Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Dear Mr. President,

With real unemployment near 20%, wages falling, prices rising and people losing their  pensions, their homes and their Hope, you should worry not only about your re-election chances but the future of America itself. Revolutions do not occur when people have enough, only when they suffer privation and injustice and we are fast approaching that point. While the wealthy see economic recovery, the rest of us see a bleak future. In the 1980s, the Reagan Revolution started the greatest transfer of wealth in history from the middle and lower classes to the wealthy and that trend continues to this day. Thanks to Reagonomics, we have gone from a creditor to a debtor nation, the rich have accumulated more and more of the nation’s wealth and the gap between the haves and the have-nots has widened. The current budget battle has brought all this into sharp relief with the Republicans attacking government and social programs with greater ferocity than ever before, refusing to give ground on taxes, demanding the elimination of Medicare and pushing us into default on the national debt. None of it a surprise. What was surprising, however, was your proposal to reduce Social Security benefits as well as Medicare and Medicaid and shred what’s left of the social contract. The problem isn’t a lack of wealth but that too much is in the hands of too few and we spend what’s left in the wrong way: on unjustified immoral wars; on inequitable, unaffordable tax cuts for millionaires; and on billion dollar bailouts for banks and corporations whose incompetent greedy leaders have brought financial chaos and ruin to the economy but whose bloated paychecks and obscene bonuses continue uninterrupted thanks to the U.S. Taxpayer and friends in high places. Those of us on Social Security, meanwhile, haven’t had an increase in two years while the price of food and fuel, utilities and other essentials continue to rise. The average wage continues to fall, the lack of jobs is a crisis and the lack of healthcare a national disgrace. And you’ve gone right along with the misguided Republican ideology and their distorted view of capitalism. You’ve given up single-payer healthcare, extended Bush’s tax cuts for millionaires and continued to finance war on the nation’s credit card. The difference between you and Bush the Lesser is only a matter of degree, not substance. Yours is not a record to be proud of, Mr. President. It is shameful. It is un-American; at least the America I grew up in.