Above: "Eviction," a crayon aquatint by Dorothy Rutka (1907-1985), created while she was in the WPA's Federal Art Project, 1937. Rutka graduated from the Cleveland School of Art in 1929, and worked "as a portrait painter, a writer and illustrator before joining the graphic arts project with the WPA in 1936." In 1985, she and her husband were murdered during a burglary of their home in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Image courtesy of the General Services Administration and the Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University.
A new report on the 400 richest people in America shows that, once again, they're enjoying record wealth - $2.7 trillion, up from $2.4 trillion. And yesterday, the stock market hit a record high too, 23,328.
Sadly, the prosperity of the few isn't doing much for everyday Americans. For example, wages are still stagnant and evictions are running rampant. With respect to the latter, Harvard Professor Matthew Desmond recently said, "If you look at the numbers, city by city, they're just shocking. There are 40 evictions a day that happen in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and 60 marshal evictions a day in New York City. The last time we rolled out the American Housing Survey, we asked renters: 'do you think you'll be evicted soon?' and 2.8 million renting homes said 'yes' to that question... we're evicting people not in the tens and hundreds of thousands, but rather millions."
Just another painful lesson in the failure of trickle-down economics. But it doesn't matter. Tens of millions of Americans will continue to vote for right-wing politicians who, in turn, will continue to push for more tax cuts for the rich. And so the nightmarish loop of economic failure and soaring income & wealth inequality continues.
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