................ If you happened to be watching NBC on the first Sunday morning in August last summer, you would have seen something curious. There, on the set of Meet the Press, the host, David Gregory, was interviewing a guest who made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become âvery distorted.â In the wake of the recession, this guest explained, high-income individuals, large banks, and major corporations had experienced a âsignificant recoveryâ; the rest of the economy, by contrastâincluding small businesses and âa very significant amount of the labor forceââwas stuck and still struggling. What we were seeing, he argued, was not a single economy at all, but rather âfundamentally two separate types of economy,â increasingly distinct and divergent. ....................... http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/8343/