You will never save money.

Prices are going up...with employment. Next, your mortgage will go up.

Does anyone think that society has now just become a guaranteed-profit scheme for the most political connected businesses (like telecoms (cable, telephone), banks (mortgages, 401ks), oil, etc.)?

It's like there's a spigot that politicians turn on an off. You build up a little something, the politicians go in a turn up the spigot so all their crony companies can make bigger profits. If the companies aren't getting the profits they want from selling things, they get their labor costs lowered (through, for example the end of overtime pay, and increased unemployment, so that it becomes a labor buyer's market), or they get their taxpayer-financed government contracts to rape, torture and humiliate Iraqis (yeah, good work if you can get it--easy money).

This isn't how markets are supposed to work. They're supposed to be competitive. Prices should be set by corporations competing to give customers what they want, and the price should reflect the value a willing buyer puts on the item, rather than the rip-off rate set by de facto monopolies, based on profit projections for Wall Street bankers and greed.

in this country.

The rich have always had the power. Today, it's primarily the wealthy corporations. In the past, it was the rich individual business owners. Oil barons, real estate moguls, bankers, etc.

This is nothing new. Politicians and companies have been bedfellows as long as both have existed. Only the players and the public viewpoint ever really change. Where the players have led, scandal and corruption have always followed.

Edit: typo

in the 70s. FDR started it. Bush is busting the dam that Clinton had stuck his finger in. The golden era was marked by increasing wealth for a growing middle class.

It's end is marked by wage slavery for a "middle class" which is quickly becoming the large bottom 95% of of a very inequitable two-tiered society.

I do not disagree that we have a patently unequal society. I do, however, disagree that this is a relatively new development.

The elite have always had little trouble stomping on the lower and middle classes. That's how Gould, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt built their empires. Undercut your competitors to drive them out of business, then jack up prices, all while paying substandard wages.

Very little has changed since the Gilded Age or the Industrial Revolution. Only the faces and names.

FDR had a little help. First, there's nothing like a war or three to jump-start the economy and fight unemployment. Just ask Bush.

Second, there was a massive increase in the need for big-ticket items after WW2 thanks in part to the baby boom. Companies like GM and Ford and US Steel had to fight their competitors for the same workers, and they did so by raising wages.

However, very little actually changed during the "golden era" for the haves and have nots in much of the country, especially in places like the South and the Plains. Increases in manufacturing wages and other unionized industries mean little in areas where there is little industry and unions are vehemently opposed.

The 50s and 60s saw huge companies - oil companies and utilities, to name two - strangle their competitors, just like Vanderbilt and Gould had done decades before. Companies like Standard Oil were already giving their executives huge stock option packages, even in the 50s and 60s.

In the 70s, it was companies like IBM, who at one time had more than 95% share in their target market. They forced smaller companies out of business and changed technology standards all the time to force competitors to spend millions retooling to keep up. IBM was more of a monopoly than MS could dream of being.

The difference now is that there is very little accountability. Companies like Enron and WorldCom bilk people out of billions and there are no repercussions. These scandals also get more attention and press than ever before, in part because they steal billions from their stockholders and employees. The corporate screwing tends to be of much wider scope and much more personal now.

If you're looking for someone to blame for our current dismal state of affairs, try Reagan. He did more to create class inequity than just about anyone. Between his trickle-on (typo intended) economics, union busting and deregulation, he set the stage in large part for where we are today.

My point is: class inequity is nothing new; it just happens to get a lot more attention in this age of constant media exposure. The corruption and scandals and inequity have always been there, even in the so-called golden era post-FDR.