MORAL VALUES Part 1

Moral Values

Millions of Americans have been watching with great interest the arrest of Senator Larry Craig for playing footsie with an undercover cop and the strong call for his resignation from the U.S. senate. Pundits and politicians decry that it’s not the same thing as Senator David Vitters tryst with a prostitute. Why not? Well, they say, Senator Craig plead guilty and Senator Vitters never got arrested.

-

So there you have it. Ethics don’t matter. You can be a U.S. senator who visits prostitutes and it’s okay as long as you don’t get arrested. That’s not seen as a moral issue to the right wing because it was heterosexual wrongdoing as opposed to homosexual.

-

How America views morality is distressing in the grand scheme of things. Issues like poverty, lack of health care and homelessness, corruption and corporate fraud aren’t considered moral issues “to worry my pretty head over,” as Barbara Bush put it when asked about the high death rate of our soldiers in Iraq.

-

These are some of the things that I few as moral issues that bug the heck out of me:

-

The economy is great if you’re lucky enough to be in the top 5% of wealthiest people in the U.S. A year ago, a Wall Street Journal poll reflected that 2/3 of the American people believed that America is in a recession. President Bush says that our economy is strong. So who is right, Bush or the American people?

-

The disconnect is that President Bush view’s economic success by how well the corporations are doing financially. If you’re a CEO of a giant corporation the economy is going great. When you outsource American jobs to foreign countries who utilize slave labor to manufacture the cheap goods Americans want, yeah, you get rich. CEO’s of big corporations who keep their employees in America, they keep their corporate profits high by hiring employees part time so they don’t have to pay benefits like health insurance.

-

Teddy Roosevelt recognized this problem. And he was a Republican. He fought the corporate idea of getting wealthy by working employees for so many hours and so hard for very long hours that it was near slave labor. He saw this as immoral, corporate greed.

- President Wilson on the other hand believed that liberty is allowing corporations to get rich by keeping wages low, the work hours long and not spending money on benefits for their employees. Under the policies of the Bush administration, the U.S. finds itself in debt to China up to our eyeballs. We borrowed billions of dollars from China to pay for the war in Iraq. Manufacturing plants in America continue to close as our jobs are outsourced, throwing more Americans into unemployment and loss of health insurance.

-

Under the Bush administration, the corporations have continued to get wealthier and wealthier. And not through entirely honest means. The lack of oversight of the billions of dollars wasted due to fraud, kickbacks and pure greed during the reconstruction of Iraq, is not by accident. The move of the Halliburton headquarters from the U.S. to off shore isn’t an accident. It was a deliberately planned way of stealing billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars outside of the reach of American laws. And we all already know that electricity, sewage, water, hospitals and schools in Iraq are being destroyed as fast as they get repaired or built. And the CEO’s are slapping each other on the back with their obscene earnings, all the way to the bank. With the stroke of a pen, President Bush signs his signing statements that these things aren’t to be investigated as he gives a proud wink to his corporate friends.

-

Now comes the NAFTA Mexican trucker situation. Before going on their August recess, our congress voted that Mexican truck drivers will be held to the same standards as American and Canadian truckers are subject to. But after congress left town, Bush got out his handy signing statement pen (signing statements are a mechanism that the president can change himself from President to King), stating that this law is null and void.

-

Effective today, Mexican truckers can not drive all over America without any mandatory rest requirements. The safety of American drivers is now at risk because there WILL be an increase in accidents on the freeways and roads in America. Their pay is low which American corporations like because now they can outsource our union truck driving jobs to Mexico.

-

We have no idea the number of illegal aliens who will be transported on these trucks into the U.S. Illegal drug smuggling and transporting terrorists into the U.S. will increase.

-

The U.S. needs to get out of this NAFTA crap. It’s destroying our country, destroying our workforce and making American unsafe. - I’m praying that our congress will grow a backbone and get America out of Nafta and start putting safeguards in place to protect our country and our jobs. I hope that America will one day wake up and say “NO!” to the continued immorality of greed that is destroying our country.