The State of Disunion By Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. 01-31-06 Tribune Media Services
Nothing is more costly or dangerous than a failed presidency. The powers of the office are without rival. The scope of responsibility spans the globe. When a presidency fails, we all pay the price - no matter what our politics.
As George Bush serves up his State of the Union address, his presidency is in virtual collapse. None of this will be apparent on the TV screen. The address will be "interrupted" with numerous standing ovations. The pundits will be respectful. The Democratic response will seem muted. As Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton understood, a president never looks better than on these ceremonial nights.
But beneath the bunting and the applause, this president is in trouble. And the list of catastrophes keeps on growing.
His war of choice in Iraq has gone bad. Our military is near 'snapping" says a report commissioned by the Pentagon. Iraq has become a training ground for international terrorists. The elections have produced a Shiite plurality, led by religious parties that have formed a mutual defense pact with Iran. The Iranian president has called for the destruction of Israel, and the Iraqi leaders that our soldiers are dying to defend stand by his side. The reconstruction of Iraq is a joke, with literally billions wasted or stolen, while citizens still have no stable source of electricity. We can't leave because a civil war, already started on the ground, will flare up. We can't stay because our presence simply feeds the terror and destabilization. Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz now projects the actual cost of the Iraq war at $1 trillion. That trillion dollars will not be available to pay for schools or health care or energy independence.
Iraq has undermined the war on terror. Bin Laden is still alive, but that matters little. What matters is that the US is more despised across the Moslem world. Abu Graib, rendition of suspects to other countries for "interrogation," secret prisons, the administration's tortured defense of torture - all this has fueled anger and hatred, and provided recruits for the evolving and decentralized networks of terror.
The administration has done nothing to move us toward energy independence. And by simply being in denial on global warming, it has isolated us in the world on a clear and increasingly present danger.
At home, the same sorry record of catastrophic failure. The administration's trade policies are hallowing out our manufacturing and high tech sectors. Bush has run up the largest trade deficits in the history of man, while leaving us increasingly dependent on the willingness of the Chinese to finance our spending.
The administration's top end tax cuts have failed to produce. Take away the jobs produced by government at all levels and by the military buildup, and the US has lost an estimated 1 million private sector jobs since Bush came into office. Yet those same tax cuts have helped rack up record deficits and staggering national debt.
The administration's unrelenting war on seniors continues apace. The prescription drug program confounds seniors, and will end up costing many of them more for drugs, even as it prohibits Medicare from negotiating a better price and shovels billions to HMOs. The effort to cut and privatize Social Security was blocked, but that debate blocked any sensible response to the growing crisis of pensions.
Inequality has reached record heights. The minimum wage has been frozen, while CEO salaries have soared. The administration does nothing to help labor under corporate assault, even as wages stagnate. African Americans and Latinos suffer disproportionately, even as the administration retreats from the commitment to equal opportunity.
And the ticket to the American Dream - a college education - is being priced out of reach of more and more working families. The administration and the Republican Congress are about to raise interest rates on student loans, adding to burdens that are already a stretch for most families.
Katrina exposed the administration's incompetence. But the catastrophic failure to reconstruct the Gulf Region is adding to the suffering of those who survived the storm.
And on homeland security, the independent and bipartisan 9/11 commission gives the administration failing grades in area after area. Were the administration a student, it would lose its government grant money for that performance.
The president will no doubt condemn corruption and partisanship. But the head of procurement of his budget office has been taken out of office in handcuffs. Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff is under indictment for misleading prosecutors in the case concerning the leaking of a CIA agent's name. The president is pretending that he never knew Enron chief Ken Lay, one of his leading donors, or conservative activist Jack Abramoff, a major contributor who partied at the White House.
The list can go on. It is to no one's advantage. This isn't about an election that is nearly a year away. It is about governing. It's not about Republicans and Democrats. It's about the country. This president has three more years in office, and we will all pay dearly if the failures continue.
