Poverty in America

I highly recommend a book by Tavis Smiley and Cornell West,  "The Rich and the Rest of Us;  a Poverty Manifesto"  published by Hay House,  Inc./Smiley Books, c2012.  The book is the result of a national tour by Smiley and West,  plus appearances on PBS and other venues.    This is no academic exercise,  but the down-to-earth continuation of the work of Martin Luther King.   Here I would like to quote the description on the back page of the book:

"There are nearly 150 million poor and near poor people in America who are not responsible for the damage done by the Great Recession.  Yet they pay the price.  The poor did not create the deindustrialization of America, unmatched corporate profiteering and greed,  more than a decade of foreign wars,  and unregulated tax benefits to the wealthy  When the largest economic institutions in the world were brought to their collective knees, they went crawling to the government's doorstep in search of salvation.  The government obliged,  allowing Wall Street to socialize its failure on the backs of Main Street Americans.  The housing and jobs crisis they created fostered a poverty unseen in generations -- not just in inner-city ghettos and barrios, but also in suburbs and rural areas crossing racial, age and gender lines.  Nearly one-third of the American middle class -- mostly families with children -- have fallen into poverty."  

Where is the political discourse on this?  How does it play out in our collective social consciences?  We have got to "git real"  about this one, folks.