Take these numbers and set them aside for a moment, we'll come back to them >> $1.05-Trillion. (Yes, I know, the trillion ought not be in caps, but, what the hell, that much money should be in bold caps.) and $700-billion..no caps there, it's only billions.
Tonight, President Obama will deliver his State of the Union address to America and we are promised that he will talk about spending freezes on non-essential and redundant federal programs and agencies. He will also talk about Democrats uniting behind the Senate version of health care reform and he'll give a wink and nod to jobs creation, and let us know that we're not going back to the moon any time soon.
So, Mr. President, let's talk. Shall we?
I am wondering if those programs are redundant and non-essential, why in the name of Aunt Gertie's persimmon butter are they still around? Huh? You've had a year!
And, Mr. President, I feel that; since I opened my purse to your campaign, spent hours speaking from various stumps in Texas, and worked diligently on election day to help insure that you got the needed votes, I am entitled to give you a dope smack on the back of the head from time-to-time. Well, I am aren't I?
Squint your eyes and clinch your shoulder and neck muscles Mr. President because here it comes.
Sir, too many of your base constituents are feeling let down and are beginning to wonder if maybe you're not an Eisenhower Republican or a Chamber-of-Commerce Democrat. We do not care a hill of hammered rat dung for the farcical Senate version of health care reform. We want real health care reform with, at the very least, a federally subsidized "public option. We want the government to invest in jobs, not cut programs; and we want you to work to restore the American middle-class by creating those jobs with the assurance that workers can organize and bargain fairly for better standards of living, health care for all, retirement security and federally enforced policies that will protect all Americans from the rampaging greed and exploitation by the stateless corporations, and their world-wide financiers, (which)--- oops, SCOTUS has turned that into "who" --- have so corrupted our legislative process that we have come to the point that our military is used to advance their worldwide expansion and profits.
Back in the late 50s, when Ike sat in the oval office and "Public Relations" was becoming the reigning science of politics, America was similarly suffering. It took John Kennedy, with the support of the unions, to turn back a depression, called recession by the Chamber of Commerce, and launch America into its most prosperous years. That transformation was accomplished by investing in working families and bringing them into the emergent middle class with affordable higher education for their children to insure that the process would continue.
That was the road to economic recovery back then and it remains so today. With unemployment at 10% and likely to climb another 2% to 5% higher and nearly 6-million people on extended unemployment benefits with at least another 6-million Americans, way too many of them children, living on nothing but food stamps, a symbolic spending freeze and curtailment of space exploration does not suffice .
Mr. President, we are not stupid---we used those opportunities for higher education and understand clearly the dynamics of the present. Wall street and the financial sector cashed in on $700-billion in TARP funds and are now back in business as usual giving themselves huge bonuses, fleecing the American public through unregulated exploitative business practices, and buying and corrupting our legislators while their public relations arm, the Chamber of Commerce, attempts to misdirect our attention from their own responsibilities for our current depression called recession.
That $1.05-TRILLION, I mentioned up yonder. That is the amount projected to be pissed away on Iraq and Afghanistan from 2001 through fiscal 2010. I'll not belabor the obvious. Thanks to our middle class upbringing and opportunity for education, we caught on to the significance of that amount right quickly, we did.
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