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The Financial Times (of London) recently ran a profile of your basic middle-class family here in America (Minneapolis), and the picture ain't pretty:

Technically speaking, Mark Freeman should count himself among the luckiest people on the planet. The 52-year-old lives with his family on a tree-lined street in his own home in the heart of the wealthiest country in the world. When he is hungry, he eats. When it gets hot, he turns on the air-conditioning. When he wants to look something up, he surfs the internet. One of the songs he likes to sing when he hosts a weekly karaoke evening is Johnny Cash's "Man in Black."

Yet somehow things don't feel so good any more.

And why is that?

Last year the bank tried to repossess the Freemans' home even though they were only three months in arrears. Their son, Andy, was recently knocked off his mother's health insurance and only painfully reinstated for a large fee. And, much like the boarded-up houses that signal America's epidemic of foreclosures, the drug dealings and shootings that were once remote from their neighborhood are edging ever closer, a block at a time.

Pretty bleak, ain't it? In a previous era, their situation wouldn't have been so dire:

At $70,000 a year, their joint gross income is more than a third higher than the median US household. Once upon a time this was called the American Dream. Nowadays it might be called America's Fitful Reverie. Indeed, Mark spends large monthly sums renting a machine to treat his sleep apnea, which gives him insomnia. "If we lost our jobs, we would have about three weeks of savings to draw on before we hit the bone," says Mark, who is sitting on his patio keeping an eye on the street and swigging from a bottle of Miller Lite. "We work day and night and try to save for our retirement. But we are never more than a pay check or two from the streets."

The profile continues:

It only takes about 30 seconds to tour Mark's 700sq ft home in north-west Minneapolis. Cluttered with chintzy memorabilia, it was bought with a $50,000 mortgage in 1989. It is now worth $73,000. "At one stage we had it valued at $105,000 -- and we thought we had entered nirvana," says Mark. "People from the banks kept calling, sometimes four or five times an evening, offering equity lines, and home improvement loans. They were like drug pushers."

Drug pushers. This is the part of the "Cancer of Capitalism" that was supposedly addressed in the recent Financial Reform Bill just passed by Congress:

A consumer financial-protection bureau will be created at the Federal Reserve to police banks and financial-services businesses for credit-card and mortgage-lending abuses. The plan was approved over the objections of Republicans and the financial industry.

But will these lending abuses really be addressed? And whose really at fault for taking on more debt than could be serviced? The home owner or the bank that was giving away free money? Is the alcoholic at the bar responsible for walking away, or the bartender for not withholding the booze?

This idea that the middle class "did it to themselves" seems too simplistic. It's really symptomatic of the entire system, created over the past few decades and only disassembled over the next few - if we have the will power and desire.

Read the entire profile. It's incredibly powerful.

Then watch this George Carlin clip:

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