Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Dear Mr. President,

Just received your email letter responding to my concerns about your double-dealing Republicrat budget proposal for 2012. Like your previous letters, this one avoids specifics and is filled with political clichés and platitudes. Nary a mention what’s going on behind those closed doors. “…we have to live within our means so we can invest in our future,” you said. Mr. President, unless “we” invest in America there will be no future. We need jobs and only government can provide them through massive public works projects that will revitalize America’s infrastructure and the economy. We need to bail out states in financial distress, cities that are going bankrupt and people who are losing their pensions and homes. What we DON’T need are more failed Republican ideas of smaller government, eviscerated social programs, bailouts for banks and tax cuts for millionaires. The budget crisis requires only three things: stop the wars, raise taxes and a single-payer health care system that contains both health and care, that’s regulated and efficient, not the chaotic, substandard money-grubbing industry that now masquerades as healthcare, a national disgrace.

Recently I was in Pasadena and visited your alma mater, Occidental College. I tried to visualize what you must have been thinking when you were there as a student, your attitudes and dreams at that time, if you already had the idea that one day you’d be sitting in the White House pulling the levers of power. You were and are a smart guy, Mr. President, capable of so much. But like most politicians, you’ve been seduced by the corrupting influence of power, deserted your vision of a better America and turned your back on those of us who aren’t wealthy or powerful. How else to explain your rightward tilt, your  willingness to cave in to every Republican demand, your continuation of war, your persecution of government whistle-blowers, your attack on Social Security, pensions and government workers, and your willingness to extend tax cuts for millionaires. $13+ billion a month on war, Guantanamo still open, Bradley Manning still locked up for exposing war crimes by the U.S military, the Patriot Act’s ongoing erosion of freedoms…. It’s a sorry state of affairs we’ve come to. You didn’t bring us here, but you’re doing nothing to get us out of it. You had an opportunity to be a really special president but you are just another politician, disappointing so many of us who voted for you in 2008. Never again.