As we near the most important election (no understatement) in a generation, middle-class Americans are feeling desperate. They have been for a longtime. Their desperation didn’t start a year ago when the prices of their houses began to drop, or when the cost to fuel their cars doubled.

It started long ago, beginning slowly reaching a crescendo in the last few weeks, the financial explosion but a boil bursting the pus of a country sick at its core wreaking havoc not only on its citizens but the world’s as well.

Trace America’s illness to the end of the Cold War, trace it back to Ronald Reagan, trace it back to when the United States achieved what it had always wanted, sole dominance of the world’s stage.

The United States achieved that goal, much like Great Britain had done at one time, and then went on to do exactly what the U.K. did: squander its opportunity to make a real difference in the world, and instead raped and pillaged. The UK went to other countries, such as Africa, to strut its hubris.

Our politicians wreaked their havoc right here at home. They parlayed with the bedrock of America, its working class.

The workers weren’t completely blameless. They let their union leaders make bad deals with their bosses and the U.S. government. They sat idly by as they watched their jobs shift overseas. Ignorant of the consequences and of their importance in a new government game of monopoly, they rushed to the American dream of home ownership, naïve to the reality that the achievement of their dream was possible because of paper money floated by the likes of AIG, BEAR STEARNS, COUNTRYWIDE and all the other game board players.

 The people who run the game, the leaders of our country, the politicians from both the Republican and Democratic Parties’ tugged on the poor soul’s heartstrings and purse-strings, and Americans’  bought their candy living the American Dream on shoe-string budgets.

Soon they found themselves weighted in debt, drunk on all that free credit, living in houses they could ill-afford, working at jobs that no longer offered future security as their pensions once the promise of a workers company loyalty were placed in the pockets of CEO’s who it seemed the more they failed their workers the bigger their golden parachutes.

For many Americans one job was not enough to sustain a family. Lost in the meme of a women’s right to have it all is the reality that too many women were forced by financial circumstance to lose the choice whether to enter the work force or raise a family. Americans’ put in longer hours at work and were paid the same rate, and government oversight committees sat idly by and watched the Scrooge-like employment practices thanks to the lobbying efforts of big-box companies like Wal-Mart and Lowe’s playing fast and loose with workers rights.

Employers weren’t the only ones drunk on their power. Think Wall Street. Think the insurance industry, the heath care industry, think lawyers charging $600.00 an hour for producing boilerplate documents and getting away with it.

The rich were getting richer and the middle-class sinking into a darker hole of debt day by day, and those in power did nothing to change things but offer promises never kept and change never brought.

Slogans like “the ownership society” turned out to mean most people were owned all right, by corrupt bankers looking for a fast buck at the people’s expense, the companies overseas who bought into the American market and pillaged American workers even more.

Meanwhile, the government haughty on the overthrow of the Soviet Union, with a hubris that democracy is the only way, the military machine seeking global dominance and the lives of young Americans meaningless to their achievement, quickly fell pray to the same egos of men like Trotsky and Stalin, Khrushchev and Hitler, men who might have once believed in some sort of ideal however insane but too soon lost their ideals in the wake of power achieved. Will George Bush and Dick Cheney the two men who sat at the helm in the eight years preceding America’s meltdown one day be seen in the history books on the same page as the other evil doers,?

Piece by piece America gave away its power to fatten the pockets of a few who cared little for the Joe Six-Pack’s of the country. If you have any doubt this is true travel to the once thriving industrial northeast where dilapidated steel towns resemble Nagasaki after the fall of the atom bomb, or visit the once thriving manufacturing centers of the south where building after building lay empty and decaying. Go to Detroit and witness what the political deal making did to an industry once the backbone of America.

Make no mistake about it; I would never condone the deeds of Osama bin Laden that killed so many lives on that late summer September day in 2001. But the question never asked, and the answer never sought in the wake of the horror was why does Osama bin Laden and the rest of the world so deplore America and everything she stands for?

When the United States became the dominant world leader it had a responsibility not only to Americans but to the world to lead in a forthright and honorable way. But our leaders became too big for their britches and lost their way, and now the world is paying the price.

Am I being too hard on our leaders those supposed to be the best and the brightest of our nation? I think not. The greedy Bush and Cheney, Pelosi and Reid, most members of Congress socked their money away as the promise of the American dream became their personal ticket to their own dreams of wealth and power.

There are those who say that despite all  of America’s problems we have it better than most. I’m not sure that’s true anymore. What do you have when you’ve sold your soul in pursuit of self-righteous destiny? Why didn’t Americans stand up to its leaders?

Today President Bush tried to assure the American people and the world at-large, that America would be “OK.” He called the American people “innovative, industrious and resilient,” a platitude to the victims by one of their perps.

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Halli Casser-Jayne/The CJ Political Report