To The Editor:
Was talking to a friend about what’s going on in our country.  Reading my out of town papers and looking at T.V., things to me are looking bad for the middle class American.  Ask the workers who’ve been trying to form a union at Wal-Mart or McDonald’s.  Or ask protesters who’re simply trying to be heard outside the Democratic or Republican National Convention but are instead herded by cops into distant corrals and kept there under guard.
More and more Americans today are having a rude awakening from their gauzy dream of “America the Beautiful, Home of the Free, and the Land of Opportunity!”  Instead, they find themselves living in a place where the alien anti-democratic forces of plutocracy and authoritarianism are brazenly pushing themselves forward to create a new U.S.A:  The United States of Corporate America. During the last 45 years or so, an oligarchy of elite corporate executives and their immensely rich investors has incrementally been tightening its grip on our people’s rights, opportunities, communities, elections, legislatures, courts, media, wealth – and even our air, water, food, and lives.  For roughly the last 15 years, however, both the plutocrats and authoritarians have abandoned incrementalism, muscling-up with audacious intake of power supplements that have strengthened their grip into a choke hold.
Consider just a few of these changes that have skewed America’s balance of power and wealth almost totally in their favor, largely by throttling the dreams and democratic possibilities of the majority of people – i.e., the poor and the endangered middle class: voter suppression laws, tattered safety net, jobless recovery, legalized tax dodging, deregulation, exorbitant student loan rates, too big to fail, perpetual war, citizens united, crumbling infrastructure, privatization, police militarization, stop and frisk, bans on unions, too big to jail, payday loan schemes, debtor prisons, poverty wages, jailing minority youth, MAFTA/CAFTA.
All of this adds up to the enthronement of the rich, the normalization of inequity and the imposition of a surveillance society – squeezing the life out of our core values of democracy, equality, and justice.  And that would be that, except for this: US! vs Average Americans; the Democratic hope and strength of our country is in the rebellious spirit of grass roots people, groups and coalitions.  We the people will speak and stand against the armed robbery of the people’s right and the grand theft of the American Dream.  (Senator Birnie Sanders is with us).
Average American
John T. Nickoless
Old Burnt Factory Road
Bennettsville, SC