July 29, 2007

By Harry T. Cook

Two and two have always made four insofar as I know. Sometimes politicians want you to believe that two and two make five. But if I read the news correctly, two and two now make less than one.

I was never much at higher mathematics, but I’ve got addition and subtraction down pat, therefore a Dow Jones average in the stratosphere and a cash-bloated, tax-cut pampered upper-upper crust do not compute with an epidemic of mortgage foreclosures, rising college and university tuitions coupled with severe budget cuts, municipalities starved for funds and, therefore, having to reduce such vital services as police protection.

A Dow Jones average at or near 14,000 is incontrovertible evidence that some privileged parts of America are rolling in dough while the hard-working middle class is increasingly living from paycheck to paycheck.

President Bush threatens a veto of a relatively modest piece of legislation that would afford poor children a guarantee of minimal health care in place of the no care they presently have. Why? A: There is a scarcity of funds. B: Too much government involvement.

How dare a President who with his handlers effected a coup d’etat on American democracy and led us into a fabulously expensive, immoral pre-emptive war and then botched it through unbelievable incompetence now tell us that the treasury is bare? A war that will end up costing in the trillions of dollars, a war that needn’t ever have happened, a war that has made shambles of a nation whose leaders (?) Bush now orders to fix.

It just doesn’t add up. Does not compute.

Two and two make four, not five and not one. And it was Bush who accused Al Gore of using “fuzzy math.”

“What,” a fellow by the name Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov laid out 105 years ago, “is to be done.” It was not a question but a list of tasks that would have to be undertaken to break the iron rule of czarism in Russia. Better known by his alias, Lenin, he would never have succeeded if the tone-deaf and otherwise unhearing monarchist class in Mother Russia had been willing to listen to even a few of the justifiable economic complaints of the multitudinous oppressed class.

Twenty-first century America certainly doesn’t need and would never tolerate a Bolshevik-like uprising, and this is certainly not a call for such a thing. It is, however, a call to democrats (lower-case “d”) to draw up their own list of what is to be done to redress the grievances noted above – real and serious grievances that are outgrowths of the floodtide of anti-democratic developments in this country.

Quoting the late Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who first articulated these hopes and, as he believed, rights in a message to Congress on Jan. 11, 1944, entitled The Economic Bill of Rights, here is such a list:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every business man, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

Roosevelt went on to say that All of these rights spell security [and]

human happiness and well-being.

Roosevelt might have said that his “Economic Bill of Rights” describes what America was ever to have stood for. He, too, would say that the conditions that obtain at present do not compute.

What is to be done to establish those rights is to break the stranglehold that free-market religionists and right-wing conservatives have on American economic and public policy. That’s what the 2008 election should be all about.

 © Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.