Words.
"Given its importance in the issue of the moment, the Massachusetts vote is going to be analyzed as a referendum on President Obama's healthcare reforms.
...But if the lessons gleaned from Massachusetts stop with healthcare, something far more profound and potentially disruptive will have been missed. There is a deep and increasingly restive anger stirring in the country.
...Much of the disaffection in Massachusetts came from self-described independents. That's significant because independents are concentrated in middle-class suburbs where physical and economic security are overriding preoccupations. Today, those anxieties are both real and justified, though not as critiques of Obama's first year.
...The mass unemployment that followed Wall Street's meltdown upset even that precarious balance, and the situation is even worse than the unemployment figures suggest. According to work done by Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, who chairs the congressional panel appointed to oversee the bank bailout, 20% of all Americans are either jobless, underemployed or simply have given up looking for work. One out of every eight Americans is on food stamps, and one out of every eight U.S. mortgages is in default or foreclosure. The wholesale flight of American employers from the responsibility of maintaining traditional pension plans forced tens of millions of 401(k) participants into the equity markets to secure their retirements. The crash erased $5 trillion from their accounts.
Scolds would have you believe that middle-class Americans were complicit in the financial collapse because of their profligacy. Warren points out that the numbers state a different case. "By the early 2000s, families were spending twice as much (adjusted for inflation) on mortgages than they did a generation ago," she wrote recently, "for a house that was, on average, only 10% bigger and 25 years older. They also had to pay twice as much to hang on to their health insurance. . . . Families today spend less than they did a generation ago on food, clothing, furniture, appliances and other flexible purchases, but it hasn't been enough to save them."
As employers have come to regard their employees as little more than another fixed expense, layoffs have become a routine tool for manicuring quarterly profits. Thus, even those lucky enough to have full-time jobs have little security in their current positions -- in which, as the current productivity numbers show, they're forced to work ever harder for less -- and none about their future, including retirement. This shift of economic risk onto the backs of the middle class has allowed the top 5% of income earners to amass a share of the country's wealth unmatched for a century.
There's the real source of the country's anger."
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