Rush Lindbaugh comes on as a regular guy with the courage to let it all hang out, the voice of everyman. Listen closer and you can hear the voice of the billionaires and the bankers in a working-class accent, appealing to our righteous anger, our need to feel better than someone else, corralling us into their mental straight-jacket where the rich are rich and the poor are poor because they deserve to be, any attempt to fix or change the system just makes it worse and anyone who tries is stupid, bad and wrong and deserves to be stepped on.

When you turn on the radio and you want to listen to talk about what's going on and you don't want to listen to high-brow talk on NPR by folks who mostly don't know what life's like for the rest of us, you usually get a choice between Rush or someone a lot like him, because the station owners and their corporate sponsors get to say what our choices are. Pressuring the advertisers to pull the plug on one of these shock jocks when they go over the line into pure hate talk is about the only power we have over the listening choices we get.

What we really need is a union person, one straight-talking union man or woman who's really on our side - not just trying to sound and talk like us - on the air for an hour or two a day to set the record straight and lead us in some honest talk about what's going on and what we need to do about it. When's the last time you heard something like that?