Follow the money.

EJ Dionne has a reasonable summary of the recently released class war income statistics:

The census had some very good news for the well-to-do. The top fifth of American households received 50.4 percent of all income last year, the highest proportion since 1967, when the Census Bureau started following that trend. The biggest gains were concentrated in the top 5 percent.

So, the rich are getting richer. And richer than ever.

The proportion of the poor who are very poor has risen. People are considered in deep poverty if they have half or less of the yearly income of those at the poverty line. In 2005 half the poverty line for a family of three was $7,788; for a family of four it was $9,985. (Try living on that.) According to the new report, 43.1 percent of poor people lived in that sort of deep poverty -- a record since 1975, when the government started assembling such statistics.

And the poor are getting poorer. Poorer than ever.

What about the middle class? Yes, the median income of American households rose by 1.1 percent last year after five years of decline. But most of the growth was in households headed by Americans 65 and over -- who are helped, rightly, by substantial government benefits. In households headed by people under 65, incomes fell yet again.

And the rest of us are just treading water.

This statistic is interesting to me, for two reasons, one obvious, one not so obvious:

Adjusted for inflation, men's earnings were lower in 2005 than they were in 1973.

The obvious reason:

I'm a man, and even without responsibilities I feel the pragmatic consequences of stagnation. Akin to the level of rage that men with one or two degrees and no place to exercise their skills must feel. Which is, of course, why the Republicans try to lead us around by our dicks, with the gay marriage scam, the flag scam, the "strength" and "firmness" scam, and all that. [Concern troll prophylactic on women in the workforce: See "zero sum game," below.]

The less obvious reason: 1973. It's as if, in the early 70s--just when I, as so many of you, entered the labor force as very late or post-Boomers--somebody threw a switch that changed all the rules. So many of the curves that our sense of progress depends on flatlined in the early 70s. [No time for research here, sorry.] And, coincidentally or not, that's when the winger billionaires started funding their systems. I had to get all foily, but in terms of the great secular trends--and the way that the curves flattened simultaneously--it as if... well... as if elections fon't matter very much, when it comes to, erm, money.

Re-reading Dionne, it looks like the rules of the economy have changed--or been changed--and that the Bush administration has brought to perfection trends that have been building for at least 30 years:

Once upon a time, when the economy grew, we'd all get a share of it. That was justice. (Yeah, yeah, Milo Minderbinder reference). Yes, yes, the rich got more than their share, but heck, I don't want to be rich. And yes, the poor didn't always get their share, but the sense of justice was still couched in terms that they could and should; that an adjustment could be made; that there were shares to be had.

So much for the American dream. The numbers show that Americans now play at two tables: The rich, and the rest of us.

At the rich table, the rich play for more and more money. The rich play for increasing shares of an increasingly larger pie. Except for outliers and cartoon examples like Kenny Boy Lay and Martha Stewart, the game is rigged so that, as long as the rich stay at their table, they literally cannot lose. Options, anyone? Golden parachutes, anyone?

At the table for the rest of us, it's a zero sum game. That's the consequence of stagnant incomes; the pie stays the same size, so if I want more pie, I have to take it from you.

(Anyone remember Frank Herbert's The Dosadi Experiment? In it, McKie, an agent from another world on the planet Dosadi, a poison world with a very limited food supply. He enters a restaurant to meet his contact, pauses, and looks for an empty seat. That very pause tells his contact that McKie is off-planet, not from Dosadi. Why? Because looked for a seat, instead of taking a seat away from somebody weaker than he was. That is the sort of world that has been constructed for us.)

As our authoritarian leaders are fond of saying, actions have consequences.

We have yet to see the consequences of a world without justice; a world where the rich build bunkers with their more-and-more; and the rest of us fight, like crabs in a basket, for less and less.

Class Warfare? It's been going on for quite some time, wouldn't you say? Follow the money.

NOTE Look! Over there! ______ ! [Iran, gay marriage, flag burning, you name it]

UPDATE And speaking of Class Warfare, Do you have an ARM mortgage? (Via the man in the grey turtleneck).