Deja vu

Tell me if you've heard this one before:
Major financial institutions, encouraged by a lawless Administration's lax enforcement of gutted regulatory statutes, make horrible investments and other fiscally questionable practices common enough for insiders to reap windfall profits, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill when the whole industry crashes.
Right! The S & L scandal of the mid-1980s!
Oh, wait, did you think I was talking about the current hedge fund/mortgage lending crisis? Well, I might as well have, given the parallels, and even some of the players involved.
Wake up, people! This is not a case of incompetence; rich Republicans have been gaming the system at the middle and lower classes expense for decades now, and non-wealthy voters have been enabling them to do so by voting against their economic interests ever since St. Reagan conned them into thinking it was somebody else (remember the fictitious "welfare queens driving Cadillacs"?) stealing from them.
Deregulation and stripping the government of its enforcement powers has done nothing except enrich the wealthy and erode the economy as a whole, and the Republican Party stands for nothing less than a continuation, if not an acceleration, of these destructive policies. The resultant slaughter of middle class financial security and near elimination of the possibility of true upward mobility represents a war against the non-rich, and it has been going on since Jan. 20, 1981. You can tell, because when anyone awake attempts to correct the imbalances these policies have created, invariably the right wing accuses them of fomenting "class warfare". This is classic right wing Republican rhetoric--accuse your opponents of that which you are practicing in a neat verbal sleight-of-hand. And that has been working since 1994.
More and better Democrats. Now.