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We call it “the nation’s capital,” but that’s increasingly a misnomer. Consider Congress, where as last year ended 250 members, or 47% of our representatives, were millionaires, and the estimated median net worth of a senator was $2.56 million. Or consider the city of movers, shakers, and lobbyists they live in. In Washington D.C., “the top fifth of earners in the District make an average of 29 times the income of the bottom fifth.” In average annual household salary that translates as $259,000 versus $9,100. For the capital’s top 5%, that number is $473,000, “far above the $292,000 averaged by their counterparts in other large cities.”

Washington as the people’s capital? More reasonably, it’s the capital of American wealth in a country in which the super-rich, after taking some lumps in the Great Recession, are again outpacing everyone else. As TomDispatch regular Barbara Ehrenreich points out, half a century ago Michael Harrington pointed a finger at the world of American poverty, calling it “the other America” — and that label stuck. Today, in a country where Hispanic and African American wealth was nearly wiped out by the bursting of the housing bubble, the elderly have increasingly seen their savings evaporate, and the poor are ever less “other” and ever more us, a new Harrington might consider labeling the world of the wildly rich, that 1% and their eternal bonuses, as “the real other America.”

It’s all too fitting that the leading Republican presidential candidate is a quarter-billionaire. He may be running as a Washington outsider, but unlike most Americans, he’ll be right at home in the new Washington.

Ehrenreich’s post today is the beginning of something new. With it, she launches the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (developed with colleagues from the Institute for Policy Studies and the G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism). Beginning this spring, it will pay laid-off or underemployed journalists to produce original work on what she calls the “greased chute” of poverty. Stay tuned, you’ll hear more about it at this website or you can check out it out early at EconomicHardship.org. Her latest piece is a joint TomDispatch/Nation article and will appear in -

Rediscovering Poverty
How We Cured “The Culture of Poverty,” Not Poverty Itself
By Barbara Ehrenreich Read the rest of this entry →

This story originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Sometimes words outlive their usefulness.  Sometimes the gap between changing reality and the names we’ve given it grows so wide that they empty of all meaning or retain older meanings that only confuse us.  “Election,” “presidential election campaign,” and “democracy” all seem like obvious candidates for name-change.

I thought about this recently as President Obama hustled around my hometown, snarling New York traffic in the name of Campaign 2012.  He was, it turned out, “hosting” three back-to-back fundraising events: one at the tony Gotham Bar and Grill for 45 supporters at $35,800 a head (the menu: roasted beet salad, steak and onion rings, with apple strudel, chocolate pecan pie, and cinnamon ice cream — a meal meant to “shine a little light” on American farms); one for 30 Jewish supporters at the home of Jack Rosen, chairman of the American Jewish Congress, for at least $10,000 a pop; and one at the Sheraton Hotel, evidently for the plebes of the contribution world, that cost a mere $1,000 a head. (Maybe the menu there was rubber chicken.)

In the course of his several meals, the president pledged his support for Israel (in the face of Republican charges that he is eternally soft on the subject), talked about “taxes and the economy” to his undoubtedly under-taxed listeners, and made this stirringly meaningless but rousing comment: “No matter who we are, no matter where we come from, we’re one nation.  We’re one people. And that’s what’s at stake in this election.”

Outside his final event, Occupy Wall Street protesters saw something else at stake, dubbing him the “1% president.”  The end result from a night’s heavy lifting: $2.4 million for his election campaign and the Democratic National Committee, nowhere close to 1% of what they will need for the next year.

These were the 67th, 68th, and 69th fundraisers attended by Obama so far in 2011, or the 71st, 72nd, and 73rd.  (It depended on who was counting.) In either case, we’re talking about approximately one fundraiser every five days, a total of 6% of the events in which Obama took part in this non-election year.

Think about that.  You vote for the president to spend some part of 20% of his days raising money for his own future from the incredibly wealthy.  Or put another way, the Washington Post now estimates that if you add in the non-fundraising, election-oriented events that involve him — 63 so far in 2011 — perhaps 12% of his time is taken up with campaign efforts of one sort or another; and this is what he’s been doing 12 to 24 months before the election is scheduled to happen. Read the rest of this entry →