Don’t Buy Government Placation
President Bush has been busy. With the election looming and not exactly swaying in favor of a third illegitimate term for President Bush, mass amounts of legislature have been pushed through the House and Senate in the last few months. This rush of legislature coming through the system is problematic due to the pressure to pass laws without sufficient debate.
Bush recently passed a bill offering tax refunds for everyone, which I must say is exciting to my wallet. The bill will allocate anyone in a certain economic bracket to receive a check from the government for up to $600 as a “shot in the arm” for the American economy, as Bush put it. The bill is intended to aid the American economy vis-à-vis money refunds spent via consumerism, with the ensuing money flow trickling down to benefit the poor. Trickle-down economics are as pointless an endeavor as pole-vaulting with a q-tip. Everyone can be happy with free money from the government, but buried in that bill are also tax cuts for businesses. No good deed to the American public gets away without also benefiting rich people.
The bill will cost America $153 billion dollars in borrowed money, putting us even deeper into the hole that Bush has already dug for us. America has become buried in debt, and borrowing nine times the amount spent on Valentine’s Day globally is not going to help. I’ll take free money from my government any day, but the problem is that most Americans will spend their refunds on items like clothes and food that do not benefit the economy in the way the bill is hoping. President Bush has gotten our economy in to more trouble than all the oil in Iraq can pay for; last time I filled my car up, it would have been cheaper to hire someone to push it to where I was going.
The Bush Administration has also been trying to protect one of the more classified laws it put into place through the Patriot Act. This law retroactively protects telecom companies who tap phones without warrants after 9/11 from violations of civil rights. The American Civil Rights Union has tried to fight these violations, but have been unable to due to a catch-22 put in place by the government in which people who have been wire-tapped without knowing it are the only ones able to sue for their rights, but their names are classified and will not be released to the public.
The American government is playing with our civil liberties as though Hobbes never existed. The Patriot Act, passed in the fear and chaos that followed 9/11, is violation enough, but the laws that protect telecom companies are obscene. The government abuses its power and wants to avoid further trouble by preventing exposure of the government’s denial of civil rights. As if Guantanamo Bay isn’t bad enough, the government is trying to protect multi-million dollar companies instead of the American public.
As Americans receive a tax refund check from the government this summer, remember that the check’s value is what the government is willing to pay in exchange for your civil rights, and to ignore the fact that the bill helps businesses that stole American rights and abused power they do not have. If for no other reason, this fall’s election looks promising because maybe one of the candidates will come to office and not try to steal American civil rights.
