This weekend, a friend of mine with two kids in college told me their family will be hit with a 20 percent pay cut because of the sequester. They were grateful to still have a job, but 20 percent is a huge cut to take when they're covering two college tuition bills and trying to get by. They had just started to climb out of their 2008 hole when the sequester took effect.

These are real people. Hard-working, middle class working people who pay taxes, pay their kids' college tuition, and are about ten years away from retirement.

Forgive me in advance for this rant, but I have had enough of the idiotic conservatives who think they can cover up their responsibility for this unnecessary sequestration by whining about White House tours, like this brainless Breitbot did on Sunday. My friends don't give a damn about White House tours and they don't begrudge the Obama family having Secret Service protection at all because they would expect our country to protect the person we have elected to run it.

It's not White House tours, you stupid, cynical conservatives. It's your fetish with "shrinking government" and serving your billionaires while decent, church-going, hard-working people take arbitrary pay cuts because conservatives are too full of their own hubris to pay attention to how they are destroying the country.

When teachers are laid off and federal employees are furloughed so they lose the equivalent of one months' pay, the economy will be destroyed. I understand that you selfish fools want to lay this at the feet of Obama and the Democrats, but I will make sure that doesn't happen if I have to shout from the top of every mountain in the country with my own mic.

I have had it with the mocking tone and the trivial focus, and not just from Breitbots, either. Where is the DC press on this? Where is the mainstream media? Have they bothered to even talk to one single person who is affected by this? Have any so-called "thought leaders" considered what this is doing to the economy?

That video at the top is about real people suffering because of this. Real people with real jobs who aren't billionaires and don't have the luxury of taking pay cuts. Like my friend, they're angry.

WHITNEY METZGER: This isn't a political game. And it's very frustrating to see so many politicians in Washington turn it into that.

CATHY LEWIS: Ten of the 11 members of Congress from Virginia voted against the bill that would have avoided sequestration. Metzger says trimming the staff now allows Davis Interiors to retain a smaller, but still highly skilled work force.

Keeping those skilled workers in the area when work is becoming more scarce is a concern shared by the region's leaders who, some say, haven't done enough to diversify the economy.

Craig Quigley says the potential loss of 12,000 good-paying jobs and more than $2 billion dollars in the local economy may be a wakeup call that's finally too loud to ignore.

CRAIG QUIGLEY: The day has arrived. OK? The federal spending in Hampton Roads is going down. So, we can accept a lower level of economic vitality, no growth, flat economy. Is that really what we want?

Or do we want to get serious finally about diversifying the economy, finding something to supplement, not replace -- I don't want to go to zero in federal spending, but I want to supplement it and reduce it as a percentage of the gross regional product, so that we are not totally drug-dependent on that.

Screw the teabaggers, the Brietbots and the merry gang of stupid pretend conservative media outlets. Especially, screw the sequester. I don't care if we have to be out in the streets with torches and pitchforks. Enough is enough. The billionaires have had their fun. Now let's please let the adults in the room fix this mess before it destroys the economy and the country right alongside it.

Also, to those cheering the across-the-board defense cuts, you should understand that the sequestration flavor of defense cuts is a bitter one for the economy. It takes a bite out of everything from shipbuilding to database development, IT services and routine maintenance of facilities. It doesn't take a bite out of security contractors' fees like Xe, and it won't stop drones from being built. So if you want actual cuts to defense that make sense, start making noise and putting pressure on Congress to do it right, to lose the budget-cutting fetish and actually do something that makes sense for the economy, stimulates growth and gets us back on track.

Are we really at a point where we have to take up collections for people who want their kids to get a college education without landing in a ton of debt, who want to hold onto their house and maybe even save something for retirement? Or maybe we could just tell the conservative echo chamber to take a long hike on the Appalachian trail and get something done for a change.

What would the US Senate be without Elizabeth Warren? She's a national treasure.

WARREN: If we started in 1960 and we said that, as productivity goes up -- that is, as workers are producing more -- then the minium wage was going to go up the same. And if that were the case, the minimum wage today would be about $22 an hour. So my question, Mr. Dube, if the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, what happened to the other $14.75? It sure didn't go to the worker.

No, it didn't. But the best part is when she very coolly schools a business owner, David Rutigliano, who walks right into her trap.

WARREN: During my Senate campaign, I ate a number 11 at McDonald’s many, many times a week. I know the price on that. $7.19. According to the data on the analysis of what would happen if we raised the minimum wage to $10.10 over three years, the price increase on that item would be about four cents. So instead of being $7.19 it would be $7.23. Are you telling me that’s unsustainable?

BUSINESS OWNER DAVID RUTIGLIANO: Senator Warren, not all restaurants are created equal. I’m in a full service restaurant business. McDonalds has efficiencies and they operate completely differently than I do. I have many jobs, many jobs that pay well above minimum wage. We have a retirement plan. We offer health insurance to our salaried employees. So my business is a little different. I can’t raise a four cent price. I mean I don’t have, I don’t operate like a fast food restaurant. I would hope you appreciate the distinction.

WARREN: I do appreciate the distinction and I’m not going to be in the business of being a McDonald’s representatives but they would talk about having some higher paid jobs and some opportunities for management and advancement as well. But I get your point, maybe it’s only four cents on $7.19. But if your entrees are $14.40 we’ll see how fast I can do the math — are you telling me you can’t raise your prices by eight cents?

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I am thankful each and every day that Barack Obama won the 2012 election, and that he is our president instead of Mitt Romney. The current version of the Republican Party is the most extreme, cynical, and utterly heartless group of people I have ever witnessed in American politics- and I have witnessed a lot in my 30-plus years in politics. I am proud of the president for the good things he has done on many different issues, and for many of the fights he has chosen to take on.

But on economic policy, and especially on fighting for the middle class, this President has two blind spots the size of a Mack truck.

The first is Wall Street. Obama’s first term Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner believed that the most important thing in making the economy work better was to help the biggest banks on Wall Street, and Obama’s current Attorney General openly admits in official testimony to Congress that he is hesitant to prosecute criminals who are executives at big banks because it might hurt those companies, and therefore, apparently, the broader economy. These policies are bad economics, bad morality, and bad politics. This allegiance to Wall Street’s interests has drained vast amounts of money out of productive investments in the real economy, put millions of homeowners underwater on their mortgages or into foreclosure, made big bank execs feel free to commit financial fraud, and allowed continued dangerous speculation in our financial markets that could lead to another financial panic in the not too distant future. These pro-Wall Street policies have slowed the economy down dramatically. Favoring the biggest banks over the rest of the economy is terrible policy if you want to help the middle class.

The other huge blind spot is on Obama’s great desire to strike this “grand bargain”, including cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits. He seems obsessed with the idea, offering it up to the Republicans over and over and over again, no matter how many times they say no. He is dead wrong on this issue, and Democrats in Congress should fight him on it tooth and nail.

On Medicare, there are plenty of ways to save serious money without hurting seniors. Negotiate drug prices, for example. Bring younger, healthier people into the Medicare pool. Ask hospitals, who cut a sweet deal in the health reform negotiating process, to find more cost savings. Squeeze the medical equipment industry more. Re-orient health care toward paying for good outcomes rather than fee for service. There’s a ton of savings to be had if we would take on the big health industry special interests, but Republicans have no interest in doing that. They want to squeeze those old people Paul Ryan describes as the “takers” in society. And because Obama wants to have a grand bargain with the Republicans, he has at various points offered up raising the retirement age (although he seems to have backed away from that offer, which is good given that the blue collar folks helped by Medicare and Social Security don’t enjoy the benefits of longer life expectancy nearly as much as high income people) and means testing Medicare. Do these proposals make good sense? Do they help the middle class? Who cares, we have to be bipartisan!

On Social Security, the president keeps suggesting a benefit cut called Chained CPI. The theory is that when inflation goes up, people can always substitute lower cost items- you know, if the cost of Ferraris heads north you can always switch to buying a Cadillac. The problem is that most seniors these days are retiring without pensions, their houses are worth less than used to be, and they don’t have the kind of savings that earlier generations of seniors did. They aren’t choosing between Ferraris and Cadillacs, they are choosing between cottage cheese and Velveeta at the grocery store. The product substitution thing on inflation that economists theorize about just doesn’t work with people on low fixed incomes.

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When I was a young organizer for Iowa Citizen Action Network, we were doing a lot of work on utility rate hikes. I met an elderly woman, maybe late 70s, who was living on her Social Security check. As utility prices went through the roof, her cost of living increase in that check wasn't coming anywhere close to covering the costs she had.

She was extremely worried, because as frugal as she was she couldn't figure out how to keep her heat on, pay her rent, and buy a few meager groceries. She thought the utilities might end up shutting her heat off. I suggested a social services agency she could go to, and that she might check with neighborhood churches to see if they had funds that could help. And I promised that I would do everything I could to fight for her.

I pushed hard on the local utility companies to try and shame them away from turning the heat off the dead of an Iowa winter, which didn't work very well because the utility companies had no shame. And my organization pushed in the legislature to get a bill passed that would prohibit utility shutoffs in the wintertime, which didn't pass the first year but did the second year we worked on it.

But it didn't pass in time to save the woman I met. Reading the Cedar Rapids Gazette one day that winter, I saw that the woman I met had been found dead in her apartment of hypothermia after the utility company had turned off her heat.

When we got the bill passed in the next session, I thought of her. I was proud that no one would die in the coming years in Iowa because of having their heat turned off, but I was also mourning that we were too late to save her. And I vowed to keep my promise to her as long as I lived, that I would keep fighting for her and people like her.

It’s 30 years later, but I still have promises to keep, as do all Democrats who claim to be on the side of the middle class and poor. As Dean Baker makes clear, if the President’s apparent offer of changing the CPI formula is part of the budget deal, it will be a very hard blow for generations to come for seniors who will be unlikely to have decent pensions or much in the way of savings to cushion the blow of these cuts. And with prices for necessities (utility prices, gas, groceries, health care) tending to go up more than the inflation rate in general, this is the absolute worst kind of cut to be making.

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I was complaining to a friend who is part of the D.C. consultancy class (although not the rich part). "What is it with all this crap about the middle class?" I said. "No one in that entire convention talked about the poor or the working class." My friend said that poor people preferred to think of themselves as middle class, even when they're not, and that it probably polled better.

"Really?" I said. "Because I don't know many people who still describe themselves as middle class. I know a lot of people who describe themselves as poor." This Pew survey bears out my impression:

The percentage of Americans who say they are in the lower-middle or lower class has risen from a quarter of the adult population to about a third in the past four years, according to a national survey of 2,508 adults by the Pew Research Center.

Not only has the lower class grown, but its demographic profile also has shifted. People younger than 30 are disproportionately swelling the ranks of the self-defined lower classes.1 The shares of Hispanics and whites who place themselves in the lower class also are growing.

Among blacks, the story is different. The share of blacks in the lower class has not changed in four years, one of the few demographic groups in which the proportion in the lower classes did not grow. As a consequence, a virtually identical share of blacks (33%) and whites (31%) now say they are in the lower class.

When it comes to political affiliation, more Democrats than Republicans place themselves in the lower classes, but Republicans saw a sharper rise over the past four years. Some 23% now call themselves lower class, up from 13% in 2008. Among Democrats, 33% now call themselves lower class, compared with 29% in 2008.

The survey finds that hard times have been particularly hard on the lower class. Eight-in-ten adults (84%) in the lower classes say they had to cut back spending in the past year because money was tight, compared with 62% who say they are middle class and 41% who say they are in the upper classes. Those in the lower classes also say they are less happy and less healthy, and the stress they report experiencing is more than other adults.

As they look to their own future and that of their children, many in the lower class see their prospects dimming. About three-quarters (77%) say it’s harder now to get ahead than it was 10 years ago. Only half (51%) say that hard work brings success, a view expressed by overwhelming majorities of those in the middle (67%) and upper classes (71%). While the expectation that each new generation will surpass their parents is a central tenet of the American Dream, those lower classes are significantly more likely than middle or upper-class adults to believe their children will have a worse standard of living than they do.

One obvious explanation: Even the people who have jobs don't have good jobs.

Doesn't seem like a group of voters who will listen all that sympathetically to millionaires and billionaires talking about "shared sacrifice." Dear oh dear, what will David Walker's Comeback America Initiative (Pete Peterson's latest surrogate front) do?

When the Obama campaign started raising questions about the way Bain Capital operated when Romney was the CEO, some Democrats who are close to Wall Street immediately starting complaining. We shouldn’t be attacking “capitalism”, they said, or the financial industry. But those Democrats are looking pretty foolish after the stories that have come out over the past few days. It has never been capitalism or even the financial industry being attacked when Bain’s style of operating is the subject: it is the worst kind of vampire capitalism that the Obama campaign is going after.

The idea of questioning Bain has always been essential to this campaign, because Romney has made clear that his main qualification to be President is the work he did at Bain. As the New York Times put it in their story Saturday “Companies’ Ills Did Not Harm Romney’s Firm”:

“Mr. Romney’s experience at Bain is at the heart of his case for the presidency. He has repeatedly promoted his years working in the “real economy,” arguing that his success turning around troubled companies and helping to start new ones, producing jobs in the process, has prepared him to revive the country’s economy. He has fended off attacks about job losses at companies Bain owned, saying, “Sometimes investments don’t work and you’re not successful.” But an examination of what happened when companies Bain controlled wound up in bankruptcy highlights just how different Bain and other private equity firms are from typical denizens of the real economy, from mom-and-pop stores to bootstrapping entrepreneurial ventures.”

But now, with this major new NYT story, plus the Washington Post pioneer-in-outsourcing story, it is becoming increasingly obvious to everyone why the Obama campaign and people like me have been making a big deal about Bain for a long time. All capitalism is not the same, and Bain is right up there with companies like Goldman Sachs in the sleaziness with which they make their money. What Bain did in buying these companies was to create a structure where they made money no matter what. As the saying goes, it’s nice work if you can get it- but you can’t get it unless you are willing to be absolutely brutal in pursuing your own profits at the expense of everyone else. What Bain did wasn’t just capitalism, but the worst sort of capitalism. As the NYT and other media sources have so explicitly laid it out, at least 7 Bain-owned companies went bankrupt, but “Bain structured deals so that it was difficult for the firm and its executives to ever really lose, even if practically everyone else involved with the company that Bain owned did, including its employees, creditors and even, at times, investors in Bain’s funds.” Bain loaded these companies with debt, in part so they could pay Bain millions (sometimes tens of millions) of dollars in fees. They then wrote off the debt on their taxes. In some cases (at least 4 times according the NYT story) Bain amassed huge short term profits before the companies, weighed down with the debt Bain forced on them, sunk under the weight of that debt.

Some of the companies Bain bought did better than that. Of course, some of those that did were out-sourcing and off-shoring pioneers. And others did better in great part by laying off huge numbers of workers and/or slashing the wages and benefits of many others. This is the track record that is “at the heart of [Romney’s] case for the Presidency”?

The debate over Bain-onomics is exactly the kind of debate this country should be having. We are at a make or break moment for the American middle class. What should our path forward be? Will it be the path of Bain and the biggest banks on Wall Street, which put profits over everything else, making millions because other people went broke and lost their jobs? Or will it be a path that invests in the health of our economy and the business sector from the bottom up? This is the fundamental choice for Americans: do we help and promote the kind of businesses that make and sell products and services here in America? Do we help the economy by investing in our people, giving them good education, college loans, and decent wages so they can buy goods from the small businesses in their community? Do we help our small businesses with start-up capital and giving them a fighting chance to compete with the big dogs? Or is our government going to be 100% geared toward the big incumbents who already have big money and market share and well-connected lobbyists who can get them sweetheart deals and tax breaks?

I think the Obama team has been absolutely right to engage all-out in this debate over Bain, and to frame this race as to who will fight for the middle class in their moment of need. This new ad shows they get it:

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I'm not sure how the Republican party came to be known as the party of "compassionate conservatism," unless it was simply because they used to at least pretend to care about the problems of the middle and low-income class people. In this 2007 video of Republican Mitt Romney's exchange with a wheelchair bound man suffering from a rare and deadly form of muscular dystrophy, Romney's compassionate conservatism takes an icy cold form, as he turns his back on the ill young man, Clayton Holton, and walks away without answering his question.

This exchange, and others like it, will no doubt keep cropping up to haunt Romney throughout his campaign. His complete inability to relate to, or show anything resembling empathy towards mainstream Americans is stunningly on display here. If his position on medical marijuana was due to something he believes is a greater good, as a contender for president of the United States, he should certainly be able to articulate that.However this is likely due to the fact that Romney has no real solutions for real people's problems.

Transcript:

Sick Man: "I suffer from an extremely rare type of muscular dystrophy and I have to take medication or I'll die. Right now I weigh less than 80 pounds, I have all my life. Um, I have support of 5 of my doctors that I am living proof that Medical Marijuana works. I am completely against legalizing it for everyone but there is medical . . ."

Romney: "And you have synthetic marijuana that's available and other . . . "

Sick Man: "It makes me sick. I've tried it and it makes me throw up. I have tried all the medications they are and all the forms they come in after my stimulators, the steroids. I have muscular dystrophy, that's completely against my DNA."

Romney: "I'm sorry to hear that."

Sick Man: "My question to you is, will you arrest me and my doctors if I get medical marijuana?"

Romney: "I'm not in favor of medical marijuana."

(Romney looks away, moves on to next person mid-conversation)

Sick Man: "So, will you have me arrested? . . . "

Romney: "Hi, how are you?" (moving on to next person in line)

Sick Man: "Excuse me, will you please answer my question?"

3rd Person: "You're not going to answer his question, Governor?"

Romney: "I think I have."

3rd Person: "No, he asked you if you were going to arrest him. He asked if you were going to arrest patients like him, Governor? You're just going to ignore a person in a wheelchair?"

Romney: "I spoke with him."

3rd Person: "Yeah, but you didn't answer his question!"

Granted, the Obama administration's stance on medical marijuana isn't any more appealing to medical marijuana advocates than Romney's, and came under fire from Democrat Nancy Pelosi earlier this month for the continued raids on marijuana dispensaries. The difference is that I doubt Obama would turn his back and walk away from someone with a legitimate concern about any issue, let alone a sick man in a wheel chair.

At least Romney didn't throw this man down on the ground and cut his hair off.

Clayton Holton, while still wheel-chair bound, and suffering the effects of the muscular dystrophy as it ravages his body, he is able to maintain some semblance of normalcy in his quality of life. He continues to credit marijuana for keeping him alive, and remains a staunch advocate of medical marijuana.

[Video Credit: Heather, H/T Ministry of Truth]

One day after branding President Obama "really out of touch with what's happening in America," Mitt Romney marked his Florida primary victory by declaring, "I'm not concerned about the very poor." Of course, back in December Romney announced that "I'm concerned about the poor in this country," adding, "We have to make sure the safety net is strong and able to help those who can't help themselves."

If Mitt Romney's latest statement seems like a contradiction, at least it's a more honest one. After all, his proposal to slash $700 billion in Medicaid spending and send what's left as block grants to the states would devastate the program serving nearly 60 million poor and elderly Americans. But as it turns out, his 59 point, 162 page economic plan isn't very concerned with the middle class, either. Over the next decade, that budget-busting blueprint would drain $6.6 trillion from the U.S. Treasury and divert most of it into the pockets of the richest Americans.

On Wednesday, Romney explained his devil-may-care attitude towards the 46.2 million Americans now living in poverty and the 51 million more with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line:

"I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there," Romney told CNN. "If it needs repair, I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich, they're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling."

That's an odd statement for Mitt Romney to make, and not merely because he previously declared himself part of "the 80 to 90 percent of us" who are middle class. Romney's own economic plan says otherwise. Romney's isn't worried about fixing the safety net; he wants to shred it. And in December, Chris Wallace of Fox News called him on it.

WALLACE: But you don't think if you cut $700 billion dollars in aid to the states that some people are going to get hurt?

ROMNEY: In the same way that by cutting welfare spending dramatically, I don't think we hurt the poor. In the same way I think cutting Medicaid spending by having it go to the states run more efficiently with less fraud, I don't think will hurt the people that depend on that program for their healthcare.

It's not just that Romney's block grant program would lead governors to begin "capping enrollment, thinning benefits, increasing co-payments, and so on" in the future. As Ezra Klein explained, they are already doing that now:

Twenty states implemented benefit restrictions in the past year. In fiscal year 2010, 39 states implemented Medicaid provider rate cuts or freezes (up from 33 in fiscal year 2009), and 37 states have provider rate restrictions planned for the next fiscal year.

And as the Kaiser Family Foundation determined last year, the Ryan plan championed by Mitt Romney and virtually every Republican in Washington to repeal the Affordable Care Act would certainly hurt working Americans as well:

"By 2021, between 31 million and 44 million fewer people nationally would have Medicaid coverage under the House Budget Plan relative to expected enrollment under current law."

Then there's Mitt Romney's tax plan.

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Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary by playing the victim card. Now, Mitt Romney hopes to win the Republican nomination by doing the same thing. But while Gingrich's ploy of portraying himself as the latest conservative target of a liberal "elite" media assault is always a winner with the Republican faithful, Romney may not be so lucky with his gambit. After all, his uniquely toxic combination of immense wealth and near-total lack of empathy will make it hard for voters to believe Romney's claim that his foes are "attacking you."

Addressing his disappointed followers Saturday, Mitt Romney took a page out of the Linda Tripp/Christine O'Donnell playbook and announced, in essence, "I'm you." As Politico reported, Romney painted himself as everyman, the living incarnation of your American Dream (starting around the 4:40 mark above):

"Our president has divided the nation, engaged in class warfare and attacked the free enterprise system that has made America the economic envy of the world. We cannot defeat that president with a candidate who has joined in that very assault on free enterprise," Romney said.

Calling Gingrich's attacks on his Bain record "a mistake for our party and for our nation," Romney appealed to the hearts of Republican primary voters in his bid to win them back.

"When my opponents attack success and free enterprise, they're not only attacking me, they're attacking every person who dreams of a better future," Romney said. "He's attacking you."

Despite the best efforts of his water-carriers like David Brooks, Ari Fleischer and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Romney's "I'm you" defense is going to be a very hard sell. After all, voters' obvious disdain for him has less to do with their mythical "envy" over his money and how he made it than their belief that Mitt Romney lives in a different world and simply doesn't care about theirs.

For confirmation, Mitt need only look to his ally and Massachusetts GOP Senator Scott Brown. Brown didn't merely call on Romney to release his tax returns (which he grudgingly announced he will do on Tuesday), but rejected any notion that the former Governor is like "you."

"He's in a category, a lot of those folks are in categories that we don't really understand."

Which is why Romney's repeated efforts to depict himself as a "man of the people" have failed so completely - and so comically. Romney, who this week explained that over the last decade "my income comes overwhelmingly from some investments made in the past," joked with jobless voters that "I'm also unemployed." The $250 million man similarly declared himself "part of the 80 to 90 percent of us" who are middle class, when just the "not very much" $374,000 he earned in speaking fees last year puts him in the top one percent of income earners. Whether or not he really enjoys firing people, Mitt Romney almost certainly was never in danger of either "getting a pink slip" or pooping in a bucket during his time as a missionary at a toney Paris mansion. (Who else would lecture a child about his plans to divvy up his estate among his 16 grandchildren or endorse rooftop canine waterboarding?) And there's no doubt that the man who spent $12 million to buy his third home (none of which are located on "the real streets of America") didn't win any friends when he offered this prescription for the housing market crisis:

"Don't try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom, allow investors to buy homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up and let it turn around and come back up."

It's no wonder Mitt Romney believes income inequality should only be discussed in "quiet rooms" and his tax returns not discussed at all.

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Some politicians are saying that the latest unemployment report is good news, but it's not. It shows us that this country is still in crisis. It shows us that the government needs to act quickly and aggressively to create jobs, and to restore the lost earning power of the average American who has a job.

Most of all it shows us that millions of struggling people are still invisible in the Nation's Capitol.

This week the Occupy movement is holding a series of "Take Back the Capitol" events in Washington. Let's hope it shines some light on the country's unemployed, under-employed, and under-earning millions. Until now, they've been pretty much invisible in that town.

The Invisible Americans are all around you. They're in your state, in your community, maybe in your family. Maybe they're your kids, just out of college. Maybe they're your fifty-something uncles and aunts, your grandparents, your grandchildren. They're right there in the jobs report, for anyone with the eyes - and the willingness - to find them.

Invisible: Millions of the long-term unemployed.

While some celebrated an unemployment rate of "only" 8.6 percent, half that change was explained by the fact that 315,000 people dropped out of the labor force. Job creation barely kept pace with the entry of new people into the workforce.

Those 315,000 people join the 5.7 million people officially classified as long-term unemployed. That number is at historically high levels, representing nearly half (43 percent) of all the jobless people in this country.

It's not that they don't want jobs. Most of them have fallen into despair. Even worse, what they may have fallen into is realism. Unless we use the power of government to do something, some of them will never work again. They're falling out of the "normal" economy and into a new reality of persistent joblessness and, for some, eventual poverty.

Invisible: Segregation on the unemployment line.

The official jobless rate for white people is 7.6 percent, versus 15.5 percent for African Americans and 11.4 percent for Hispanics.

And those are only the official numbers. The figures are much higher if you count the long-term unemployed, the under-employed, and "discouraged" workers.

In a nation that prides itself on being the land of opportunity, we're denying entire groups of people the chance for a better life.

Invisible: The jobless generation.

There's a silent epidemic of youth unemployment. Official teenaged unemployment is 23.7 percent, and the real rate is much higher. Recent college graduates face historically high jobless rates - along with historically high student debt.

Studies show that young people who begin their work lives un- or under-employed face an entire lifetime of lower income. By failing to act, we're betraying our own children and throwing away an entire generation of young people.

Invisible: The under-employed.

There's a silent epidemic of under-employment. There are 8.5 million people who want to work full-time but can only get part time work. in that category. That figure dropped slightly, but we don't know how much of the drop was due to people finding full-time work or being laid off altogether.

And remember, underemployed people aren't just making less money. In most cases they're also going without health insurance or other benefits. They're struggling on the margins of working America, barely surviving and never knowing how much money the'll earn from one week to the next.

Invisible: The vanishing public servant.

While Washington politicians drone on about "budget cuts," there's not much discussion of the fact that many of those cuts increase unemployment - at the Federal, state, and local levels. Government jobs have been dwindling since 2008, and the shrinkage is continuing a time when we need more of them.

Teachers, police officers, highway toll takers, postal workers - you name it, they're losing their jobs. And the only debate in Washington seems to be, How many more of them can we make unemployed?

Invisible: The drowning middle class.

Average hourly earnings for all nonfarm employees decreased last month by 1 percent. Average hourly earnings increased by only 1.8 percen over the last year, while the cost of living (measured by the Consumer Price Index) increased 3.5 percent.

Once again average Americans have fallen behind in earnings and has seen their standard of living decline. Meanwhile, incomes continue to skyrocket for the wealthiest Americans. Income inequality is the worst it's been since the Great Depression.

Welcome to the New Gilded Age.

Political Blindness

This week we heard almost nothing in Washington about direct action to address these crises. The Democrats' "payroll tax holiday" would provide urgently needed ongoing relief for the battered middle class, and would also have a mild job-creating effect. But it would do so in an inefficient way, and also needlessly and recklessly endangers Social Security.

Republicans have no solution at all - just more of the same policies that caused these problems in the first place.

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