More Than Fifteen Million

That's how many people are "officially" unemployed. Worse is that people are concluding that this is no ordinary recession and that the American Dream is gone for them.

This all ties into the expansion of income inequality, which started to take off thirty years ago and which is approaching that of a 3rd World nation. Severe income inequality means that people who are not born into money, who are not winners of Lucky Sperm Lotto, stand no real chance of moving up in the world. When people believe that hard work will not pay off, when they believe that the game is rigged against them, that's when they are ripe for the message that they are being kept down by some nefarious cabal.

We know how that tends to work out.

And I cannot conclude anything other than such an outcome is what many of the strategists of the republican party have in mind.