The Consumer Price Index for February shows no change from the prior month, which would be great news if the CPI was a survey of all lifestyles within the country, but it isn’t. The CPI is only applicable for urban dwellers. The CPI fails to take into account the incredible hardships being encountered by rural Americans, who are struggling to make ends meet to get to and from their jobs, doctors, and other crucial services miles and miles away.

The decreases in household transportation and energy costs for urban dwellers are great – if you’re an urban dweller and have access to public transportation. If you live outside of an urban core, you saw your gasoline prices skyrocket 20 and 30 cents per gallon within the past week. You are hearing grumblings from all of the utility companies that your bills for electricity are going to jump this summer.

If you live in rural America, you’re wondering if you can afford to keep going to work.

That is, if you actually keep your job, and it isn’t part of the aftermath of the credit debacle created by lunatic lending schemes that drove up housing prices beyond the reality point into the Twilight Zone. The tumbling prices are only affecting people who bought into that schema of false belief, and only on paper IF they can afford to continue making the outrageous payments the banks said they could afford.

And if those Americans cannot continue the payments – they face potential homelessness. And Congress and President George W. Bush continues to sit on their collective duffs doing nothing.

We’re talking potentially 15 million Americans put out of their homes within the next two years. That’s 5% of the population.

That’s not recession, that’s an economic depression. And the only people being bailed out are the banks. The banks and other lending institutions which created the very economic crisis. Easing credit for the banks should have conditions – and one of those a moratorium on foreclosures, and a restructuring of all loans potentially in default. The value of the securities backing those loans would obviously suffer – but wouldn’t it be preferable that a few suffer losses than have those securities become entirely valueless?

Then go after the officers of those institutions with criminal indictments for perpetrating one of the most massive fraud schemes ever contrived against the American people, and the financial institutions of the world.