Back in the late 1960s, when he was my age, my father was a blue collar worker from Brooklyn with an eighth grade education. Nevertheless, he owned an automobile, took vacations, could afford dental and medical coverage, had a mortgage on a Levittown house, and raised six kids - four of whom had attended a Catholic elementary school. Today a man with dad's job, level of education and size family would depend on welfare, food stamps and other overburdened and failing social services to get by. There are lot of people like that whom you will never hear the Democrats or Republicans talk about because America is not on their agenda and John Q. Public is no longer one of their constituents. Who do I mean?

I mean the can't-afford-health-insurance working family who loses all of their savings paying hospital bills for a catastrophic illness while illegal aliens get medical treatment for free. The Democrats want cheap votes and the Republicans want cheap labor. Importing poor and unskilled and uneducated people from overseas (or turning native-born Americans into a class of poor and unskilled and uneducated people) is one way to accomplish this. Don't forget that the poorest countries in the world are run by the richest people in the world. It's called kleptocracy.

I mean the 50-year-old with a mortgage whose job has been downsized or outsourced while the CEO of his former company, who earns 300 times more than the average worker, gets to walk away with a $2.6 million golden parachute for devaluating the stock, closing down facilities, and running the company into the ground. Such a 50-year-old with his university degree and quarter-of-a-century experience in the business world can't even get a job at McDonald's because he's "overqualified."

I mean the 18-year-old who has to take remedial courses at the community college because his K-12 "educators" cared more about condoms, school prayer, self-esteem workshops, holiday decorations and religious sensitivities and the ethnic composition of the classroom than they cared about science, mathematics, literature, music, or art.

I mean the employee of Walmart whose grandparents or great-grandparents were confronted with "Irish need not apply" Help Wanted notices. Where are his reparations? Where is his set-aside, scholarship, business loan, and affirmative action?

Stand-up comic Chris Rock recently observed this growing constituency of millions of Americans of every race, color and creed: the porter who works in a hospital in which he can't afford to be sick, the employee in a retail establishment in which he can't afford to shop and the factory worker manufacturing items he can't afford to purchase. It takes a night club act to properly describe the real issues confronting millions of people in America but it's the Democans and Republicrats who are the real joke.

Imagine it's 1974 and you're at a fashionable cocktail party in Leningrad. Attending are the people who now run the Soviet Union - not the Old Guard in rumpled coats and fur hats left over from the October Revolution, but engineers, economists, technicians, doctors, researchers, journalists, legal experts and university professors. These people enjoy well-paying jobs, fine vacations, health care and pensions. It would be impossible to convince these people that their economic system was not sustainable in the long run, that their political system couldn't be reformed, and that the Soviet Union itself was comprised of such a culturally diverse population that there was nothing left to hold it together except what Checkov called "force and lies."

Naturally none of these issues, or the tens of millions of people facing them, would darken the doorstep of Communist Party gatherings.

Paul Manton