A Deaf Ear For America's Concerns
by Jim Wright


"Only 27 percent of Americans, by the latest accounting, think our national leadership is moving us in the right direction.

President Bush and his congressional followers sank last week to the lowest public approval levels they've registered in the five-plus years since Bush became president.

According to the most recent nationwide Gallup poll, the GOP-led Congress is more unpopular right now than the Democratic Congress was in 1994 when the public unseated the Democrats' 40-year House majority. Today, only 23 percent approve of the job that this Congress is doing. A thundering 70 percent disapprove!

Personnel shuffles won't change anything. That's razzle-dazzle. This goes deeper.

The conclusion seems inescapable: America's mythical "average" person believes that Bush and his GOP cohorts have habitually ignored the public's strongest concerns. Consider these:

For five years Bush has talked sporadically about "fixing" Social Security but steadfastly refuses to do anything to strengthen the trust fund. Whenever challenged to "do something," he trots out that tired, old shibboleth of robbing the trust fund to fatten the private stock market.

Repeatedly -- year after year and in poll after poll -- ordinary people tell the president that's emphatically not what they want. Bush and Dick Cheney, unheeding, persist.

To serve the needs of public education, Bush tirelessly suggests giving tuition vouchers to parents who send their kids to private schools. This fixes nothing.

The same weary formula of talking boldly and carrying a toothpick applies to healthcare.

Occasionally, the president and his tame Congress grow anxious because people are getting restless about the rising loss of health benefits. Instead of offering some system of universal healthcare, Bush and Co. concoct a complicated conglomeration featuring something called "private accounts" that don't do anything for poor, sick folks and just keep pushing a real solution off to some distant successor.

Meanwhile, the number of uninsured grows, and some of America's biggest companies get by with taking bankruptcy and thus shucking off their sworn responsibility to their own faithful employees.

Sick and tired? You bet! Plain people are growing sick and tired of learning how these companies, with apparent administration and congressional approval, are paying multiple millions in retirement bonuses to individual executives while blithely shirking their duty to multiple thousands of hard-working employees.

It should be no surprise that the general public, reflected in the plunging polls, grows increasingly disenchanted with our country's national leadership. For the past five years, that leadership has, with increasing hauteur, routinely ignored the public's principal needs and wants.

The Bush-Cheney attitude has been: It doesn't matter what you say or think. We know what's best for you. On Tuesday, Bush dismissively said, "I'm the decider."

The first two elephants that the Bush-Cheney team crammed so resolutely down the public's collective throat -- the huge feed-the-wealthy tax cut and the hasty, headstrong invasion and occupation of Iraq -- should have sounded an alarm. These two acts, in combination, swiftly devoured an inherited fiscal surplus and unblinkingly piled up history's most monstrous national debt -- close to $8 trillion now, with most of these interest-bearing bonds owned, for the first time, by foreigners.

Our grandchildren's generation will be in hock up to its ears. Any historian or economist could have told our "deciders" that it wasn't prudent to launch a huge tax cut and a costly war at the same time. But Bush and Cheney weren't listening.

Perhaps the greatest disservice that this self-satisfied crowd has visited upon America's working families is the steady erosion of wages, combined with a stubborn opposition to any increase in the minimum wage. On average, a full day's work buys the American wage earner 19 percent less than it did 30 years ago.

Literally hundreds of American factories -- and service and communications jobs -- have closed down, lured to Third World countries by dirt-cheap wages. Now we learn that Wal-Mart, our country's biggest purchaser of goods, is telling its huge network of American suppliers to close and move production units to China or India, or else be replaced by low-wage foreign sweatshops.

All of this downward pressure on wages means downward mobility for the average American working family.

This isn't the way that things were supposed to work in this blessed country. We were built to pursue upward mobility -- for the many, not just the few.

That's why 70 percent of the American people say our current leadership is taking us in the wrong direction. "



Is this what you think, what you feel?

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What it do?

You perfectly illustrated the Media's deception of linking that poll with the GOP. Only a moron would conclude America is going in the wrong/right direction from Adminstration to Administration. Ultimately, I believe America has been going in the wrong direction for half a century. True, the war is not going well and other things have been failures but that hardly ecompasses the integral Welfare of America as a whole. You judge from a plane instead of on the street.

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I'll never Forget. To pull You Closer is to Pull You Down. Ignorence can be an envy. Applaud us as the old American Power goes quietly into the night.

I wouldn't put any faith in numbers from polls. Regardless, there is some truth in this.

I hardly think that they're his "congressional followers." Actually, they're "congressional opposers," and since they say "black" every time Bush says "white," I put just as much blame on them, as I do on Bush, for not getting anything done. It's all just a game now, between two spoiled brats.

Been living in a cave for the past three years? Congress is run by the Commucrats. NOT the GOP.

You have a point there.
I need to use "shibboleth" in a sentence sometime today.

Or maybe that's what you're TOLD is what's happening. Stop blindly accepting the media as fact. If anything, there have been polls stating that while Bush's polls are low, the Commucratic-led congress' polls are even LOWER.

Statistically, you are 100% wrong. Almost every single source you find, will tell you that privately schooled children are "smarter" in tests than publicly schooled children. Serve up some legitimate links to prove this wrong, before spouting off heresay.

Why can't you be responsible for your own health? Why shrug it off on other people? Is it too much to ask that you put your health before such things as your "internet connection, satellite TV and cell phone?" Isn't this an issue of what your priorities are?

Obviously, you've not researched an HSA account, or perhaps you'd not be so critical of it (unless you're one of the dregs of society, and have made poor decisions in your life, and now you want other folks to bail you out of your own problems).

Ok...one or two companies are guilty of this (like Enron), but what about the hundreds of thousands others who aren't? Again...there's no proof in this argument.

I wouldn't say so much it's "plain people." It's more like "ignorant people."

You are SO wrong here. If anyone gives that "we know what's best for you" attitude, it's the Commucrats. THEY are the ones who want to hold your leash.

Stop reading "Conspiracy Theory Magazine."

Right...because our country truly IS in a great depression, right? I mean, I don't know about YOU, but I'm getting sick of seeing all the food lines at the local Salvation Army. It's a blight on my "evil rich" community.

Erosion of wages? Didn't they just pass a wage increase, lately?

Yeah...they went overseas to escape the oppressive taxes that your socialistic mind thinks is so great. Companies' jobs are to make money. Not pander to the dregs of society. If the taxes get too oppressive, I don't blame them for leaving. Perhaps the stupid people who lost their jobs from these companies, need to start arguing for less taxes, so that their jobs come back to them.

I think you're tragically wrong in almost every one of these points. You have zero links to back up your statements, so there's no reason to believe you have valid points, and you're not just spouting off about something you know nothing about.

The other 77% don't care! You need an educated population that do care, in order for your entire politcal process to strenthen, and hence get good presidential candidate's. Granted, you've got some fanatics over there whether it be in sport or politics or whatever, which is good, but I just can't help thinking most people don't really care or have an opinion, sorry .

You are just spouting off denials of the truths. We don't need proof of what we can actually see, you are so busy digging in the feed trough that you don't know what is going on around you or you are flapping your ears over your eyes to not see it. I read a lot of your replies above and it read that you are a very selfish pig-headed person. The bible said there will come a time when there will be pigs that walk on their hind legs.

The bible said there will come a time when there will be pigs that walk on their hind legs.

I see you have been reading from the Quran.

"All things are possible, to those who believe"
that statement from the bible is true, because you believe America is
going down hill, it is true. but, it's only true to you.

.

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The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
Thomas Jefferson

I hate it when people say "you just have to believe".
If I just HAVE to believe then that mean I have to MAKE myself believe, and if I have to MAKE myself BELIEVE then to me then it is just MAKE-BELIEVE.

Prove me wrong, boy. I DARE you to provide some proof.

By the way...two things:
1) For someone who hates God as much as you do, you sure read the Bible a lot.

2) Seriously...stop insulting people, including myself. There's a reason that half the B.S. posts you submit get deleted.

Reading the bible is what made me come to not believe it anymore. It was the most implausible thing I ever read. Before that I believe what all the preacher told me, but when I read it myself I saw how implausible it was and how gullible I been to have believed it.