Normalizing the unthinkable

David DeGraw has assembled a report (part 1 of 2) on how the “Economic Elite Have Engineered an Extraordinary Coup, Threatening the Very Existence of the Middle Class.”

It’s what I’ve been arguing for quite a while now: that, apart from (but also in part as a result of) the current crises, there has been a steady immiseration of the U.S. working-class.

The devastating numbers across-the-board on the economic front are staggering. I’ll go through some of them here, many we have already become all too familiar with. We hear some of these numbers all the time, so much so that it appears as if we have already begun “to normalize the unthinkable.” You may be sick of hearing them, but behind each number is an enormous amount of individual suffering, American lives and families who are struggling worse than they ever have.

DeGraw goes through the numbers, with links to the original sources. The upshot is, for the past 30 years or so, the balance has slowly but steadily shifted in favor of capital and against working people. The current crises are both a result of that shift (since the financial bubbles are at least in part a consequence of a worsening the distribution of income and wealth) and one more cause of that shift (since the current crises, and the policies enacted to “save” the system, are enhancing profitability but lowering living standards for the vast majority).

The fact is, neither the mainstream media, which fails to connect the dots, nor mainstream academic economists, who are obsessed with defending their models and pinning the blame on one or another financial enterprise, are helping us make sense of these changes. They are merely serving to normalize the unthinkable. It’s people like DeGraw and Elizabeth Warren who are putting the pieces together and sounding the alarm. The question is, who is listening? And when will we do something about it?