There are two things growing simultaneously in America that do not make sense when they’re viewed together: the poverty rate and the ranks of the Tea Party and their cheerleaders in Congress.

Granted, the government is beleaguered and the economy is in turmoil - jobless rates are holding steady at about 10 percent (officially) - and, without intervention that benefits wage workers, the economy is ready to take another dip.

Although experts and pundits and people on the street ask the question, “How can the poverty rate be as high as it is in the greatest country on earth?” the question itself shows an ignorance of the state of the American people who are at the low end of the economic ladder.

The simple answer is: We’ve always had this kind of poverty. It’s just that, for the most part, nobody was looking, or looking in the right places.

There was a stab at ending poverty as we know it, back 50 years ago, or so, at the time of Michael Harrington’s book, “The Other America,” which was widely regarded as the spur to governmental action that resulted in the “War on Poverty.” But, that war was derided by those of right-wing persuasion as “throwing money at the problem,” without ever acknowledging that there were positive results that few cared to study or build upon. They fought against it with everything they had. Then, the Vietnam War pretty much brought the “war on poverty” to an end.

The struggle of the powerful against the poor never let up and eventually even President Bill Clinton got in on the act, to “end welfare as we know it,” ripping a page from the Republican playbook and taking one of their absolutely favorite issues right out from under them. They had to find another issue and there were several from which to choose.

So far, no one has been able to track all of those on welfare in the 1990s, who were thrown off the welfare rolls and into the “job market.” For sure, some of them found work, but it wasn’t long before the period of adjustment began to show its ugly side. A large percentage of those thrown off the rolls were women with children and they were entering the job market at the low end of the pay scale.

A clash of two views of society ensued: every person should work for his or her keep and every parent will provide for the children in an “appropriate” manner.

Unfortunately, the mothers newly thrown off welfare had to take whatever job they could to provide housing, food, health care (when possible), and clothing. Also unfortunately, there was not enough money on a $9-an-hour job to pay for childcare. It has not been widely reported how many of the mothers left a 12-year-old child in charge of younger siblings while she worked and subsequently was charged with endangering the welfare of those same children and hauled into family court, usually sending the whole family into turmoil.

The social disruption caused by the lack of services to struggling families - whether “intact” families with a mother and father, or single parent - is incalculable. In fact, the results are not viewed in that light, except for a few academics who care about the general status of families in disruption caused by the lack of services that most developed nations provide for their people.

As of about a year ago, the U.S. poverty rate stood at 14.3 percent, with 43.6 million living in poverty.

How did this happen? All of the brilliant ones seem to be puzzled about the problem of “the-richest-country-in-the-world-having-some-of-the-poorest-folks-in-the-developed-world.” They just can’t understand how that could happen.

The formula is relatively easy to understand when one gets a handle on the way American capitalism works: one maximizes profits by moving production to wherever the labor costs are lowest, first around the country, then around the world. Secondly, one struggles very hard against the onslaught of the poor, who are demanding that you pay your fair share. The rich always have been very successful at getting their taxes relieved.

In practical terms, those in power in America eventually took manufacturing and heavy industry out of the country and, with that move, took the heart and lifeblood of the relatively healthy economy with it and sent millions of workers to the rolls of retail and service “industries,” which are low-wage and without health benefits or pensions.

And they wonder why the poverty rate is growing. Or…maybe they don’t.

The millions of jobs that paid well and provided benefits and pensions are not coming back. We are on the threshold of a new economy, possibly a “green” economy, which will provide jobs (maybe not as highly paid as the lost jobs) in ways that will be environmentally sound. That is, if one believes that environmental degradation is causing problems in the human and natural worlds. Just have a look at the state of public health and the diseases, maladies, and syndromes that we don’t have a way of describing, yet.

Over the last hundred years, or so, the American people have been subjected to a barrage of propaganda, public relations, and advertising, to the point at which they are prepared to believe that there is no such thing as human-caused climate change, massive deforestation, the loss of the world’s potable water, mass extinctions of wildlife, the death of our oceans, and general economic decline. The deniers have created the political gridlock that keeps us from solving our problems.

And the tea partiers believe. They are willing to believe that more of the same thing will be the solution to most of the problems, even if it harms them and their families.

If the top 1 percent of Americans controls 34 percent of the wealth and the bottom 80 percent has control over just 15 percent, that’s okay. We want to return to that, they say. “Take back our country, take back our economy,” say the tea partiers. Clearly, they have not noticed that the country has not moved much from where it was 35 years ago, in terms of their relative place in the scheme of things, except that, now, we are seeing the greatest gap in wealth between the top 1 percent and the rest of us.

To most people, that 1 percent would constitute an “elite,” yet the right-wingers continually rail against the “elite” and never define what they mean. The tea partiers don’t have a platform, nor do their heroes and those they put forward as leaders. We have yet to hear about what they would do to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., and we’re not likely to hear such a plan. Instead of addressing immigration reform, which looms heavy over the country, it seems they would rather cleanse the country of every undocumented alien. How they would do that is never addressed.

Tea partiers and many Republicans talk in terms of “values,” without describing what those values are, and they want a return to “constitutional principles” in government, as well as (never-defined) freedom. In Psychology 101, a half-century ago, this kind of rhetoric was described as “glittering generalities” - all talk and very little substance.

The folks on the right have come to believe in $20 million golden parachutes. And, if someone takes $100,000 an hour as “pay,” well, that’s okay, too. They say, “That’s free enterprise and capitalism, and that’s what has brought us such a high standard of living.”

Try telling that to people who live on Indian reservations, where unemployment has hit 70 percent, or urban ghettoes, where the unemployment rate is at 20 percent for some and is probably much higher. What are the congressional leaders on the right and their Tea Party supporters going to do about those problems? They don’t say.

Elites in America don’t live the way wage earners live. They’re too busy chasing campaign money, if they are in elective office. Or, they are too busy finding safe ways to travel from one gated community to another, if they are the elites of Corporate America.

Those are some of the reasons that poverty is growing in America, and a lot of tea partiers are negatively affected by the actions of those elites. That’s why they are mad as hell - they can see themselves going the way of millions of others, counting not only every dollar, but also nickels and dimes.

Tea partiers and others on the right would do well to find out who the “elites” they speak of really are. If they think that Rep. John Boehner, Newt Gingrich, Rep. Mike Pence, Senator Jim DeMint (who sells “Freedom Fighter” tee shirts on his campaign website), Michele Bachman, and a host of others like them are not part of the elite, indeed they will suffer the fate they fear.

Knowing who your friends are and why you are in the straits you are in are important. Not wanting to know what’s going on in the “reality-based” world is dangerous to your own well-being and the well-being of the nation. Even though it might be unfair to a percentage of tea partiers, it’s why some refer to them as the “new Know Nothings,” not because they don’t have the capacity to understand what is happening in the “reality-based world,” but because they choose not to understand, and that is likely to make them all the poorer.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.