"Does the Task Force have any ideas yet?" Image by Getty Images via @daylife  I met Chrystia Freeland for coffee several months ago to discuss her views on why the Middle Class is dying in America today and what can be done to fix it. To me, this seems to be the most important issue facing America today. If we can’t get the Middle Class working – and unemployment down – none of us can do as well as we could otherwise.  I wrote up our conversation in 3 parts. Quite frankly, no one read the interview which bummed me out immensely. Maybe it’s because I didn’t have a lot of stock tickers in the post, or mention Apple (AAPL), or Britney Spears.  However, with all the protests going on relating to “Occupy Wall Street” right now, her ideas seem more relevant than ever.  The one answer that no politician (regardless of party) seems to have these days is how do you save the Middle Class? Here is the full interview:  In January, Chrystia Freeland wrote about “The Rise of the New Global Elite” in The Atlantic. It put front and center the issue of the growing divide between the global elite and the increasingly impoverished who are slipping out of the middle class (especially in developed countries like the US and Europe).  It’s a problem that most of us see easily in our day-to-day lives and yet no politician – on either the left or right – likes to acknowledge because there is not an easy solution.  What the article makes plain is that – contrary to what filmmaker Michael Moore would hope – we aren’t going back to the world we knew in 1950s middle-class Michigan prior to the technology explosion of the last 35 years. The solution to this growing gulf is going to require new solutions.  I asked to meet Chrystia Freeland recently in New York to get her take on this topic in more detail. I asked her how she would like to see this problem dealt with in the years ahead. Her excerpted comments from our conversation are captured below:  Why did you write this article?  What impelled me to write about this is:
Excerpts from my Interview with Chrystia Freeland earlier this year and her thoughts on the Middle Class and the Global Elites.