This recession caused by Wall Street greed and scheming, aided and abetted by the Bush administration and, unfortunately, protected by the Obama administration, has thrust millions more into poverty.

It is a terrible state of affairs when the chasm between the wealthy few and the rest of us has widened and the numbers of poor have increased.

The Washington Post reports: "The grim economic statistics unveiled Thursday in the Census Bureau's annual report on income, poverty and health insurance are destined to grow bleaker. Since the data were collected in the spring, millions of people have lost their jobs."

" 'We've basically seen a lost decade,' said Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard University. 'We had a plutocratic boom. Then we have egalitarian recessions. Taken together, only the top ends up growing, on average. For the typical American family, the 2000s have been a disaster.' "

In 2008, one out of three of those people living in poverty were children and the Economic Policy Institute projects that this year a quarter of those living in poverty will be children.

It grated on my nerves when, during the presidential campaign, even Barack Obama prattled on about the middle class, the middle class, the middle class, as if the working poor didn't exist, its ranks swelling each month.

As Jonathan Tasini writes at Working Life:

"We don't talk about poverty in our country. Our political discourse, guided by pollsters and consultants, directs leaders to refer to "the middle-class", not to the millions of people who live in conditions that do not get much better, whether we are in something called a "recession" or we are in "recovery". And it is getting worse.

"According to the Census Bureau, poverty is on the rise:

In the recession, the nation’s poverty rate climbed to 13.2 percent last year, up from 12.5 percent in 2007, according to an annual report released Thursday by the Census Bureau. The report also documented a decline in employer-provided health insurance and in coverage for adults.

"Almost 40 million Americans--FORTY MILLION--live below the poverty line, which is defined as an income for a family of four of just $22,025.

"I said, from the outset, that for those living in poverty, the boom-and-bust economic cycles are pretty irrelevant--their lives just get worse no matter what. It is true that the current economic calamity has made things much worse. But, it only heightens the crisis.

"While the cost of living goes up, our country has masked, even in "good times", the decline into poverty with the sham of the minimum wage. Increasing the minimum wage relieves the conscience of the country by instilling a false sense of increased well-being. In fact, as I and others have argued, you can't live on the minimum wage--it is a poverty-level wage.

"But, the middle-class is barely staying outside that descent into poverty. Thanks to the geniuses on Wall Street (the Goldman Sachs-Rubinites who were both incompetent and greedy), median family incomes are wrose than they were TEN YEARS AGO..."

Tasini hits the nail on the head when he calls poverty the shame of America and a national scandal.

Again, I will paraphrase the late Brazilian bishop, Dom Helder Camara when he said: " As long as I fed the poor and hungry, they said I was a saint.  But when I began to ask why there had to be poor and hungry people in this world, they said I was a communist."