by Zach Bigalke

Created on: May 16, 2007   Last Updated: May 18, 2007

That is the underlying problem with the course our government has chosen to steer over the past thirty years. The real tragedy wrought upon the United States by the politics formulated by Nixon and perfected by Reagan is the indiscrete ignorance of the needs of the average American. Big Business has achieved a predominance in political affairs unimagined by any previous generation. Our current leaders suckled at the teat of the feral boar that symbolizes the self-serving hubris of the 1980s. Personally motivated to appease their big-budget benefactors, too many politicians have become comfortable in their seats of power - forgetting the faces of the electorate who pulled the chair to the table.

Those faces are becoming increasingly destitute. Until last 25 May, I, along with my wife, was one of the forty-seven million Americans without any health coverage. In the most-powerful, wealthiest nation on the planet, one-sixth of the populace is neglected. I was fortunate to land a union-protected catering position at the University of Oregon. But not even the hard-won rights of unions, achieved through over a century of struggle, can always protect the jobs and securities of union workers.

United Auto Workers cannot protect and retain jobs at Ford and General Motors plants throughout Michigan. The United Mine Workers of America watches, powerless, as jobs are slashed through the Virginias and across Appalachia. Across the nation, business continues to plow through union rights in a similar pattern to urbanization's destruction of protective wetlands in the Gulf Coast region. When will the working class rise up into the Big Business equivalent of Hurricane Katrina?

This is one disaster that federal and state governments are working tirelessly to prevent. Corporate pirates line up in a government-sponsored plunder of our national assets and resources. Like the scenes of homesteaders rushing to claim the best plots of land following the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, businesses bid to rapidly carve up our landscape to snatch every saleable gram of soil, oil, and mineral for their sole profit. Multinational corporate interests are buying up our busiest interstate tollways. Chicago sold out its transportation future for $1.8 billion; Austin for $1.3 billion; and, most recently Indiana signed off on a 75-year lease of the 157-mile Indiana Toll Road to Spanish firm Cintra and Australian conglomerate Macquarie Infrastructure Group for a one-time $3.8 billion lump sum.

This win-now,

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