Where we may differ is in the motivation of the elites who presided over the past 40 years of de-industrialization in the US and other western countries. Having worked in quite a few board rooms with many corporate executives, and having met my share of multimillionaires and a few billionaires, I never got the sense in the conversations I heard that anyone was purposefully out to destroy factories, throw people out on the streets without a job, turn the middle class into the poverty class, and render the US into a third world country. The executives I know believe in capitalism fully, as the best possible economic system, especially in relation to all others. They view themselves as decent and honorable people, operating businesses in tough times where difficult decisions have to be made due to forces beyond their control. Some of them waited long after their competitors had moved operations to Mexico or China before they finally gave in to the "inevitable", as they saw it (do as the others do or your company will die, in other words). They didn't like it when they had to lay off people but they felt they were paid to make difficult decisions. To ameliorate the pain, or some would say soothe their conscience, they set up corporate out-placement programs, giving people access to counseling, administrative help, networking programs, office space, etc.

The hedge fund people I've met believe fully in the nobility of their profession. They think their labor is to take faltering and weak companies, make hard decisions, and return them to health so they can once again be listed as a public company. That they might make tens of millions of dollars doing this is to them proper compensation for the enormous risks they take in this endeavor. I'm sure Mitt Romney has always felt that way about the work he has done at Bain Capital, just as I'm sure Lloyd Blankfein is sincere when he says that Goldman Sachs is doing "God's work".

I've come across a few sociopaths in the CEO world; men who are very charming, believe fully in their own genius and the right to success, and have zero emotional connection to the people around them. There has been a tendency the past 30 years for men like this to prosper, and that speaks very poorly about the fact that American business has lost its ethical groundings of the 40s and 50s, some of which came from hard lessons learned from the Depression.

What is interesting is what happens to these men when they leave the corporate world. Many of them have a transformation, and begin to look differently on the company and industry they left behind. We've seen both John Reed and Sandy Weill admit they were wrong about banking industry consolidation, and now believe the big banks should be broken up. Some of this is perhaps expressing anger at their successors who have botched up the bank they left them, but still it takes some rethinking to come out publicly and announce you were wrong about the most fundamental thing you did in your career. Similarly, some equity buyout guys who are retired now look back and see the greed that underlay their actions, and the real damage it did to people. At the time all they could think about was maximizing their investors' returns and maintaining a very high rating for their fund, year after year.

What this says is that the corporate world is filled with group think, and only until you are out of that world can you see things differently. That group think does not involve "let's move all our factories to China, enslave all of our workers, destroy all the unions, and then default on all the bonds China will buy from us." Executives were not meeting on golf courses to plot out the destruction of the middle class. They might have been plotting out with other companies how to maximize their respective profits, but that gets into illegal territory with a lot of risks for price fixing and anti-competitive behavior. And yes, some of them did engage in such behavior and we certainly do not have a government in the US anxious to bring such players to justice.

I don't want to take away from the many justifiable things you have said in your comments. There is indeed every reason for workers to feel angry, and without that anger we aren't going to get a change in attitude that will bring about a completely different political climate. As for the Dependency Class, the right has been latching on to this phrase for a year or so, and I wanted to grab hold of it before they fully owned it. To me, it represents a failure not of the people who are in this situation, but of the economic and political system that put them there. The Republicans are going to do everything possible to put the blame on the poor. Putting some more gentile word to use, such as Entitlements Class or Lower Middle Class will not stop the campaign to blame individuals for this. Similarly, such words help leftists soften the impact of what has happened. People are dependent - for their survival, not so they can sit around and watch TV all day.