Ellen Schultz has given us a fascinating account of the ways in which corporate America has been able to game legal and accounting rules to emasculate the private pension system. It was only a few decades ago that a secure pension was a staple of middle class life. Workers in middle class jobs, whether in offices, construction, or manufacturing expected to have a pension in retirement to supplement their Social Security income. In many cases, the pension would provide the larger portion of their income, with the Social Security benefit being the supplement.

I encourage readers to purchase two copies of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism – one for themselves and one as a Christmas present for their right wing uncle. That uncle might well stay with Skocpol and Williamson’s highly readable and well-crafted study to the end without throwing it down in anger – something I can’t say with much confidence about my book with DiMaggio.

I talked to Franken via phone today, as he returned home from a funeral for a soldier killed overseas. His remarks tomorrow are really connected to the fear that we are seeing a flickering out of the American dream. “We have the greatest disparity in income since the 1920s. The middle class dream is fading, and we’re losing the argument on the economy. We need to gain back the initiative, and convince people that it’s ridiculous to be gutting Medicare, to essentially end it, in order to give huge tax cuts.”

Why does the Obama administration take the side of the banks against the middle class? Look at the officials he hires and listens to: they sold out long ago, and now are nothing but jello when they face their potential employers.

One of the maddening riddles of American life is why a country with an egalitarian ethos and the world’s oldest democratic system could allow itself to become a grossly unequal land of haves and have nots in recent decades – a society with a pattern of income distribution now closer to that of Brazil than, say, Germany.

Look no further for an answer to the riddle. This alarming new book by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson offers up perhaps the best explanation so far of how the U.S. got on the path to plutocracy.

The White House is generally pretty pleased with what they’ve done, they don’t think they’re likely to get anything additional from Congress – which they’re right about, but that assumes that the executive branch has no authority of its own – and they’re going to just engage in happy, sunny, Reagan-esque optimistic talk and hope the economy comes back on its own. There are some things – like a new budget – that must be done, and there we shall see where talk meets action. But basically, the White House is done, and they’re quite happy with their efforts. If you want to be real charitable, they think it’s the best they can do.

We have a party that failed to make the argument, and a President clearly following the blueprint of his deficit hawk ex-budget director, with the emphasis on extending the tax cuts, “fixing” Social Security through benefit cuts and rapprochement with the business community. This is not, then, just about negotiating. It’s about policy, a policy that liberals see as completely misguided, at odds with the real problems facing the country (the continuing unemployment and housing crises) and simply more concerned to pleasing banks and elites than making the economy better for working people.

On November 17, my mother died. She was the last surviving grandparent of my children, so her death was in a very real sense the death of a generation in our family. However, as I look back on the lives of my parents, I see that their generation represented a unique bridge in the American cultural landscape. Both of my parents were born in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, and yet their early adult lives saw the very best of economic times for a huge middle class. Sadly, at their passing, that middle class now also is dying, as the distribution of wealth returns to its concentration into only a few hands, just as it was in the 1920′s prior to the Depression.

There’s a lot to despise about David Axelrod’s announcement of Obama’s capitulation to the oligarchs on tax cuts, not least that he made this announcement on the same day Obama’s Catfood Commission Chairs started the process of stealing from seniors to “fix” our deficit.

As the economy fails to improve, as we chart the rise of the Tea Party and the Republican Party’s ability to express disdain for unemployment benefits without significant political cost, Americans lack a roadmap for the role of class and gender in the new American landscape. Joan Williams’ book, Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter (Harvard 2010), supplies that roadmap. The book creates an innovative framework for examining the relationship between law, work and family in the post-industrial economy.