Letters to Bernie Sanders

Often when we talk about the big picture, we forget about the effects of events on everyday people.  Bob Hebert wrote an excellent editorial about Letters to Bernie Sanders, my favorite almost Democrat, who never forgets the little guy’s pain.  The letters show the pain and despair that Republican assaults on Main Street and DINO compromises have brought.  Then Rachel Maddow shows us how Republicans plan to impose a 1,000 year Republican Regime of one party rule.

Buried deep beneath the stories about executive bonuses, the stock market surge and the economy’s agonizingly slow road to recovery is the all-but-silent suffering of the many millions of Americans who, economically, are going down for the count.

A 46-year-old teacher in Charlotte, Vt., who has been unable to find a full-time job and is weighed down with debt, wrote to his U.S. senator, Bernie Sanders:

“I am financially ruined. I find myself depressed and demoralized and my confidence is shattered. Worst of all, as I hear more and more talk about deficit reduction and further layoffs, I have the agonizing feeling that the worst may not be behind us.”

Similar stories of hardship and desolation can be found throughout Vermont and the rest of the nation. The true extent of the economic devastation, and the enormous size of that portion of the population that is being left behind, has not yet been properly acknowledged. What is being allowed to happen to those being pushed out or left out of the American mainstream is the most important and potentially most dangerous issue facing the country.

Senator Sanders is a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democrats. He asked his constituents to write to him about their experiences coping with the recession and its aftermath. Hundreds responded, including several from outside Vermont. A 69-year-old woman from northeastern Vermont wrote plaintively:

“We are the first generation to leave our kids worse off than we were. How did this happen? Why is there such a wide distance between the rich and the middle class and the poor? What happened to the middle class? We did not buy boats or fancy cars or diamonds. Why was it possible to change the economy from one that was based on what we made and grew and serviced to a paper economy that disappeared?”

A woman with two teenagers told the senator about her husband, a building contractor for many years, who has been unable to find work in the downturn:

“I see my husband, capable and experienced, now really struggling with depression and trying to reinvent his profession at age 51. I feel this recession is leaving us, once perhaps a middle-class couple, now suddenly thrust into the lower-middle-class world without loads of options except to try and find more and more smaller jobs to fill in some of the financial gaps we feel day to day.

“All we want to do is work hard and pay our bills. We’re just not sure even that part of the American Dream is still possible anymore.”

One of the things I noticed reading through the letters was the pervasive sense of loss, not just of employment, but of faith in the soundness and possibilities of America. For centuries, Americans have been nothing if not optimistic. But now there is a terrible sense that so much that was taken for granted during the past six or seven decades is being dismantled or destroyed.

A 26-year-old man who emerged from college with big dreams wrote: “I had hoped to be able to support not just myself by this point, but to be able to think about settling down and starting a family. My family always told me that an education was the ticket to success, but all my education seems to have done in this landscape is make it impossible to pull myself out of debt and begin a successful career.”

How bad have things become? According to the National Employment Law Project, a trend is growing among employers to not even consider the applications of the unemployed for jobs that become available. Among examples offered by the project were a phone manufacturer that posted a job announcement with the message: “No Unemployed Candidate Will Be Considered At All,” and a Texas electronics company that announced online that it would “not consider/review anyone NOT currently employed regardless of the reason.”… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

That’s right.  In many cases, you have to have a job to get a job.  Right not the disparity of income and wealth between the richest Americans and everyone else is the greatest it has ever been and it’s getting worse by the day.  Our once proud middle class is on the endangered species list and will not survive more Republican rule.

We are in this situation because of Republican supply-side economic myth, deregulation and gutting regulatory agencies during the Bush Regime, and Republican obstruction, with help from a few DINOs, of Democratic attempts to improve the mess.

If we’re not careful, this condition will become permanent, because everything Republicans do has one of two goals: to transfer wealth from the poor and middle classes to millionaires, billionaires and criminal corporations and to impose a one party Republican Regime.

Rachel Maddow explains how Republicans pursue the latter goal by attempting to destroy the institutions that support Democrats and make it possible for Democrats to be competitive in elections.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

When Republicans hijacked ACORN through criminal means, they succeeded in disenfranchising all the poor people ACORN will not be here to register.  Now Republicans want to kill unions, and if the succeed, the stories people are telling Bernie Sanders will become the norm for many years to come.