America's Unknown Silent Egalitarian Majority

[marmar]

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:


America's Unknown
Silent Egalitarian Majority

The GOP convention in St. Paul totally — and predictably — ignored the reality of America's ever more flagrantly skewed distribution of income and wealth. Smart politics? We have the surprising answer.

September 8, 2008

By Sam Pizzigati

Last week, if you listened really closely to the dozens of speeches delivered at the Republican National Convention, you probably would have heard just about every word that makes up the prime-time vocabulary of contemporary American political discourse. Every word except one. Inequality.

Speakers at the St. Paul GOP convention had nary a word to say about today’s record gaps between America’s wealthy and everyone else. But, then again, neither did the pundits who covered the confab. Not one major media outlet made a point of noting the convention’s total obliviousness to the top-heavy distribution of income and wealth that so defines — and distorts — America’s economy and politics.

Why this media indifference to the GOP’s inequality blindspot? Most pundits simply figure the public doesn’t particularly care about inequality. So why pound on the Republicans for ignoring it?

Ironically, the week before the GOP convention opened, thousands of experts on U.S. politics gathered in Boston at a convention that put inequality — in all its manifestations — front and center. This convention, the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, drew virtually zilch national media attention.

That’s a shame. The pundits massed in St. Paul could have learned a thing or two from the goings-on in Boston. They would have learned, for instance, that the American public, contrary to the conventional wisdom of politicians and pundits alike, really does care about inequality — and wants to see much less of it.

The evidence? Benjamin Page, a political scientist at Northwestern University, has oodles of it. Page and his University of Minnesota colleague, Lawrence Jacobs, have been analyzing decades of public opinion polling data on public attitudes toward economic inequality, and last summer, with the help of researchers from the University of Connecticut, they fielded their own “original national survey to explore these matters” in even greater depth. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew2008/sept8a.html

[rockymountaindem]

1. Yeah, well, keep voting Republican everybody

since there's "just something about Obama" that you don't like :eyes:

[Wiley50]

2. Eagletarians? I can't be;ieve we have that many people here who eat eagles

Whatever will we use for a national bird?

A Turkey?


On nothing but SSI, I am on the absolute bottom of our money pyramid

But, at least I have more brains than those uncaring wealthy idiots!