SHOW ME THE MONEY

The administration’s economic stimulus program designed to head off or alleviate recession is a fraud.

Putting a few hundred bucks into folks’ pockets may reduce the collective blood pressure over our economic slide towards the abyss, but it will not stem that slide.

The reckless borrowing, investing six hundred billion dollars annually in military death and destruction, refusal to rebuild America’s infrastructure, shoveling hundreds of billions into the coffers of the oil producers, allowing the world’s most inefficient health care system to ignore tens of millions, and elimination and transfer of good jobs to ambitious, hungry countries like India and China, represent an unstoppable juggernaught of decline.

For those who prefer delusion, they can always fall back on the President’s painful sound bite: “The American economy is fundamentally sound.”

Originally published in Chicago Tribune, January 24, 2008
Published in Glen Ellyn Sun, February 1, 2008

THE GODS MAY BE ANGRY

God Bless the USA.

We follow it everywhere on car bumpers and anticipate its scripted closing of every Presidential speech.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume there is an almighty Deity up there perusing our use of His gift of Fee Will at home and abroad.

Would He be pleased at our squandering of six hundred twenty-five billion dollars annually, more than the other six billion folks in other countries combined, on weaponry used around the world for death and destruction?

Would He applaud leaders who lie as easily as breathing to create imagined new threats and launch real wars?

Would He reward our plunder of His Earth’s natural resources to gratify our ravenous material appetites?

Would He “High Five” our rapacious movement of wealth from the lower and middle rungs of society into the coffers of the already gluttonous rich?

God Bless the USA?

Not likely.

Originally published in Chicago Tribune Online Exclusive, January 23, 2008

Published in Glen Ellyn Sun, February 8, 2008