All of that is noble and would be great if we were among adults
While the President gave a superb speech last night at the State of the Union; he did what he does best: give excellent speeches…I mean the man is articulate and eloquent… he can do with words what others can’t. His views for the future are noble and visionary…but I think that is where it may stop. There are a couple of stumbling blocks that might prevent the President’s vision from becoming a reality.
The number one issue is economics…our country is in a different position than it was when we decided to send a spacecraft into space…then we not only had surpluses but the economy was ebullient, there was affluence all around. Today the realities are that we are deep in debt and spending more than we take in. How do we fix that? It is not by cutting education or Social Security…it is not by not embarking on infrastructure building…it is by eliminating wars altogether and cut down on defense.
But the Teahadist-Republicans are not behaving like adults; that is one of the other stumbling blocks. The GOP has made it their most important goal to dislodge Obama from the Presidency and to sabotage any effort to fix the mess they left behind…which was for at least a good 90% of it their own doing due to incompetence and greed.
Now we progressives are told that we have to ”tone it down”, to scale back our expectations and to compromise. I for one don’t see how you can compromise on some issues. It is like being “a little bit pregnant”…you either are or you are not. On issues like eliminating Social Security, giving tax cut for the rich at the expense of the middle class and poor while getting our country into debt to do so, in the areas of equality…there is no such thing as compromise…you either have rights or you don’t; this idea that somehow we give minorities just enough to shut them up and still don’t recognize that equality has to apply for all, not just a few…it is not just unacceptable, it is also un-American.
I for one have absolutely no taste to accept any of these ideas that deprive individuals their rights, that decimate the middle class, that get us into unnecessary wars and that will, if allowed destroy all the safety nets and entitlement programs while giving the super rich and the corporations all kinds of privileges and tax cuts. That is not acceptable to me nor will I compromise on any of those issues. The Teahadist-Republicans can obstruct and say NO all they want…they know they are hurting the poor and the middle class but it really doesn’t matter to them as long as they can solidify that oligarchy they represent.
The Constitution says Congress can call up the militia only to “execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions,” all tasks performed within the United States. Yet today there are National Guardsmen in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is possible because the militia, which the Second Amendment was intended to protect, is defunct. Are we less secure or less free as a consequence? After all, it is very clear in the Constitution:
I don’t think that executing the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions mean that we have to spend billions of dollars invading countries that did nothing to harm us. I don’t think that it means that we as a nation are obligated to defend other countries. We can barely defend our own and the costs of doing so are staggering.
It also defies logic to go and destroy a country while we invade it, occupy it and then spend billions of dollars of our treasure to rebuild it while our own infrastructure languishes and deteriorates; ironically, we want to reduce social programs, education and even plan for future building just so that we can do just that.
I think that the starting point should be to cut down on our defense budget and stop unnecessary wars, defending countries that can do so by themselves, the military wastes so much money…stop giving tax cuts to the very rich and close tax loopholes for corporations; streamline the tax codes and lastly, stop giving subsidies to oil companies. I am sure the Koch brothers were not very happy with the President's speech last night. We have to fight them every inch of the way or we will never become energy independent.
PHOTO SOURCE: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/white-house/first-thoughts-on-president-ob-1.html