By the time Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the right-wing in America, left the White House after eight years in office, he had set in motion the machinery for the destruction of America's middle-class.

"The Gipper," as he was fondly called by his admirers did this by instituting several sea changes to how the U.S. government operated. He'd give that silly grin, shake his empty head, and say something stupid like, "The scariest words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help you."

Never mind that this perverse philosophy (if you could call it that) was not true; as tens of millions of elderly people now lived far better lives due to Social Security and Medicare or that the U.S. government had bailed out Wall St. and the banks several times before, and would again or that the FDA now screened harmful drugs or food products, and other federal agencies also saved American lives or improved their health. The fact was that Reagan and the GOP were shills for corporate America, and the greedy rich who ran those corporations were chaffing under the restrictions, regulations and laws that prevented them from making bigger profits and more money by exploiting the American people or compromising the environment!

And so Reagan called a halt to anti-trust law enforcement by his so called "Justice Department." The result? Companies merged into monopolies or oligopolies that could price-fix better, and banks acquired others banks at a frenzied pace until by the 21st century they were "too big to fail."

And as the corporations got richer, the top management pay skyrocketed from 20 to 500 times what they're average worker received. The corporations also had more money for lobbying government and making "donations" to their favorite political candidates, who typically were Republicans. Soon all those government agencies that were set up to protect the American people from Big Pharma or Big Oil or Big Chemical, were being staffed with people from those very industries. Thus began the "revolving door" practice where industry insiders protected the corporations and their profits, and boosted their careers at the expense of the American people.

Reagan also said that the worst thing you could call a person in his administration was "a re-regulator," because Ronnie was hell-bent on "deregulation." After all, there was no need to regulate Big Coal or Big Banks or Big Pharma, when these companies actually volunteered to do it themselves! The result in the short term was the collapse of the "deregulated" Savings & Loan banks, which cost the U.S. government over $800 billion to bailout in the late 1980s.

Reagan also replaced Paul Volcker as Chairman of the Federal Reserve with Alan Greenspan. It seems Volcker thought that the banks and Wall St. needed to be watched, monitored and punished for reckless behavior, while Alan figured the "free market" would somehow do the job of protecting the American people from the Big Business predators. That bore it's full and ugly fruit by 2008, when the U.S. economy collapsed into a sea of debt created by those rogue companies, and it left Greenspan admitting that he had been "wrong" to believe in that the "free market" could trump greed.

With the usurpation of the 2000 election by Bushboy, the stage was set for the final coup de grace of the American middle-class. By this time union membership had been slashed in half to 15% of the U.S. workforce, thanks to the non-enforcement of labor laws by Republican administrations, and while the corporate top managements were now enjoying geometric increases in salaries and benefits, the workers were lucky to be able to keep up with inflation, while their benefits, particularly healthcare were being cut.

And so it was no surprise to the smarter economists and financial players when the U.S. economy collapsed from Bushboy's incompetence and Republican policies of "laissez faire" and "deregulation." Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, both Nobel Award winning economists predicted the fall, as did the ever astute George Soros, who made billions more betting against the banks and Wall St. "mortgage backed securities" scam.

And so we have seen the largest transfer of wealth from the middle-class and the poor to the rich in the history of the world thanks to the Republican policies previously mentioned, and their refusal to use government to protect the people from the Big Business predators.

From the 1930s until the 1980s FDR's "New Deal" provided a stable and sensible regulatory regime for banks and the financial sector. This was gradually torn down by the Republican Party. The Savings & Loan debacle of the 1980s was an omen of what was to come. But it was ignored and with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, led by then Senator Phil Gramm (who naturally became a highly paid lobbyist for the banking industry when he left the Senate), the financial sector of America became a crazed casino with the CEOs and other top management people only concerned with making obscene profits, and no concern about how well their products served America.

Today we live with the aftermath of this "thirty years Republican war" on the middle-class, and as I write this polls show many American people are considering voting the Republicans back into office in the Congress and state houses across the country!!! To this I can only say, "OMG! Will there be any middle-class left after the next Republican crime wave on behalf of their corporate masters?"