Shirin Vossoughi Vossoughi is a
third-year history and American literature and culture student.
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Despite our current boom in military spending, the U.S. Pentagon
will assure you that the country is at peace. This could not be
further from the truth. On Jan. 16, 2001, George W. Bush was
inaugurated as president and war was subsequently declared. This
battle is currently being waged both within and without our borders
against women, workers, the environment, victims of AIDS, the
elderly and perhaps most importantly, our children. But this war is
not fueled by high tech arms or aided by missile defense. It runs
on something much more cheap and plentiful: our silence.
Many people jokingly question the intelligence of our current
CEO, I mean president, laughing about ridiculous quotes such as my
personal favorite, “More and more of our imports are coming
from overseas.” While material for political comedians is at
an all-time high, the reality of the Bush agenda’s rapid
manifestation is far from humorous.
To understand just how seriously frightening the direction we
are heading in is, just glance at the Bush team. Andrew Card, the
White House chief of staff, was the main lobbyist for General
Motors. Condoleezza Rice sat on the board of Chevron and even has
an oil tanker in her name.
Most recently, Bush nominated John Negroponte, key player in the
CIA death squads of the contra wars against Nicaragua, as U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations. Not to mention appointing Otto
Reich, who helped Reagan illegally promote support of the contras
to a senior Latin American post. And the list of big businessmen
and CIA Cold War vets with blood on their hands goes on.
So what has this stellar crew come up with so far? In the name
of tax cuts and defense, social programs have been slashed across
the board. Bush plans to cut a plan for dislocated workers by $200
million, state jobs for young people by $100 million and a grant
program aimed at helping health care providers for the uninsured
will be scrapped for a meager allocation to the states. The
administration did, however, settle on a smaller cut of $25 million
for youth opportunity grants aimed at disadvantaged young people.
Sure is nice to see they care.
Workers take an even bigger punch with the overturning of
labor-management councils set up in unionized federal workplaces.
As if attacking unions is not enough, Bush led the destruction of
ergonomics rules aimed at preventing health problems associated
with repetitive motion, contact stress and other job-related
conditions. The regulations covered 102 million workers and would
have prevented an estimated 4.6 million musculoskeletal
disorders.
 Illustration by ZACH LOPEZ/Daily Bruin And don’t go
crying to Clinton. The former president issued the rule in January,
four days before leaving office, showing how high a priority the
workers of this country are to politicians on both sides of the
partisan circus.
While Bush stresses spending increases in areas like defense,
education and medical research, the money spent is simply filtered
back into the upper crust of the current system.
Take education: many charter schools in Texas and other states
are run by for-profit companies. Bush has offered to pay $3 billion
to such privatized schools. Coincidentally, it is some of
Bush’s largest donors that will benefit from handing
education over to the market. Backers of Edison and Advantage
schools, two rival private managers of public education,
contributed heavily to the Republicans’ illegitimate triumph.
So, more money goes into private education while child-care
assistance for lower-income families and programs designed to fight
child abuse are swept under the rug.
Similarly, while an increase in medical research seems
wonderful, we must question whom it will benefit. The recent attack
of many pharmaceutical companies who refuse to provide cheap AIDS
medication or allow governments to patent anti-viral drugs
demonstrates the precedence profit takes over human life. Bush
unveiled his stance when he moved to gut out the office of AIDS and
race relations in the White House only three weeks after taking the
wheel, shutting down the 35-member Presidential Advisory Council on
HIV/AIDS. Pair that with legislation passed on the first day of
Bush’s presidency to block aid for any international
organizations that promotes or offers abortions, and the future of
women and children in the underdeveloped world takes a double
hit.
Too bad we can’t look to the First Lady for help. Laura
Bush, a virtual resurrection of the quintessential ’50s
housewife, is too busy picking out wallpaper to concern herself
with such petty matters as international women’s health or
child starvation.
While Bush uses such policies as ammunition against those who
have no voice in the U.S. system, his beefed up military makes this
war all the more real. In Puerto Rico last week, citizens mobilized
for massive protests against the Navy’s bombing of the
Vieques island range as military exercise.
In countries like Columbia and Peru, the CIA and the Drug
Enforcement Administration currently sponsor and implement war-like
conditions. As Edward N. Luttwak, senior fellow at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies states, “The funds of
U.S. taxpayers and efforts of U.S. policy officials from the
president down are encouraging the militarization of life in
countries that have had more than their share of military
rule.”
Finally, many argue that Bush’s strongest mark has been
made in his efforts to devastate the environment. Turning his back
on an international effort to reduce carbon dioxide emission and
giving businesses the green light to pump out harmful gasses, Bush
promises to avoid any steps that might hurt the U.S. economy.
Apparently he thinks we can just breathe money once we run out of
clean air. The Environmental Protection Agency, (cut by $500
million) also revoked new standards that would have decreased the
allowable arsenic in water by 80 percent. Unsafe levels of arsenic
cause bladder and other cancers and among the developed world,
levels of arsenic in water are highest in the U.S.
But many followers of Washington’s political spectacle may
be up in arms over Bush for this precise reason: it is our air and
water that is currently at risk. It is workers, patients and
children within our borders that will suffer.
While this may be true, placing all of the blame for our current
state of war on “President” Bush and weeping
nostalgically for the days of Clinton denies the fact that many of
the world’s inhabitants have been suffering for years due to
the government of generally silent U.S. citizens.
So what if democrats and so-called “liberals” alike
begrudge and moan about Bush for the next four to eight years if
the next neoliberal Democrat soothes their souls with policies that
are a little less destructive?
While many media moguls run around cursing themselves for ever
suggesting that there was no difference between Bush and Gore, they
fail to fundamentally question a system that rolls out the red
carpet for business while throwing scraps at those who break their
backs to keep the world system running.