blissandzen:

Exhibit 1 is “deep poverty”, people living below 50 percent of the poverty line:

   

Exhibit 2 is real income of non-elderly households:

And Exhibit 3 is employment-based health insurance, whose decline has luckily been offset by public provision:

Things were getting worse for lots of Americans even before the slump. Now they’re getting worse faster.

via Paul Krugman

kileyrae:

“Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”

(via MoveOn)

cultureofresistance:

#1) According to a poll taken in 2009, 61 percent of Americans ”always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

#2) The number of Americans with incomes below the official poverty line rose by about 15% between 2000 and 2006, and by 2008 over 30 million U.S. workers were earning less than $10 per hour.

#3) According to Harvard Magazine, 66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.

#4) According to that same poll, 36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.

#5) A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.

#6) According to one new survey, 24% of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.

#7) Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.

#8) Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.

#9) For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.

#10) In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1.  Since the year 2000, that ratiohas exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.

#11) One study found that as of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.

#12) The bottom 40 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.

#13) Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.

#14) In the United States, the average federal worker now earns about twice as much as the average worker in the private sector.

#15) An analysis of income tax data by the Congressional Budget Office found that the top 1% of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.

#16) In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.

#17) More than 40% of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.

#18) For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.

#19) This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.

#20) Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.

#21) According to one new study, approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.

#22) According to Professor Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley, the gap between what the top 10 percent of Americans earn per year and what the rest of us earn has been widening sharply for the last 30 years.  His measurements show that the top 10% percent of Americans now take in approximately 50% of the income.

timetruthhumor:

About 45,000 striking Verizon Communications employees are set to go back to work starting Monday night, agreeing Saturday to end a walkout while contract negotiations continue.

Almost half of the workers in Verizon’s wireline business went on strike on Aug. 7 after talks for a new labor pact failed when their contract expired.

Under the latest agreement, Verizon promised to extend the terms of the old contract while it continues bargaining for a new one with two unions, the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. The CWA represents about 35,000 of the workers and the IBEW represents 10,000. […]

{Hopefully, the workers will get a fair deal from the management at Verizon. It would be nice to see the middle class be treated fairly, for a change.}

kohenari:

It seems President Obama knows I love infographics.

Here’s one that his campaign staffers put together after last night’s riveting GOP debate …

Personally, I love the prominence of “hogwash,” “Donald Trump,” “dog food,” and “cook you dinner.” Oh — and “Christmas with Elvis.”

The GOP definitely knows what’s on my mind right about now.

Tea Party Republicans like Gov. Scott Walker want to eliminate all unions, and we’re taking to the streets again Tuesday and Wednesday to stop them.

They also want to outlaw abortion and birth control and return to the dark days of back-alley abortions. We can’t vote them out until next November, but we can stop spending our hard-earned dollars with the companies that fund them.

You’ve been hearing a lot about state politicians trying to destroy jobs, the middle-class way of life and collective bargaining rights as payback to the CEOs who funded their campaigns.

Have you seen what’s going on in Washington, D.C.?

The CEO-funded politicians in D.C. are attempting to ram through a slash-and-burn budget that would hurt working families nationwide—a budget that cuts health care and education for children, college aid for students, job safety for all of us and Social Security for our parents and grandparents.

This has gone too far already!

Activists like you will be joining rallies that start between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. local time Tuesday in hundreds of cities and towns across America.

Click to find a rally location near you:

http://pol.moveon.org/event/events/index.html?action_id=239&id=&search_distance=200&search_zip=&submit=Search

America Continues To Pay An Enormous Price For The Reagan Revolution

Myths can be harmful. And perhaps the most damaging myth in modern American history is this: Ronald Reagan was a great president.

The Reagan myth machine has been in high gear as we recently passed the centennial of the 40th president’s birth…

Reagan came to power largely on the strength of a question he asked of Americans, to great effect, during a debate with Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” …

Perhaps it’s time for Americans to ask this question: “Are we better off than we were 30 years ago, when Reagan took office?” The answer is a resounding no. And that question is particularly powerful when you consider that two of “The Gipper’s” successors—George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush—practiced what might charitably be called “refried Reaganism.”

In essence, America has been ruled by Reagan’s ideas for 20 of the past 30 years—and even Democrats in the White House during that time have moved way to the right of genuine progressive ideas. Where has it gotten us? On a road to destruction, says veteran journalist Robert Parry, who broke many of the stories about the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.

Numerous reports have been issued in recent months about negative U.S. trends that started roughly around 1980. That’s not an accident, Parry says, because that’s the year Reagan (was elected to) office. Parry makes his case in a recent article at Consortium News titled “Ronald Reagan’s 30-Year Time Bombs.” Writes Parry:

The time element of “30 years” keeps slipping into American official reports and news stories about the origins of crises—the latest in “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report”—but rarely is the relevance of the three-decade span explained, and there is a reason.

The failure to close the circle in saying who started the nation off on the path toward these disasters is because nearly everyone shies away from blaming Ronald Reagan for almost anything. […]

Wisconsin’s Republican Senators found a way to pass Gov. Walker’s anti-worker proposal — without a single Democratic Senator present.

There isn’t a shred of doubt left if this was a budget fight or an assault on workers. With one vote, Republicans have declared one goal: Break unions and middle class families.

We will hold them accountable in Wisconsin. We will fight back and win.

We will be working all night to prepare new online ads and radio ads — and in the morning, we’ll buy more TV ads in the districts of Republican senators up for recall.

Please contribute $5 to fund our campaign to fight back and stop the Republican war on working families.

This is it. Now more than ever we need to fight back and not give an inch.

As it says in our ad. “This is a battle we need to win.”

Contribute now

Thank you for everything you do.

-Charles

Charles Chamberlain, Political Director
Democracy for America