“Regime change starts at home,” the bumper stickers remind us. But even if we succeed in re-defeating Bush this November, we’ll spend the next decade trying to undo the harm he’s caused—and much of the damage can never be repaired.
This issue looks at a few of the more recent horrors and the way they fit in the bigger picture.
The Bush administration recently signed off on another free trade pact, the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Basically CAFTA would extend NAFTA beyond Mexico to all of Central America and so spread all NAFTA’s threats and realities of job outsourcing and the super-exploitation of other countries’ people, environment and resources. (See story, page 4.) Those American manufacturing jobs, with wages and benefits you could raise a family on, are gone. Workers’ lives have been disrupted and dislocated and marriages broken. Family members have been lost through lack of minimum health care coverage. These free trade agreements give another level of meaning to the term “capital crime.”
Bush’s plans to privatize Social Security, the retirement and disability fund all American workers count on, have been fended off so far, but they will be hard to stop if he gets a second term. (See story, page 9.) The U.S. is already the only industrialized country in the world that doesn’t have some form of national health care. Now they want to take away minimum retirement and disability support? As our story points out, the Social Security fund has been raided to pay for the tax cut for the rich and the war in Iraq. The Bush plan would bankrupt the fund, claim it is impractical and insolvent and then privatize retirement savings (in 401ks or IRAs) so Wall Street stockbrokers can siphon off part for themselves.
And then there’s port security—another Bush post-9-11 anti-terrorist initiative turned into domestic civil rights repression. It’s bad enough that longshore workers are being screened with criminal background checks, as if American union workers were going to blow up their jobs and communities. But in the meantime real safety and security concerns are sacrificed to the gods of productivity and profit.
Empty containers aren’t checked, container seals go un-inspected and truckers and their passengers roll onto the docks with no one checking their IDs or their reason to be there. Making those checks would slow the movement of cargo and impede the accumulation of profit. The employers have made their priorities clear.
And apparently so has the Bush administration. It has budgeted a mere $47 million for port security when the Coast Guard estimates it will cost $7.4 billion over 10 years. Bush can’t seem to find the money to protect port communities.
“Sorry. Spent it all blowing up Iraq. My bad.”
Even this relatively short list of Bush casualties can numb the mind, and the prospect of four more years defies the imagination. As we work towards November, keep in mind: losing is not an option.
–Steve Stallone,
Editor
