Clouding the issue with facts has never been a less effective strategy for social change than it is today.

The internet, cable news, AM radio talk shows, and social networking technologies all contribute to a media culture that can make anything at all seem true through repetition and heated appeals to human emotion. In other words, say anything enough times with enough feeling and it becomes true, regardless of whether or not it really is true.

‘Spin’ is a powerful force and people believe what they want to believe. I can’t change that fact, even though I personally find it disturbing. My own political sentiments are similar to those of a friend I once had who would listen to long-winded theoretical arguments with great patience and then, when the speaker was finally finished, remark dryly, “OK, but reality still counts for something, right?”

I’m a pragmatist, not a commie, but I’ve gotten used being called names (like commie) whenever I bring this stuff up. I realize now that labeling is what angry people do on the internets in place of research, analysis, and problem solving. Find the right epithet, apply, move on. Problem solved. At least for awhile.

I get that. I really do.

Yet surely reality does still count for something. Maybe nothing persuasive. But something.

I’ve become something of a statistics geek since the crash. Nothing gets my attention these days like a weird, unsettling number—especially if I can verify that it means exactly what it seems to mean (which it doesn’t always). Collecting statistics—listing actual verifiable factual facts as opposed to invented facts—can cobble together a picture of our collective economic situation that is dramatically different than the one endlessly debated in today’s media.

Statistics can always be manipulated, sure—but the weight of a big pile of compatible numbers from a wide variety of sources begins to gather an odifierous presence after awhile. We can ignore the elephant in the living room, but the pile of elephant dung—that’s a problem. A list of facts may not be as persuasive as professionally presented BS—but facts, like people, can make a compelling case when enough of them come together in one place. Numbers still matter. In lots of ways.

If nothing else, the facts today tell working people who aren’t rich that they aren’t nuts—they just aren’t rich. (Being poor can make you nuts of course, but that’s a different issue.)

Still think Americans live in the land of opportunity?

Consider the following facts:

• The richest top 10% of all Americans earn 71% of the nation’s wages. The top 1% earn over 30%.
• Wealth distribution is currently even more unequal than income distribution. The top 10% of Americans currently hold 90% of the nation’s wealth.
• Unemployment among the bottom 25% of wage earners currently stands at over 30%. Unemployment among the top 25% is currently 3.2%. (A rate of 3-5% is considered by many economists to signal no unemployment—that is, such a rate simply quantifies normal job changes, shifts in life choices, etc.)
• With two working adults, the average American family today earns less in wages than a family with one working adult earned 30 years ago.
• The U.N. and the OECD place the U.S. dead last among developed nations in terms of social mobility. Despite the Horatio Algier myth, there is more upward social mobility in any other developed nation on the planet right now than there is in the U.S.
• 41% of increased U.S. profits generated in 2010 were created by speculation within the financial industry—the same kind of nonproductive trading that caused the crash. 
• The financial sector currently also accounts for 41% of U.S. GDP (a different way of saying the industry generates 41% of national profits). In other words, nearly half of all production right now in the U.S. is smoke-and-mirrors high finance, so if you’re unemployed and you’re still not feelin’ the love, it isn’t just your bad attitude—at least, not statistically speaking it isn’t.
• Investment generates far, far more income than work. In other words, labor is NOT a good way to generate income today. Even if you can find a way to work for money, (and many can’t), you will not be able to keep up with the amount of income generated by investment at the top. In other words, if you don’t start with real wealth to invest, you cannot accumulate wealth in the current financial environment. Mathematically speaking, hard work will not do it, no matter WHAT your grandmother told you.
• Income inequality has spiked so rapidly and so dramatically in the U.S. since the 1980s that the U.N. released a special report in 2009 expressing concerns that inequality, especially in major U.S. cities, was approaching levels that are known to result in poliitical instability and violence—levels comparable to some of the most unstable African and South American nations.
• Political instability in the U.S. has global implications. A sudden collapse of the U.S. government is no longer considered a ridiculous possibility by some financial experts outside the U.S., by he aforementioned  U.N. report, and by some economists.
• The average American household carries $11,000 in credit card debt alone. 
• Nearly one third of all mortgages—subprime and otherwise—are currently ‘underwater’, meaning the home is now worth less than what is owed on the note. This percentage is expected to rise over the course of the next several years.
• Since 1983, average pay in the financial sector ballooned to 181% that of other industries.
• During the same period, average CEO pay has increased over 400%.
• Income disparity in the U.S. is now greater than it was in 1929. The superrich in the U.S. now hold a larger share of the national wealth than since statistics on wealth first started being recorded.

In an articled entitled The Quiet Coup, published in the May 2009 issue of The Atlantic, former IMF economist Simon Johnson makes the credible argument that the U.S. government has in fact already fallen, and that what we have now in the U.S. is not a democracy but rather an functional oligarchy in which the superrich one half of one percent at the top of the foodchain—the same people who run the financial sector—have seized the government and now effectively control it to further enrich themselves.

That may not be news. But it’s backed up by lots of rather scary facts.

Resources and websites, red, blue, pink, whatever:

http://extremeinequality.org/

http://www.a-e-e.org/

http://www.stateoftheusa.org/index.asp

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121677287690575589.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/opinion/18brooks.html?_r=1

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120468366051012473-email.html