During the past 10 years, inflation-adjusted wages have stagnated or declined for working Americans; net job creation has been zero; and temporary, bubble-driven gains in the stock market have been erased.

This isn’t what Bill Clinton and the other “New Democrats” of the 1990s promised us.

Remember “the new economy“? In the second half of the 1990s, after years of stagnation, the U.S. economy briefly boomed. Members of the New Democrat wing of the Democratic Party, associated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), made a number of claims…

[...]

If ever a school of political economy has been discredited by events, it is Clinton-era neoliberalism. And yet the Obama administration’s economic team is made up of recycled Clintonites, the very people who misunderstood the actual trends in the U.S. and global economy for the past 20 years.

via U.S. Economy – Salon.com.

This is pretty much what I’ve been saying all along. The DLC and PPI are not “progressive” nor even particularly “liberal” Democratic organizations. They are not necessarily “centrist” either; they even call themselves Third Way. They represent the melding of transnational/multinational corporations (they have no country, they’re loyal only to profit) + government… something that I refer to as Corporatism, which has no party lines, no Left nor Right, no liberal nor conservative. Like religion, Corporatist ideology crosses party lines, Left/Right lines, liberal/conservative lines. Corporatism is responsible for the excessively widening gap between the 2% super-rich and the 98% working class, and this is not limited to only the United States since transnational corporations exist throughout the globe. Working class wage earners’ wages have stagnated for the past 30 years (flatlined) and their buying power has declined due to higher costs of living. Union-busting, an eroding minimum wage, and the flood of both legal and illegal immigrants in the low-wage labor market have all contributed to this wage stagnation.