A CITIZEN’S VIEW ON

THE STATE OF THE UNION

Scott Russell Sanders

Buskirk-Chumley Theatre, Bloomington, Indiana – 4 May 2008

Each year in January, the President of the United States delivers the State of the Union Address. If we expect to hear on this occasion an honest account of America’s health and prospects, however, we will be sorely disappointed. For this affair has become, especially in recent years, a pompous exercise in flimflam. Reading from the teleprompter a speech written by underlings, the President assures us that everything is fine, except for a few things that are not fine, and those few troublesome things will become fine if only Congress and the American people will slavishly follow the President’s policies.

I come before you this evening to provide an alternative view of the State of the Union. I am neither an elected official nor any sort of expert. I do not speak for Senator Obama or anyone else. I speak as an ordinary citizen who loves our country and believes we ought to be behaving far better, as a nation, than we have been doing over these past seven years.

While the President typically spends an hour delivering his speech, I will limit myself to fifteen minutes. To compensate for my briefer allotment of time, I have an advantage over the President in not needing to put a happy face on policies that are in many cases illegal, immoral, and ineffectual.

So how are things with us as a nation? Since we are gathered here to consider what we require of our next President, I will begin by identifying a few of the gravest problems that the current administration has either created or aggravated or ignored, and I will conclude by pointing out some of the resources we possess, as a people, for reclaiming and renewing our country.

The US invasion of Iraq has been a catastrophic blunder—surely one of the most damaging and inexcusable actions in our nation’s history. True, the US invasion toppled a dictator, but it also provoked an insurgency, unleashed a civil war, and created a breeding ground for terrorists where none had existed before. The war was launched recklessly, in violation of the Constitution and the United Nations charter. It was justified by lies from the highest officials in the land, and it has been perpetuated by more lies from those same officials and from retired US generals recruited by the Pentagon to peddle the administration’s talking points on television.

This war has cost the lives, so far, of more than 4,000 American soldiers, has sent home tens of thousands more with severe wounds, and has condemned more than a hundred thousand to prolonged mental trauma.

Instead of liberating the Iraqi people, this war has brought them untold suffering. Estimates of the number of civilians killed since the invasion range from a low of 150,000 to a high of 1.3 million. In our country, that would be the equivalent of nearly two million to over 14 million deaths. A fifth of the Iraqi population has been displaced. Much of Iraq’s infrastructure has been demolished. Much of the nation’s wealth has been looted. And still, after more than five years of warfare, no part of the country is safe from violence, not even the heart of the capitol in Baghdad.

This mayhem is costing our nation $500,000 per minute, $720 million per day. And that is only the immediate outlay, not counting the lifetime benefits for veterans, payment on increases to the national debt, or replacement of equipment destroyed in the war. Economists estimate that the total cost will be on the order of three trillion dollars—which amounts to $40,000 for each family of four.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq have aroused the hostility of people around the world, confirming the worst impressions of the United States as a selfish, arrogant, bullying nation. The Bush administration has reinforced this impression by scorning the Geneva Convention, refusing to recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court, and repudiating the Kyoto Treaty—to name only a few gestures of contempt toward what the Declaration of Independence called “the opinions of mankind.”

As a result, the almost universal sympathy shown toward the United States following the attacks of September 11th, 2001, has been squandered. It will take us a generation or more to earn back the world’s trust and good will, just as it will take us a generation or more to pay for this war.

In the name of protecting American security, the Bush administration has licensed torture, thus further lowering our standing among civilized nations. It has held prisoners for years without charging them for any crime and without allowing them legal counsel. Against our own citizens, this administration has practiced illegal wiretapping and email monitoring. It has thwarted the oversight powers of Congress guaranteed in the Constitution. It has dismissed federal prosecutors and installed new ones on the basis of their loyalty to the Republican Party rather than to the law. On signing new legislation, the President has attached provisos that effectively nullify the legislation. The administration has leaked classified information in order to punish and intimidate its critics. It has muzzled government scientists whose findings conflicted with official ideology on matters such as global warming and family planning. And it has shielded its worst actions behind the claim of executive privilege. In short, this President has taken on many of the powers and methods of the dictators he claims to oppose.

In the name of protecting American security, the Bush administration has poured tens of billions of dollars into the so-called “missile shield,” which is a technological fantasy, but a highly lucrative one for contractors. Simultaneously, the administration has pushed to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons. And this President, who already controls 10,000 such weapons, condemns Iran and North Korea for trying to join the nuclear club.

All this while, the Bush administration has ignored the single greatest threat to our collective security, which is the devastation of the Earth’s environment, especially the disruption of global climate through greenhouse gas emissions. By failing to propose any meaningful alternative to the Kyoto Treaty, this administration has shown itself to be more concerned with the short-term profits of the fossil fuel industry than with the future of the planet. Instead of pushing for conservation, more efficient vehicles and appliances, public transportation, and the development of renewable sources of energy such as wind and solar, the administration has increased subsidies to oil, natural gas, and coal. Most astonishing, it has proposed a revival of nuclear power, even though, sixty years into the nuclear age, we still have no safe way of dealing with radioactive waste or of protecting reactors against assault.

This pandering to the fossil fuel lobby is a symptom of another grave threat to our nation, which is the virtual takeover of the government and the mass media by a cabal of global corporations. I say “a cabal,” because nearly all the spoils of the corporate state are reaped by only a few sectors of the American economy—notably Wall Street, military contractors, agribusiness, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, and Detroit automakers, as well as the fossil fuel lobby. Most other sectors of the American economy, like the vast majority of citizens, are harmed by this corporate takeover.

To see the corporate influence at work, contrast the federal government’s swift and generous bailout of big-money gamblers, such as Bear Stearns, with the slow and stingy response to the devastation of New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina. Consider the Environmental Protection Agency’s refusal to regulate the release of carbon dioxide, in spite of orders from the Supreme Court. Consider the administration’s relentless push to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Nowhere is the failure of the corporate state clearer than in our overpriced and unjust healthcare system. Americans spend by far the most per capita on healthcare of any people in the world, yet the results are mediocre compared to the results in other wealthy nations. In fact, we are the only major industrialized nation without a universal healthcare system. Nearly fifty million Americans lack any health insurance whatsoever—a number that has increased by nearly ten million since George W. Bush took office—and tens of millions more can afford only inferior coverage. A just and compassionate society would recognize that access to healthcare is a basic human right, like public education and equal treatment under the law.

The unequal provision of healthcare is only one symptom of the increasingly lopsided distribution of wealth in our nation. Since 1980, of all the increase in real income achieved by the American workforce, 80% went to people in the top 1% of the income distribution. This disparity between the super-rich and everyone else has been magnified by recent tax policies. In the Bush tax cuts, for example, 40% of the benefits have gone to the richest 1% of taxpayers. The proposed elimination of the estate tax would mean that vast concentrations of wealth would be passed down, generation after generation, to descendants who had no hand in earning it.

During the Bush presidency, these tax-cuts, coupled with gargantuan military expenditures—now amounting to more than half of the annual military spending for the entire world—have thus far increased the federal debt by more than two-thirds, from $5.6 trillion to $9.4 trillion. This amounts to a debt of more than $30,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. And most of this newly-acquired debt is owed to foreign banks, thus turning America into a colony subject to the whims of other countries.

While billions of tax dollars are pouring into the war and the military machine, into subsidies for agribusiness and the fossil fuel industry, and into prisons, our nation’s infrastructure is crumbling—everything from bridges and parks to sewage systems and schools.

Partly because they are so underfunded, many of our schools are failing. In some of our nation’s largest cities—including Indianapolis, New York, and Detroit—more than half of high school students drop out before graduating. In the nation as a whole, 1.2 million students drop out of high school each year. The response of the Bush administration to this calamity has been to impose more standardized testing and to shift money from public to private schools.

The list of troubles besetting our nation could easily be extended. But instead let me close by considering what resources we have, as a people, for reviving our democracy and restoring the health of our society.

We can draw on the deep knowledge and wise practices of the indigenous peoples who inhabited this continent for millennia before the arrival of European colonists. We can draw on the wisdom and energy brought to this country by countless immigrants. We can draw on our tradition of radical democratic thought, stretching from Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Wendell Berry.

Our nation has a history of philanthropy and public-spirited action. We have a history of cooperating in worthy causes, such as the abolition of slavery, the enfranchisement of women, and the ending of child labor. We have a history of neighborliness, ingenuity, and thrift, which helped our ancestors survive on the frontier and through the Great Depression.

We have created unions, agricultural co-ops, settlement houses, charities, and countless other organizations devoted to achieving a more just and peaceful society. Today there are thousands of groups across our land addressing a host of problems—from poverty and pollution to global warming and AIDS—and their work is supported by millions of volunteers.

In every religious tradition, there are people who understand their faith as a call to live generously and to relieve suffering. In every community there are businesses that seek not only to make a profit but also to serve the real needs of their customers. At every level of government, there are elected officials who strive to protect and enhance the common good.

There are many honorable people in the armed forces who believe that our military should be used to defend the country, not to impose our will on other nations. In this age of crassly commercial media, there are still journalists who strive to inform the public about vital issues of the day. There are still artists who help us to see more clearly and feel more deeply, who open our hearts to our neighbors, to nature, and to our responsibilities.

Although the financing of our healthcare system is badly askew, we are still blessed by an abundance of skilled and committed medical professionals. Although our land and its resources have been sorely abused, we still dwell on a beautiful and bountiful continent, and we still share magnificent public forests, refuges, parks, and wilderness areas.

Our nation pioneered the offering of free public education to all citizens, and once we had the greatest system of schools in the world. We can restore that high quality, if we put our minds and resources to the task. Our nation still possesses the world’s greatest system of higher education, sponsoring the work of scientists and scholars and artists.

As a people, we still possess great reserves of creativity and intelligence and compassion.

We need leaders at all levels of government, from the city council to the White House, who embody these strengths. We need leaders who appeal to our highest qualities and worthiest traditions, rather than to our selfishness and fear. We need leaders whom we can look to with pride and gratitude rather than shame. I am speaking to you this evening because I believe that Barack Obama is such a leader.

I will not end this talk, as the President customarily does, by asking God to bless America. For if there is a power in the universe that intervenes in human affairs, I do not believe this power picks and chooses among nations. So I say, may all nations be blessed, may all peoples be blessed, may all of Earth’s creatures be blessed.

These blessings will not come automatically. They will not be delivered even by the very best leaders. The responsibility for healing our nation begins with us. So let us roll up our sleeves and get to work.