"The Hourglass Economy" - Corporations Plan for Post-Middle-Class America
Corporations Plan for Post-Middle-Class America
Posted: 04/ 6/2012 5:33 pm
Top & Bottom But No Middle
American corporations have pretty much written off the middle class. Their actions declare that the middle class is moribund. And they should know since they have been in the front lines shooting down and decimating the middle class. Indeed, American business has dismantled much of its manufacturing and has eliminated untold numbers of other middle class jobs, sending them overseas where cheap labor fattens corporate profits at the expense of American workers. That's why the employment and housing markets are struggling on life support, food stamp use is at an all-time high and the ranks of the working poor are swelling -- while corporate profits soar and the S&P 500 stocks show the best first quarter since 1998.
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What is corporate America's response? Rather than mounting crash programs for generating solid middle class jobs they have figured out how to profit from the sinking ship.
Corporate America is shifting its focus in product development and marketing to serve the "hourglass economy." The hourglass has two chambers connected by a slim channel. Translated into economic terms, or better yet, the emerging picture of America, the two chambers represent rich and poor, with virtually nothing in the middle.
Worse, while the traditional hourglass has two equal chambers, the economic hourglass does not. One chamber contains a small percent of the population and most of the wealth and the other is filled with the bulk of Americans, who have little access to resources and diminished hope for prosperity. The hourglass economy has become so entrenched that Bloomberg News credits it with dividing Americans and defining U.S. politics.
the rest:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bernard-starr/middle-class_b_1395443.html
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