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President Obama's State of the Union Speech: WTF?
By Dave Lindorff
I never expected to find myself agreeing with Sarah Palin, but I’ve got to admit that the woman nailed it regarding President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address. Asked to comment on it, she said it had a lot of “WTF moments.”
That’s exactly what I found myself thinking as I read through it!
We’ve “broken the back” of the recession? WTF? The official unemployment rate is still 9.4%, and even that is down slightly from a 9.8% high only because so many people have given up trying to find a job and have left the workforce, taking early retirement or just staying home. And the real unemployment rate--the one that counts those who have given up but would work if there were actually jobs to be had, and those who have grasped at part time work just to survive--is still at between 19% and 22%, depending on how you’re counting. Who’s Obama kidding: us or himself?
We need to “out-educate” the rest of the world? WTF? All across the country, school districts are laying off teachers. In New York City, the country’s largest school district, the world’s richest mayor, $18-billionaire Michael Bloomberg, recently hired corporate hack, Cathleen P. Black, a former magazine publisher who has no educational experience or training, but who does have a reputation for whacking employee lists, as his new school chancellor, and has put out the word that teachers in New York, including those who have earned tenure through years of dedicated work, that their jobs are on the line because of a lack of money. In Philadelphia, another or the country’s largest districts, principals have been warned to prepare for 20-30% budget cuts next school year--this in a district where 40 kids to a classroom the norm, and where kids still study from dog-eared history and science textbooks dating to the 1970s and ‘80s. Obama also talked about the need to focus education on science, math and technology. WTF? What about foreign languages? What about history and political science? What about the arts? If he had actually checked what happens in China--a country he warned was outdoing us in educating its kids--he’d have discovered that music and art are key parts of every kids’s education, and that kids start learning foreign languages when they are little--not in high school. Same in most countries like Korea, Taiwan or Germany, all of which are eating our lunch in global economic competition.
Oh, and that $10,000 one-time college tuition tax credit you called for? WTF? ...
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent, collectively-owned, journalist-run, reader-backed online alternative newspaper, please go to: ThisCantBeHappening!
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Not himself, since he knows he's lying and knows it's grotesquely lying. He perhaps, if not surely, figures that he can fool a serious number of Americans with his lies, but he surely realizes that this isn't every American.
I don't see how China, Taiwan, Germany, Korea, and so on, are eating Americans' lunch or lunches though. A third of the world is starving and it's primarily due to Americans eating a lot more than the lunches of these billions of innocent people.
After starving and robbing a third or more of the human population, perhaps it's due time for Americans to experience some of the harm the US has done to billions of others and continue to do to them. It's US voters who elect rogue US "representatives" who work for Wall Street and so on. Maybe this is the only way that enough Americans will wake up and learn about US crimes against many parts of humanity and then push to stop Washington, Wall Street, et cetera. Otherwise, the extreme and global crimes against humanity committed by the US, et al, would continue with a highly complacent, ignorant, complicit citizenry in the US.
It's still bad, what's happening in the US, to the US, by the US, of and for Washington, Wall Street, and so on, elites; but maybe their rogue, corporatist and imperialist ways harming many Americans will cause a sufficient majority of Americans to wake up and finally take responsibility for making sure to stop electing rogue government.
Arts and history, languages, et cetera, are certainly important for people to start learning at very young ages; although history probably isn't really important, since a lot of what's taught in these school courses consists of lies and cover-ups and it's a very, very bad thing to teach such shit to children, as well as to anyone older. Children and everyone else needs to learn truthful history, but not much is taught in schools and plenty of very important parts of history, including recent and current events history, might not be even taught at all. What do schools teach of truth about what really happened and is happening, ever since, in the DR Congo, Rwanda, Indonesia, et cetera? What about the true history of what was done to and is done to, today, to American Indians? Et cetera. How many Americans realize that the genocide in the DR Congo and which is going, while having begun around 1996 or 1997, for western corporations to profit and them using the governments of the US, UK, France, Belgium, et cetera, to rob the Congolese people of their rich natural resources, well, how many Americans realize that the genocide has now reached around 10 million innocent Congolese? VERY FEW!
Teaching and learning history is important, but only if it's done truthfully and as thoroughly as possible; otherwise, there's little point, if any point at all, in teaching history. Common sense doesn't require historical knowledge. Common sense was all that was needed to oppose the wars on Afghanistan, Iraq (wars I and II), Kosovo, and others.
Anyway, it's Americans who've been eating the lunches (and more) of billions of innocent people; not the other way around. And Americans are suffering due to their/our own fault, not due to the fault of others.
Americans FUCKED UP and now we're to claim that others are eating our lunches? That's "funny".
Otoh, Washington does roguishly give millions or billions of US taxpayer dollars to criminal governments allied with Washington in order to profit the rogue, capitalist, corporatist and imperialist elites of the US, and this can be how we can realize that others are eating our lunches; but it's not the fault of the others. It's Americans' fault. Americans blindly vote in partisan ways and this is what results. Americans only have Americans to blame and no one else.