posted on December 11, 2002 05:08:01 AM new
Posted 12/5/2002 6:55 PM
No bonuses for jobless, hungry
By Jill Nelson
Imagine a place where in two short years a budget surplus has been magically transformed into a deficit. A place where millions of people are jobless, many of them laid off in the past 24 months. Homelessness is steadily increasing, millions of children go to bed hungry and terrorists have recently attacked, killing thousands.
Then imagine that this country's king decides to deny government workers scheduled raises and new government workers civil service protection, but confers upon the appointed members of his court bonuses of up to $25,000.
This is the America we all live in. The Bush administration has quietly started awarding bonuses to political appointees, a practice abandoned during the Clinton administration — back when the economy was booming, the budget had a surplus and terrorist attacks on American soil were unimaginable.
This is just the latest act of greed and insensitivity from an administration whose very legitimacy, lest we forget the 2000 election, is suspect. Add it to the growing list of outrages: undermined civil and constitutional rights, government surveillance, secret detentions without charges, fouling of the environment.
That doesn't even touch on a post-9/11 foreign policy that, according to a huge survey released this week by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, is rapidly making the United States one of the least favorite nations of much of the world.
Yet Americans, terrified of terrorists, seem unwilling to rein in a president who has little or no respect for the law of the land, the dream of democracy, or, as far as I can tell, the American people.
As so many of us struggle to make ends meet, afraid that it may be our job eliminated in the next round of layoffs, Bush is using our tax dollars to award his political appointees, many of whom already make more than $100,000 a year.
Exactly what have they done so well? Couldn't be the economy, justice system, environment, equal protection. The administration says many of those rewarded are involved in counter-terrorism activities. Funny; I haven't been able to find one person who feels safer now than he or she did a year ago.
Frightened as Americans are of what the future holds, it's time we recognized that not only does our emperor have no clothes — he's steadily stealing ours.
