I’M SICK AND TIRED AND I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE

By R. A. Pearson

Many of you Clarion Issue readers may remember this paraphrase from the 1976 movie Network starring Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, William Holden, and Robert Duvall, where the newscaster calls on the entire city to open its windows and shout “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” This is how I feel just a few days before I will walk into the polls on November 4 and vote in this election. I’m mad, and I know who I’m going to blame from the top office in the land down to the county dogcatcher.

I will preface this article by saying no one really has experience in the job of being president unless he is running as the incumbent; therefore, any claims to experience a candidate may offer is purely hypothetical and arbitrary in this race. While time served in various offices may broaden a candidate’s knowledge of important national and international information, shape their political and economic philosophies, and influence his world prospective, it in no way really prepares him to be president “on day one.”

What concerns this writer most about this election is today I am not better off than I was four years ago, or better yet ten years ago. My salary has gone up yet my buying power has gone down. My health insurance pays less and costs more, and I am lucky to be one of the Americans to still have health insurance coverage provided through my employer. My daughter and son-in-law, both of whom own local business and are the ‘backbone of the economy’ according to both Republicans and Democrats, pay over $400 a month for a private health care policy. They have an outrageous deductible and the cost of having my second granddaughter was not even covered under their plan. For eight years we have had Pres. Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’ yet there has been no move on fixing health care, and today 45 million Americans now go without healthcare while millions more are underinsured. Two years of Democratic control of Congress has also done little to move America forward on this vital issue.

I also recall Pres. Bush ‘compassionate conservative’ fix to Social Security; private investment accounts on Wall Street. If that had taken place the bail out may be near a trillion dollars instead of just $700 billion. (Remember Senator McCain has or had a similar plan for Social Security.) However, it is not my intention to discuss Social Security here but what Wall St. and the banks have done to the American people. By lowering interest rates to nothing the banks have forced Americans into the stock market at a higher rate than many would prefer. What interest rate do you get on your savings account? Your CDs? Your money markets? I would like to see higher interest rates and more responsibility placed on who the banks loan money to. I remember when Cluny, my dog who writes a column in the Clarion Issue most of the time, got an offer for a home improvement loan in his email. The banks have been irresponsible, and when Pres. Bush promised on Sept.16 the tax payers would get their money back from this massive bail out, it reminded me of Paul Wolfowitz’s promise the Iraq war would be paid for by Iraqi oil money. The housing crisis, the bank failures, and the Wall St. crisis happened on the Bush watch, and the architect of the banking deregulation was Phil Graham, who became an economic advisor to McCain until he called America ‘a nation of whiners.’ McCain admits he doesn’t understand the economy. Even the day after AIG threw in the towel, McCain said the fundamentals of the American economy were sound. Finally a piece of granite from a bank ceiling must have hit him on the head, and he finally admitted we have a problem, ‘suspended his campaign’ to help return to Washington to fix the problem, and threatened to postpone the first presidential debate which had been planned since spring. Wall St. has been bailed out with your tax money. However, if America believes this problem is fixed, I’ve got a bridge in Alaska I’ll sell you.

On taxes, I have a problem with tax cuts here and tax breaks there. Tax cuts and tax breaks are like quack-quacks on old McDonald’s farm; some are here, some are there, they are everywhere but where you need one. On taxes, the Tax Policy Center concluded that Senator Obama’s plan would increase after-tax income for middle-income taxpayers by about five percent by 2012, or nearly $2,200 annually. Senator McCain's plan, which cuts taxes across all income levels, would raise after tax-income for middle-income taxpayers by three percent. However, all of this is smoke and mirrors, voodoo tax policy. It depends on tax breaks for childcare, business loans, hiring the handicapped or teenage worker, and other tax cuts for houses, businesses, children, medical needs, and other plans, or tax cuts for business that meet this requirement or spend on that program, or if your money is made via a salary or by capital gains, or whatever. Here is a real way to cut taxes. Lower the tax threshold: if a person paid 28% in Federal Income taxes lower it to 25%. That is a real tax cut! My house is paid off. My children are raised, and I’m a grandparent with no deductions. This is the only way I’ll ever get my taxes lowered. Neither Obama nor McCain are really listening to America. I’m mad as hell!

The situation with gas prices continues to cripple the American economy and the pocket book of the American consumer. The inflation in food and consumer prices is directly related to the cost of fuel both to ship and produce the basic products Americans buy weekly as necessities for their families. The failure of the Bush-Cheney administration over the last eight years to produce a true comprehensive energy policy has cost this country precious years in the race for green technology to offset the high cost of petrol energy. The McCain policy of ‘drill baby drill’ is equivalent to people chanting ‘IBM Selectric typewriters’ on the eve of the personal computer revolution of the late 1980s. Inflation and the fall of the stock market, the housing crisis, and massive bank failures across the country mark hard times for America. Once again, it happened on the Republican watch.

In Iraq, McCain refuses to realize the surge has only worked to put a heavier lid on a boiling pot and has not guaranteed victory. Today the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and his Shiite led government, have placed arrest warrants on many of the leaders of the Sunni Awakening leaders in al-Anbar and other providences while trying to stop their participation in provisional elections that have been postponed for years. The real winner in Iraq is Iran, a Shiite nation that has expanded and will continue to expand its influence over Iraq and the Hezbollah areas of Palestine and Lebanon. The worldview of the Republicans continues to be ‘big stick’ diplomacy. As America’s military is pressed around the world, Gen. David McKiernan (not Sarah Palin’s Gen. McClellan) has called for three more divisions in Afghanistan while our British allies admitted on October 5, “The war could not be won militarily.” Yet we continue to spend billions to rebuild in Iraq where much of Baghdad does not have but two hours of electricity a day and very little water and sewer service! Plus we spend billions of dollars in Afghanistan who is the major producer of opium in the world! I’m mad as hell; why aren’t you?

I also cast a weary eye toward Senator McCain’s ‘shoot from the hip’ responses to national and world events. When Russia invaded Georgia he labeled Russia the aggressor and said, “Today we are all Georgians.” McCain made his statements despite the fact the Bush administration was calling for restraint from the presidential candidates and the fact, admitted to by Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice, Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili initiated the conflict. When you kick a schoolyard bully in the shin, you need to be willing to back up the action. When the American banks began to drop like flies in mid-September, McCain said he would fire SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) chairman Christopher Cox and create a special trust to help strengthen weak institutions of Wall St. First, Cox is maybe one of the two Republicans in the Bush administration who may have an idea what is going on and how to fix it. Second, a president cannot fire the chair of an independent regulatory commission like the SEC. While the president nominates and the Senate confirms the SEC chair, a commissioner of an independent regulatory commission cannot be removed by the president. From time to time, presidents have attempted to remove commissioners who have proven “uncooperative.” However, the courts have general upheld the independence of commissioners. The president may ask for the SEC chairman to resign, but he cannot fire him. I think McCain is a hot head. He never vetted Sarah Palin, his suspension of his campaign and threat not to attend the first debate was an attempt to gain headlines, and he does not know U. S. Constitutional law.

In Georgia, the Clarion Issue worked and lobbied for a two party state; however, today it is a one party state dominated by the Republican Party. With very little checks on his power, Governor Sonny Perdue is working to get access to the teacher retirement fund while denying retired teachers cost of living increases. The same Republican government is cutting funding to schools and school programs all over the state. Teachers and other state employees have not received decent or even cost of living raises in over five years. At the same time other state budgets are being cut while the state marches ahead with tax cuts. Voters can easily look south at Florida and its revenue woes from tax cuts. Look at what the tax cuts have done to California, in the middle of the national seven-hundred-billion-dollar bail out of Wall St. America will be called on to issue the Bear Flag state a ten billion dollar transfusion of its own. The reason: tax cuts. Tax cuts are nice, but when the ambulance or fire truck takes 27 minutes to show up at your door instead of seven, was the tax cut really worth it? When you child or grandchild is in the eighth grade and reads on a forth grade level, was the tax cut worth it?


In summing up the presidential race, America suffered 159,000 job losses in September alone. The total job loss for 2008 is estimated at 760,000 jobs across the nation. Many good jobs have gone overseas during the last eight years, and American workers have been forced to train their foreign replacements and even disassemble the plants where they were employed for shipment overseas or to Latin America. By now you have seen your latest 401K or 403B statements and wondered what happened to the money you had ten months ago. The massive loss of jobs and the plunging economy have occured as the Bush Administration insisted the economy was sound, a sentiment echoed time and again by Senator McCain during the primaries and for months until mid-September. In the midst of rising inflation, rising energy costs, rising health care costs, rising individual bankruptcies, and the housing crisis, the Republican Party got it wrong. America is now in the midst of two costly and probably unwinnable wars, both of which Senator McCain insists he knows how to win. McCain insists on continued tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans while the trillion-dollar Iraq War, the unknown cost of the War in Afghanistan, and the virtual trillion dollar Wall St. bail out have gone on the tax payers credit card. I’m mad as hell and see no where else to lay the blame but at the feet of Pres. Bush, the Republicans in Congress who supported his policies and ran up these debts, and John McCain, who for the most part was part of that Republican majority.

I feel the same way about the Republicans in Georgia. There may be a few local Republicans I may vote for but not many.

Will the Democrats do any better? Probably not; however, if the ship has not totally gone down maybe a change of crew can help. Maybe one day there will be a third party that really cares about the American worker and middle class. Maybe by 2012 there will be real leaders with real plans supported by real Americans, but for now I guess I’ll vote for the other party. If the guard does change in Washington or Georgia, rest assured the Clarion Issue will be as hard on the new crew as it has been on the old crew. But for now, I’m raising my window and shouting, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”