[jeffkrol]

Ahh my buddy Eric.. he's so loveable.

David Donnelly: "Occupy" Coward: Eric Cantor Cancels Philly Speech

The thing is, though, he wouldn't have addressed their demands. An aide let it slip to Politico that his speech would be about how “we make sure the people at the top stay there.” Oops

Eric Cantor to address the rich-poor gap in speech at University of Pennsylvania - Jake Sherman - POLITICO.com

The Virginia congressman, the most recent and prominent Republican whipping boy for Democrats, is heading to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania to talk about income disparity and how Republicans believe the government could help fix it, an aide said. The speech will zero in on how Washington could help a “a single working mom…a small business owner…and how we make sure the people at the top stay there,” the aide said.

Looking at charts like these, the pertinent question isn’t why Americans are increasingly concerned about inequality, but why they weren’t marching in the streets years ago. The stagnation of wages and incomes for working-class and lower-middle-class Americans goes back to the nineteen-seventies, and the enormous gains at the top began in the nineteen-eighties.

It isn’t as if nobody noticed what was happening. My first article about the subject appeared in 1995, and I was late to the game. Recently, I was re-reading a September 1992 piece in the American Prospect by Paul Krugman, which provided an excellent survey of developments up to that date. Rising inequality actually featured fairly prominently in the 1992 Presidential campaign. But with Bill Clinton’s election, and particularly with the economic boom of the late nineteen-nineties, which lifted all boats, it gradually receded as a political issue. Now it’s back with a vengeance, and not just because of Occupy Wall Street. Even among middle-aged suburbanites who wouldn’t dream of going down to Zuccotti Park the lopsided allocation of rewards in today’s economy seems to be causing concern: hence the reaction of Cantor and other Republican

s.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2011/10/charting-the-great...#ixzz1bSxEJcjJ