages and benefits," and that squeezing the middle class might be even harder going forward now that "labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP," it looks like the wealthy in this country have found a way to squeeze harder.

It makes me ill when I hear John Boehner talk about how "job creators need more money to create new jobs." Every chart, and every economist, and JP Morgan itself, admits that for the past ten years money has been concentrated in those super-rich, in those "job creators." I have to wonder what kind of shock collar they have around Boehner, McConnel, and Cantor's cocks to make them say such idiotic things. Do they really think they can take this country back to a time when it was acceptable to send Grandma out onto the ice to die?

Apparently, they do. House Republicans this week held a conference to describe overtime protections and minimum wage protections as "job killers."

At some point, we're going to have to admit that not having a middle class is what is destroying job creation in this country. But guess what?

A startling new study proves that America's Middle Class has been utterly, completely wiped out. ... Apparently, wages have been declining for thirty or forty years and pensions have vanished and the one asset 90% of middle class people owned is no longer worth anything. (That asset is “their house," and many have also lost the actual house, in addition to its supposed value before the crash.)

Rex Nutting writes at Marketwatch: "On average, American homeowners lost 55% of the wealth in their home." ... Whoa, why such a Negative Nancy? Didn't we also have a recovery since then? Yes we did: “The rich recovered; the rest of us didn't."...

But how did we, uh, even manage to survive during the first decade of this awful century? Experts say it's because the Middle Class took out home equity loans to make up for all the raises they weren't getting. That's how America kept spending money (and charging more on those high-limit credit cards everybody got the week after they signed a fraudulent mortgage document) from 9/11 onward....

Comments

[urox.livejournal.com]

It's things like this combined with the widening gap between worker and CEO salary that makes me want them to be told, "No, you do *not* need more money. Take a pay cut and start funding your company! Stop giving yourselves bonuses; you know exactly what you're doing to your company for your own benefit."