They sock it away. As for creating jobs — do you see any? There are some new jobs being created, true. In Mexico.

"They are destroying the middle class in this country," my friend Peggy Winkelman told me the other day. Peggy, who is in her 80s, is anything but poor. Her late husband, Stanley, had a chain of clothing stores in Detroit. She has always been well-off.

But she also thinks our nation is more important than her being able to hold on to every last nickel while most Americans get more and more desperate. She remembers that back in the '50s and '60s, the rich paid as much as 90 percent on incomes over a certain level.

They still got richer. We can fix this if we have the guts, or we can go on becoming a society with a very few rich and a whole lot of poor. Karl Marx said that was bound to happen someday.

And guess what he said was bound to happen next?

Newspaper atrocity update:  Last week I mentioned how JRC, the Journal-Register Company (JRC) of Yardley, Pa., had fired some of the best and most loyal staffers at the Downriver Heritage Newspaper Group, in an attempt to dump salaries.

Since then, many of the remaining few staffers at the Oakland Press have written to complain that I didn't mention that, at the same time, JRC offed several of the last long-time editors at the Oakland Press, including Al Adler and Roger Wingelaar.

Incidentally, I also said the employees' ability to send internal e-mails to company brass was disabled when they asked about these outrageous layoffs. That wasn't quite right; it was disabled when they attempted to ask Journal-Register CEO John Paton what the recently bankrupt company's purchase by Alden Capital Management meant. Well, now they know.

Here, by the way, is what is likely to happen next. Alden will continue stripping the newspapers, eliminating overhead, and then attempt to sell them off for more than they paid for them.

That, children, is what venture capitalists do. In a better world, some of them might be doing hard time.

> Email Jack Lessenberry