Stretch…ah, Saturday and Sunday it just takes a little longer to turn that computer on.

It seems like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have discovered an amazing fact, almost at the same time: there is such a thing as class. Both of the papers of the elite have been running stories on class in America—I wonder, is there a spy for one of those newspapers borrowed away at the competition? Last Sunday, the Times kicked off a three-week series of articles with the curtain-raiser entitled “Class in America: Shadowy Lines That Still Divide.” And we’re told that a team of reporters spent A YEAR examining “the role of social class in America today.” Hell, I could have saved them that money and time by just giving them a reading list of the piles of material that have been churned out to show the class warfare underway in America.

I’m making a private bet to see how many times the series uses the word “unions” when it talks about why class lines have hardened (as in incomes are declining, pensions are being obliterated because we have no unions). Blind spot number one: “For most workers, the only time in the last three decades when the rise in hourly pay beat inflation we during the speculative bubble of the 90s. Reduced pensions have made retirement less secure.”

Eh, and what about the missing next sentence that those three decades exactly mirrored the relentless attack against unions? And, by the way, wasn’t it the Times’ business reporters, along with the rest of the cheerleaders in the press, out front panting about the go-go 90s New Economy? Of course.

And, of course, the Times will continue to parrot Robert Reich’s idiotic premise that we don’t have to worry about the global maurauding of corporations as long as get smarter. To wit: “Now that manual labor can be done in developing countries for $2 a day, skills and education have become more essential than ever.” Really? You mean if we weren’t so dumb—as opposed to having to live in a world where government policy aid and abets the worldwide arbitrage of peoples’ wages—then, we’d be fine. See, that’s what happens when you’ve never had a real job besides a cushy job at the Times or, in Reich’s case, some academic institution.

Over at the Journal, we can read a series, “Moving Up: Challenges to the American Dream.” The second article in the series caught my eye. On May 17th, we got a piece entitled, “Lagging Behind the Wealthy, Many Use Debt to Catch Up.” I always prefer, in general, the Journal on these topics because unlike the Times, the Journal doesn’t carry about itself any false pretenses that it’s role in life is anything but representing the voice of corporate power. And, on the whole, I find the Journal’s reporting more interesting.

As the Journal article says:

More and more Americans are turning to debt to pay for lifestyles their current incomes can’t support. They are determined to live better than their parents, seduced by TV shows like ‘The OC’ and ‘Desperate Housewives’, which take upper-class life for granted, and bombarded with advertisements for expensive automobiles and big-screen TVs.

Yikes. Household debt has more than doubled to more than $10 trillion between 1992 and 2004, after accounting for inflation. And matched with that trend: interest rates are going up and wages are not. Hello? Can anyone say “the shit will hit the fan” real soon?

I’ll keep posting some tidbits from the on-going series as it unfolds to its shocking conclusion: class matters.