docmercer--banned
Banned
- Joined
- Oct 21, 2004
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 0
Huck Gutman: 'Is George W. Bush the worst US president ever?'
<HR color=#000000 noShade SIZE=1>A dismal performance on home front
By Huck Gutman, Dawn
Mr. Bush has not been kinder to American people, nor secured their well-being as their elected leader is supposed to do. He has redistributed wealth from the middle class upward — to the very wealthiest families in America. Two tax cuts which give the biggest benefits to the top one per cent — those who earn more than $337,000 annually — have raised the tax burden on the middle class.
This past year, for instance, President and Mrs Bush earned $784,219 and Vice-President and Mrs Cheney earned $2,173,892. (Yes, they are both clearly in the top one per cent of income earners). The Bush-enacted tax cuts slashed their tax bills, 12 per cent for Mr Bush, 18 per cent for Mr Cheney so that they paid $110,182 less than they would have paid had the legislation not been enacted.
Meanwhile, in the longer run the only way to pay for these tax cuts — which turned a federal surplus into an enormous deficit that the Bush administration projects at $521 billion in this year alone — will be to reduce government spending on the programmes which underwrite the quality of life for poor and middle class Americans: food and income support for the poor, education and health care and pensions for the middle class. Thus, the massive tax cuts to the wealthy will be paid for by hacking away at, bankrupting and terminating programmes that support the working people of America.
In his administration, more than any other during the past three quarters of a century, the rich have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poorer, and the middle class has shrunk. America is currently an oligopoly run not only by, but for, the wealthy class.
Mr Bush has embraced deficits which will undermine the long term health of the American economy. The numbers are staggering. The budget deficit is $512 billion. The current accounts deficit for the first quarter of 2005 was $195.1 billion, which projects to a deficit for 2005 of $780.1 billion. That means that this year alone the United States has financed its lowered taxes, its costly war in Iraq, its hunger for cheap goods, by a total of $1.29 trillion.
Numbers can by themselves be numbing, so let us try a comparison. Pakistan’s government budget expends $16.5 billion, India’s 2004 $104 billion, China’s $348.9 billion, all including capital expenditures. The three governments spend barely over a third of what the United States borrows through deficit spending and balance of payments debits.
Although Mr Bush would prefer to hide the fact, this money in one way or another will have to be repaid. Those repayments will hold the United States hostage, exactly as developing nations today are often held hostage by the IMF and the World Bank. Even a vibrant American economy would be strained by the enormous obligation of paying interest on and paying down the national debt, and repatriating the dollars ‘borrowed’ by the balance of payments deficit.
But the American economy is not as vibrant as is claimed: more and more of America’s productive capacity, both in manufacturing and in the intellectual work done by white collar workers, is being supplanted by the productive capacity of other nations, China and India chief among them. Consumer spending has been fuelled almost entirely by low interest rates which have created a housing boom — now at the stage of being a speculative bubble which may soon crash, bringing the economy to a halt.
Thus, the American standard of living, already in modest decline, will likely plummet fairly rapidly in coming decades. And American economic pre-eminence is likely to be challenged — though this may well be a fine thing for other nations — by China and the other nations of East Asia, the EEC, India and South Asia, and perhaps the nations of Southeast Asia.
Mr Bush has initiated an attack on civil liberties almost unparalleled in the history of the United States. With the passage of the Bush-initiated “Patriot Act,” the federal government was given enormous powers to invade privacy and intrude on basic freedoms which had been guaranteed to Americans for over two centuries. The legislation gave federal authorities the power to obtain medical records, tax records, book buying and library borrowing records — all without requiring a probable cause or a court adjudication that national security is imperilled. Federal police are now authorized to break into a person’s home and do a search without ever informing the person the search has been conducted. Not only have civil liberties been curtailed, the chilling effect on freedom of speech and association means that more and more Americans are afraid to exercise their most basic liberties.
Mr Bush has politicized the American nation beyond permissible bounds. He has politicized the judicial system by forcing the judicial appointment of ideological conservatives who pass a ‘litmus test’ on such issues as abortion (opposed), class action suits which allow collections of individuals to sue corporations which have injured them (opposed), and the rights of labour (opposed). The sole credential for important government positions, too, is ideological purity. Recently, Mr Bush and his cohorts tried to slash the funding for public broadcasting because he thinks it too ‘liberal.’
He refuses to work with the opposition party, the Democrats. Just as he adheres to unilateralism in foreign policy, in domestic affairs it must always be his way, with no negotiation, no meeting half-way, not even consultation. He seems — and this if far more frightening in fact than the mere statement of it suggests — determined to turn America into a de facto one-party state.
And then, there is the corruption in which political cohorts get huge government subsidies and gifts. His defence department gives huge contracts to ‘friendly’ corporations without even the semblance of open bidding or fair awarding of contracts. Halliburton, for instance, was awarded a $7 billion contract, non-competitively, to repair Iraq’s oil infrastructure. (The former CEO of Halliburton is none other than the sitting vice-president, Mr Cheney.)
Mr Bush has played the religion card — what South Asians call communalism — often, and with a vengeance. Elected in large part with the support and money of fundamentalist Christians, Mr Bush has turned American politics into a religious battleground. His communalist ‘game’ seldom addresses religion per se, instead using coded words and battles about social phenomena to communicate to fundamentalists that he is committed to turning America in a profoundly religious direction.
Thus, in recent years, Mr Bush has opposed abortion (while 63 per cent of Americans said, this month, that they do not want to see the federal court legalizing abortion overturned). He has opposed stem cell research (58 per cent of Americans approve such research). He has campaigned against a homosexual’s right to marry (55 per cent of Americans do not want to see homosexual marriage. But an even larger 58 per cent opposed the Constitutional amendment to ban homosexual marriage that Mr Bush called for.) Increasingly, Muslims, Jews, atheists, and non-religious people in general feel social pressure from the Bush administration to be like other people — meaning, to act like Christians or shut up.
There is much that can be said about America not living up to its ideals, but in the separation of church and state — enshrined in the nation’s Constitution — it has been a model of religious tolerance and freedom for most other nations. No longer. No other American president has injected religion and religious doctrine as deeply into the discourse of American politics as Mr Bush. Expediency has won out over tolerance; accordingly, the religious divide between Americans seems more profound than at any moment in its history.
Whether it is world peace, religious tolerance, the American economy or social and economic justice, Mr Bush has hollowed out much that he should have been strengthening. Nor has he learned from his experience: in not one of the 10 areas highlighted has he changed his course or his thinking. In fact, his mind seems permanently made up, untouched by experience, and untouchable. He sails serenely forward, towards disaster, trying to drag America and the world along on his misguided journeys. The only good news is that, more and more, the American people are not sure they want to be his fellow sailors.
The writer is a professor at the University of Vermont, US.
<HR color=#000000 noShade SIZE=1>A dismal performance on home front
By Huck Gutman, Dawn
Mr. Bush has not been kinder to American people, nor secured their well-being as their elected leader is supposed to do. He has redistributed wealth from the middle class upward — to the very wealthiest families in America. Two tax cuts which give the biggest benefits to the top one per cent — those who earn more than $337,000 annually — have raised the tax burden on the middle class.
This past year, for instance, President and Mrs Bush earned $784,219 and Vice-President and Mrs Cheney earned $2,173,892. (Yes, they are both clearly in the top one per cent of income earners). The Bush-enacted tax cuts slashed their tax bills, 12 per cent for Mr Bush, 18 per cent for Mr Cheney so that they paid $110,182 less than they would have paid had the legislation not been enacted.
Meanwhile, in the longer run the only way to pay for these tax cuts — which turned a federal surplus into an enormous deficit that the Bush administration projects at $521 billion in this year alone — will be to reduce government spending on the programmes which underwrite the quality of life for poor and middle class Americans: food and income support for the poor, education and health care and pensions for the middle class. Thus, the massive tax cuts to the wealthy will be paid for by hacking away at, bankrupting and terminating programmes that support the working people of America.
In his administration, more than any other during the past three quarters of a century, the rich have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poorer, and the middle class has shrunk. America is currently an oligopoly run not only by, but for, the wealthy class.
Mr Bush has embraced deficits which will undermine the long term health of the American economy. The numbers are staggering. The budget deficit is $512 billion. The current accounts deficit for the first quarter of 2005 was $195.1 billion, which projects to a deficit for 2005 of $780.1 billion. That means that this year alone the United States has financed its lowered taxes, its costly war in Iraq, its hunger for cheap goods, by a total of $1.29 trillion.
Numbers can by themselves be numbing, so let us try a comparison. Pakistan’s government budget expends $16.5 billion, India’s 2004 $104 billion, China’s $348.9 billion, all including capital expenditures. The three governments spend barely over a third of what the United States borrows through deficit spending and balance of payments debits.
Although Mr Bush would prefer to hide the fact, this money in one way or another will have to be repaid. Those repayments will hold the United States hostage, exactly as developing nations today are often held hostage by the IMF and the World Bank. Even a vibrant American economy would be strained by the enormous obligation of paying interest on and paying down the national debt, and repatriating the dollars ‘borrowed’ by the balance of payments deficit.
But the American economy is not as vibrant as is claimed: more and more of America’s productive capacity, both in manufacturing and in the intellectual work done by white collar workers, is being supplanted by the productive capacity of other nations, China and India chief among them. Consumer spending has been fuelled almost entirely by low interest rates which have created a housing boom — now at the stage of being a speculative bubble which may soon crash, bringing the economy to a halt.
Thus, the American standard of living, already in modest decline, will likely plummet fairly rapidly in coming decades. And American economic pre-eminence is likely to be challenged — though this may well be a fine thing for other nations — by China and the other nations of East Asia, the EEC, India and South Asia, and perhaps the nations of Southeast Asia.
Mr Bush has initiated an attack on civil liberties almost unparalleled in the history of the United States. With the passage of the Bush-initiated “Patriot Act,” the federal government was given enormous powers to invade privacy and intrude on basic freedoms which had been guaranteed to Americans for over two centuries. The legislation gave federal authorities the power to obtain medical records, tax records, book buying and library borrowing records — all without requiring a probable cause or a court adjudication that national security is imperilled. Federal police are now authorized to break into a person’s home and do a search without ever informing the person the search has been conducted. Not only have civil liberties been curtailed, the chilling effect on freedom of speech and association means that more and more Americans are afraid to exercise their most basic liberties.
Mr Bush has politicized the American nation beyond permissible bounds. He has politicized the judicial system by forcing the judicial appointment of ideological conservatives who pass a ‘litmus test’ on such issues as abortion (opposed), class action suits which allow collections of individuals to sue corporations which have injured them (opposed), and the rights of labour (opposed). The sole credential for important government positions, too, is ideological purity. Recently, Mr Bush and his cohorts tried to slash the funding for public broadcasting because he thinks it too ‘liberal.’
He refuses to work with the opposition party, the Democrats. Just as he adheres to unilateralism in foreign policy, in domestic affairs it must always be his way, with no negotiation, no meeting half-way, not even consultation. He seems — and this if far more frightening in fact than the mere statement of it suggests — determined to turn America into a de facto one-party state.
And then, there is the corruption in which political cohorts get huge government subsidies and gifts. His defence department gives huge contracts to ‘friendly’ corporations without even the semblance of open bidding or fair awarding of contracts. Halliburton, for instance, was awarded a $7 billion contract, non-competitively, to repair Iraq’s oil infrastructure. (The former CEO of Halliburton is none other than the sitting vice-president, Mr Cheney.)
Mr Bush has played the religion card — what South Asians call communalism — often, and with a vengeance. Elected in large part with the support and money of fundamentalist Christians, Mr Bush has turned American politics into a religious battleground. His communalist ‘game’ seldom addresses religion per se, instead using coded words and battles about social phenomena to communicate to fundamentalists that he is committed to turning America in a profoundly religious direction.
Thus, in recent years, Mr Bush has opposed abortion (while 63 per cent of Americans said, this month, that they do not want to see the federal court legalizing abortion overturned). He has opposed stem cell research (58 per cent of Americans approve such research). He has campaigned against a homosexual’s right to marry (55 per cent of Americans do not want to see homosexual marriage. But an even larger 58 per cent opposed the Constitutional amendment to ban homosexual marriage that Mr Bush called for.) Increasingly, Muslims, Jews, atheists, and non-religious people in general feel social pressure from the Bush administration to be like other people — meaning, to act like Christians or shut up.
There is much that can be said about America not living up to its ideals, but in the separation of church and state — enshrined in the nation’s Constitution — it has been a model of religious tolerance and freedom for most other nations. No longer. No other American president has injected religion and religious doctrine as deeply into the discourse of American politics as Mr Bush. Expediency has won out over tolerance; accordingly, the religious divide between Americans seems more profound than at any moment in its history.
Whether it is world peace, religious tolerance, the American economy or social and economic justice, Mr Bush has hollowed out much that he should have been strengthening. Nor has he learned from his experience: in not one of the 10 areas highlighted has he changed his course or his thinking. In fact, his mind seems permanently made up, untouched by experience, and untouchable. He sails serenely forward, towards disaster, trying to drag America and the world along on his misguided journeys. The only good news is that, more and more, the American people are not sure they want to be his fellow sailors.
The writer is a professor at the University of Vermont, US.
