Five Years Later, US Households Still Haven’t Recouped Financial Losses from Crisis
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/02/12/1579211/1-percent-121-gains/
The Federal Reserve reported on Monday that total American household net worth increased by $1.9 trillion in the third quarter of the year, hitting a total of $77.3 trillion. As the Wall Street Journal notes, “Americans’ net worth is still roughly 1.4 percent below its peak” once inflation is factored in. Total household net worth peaked at the end of the first quarter of 2007 — just before the collapse wiped out about $17 trillion in household wealth — at roughly a trillion dollars above its latest level.
By contrast, bank profits have rebounded to record highs in less than five years. Many of the financial officials whose negligence or malfeasance contributed most directly to the crisis have walked away with not just their freedom but their personal fortunes intact. None of this has stopped financial executives from feeling aggrieved.
The partial recovery in household wealth is also misleading because that recovery has been so concentrated among the wealthy as to be imperceptible for most of the country. The top 1 percent of earners captured 121 percent of income gains in the first two years of the recovery — meaning that people at the bottom of the income distribution saw their earnings fall in that same period. Despite massive productivity gains in recent years, American workers have seen their wages fall since the recession. These facts contribute to a scary and ongoing reality: The middle class is disappearing at a time when America’s economy needs to be growing from the middle out in order to restore economic mobility for future generations.
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design, partly because of our inaction, and mostly because of policies from our administrations, some of whom we voted for, that have and continue to deliberately "enhanced" the 1%'s ability to hoover wealth away from hard working people...
I'm sick of the cheerleaders for these assholes. They encourage this sort of behavior by psychopaths politicians they happen to get strokes from, whether it is a paycheck or just something for their ego...
And I'm through with talking about it. Whether it comes to not voting for the party because they won't quit helping those bastards at everyone else's expense, or something else, I've had enough.
btw, the below is an excerpt from Baker's book - because being informed and angry is always better than being, well, just angry 
. And unlike the additional costs one will incur by voting for people who have only the wealthy person's interests in mind, he makes this available at no additional cost to you, as a pdf or for your Kindle or Nook, here.
Dean Baker | Inequality: Government Is a Perp, Not a Bystander, here.
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The problem is that President Obama wants the public to believe that inequality is something that just happened. It turns out that the forces of technology, globalization, and whatever else simply made some people very rich and left others working for low wages or out of work altogether. The president and other like-minded people feel a moral compulsion to reverse the resulting inequality. This story is 180 degrees at odds with the reality. Inequality did not just happen, it was deliberately engineered through a whole range of policies intended to redistribute income upward.
Trade is probably the best place to start just because it is so obvious. Trade deals like NAFTA were quite explicitly designed to place our manufacturing workers in direct competition with the lowest paid workers in the world. The text was written after consulting with top executives at major companies like General Electric. Our negotiators asked these executives what changes in Mexico's law would make it easier for them to set up factories in Mexico. The text was written accordingly
....
Those banksters belong behind bars. Like they do in Iceland. That meltdown did not have to happen.
