June 15, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

SICK OF BUSH

Even George H. W. Bush, the first President Bush, talked recently of "Bush fatigue." I never liked George W. Bush. From the first, I thought he was a phony and a dangerous reactionary. His whole life has been one of privilege, but he has presided over failure after failure. There was always someone there to bail him out. But the American people were deluded and foolish enough to get him close enough to the Oval Office that his buddies in the Supreme Court were able to install him into the presidency. Then the corrupt Republican machine managed to steal enough votes in Ohio in 2004 to get him back into the White House. This goes way beyond "fatigue." Bush has done considerable harm to our electoral process, to our international reputation and credibility, and to our economy. It will take decades to repair the damage if it is repairable. This column by Rosa Brooks is at www.latimes.com:

Bush didn't return from his European trip to a warm welcome here at home either. The political left doesn't like him — not that that's anything new. The political center doesn't like him either: A new NBC/Wall Street Journal report finds that only 29% of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing, the lowest level of his presidency. Even on the political right (where most of the 29% of Americans who aren't yet sick of him reside), many have developed an acute case of buyer's remorse.

The GOP's Republican primary candidates are competing to distance themselves from Bush, and more and more conservatives are in open revolt. Some, like economist Bruce Bartlett, fume at the explosion of government spending under Bush. Others, like Sen. Chuck Hagel and a growing cadre of Republican foreign policy experts, are appalled by Bush's mishandling of the Iraq war and other national security issues.

Others, such as Richard Viguerie (conservative direct-mail pioneer) and former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr (the House's lead prosecutor during the Clinton impeachment), are so angry at what they see as Bush's constitutional abuses that they've started channeling (and in Barr's case, joining) the ACLU. "Since 9/11," they assert, "the executive branch has chronically usurped legislative or judicial power and has repeatedly claimed that the president is the law. The constitutional grievances against the White House are chilling." Even the three harpies of far-right punditry — Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and Laura Ingraham — have denounced Bush's favored immigration bill as soft on illegal immigrants.

THE EDUCATION MYTH

We keep hearing that the way out of poverty is getting better skills and a better education. But it's similar to the idea that anyone in America can make it by working hard and playing by the rules. It doesn't work that way. Not everyone in the country is going to be rich. For society to work, there have to be people available to do the necessary services, whether it be plumbing, the law, picking up the garbage, or policing the streets. As this author points out, we need higher wages, not some illusory benefit from a higher education. The article by Daniel Brook is at www.huffingtonpost.com:

There are lots of jobs for burger flippers not because there are lots of uneducated people who can't do other jobs. People don't flip burgers for a living because we have compassion on them and give them spatulas. There are lots of jobs for burger flippers because there's a high demand for burgers and because running a chain of restaurants that serve burgers is very profitable. (McDonald's stock recently hit an all-time high.)

In a world where everyone had a college degree, there would still be burger flippers -- they would just have college degrees too. The issue is not whether there will be burger flippers -- there will be as long as there is demand for burgers -- the issue is what burger flippers will get paid. And here we have a political question more than an economic question.

Burger flipping is a job that falls towards the bottom of the wage scale everywhere. The actual wage is determined largely by the minimum wage and whether or not burger flippers are able to effectively organize. The post-war U.S. economy was based on the principle that, with unions, working-class jobs could pay middle-class wages. And judging from McDonald's profit margins, that's still true. But to make that the reality in the U.S., we'd have to raise the minimum wage and reform our ineffectual labor laws.