It turned out to be the Only Child Syndrome run amuck, with The Kid being pathologically overindulged and overprotected, especially by my aunt, and effectively taking charge of their household from the time he learned to walk.

When The Kid reached his teens, he didn't become a juvenile delinquent or drug abuser; instead, he habitually spent my uncle's hard-earned money on expensive purchases for his hobbies, pastimes, and supposed home-improvement projects that he never actually carried out. (He liked buying tools.)

My aunt took the lead in rationalizing and spinning these reckless expenditures; perpetually outgunned and outnumbered, Uncle Max reluctantly but invariably acquiesced.

In turn, my mother would inform me and my siblings of The Kid's latest extravagance, and always ended the report with "... and Max was SO MAD!"

We all felt sorry for poor Uncle Max, but the refrain "... and Max was SO MAD!" became a running family joke; singly or in chorus, we would chime in with it at the end of our mother's stories to save her the trouble.

Even she had to laugh; it summed up Uncle Max's utterly helpless, impotent frustration and rage in the face of our domineering cousin's excesses.

Over the years, whenever I read articles like this one-- regardless of whether the aggrieved parties are "liberal Democrats", "unions", or liberal-lite progressive organizations, I find myself murmuring, "... and Max was SO MAD!"

"I can hire one half of the working-class to kill the other half." -- Jay Gould, Gilded Age railroad tycoon and land speculator

The Ayn Rand/Milton Friedman "free market" fundamentalist fairytale of economic neo-liberalism is leading the U.S. off a cliff and Barrack Obama is prancing along before it like a stoned Romulan enthusiastically carrying its banner.

Too many voting Democrats are still deceived that President Obama's politics are not overly shaped by Reaganomics. In a January 2008 interview with the editorial board of the Reno Gazette, then candidate Obama said:

"I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people—he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

Reagan, like Obama, "optimistically" extended tax cuts to the rich, deregulated corporations and savings & loans [whereas Obama treacherously allowed Clinton's deregulations of banks and derivatives to continue after 2008], and permitted military spending to soar without substantial cuts in other government spending or waste associated with specific civilian and military programs.

By the end of Reagan's two terms he had quadrupled the national debt, turned the U.S from the world's greatest creditor nation into a debtor nation, and his successor, Bush Sr., faced a Recession. Reagan, like every president after him, authorized hundreds of billions of dollars a year in corporate welfare subsidies for already profitable corporations and plutocrats despite critical basic needs in America that went unmet. This country will be in far worse shape when Obama gets through magnifying all the worst, failed policy aftermaths of Reagan, Clinton and Bush II.

Reagan and Bush Sr. cheerfully rolled out the fuse that would ignite economic globalization with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Influenced by neo-liberal Reaganomics, Bill Clinton lit their fuse on the grand betrayal of the American middle-class that is “free trade” offshoring of U.S. jobs via NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. Obama follows in their reckless footsteps on this despite flat job creation and worsening long-term unemployment.

What is now holding down and keeping down America’s optimism, domestic dynamism, job growth and its ability to well educate its people and adapt to a more competitive, greener, cleaner energy paradigm and green domestic manufacturing economy is sixteen years of bipartisan offshoring of American jobs, their middle-class tax revenue and Gross DOMESTIC Product in tradable goods, and a current wartime marginal income tax rate that, after loopholes, averages 17% for the richest four hundred Americans. Only hedge fund managers pay less.

These policies trace back directly to Reaganomics that began thirty years of bipartisan undermining of American organized labor and the manufacturing middle-class. Neo-liberal Obama would not even send his Vice President to speak with public sector unions having their collective bargaining rights stripped in Wisconsin. Several Democratic governors now openly attack unions.

“Free trade” without globally enforced labor and environmental protections is a barrier to rebuilding good paying, long-lasting green or legacy manufacturing jobs in the U.S. It is increasingly offshoring upper-middle-class jobs that require advanced degrees.

Because contemporary Democrats recklessly push “free trade,” openly shun or attack labor unions, and self-servingly surrender to fiscally insane, historically unprecedented wartime tax cuts for the super-rich that compel foreign borrowing plus interest--and now have the supreme contempt for their base to openly assault Social Security--it’s time to organize an independent national labor movement and a Labor Progress Party to unite all labor unions, true progressives, socialists and left-libertarians.