"I didn't come up here to Washington to pass problems on... I like to confront problems," states George W. Bush, who will be inaugurated for his second term on Jan. 20. To finance Bush's inauguration pageantry, officials are spending a reported $2.6 million in public money (excluding $17.3 million in security costs) and hoping to raise another $40 million in private donations.
To big donors, officials are offering such profligate rewards as upgraded seats for the parade and swearing-in ceremony, plus admission to a candlelit soir+â-¬e with Bush and Cheney. Now recall that the Bush Administration first offered tsunami victims a derisory $15 million in aid (as he and Tony Blair continued to vacation days after the disaster). Further recall that Bush and Kerry spent over $547 million on their presidential campaigns. Now consider that the United States offers $350 million in aid to tsunami victims.
Does anyone else perceive a jarring incongruity? Sure we splurge hundreds of millions of dollars every four years so that presidential candidates can machinate around the country (that is, in swing states), squander millions on $2,000-a-plate fundraisers, pass billions of dollars in Congressional pork and overindulge ourselves by purchasing gas-guzzling Humvees. However, we cannot afford to match the money we spend on such opulence to help feed, clothe and heal millions of people affected by the tsunami.
Furthermore, the United States exhausts a paltry 0.15 percent of its GNP in combating world hunger. The United States originally promised more aid (0.7 percent) but forsook its pledge (anyone remember "No Child Left Behind?").
Yet these revelations should not astonish anyone seeing how those in power treat the lesser in the United States contemptuously: how U.S. governance discounts the majority of the public that desires a national healthcare system; how the mentally ill are relegated and mental health services underfunded; how, of the approximately 16 percent of adult inmates and 30 percent of juveniles who have a psychopathological condition, only a handful are appropriately treated; how in the wealthiest Western country 36.4 million people still live below the poverty level, 43.6 million subsist without healthcare and 71 percent of students graduate with student loans (the average amount of debt per person is around $17,000).
Jan Egeland, the U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator, said, "We were more generous when we were less rich... it is beyond me why we are so stingy.... Even Christmastime should remind many Western countries, at least, how rich we have become." Proportionally, as countries become richer, the less they give aid. Conversely, the world spends $1 trillion on arms annually (over $400 billion is allotted for the Pentagon alone). It's tragic how we spend billions of dollars to develop better means to destroy life, while we spend so little to save, protect and preserve it -- by not inaugurating national healthcare, guarding our borders, nuclear plants and food supply, as well as safeguarding the grasses, plants and trees that give us life.
It's great that Bush wants to "confront problems," but his second-term priorities (privatizing Social Security, rewriting the tax code and capping lawsuit settlements) are formulated in willful disregard of more significant problems encumbering Americans and all others sharing this Earth.
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