Catastrophic presidency

The article I want to share with you today is entitled, "If You Don't Mind, Why Don't You Mind?" Here's an excerpt:

Not a day goes by without some new disclosure, some new bit of headline evidence that the Bush presidency is the most catastrophic presidency in the history of our great country. The consequences of this fact will effect not only yours and my personal future and fortunes, but those of our children and theirs. Where is your sense of indignation?

What can be safely said is this: Poverty is up by nearly 50 percent since this president took office. Somewhere between five and ten million Americans have lost their health insurance. Income inequality is the highest since the 1920s. Real median income has declined five consecutive years, the longest such streak since the Great Depression. And the Bush budget cuts have left Americans with the most threadbare social safety net since that dreadful era.

Almost 30 percent of American manufacturing jobs have been lost over these past five years. Manufacturing now accounts for less than 13 percent of our Gross Domestic Product, while the finance, insurance and real estate sector accounts for greater than 20 percent. Under Bush, moving money around has surpassed making things as the greatest share of our GDP.

Bush inherited massive budget surpluses but has turned those into massive deficits. While our net foreign indebtedness took over 200 years to reach $1 trillion, just since 2001 it has increased by another $3 trillion. While just five years ago our national debt stood at just over $5 trillion, now it stands at over $8 trillion. America has become a rentier nation, living off unearned income and racking up millions more debt every second of every day. Why don’t you mind?

The trade deficit has exploded to over $800 billion per year, and the United States is having to borrow more than $2 billion per day to pay for our profligacy. And it is China – our greatest strategic adversary – that loans us much of those sums. Never could anyone have imagined that the most powerful and arguably democratic nation the world has ever known would give its most threatening competitor and the world's largest remaining communist nation such direct control over its economic destiny. Where is your sense of indignation?

It does not matter, not much anyway, to Bush Republicans that their out-of-control spending and their tax cuts for the rich have driven this nation into a downward spiral of debt. The spend-and-spend, big business, cheap labor, big government, socially regressive Republican Party has also become the political vehicle of the radically religious who, believing Jesus is coming at any minute, believe therefore that long-term fiscal responsibility is of little concern, to say nothing of social and environmental responsibility.

And that's just part of it. I really recommend that you click through and read the whole article if you have time. You know, I think sometimes that we've all been desensitized. There have been so many outrages perpetrated by this administration that we no longer able to feel the impact. We need an article like this to see just how bad it really is lest we forget.