Chuck, thanks for spotting the Vincent Navarro article. His work is always compelling and informative.

Of course, anyone in the US who would suggest that the rich and the poor do NOT have a commonality of interest is waging class war and is branded as a dangerous socialist or worse. The myth that we are all middle class has a long history in America and there was once a time when people mired in poverty could hope to rise at least to the upper middle class through hard work and maybe a little subterfuge. Those days are long gone, but the myth lives on.

Americans recognized (briefly) the fallacy of this thinking when the Great Depression moved the "middle" into poverty and it was no longer possible to pretend that one was living a middle class lifestyle or had much hope of gaining one. As a result, we were able to actually use government as an instrument to improve the common welfare and virtually all the social legislation still extant was passed in that era.

Under the massive marketing blitz, the migration to suburbia, the return of women to the kitchen, and the advent of TV a generation of Americans forgot the lessons their parents learned. Perhaps we need another economic collapse to refresh the national memory about the true nature of class and the true function of government. Perhaps it's coming.

What Charles said, and economic reorganization is both unavoidable and desirable if we can do it without causing an intervening collapse. I am hopeful that the new economic reality will rise alongside the decline of the old one so that it's just a matter of switching from one to the other escalator.

Here's what I'm saying, and I'm not proposing this as a concrete plan, but an observation of what is proceeding organically without need of plans. We are building the new social and economic fabric by our own links of communication and exchange.