My parents had been firm believers in life insurance policies for as long as I can remember. I recall, even in my teens, calculating premium payment amounts over a number of years, looking at the face value and wondering why anyone would bother buying insurance policies. So, you see, life insurance had been an ongoing topic in my family for many years, but even with that in mind, we were totally unprepared for what actually did happen:

In December 2008, my mother, Mary Sina, who was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, called to say that she would not be joining us for the holidays, because she was having trouble shaking a head cold. Four months later, she was still claiming to have the same cold so in April 2009, my husband and I went to Santa Fe to celebrate her 84th birthday with her.

What we found upon our arrival amid piles of newspapers, unopened mail and Christmas gifts in an uncharacteristically filthy apartment, was a woman who had seemed to have lost interest in most everything, which included such basic necessities as grocery shopping and paying bills. Long story short, she was diagnosed with Dementia.

We arranged meal delivery, automatic prescriptions, cleaning lady and online bill pay so that she could continue to live on her own without liability. Then began the task of taking care of other matters that had come unraveled during that period of neglect. She had managed to keep up with household expenses with the help of friends or by making payments if a service was interrupted; occurrences that were completely out of character for my mother.

Among the unopened mail, we discovered that she had several life insurance policies purchased from various companies, all of which had lapsed. I can equivocally say that, although time consuming, across the board, reinstating the policies was a simple enough matter of providing the proper paperwork and a check for the outstanding balance and her polices were reinstated as before.

All except for one company, CUNA Mutual Insurance Group, from whom she had purchased policies in 1992 and in 2000 which would automatically convert from whole life insurance coverage to term life coverage, in the event of a default on her premium payments. Despite the extenuating medical circumstances and the longevity of the account, CUNA refused to revert the policies back to their original state. It was also the amount that CUNA claimed that she owed them, to bring what were now term life polices up to date, in relation to what I had paid to reinstate the other policies, that called my attention to some serious discrepancies between what was printed on the policy and what was owed on the billing statement.

CUNA Mutual Insurance Group is the insurance arm of the Credit Union National Association (CUNA), who according to their website, is the premier national trade association serving 90% of America's credit unions. In a written testimony before The Senate Banking Committee dated March 24, 2009, Dan Mica, President and CEO of the Credit Union National Association counted "92 million members."The actual purpose of the document was to "express the need for maintaining an independent federal regulatory agency for federally-insured credit unions" separate from those that regulate other US financial institutions. In it Mica claimed that "Credit Unions did not in any way contribute to the current financial debacle... Therefore it is imperative that credit unions not be swept up in the tide of regulatory reform that is so essential for some other parts of the financial system." The Credit Union National Association was also lobbying strongly, in 2009, for a raise in member business cap lending.

CUNA Mutual Insurance Group sends out insurance materials to credit union members immediately upon their joining, announcing $1,000.00 of accidental death & dismemberment coverage, provided free of charge, and the opportunity to purchase other plans. In my parent's case, their introduction to CUNA Insurance came through the Land of Enchantment Federal Credit Union.

I spent several months communicating with various departments at CUNA Mutual, trying unsuccessfully to get a copy of her file so I sought out the help of the NM State Superintendent of Insurance and eventually did receive it. If I had not seen it with my own eyes, I would never have believed what fragmented paperwork exists in the inner files of such a lucrative company. The CUNA files contained a handwritten application for a policy conversion that was conducted over the telephone, which apparently required no signature verification from my mother. I couldn't help but wonder how any prudent person would elect to change an $81.00 yearly premium to a $138.79 quarterly premium for the exact same amount of coverage. Prior to the onset of Mary's illness, she had been a very practical individual, but by this time was not able to shed any light on how this actually took place.

So I wrote another letter directly to Jeff Post, CEO of CUNA Mutual Insurance Group; Dan Mica, then President of the Credit Union National Association; Mo Chavez, the NM State Superintendent of Insurance; and Joe Maldonado, President of Land of Enchantment Federal Credit Union.

I heard back from Gregg Gonzales, from the NM Superintendent of Insurance Office, who basically told me that it was common knowledge that insurance companies were in the business to make a lot of money off of their customers and there was nothing to be done about it. Joe Maldonado, President of Land of Enchantment Credit Union, dismissed me with a shrug and said, "We don't really have anything to do with the insurance that gets offered to our members."

I received a letter from CUNA President, Dan Mica's office telling me that they had forwarded my letter to Jeff Post, who was the CEO of CUNA Mutual Insurance. By then Jeff Post's office would have been in receipt of my letter twice, first from me and then from Dan Mica's office, so Jeff Post arrogantly ignored both letters. Incidentally, former CEO of CUNA Mutual Insurance Group, Michael Kitchen, resigned in 2004 after it was disclosed his offering money to employees to go against their union, resulting in a lawsuit against CUNA Mutual by the National Labor Relations Board.

In July of 2010 Mary Sina moved to Southern California to be with her family and her health has improved considerably. While packing up her apartment of 27 years, we discovered that the one questionable policy in our possession was, in actuality, yet a different policy purchased from CUNA Mutual Insurance Group for a ridiculously low "burial"amount, of which there was never any mention from CUNA. We realized that even if we had continued to pay premiums; had my mother died, we would have had no policy with which to collect.

CUNA Mutual Insurance Group thrives on an automatic customer base in the consumer who has chosen to invest their money in a credit union, and trusts that credit union's choices regarding benefits provided to their members. Because of that automatic customer base, CUNA Mutual Insurance Group appears to be operating with little, if any, restriction or accountability. It would be interesting to see what percentage of their revenue has accrued through people who have just gotten tired of fighting. Although in June, 2009, a South Dakota jury awarded Teri Powell's estate $6.2 million for a disability claim that she filed when she was diagnosed with cancer in 2005 and CUNA continually denied until her death in 2006. The article also stated that CUNA was appealing that decision on technicalities.

Most lawsuits appear to be over disability insurance, while others include a 2008 filing by Veronica Keith of Washington over the Accidental Death & Dismemberment policy, which apparently excludes "accidental death caused by, or resulting from, committing or attempting to commit a felony" plus the argument that the 3-year period to file suit had expired. In 2009 Southeast Financial Credit Union filed suit against CUNA Mutual Insurance Society and CUNA Brokerage Services Inc. for misrepresentations regarding deferred compensation plans and variable annuities.

A quick visit to the employee review of employer website glassdoor.com gives the overall impression that CUNA Mutual Insurance's management team is unqualified, unapproachable, and complacent with very little respect given to their staff in general, resulting in a high turn over rate. That might explain why everyone was so hateful to me on the telephone.

Recently, CUNA Mutual Insurance Group advertising mediums have increased exponentially. Not only do I strongly discourage anyone from doing business with them, but please take the time to make sure that your parent's insurance policies are updated and intact before it is too late. We need to protect our parents from the nice, smiling salesperson who assures them that checking the little provision box is really in their best interest.
(c) 2011 Patricia Cunliffe is a freelance journalist, documentary filmmaker & Santa Fe native living in Southern California

SOURCES:

Michael Kitchen/NLRB story:

http://www.scfl.org/?ulnid=957
http://www.scfl.org/?ulnid=1019
http://www.allbusiness.com/banking-finance/banking-institutions-systems/14725798-1.html

Teri Powell story:

http://law.freeadvice.com/insurance_law/insurers_bad_faith/cuna-mutual-laible-for-bad-faith.htm

Veronica Keith story:

http://wa.findacase.com/research/wfrmDocViewer.aspx/xq/fac.%2FFDCT%2FWWA%2F2009%2F20090623_0001469.WWA.htm/qx

Southeast Financial story:

http://www.cutimes.com/2009/09/09/southeast-financial-cu-files-suit-against-cuna-mutual

CUNA Mutual CEO chronological history 2004-2007:

http://keepcunamutual.com/4.pdf
http://www.waxingamerica.com/2008/01/does-cuna-mutua.html
http://www.cuna.org/newsnow/09/system070909-10.html
http://www.cujournal.com/departments/insurance.html

I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities-window smashing in Athens, or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.

But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion-a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.

Back then the people on cable news thought looting was highly political. They said this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves. But London isn't Baghdad, and British Prime Minister David Cameron is hardly Saddam, so surely there is nothing to learn there.

How about a democratic example then? Argentina, circa 2001. The economy was in freefall and thousands of people living in rough neighborhoods (which had been thriving manufacturing zones before the neoliberal era) stormed foreign-owned superstores. They came out pushing shopping carts overflowing with the goods they could no longer afford-clothes, electronics, meat. The government called a "state of siege"to restore order; the people didn't like that and overthrew the government.

Argentina's mass looting was called El Saqueo-the sacking. That was politically significant because it was the very same word used to describe what that country's elites had done by selling off the country's national assets in flagrantly corrupt privatization deals, hiding their money offshore, then passing on the bill to the people with a brutal austerity package. Argentines understood that the saqueo of the shopping centers would not have happened without the bigger saqueo of the country, and that the real gangsters were the ones in charge.

But England is not Latin America, and its riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn't theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behavior.

This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G-8 and G-20 meetings, when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again. Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable. They would do this by firing public sector workers, scapegoating teachers, closing libraries, upping tuitions, rolling back union contracts, creating rush privatizations of public assets and decreasing pensions – mix the cocktail for where you live. And who is on television lecturing about the need to give up these "entitlements?" The bankers and hedge-fund managers, of course.

This is the global Saqueo, a time of great taking. Fueled by a pathological sense of entitlement, this looting has all been done with the lights left on, as if there was nothing at all to hide. There are some nagging fears, however. In early July, the Wall Street Journal, citing a new poll, reported that 94 percent of millionaires were afraid of "violence in the streets." This, it turns out, was a reasonable fear.

Of course London's riots weren't a political protest. But the people committing nighttime robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daytime robbery. Saqueos are contagious.

The Tories are right when they say the rioting is not about the cuts. But it has a great deal to do with what those cuts represent: being cut off. Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered-a union job, a good affordable education-being rapidly sealed off. The cuts are a message. They are saying to whole sectors of society: you are stuck where you are, much like the migrants and refugees we turn away at our increasingly fortressed borders.

David Cameron's response to the riots is to make this locking-out literal: evictions from public housing, threats to cut off communication tools and outrageous jail terms (five months to a woman for receiving a stolen pair of shorts). The message is once again being sent: disappear, and do it quietly.

At last year's G-20 "austerity summit" in Toronto, the protests turned into riots and multiple cop cars burned. It was nothing by London 2011 standards, but it was still shocking to us Canadians. The big controversy then was that the government had spent $675 million on summit "security" (yet they still couldn't seem to put out those fires). At the time, many of us pointed out that the pricey new arsenal that the police had acquired-water cannons, sound cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets-wasn't just meant for the protesters in the streets. Its long-term use would be to discipline the poor, who in the new era of austerity would have dangerously little to lose.

This is what David Cameron got wrong: you can't cut police budgets at the same time as you cut everything else. Because when you rob people of what little they have, in order to protect the interests of those who have more than anyone deserves, you should expect resistance-whether organized protests or spontaneous looting.

As expected, Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, has announced that he is running for president. And we already know what his campaign will be about: faith in miracles.

Some of these miracles will involve things that you're liable to read in the Bible. But if he wins the Republican nomination, his campaign will probably center on a more secular theme: the alleged economic miracle in Texas, which, it's often asserted, sailed through the Great Recession almost unscathed thanks to conservative economic policies. And Mr. Perry will claim that he can restore prosperity to America by applying the same policies at a national level.

So what you need to know is that the Texas miracle is a myth, and more broadly that Texan experience offers no useful lessons on how to restore national full employment.

It's true that Texas entered recession a bit later than the rest of America, mainly because the state's still energy-heavy economy was buoyed by high oil prices through the first half of 2008. Also, Texas was spared the worst of the housing crisis, partly because it turns out to have surprisingly strict regulation of mortgage lending.

Despite all that, however, from mid-2008 onward unemployment soared in Texas, just as it did almost everywhere else.

In June 2011, the Texas unemployment rate was 8.2 percent. That was less than unemployment in collapsed-bubble states like California and Florida, but it was slightly higher than the unemployment rate in New York, and significantly higher than the rate in Massachusetts. By the way, one in four Texans lacks health insurance, the highest proportion in the nation, thanks largely to the state's small-government approach. Meanwhile, Massachusetts has near-universal coverage thanks to health reform very similar to the "job-killing" Affordable Care Act.

So where does the notion of a Texas miracle come from? Mainly from widespread misunderstanding of the economic effects of population growth.

For this much is true about Texas: It has, for many decades, had much faster population growth than the rest of America - about twice as fast since 1990. Several factors underlie this rapid population growth: a high birth rate, immigration from Mexico, and inward migration of Americans from other states, who are attracted to Texas by its warm weather and low cost of living, low housing costs in particular.

And just to be clear, there's nothing wrong with a low cost of living. In particular, there's a good case to be made that zoning policies in many states unnecessarily restrict the supply of housing, and that this is one area where Texas does in fact do something right.

But what does population growth have to do with job growth? Well, the high rate of population growth translates into above-average job growth through a couple of channels. Many of the people moving to Texas - retirees in search of warm winters, middle-class Mexicans in search of a safer life - bring purchasing power that leads to greater local employment. At the same time, the rapid growth in the Texas work force keeps wages low - almost 10 percent of Texan workers earn the minimum wage or less, well above the national average - and these low wages give corporations an incentive to move production to the Lone Star State.

So Texas tends, in good years and bad, to have higher job growth than the rest of America. But it needs lots of new jobs just to keep up with its rising population - and as those unemployment comparisons show, recent employment growth has fallen well short of what's needed.

If this picture doesn't look very much like the glowing portrait Texas boosters like to paint, there's a reason: the glowing portrait is false.

Still, does Texas job growth point the way to faster job growth in the nation as a whole? No.

What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states. I believe that the appropriate response to this insight is "Well, duh." The point is that arguing from this experience that depressing wages and dismantling regulation in America as a whole would create more jobs - which is, whatever Mr. Perry may say, what Perrynomics amounts to in practice - involves a fallacy of composition: every state can't lure jobs away from every other state.

In fact, at a national level lower wages would almost certainly lead to fewer jobs - because they would leave working Americans even less able to cope with the overhang of debt left behind by the housing bubble, an overhang that is at the heart of our economic problem.

There was a raid in Ishaqi last week. Armed men crept upon the sleeping houses in the dead of night. Armed men stirring in the darkness, in a land still open, like a flayed wound, to violent death and chaos from every direction, many years after the savage act of aggression that first tore the country to pieces.

They crept toward the houses. They said nothing, gave no warning, could not be clearly seen, did not identify themselves. "Thieves!" someone shouted. Someone grabbed a rifle - one kept ready at hand to guard the sleeping family - and fired a shot to scare away the raiders.

But men creeping in the darkness were not local thieves. They were soldiers of the foreign army that still occupied the land. Foreign invaders, accompanied by forces from the local army they had raised for the government they had built on the mound of a million rotting corpses.

Armed to the teeth with expensive gear bought with public money from bloated war profiteers in the invaders' home country, the creeping men were not to be frightened off by a rifle shot fired blindly in the darkness. They saw the flash - and lit up the village with heavy gunfire and grenades. They called in a helicopter gunship hovering nearby to support them against the rifle of a villager awakened by the sound of unknown, unidentified, armed men creeping near his house and family.

In the tumult, a 13-year-old boy began running through the garden, frightened, confused, trying to escape the hellish metal flying all around him. But the metal found him; it tore into his fleeing body - the body of this scared, unarmed boy running away from the well-armed soldiers - the bullets tore into his body and killed him in the garden where he used to play.

The armed men then stalked through the village. Kicking down doors, dragging people out, hogtied, and throwing them into the dirt. They ransacked, they smashed, they ripped, they broke - and, like thieves, they stole.

"We heard gunfire near our house, and my son woke up and went to the garden because he was afraid," said the boy's mother, Nagia Gamas, 51. "They shot him and my husband."

... Muhammad Farhan, a 62-year-old farmer in Ishaqi ... said Iraqi and American forces knocked down his door around 2 a.m. Friday, tied him and three of his relatives up and took them outside.

He said that the Iraqi and American forces searched his house, stole a check from him and took his brother's passport. "The Americans were telling us we are liars and terrorists," Mr. Farhan said. "Why do you attack us? We are just innocent people."

And it was just another atrocity in Ishaqi, where the American invaders and their colonial helpers had already inflicted horror and death on the area's children in years past. The 13-year-old boy - who had been only five when the invasion began, so many years and so many deaths ago, probably knew the little children, some just a few months old, killed in the earlier attacks. As I noted here in March 2006:

We know that U.S. forces conducted a raid on a house in the village on March 15. ... We know that two Iraqi police officials, Major Ali Ahmed and Colonel Farouq Hussein - both employed by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government - told Reuters that the 11 occupants of the house, including the five children, had been bound and shot in the head before the house was blown up. We know that the U.S.-backed Iraqi police told Reuters that an American helicopter landed on the roof in the early hours of the morning, then the house was blown up, and then the victims were discovered. We know that the U.S.-backed Iraqi police said that an autopsy performed on the bodies found that "all the victims had gunshot wounds to the head."

We know that Ahmed Khalaf, brother of house's owner, told AP that nine of the [11] victims were family members and two were visitors, adding, "the killed family was not part of the resistance, they were women and children. The Americans have promised us a better life, but we get only death."

We know from the photographs that one child, the youngest, the baby, has a gaping wound in his forehead. We can see that one other child, a girl with a pink ribbon in her hair, is lying on her side and has blood oozing from the back of her head. ... We know from the photographs that two of the children - two girls, still in their pajamas - are lying with their dead eyes open. We can see that the light and tenderness that animate the eyes of every young child have vanished; nothing remains but the brute stare of nothingness into nothingness. We can see that the other three children have their eyes closed; two are limp, but the baby has one stiffened arm raised to his cheek, as if trying to ward off the blow that gashed and pulped his face so terribly.

Later, the Pentagon changed its original story about the raid, in which it claimed that "only" one man, two women and a single child had been killed. Following an "investigation," the Pentagon said that one terrorist had been killed, along with "three noncombatant" deaths and an estimated nine "collateral deaths." (As I noted at the time: The difference between these two categories is not explained. And of course it doesn't matter to the innocent people killed; whether they are "non-combatants" or "collaterals," they're still just as dead.) The invaders categorically denied that any children had been shot in the head. But the evidence indicated differently:

First is the photographic evidence: pictures taken of the aftermath by Agence France Presse, and a video that emerged this week on BBC. These clearly dispute the Pentagon's account, which holds that the house was first raked with gunfire, then attack by helicopter gunships, then finally bombed by American jets: a massive barrage of firepower that left the house in ruins. But the video shows that part of the house was left standing. The photographs, which have been widely available for months, show five dead children, one of them only a few months old. They have been laid out by grieving relatives. Their bodies show no signs of having been ripped up or damaged in the course of an all-out air and ground assault; as the BBC's John Simpson points out, they had not been crushed by the collapse of the house, as the Pentagon claimed. Instead, they are unmarked, their clothes dusty but in most cases untorn. In the photographs I saw, one child clearly has blood oozing from the back of her head, while the baby has a hole in his forehead, and other damage to his face. The other children are laid on their back, with their wounds invisible, their bodies remarkably whole. Simpson, shown viewing the film, said it was clear that the children had been shot.

Second is the testimony of the villagers, and of two officials of the U.S.-backed Iraqi police, Major Ali Ahmed and Colonel Farouq Hussein. These are men who risk their lives by their cooperation with the Coalition. The villagers say soldiers entered the house and killed the occupants; the house was later hit by the helicopter then bombed, apparently to cover up the killings, some of the villagers surmised. The Iraqi police said "all the victims had gunshot wounds to the head." Later, a Knight-Ridder reporter saw a preliminary report indicating that the 11 victims had multiple wounds. This tallies with Simpson's viewing, which showed that one of the dead children had been shot in the side. Everyone who saw or examined the bodies agreed that the victims had been shot, most likely by bullets from the large pile of American-issue cartridges found inside the house, which can also be seen on the video.

"This was an Iraqi-planned and -led counterterrorism operation," Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, an American military spokesman, said in a statement. "The operation was enabled by U.S. support that included helicopters. Also, there was a small number of U.S. advisers taking part in the operation, although it was predominantly Iraqi forces, and they were in charge of all activities on the ground."

"Advisers." This is the new term-of-art for invasion forces. This is the word now being used by the Obama Administration and the Iraqi government in their relentless efforts to weasel out of the agreement to withdraw all American "military forces" from Iraq by the end of the year. This follows the line of the Peace Laureate's earlier scam, when he claimed to have kept his promise to withdraw "all combat troops" from Iraq by simply renaming the tens of thousands of occupying soldiers left behind as "non-combat troops" - although they continued, and continue, to carry out combat missions. (And of course, the "withdrawal" agreement doesn't include the thousands upon thousands of "security personnel" and mercenaries who will guard the vast embassy-fortress the invaders have built in the center of Baghdad.)

Nobility is a bitch, and a real seductive one at that.

I'm capable of some serious cynicism, but these days I kinda wish I had a lot more of it. I kinda wish I had born and raised in a more cynical time. Then maybe I wouldn't get my heart broken so often.

That's a funny thing to say about the time I grew up in, in a way. It was the era of Vietnam and Watergate, the era of police attack dogs and burning cities. My Lai, Kent State, Nixon, Watts. What's uglier than that? And can't one make a very compelling case that these are significantly better times today? I mean, after all, the government isn't beating and murdering our kids on America's streets. And while we're still fighting wars (of course), there are a lot less casualties on either side these days. Aren't things better?

No. They're worse. What's absent today from the America of my younger days is hope and understanding. Back then, everyone understood there was a struggle going on, and lots of people did just that. And they generated enormous successes, ranging from changing both racial civil rights laws and norms, to doing the same for gender equality, to demanding cleaner government, to improving the New Deal social safety net, to ending the Vietnam war, to distributing the national wealth more fairly, to changing environmental consciousness and law, and more.

It was a painful process, but one that came with an outstanding record of achievement, a record which therefore justified the sense of hope. There was solid and robust empirical evidence to prove that having high expectations for the country was not some pollyannaish exercise in naivete.

That's all gone. It's been replaced by something far worse than a tired stasis. And, really, when you consider the present picture in its full glory, you're left with something beyond despair. For this is not only a story of deceit and hypocrisy, of rampant greed, of sociopathic disdain for the lives of others, but, finally, also a story of complete betrayal and the predatory exploitation of innocent people.

As in any crime story, it's crucial to understand the who, what, when, why and how in order to unravel the true tale, and to have any hope for crime prevention and remediation in the future.

The 'what' of this crime scene is crucial, and so many people still don't understand it (despite the rampant prevalence of CSI dramas all across the television dial - or perhaps because of it). It's been said that the perfect crime is one of which the victim isn't even cognizant. That's all too true here. This lack of comprehension of what has been done, who did it, and why is the single most depressing feature of American politics today. How can 300 million people hallucinate so deeply all at once? Is there really that much LSD to go around? Or do we just get our drugs from the end of a cable nowadays?

There's really only one main theme to the story of American politics in the last century (if not more), and that is the question of the distribution of wealth. This is particularly true of the last three decades, a period during which other important things - not least including wars and civil rights struggles - transpired, but were ultimately peripheral to the real story. And yet people still don't understand this central concept and the crime committed around it.

A hundred years ago the distribution of wealth in this country looked like that of any standard issue banana republic. The rich had almost everything, and all of the rest of us barely got by, working (alongside our children) long hours in horrid conditions, for low pay, no benefits and zero respect for us as humans deserving of an equal regard for our welfare, happiness, opportunities, fortunes and basic dignity. We were 'human resources' (though the term was not in use until the ethos was revived in the present era), who were to be used and abused in the processing of natural resources, and discarded when our usefulness ceased. This approach to class relations within the society produced the expected result: wealthy Americans lived long and highly comfortable lives, while the rest of us resembled something nearer to characters out of Hobbes.

But then Franklin Roosevelt, easily the most transformative figure in American history, gave us a New Deal, which was quite literally that. Roosevelt and his fellow travelers in and out of government changed the essential terms of political economy in America, such that it was no longer a game entirely for the benefit of the wealthy. Mind you, those rich folks still did real well, thank you very much, and it is correctly argued that Roosevelt actually saved capitalism from capitalists - so, when it comes to FDR, we're not talking about Leon Trotsky here. But Roosevelt's program changed the rules of labor relations, taxation, government spending, regulation and so on, a reform that had the ultimate effect of redistributing wealth in America, so that the richest among us no longer had it all. And, in the process, this massive sea change in public policy also created a giant middle class that had not existed before, and launched an era of prosperity in this country that may have no equal across all of human history.

Which brings us to the 'who' of this murder mystery. They are the predatory plutocrats who hated FDR and the New Deal then, and have not stopped doing so down to this day. They despised Roosevelt so much for being "a traitor to his class" that many of them had to refer to him as "that man", because they couldn't bear to actually spit out his name. These people, with their infantile obsession for acquisition coming right out of some Freud 101 textbook, have never gone away. But they were marginalized during the half-century of the New Deal era. In fact, they were marginalized by the core mainstream of even the Republican Party. Dwight Eisenhower referred to them - in particular, to those who wanted to abolish Social Security twenty years after its launch - as "stupid."

Eisenhower's comment points to another answer to the 'who' question here. Plutocrats need agents to commit their crimes for them. That includes cadres of cops and soldiers who are either clueless as to their place in the scheme of things, or satisfied to be bought off for a few shekels and/or a pittance of prestige in the social hierarchy. In the contemporary context, however, it mostly means politicians. In our time these (alleged) people are little more than kabuki dancers, who job is to maintain a layered set of illusions. On top is the idea of political debate, as if there was fundamentally any difference between the two parties in America. As if Harry Reid and Barack Obama get up every day wondering how they can spend their waking hours fighting off Republican intransigencies to make life better for you and me. At the next level down is the idea of patriotism and the national interest. This facade brainwashes us to believe that while we may disagree with leaders of the other party, at least they are well meaning patriots who just happen to be wrong-headed - but right-hearted! - in their prescription for what ails the country. Finally, we have the last veil, the democracy ruse, where we are told that our government is responsive to the public will. Never mind all that corporate money washing around in the system - it doesn't actually effect anything. It's one person, one vote. Where your representatives are concerned, you count every bit as much as the CEO of Goldman Sachs.

Almost without exception, our contemporary political class serves the function of acting out this tawdry little soap opera, this elaborate diversionary scheme. That's why there's so much overlap between Madison Avenue and Hollywood and Washington, America's politicians are B-rate actors (sometimes literally), playing a role in a lame white-hat-versus-black-hat pseudo-drama filmed on a soundstage called Washington, and doing the commercials in-between as well. But it wasn't always thus. We used to have (at least some) limits, and we used to have (at least some) politicians genuinely committed to the public interest.

That crucial difference gives us the 'when' to this tale. For fifty years there was a broad consensus in America around the values of the New Deal and the lessons learned from the period preceding it. That consensus began unraveling in the 1980s, and has continued to do so ever since. The essential narrative of the last thirty years is the story of the dismantling of the New Deal, and with it the broad and shared prosperity that Americans once enjoyed. This process has occurred piecemeal, because it had to, because in fact both the deal of the New Deal era and the values it personifies are highly popular with the American public.

So the 'how' was to lie, cheat and steal in order for the rich to redress the 'crime' of the New Deal and get 'their' money back. Trade deals that seemed on their surface plainly to be disastrous for American workers - perhaps because that is exactly what they were - were sold to us as beneficial. Union busting, a la Reagan and PATCO, was made to seem an act of necessary national toughness. And who needed unions, anyhow? Didn't we already have good wages? Deregulation - hey, what a great idea! Let Wall Street banks do whatever they want - you know, like in the 1920s! They didn't call 'em "roaring" for nuthin', pal! Tax slashing for millionaires and billionaires was another big winner. It'll trickle-down to the rest of us when these job-creators create jobs, it won't cost the government any revenues, and it will jump-start the economy. So what if regressives went zero for three on those claims? We have to cut taxes even more! And then there are the diversions to keep you voting for the kleptocrats at every turn, such as foreign evil-doers (Ooooohhh, Saddam! Very scary! Noriega! Plenty bad man! Castro! An athiest, for Christ's sake!), job-stealing Mexicans (you would have wound up being a rich attorney - even though you didn't go to law school, or even college - but some sneaky wetback crossed the border and took your job), and predatory gays who want to deflower your innocent daughter - er, well, something like that.

Really, you have to give this country credit where credit is due. No contemporary developed nation in the world can touch us where political stupidity is concerned. We're the best at that! American exceptionalism, man! Take that, you cheese-eating European socialists! Having repudiated the rampant regressivism of the last president - a shit-kicker Texas Republican governor who made his bones frying people on death row - and having spent four years with more of precisely the same politics (except with much more niceness) from our present Social Worker-in-Chief, we are now very likely to turn again next to an even more radical version of the Bush debacle, that being the current shit-kicker Texas Republican governor, Rick Perry. I mean, it all might even have a certain entertainment value to it if Americans had any sense of irony whatsoever. Alas, that is far from the case, and this will all somehow make perfect sense to voters in 2012. The Democrat who governs like a Republican couldn't do squat to fix the crises created by the Republicans, so we'll need to get an even more Republican Republican in there to do it right! Far, far right.

I have to confess that I am deeply despondent about politics today, in a way I don't remember feeling, even during the ugliest days of George W. Caligula. It was awful then, but those actions and ethics were only a natural extension of what had already been going on within the GOP for twenty years. Each successive wave of thuggish animals was uglier than the last (as continues to be the case today), from Reagan to Gingrich to Bush. The Obama presidency, on the other hand, has been crushing to the spirit, and more so because even disappointed liberals still don't get it, thinking he's a wimp or a lousy poker player, when in fact he is - like Clinton before him - just another kleptocrat, come to sell out not just the country, but also the ideology of liberalism and the political party which once embodied those principles. That's quite a trifecta, really. Most horror story politicians would be satisfied just to wreck their country in the name of personal narcissism. Obama is additionally destroying a set of crucial and hard-won ideas along with a political party in the bargain.

He is the anti-FDR in every meaning of that term. FDR saved the country. Obama is burying it. FDR created the Democratic Party as we (used to) know it, once probably the most formidable political machine in American history. Obama is dragging it curbside. FDR gave America its social contract. Obama is dismantling it. FDR reveled in the hatred of the greedy thuggish scum who despised him. Obama keeps hoping they'll like him and invite him over for a beer if only he lets them pass his limp body around the jail cell one more time. FDR was America's greatest president. Obama is undoubtedly one of its worst.

This cuts deep, man. Perhaps I should have been used to it after eight years of Clinton (whose adoration to this day by Democrats is a thing of sad wonder and another unrelenting source of despondency) and the absolute nothingburgerness of Nancy Pelosi and crew following the 2006 election. Just the same, I'm having an "Et tu, Brute?" moment as I watch the complete sell-out of 300 million people by a handful of traitors. I'll give Obama credit for achieving one goal, though. This is a truly bipartisan act of treason. Good for him. Working together with Republicans seems very important to this president.

Meanwhile, though, what is there to do, say and think when the avenues for seeking solutions - hell, even for just ending our suicidal tendencies - all seem to be closing up at once, and every iteration of American politics is about losing more of what matters? Like I said, it's getting harder and harder to have hope, and even to care. I guess at some point if stupid people want to do stupid things to themselves, you gotta let them. I kinda wish the rest of us weren't dragged down the toilet with them, though. That's just rude.

It's even tempting to think that a Republican sweep in 2012 would be good for the country. Since conservative prescriptions can only continue the destruction they've begun, perhaps this disaster could mark the repudiation of the ideology forever. 'Course, that's what some of us thought in 2008, and now it is only worse. Far worse. Who could have imagined that, after a decade of Bush, regressivism and disaster that two years later the right would be back with the tea party and stronger than ever? Kafka? Dali? Timothy Leary?

The most disheartening thing about the American political condition is the degree to which people don't get what has happened to them, and still continues to happen, destroying the body politic. It's as if you were staring at an x-ray of a giant tumor in your belly, and nevertheless still sat there in befuddled consternation, wondering what the hell was making you feel so ill. It's as if you then thought to yourself, "Oh, what the hell, I guess I'll just drink a keg or two of this here Tumor Growth Potion. Maybe that will cure me." In the latest sign of this diagnostic idiocy, voters in Wisconsin this week had the opportunity to respond to the tumor that is their Republican governor, through the mechanism of recall elections. The results were hardly a ringing endorsement for sanity, or even self-protection from the predators for whom Scott Walker and his party (as well as most of the other party) shills. That's really depressing.

What is most disheartening is that Americans don't even understand the experiment they've been subjected to these last thirty years. They seem to get the fact that it has failed, but they don't know what "it" is. How many people know that regressives have won more or less every single economic policy battle of the last three decades, from taxes to trade to labor relations to deregulation to privatization to subsidies and beyond? How many Americans know this? How many know, to simply choose the most obvious example (but the same logic applies across the board), that taxes are far lower in America today than they have been for almost a century? And how can they possibly reject this regressive experiment in political economy if they don't even know that it has been conducted?

One reason they don't know, of course, is that nobody is telling them this. Sure, there are a couple of real liberals in Congress and even a socialist senator. But the real truth is that there is absolutely no left in America today, as a serious political movement. None. Liberalism hasn't had a real voice in America for thirty years, perhaps forty. What we have today, instead, is an insane tea party right, whom people like Eisenhower would have utterly abhorred. Then we have the 'mainstream' GOP, like John Boehner, who are simply yesterday's regressive tea party revolutionaries, and who therefore look moderate only through (faux) comparison to the Michele Bachmanns and Allen Wests of this world. Then you have the so-called 'centrist' or moderate Democrats in Congress, who can always be relied upon to provide any non-GOP votes necessary to stuff the plutocratic stocking with Xmas gifts, not to mention the one in the White House who signs the bill a day or two later. Finally, there are the Nancy Pelosis and Chuck Schumers of our political firmament, whose job it is to provide the image of an opposition to oligarchy and the military-industrial complex. "We'll shut down the war as soon as we get control of Congress," they say. Until they actually do win majorities, that is, when it becomes, "Oh, did we say that?"

And so on. Like I said, there is no one out there - and hasn't been for over a generation - who is leading the progressive charge, or even trumpeting the liberal narrative, to counter the absurdly manifest lies of the right. Fox News only makes sense if you're stupid. Similarly, more tax cuts for billionaires as a solution to an economy and a federal budget wrecked by tax cuts for billionaires only makes sense if no one else is out there pointing out that this particular imperial monarch is standing before us buck naked (if you catch my drift). I wouldn't mind quite as much that my country was committing national suicide if I thought that was the intention. In fact, it's more like murder by giving poisoned lollipops to middle-aged babies who gleefully grab for them. Hence my despondency.

If there is a small ray of hope out there, it is that more people are beginning to catch on. There has been a large spate of articles in the media lately with the theme of Obama's complete ineptitude and insignificance as a serious political force. Liberals are by and large finally, amazingly, beginning to understand that he is not a liberal champion by any stretch of the imagination. That's progress, at least, over reading for the last two years that Obama is a liberal or socialist or has a far-left agenda. What sickening, Orwellian, bullshit that is. Sadly, however, while commentators and the voting public are starting to recognize that Obama is not one of us, they have not yet realized the full truth, which is that he is one of them. As if somebody else picked Larry Summers and Tim Geithner and Bob Gates to serve in his cabinet. As if someone else decided to bail-out Wall Street while doing nothing about jobs or mortgages. As if there was another guy in the White House who tripled American forces in Afghanistan, or maintained Guantánamo in its fully operational state. This is what is, ultimately, so sickening about our current political condition. As a country, we don't even know what it is.

If there is another slightly larger a ray of hope on the horizon, it is the premise that there is a breaking point out there somewhere. We're seeing it in Israel (though, of course, the US media declines to cover the story), where huge swaths of the population have been on the streets protesting against - not Palestinians - but rather plutocratic plundering and the diminished lives it has left them with. We've seen that right across the Arab Spring countries, and in Greece and Britain.

Just the other day someone correctly noted that, "There is no excuse for violence, no excuse for looting, no excuse for thuggery, and those who are responsible must know that they will be brought to justice. I think this is about sheer criminality." I couldn't agree more, except that I was thinking it applies to the greedy bastard thugs whose sheer criminality, looting and - yes - violence has brought the world's economy to its knees, rather than to the response to that on the streets of London, which was what Tory Home Secretary Theresa May meant when she made that comment. In any case, maybe we're seeing the beginnings of the breaking point. Perhaps people are at last starting to say Basta! to impoverishment of the many in order to serve the greed of the few.

Maybe such restored political nobility will even come to America.

Maybe it isn't the entire human species that tramples on nobility in its grubby pursuit of greed, but just Homo Sapien Americanus.

Yet, while there is proliferate evidence that, even as people worldwide are rising up against inequity and exploitation, the economic elite have little inclination to do so much as glimpse the plight of those from whose life blood their immense riches have been wrung, nor hear the admonition of the downtrodden…that they are weary of life on their knees and are awakening to the reality that the con of freedom of choice under corporate state oligarchy is, in fact, a life shackled to the consumerism-addicted/debt-indenturement that comprises the structure of the neoliberal, global company store.

"The rotten masks that divide one man
From another, one man from himself
They crumble
For one enormous moment and we glimpse
The unity that we lost, the desolation
...Of being man, and all its glories
Sharing bread and sun and death
The forgotten astonishment of being alive"
--Octavio Paz, excerpt from "Sunstone"