The “death of adulthood” is really just capitalism at work, Andrew O’Hehir, Salon, September 12, 2014 (h/t Kjerstin Johnson)

It’s all very well to discuss feminism as a force of cultural liberation expressed by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Lena Dunham, but for millions of women in the Western world it has also been an economic imperative, one that set them free from some (but not all) traditional expectations and thrust them into a job marketplace where they are often underpaid relative to their male counterparts. This is too complicated an argument to develop here, but I suspect that the “death of adulthood” is so much more evident among men than women because women are still called upon to perform productive labor – the bearing and nurturing of children – that cannot be or generally is not performed by men. In that sense the death of adulthood is just another name for the fabled “crisis of masculinity” we’ve been hearing about for 30 years or longer, in which men often feel that their power has been undermined by ball-busting feminists when what’s really happening is that their economic role has changed and they don’t know what the hell to do about it.

Fox News Correspondent Tries to Slam Obama, Instead Proves Trickle-Down Economics is a Scam, Allen Clifton, Forward Progressives, August 16, 2014

So, here we have James Rosen over at Fox News trying to perpetuate this myth that somehow Obama’s policies have done nothing but kill wage growth, while he actually ends up citing an economist who admits that since the dawn of trickle-down economics income inequality has been a massive problem and nothing he’s seen in Obama’s policy making has had anything to do with wage stagnation.

Because wages have been stagnant for nearly four decades.

And it’s not as if there’s an issue with wealth or corporate profits in this country. Corporations are doing fine and the rich are richer than ever before.

So, by the definition of trickle-down economics, we should be experiencing some of our biggest wage growth in years.

But we’re not.

Because trickle-down economics is a scam. It’s a massive con perpetuated by the rich that somehow convinced millions of middle class and poor Americans that they too could become rich, by giving rich people more money.

The Plutocracy Strikes Back: The Pathologies of Rule by a Handful of Billionaires, Steve Fraser, Informed Comment, September 13, 2014

George Baer was a railroad and coal mining magnate at the turn of the twentieth century. Amid a violent and protracted strike that shut down much of the country’s anthracite coal industry, Baer defied President Teddy Roosevelt’s appeal to arbitrate the issues at stake, saying, “The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for… not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men of property to whom God has given control of the property rights of the country.” To the Anthracite Coal Commission investigating the uproar, Baer insisted, “These men don’t suffer. Why hell, half of them don’t even speak English.”
We might call that adopting the imperial position. Titans of industry and finance back then often assumed that they had the right to supersede the law and tutor the rest of America on how best to order its affairs. They liked to play God. It’s a habit that’s returned with a vengeance in our own time.