America at the end of this dreadful decade
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By Harold Meyerson
Washington Post
This decade began and ended in dread. It began with Wall Street — the World Trade Center — targeted for mass murder. It ends with Main Street fearful and reeling from economic reverses that Wall Street helped create.
It was the decade of distraction. While the U.S. economy bubbled and then crumbled, the president for eight of the decade's 10 years threw lives and money into a chaotic conflict in Iraq. The decline of the American middle class was nowhere on his radar screen.
The stocks bubble of the late 1990s was succeeded by a bubble in housing; these were the engines of our economic growth. America's production of goods no longer received the level of investment that had made it the engine of our economic growth from the mid-19th century through the 1970s.
A report from the International Labor Organization published this month shows where the money went: to shareholder dividends, disproportionately benefiting the wealthy. In the prosperity years of 1946 to 1979, dividends constituted 23 percent of profits. From 1980 to 2008, they constituted 46 percent.
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