2009 was the worst economic year since the Great Depression.

Yet, the average American household has LESS money than in 2009, and has been declining year after year. (By '2009' I mean the year late 08 through late 09. These collapses don't tend to start January first.)

Despite our "recovery," people are worse off than worst. It's not that the fantastic enrichment of the 1% 2009-2013 has merelt failed to trickle-down proportionally. The folks in the bottom half have lost additional ground, and continue to do so.

Cable TV and internet chatter throw up one issue after another and find deep political meaning in a series of tabloid news stories in the daily churn, but none of them really mean all that much, politically.

For a large segment of America the economic collapse remains the big story, and has been the big story every single day for coming up on six fricking years.

And that drives and colors all political developments in the way that the nature of water is the base reality for a ship tacking this way and that.


The political argument world is starting to resemble the show UNDER THE DOME which introduces endless soap-opera elements to maintain viewer interest because somehow the problem of an entire town being trapped under a giant impenetrable supernatural space dome isn't interesting enough.

Like "the dome," catastrophic changes in our national economic life are just "there"... a constant background that we adjust our daily expectations to accommodate. The forest than cannot be seen for the trees.