Barbara Ehrenreich on the real toll of the recession

Ehrenreich has a must-read Op-Ed ("Too Poor to Make the News") on the lazy journalism of the recession, and its obsessive focus on the recession's effects on the rich and middle-class. I particularly love this opening paragaph:

THE human side of the recession, in the new media genre that?s been called ?recession porn,? is the story of an incremental descent from excess to frugality, from ease to austerity. The super-rich give up their personal jets; the upper middle class cut back on private Pilates classes; the merely middle class forgo vacations and evenings at Applebee?s. In some accounts, the recession is even described as the ?great leveler,? smudging the dizzying levels of inequality that characterized the last couple of decades and squeezing everyone into a single great class, the Nouveau Poor, in which we will all drive tiny fuel-efficient cars and grow tomatoes on our porches.