I come before you tonight to report that The State of the Union is fragile and fraying.
It is my duty to report to you that our proud country has reached a moment which requires bold changes in the ways we do the public business, and we must recognize that these changes will demand both courage and sacrifice from everyone. For the past 30 years our government has embarked on an unsustainable course of action. We have sold off our industry, our birthrights and our future prosperity to a small group of private interests who, in turn have created a big lie. This lie says that government is the problem in our lives and that we would be happier if we trusted our futures to the efficiencies of the market system.
Sadly, this Congress has been complicit in that sale of the public’s trust. It ignored the people’s business while rushing to fulfill every wish of the financial and corporate interests. This betrayal of the public trust has been masked in a show of procedural shenanigans and political posturing which helped convince the public that government really is the problem.
This Congress’ and this President’s failure to fix our broken systems of health care, finance, education, military procurement and public safety is proof enough, that government as we now know it is the problem. We have continually repeated the sad show of political paralysis through a system of partisan Gridlock assisted by the undemocratic demand for legislative supermajorities. It is simply unacceptable today as we face deep and abiding challenges to our safety and our hope for future peace and prosperity to continue this disgraceful failure to live up to our responsibilities to govern.
We are mired in two wars entered because of the lies of the last administration. Trapped in these conflicts, we cannot exit because we fear our national honor will be damaged.
Our economy is held hostage to a bunch of banks too big to fail, and a bunch of bankers who are enjoying their role as well bonused masters of the universe. To add insult to injury, through your elected representatives, these financial services companies have conned you, my fellow Americans, into taking on a debt burden, for both yourselves and your country, which can never be paid off.
Our markets are swamped with millions of empty houses built in the wrong places for people who will never be able to afford their purchase price.
Our food supply may rapidly dwindle this spring as the effect of too much rain in the wrong places at the wrong times will be seen in the prices you pay at the supermarket. Our schools our failing, our towns and cities are laying off policemen, firewomen and teachers because they are going broke. Many people are one paycheck away from bankruptcy. Health care costs continue to rise despite all the hot air wasted here on complaints about their inflation. Our so called health care system is not the best in the world. According to the World Health Organization it is rated 32nd, behind Bosnia.
Our children have been failed by our education system. Recent scores put them at the very bottom of the developed world.
We should be ashamed.
I charge you the honorable representatives of the American people with caving into the representatives of the insurance companies, the drug companies, the medical profiteers , the defense contractors, the bankers and the Junk food industry an the whole industry of government contractors who feed at the public’s expense. You have sold yourself to their lobbyists, (many of them our former colleagues) who daily swarm these sacred halls. Afraid to challenge their generous contributions we have all failed the people who entrust us to come here in their interest.
I include myself in this charge, because I too believed that ultimately the corporate interests were the public’s interests. But the time has come to end that illusion. The time has come to listen to the hopes and fears of those whose interests we are here to support.
In this world of wars and terrorist threats, plunging personal wealth, failing schools systems and congressional gridlock is it any wonder that we are all fearful of the coming changes in our lives and our children’s lives. Throughout history, in such times radical and painful change, people have embraced the politics of fear and hate over the politics of optimism and progress. 80 years ago, in a fateful choice, the Depression wracked Germans elected Hitler under his promise of new German prosperity. There are consequences of the politics of fear.
So, My fellow Americans, I appeal to you to listen to what I have to say tonight, not with your fears, but with your hopes. If you want this Congress, and this President, to look out for your interests, then you have to learn from the citizens of Massachusetts this week, who elected a new junior Senator, who I believe is an truly independent Republican. He was elected because he appealed to citizens who believe we, her in Washington, are not providing the responsible leadership they have the right to expect.
For my part, I accept the charge. I have not provided the leadership you expected. I have failed to fight for your needs in a vain hope of returning some sense of cooperation to this government. I had come to this vipers nest of a city thinking we had a mandate for change. I learned that mandates for change are only as long as a news cycle.
As we tried to engage you the congress in a discussion about changes we need we found out that the people’s will did not seem to count for those in this Congress whose constituents do not hold them to the same standards as they hold the greater institutions of government. I had not counted on the huge divisions between the good people in this house, whose definitions of public interest too often gets confused with your definitions of self interest. I truly believed that there could be bipartisan agreements on the key issues that divide us. I was mistaken
Every time we tried to do the people’s business, we learned of huge hidden price tags which were attached to any possible agreement. These were prices that are not to be discussed publicly because of the interests involved. Often we found that those prices were actually obscene private profit for those contracted to serve the people.
For instance, we found that our military is too highly trained to waste time doing cooking, washing and cleaners. No, instead we have to contract for Halliburton and other private vendors to do those menial tasks for the Army, at an obscene cost.
Can we control our money supply? No. We have to do what the Federal Reserve wants. Can we provide for basic health care services for our people? No we have to contract for private insurers. The growth in government that you so rightly resent is actually the growth in the private contractors who are supposedly bringing the efficiencies of free enterprise to the public.
As for fixing the economy, I also failed when it came to provide the leadership you deserve. I believed my Economic team when they said that we needed to keep bailing out the big financial monopolies or risk a second depression. I failed to understand the interests they serve.
The Congress and I are not alone in our failures of responsibility. All of us, as a people, have allowed ourselves to be seduced into a new definition of our role in the country’s life. We seem to have voluntarily given up our role as citizens, responsible for the force and future of this great country. Instead, we allowed ourselves to become mere consumers, dependent on the marketplace for our sense of happiness and possibilities. I believe that in our hearts we know this role has no future, but we don’t know how to change it. Instead we have gotten angry at our lot and angry at our elected representatives.
This anger has been building for a long time. We just haven’t heard it here in this protected bubble of the Washington Beltway establishment. A bubble, I might add, which can only be entered if you can pay a lot for admission.
Over the past year, As the Main Street economy imploded, people lost their belief in a better future for their children Without that belief, a crucial part of our collective dream is in danger. Maybe the vote in Massachusetts can remind us that there is real anger at the way we have been doing business here in Washington and that the citizens may want to take back their power.
I also suspect that we all feel a little guilty as we realize we had embraced an economic illusion of unending growth in our consumer culture. We have been seduced by the deeper lie that money is an end in itself, a joy in itself, rather than a means of measuring real wealth created from our work, our inventions, our thrift, our communities, and our collective hopes for a safe and compassionate future for ourselves, our children and our neighbors .
For the past two decades we have given up our real strength, shipped off our productive capacity to countries where the wealthy business owners can find cheaper labor. We bought into a lie that our investments in the rigged game of financial services rather than investment in technology and infrastructure would eventually pay for all the debts we have piled up. So now, when that lie of a dream fed by the big banks and insurance companies has been broken, we must find a way of making up for lost time. We need to help sponsor new ideas, technologies and visions which will create the real wealth of our future.
To do this, you the Congress must start living up to the trust invested in you.
It is time to give up the irreparable corruption of our campaign finance system.
It is time to recognize the special interests have taken control of all of our government, and threaten our economic survival if we don’t do their bidding. We can start resisting this control by repealing the laws that allow an essentially selfish organization, called a corporation, to be ruled an independent person by the courts.
Let me stop here a moment and answer those who say that our efforts to regulate and limit the power of the large corporations is anti business and will prevent business from creating badly needed jobs. To those critics, I ask: please tell me which of these corporations have been creating American jobs in the last year?
It is time to help restart our economy by providing real work and real jobs in things we know we need. We need a world class rail system which uses US made trains to run on US made rails. We need to help stabilize the glass and chemical industries that are moving off shore. We need to invest and nurture industries and services which will provide jobs and prosperity for our children and grandchildren. We need to stop supporting corporations who are sucking the public treasure dry to fatten their own wallets.
I propose tonight the creating of a new Partnership for America’s future. This partnership would bring together business, labor, entrepreneurs and educators along with our best schools and our best thinkers to help created new sustainable businesses which can be created and grow here at home. This Partnership would be an ongoing discussion and think tank with access to Government financing . It will become an integrated set of national incubators to help bring about new and expanding businesses and social enterprises. In turn, these enterprises will produce non financial service jobs with a real promise of future productive growth.
As for health care, we should all be ashamed. We need to restart that debate by recognizing that every special interest involved in profiting from the current system will quite simply lie about our loss of choices and our move to socialism. So lets hear the real truth. Although our drugs and our hospitals perform miracles for the well to do, overall, our American health care system is a laughing stock. In terms of every international measure our system is ranked about 32nd in the world because our people are so unhealthy and so many go into bankruptcy seeking care.
Since this Congress does not want to provide the American people with the health care coverage it provides itself, instead, perhaps you in Congress should consider giving yourselves the average coverage the public enjoys. Of course that will mean that 50% of you will have to go without any or adequate coverage, but you would then be honestly representing your constituents.
While we are on health care, it is time to face up to the simple fact that so many of us are sick because we eat junk food produced with massive agricultural subsidies. I propose tonight that we end the subsidies we provide to the grain and meat industries who provide the junk food that is literally killing us. It should be a source of shame that farmers should joke about farming the government rather than providing the truly wholesome and nutritious crops which will sustainably nourish our nation.
Should we wish to subsidize any agriculture, let it be for family farms close to our cities where fruits, grains and vegetables can be provided with little shipping costs. This would provide true food security against future unforeseeable shocks.
Our education system has also become an international joke. We score last in the developed world in our national testing for literacy and math. Our teachers are scorned in society as losers who couldn’t make it in the business world. Some school boards around the country have given up science and history to meet the religious and social demands of their local voters. This is not a system that will help create the inventors, the builders, the organizers and the leaders of a new world. This is a system designed to perpetuate failure.
As part of our Partnership for America’s Future, let us figure out how to put the research and resources into education that we put into road subsidies and defense. It is time to recognize a simple fact, it is those people who teach our children, tend to our sick and elderly, guard our streets and insure our environment health. These people are the source of our wealth and security much more than the bankers and the financiers. Lets start rewarding our real heros.
So I come before you tonight to challenge you to give up the false hopes of a market driven recovery that will magically arise when government gets off your back. No government should be on your back, but it is up to you, the citizens of this country, to decide what you want to give up in order to lower your taxes while still providing the stability and security upon which you depend.
We have seen what a low tax, deregulated business environment can do. It has created economic, social and environmental challenges which are rapidly running out of control. It has produced a world in which over a third of the people in this country now carry a personal debt burden that they may never be able to pay off. can only be met by the good old American values of vision, thrift and industry.
Tonight, we must start resisting the quiet coup that has taken over this Congress and the elected representatives throughout America This coup was carried out by a small group of people who are acting as an unelected oligarchy. This oligarchy is composed of the owners and managers of the out of control investment firms financial institutions have purchased enough influence in these chambers to make their needs and desires greater than the American people. They have made the laws to their advantage and opened the purse strings of the Treasury to service their every desire.
In the past few days, the Supreme Court in the front row here has become complicit in that coup. It has ruled that we cannot make laws that limit the amount corporations spend on campaign advertising. In essence, they can use every trick in the book to hypnotize you into doing their bidding.
It is time to take our country back. And to do that, this Congress must start to stand up again for the needs of the American people. It can start doing that by rewriting the laws that make corporations an individual under the law. It can amend the national banking laws to bring back usury limits on loans and credit cards. This Congress can live up to its responsibility to care for the economic health of the people by taxing the great fortunes that have been made even greater by your bank bail outs and corporate largess.
This Congress can be remembered as a truly revolutionary body by beginning to act in the interests of the people, to forge a new vision of a peaceful prosperous America built on opportunity, hard work and sacrifice Or, it can be a Congress remembered for one which uses its power to transfer the people’s wealth to the oligarchs and the well to do.
It is time Congress to serve the American people once again. It is time to choose.
