Dear President Obama,
When you ran for office, you said that you represent “Change We Can Believe In.”
At this point in time, as a card carrying member of organized labor and a member of what is becoming the former middle class, I'd like a definition of your concept of “change.”   From my perspective, your version of “change” seems to consist of a variation of Republican style trickle down economics that combines the worst features of capitalism with the worst features of socialism.   The rich investors get the risky bets that they call “investments” insured with the immediate use of taxpayer dollars to cover losses because they are “too big to fail.”  While the rest of us get to lose our jobs, homes and have our safety nets cut by the very people that we elected to protect us, presumably because we are too small to matter.

After years of enduring the slings and arrows of the Bush and other Republican administrations that put the interests of corporate America first, the working people who comprise the middle class looked to you and the Democratic Party to level the playing field.   After years of stagnant wages, seeing our jobs outsourced to places like China and India and being convinced by the Bush administration that running up tabs on our credit cards is the same as getting the pay raises we had in more equitable times, we hoped that, in the interest of fairness, you would push the pendulum in the other direction.   Instead, you keep using the word bipartisan which translates to compromising our interests.  I say that you can't compromise with members of the Party that helped to create the disparity of wealth that is commonly called the top 2% without embracing their “values!”

As the core group that supported you and helped to get you elected, many of us now have a few questions:

1. Why has so little been done about The Employee Free Choice Act, a law that would help working people unionize their workplace?  Action speaks louder than words, sincere people don’t just pay lip-service to unions, they firmly support legislation that helps them.
2. Why are you supporting three “free” trade agreements that are nothing more that NAFTA style job killers?  Even George Bush couldn't get the South Korea US Free Trade Agreement passed into law.   In these tough times, why are you supporting legislation that helps corporations outsource American jobs?  Perhaps you are doing that at the behest of “too big to fail corporations?”  All of this sounds like a replay of Bill Clinton's empty NAFTA promises to me, we all know how that worked out.
   
3. Even though you would have had to buck the corporate backed right wing lie machine and their main stream media henchmen, why didn't you support single payer health care?  With so many people losing their jobs, there is NO justification for any elected official putting corporate interests before the health and safety of ALL Americans!  Almost every industrialized country has some form of national healthcare.   In our country, if you can't pay the corporate ransom, your health is your problem! 
   
4. Finally, why are you talking about putting Social Security and Medicare on the negotiating table? NEED I SAY MORE?
   

I'm not telling you how to do your job, but if I were in your position, the first thing that I would do is to reinstate every single tariff on imports that existed prior to the Reagan administration and have truth in labeling legislation introduced that identifies U.S. brand name products that are really imports in disguise with a cigarette style warning label.  Then I would go for the repeal of Taft-Hartley to help America's unions restore prosperity to the Middle-Class.   Those moves would cost the American taxpayer nothing, but will create enough tax revenue to fix the deficit, because job offshoring and the resulting lopsided balance of trade is the primary cause of the deficit in the first place!  Corporations got richer, but it destroyed the middle class and made America a country without a product!

Now about Social Security which is actually a form of insurance that was funded, in good faith by America's hard working people.   Our electeds from BOTH parties have systematically raided the Social Security Trust fund to finance general government spending.   Anyway you look at the situation, that's FRAUD because none of it was paid back!  Any cuts to Social Security will be seen by everybody who paid into the fund, not as a cut to just another so called “entitlement” but as out and out robbery of a portion of our life savings!

In closing, let me say that most middle class Americans would probably agree with me when I say that the change that we've seen so far has been symbolic change, not substantive change a.k.a. SMALL CHANGE.  Keeping 2012 in mind and in light of that I say, Mr. President, keep the change, we just want our lives and our dignity back!

Respectfully Yours,
Jack Wesley Wade