Some of the execrable numbers are, simply stultifying ... in aggregate.
From Clinton's caving-to/out-vicious-ing, the greedheads--in torpedoing the last-resoert of 'welfare',
to the 0.7% 40-yr. averaged annual wage-increase of the bottom 70? 80%?
--to the precipitate drop, on all scales, since the USSC installed Shrub:
[who got us the Roberts Court--Internecine Warfare, next?]

No One would believe our scenario today--as premise for any novel.


http://billmoyers.co...s-and-government/

Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith on the Follies of Big Banks and Government
June 22, 2012

Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith, creator of the finance and economics blog Naked Capitalism, join Bill to discuss the folly and corruption of both banks and government, and how that tag-team leaves deep wounds in our democracy. Taibbi’s latest piece is “The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia.” Smith is the author of ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism.

Also oft-quoted in such analyses:
http://thenewpress.c...etaproductid=1856

So Rich, So Poor
Why It's So Hard to End Poverty in America

PETER EDELMAN

Hardcover
$24.95


AN UNCOMPROMISING LOOK AT THE INCREASING POVERTY IN AMERICA TODAY—ESPECIALLY AMONG YOUNG PEOPLE—BY THE MAN WHO FAMOUSLY RESIGNED FROM THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION TO PROTEST THE TREATMENT OF THE NATION'S POOR
If the nation’s gross national income—over $14 trillion—were divided evenly across the entire U.S. population, every household could call itself middle class. Yet the income-level disparity in this country is now wider than at any point since the Great Depression. In 2010 the average salary for CEOs on the S&P 500 was over $1 million—climbing to over $11 million when all forms of compensation are accounted for—while the current median household income for African Americans is just over $32,000. How can some be so rich, while others are so poor?

In this provocative book, lifelong antipoverty advocate Peter Edelman offers an informed analysis of how this country can be so wealthy yet have a steadily growing number of unemployed and working poor. According to Edelman, we have taken important positive steps without which 25 to 30 million more people would be poor, but poverty fluctuates with the business cycle. The structure of today’s economy has stultified wage growth for half of America’s workers—with even worse results at the bottom and for people of color—while bestowing billions on those at the top.

So Rich, So Poor delves into what is happening to the people behind the statistics, and takes a particular look at the continuing crisis of young people of color, whose possibility of a productive life too often is lost on their way to adulthood. This is crucial reading for anyone who wants to understand the most critical American dilemma of the twenty-first century.


Peter Edelman is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. A top adviser to Senator Robert F. Kennedy from 1964 to 1968, he went on to fill various roles in President Bill Clinton’s administration, from which he famously resigned in protest after Clinton signed the 1996 welfare reform legislation.

re Bolded: he accompanied RFK across South, viewing children with the diseases associated with III-world (IVth?) places: swollen bellies, rickets, bare-subsistence 'breakfasts' and NO lunch:
USA-South in mid-sixties. We be such polished-hypocrites, all following from the National Gullibility Quotient, Puritan sanctimony and _____ + _____ .

At least the new techno-glut of Info.. Info.. Info.. Info.. Info.. Info.. scatters the long-missing Stats all over the place.
Not that this can do much for the non-readers/TeeVee infotainment consumers.
Solutions? ... ... Hah.



:oTyp