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May, 2006 |
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May 23, 2006 - There are, the Bush Administration tells us, 11.5 million foreigners living in the United States who are here in violation of our immigration laws. They either crossed our border without permission or, if they had the necessary paperwork to temporarily enter the country, they stayed beyond their welcome. That is the dimension of what the politicians are decrying as a crisis. That number is, of course, an estimate. By definitions these illegal immigrants are without documentation, are not counted in our census, and we can only guess at their number. They have come to work, earn money and realize their economic dreams. We say that they are taking opportunity from hard working Americans. If we guess that 1/3rd of these illegal residents are children that means that about 7 million of them are working within our economy. At the same time the Bush Administration points proudly to what it says is a booming economy. The economy is so hot that the Federal Reserve is repeatedly raising interest rates to cool it down and avoid the resumption of the runaway inflation of the 70s and 80s. The unemployment rate has fallen below 5%. Practitioners of the dismal science consider any unemployment rate from 4.7% to 7.3% to be full employment. That is that the unemployed are either between positions or unemployable and everybody who wants to work can find a job. According to the Bush Administration’s figures our economy is at full employment. Those 7 million or so Americans on the unemployment rolls represent what the economists call structural unemployment – the number of workers temporarily without work....click here for entire article. May 18, 2006 - In his doctorial thesis social historian William Cecil Headrick called the American Dream “a fiction stronger than truth.” He was writing in 1941 while Europe and Asia were buffeted by the winds of war – a storm which would soon engulf America and irretrievably alter the country. Headrick described the concept of an American Dream as the proposition that on this continent people were freed from old world ideas of status and class. In America an immigrant could by seizing opportunity and applying industry create for his children and their children an improved economic and social standing impossible in the world that the immigrant had left behind. It was Headrick’s thesis that American reality had failed to live up to the dream; that social and economic class was as rigidly defined in America as it had been in Old World societies. We still give lip service to the fiction of the American Dream; that in this nation of immigrants a person is free to rise above his origins and by hard work and perseverance provide his children with a life that will transcend that to which the parents were born. We have trumpeted the myth of an open society in a land of opportunity from the earliest days of European settlement whenever the powerful needed to attract people to populate the wilderness and perform the work needed to be done....click here for entire article. May 12, 2006 - We are creating a massive data base to record every number that is called from your telephone and every number that calls your number. We are doing so that we can establish your pattern of calls to determine whether you fit a profile we have created to tell us who our enemies are. That is called data mining. AT&T is cooperating. So are Verizon and Bell South. Qwest has refused to give the NSA access to its records citing their responsibility to keep their customers affairs private. The President says that his government is collecting your private information so that he can fiercely protect you and your privacy. His justification for this program is that old refrain – we are only targeting terrorists. Innocent Americans have nothing to fear. I say “we” are doing these things because you and I, your children and grandchildren are paying for this massive intrusion into our lives. We pay the taxes and our descendants will pay off the borrowing it takes to run this and all the other government intrusions that Bush, Cheney, and Company thinks up. That is the reality of it. The government is using our tax dollars to snoop into our affairs. Why does the government need to know who you call and how often? With this information it can tell if you are up to something. It can detect who your associates are. But, says the President, it won’t be listening to your conversations – at least not at first....click here for entire article. May 10, 2006 - Before Mission Accomplished; before shock and awe; before Colin Powell was sent to do his cheap imitation of Adlai Stevenson for the Security Council America was engaged in a righteous war in Afghanistan. Our mission there was straight forward and easily defined – bring Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda to justice and destroy the Taliban who provided him sanctuary. It was a mission that was easily understood and in the wake of 911 it was one that the international community could support. It was also a mission that failed. Bin Laden and his henchmen remain at large and the Taliban leadership simply melted into the hills. To be sure America’s surrogate presides over a government sitting in Kabul; a government whose writ runs reliably to the edge of the city; but the Taliban still roams the plains and holds the mountain passes from which they strike with deadly effect. Our America inning in the contest that the British called the Great Game and the Russians styled the Tournament of Shadows is not yet over....click here for entire article. May 8, 2006 - There were yellow ribbons tied around the old oak tree and every other tree and lamppost all the way from the airport to the armory as HQ Company 2/130th came home. No one was heard to call names, nobody was spat upon. After more than a year in Iraq the troops have come home. There were salutes and ceremony and tearful reunions. There were no real celebrations because everybody knew that these weren’t the last buses bringing American soldiers home. They weren’t even the first buses bring the last of the Americans home. The war is not over but has only just begun. There are 2415 – two regiments - of American dead and 17,894 wounded in the President’s splendid little war. We have to be proud of ourselves. More and more of the seriously wounded are coming home from the second Iraqi War with broken bodies and fractured minds. Medical advances have reduced the death rate of combat. Is that good news? Not if you are a budget planner dealing with military spending. It is much cheaper to bury a 20 year old soldier than to provide that same soldier with lifetime medical care and prosthesis from time to time when Johnny and Janey come marching home...click here for entire article May 3, 2006 - My name is Keith Hays and I’m an oil addict. It all started when I was 15. I met Emily in the hallway at school. It was spring and I was getting my driver’s license that summer. I needed a car so that I did not have to have my parents driving us around on dates. Gas was cheap. A gallon of gas and the price of a pack of cigarettes were both 17 cents. I could fill up the tank on the 48 Plymouth coupe I bought for just $2. We still had bus service and you could ride all day for a nickel. It wasn’t the same though. You couldn’t take your girl out for a coke and a movie on the bus. It just wasn’t done. And my rival for her affections had a car of his own. So it was as a teenager I became addicted to oil and I spent most of my free time trying to raise the money for another tank full of gas...click here for entire article
May 2, 2006 - With apologies to the Kingston Trio and the MTA
(sung to The Wreck of Old 97) Poor Charlie drove up with his tank on empty, |
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