A massive crime against this nation by the 1%

From Hullabaloo:

The fact that the Dow is at over 13,500 but unemployment remains above 8% is proof of a massive crime against this nation by the 1%. It may be "legal" crime, but it's a crime nonetheless.

A bit more here.

It is a crime that the wealthy ruling elite has figured out how to keep the vast majority of American prosperity for itself, a moral crime, as the excerpt above suggests, because this same elite has also transmuted its massive economic power into massive political power in order to literally rewrite the law for its own benefit.

But what's really fascinating to me about this comparison of economic measurements is that it makes pretty obvious that the whole notion of "trickle down" or "rising tides lifting all the boats," whatever you want to call it, is fatally flawed. That is, the entire rationale undergirding pretty much all conservative economic arguments is that if government helps the rich to get richer, the rich then use that help, in the form of tax cuts and deregulation, to expand their businesses, hire more people, and raise wages: maybe it used to work this way, back when I was a kid, but definitely not anymore.

The rich now get richer and keep it all for themselves.

The statistics at the moment make it achingly obvious, but this is a longstanding trend. Wages have been stagnating since the late 1970s. Middle class families have been maintaining their lifestyles with credit. The single earner family became the two earner family not because of feminism, but because of necessity. This stark contrast between the go-go stock market and dismal employment prospects is hopefully the low point for all this--it could very well get worse. But this is not new; we've been in big trouble for years.

The numbers, after all, don't lie.

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