America's Lost Decade

Not good:

Another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.And in new signs of distress among the middle class, median household incomes fell last year to levels last seen in 1997.Economists pointed to a telling statistic: It was the first time since the Great Depression that median household income, adjusted for inflation, had not risen over such a long period, said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard.“This is truly a lost decade,” Mr. Katz said. “We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”The bureau’s findings were worse than many economists expected, and brought into sharp relief the toll the past decade — including the painful declines of the financial crisis and recession —had taken on Americans at the middle and lower parts of the income ladder. It is also fresh evidence that the disappointing economic recovery has done nothing for the country’s poorest citizens.

And this while congressional Republicans continues to plot how best to fuck over the economy in order to wound President Obama, while continuing their slobbery fealty to their corporate and wealthy masters. In any normal, moral, or sane democracy, these numbers would be treated as gravely as their substance dictates. Elected officials and those in a position of power to do something about it would be rightfully concerned. But not in America. We have an entire political party and their not-at-all-biased corporate propaganda mouthpiece wholly devoted to marginalizing grim reports like this and trying to entrench the perverse idea that the poor are a bunch of whiny, freeloading, lazy fucks who aren't really poor because they have Xbox 360s. I wish I were kidding. And graphs like these are just the best:

Who the fuck cares that they can't afford healthcare, education? They have coffee makers goddammit, and in some cases, more than one DVD player. And Obama wages class warfare because he doesn't think that corporate jet owners should get a tax break.

These people are sick, and it's well past time that their low information base wakes up and tosses them out of office. And while we're talking about sane, moral, normal democracies, I might add that we would  also have a party beating this point to a bloody pulp on a daily basis, unafraid of being labeled as fighting class warfare, and unafraid of being outspent (or not receiving any) in an election by corporate money, and unafraid if fighting these bastards cost them their job. The facts are there, and they are indisputable. Our pathetic center right policies are not advancing the American Dream, but are in fact destroying it. It's well past time that somebody puts up a real fight to reverse this disgusting trend.