Posted on 12/08/2002 1:35:47 PM PST by NormsRevenge
Imagine a place where in two short years a budget surplus has been magically transformed into a deficit. A place where millions of people are jobless, many of them laid off in the past 24 months. Homelessness is steadily increasing, millions of children go to bed hungry and terrorists have recently attacked, killing thousands.
Then imagine that this country's king decides to deny government workers scheduled raises and new government workers civil service protection, but confers upon the appointed members of his court bonuses of up to $25,000.
This is the America we all live in. The Bush administration has quietly started awarding bonuses to political appointees, a practice abandoned during the Clinton administration -- back when the economy was booming, the budget had a surplus and terrorist attacks on American soil were unimaginable.
This is just the latest act of greed and insensitivity from an administration whose very legitimacy, lest we forget the 2000 election, is suspect. Add it to the growing list of outrages: undermined civil and constitutional rights, government surveillance, secret detentions without charges, fouling of the environment.
That doesn't even touch on a post-9/11 foreign policy that, according to a huge survey released this week by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, is rapidly making the United States one of the least favorite nations of much of the world.
Yet Americans, terrified of terrorists, seem unwilling to rein in a president who has little or no respect for the law of the land, the dream of democracy, or, as far as I can tell, the American people.
As so many of us struggle to make ends meet, afraid that it may be our job eliminated in the next round of layoffs, Bush is using our tax dollars to award his political appointees, many of whom already make more than $100,000 a year.
Exactly what have they done so well? Couldn't be the economy, justice system, environment, equal protection. The administration says many of those rewarded are involved in counter-terrorism activities. Funny; I haven't been able to find one person who feels safer now than he or she did a year ago.
Frightened as Americans are of what the future holds, it's time we recognized that not only does our emperor have no clothes -- he's steadily stealing ours.
Jill Nelson is a New York writer and editor.
Nah, that could never happen.
I'd like to she the pinhead prove it. Actually childhood obesity is a worse problem in the US especially with the so-called "poor".
Ignorance is bliss, but this woman is in paradise.
Explain how it is OK for unemployed, non-tax paying "voters" to collectively mug me and all other taxpayers?
Will wait for an answer
I don't know what token writers that get their unsubstantiated drivel published in USA Today get paid these days, but I'll bet Jill makes over 100K a year.
Now we'll all be accused of racism!
Yeah funny how there were apparently no homeless as soon as the serial rapist took office--then all of the sudden on January 21, 2000 a million people end-up in the street. Amazing how the mere swearing in of President Bush resulted in all those people becoming homeless. The sad thing of it is that the dumb jackasses in the RAT cult really believe this crap.
500,000 - 600,000 (1988)
700,000+/night; 2 million/year (1999)
From http://www.nationalhomeless.org/numbers.html Looks like it went up while Clinton was in white house...
A 1997 review of research conducted over the past decade (1987-1997) in 11 communities and 4 states found that shelter capacity more than doubled in nine communities and three states during that time period (National Coalition for the Homeless, 1997). In two communities and two states, shelter capacity tripled over the decade.
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