… are going speak up as soon as it seems like the right time — Tom Tomorrow.

James says I should take credit, but I doubt it’s my doing. The NY Daily News has an article about the White House denying “it did anything wrong by sitting on the bombshell disclosure that North Korea had nuclear weapons until after securing the congressional okay to attack Iraq.”

Another interesting thing, given the Daily News publisher’s and editorial board’s support for bombing Iraq, is that there are a number of anti-war letters in today’s Voice of the People. I’ll quote part of my favorite one:

You dilldocks! President Bush isn’t FDR, he’s Japanese Emperor Hirohito, attacking a country that hasn’t attacked his just because he sees a threat.

I don’t normally link to anything that has my real name from this site, but I couldn’t help myself this time. I’m the top letter in the “Voice of the People” in today’s NY Daily News!

The letter is about what I discussed earlier, that I find it outrageous that the Bush administration knew about North Korea’s nuclear program before the vote on the Iraq resolution, but didn’t tell Congress until afterward.

Paul Krugman has the cover article in this week’s NY Times Magazine, on how America is becoming a plutocracy, and that the days of America as a middle-class society are ending. He also points out that all of our arguments about America being the richest country, and benefitting from it, don’t really hold once you realize that we’re now at that point because the rich have so much, not because the average American does.

One criticism: He barely mentions the role of organized labor in the creation of a middle-class America in the 1950s and 1960s.

Over the past 30 years most people have seen only modest salary increases: the average annual salary in America, expressed in 1998 dollars (that is, adjusted for inflation), rose from $32,522 in 1970 to $35,864 in 1999. That’s about a 10 percent increase over 29 years — progress, but not much. Over the same period, however, according to Fortune magazine, the average real annual compensation of the top 100 C.E.O.’s went from $1.3 million — 39 times the pay of an average worker — to $37.5 million, more than 1,000 times the pay of ordinary workers.

…

One ploy often used to play down growing inequality is to rely on rather coarse statistical breakdowns — dividing the population into five ”quintiles,” each containing 20 percent of families, or at most 10 ”deciles.” Indeed, Greenspan’s speech at Jackson Hole relied mainly on decile data. From there it’s a short step to denying that we’re really talking about the rich at all. For example, a conservative commentator might concede, grudgingly, that there has been some increase in the share of national income going to the top 10 percent of taxpayers, but then point out that anyone with an income over $81,000 is in that top 10 percent. So we’re just talking about shifts within the middle class, right?

Wrong: the top 10 percent contains a lot of people whom we would still consider middle class, but they weren’t the big winners. Most of the gains in the share of the top 10 percent of taxpayers over the past 30 years were actually gains to the top 1 percent, rather than the next 9 percent. In 1998 the top 1 percent started at $230,000. In turn, 60 percent of the gains of that top 1 percent went to the top 0.1 percent, those with incomes of more than $790,000. And almost half of those gains went to a mere 13,000 taxpayers, the top 0.01 percent, who had an income of at least $3.6 million and an average income of $17 million.

…

You might think that 1987, the year Tom Wolfe published his novel ”The Bonfire of the Vanities” and Oliver Stone released his movie ”Wall Street,” marked the high tide of America’s new money culture. But in 1987 the top 0.01 percent earned only about 40 percent of what they do today, and top executives less than a fifth as much. The America of ”Wall Street” and ”The Bonfire of the Vanities” was positively egalitarian compared with the country we live in today.

…

Canadians can expect to live about two years longer than Americans. In fact, life expectancy in the U.S. is well below that in Canada, Japan and every major nation in Western Europe. On average, we can expect lives a bit shorter than those of Greeks, a bit longer than those of Portuguese. Male life expectancy is lower in the U.S. than it is in Costa Rica.

…

Although America has higher per capita income than other advanced countries, it turns out that that’s mainly because our rich are much richer. And here’s a radical thought: if the rich get more, that leaves less for everyone else.

…

Many Americans assume that because we are the richest country in the world, with real G.D.P. per capita higher than that of other major advanced countries, Americans must be better off across the board — that it’s not just our rich who are richer than their counterparts abroad, but that the typical American family is much better off than the typical family elsewhere, and that even our poor are well off by foreign standards.

But it’s not true. Let me use the example of Sweden, that great conservative bete noire.

…

But life expectancy in Sweden is about three years higher than that of the U.S. Infant mortality is half the U.S. level, and less than a third the rate in Mississippi. Functional illiteracy is much less common than in the U.S.

How is this possible? One answer is that G.D.P. per capita is in some ways a misleading measure. Swedes take longer vacations than Americans, so they work fewer hours per year. That’s a choice, not a failure of economic performance. Real G.D.P. per hour worked is 16 percent lower than in the United States, which makes Swedish productivity about the same as Canada’s.

But the main point is that though Sweden may have lower average income than the United States, that’s mainly because our rich are so much richer. The median Swedish family has a standard of living roughly comparable with that of the median U.S. family: wages are if anything higher in Sweden, and a higher tax burden is offset by public provision of health care and generally better public services. And as you move further down the income distribution, Swedish living standards are way ahead of those in the U.S. Swedish families with children that are at the 10th percentile — poorer than 90 percent of the population — have incomes 60 percent higher than their U.S. counterparts. And very few people in Sweden experience the deep poverty that is all too common in the United States. One measure: in 1994 only 6 percent of Swedes lived on less than $11 per day, compared with 14 percent in the U.S.

I ignored Dan as he kept screaming about Ralph Nader supposedly costing Al “can’t wait to talk about God and morality again” Gore the election.

Now he’s ranting about how liberals should be FOR the war in Iraq because it will liberate the Iraqi population from a terrible dictator. He thinks this administration is capable of pulling of a post-WWII Japan trick on Iraq!

Did aliens replace his brain? It’s more fun to read David Ehrenstein’s discussion of it than it is to read the actual column.

Oh, and he’s tired of worrying about AIDS too:

“I used to think about AIDS all the time, read about AIDS constantly, and do a lot of writing about AIDS. But in the last few years, I’ve found it harder and harder to give a shit about AIDS. Instead, I want to write about the monorail or Iraq — this despite the fact that two of my best friends in the whole world are infected with HIV.”

Where are our priorities? I just read this letter in the NY Times.

Re “The Forgotten Domestic Crisis,” by Marcia Angell (Op-Ed, Oct. 13): In addition to placing health care increasingly out of the economic reach of individuals and businesses, our commodity approach guarantees that the pool of insurable individuals will continue to shrink, thereby undermining the very essence of affordable insurance.

Insurance works because a lot of people pay premiums and not everyone uses services. The more healthy people insured, the stronger the system. A single-payer, broadly financed health insurance system is hardly socialism; it is the only way health care can become universally accessible and even remotely cost-effective.

SUSAN POOR
San Francisco, Oct. 15, 2002

My first reaction was that we’re going to have national terrorism insurance before we have national health insurance!