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Conflict of interest became a precondition for employment in government. They unleashed a gang of corporate sociopaths to raid and ravage the national treasury.

Then, as now, they forced a form of triage economics upon us. Then it produced the firsst increase in infant mortality rates in twenty years and pushed thousands of poor and working poor Americans deeper into poverty.

By the mid-80's, the Census Bureau reported that the number of Americans living in poverty had increased over the previous four years by nine million, the biggest increase since these statistics were first collected over two decades ago. Even today the poorest of 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. The United States today is the most economically stratified of all industrial nations, the gap between rich and poor larger than in Britain, Italy, Canada, Germany, France, Finland -- greater and rising faster than anywhere else in the world.

In this period, income for the bottom fifth of America's population went down by 9%; for the top fifth, it went up by 32%, and for the one percent at they very top, after-tax income went up by 102%.

Those years then were what these years now promise to be -- a kind of festive party thrown for America's rich. Then the middle class had to get by on two paychecks, median family income was stagnant, and the percentage of young families who owned