Greed and Politics

Here are the consequences of the House Republican proposal to cut more than $60 billion for the rest of this year. The bill would:


• Cut $1.1 billion from Head Start depriving services for 218,000 children.

• Cut $1.3 billion from Social Security delaying benefits for 500,000 Americans.

• Slash $1.3 billion from community health centers taking primary health care from 11 million patients.

• Reduce or eliminate Pell Grants for 9.4 million low-income college students.

• Cut $405 million from Community Services Block Grants affecting 20 million seniors, families with children and the disabled.

• End job training and other employment services for 8 million Americans.

All the while we will remain in Afghanistan and Iraq, and continue to develop weapons at an ever increasing pace. Unlike previous times when, after a so-called "war", we scaled

back the military industrial complex, these last few years have seen no cutbacks. We, as a nation, continue to believe in the power of the sword rather than the power of the plowshare.

We continue to believe the so-called War on Terror can be won with a Blackhawk as if it was won with a tomahawk.



We continue to trust in missiles rather than diplomacy. We continue to believe people must be forced into democracy and that our way is the only way.

We continue to act imperially while our citizens suffer.

The promise of America is now bound to a perception of success that is about only money. Neither sustainability, nor education, nor sharing, nor progress is valued in any way beyond their ability to make money, make profit, and short term profit at that. No longer may we say "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!", because we no longer mean it. We no longer believe in that promise.

The promise of America is reserved for those fortunate to have money and power...clout...influence...the Oligarchs, the privileged elite of what was once the heart of freedom for the most undeserving of us.

We have hoisted the flag of mediocrity rather than the flag of the middle class. We have traded our belief in the divine within all citizens for the belief in the divine within some, and English speakers only need apply.

We are losing our place in the world and are universally excoriated. A sad fate for what we have been...the most generous of nations, once giving rather than receiving. But now I am terrified of you no matter who you are. Now it is all about us....our little enclave.... protected from the creeping forces of aliens, socialism, diversity and sustainability behind our fenced communities, behind our guarded walls of sameness, behind our featured mantra of "you must eat and act and talk and vote like me. You must embrace only my values and my sustenances because I am the majority, and what I say, goes. I cannot trust you to act honorably because you are not as wealthy as I am and do not look like me."

There is a price to be paid for our arrogance and greed. We were warned of it by the eighth century prophets of the Old Testament and the Christ of the New. But we disregard those warnings as old and ineffective in a place where only money is valued, only my profit today is valuable.

It is not too late to take back the reins and rein in the engines of destruction. It is not too late to make a mark that sustains the poor and doesn't penalize them. That makes a mark for the future generations that will lift them rather than doom them. It is not too late to turn the grim specter of a student loan payback into a student scholarship, a jobless worker into a contributor, a family in peril into a family that stays on course. But we cannot do it with Wall Street. It requires Main Street....you and me.

We could do it. And we do not have to go into further debt. There are ways, there are methods. There is a possibility for everyone to share. But not this way. Not the way we are headed. Not down the path we are on. Not through profit and loss, not through killing collective bargaining so the worker has no voice in his future, but through empathy, sharing and responsibility.

I pray for our people's deliverance from the prisons of greed.



John P. Middleton