What Nation Did President Bush Report About?
The Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation Response to the State of the
Union Address
By Ibrahim Ramey
Every January, the President of the United States gives a
constitutionally-mandated address to the American people on the condition of
the nation. This "State of the Union" speech is regarded as an annual
scorecard not only on the economic, political, social and moral health of the
country, but on the effectiveness of the national leadership of the Congress,
and-more importantly-the chief executive of the United States himself.
As political speeches go, President Bush's address to the nation on January
23rd was a talk full of hubris and bravado given in the context of an
extraordinary national crisis. Faced with an approval rating on par with the
end days of the Nixon administration, a Congress controlled for the first time
in 12 years by his opposition party, and-above all- a massive national (and
global) uprising against the most unpopular (and unsuccessful) U.S. military
venture since the Vietnam war, Mr. Bush made an effort to rally support for a
new domestic agenda and a new Iraq war strategy that is the catalyst for
massive dissent from both Democrats and some leading Republicans.
But I suspect that the President of the United States, even in his most
optimistic and affable moments, gave a talk about a country that was not the
one located between Canada and Mexico.
To be fair, Mr. Bush did acknowledge some of the deep structural and economic
challenges facing the nation: the crisis confronting a Social Security system
going broke, the Federal budget deficit, the $18 billion in extra "earmarks"
authorized for what is usually regarded as under-the-radar "Pork Barrel"
spending, the crucial need for immigration law reform, and perhaps above all,
the issue of affordable health insurance for the more than 45 million
individuals in the nation who have none.
And for all of these structural maladies, Mr. Bush promised to balance the
federal budget within 5 years without raising taxes.
The laundry list of other proposed initiatives was also interesting.
President Bush promised to strengthen U.S. border security (presumably as one
element of his immigration reform plan), create a temporary worker program for
undocumented workers from other countries, expand health savings accounts, give
federal tax assistance to states (like California) that create state-wide
health insurance, and protect doctors from frivolous medical liability lawsuits.
There was also a commitment by Mr. Bush to continue the "No Child Left
Behind" initiative, and presumably, its back-door provision for increasing the
access that military recruiters have to school records.
And on the energy independence front, Mr. Bush called for expanded use of
alternative (to fossil fuels) energy sources, expanded oil and gas exploration
in the continental United Sates and-most radically- a cut of 20% in national
gasoline consumption by 2017, and a 75% decrease in Middle East oil imports
over the same time period. No specific plans for achieving this goal were
mentioned
But the nation in which we live is, simply put, not the one that Mr. Bush
based his speech on. Here are just a few troubling realities that the speech
ignored. Consider the following:
Some 13% of Americans live in poverty, and the numbers remain staggering for
Black, Brown, and Native people. Poor folks weren't mentioned at all by
President Bush, nor did Mr. Bush offer any initiatives to combat poverty in the
richest nation in the world. The closest he came to mentioning real poverty, in
fact, was his "shout-out" to basketball star Dikembe Mutombo, originally a poor
African immigrant from Congo who is not a (very rich) humanitarian and citizen
of the United States.
Mr. Bush claimed that the United States is now in our 41st consecutive month
of job growth, with 7.2 million new jobs creates in that period. But the harsh
reality (as pointed out by Senator James Webb (D-VA) in his response to the
Bush speech is the gap between CEO and worker compensation has grown from 20 to
1 (in the 1970's) to 400 to I today. And wages, adjusted for taxes and
inflation during that period, have actually decreased in that period.
The United States remains the only advanced industrialized nation in the
world without a national (not private) health care and health insurance system.
The national prison population exceeds 2 million people. I heard no
acknowledgement of this shameful fact, nor any suggested remedy.
The U.S. international trade balance (which measures the international
surplus or deficit of what a nation has, or owes the world) was a staggering
$837.2 billion deficit in November of 2006. This makes the U.S., by a huge
margin, the largest debtor nation in the world. (China, in contrast, enjoys a
$177.5 billion trade surplus).
The Muslim community (and progressives of all descriptions) should, however,
be especially alarmed by the failure of the State of the Union speech to
address the continuation of the Guantanamo prison camp, the continuation of
secret prisons and secret tribunals for "terrorist" suspects, and most
alarming, the continued threats against Iran.
Of course, the biggest issue is the ungodly and failed war against Iraq, and
the willingness of the President and his administration to defy the will of the
Congress and the people of the United States by sending 21,500 more troops into
the meat grinder of Iraq, with no acknowledgement of the failure of both the
war "strategy" and the war itself.
The current occupant of the White House is likely to go down in history as
one of the worst, if not the worst, presidents in the history of this republic.
And his unwillingness to speak the truth about, and address, the deep, and
multiple, crises facing the nation spoke much more loudly than his words on
Tuesday evening.
After the slick words, it is a state of dis-union, and failed policies, that
the rest of us are left to deal with.
Ibrahim Abdil-Mu'id Ramey
-----------------------------
Ibrahim Ramey, the author, is the Director of the Human and Civil Rights
Division of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation. He has traveled to
Iraq on two occasions (in 1998 and 2000) as is one of the founding members of
the humanitarian Campaign of Conscience for the Iraq People, which openly
challenged the sanctions against Iraq.
Ramey, in addition to having lectured at numerous U.S. universities on the
issue of the Iraq war, served as a member of the U.S. Tribunal on Iraq, which
investigated violations of international law committed by U.S. military forces
during the initial months of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
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