A Response to Bush’s State of the Union Address

I listened on the radio.  The applause operated like a faucet.  It turned on and lasted certain lengths of time and turned off, in unison, despite the fact that the timing and length of the clapping could not be an inevitable response to Bush’s words.  Not even our political class is that likeminded.  (There was some laughter at one point that did seem to come on the audiences own initiative.)  There were no false starts by the audience; Bush occasionally had to wait for clapping (that was always on, hold steady, off) but he probably failed to follow the pause for applause instruction on the teleprompter, or maybe even the false starts were planned.  I get paranoid when the media will describe everything, including people’s clothing, and analyze the speech before and after, but never mention the teleprompter.  Incidentally, I could listen to Bush mislead by ommission and take hypocrisy to nosebleed heights; I couldn’t stomach the media fluff surrounding the speech.

Bush repeated the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” at least half-a-dozen times.  Our weapons, in total, are the most massively destructive in the world.  Period.  India, Pakistan, and China are all into building up arsenals of their own.  Our most important allies in Europe plus Israel have “weapons of mass destruction”, and let’s not forget Russia.  And yet that frightening phrase is to be our justification for attacking whomever we want to attack around the globe, including Somalia, which hardly has a government let alone weapons of mass destruction.  All countries with weapons of mass destruction that could actually be a threat to the U.S. are absent from Bush’s war plans.  And our entire pretext for planned attacks on other countries, after Afghanistan, is that they might be developing weapons of mass destruction.

Then there’s North Korea, building weapons while people starve.  Sadly analogous to Bush’s explicit statement that no price is too high for security in terms of spending on weapons and the military, while proposed fixes for the economy featured tax cuts for the very rich and welfare recipients (not the poor in general) were given a promise, emptier than a hot air balloon, of “the dignity of a job.”  And while spending on our “national security” should be limitless according to Bush, social security has to be financially responsible.  Maybe Bush would get along with Kim Jong Il better than he knows.

Bush talked a lot about education, how he will leave no child behind.  He didn’t mention that localities all over the country were laying off teachers due to lack of funds.

Let’s see, in addition to education our economy was supposed to rely on:

• Energy security
• Increased trade
• Sound tax policy, including making temporary tax cuts permanent.

All this, “for the sake of American workers.”  Yet oil doesn’t produce many jobs, clean alternative sources of energy would.  Increased trade is great, but not when it means freedom for money and goods and more competition among people; NAFTA, the style of increased trade called for, lowered incomes in both the U.S. and Mexico.  As for taxes, Bush’s changes already have made them more complicated than ever and they fall still more disproportionately on the middle and lower-middle classes.  And when we give people money to spend, as Bush emphasized, why can’t we give some of that money to the non-rich, who would actually spend it?

Farm policy, a cleaner environment, and broader home ownership each got a sentence without a single specific proposal.  In fact, except for war, Bush was generally vague on any government function.  He was more vocal on what volunteers should do, such as provide social welfare and bring opportunity to the world.  Government is to seek “ways to encourage the good work of charities and faith-based groups.”  Bush called for community service, going back to a theme of his inaugural address, which was that people, organizations, and even corporations – anyone but government – had to take responsibility.  The new USA Freedom Corps are to provide emergency aid around the country, rebuild after disasters here at home, and do something involving compassion abroad; a magically doubled number of Peace Corps volunteers are to handle a new effort to improve opportunity in the Islamic world.  Our government could start supporting democracy or at least stop supporting dictators, but when it comes to constructive things, the Bush mantra is ‘all volunteer, no government.’

Our military will defend people the world over from “the midnight knock of the secret police.”  Which we have in our own country.  Matter of fact, after completely failing to do their job prior to 2001 September 11 and the FBI doing the midnight knocking routine for a while afterward, now that our secret police agencies have settled into detaining foreigners without telling anyone who they are holding, the FBI and the CIA are getting big budget increases (in the portion of their budgets we know about, that is).

Justice and freedom received constant mention in the speech, apparently approvingly.  At least Bush didn’t mention democracy.

America will always stand firm for

• human dignity
• rule of law
• rights of women
• private property
• religious tolerance.

America standing firm for rule of law has particular irony, as we talk of bringing terrorists to justice without mentioning courts or trials, as we set up courts that violate our own Constitution, and as we redefine prisoners of war as something else so we feel better about violating the Geneva convention.

For the rest, the type of regimes left unmentioned in the speech, the kind this country supports, shows our deadly hypocrisy.  To name one country is sufficient: Saudi Arabia.  Although I suppose they protect the one thing on that list that actually matterst to Bush, private property.

Bush made reference to “free market, free trade, free societies proving their power to lift lives.”  Like in Argentina, which did everything this country told it to do.  And the people there rail against the “political class” while the country as a whole is nearly powerless.  And the answer everywhere is more military, more police— less freedom instead of more justice.  Most of the people of the world remain in horrible poverty, and we establish military bases or our companies hire private security to ensure that the resources we most want to extract, such as oil, will be extracted.  People everywhere need resources with which to invest in themselves, and our government’s international economic goals are ensure that capital and goods, but not people, can flow completely freely from country to country.  In this way multinational corporations can, through the threat of going elsewhere, get to take and take and take while giving as little as possible in return, so that the country remains poor and without money that could be spent on infrastructure, education, and social services.  No country develops without huge investment in infrastructure, but to receive any foreign investment poor countries must keep their tax rates even lower than ours.  Generally, with all the poor workers of the world competing with one another for jobs, wages remain low and many people remain unemployed, most people remain poor, they can’t spend money they don’t have, and we have the horrible irony of people having unmet needs while people lack work.  It’s an old story.  The powerful benefit from the powerless.  Everyone would benefit if all people had more power over their own lives but this possible future is actively resisted in the interests of the currently most powerful.  As Mr. Bush said:

“Evil is real.  And it must be opposed.”

Here’s to opposing you, Mr. Bush.  And opposing your father, and the clique of extremely rich people, most of them rich from oil, who support you, and other such people with a deeply flawed view of the future of the world willing to lie and to bring misery and death in order to impose their views.

The targeted countries are not targeted due to their disrespect for human dignity, rule of law, rights of women, other religions, or even private property.  North Korea, Iraq, and others are not unique for these reasons, they are unique for not allowing their people and land to be exploited by us in addition to themselves.

And our military operations are hardly limited to such places.  What’s going on in Colombia?  What’s coming in Bolivia?  Just why do we already have military bases with troops stationed in more than 100 countries?  And what about those troops Bush says are making themselves useful in the Philippines, a country which only just a few years ago threw out the American military presence after more than a century of our direct domination?  Are those rebels, busy fighting the Philippine government, really going to be sending people to fly our airplanes into our buildings?

Just what will our troops in and around Afghanistan be protecting those people from, now that we’ve won the war?  If you have an answer, Mr. Bush, it would help to show your sincerity by forgoing the long-planned pipeline through Afghanistan (this would also help us in the United States believe your desire to free us from the insecurity of foreign oil).

As Bush said, “We will see freedom’s victory.”

And that freedom will involve the human right to self determination: full democracy.  And I hope people will choose the most fair and free ways of constructing societies.  (But freedom refers to more than just the freedom of groups to decide their own future.)

The freedom of movement is a basic freedom.  America will spare no expense to rid Laos of the unexploded cluster bombs dropped during a secret war 30 years ago that violated international law.  We will do the same with the cluster bombs dropped in Afghanistan just recently, no matter how hopeless the task may seem.  And we will drop no such weapons anywhere, nor will we drop more depleted uranium bombs.

Again, to further the basic goal of freedom of movement, we will work to bring equality to the world, so that the United States has no more to fear from immigrants from Latin America than Massachusetts to fear from immigrants from New Jersey.

And freedom of speech, recognizing that rather than money being a form of free speech (the position of our Supreme Court), some amount of it helps fantastically a person to make his or her voice heard.

And freedom of association.  People will not be fired from their jobs for attempting to organize a labor union.  Public gatherings will be allowed, including outside the building in which the President makes a speech.  And people will have to be proven to have harmed or planned to harm other people, not that they have plotted against the interests of a government), not that they have associated with “terrorists” or, in the case of John Walker Lindh, joined the army of a government that the U.S. government enabled but would later destroy.

This was not brief, as I originally intended.  But I wrote it quickly, on my own, with no government resources to help me out— just what I remember from occasionally reading newspaper articles.  That’s how I excuse any factual inaccuracies I may have; how does Bush excuse the lies noted above?  I’d also like to look up some of Bush’s assertions about tens of thousands of terrorists, few civilian casualties in Afghanistan due to expensive precision weapons, and no children being left behind now that he and Ted Kennedy passed a stingy education law (Jim Jeffords refused to vote for it because it provided insufficient resources), to name a few.

For liberty and justice – meaning freedom of choice and fair compensation for benefit provided to others, which requires similar bargaining power between parties, which requires equal opportunity, which needs relative equality in power, which will benefit everone so long as the other aspects of freedom and fairness are also present in full – this is Benjamin Melançon.

2002 January 29, a Tuesday.