The continued deepening economic and social injustice is a reality that  has been maintained by every administration for the last twenty-five years.

Most of those elected officials in the White House and on Capitol Hill, Democrats and Republicans, are millionaires and multimillionaires; the GOP with their on-your-own, government of, by, and for the wealthy few and for the past quarter century, since the Reagan era, Democrats who mimic the GOP while pretending to uphold the Democratic Party values of the common good and government of, by, and for all the people with rhetoric but little action.

We have a country where Bush's regime aided and abetted the economic disaster caused by Wall Street's greedy fat cats who were rewarded with a bailout by both the Bush and Obama administrations and decades of working Americans' wages having been kept stagnant and now the terrible double digit unemployment crisis that Obama's team either arrogantly dismisses or deliberately fails to directly, effectively overcome, offering pathetic rationale that sounds like Reagan, Papa Bush, Rubin Clintonites, or Dubya.

And regular working Americans (those who still have a job) have been bamboozled into being embarrassed by being working class, and keep electing these DINO and GOP hypocrites who are in the pockets of corporate crony contributors.

Why?

David Macaray at Counterpunch suggests a reason as he reminds us about Cindy Sheehan.  Her son was killed in Iraq (an illegal Bushite invasion and occupation of that country) and "Sheehan learned that WMD didn’t exist, that Saddam Hussein had no role in 9-11 (and that the White House knew he didn’t), that post-Saddam Iraq is a country defined by duplicity, confusion, blood feuds and corruption, and that, as American soldiers continued to die and American taxpayers continued to foot the bill, the contractors, private security firms and military ordnance corporations continued to rake in their blood money, hand over fist.

"Feeling betrayed and angry, Sheehan attempted to draw attention to the debacle by doing more than simply writing letters to the editor or starting her own vanity blog.  She put herself on the line.  And for this—for a mother’s loss of a son and a woman’s courage to defy authority—people looked at her askance and accused her of embarrassing herself?  Sweet Baby Jesus…..how cynical and distracted have we become?

"Unfortunately, a similar sense of “embarrassment” infects America’s working class.  A century ago, workers weren’t ashamed to hit the streets and take on those who ran the country’s industry and financial institutions.  We don’t do that today because workers don’t recognize the fundamental tension between the privileged rich and the lower class and the rapidly dwindling middle-class, and because workers have a negative self-image.

"But the difference between the working class a century ago and workers today, is that the former hadn’t yet been “domesticated.”  They hadn’t yet been co-opted by the Establishment.  They were still filled with a working man’s piss and vinegar.  Indeed, they believed you could bring self-respect to any task, even a mundane one, and that any job—no matter how crude or “low”—could be performed with pride and dignity. 

"Accordingly, their socio-economic antennae were a mile long and hyper sensitive.  Having not yet been brainwashed into denying the existence of class warfare, these workers had a healthy resentment for the fat cats—the ones who controlled the work, manipulated the system, reaped the profits, and were committed to keeping the workers down.  But unlike the bulk of today’s workers, they were willing to push back.

"And guess what happened when these people poured into the streets, stopped traffic, shut down businesses, and mixed it up with the police?  They found that by making a goddamn bloody nuisance of themselves they got what they wanted.  Only by “embarrassing” themselves were they reckoned with."