If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.<\/em><\/p>\n \u2014Frederick Douglass, 1857<\/a><\/p>\n The American failure in the past decades to protect and preserve working families can be laid at the feet of complacent liberals and the Democratic party as much as it can be laid at the feet of Republicans and movement conservatives. An addiction to comfort and the lucrative returns from the economic bubbles created by Wall Street allowed many so-called liberals (both politicians and voters) to look the other way as life deteriorated for the majority of poor and middle class Americans. The growing influence of corporations and Wall Street \u00a0on the political process, and on the American psyche, over the last decades has had an increasingly corrupting affect on our democracy. In what has become an Orwellian<\/a> reality, our politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, invite corporate lobbyists to write our legislation, then take lucrative jobs as lobbyists when they leave office. It is a closed loop that leaves the citizens who elected them with no real voice or representation.<\/p>\n Democrats as well as Republicans, by aligning themselves with corporate money and power, have contributed to the precipitous economic decline of working and middle class families. President Reagan began the assault on unions and American families, then President Clinton continued with NAFTA<\/a>, which helped corporations move middle class jobs overseas, and the deregulation of financial markets, which caused the economic meltdown of 2008. Recently, the\u00a0Citizens United<\/a><\/em> Supreme Court decision unleashed unlimited corporate money into the political process.<\/p>\n The corporate-fueled November 2010 shift to Republican control in Congress\u2014and in many normally blue state legislatures and governorships\u2014has resulted in an all out attack on what is left of unions and the middle class. \u00a0It is now clear that the wealthy are determined to claim any and all taxpayer-generated assets as their own, through government bailouts, tax cuts, and privatization schemes. The 2008 bailout of Wall Street, which saw trillions in taxpayer wealth transferred to the top 1%, was just a start. They are now trying to dismantle social safety nets and public sector unions as a way to cut \u201cexpenses\u201d and \u201cbalance the budget\u201d when the real issue is a lack of revenue\u2014a fair taxation system that would fund the infrastructure and services a healthy society needs. As evidenced by Wisconsin Republican Governor Walker\u2019s recent, and for the moment successful attack, on public sector workers, the billionaire\u2019s coup is well under way.<\/p>\n The failure of liberals and the Democratic Party<\/strong><\/p>\n Chris Hedges, author of The Death of the Liberal Class<\/em>, in a recent article at Truthdig, commented on what happens when so-called liberals and the Democratic party, which is supposed to be the champion of working people, allow the erosion of democracy and democratic institutions.The following are excerpts from his excellent article “Power Concedes Nothing without a Demand.”<\/a><\/p>\n The liberal class is discovering what happens when you tolerate the intolerant. Let hate speech pollute the airways. Let corporations buy up your courts and state and federal legislative bodies. Let the Christian religion be manipulated by charlatans to demonize Muslims, gays and intellectuals, discredit science and become a source of personal enrichment. Let unions wither under corporate assault. Let social services and public education be stripped of funding. Let Wall Street loot the national treasury with impunity. . . .<\/p>\n Workers in this country paid for their rights by suffering brutal beatings, mass expulsions from company housing and jobs, crippling strikes, targeted assassinations of union leaders and armed battles with hired gun thugs and state militias. The Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Carnegies and the Morgans\u2014the Koch Brothers Industries, Goldman Sachs and Wal-Mart of their day\u2014never gave a damn about workers. All they cared about was profit. The eight-hour workday, the minimum wage, Social Security, pensions, job safety, paid-vacations, retirement benefits and health insurance were achieved because hundreds of thousands of workers physically fought a system of capitalist exploitation. . . .<\/p>\n