Considering what is coming out of Washington these days, you can’t help but look forward to the new year since this one can’t end soon enough. The year started with the President announcing that privatizing Social Security and cutting future benefits was his number one priority. Luckily, once Americans cut through the cant, they overwhelmingly rejected his plan.
The year ended with the Senate voting to cut $40 billion from programs for working and poor people – including the largest cut in college student loan program in the history of the country. This was such an administration priority that Vice President Dick Cheney flew back from Pakistan to cast the tie-breaking vote. Republicans in Congress call this a matter of “fiscal responsibility, but that is simply a lie. They return next month intent on passing over $100 billion in tax cuts benefiting almost completely only the already wealthy. The deficit will get larger. The cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, home heating assistance, and student loans won’t cover all the tax cuts for the wealthy. These priorities shame the Master whose teachings we celebrate this Christmas.
And the big story at the year’s end is the president’s claim that he has the power to authorize spying and surveillance of Americans, without law or warrant. This president now claims the power to spy on you, to arrest you without charges, to lock you up without a lawyer, to detain you without judicial review. These astounding claims shame the Founders who drew up a Constitution explicitly designed to create a president under law, not a king above it.
This was the year when we learned the true costs of corruption. House Republican leader Tom DeLay, now under indictment for money laundering, lived the high life of golf at posh resorts, junkets on corporate jets to exotic foreign islands, while raising money for Republicans, ensuring a lockstep loyalty to him. We’re the ones who got the bill. He raised millions from the drug companies and HMOs, and they got billions in subsidies in the drug bill that actually PROHIBITED Medicare from negotiating a better price on drugs. Who pays? We do – with drug plans so confusing that they will cause more high blood pressure than they treat, while forcing us to pay the highest price for prescription drugs of any people in the world. The oil companies got billions in subsidies, even while enjoying record profits; we got higher gas prices and greater reliance on foreign oil. And so it goes. This special interest politics offends any notion of serving the common good.
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Yes, there is promise too among this pain. And we know that morning comes after the long night. But we won’t see either that promise or that morning come from Washington. The new hope will come from outside the Washington beltway, away from the corruption, the cronyism and the callousness that has become the signature of crowd that now governs us.
http://www.blacknews.com/pr/shameful101.html
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