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became a precondition for employment in government. A band of financial and ideological profiteers descended on Washington like a crazed swarm of right-wing locusts bent on destroying the rules and laws which protected our people from poisoned air and water, and from greed. But nowhere was their assault on the rule of law so great as in their attempt to subvert, ignore, defy and destroy the laws which require an America that is bias free.

A constituency of the comfortable, the callous and the smug was recruited to form solid ranks against the forgotten. They enforced the national nullification of the needs of the needy, the gratuitous gratification of the gross and the greedy and practiced the politics of impropriety, prevarication, pious platitudes and self-righteous swinishness. They forced a form of triage economic upon us, producing the first increase in infant mortality rates in twenty years and pushing thousands of poor and working poor Americans deeper into poverty. By mid-term, the Census Bureau reported that the number of people living in poverty had increased over the previous four years by more than nine million, the biggest increase since these statistics were first collected over two decades ago. Today the poorest two-fifths of our population receives a smaller share of the national income and the richest two-fifths a larger share than at any time since 1947. Over the last five years, income for the bottom fifth of our population went down by 9%; for the top fifth, it went up by 32%, and for that one percent at the very top, after-tax income went up by 102%/¹ If we are to believe with Thomas Jefferson that "the common man is the most precious resource of