@larryhol tweeted a link to this NYTimes article today.

In my reporting, I regularly travel to banana republics notorious for their inequality. In some of these plutocracies, the richest 1 percent of the population gobbles up 20 percent of the national pie.

But guess what? You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home — and in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it may get worse.

Our Banana Republic – NYTimes.com

Larry added on his Facebook post : “Something I’ve been thinking for a long time. The process has been going on since the Reagan era.”

Yes it has.  And it looks like we’re ignorantly going to help that cause again by our knee-jerk ,  naive reactions (once again) in the mid-terms. 

Isn’t there any way to point out to the American public that a party’s habits DO NOT CHANGE in two years.  John Boehner promised us already that the Republicans “are not going to be any different than we were before”.  Cool.  That’ll do us.  Right back to where we were ,  which got us right to where we are. 

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976.

From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

Those are damning statistics right there.  And yet the Republican myth still lives:  Trickle down.  Here,  in actuality,  we have increase in wealth for the wealthiest,  and DECREASE for everyone else.  The exact OPPOSITE of “trickle” down.  The OPPOSITE. 

and the studies continue here

Robert H. Frank of Cornell University, Adam Seth Levine of Vanderbilt University, and Oege Dijk of the European University Institute recently wrote a fascinating paper suggesting that inequality leads to more financial distress. They looked at census data for the 50 states and the 100 most populous counties in America, and found that places where inequality increased the most also endured the greatest surges in bankruptcies.

Wake up America!  You are NOT exempt from falling prey to the myths that the rich and powerful spend billions to propagate.  And the Republican policies of the past 30 years (and not exactly challenged by the Clinton administration,  which no doubt helped them grasp power and be re-elected). Not only are you NOT exempt, you have fallen hard or it,  and keep your heads in the sand to keep from seeing the obvious fallout.  Economists told us that in the Bush W. years,  we have the first time in recorded economic history that an increase in GDP was NOT accompanied by a rise in standard of living for the middle class.  That’s because,  contrary to the trickle-down myth,  the rich kept the profits and used that to further tip the balance toward funneling larger and larger shares to THEIR coffers ,  leaving the economy dry once it “ran down” to the “lower classes”.  Essentially,  less and less ,  if anything,  is actually left to “run down”.  The “lower classes” is now everyone but the rich. The gap between the rich and the rest is much larger than the gap between the bottom and the middle class.  It has been that way for quite some time,  but it’s moving quickly and at record pace in the wrong direction.

So in this postelection landscape, let’s not aggravate income gaps that already would make a Latin American caudillo proud. To me, we’ve reached a banana republic point where our inequality has become both economically unhealthy and morally repugnant.