As the Nail Sunk in the Cloud

Gee, you think the guy (I refuse to Google up his name and give him any more play) who confessed to killing JonBenet Ramsey did it because he got off on all the media attention he knew he'd get? Call it mediaerotic asphyxiation.

Meanwhile, there's the one year anniversary of the horrible un-natural disaster in New Orleans--the rest of Katrina was a natural disaster, but the failure of the levees is all human's fault, and we're not natural at all. Stories have rightfully flooded the media, even if at this point too much of the coverage is caught up in Bush spin.

Yet there's also this in the New York Times yesterday:

The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity — the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic wellspring of a nation’s living standards — has risen steadily over the same period.

As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s.

How could this happen? If profits are climbing, how do wages fall?

At the very top of the income spectrum, many workers have continued to receive raises that outpace inflation, and the gains have been large enough to keep average income and consumer spending rising.

Oh.

And don't think this isn't a Katrina story, too. For Katrina is one more lesson about class, about how America doesn't want its own poor yearning to breathe free anymore. In the age of Bush, the high ground is shrinking, but as long as he's there with his base, the elites, the rest of us can get washed away. Not only is the Ninth Ward still a wasteland, it's growing.