(Newser)
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When the tea party protesters converged on Washington, one leader, radio demagogue Mark Williams, repeatedly described them as “working stiffs” who felt left out. It’s no wonder they’re angry, writes Timothy Egan for the New York Times, because it’s been a lost decade for “working stiffs.” In 2008 the poverty rate hit an 11-year high and the median household income fell to $50,303, less than it was 10 years earlier.
These purported middle-class champions were MIA while the middle class was being dismantled. There were no tea parties when the Bush tax cuts stiffed the middle class, or when Wall Street’s congressional stooges turned “mortgages to poker chips at a trillion-dollar table,” Egan writes. "But now, at a time when a new president wants to reform health care to fix the largest single cause of middle-class economic collapse, he’s called a Nazi by these self-described friends of the working stiff."
