It’s hard not to get blinded by the searing light of Bill Clinton. But Elizabeth Warren gave the speech that spoke more to me last night. Strip away the reason all these speeches are happening – support for the President – and the stories that Warren and Clinton told were a little different. Clinton told a story of Democratic policy ideas building a foundation for growth, and creating opportunity, and bringing back shared prosperity. He added an important moral component that “poverty, discrimination and ignorance restrict growth.”

Warren told the truth. “The game is rigged,” she said, and then she explained how.

Labor Day 2012 comes at a turning point in American history. At a time when the wealthiest have prospered beyond the wildest of dreams, the vast majority of working Americans struggle to make ends meet. Millions have seen their incomes flatten, their jobs outsourced, and their hopes for retirement security put on hold, if not quashed completely. At the same time, Wall Street and the politicians who conspire with them have worked overtime to destroy the ability of American workers to join unions and bargain collectively for better wages and benefits.

With recoveries like this one, who needs recessions?

The average household income has fallen steadily for nearly everyone since the start of the economic expansion in June 2009, with average income dropping 4.8 percent in the three years since the upturn began, according to a report released Thursday.

The great middle class, the group lauded in campaign ads by every politician in the country, is wasting away according to a Pew study. Using the broadest possible figures (between 67% and 200% of the national median income), the study shows that the middle class has declined to a bare majority of the population. Furthermore, those remaining in the middle class have suffered the worst decade in post-war history.

Mitt Romney is firmly viewed as the candidate of the rich and not the middle class according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll. A remarkable 65 percent think Romney would do the most to advance the economic interests of the wealthiest Americans. In comparison, less than a quarter of voters think President Obama would do the most to help enrich those already very wealthy.

Austerity for all! What could possible go wrong?

The Great Crash posed one question for this country: who would bear the losses? Would it be the banks that caused the problems? The officers, directors and shareholders of those banks? Their careless counterparties? The investors who bought the fraudulent real estate mortgage-backed securities and the complex spin-offs? The owners of capital who threw money into hedge funds and other exotic investments expecting a geyser of money in return?

No.

Katherine Porter’s book, Broke: How Debt Bankrupts the Middle Class, is a group of essays based on the 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project. The 2007 CBP collected basic information on substantially all Chapter 7 (liquidation) and Chapter 13 (partial repayment plans) cases filed for five consecutive weeks in early 2007, and selected 1000 cases per week for detailed study. The researchers collected data from a) the petitions filed by the debtors, which contain enormous detail about their financial condition; b) other court records; c) questionnaires from about half of the cases; and d) interviews of about 20% of the filers. That is a wonderful cross-section of Americans whose finances were destroyed just before the Great Crash.

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.