Watching the Woody Allen film Midnight In Paris one learns that there were certain literary and artistic golden ages in history. A study of history reveals this to be true. There was the Athens of Socrates, the Pax Romano, the Renaissance of Florence, Paris in the 20s and New York in the 60s or even America in the 60s.
Americans had so much energy in the 60s and incredible wealth. Yes there was discrimination and war but there was a strong and healthy and prosperous middle class at the same time. The question is where did this middle class wealth go?
One must use the power of deduction to ascertain what happened. First we know there was wealth in the middle class and second we know that there was the rise of the right and a concurrent decline in that wealth.
There is a connection between the two and it does not take much to deduce that conservative economic policies put the fork into the middle class. I was at a dinner recently when the host, a Fortune 500 corporate employee, said, “let us give thanks for what we have, I know it may not seem so but we have much to give thanks for.”
I guess that depends on who “we” is. Yes things are just fine and dandy if you are the one percent and those that serve them but then there are the rest of us, the victims of conservative economics and the politics of the corporate state. People losing homes and jobs and lives have nothing to give thanks for. The middle class wealth of the 60s was something to give thanks for unfortunately that time is over as is the time of the great American middle class.