DOREMUS OBSERVES :
MATTERS OF INTEREST
Doremus Jessup, editor
of the Fort Beulah The Daily Informer, in
Sinclair Lewis' famous book "It Can't Happen
Here", at its conclusion, "drove out saluted by
the meadow larks, and onward all day, to a hidden cabin
in the Northern Woods where quiet men awaited news of
freedom.....still Doremus goes on, into the sunrise, for
a Doremus Jessup can never die......
************************
from Crisispapers.org/editorials
Shallow Throat took a long swig of Snapple.
"It's like Watergate, in a way. Nixon was trapped,
it was obvious to all that he was going down, but he
refused to resign until the impeachment train was in the
station, and it was then that the GOP leaders abandoned
him and sought a meeting. These Bush guys are not going
to leave until impeachment is staring them in the face --
and, even then, they're desperate and greedy enough to be
capable of anything, including trying to impose martial
law on the country and ruling from the bunkers,
postponing the 2004 election, whatever.
**********************************
Death
of Manufacturing
The rise of free trade has eroded America’s
industrial base and with it our sovereignty.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
The American Conservative
http://www.amconmag.com/08_11_03/cover.html
August 11, 2003
After Mass at St. Mary’s, a retired FBI agent who
had worked as a boy in the great steel plant in Weirton,
W.Va., whose father had died in an accident at the mill,
handed me the Weirton Daily Times. “Where Do We Go
From Here?” read the May 20 banner. The front page
was devoted to the bankruptcy filing of Weirton Steel,
which had once employed 14,000 workers in a town of
23,000. Mark Glyptis, president of the Independent
Steelworkers Union, said it didn’t have to happen.
It was a poignant story. When I began my campaign of 2000
at the Weirton mill, Mark and his ISU endorsed me.
That same week, a friend e-mailed me. Timco, a lumber
mill where we spent the last day of the New Hampshire
campaign of 1996, had shut down. As Weirton Steel had
been hammered by subsidized steel dumped in the U.S.
market, Timco had to compete with subsidized lumber from
Canada.
Across America the story is the same: steel and lumber
mills going into bankruptcy; textile plants moving to the
Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and the Far East;
auto plants closing and opening overseas; American mines
being sealed and farms vanishing. Seven hundred thousand
textile workers—many of them minorities and single
women—have lost their jobs since NAFTA passed in
1993.
Thirty years have elapsed since our free-trade era began
and 30 months since George W. Bush became president.
It’s time to measure the promise of global free
trade against the performance.
Undeniably, free trade has delivered for consumers. A
trip to the mall, where the variety of suits, shoes,
shirts, toys, gadgets, games, TVs, and appliances
abounds, makes the case. But what has it cost our
country?
Every month George Bush has been in office, America has
lost manufacturing jobs. One in seven has vanished since
his inauguration. In 1950, a third of our labor force was
in manufacturing. Now, it is 12.5 percent. U.S.
manufacturing is in a death spiral, and it is not a
natural death. This is a homicide. Open-borders free
trade is killing American manufacturing.
In 2002, we ran a trade deficit in goods of $484 billion.
This May, it reached the level of $562 billion, nearly 6
percent of GDP. Evangelists of free trade tell us trade
deficits do not matter. Michael Boskin, Chairman of the
Council of Economic Advisers under Bush I, declared,
“It does not make any difference whether a country
makes computer chips or potato chips.”
History teaches otherwise. In 1860, Britain abandoned its
Britain First trade policy for the free-trade faith of
David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and Richard Cobden. By
World War I, Britain, which produced twice what America
did in 1860, produced less than half and had been
surpassed by a Germany that did not even exist in 1860.
Free trade does to a nation what alcohol does to a man:
saps him first of his vitality, then his energy, then his
independence, then his life.
America today exhibits the symptoms of a nation passing
into late middle age. We spend more than we earn. We
consume more than we produce.
Why does it matter where our goods are produced? Because,
as I wrote in The Great Betrayal:
Manufacturing is the key to national power. Not only does
it pay more than service industries, the rates of
productivity growth are higher and the potential of new
industries arising is far greater. From radio came
television, VCRs, and flat-panel screens. From adding
machines came calculators and computers. From the
electric typewriter came the word processors. Research
and development follow manufacturing.
Alexander Hamilton, the architect of the U.S. economy,
knew this. He had served in the Revolution as aide to
Washington and lived through the British blockades. He
had led the bayonet charge at Yorktown. And he had
resolved that never again would his country’s
survival depend upon French muskets or French ships.
As first Treasury Secretary, he delivered in 1791 the
“Report on Manufactures,” one of America’s
great state papers. Reflecting on how close his country
had come to losing its liberty, Hamilton wrote,
Not only the wealth, but the independence and security of
a country, appear to be materially connected with the
prosperity of manufactures. Every nation … ought to
endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of a
national supply. These comprise the means of subsistence,
habitation, clothing and defense.
Under the Constitution he helped write, a national
free-trade zone was created. Hamilton’s idea was to
use tariffs to end our dependence on Europe and force
British merchants to finance our government and the
roads, harbors, and canals that would tie America
together with commerce.
Tariffs would give our national government the revenue to
operate, while providing our people both privileged
access to the fastest growing market on earth and
incentives to go into manufacturing. With American
manufacturing thus encouraged, we would soon produce
ourselves the guns and ships to defend the republic and
the necessities of our national life so we could stand
alone against the world.
For 12 decades, America followed Hamilton’s vision.
On the eve of World War I, the 13 agricultural colonies
on the eastern seaboard had become the richest nation on
earth with the highest standard of living, a republic
that produced 96 percent of all it consumed while
exporting 8 percent of its GNP, an industrial colossus
that manufactured more than Britain, France, and Germany
combined.
The self-sufficiency and industrial power Hamiltonian
policies created enabled us to rearm in security, crush
the Axis in four years, rebuild Europe and Japan, and
outlast the Soviet empire in a Cold War, while meeting
all the needs of our people.
But in the Clinton-Bush free-trade era, Alexander
Hamilton is derided as a “protectionist.”
Woodrow Wilson’s free-trade dogma is gospel. Result:
our trade surpluses have vanished, our deficits have
exploded, our self-sufficiency has been lost, our
sovereignty has been diminished, and an industrial base
that was the envy of mankind has been gutted.
And for what? All that junk down at the mall? What do we
have now that we did not have before we submitted to this
cult of free trade?
The Loss of Independence
Consider the depths of our new dependency. Imports, 4
percent of GDP for the first 70 years of the 20th
century, are near 15 percent now, and 30 percent of the
manufactures we consume. Pat Choate, author of Agents of
Influence, gives the following levels of U.S. dependency
on foreign suppliers for critical goods:
* Medicines and pharmaceuticals: 72 percent
* Metalworking machinery: 51 percent
* Engines and power equipment: 56 percent
* Computer equipment: 70 percent
* Communications equipment: 67 percent
* Semiconductors and electronics: 64 percent
In July, the U.S. Business and Industrial Council
reported that the Pentagon officials responsible for
procuring U.S. weapons had joined with defense industries
to oppose legislation requiring 65 percent U.S. content.
U.S. missile defense and the Joint Strike Fighter would
be imperiled if 65 percent of the components had to be
made in the USA.
As Choate writes, Dell Computers of Austin has 4,500
suppliers. Its just-in-time supply line, which stretches
across the Atlantic and Pacific, has an inventory of four
days. A dock strike on either coast, and Dell begins to
close down after 96 hours.
The Loss of Sovereignty
In the lame-duck session of Congress after the GOP
triumph of 1994, Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich colluded with
Clinton to bring us into a World Trade Organization where
we are outvoted 15-1 by the European Union. In its most
important ruling, the WTO has held that the foreign sales
corporations of U.S. exporters like Microsoft and Boeing,
set up to receive tax benefits voted by Congress, violate
the rules of free trade.
Europe is now authorized to impose $4 billion in tariff
penalties on U.S. exports if Congress fails to rewrite
our tax laws to conform to WTO commands.
When America bailed out the world in the Asian crisis of
1997-98, Indonesia, South Korea, Russia, and Brazil
devalued their currencies, slashing the dollar price of
their exports. To enable them to earn the hard currency
to pay back Western banks and the IMF, America agreed to
keep her markets open. Soon, steel from Indonesia, South
Korea, Japan, Russia, and Brazil was being dumped in the
United States, and American mills were reeling.
The recent steel decision is instructive. By 2002, 25
steel companies had gone bankrupt, and the International
Trade Commission had identified dumping as the industry
killer. Invoking U.S. trade law, President Bush imposed
tariffs. The dumpers howled and ran to the WTO, which
declared the U.S. tariffs unjustified. Either the
Congress removes them or the EU is empowered to impose $2
billion in tariff penalties on U.S. exports.
Consider what submission to the WTO has meant. Our
Congress is ordered by foreign bureaucrats to alter U.S.
law or our companies face penalties. Presidential
decisions to protect vital American industries are
declared invalid by Eurocrats. The terms of access to the
U.S. market are now to be decided in Geneva by
Lilliputians of the New World Order.
Why are we letting this happen?
Libertarians teach that free trade provides a check on
government power. By enabling citizens to buy outside
their borders, free trade forces governments to reduce
regulations and taxes to stay competitive.
A fine theory. Has it worked out? Hardly. History shows
that the opposite is true. Bismarck’s Zollverein, or
customs union, went hand-in-hand with the rise of the
Second Reich. The EU evolved from a free-trade common
market into the socialist superstate of today that is the
model for the world government under which all nations
surrender sovereignty and how we live will be decided by
Platonic guardians.
In the protectionist era from 1789 to 1933, U.S. taxes
rarely took more than 3 percent of GNP, except in
wartime. Government relied on tariffs. Before 1913,
except for the Civil-War era and briefly under Cleveland,
we had no income tax. But in the free-trade era, U.S. tax
rates on incomes, currently 35 percent, have risen as
high as 70 percent, and spending has exceeded 20 percent
of GDP in peacetime. The free-trade era is the era of Big
Government.
As a former Friedmanite free trader, let me say it: free
trade is a bright shining lie. Free trade is the Trojan
Horse of world government. Free trade is the murderer of
manufacturing and the primrose path to the loss of
national sovereignty and the end of our independence.
NAFTA: The Big Sting
In 1993, the NAFTA debate gripped the country. Clinton
had the backing of the political establishment, the
Heritage Foundation, AEI, Brookings, National Review, New
Republic, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chamber
of Commerce, Business Roundtable. Perot, Buchanan, Nader,
and the AFL-CIO were opposed, as were the people. But
that did not matter. Before the vote, the bazaar opened,
and Congressmen began selling votes to Clinton for
whatever they could get. NAFTA won.
Ten years later, returns are in. We were told our trade
surplus with Mexico would grow, that NAFTA would create
jobs here, that the rising wages in Mexico would end the
invasion of illegal aliens.
But, the year after NAFTA passed, Mexico devalued the
peso, and the United States began to run a string of
trade deficits that has reached $40 billion a year. Drug
cartels in South America shifted operations to Mexico.
U.S. exports to Mexico are up, but it is not finished
goods we send south but parts to be assembled—and
factories and jobs as owners shutter plants north of the
Rio Grande in search of wages that are 10 to 20 percent
of what they have to pay in the United States.
By 2000, a million Mexicans were working in maquiladora
plants south of the border at jobs once held by
Americans. But now, the creative destruction of
globalization has come to Mexico. Factories there are
being shut down and moved to America’s new
enterprise zone, China.
And the Mexican people? Half of the 100 million are still
mired in poverty. Tens of millions are unemployed or
underemployed. Real wages are below what they were in
1993. And the migration north continues as 1.5 million
are caught each year breaking into the United States. Of
those who make it, one-third head for California where
their claims on welfare, Medicaid, schools, and prisons
have tipped the state toward bankruptcy as the taxpayers
have begun a great exodus to Nevada, Idaho, and Colorado.
NAFTA has helped to convert California into Mexifornia
and the Golden State into a Third-World country. Ten
years after its passage, Mexico’s leading export
continues to be Mexicans.
Factory Floor to the World
While Americans are sacrificing the future for the
present, China is sacrificing the present for the future.
Beijing’s boom began after it devalued its currency
in 1994. While a blow to Chinese consumers, devaluation
gave Beijing a competitive edge over the other
“Asian tigers.” Beijing then invited Western
companies to locate new factories there to tap its pool
of low-wage labor. As the price of access, Beijing
demanded that Western companies transfer technology to
Chinese partners. What the companies do not transfer, the
Chinese extort or steal.
By offering excellent workers at $2 a day, guaranteeing
no union trouble, allowing levels of pollution we would
not tolerate, and ignoring health and safety standards,
China has become the factory floor of the Global Economy
and surpassed the United States as the world’s first
choice for foreign investment.
What analyst Charles McMillion calls “the
world’s most unequal trading relationship,” can
be seen in the trade statistics. In 2002, the U.S. trade
deficit with China was $103 billion. In May, it was
running at $120 billion, the largest deficit between two
trading nations in history.
It is thus a myth to say President Bush is presiding over
a “jobless recovery.” The Bush tax cuts and
Bush deficits are creating millions of manufacturing jobs
—in China. America buys 14 percent of China’s
production and delivers Beijing a trade surplus of 12
percent of its entire GDP. American purchases probably
account today for 100 percent of China’s economic
growth.
The U.S.-China relationship cannot truly be described as
trade. It is rather the looting of America by China and
its corporate collaborators in the United States. Beijing
understands what economic nationalist Friedrich List
wrote long ago: “The power of producing wealth is
infinitely more important than the wealth itself.”
China has now amassed $360 billion in reserves from her
trade surpluses since 1990. Much of that is invested in
U.S. bonds and T-bills, earning Beijing billions in
interest from the U.S. Treasury. America may be the most
advanced nation on earth, and China a developing country,
but you could not tell that from studying the trade
statistics.
In 2002, China ran up its largest trade surpluses with us
in electrical machinery, computers, toys, games,
footwear, furniture, clothing, plastics, articles of iron
and steel, vehicles, optical and photographic equipment,
and other manufactures. Among the 23 items where we had a
surplus with China were soybeans, corn, wheat, animal
feeds, meat, cotton, metal ores, scrap, hides and skins,
pulp and waste paper, cigarettes, gold, coal, mineral
fuels, rice, tobacco, fertilizers, glass. Beijing uses us
as George III used his Jamestown colony.
One who has studied how China deals with craven
capitalists who come courting is columnist Terry Jeffrey.
On inspecting the Web site of Motorola, Jeffrey found
this description of how it sees its future:
Motorola is moving toward … taking China as its home
and development base. Motorola Chinese Electronics …
has increased its investment several times in China
without taking away a single dollar. The company
reinvested all the profits in China. … Since the
very beginning Motorola has brought forward the idea of
trying to be a good citizen of China, taking China as its
home and thriving with the Chinese people. … The
development goal is to become a true Chinese company.
The hilarity of Motorola’s kowtow to the mandarins
of the Middle Kingdom aside, this passage reveals a
hidden cost of globalization. When U.S. companies go
global, they shed their loyalty to America.
Consider Boeing, last surviving U.S. manufacturer of
commercial aircraft. Apparently, Boeing has gone beyond
building plants in China to make horizontal stabilizers
and vertical fins for its fleet. On Jan. 1, this story
ran in the New York Times:
The State Department has accused two leading American
companies of 123 violations of export laws in connection
with the transfer of rocket and satellite data to China
during the 1990s. The Boeing company and Hughes
Electronics Corporation, a unit of General Motors, were
notified of the accusations last week.
Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln, and T.R. would recognize
China’s policy for what it is and counter it. But
this generation of free traders does not have a clue as
to what is going on, or does not care. Either way, the
consequences will be the same: de-industrialization of
America, decline of the dollar, a deepening dependency on
foreign countries for the necessities of our national
life, diminished sovereignty, and eventual loss of our
independence. If you disbelieve this, look at the once
sovereign and independent nations of Europe.
Implosion of the Global Economy
One need not have a Nobel Prize in economics to
understand that U.S. trade deficits cannot continue
rising indefinitely. As Choate reports,
In the 1970s, [the United States] mounted a decades-long
deficit of $75 billion. … In the 1980s, the deficit
soared to $843 billion as Japan began to take away our
industries. … In the 1990s, that trade deficit
doubled to $1.7 trillion. … At this pace, we’re
probably going to have a $6 trillion cumulative deficit
in this decade—and that’s probably an
understated number given the pace we are losing our
manufacturing base.
But the world is not going to continue lending Americans
$500 or $600 billion a year to indulge our appetite for
foreign goods. The U.S. dollar has already lost 25
percent of its value against the Euro, and foreigners
have begun to buy up America, purchasing our land,
stocks, bonds, and T-bills. Foreigners now claim a
lion’s share of the $300 billion we pay in annual
interest on the U.S. debt and have liens against all
future profits of our Fortune 500 companies.
Consider the altered situation we face today compared
with five years ago. When the Asian crisis broke, our
economy was booming. We could see budget surpluses out to
the horizon. With the IMF, we poured over $200 billion in
fresh loans into Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines,
South Korea, Russia, Argentina, and Brazil. To enable
them to earn the cash to pay back the sums they owed
private creditors and international banks, we pledged to
keep America’s markets open to their exports.
These, then, are the three pillars of the Global Economy:
first, the willingness of America to bail out nations
about to default. Second, the willingness and capacity of
America to run enormous trade deficits indefinitely.
Third, continued wealth transfers to the Third World.
And this is why the Global Economy is in peril. When
Argentina declared it could not service its debt, America
and the IMF refused to lend new money. Argentina
defaulted. A tottering Brazil was bailed out, but the
message was clear. The days of automatic bailouts of
bankrupt regimes are over.
And with the dollar sinking, the U.S. budget deficit
soaring, our merchandise trade deficit at $562 billion
and rising, and manufacturing jobs vanishing at the rate
of 80,000 a month, America’s willingness and ability
to continue sacrificing for the Global Economy are coming
to an end.
Perhaps the most inexplicable free traders are the
neoconservatives who champion “unilateralism,”
talk of a Pax Americana, and cheer the coming American
empire of pith helmets and jodhpurs. Do they not
understand that trade is not an end in itself but a means
to an end: national power? Can they not see that our
growing dependence on foreign oil and nations like China
for the necessities of national defense imperils our
security? Can they not see that these mammoth trade
deficits must sink the dollar and that no nation with a
falling currency can maintain the troops and subsidies to
sustain an empire?
In 1962, Prescott Bush stood with Barry Goldwater and
Strom Thurmond to vote no on JFK’s Trade Expansion
Act. President Bush rejects the economic patriotism of
his grandfather and embraces the Wilsonian faith that
free trade will lead to global democracy and world peace.
Like his father, he also embraces Wilson’s faith in
open borders and moral interventionism. Wilsonism may
cost him his presidency.
Patrick Buchanan Forwarded by Tony
Hancock
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/103103I.shtml
The latest
pronouncement from Warren Buffett, the
second-richest man in the world who is frequently
referred to as "the most successful investor
ever."
The corporate free trade agenda, says Buffett, has
created a mess so serious that he is losing confidence in
the stability of the U.S. dollar, and the economy it
underpins. "I am crying wolf again and this time
backing it with Berkshire Hathaway money," Buffett
says of the assets of the investment conglomerate he
created and controls. "Through the spring of 2002, I
had lived nearly 72 years without purchasing a foreign
currency. Since then Berkshire has made significant
investments in -- and today holds -- several
currencies."Buffett says he is losing faith in the
soundness of U.S. currency as an investment vehicle
because the United States is running a huge trade deficit
-- close to $500 billion, and rising rapidly -- that is
causing income to flow out of the country at such a rapid
rate that it will soon become unsustainable. In the
November edition of Fortune magazine, Buffett warns that
the rapidly mounting U.S. trade deficit could lead to a
dramatic plunge in the value of the dollar and a host of
additional economic consequences that could add up to
disaster for American families.
In the post-Cold War era, U.S. leaders embraced the
corporate free trade agenda embodied in pacts such as the
North American Free Trade Agreement and the granting of
permanent most-favored nation trading status to China.
These deals and others like them encourage U.S.
businesses to engage in a race-to-the-bottom, relocating
on a regular basis to countries that permit them to pay
the lowest possible wages, to despoil the environment and
to dismiss human rights concerns. U.S. businesses have
shuttered factories, laid off unionized workers and
shifted millions of jobs overseas.
In Wisconsin, more than 50,000 manufacturing jobs have
been lost since George W. Bush assumed the presidency, as
whole sectors of our economy shut down here and move
overseas, mostly to China.Now the abandonment of American
communities and families has extended to the service
sector. The shifting of manufacturing and service work
out of the United States is great for the huge
corporations that contribute mightily to the campaigns of
politicians who back their free trade agenda. These
corporations can lower their costs by moving production
to countries where wages are low, and basic safety
regulations and environmental protections have been
eliminated. But it is terrible for workers here and
abroad, who are pitted against each other in a battle to
see who will work for the least. And it is horrific for
the U.S. economy.
By allowing for policies that have transformed the United
States, which used to export far more than it imported,
into a nation that imports far more than it exports,
President Bush and the bipartisan congressional coalition
that backs the corporate free trade agenda are building
up a trade deficit that could ultimately take down the
U.S. economy. Unwise economic policies, Buffett says, are
literally "selling the nation out from under
us."
Buffett's warning needs to be taken seriously, not just
by citizens who have already witnessed the devastation
caused by the corporate free trade agenda, but by elected
officials. When U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., and U.S.
Reps. Ron Kind, D-La Crosse; Paul Ryan, R-Janesville; Tom
Petri, R-Fond du Lac; Mark Green, R-Green Bay; and Jim
Sensenbrenner, R-Menomonee Falls, vote for free trade
legislation, they are doing serious damage to Wisconsin
and to the U.S. economy.
Copyright 2003 The Capital Times
--- End forwarded message ---
Call
Him President Backwards
Dick Meyer
CBSNews.com
Tuesday 29 October 2003
Don't assume that bad news is bad and good news is good.
In his latest Against the Grain commentary, CBSNews.com's
Dick Meyer shares some wisdom from the president.
Sometimes a big 100-watt goes off over my tired, graying
head and I see things in a whole new light. When its the
president of the United States who turns on the light,
well, it makes me proud to be an American.
Thanks to some philosophy President Bush shared the other
day, I realized that I've been looking at this whole Iraq
thing bass-ackwards. The sorry truth is, my whole
perspective on stuff like current events is pretty
gloom-and-doom and entrenchified. I think that's the
word.
My big epiphany came after bad guys in Iraq bombed police
stations and a Red Cross facility and killed about 40
people. I was very discouraged, but then the president
spoke.
The more successful we are on the ground, the more these
killers will react, the zen President said. The more
progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis
become, the more electricity is available, the more kids
that are going to school, the more desperate these
killers become, because they cant stand the thought of a
free society.
Ding, ding, ding of course that's right.
Do you realize how bad things would really be if there
were no suicide bombings, guerrilla attacks and
anti-American violence in Iraq? It would be a sure sign
that the enemies of freedom were kickin back and getting
ready for Ramadan because they knew we weren't fixing up
Iraq right. That's scary. If we weren't making such good
progress, the lack of violence and slaughter would a sure
sign of trouble.
The real disaster would come if we found Saddam Hussein.
Disaster-city, big time. Its great that hes still on the
lam because it just shows how impressed the chief
evil-doer is with our reconstruction of Iraq. If things
were going to the dogs, Saddam would turn himself in,
knowing the masses would rescue him and return him to his
palaces. Remember this the next time you're stuck at the
water cooler with a gloom-and-doom guy like I used to be:
a free Saddam means freedom in Iraq is becoming
entrenchified.
We also better hope we dont nab Osama. The minute that
guy gets plunked into a dungeon in Gitmo, forget about
it. That will be proof positive that al Qaeda is so
confident that our war on terror is terrible that theyll
let us capture their fearless leader as a taunt and a
distraction. You see the logic here? If I were to bump
into Osama at Starbucks this afternoon, it would be my
duty to buy him a latte and a Halloween mask and send him
back into hiding. Same with Mullah Omar. And all those
weapons of mass destruction.
This kind of geopolitical theory isnt just for foreign
stuff. Take the California wildfires. Sure, they're a
short-term inconvenience. But in a year everything will
be fine even though hundreds of thousands acres were
scorched a little bit. It just proves that God wants us
to drill for oil in the wilds of Alaska because its just
not a big deal. In fact, all this smoke and pollution is
just a reminder that smoke and pollution are a part of
nature and all this EPA stuff is just mumbo-jumbo.
Some of the best news lately came from the folks who do
the census. Not only did they find the official poverty
rate rose from 11.7 percent in 2001 to 12.1 percent in
2002, they discovered that 2.4 million more people didn't
have any health insurance. First of all, this does a
pretty good job of explaining why poor people are so full
of sour grapes. But the statistics show that the war to
make rich people richer is making progress. And when poor
people realize that the rich are getting richer, they'll
realize that America is the land of opportunity.
So long as the economy doesn' heat up, the president will
do just fine in 04. And bad stuff will be good.
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