To the Editor:

    Be it Greece or Portugal or Ireland or Spain or Italy or England or Iceland or here in the United States, average, everyday citizens are being shouldered with taxes, austerity measures, and loss of social safety nets all in the name of righting an economic collapse decidedly not of their making.  Meanwhile the guilty parties, the “too big to fail” financial institutions and rating agencies whose greed and manipulation created this depression/recession, have been rewarded for their bad behavior with bailouts and continue having majestic profits and obscene CEO salaries and bonuses.  And here, particularly, there is a massive effort to deflect the public attention away from these colossal giants:  it’s Social Security, it’s Medicare, it’s the unions, it’s the public sector, it’s school teachers, and the biggest of all, it’s “the government”!  The question seldom asked though is:  just who is this government that is so frightening and incompetent?  With lobbyists writing regulations (and even legislation) and financial interests literally buying elections and politicians, it is impossible today to say that America today is still a democracy, a government of, for, and by the People.  If the Tea Party adherents do not wake up to this fact, the average American’s quality of life will only continue to deteriorate.  Becoming the minions of an elite class is most certainly not The American Dream.

RP