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Here's Your State of the Union
By Jeff Koopersmith
Sept. 13, 2006 – Lugano (americanpolitics.com) – I am such a lucky guy.
All my life I worked hard for my advocacy clients, my candidates -- on both sides of the aisle -- and my son.
Sure, I've had my ups and downs, and many of you have shared them with me.
Today, as I split my time between The District, Palm Beach, New York, Lake Lugano, and Philadelphia, I have great opportunity to watch and record what's going on around me -- what people look at, how they are building their lives (or not), how greedy they are (or not), how giving they are (or not), and how stupid they are (or not).
There is no question that the generation scheduled to finish high school these days is less educated than mine, but it also appears that it will -- as did generation X -- proceed to produce plenty of doctoral candidates, physicians, scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. In fact, it appears we have too many of these geniuses. Take a gander at the underemployment of men and women that went to grad school for from eight to twelve years behind college. It's a disarming fact of life -- and makes poop out of the argument that our educators are letting us down. What educators are doing, however, is ignoring the ignoramuses -- which is not good, because these kids' parents are already marginalized, and they will be in an even worse position as they grow into the workforce or welfare lines.
So, with less than two months to go until Election Day 2006 -- a point in time that makes far more sense than January -- let's assess the State of the Union -- Let's take a look at what the Bush Legacy is thus far -- and where we might be by the time we escape the era of his Administration and the influence of people surrounding him.
Education
The only result from Bush's "Leave No Child Behind" scheme is that he has left millions of kids behind.
Mr. Bush's belief that tests tell all is about as stupid as the old "tracking" systems used in the most forward-thinking school systems in New York during the 1950s. During that period, students in the sixth grade were tested to see if it was worth it to train them for college. If the test deemed that the student was not "college" material, they were put in shop class for the rest of their middle- and high school careers. Bush has created mayhem. Teachers now teach nothing but math and English, and teach to the tests. It matters not whether our children take a look at art, biology, history, and other "unimportant" subjects -- just get those test scores up to make sure Bush shares the federal money with our schools!
Absurd.
It's gone so far that school administrators are being prosecuted for reporting falsely high test scores in an attempt to save their kids and their own jobs. Teachers are fed up. All of a sudden, the nation that led the way in almost any subject is now concerned that it's not keeping up.
Why?
Because "No Child Left Behind" is a fraud. The reason we are testing is to break the backs of teachers' unions, a goal has been a Neocon agenda item for decades -- and this is how it is being done.
Housing
What a disgrace.
Bush has created such a monetary panic that the rich have lost all conscience -- understandably -- choosing to make certain that their own families are protected and living in neighborhoods that even Croesus could not afford. The gap between rich and poor has grown to unconscionable levels. Working men and women make less now (in buying power) than they did in 1958. The cheapest new car costs almost as much as the average annual income per capita. The average home price is now 10 times the annual income of the average American except in the most deserted locales where no jobs are available anyway.
Welfare
What a sensational evolution -- or rather, devolution.
Have we made progress or what? Now single moms ignore their kids, who turn into street thugs waiting for mother dear to come home from a dead-end job at which she earns less than $40 a day flipping burgers at the usual trans-fat junk food poison hangouts our children worship.
This is an issue that was first framed by the now-disgraced Newt Gingrich as welfare "reform" -- as if having to live on three hundred bucks a month is something needing reformatory overhaul.
Sadly, President Clinton became the Vicar of Welfare Repair, and in doing so sowed the seeds for not only dazzling poverty but stunning greed as its reflection. He and I parted company on the issue of welfare -- but I had enough courage to write him and tell him exactly why, and continued that courage defending him against the morons in the House who sought to impeach his penis and make fools of us all and "heroes" of the likes of Wolf Blitzer (a passed-over moron first hired and trained by Pat Robertson's CBN), Ann Coulter (the anorexic American Eva Braun), and other pseudojournalists too numerous to mention, a pack of jackals who have taken center stage as "news celebrities"who wouldn't know the truth if it bit them on the ankle.
Murders among youth are rampant. Just focus on Philadelphia, which now leads the nation in murder -- and in youth violence. Kids just roam the streets looking for something, someone, to pay for the accident of their births.
Yeah, sure -- we wish everyone could be as fortunate as Colin Powell or Condi Rice -- but the truth is that a three-year-old black American kid takes a look out his window and loses all hope right then and there.
Poverty -- appalling poverty -- lurks around the corner in every American city and in sub-rural towns across America. This is the kind of poverty that is dirty-filthy, not the "sweet" poverty of black and white movies in which the poor held their heads high. No, this is the poverty wrought by the ever-widening gap between the well-off and the pitiable. This is the poverty that causes the elderly to die in the cold of winter or the heat of summer because there is no safety net to pay their utility bills. This is the brand of poverty that forces a choice between laundry soap and medicine, dinner or another night of scantiness. Appalling can't even describe what we feel as we read ads in our local newspapers offering to lease Bentleys for nearly $3,000 a month.
And lest you think I am a communist or anti-capitalist, you would be mortified should you judge me thus. I am far from that -- and much closer to the capitalist than the socialist.
However, there are limits -- and I don't mean constitutional, but instead conscientious limits, and like most human beings I am unwilling to sacrifice my colleague Americans on the Republican or Democrat altar of covetousness, let alone some Tutsi human target in Africa, merely to guarantee that George Soros or Bill Gates or Dick Cheney earns another billion or two next month.
Come on.
Enough is enough. Let anyone who can earn, steal, or inherit millions a year and save even up to a billion walk free -- but there is a boundary, a limit once recognized not only by the American system of taxation but by most other nations as well.
Plainly, if one earns one billion dollars a year, it is really just a tiny retribution toward that person or his ne'er-do-well heirs to tax that annual income at 90% -- sadly, ever so wretchedly leaving the family with merely $100 million to spend, save, give away, or set ablaze that year.
Have we gone mad? Don't we see those children in Darfur? Don't we tire of the jokes that the children of Africa should learn to eat the flies that lay eggs in their eye sockets -- and eat those eggs as well? I recall, nearly thirty years ago, I penned a small counter book titled the California Medfly Cookbook. It was borne from a remark made by the then Secretary of Agriculture that people should not shun California-grown fruit -- then smitten with egg-depositing fruit flies -- because these insects' larvae were a "a good source of protein."
I could not then project that we would be laughing about similar flying disease carriers as food for the children of the desperately poor.
Take a trip to Detroit or Denver -- or just throw a dart in a map of the United States to see what I mean. And I don't mean New Orleans - which was only the harbinger of what's to come in this country if we do not revisit programs to help impoverished Americans, especially blacks and Hispanics, to fight social racism -- not institutional racism, although it exists as well, but now as an entity so disguised and subsurface that it's very difficult to prosecute. At the same time we are telling young women that they are murdering children when they seek an abortion to try and make certain they won't bring another disturbingly unfortunate kid into their world. What could be more stupid?
Abortion
You might be surprised to learn that I am in opposition to abortion.
Nevertheless, this is -- and should remain -- a private matter, and in al truth has nothing to do with God, Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, Buddha, Krishna, Bob Dobbs, The Flying Spaghetti Monster or any other spectral influence -- especially the Bible, which is surely a collection of allegory or fable from some very wise and quite manipulative males writing in the 2nd century.
Since when do you or I however have the right to tell a woman what to do with her body or the body of her prenatal child? This rubbish about salvaging "the unborn" is entirely pap.
Even though, if one agrees that a three-week-old fetus is a human being, I dare one to prove this in a court of law. Religious fanatics should have enough faith in their Gods to believe any woman undergoing and anyone providing such "operations" will be punished or not upon application to "heaven." A cry for the State to do God's bidding is sidesplitting -- within any sane philosophical or religious framework. The State's only interest in a fetus growing inside a woman with zero income and little or no education is to prevent that pregnancy before that child is born at a cost to society estimated at between $300 and $950 thousand dollars over its lifetime.
And step up, all you Bible-beating frauds: adopt those children -- and before they are born, before you can check on them to make sure they are free of birth defects and have all their fingers and toes, before you know whether or not they are black, Hispanic or Asian!
The War on Terror
America's biggest yarn is Mr. Bush's "war on terror" -- or is it "terrorism" now? -- which appears more like a War on the Middle Class, raping them of every last dollar they will earn in the future as the spurious Bush tax cuts evaporate -- as they must -- and we, Americans all, begin to pay our huge debt for the Iraq war, Afghanistan, and the rest of the Middle East, which hasn't done a damn thing to harm us as a nation for our entire history.
Who will benefit from this? Not the young Marine killed by some improvised explosive device planted on the roadway 8,000 miles from home. Not his mother, nor his wife, nor his children if any.
No, the beneficiaries of war, as always, are American, foreign, and most of all nonaligned (in any way) corporations who claim there is something sacred about faithfulness to only the "bottom line."
What greedy drivel.
Since when does the corporate individual -- a person under law -- not have a responsibility to the society that supports it?
One must heave when realizing that the new Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke -- whose previous job was chairperson of Goldman Sachs -- earned last year nearly $40 million -- forty million! Who on earth, let alone the skeleton-like persona of this new secretary, is worth $770,000.00 a week? Tell me. Defend that contemptible paycheck -- enough to feed a million starving people every day.
Yet for the past few months, since the last Fed Chairman bailed out of the Bush diaper pail, I haven't heard one "reporter" -- not one -- remark about the unspeakable nightmare this man stands for. And no, I don't care if he happened to occupy the corner office at a time when Goldman earned a trillion dollars more than last year. Anyone who believes that a single man at the helm of an investment bank that size has even a scintilla of impact on the bottom line is smoking mushrooms. Now this man is the head of the Treasury in the United States -- and sworn to serve the "people."
Do you believe he will?
What has happened to us? What malevolence or evildoers lurk in not only ours but in most societies in the West and now the East? And if you think our "Mr. Secretary" is the only one earning these preposterous salaries - think again. There are thousands of corporate executives and "small" businessmen - as defined by our government earning as much or more and socking it away in secret bank accounts abroad.
"Nucular" Proliferation (for the slender of mind, that's "Increase in Weapons of Mass Destruction")
Excuse me, but I could not resist the Bushspeak here.
Not too long ago, I witnessed the spectacle of our Secretary of State announcing that she would sink so low as to entertain direct negotiations with Iran concerning that nation's supposed quest to gain access to nuclear weapons – A Bombs, if you like.
Not for a moment will you accuse me of defending Iraq's right or ability or whatever to possess such a weapon, or three. In fact, I loathe the phony Islamic "fundamentalists" who control that very ailing nation, and, I support, those who struggle within to overthrow the Mullahs and Imams who don't have the sense to have any sense.
However -- and you might have known I'd ask -- what allows us, the United States of America, to possess thousands, even tens of thousands, of these weapons while only our (current) allies are allowed to follow suit? Why has not a single White House goon squad reporter (with a conscience) asked the Imperial President or the Secretary of State or Defense why we maintain our own all-too-well-stocked nuclear arsenal?
Wouldn't it be wiser for all nations to surrender these weapons?
It's not as if we didn't use them. And it's not as if we wouldn't use them. We certainly would -- and every day some nut, most likely not within the structure of the Pentagon, but instead a contractor, plots how we might use "tactical" nukes to annihilate our enemies or to control more basic resources -- oil among them -- by wiping out small populations who won't be missed.
As an aside to our dimwitted White House Press Corps, Ms. Rice is neither "Madame" nor "Madam" Secretary. Last time I checked, she was yet unmarried. She is, at best, "Mademoiselle" Secretary. So please, make a note!
Conspicuous Consumption -- Not Just of Things But People
And finally, far worse than most of the above is the almost wholehearted descent of American society into some hell than could not have been described by Hesse or depicted by Mann.
I regret echoing my grandparents, but have you studied the fare on television as of late?
I do not speak of exposed nipples at the Super Bowl or discussions of birth control devices on children's programming. I speak of America's newfound love for despising and ridiculing the less fortunate. Do you think for one moment that our "viewing audience" tunes in to programs featuring, say, imbecile heiress Paris Hilton for illumination? No. They tune in either to emulate that contemptible girl (with even more loathsome parents), or they tune in to despise her. Either way, the celebration of greed and preposterous agony over unsophisticated conspicuousness is disheartening at best.
What have we become when we and our children salivate over programs featuring sweet sixteen parties for children of the rich -- where hundreds of thousands are spent on bashes and gifts for the most self-absorbed teens on earth? Just the other evening I happened, in Europe, to come across this program where a 15-year-old boy, the son of a a top "gangsta rap" record label plus, was reaming an adult party planner for "messing up" the prompt delivery of his "invitations" which were boxed and included a personal MP3 player for each invited guest with a message from the little birthday-snob recorded therein. This show was, however, not as low as others from this particular producer inasmuch as one could defend the handsome and accomplished parents remarking that they were attempting -- by leasing a nightclub for their unbelievably fat and shallow son -- to lay the groundwork for his own assumption of the rap music throne now occupied by people you wouldn't stand next to on the subway without shuddering.
What are we teaching our children when we telegraph to them through "our corporate sponsors" that unless kids wear $200 athletic shoes, they are not worth the time of day? What lessons are learned from watching a panel of frustrated losers' abuse and criticism of young performers who are bent on gaining stardom -- even at the cost of their sanity and pride? How do we go from laughing at the buffoonish Donald Trump, whose only talent is marketing his name as a brand, to worshiping his spittle as he snaps, "You're fired!"? Or still thinking that Tom Delay might be innocent, or that Dick Cheney EARNED his last $22 million a year at Halliburton?
Yes, this is what we, simultaneous sycophants and victims of the National Infotainment State, have become.
JEFF KOOPERSMITH is a political consultant, opinion research authority, policy analyst, and self-described "renegade lobbyist."
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