Today brings in stark relief the economic chasm in America: the Depression is here, if you measure what real people are going through, but, on Wall Street, the party continues as, in Marie Antoinette style, financial executives reap millions while the rest of the people grasp for crumbs.

  Today, David Leonhardt has an excellent column in The New York Times that effectively tells us this: we are in a Depression—

In California and a handful of other states, one out of every five people who would like to be working full time is not now doing so.

It is a startling sign of the pain that the Great Recession is inflicting, and it is largely missed by the official, oft-repeated statistics on unemployment. The national unemployment rate has risen to 9.5 percent, the highest level in more than a quarter-century. Yet it still excludes all those who have given up looking for a job and those part-time workers who want to be working full time.

Include them — as the Labor Department does when calculating its broadest measure of the job market — and the rate reached 23.5 percent in Oregon this spring, according to a New York Times analysis of state-by-state data. It was 21.5 percent in both Michigan and Rhode Island and 20.3 percent in California. In Tennessee, Nevada and several other states that have relied heavily on manufacturing or housing, the rate was just under 20 percent this spring and may have since surpassed it.[emphasis added]

  For a long time, I–and others–have made the point that the official unemployment rate that the traditional media regurgitates masks the deep dysfunction in the economy (most recently, see here for my view). And here’s what this means:

A jobless rate of 20 percent is clearly a bit shocking. It sounds like something out of the Great Depression, and as bad as this recession is, it’s no Great Depression. So what’s going on?

For starters, this rate does include part-time workers who want to be full time. Such people are not quite unemployed or fully employed.

On average, they are working three days a week, and many are struggling to get by. Richard Smith (not related to Bernard) and his wife, Lynn, for example, moved from Michigan to Charlotte, N.C., last summer, after he had been laid off from white-collar jobs by both Ford and General Motors in the last five years. But after talking with 35 headhunters and sending out hundreds of applications, Mr. Smith, who’s 58, still hasn’t found full-time work.

  And it will get worse:

By September, one out of every four Californians — and Oregonians and South Carolinians and Michiganders — who would like to have a full-time job might not have one.

Who ever thought we would be saying such a thing?

  Of course, this isn’t true for everyone. For Goldman Sachs:

Even on Wall Street, the land of six- and seven-figure incomes, jaws dropped at the news on Tuesday: After all that federal aid, a resurgent Goldman Sachs is on course to dole out bonuses that could rival the record paydays of the heady bull-market years.

Goldman posted the richest quarterly profit in its 140-year history and, to the envy of its rivals, announced that it had earmarked $11.4 billion so far this year to compensate its workers.

At that rate, Goldman employees could, on average, earn roughly $770,000 each this year — or nearly what they did at the height of the boom.

Senior Goldman executives and bankers would be paid considerably more. Only three years ago, Goldman paid more than 50 employees above $20 million each. In 2007, its chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, collected one of the biggest bonuses in corporate history. The latest headline results — $3.44 billion in profits — were powered by earnings from the bank’s secretive trading operations and exceeded even the most optimistic predictions.

  And for Blackrock, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal:

Money-management firm BlackRock Inc. is set to earn tens of millions of dollars for managing assets that once belonged to Bear Stearns Cos. and American International Group Inc.

BlackRock will earn minimum asset-management fees of $42 million in the first year for running three vehicles holding mortgage-related securities and other investments, according to agreements recently posted on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Web site. The money manager also will get one-time advisory, analytics and structuring fees of $13.5 million, according to the agreements.

  So, the bottom line is this. We got to this point because of an economic system that basically took the fruits of workers’ productivity over thirty years and piled it into the pockets of the richest one percent and CEOs. That is the effective result of a thirty-period where productivity soared but wages were flat and the divide between rich and poor grew.

  And political leaders on both sides of the aisle allowed this to happen, partly by pocketing millions of dollars from Wall Street and financial interests and, then, helping to de-regulate the industry (by the way, some of those very politicians, seeing the rebellion and disgust among voters, are now recasting themselves as "reformers" and "outsiders"), and, even more so, parroting the notion that the "free market" cannot be restrained.

  At the very least, the deep chasm we still find ourselves trying to climb out of does, as many have argued, require additional government action. We need to drown out the voices who are screaming about "deficit reduction"–some of the same voices who got us into this mess in the first place–in favor of pounding the table and demanding that our country act now, decisively, to heal the part of the economy that really matters: that would be the real people.