Thoughts on this Thanksgiving, 2010.

The filthy rich are getting filthyricher, especially the financial industry thieves on Wall Street that caused this economic disaster.

As an article in Huffington Post states: "Though the unemployment rate remains near 10 percent with millions of Americans about to run out of their jobless benefits, one in five Americans are using food stamps to buy groceries and small businesses are being forced to slash their work forces to stay alive, Wall Street's top bankers and wealthy investors are spending to excess, indulging their every whim.

"Wall Street bankers hiring a dwarf for an over-the-top bachelor party in Miami. Nieman Marcus selling out its 100 limited-edition $75,000 Camaros in three minutes. Socialites dropping $40,000 on a custom cellphone at a jewelry store in Chicago."

As Robert Scheer writes at Truthdig:

"Welcome to the brave new world of post-bailout capitalism. The Commerce Department announced Tuesday that corporate profits are at their highest level in U.S. history, and the Fed released minutes of an early November meeting in which officials predicted a stagnant economy and continued high unemployment.

"The lead on the New York Times story read like a line from a Dickens novel: “The nation’s workers may be struggling, but American companies just had their best quarter ever.” What the Times story neglected to mention is that the bulk of the increase in corporate profits was nabbed by the financial industry rather than manufacturing and other productive sectors. A whopping $33.3 billion out of the total corporate profits increase of $44.4 billion went to the banks and investment houses that those same workers had bailed out with their tax dollars. 

"What has occurred is what former International Monetary Fund chief economist Simon Johnson referred in The Atlantic back in May of 2009 as “The Quiet Coup,” in which the financial industry is fully in charge of the government’s response to our economic problems. The result, he noted, is “the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy” that had been broken by the banking regulations imposed during the New Deal in response to the Great Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s sensible regulations were gutted by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and tragically Obama has failed to restore them. The Wall Street lobbyists got their way and unfettered greed prevails. How else to explain last quarter’s outrageous profit figures?"

It appears we are returning to the 19th century of robber barons, the very rich and the rest of us....struggling, poor, and hungry.

From the Progress Report: "As the holidays approach, more American kitchen tables will be empty than at any time in recent memory. Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released a report saying that "food insecurity" rates are the highest they've been since the government began keeping track. Food pantries across the country, meanwhile, are struggling to meet escalating demands for their services, while key safety net measures that could keep homes headed and food on the table, like unemployment insurance and food stamps, are imperiled by Republican obstruction in Congress. Worse, many conservatives and too many in the mainstream media don't seem to take this crisis seriously -- meaning that more families are likely to be left out in the cold."

It's the second decade of the 21st century and this country still depends on food banks and other charities to feed the increasing millions of individuals and families who are "food insecure".  There should be no hungry or homeless people in this country in the 21st century.  There should be no jobless people in this country in the 21st century.  There should be no shortage of jobs where five people must compete for every job in this country in the 21st century.  There should be no economic inequality in this country in the 21st century. 

The late Brazilian bishop, Dom Heider Camara, expressed the ugly reality: "As long as I fed the hungry they said I was a saint.  But when I began to ask why there had to be hungry people in this world, they said I was a communist."