"and so we have people chewing on each other’s legs" Les Leopold

Straight up. Leopold calls it straight up.

http://www.dailypublic.com/articles/02032016/interview-les-leopold-economic-inequality

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If inequality has been running away for decades, that has to indict the American voter and our paltry voter turnout rates. Is democracy not working?

Oh, it’s definitely not working. Let’s go back to the better business climate model. Both parties adopted it—the Democrats adopted it just as strongly as the Republicans did—so it wasn’t just Reagan. Carter already began the deregulation. I don’t know if you’ll recall, but Ted Kennedy was all high on deregulating airlines, communications, trucking—they thought it would help deal with inflation and create new openings in the economy. Carter took off the cap for interest rates for credit cards, that was first big deregulation of finance. Everyone was into it. Look at the Clinton administration, they deregulated the big things: Glass Steagall, derivatives (they didn’t deregulate, they said you weren’t allowed to regulate derivatives which a decade later lead directly to the crash). So the Kool-Aid was already imbibed by both parties.

If you look at voter participation during the Kennedy era, it was really high, like 70 percent, and it’s gone steadily down. The more the economy got financialized as this better business climate set in and as more people’s wages began stagnating, they started to feel like, “No one is really representing me.” There’s an incredible study, which I quote in the book, but I also have been writing about in the Huffington Post and everywhere else. Two political scientists, one from Princeton one from Northwestern, Gilens and Page, they looked, about a decade ago, at the years 1990 to 2003. They looked at 1,771 Congressional bills, and they tried to figure out, looking at poll data, that which was passed, how did it represent the average voter, compared to wealthy voters and large business lobbyists. And they found the average voter had NO, near zero, impact on legislation. Zero. Now think about that. That’s the very definition of a plutocracy. You have no influence. So the frustration that America feels is that it doesn’t matter who gets in. I mean, why else would people be so upset about Obama? Because he lifted people’s hopes up that he was going to make big changes. And when you think about it, other than the health care act, which was a weird compromise to being with, he made very few changes that impact everyday people’s lives. He still follows the better business climate model. Let me ask you this: When was the last time a politician said, I think we should create more public sector jobs? For people who need work, for the people who are being laid off at this plant and that plant. We need more public sector employees. We need more teachers in the schools. We need more day care, more health care?

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