AlterNet /
By Joshua HollandMany Americans Face Economic Catastrophe -- Why Do the Political and Media Establishments Ignore Their Suffering?
Our leaders appear to be oblivious to the profound economic pain the majority of Americans are experiencing.January 14, 2011 |
This is what a broken economic model looks like: record profits for corporate America, Wall Street paying out fat bonuses to its execs and the wealthy doing well enough to create a surge in demand for luxury items, while most of the rest of us struggle just to make ends meet in a devastated economic landscape.
You've no doubt heard about the unemployment numbers and the alarming number of Americans losing their homes, but a series of reports that paint a stunningly vivid picture of the human toll of the meltdown – the intense pain felt by the unemployed, the under-employed and the working poor – have gotten less play, in large part because while most of the U.S. remains in the grip of what appears to be a Second Great Depression, the political and media establishment largely ignores -- or at least underplays – the economic catastrophe a huge number of families are experiencing.
Part of the reason for that disconnect is simply that corporate America is sitting on record profits, and the stock market has by and large rebounded from its bottom. It's also due to the fact that a country as large as the U.S. doesn't really have a single economy; we live and work in a number of state and regional economies. And the Washington DC metropolitan area is doing very well – its residents are living in an economy completely divorced from the one in which many Americans are desperately trying to stay afloat.
The unemployment rate in DC is 6 percent – more than a third lower than the nationwide rate of 9.4 percent. It added more net jobs in 2010 than any other area in the U.S. In 2008, before the crash, residents of the metropolitan area enjoyed the third highest incomes in the U.S.; since the meltdown, their wages have remained well above the national average. (It's worth noting, however, that according to the Washington Post, the political class's newfound obsession with cutting the deficit may put a damper on the DC area's fortunes in the coming years as tens of thousands of public sector jobs are killed off.) .........(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.alternet.org/economy/149538/many_americans_face_economic_catastrophe_--_why_do_the_political_and_media_establishments_ignore_their_suffering/