President Obama's State of the Union Address was chalk-full of theatrical political double speak. It is important to note that whether or not the President's whimsical flurries of optimistic tones resonated with you, it was all said by a man who recently extended the deplorable policy of tax cuts to the wealthiest people in America, while actually increasing the tax rate on the poorest among us. Just that simple fact alone ought to make virtually everything this President says be classified as one-hundred percent pure bull crap.
I'm not going to go through his speech line by line, because frankly, I have better things to do with my time, as do you, the reader. I will simply say that all his rhetoric about education, our "Sputnik moment", our "free enterprise system" being what "drives innovation", and our need to outshine the rest of the world in every conceivable way, is all vacuous rhetoric meant to satiate an under-educated and over-entertained population. Apparently nobody in the media has the cahones to point out to the President that he's dead wrong about that "free enterprise" statement. We don't, nor have we ever had, actual freedom of enterprise, and that's by design. One would have to be a completely sycophantic nincompoop to think that the development of the Internet, the arrival on the Moon, and all other other truly important inventions in the last two hundred years would have been developed if we had a so-called "free enterprise" system. The fact remains, no matter how hard this President and all others try to hide it, that those things all came about during a time when the government was infinitely more invested in the economy than it is today. Further, the top tax rate during most of these great accomplishments was well over 75%. By today's standards, we were basically a socialist country when we went to the moon.
Now, I'm not saying that everything President Obama said last night was bull pucky. (Why am I using so many Southern colloquialisms today?) There were plenty of things he said that are not only true, but need to be said. I am the first person to say that the bully pulpit should often be used to frame the debate in the country. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the strongest influence President Obama could have is to raise the rhetoric to a level that is intelligent, relevant, and centered on building up the least among us. What I am saying though, is that much of what he said is virtually meaningless because none of the things he is proposing or philosophizing about can be accomplished if we are basically beholden to borrowing money from China for the tax relief we give to the wealthiest people on the planet; the yacht sailors and private plane flyers.
It's all political double speak. It sounds just like what you want to hear from the President (minus a lot of other things we all wish he would address) but has no chance of really affecting those of us who just want to work, pay our bills, go to school, and live our lives free of the constant threat of poverty. It's political theater on the grandest scale. I mean, damn! They even went as far as to wear those ridiculous ribbons "in honor of Gabbie Giffords." And if that was not enough theater for you, Republicans and Democrats mixed it up and sat next to one another in a "show national solidarity," like they were kinder-gardeners who were sitting boy girl boy girl. That act took away the ability for the public to see which legislators present were the ones who worship the dollar above all else; usually evident by never clapping for anything that has to do with funding things like education and infrastructure. I think we can call that theatrical double speak.
I don't know, I guess my point is this: There is nothing the President can do at this point to convince me that he is truly attempting to rebuild this country, or reform it for the better, until he speaks to the issues of poverty, unfair taxation, ending all wars of occupation, disclosing the budgets for the 16 secretive government agencies, making elections publicly funded, and taking the health care system out of the for-profit market. A good place to start would be reversing the tax cuts to the wealthy, and increasing the highest tax rate to what it was in the late 1960s, the most prosperous time in American history, if we are judging by household debt, education access, and health care costs. Is that too much to ask for in the richest country in the world? I think not. Not when every single other industrialized country in the world has all those things I mentioned.
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