The real course that should be focused on then "stayed" with is the nearly 36 million Americans who are barely existing in abject poverty, who are starving to death, and who are homeless at this very moment; and this figure probably does not include those Americans who may become impoverished due to downsizing, health issues, or the cost of medical attention.
Mayor Ray Nagin, on ABC's "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos, correctly summed it all up about President Bush's priority being on Iraq and not the forgotten American city of New Orleans--a city, within a state, of major historical, political, economic (oil, gas, seafood), and diverse spiritual legacy. It seems to me that Bush is dragging (not leading) all of America down that same rat hole of a war former President Johnson got us into with Southeast Asia.
Bush's multi-billion dollar, idealistic crusade in the Middle East could have be well utilized in lowering the cost of health care and pharmaceuticals, fighting poverty, and lowing taxes--just to name a few domestic ills.
Perhaps Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld need to consult Henry Kissinger's Does America Need a Foreign Policy?: Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century (2001) and Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War (2003).
Now let's turn our attention to the so-called "strengthening" economy that the Fed and Wall Street economists claim to be so wonderful. What this really means is that the richer have gotten a little richer, again--and the poor have just gotten a lot poorer at exponential rates. According to recent business news reports, new jobs have sprung up all over the United States--yeah, low-wage (all work-and no pay) service jobs that seem like they require extreme amounts of indentured servitude of the days of Colonial America. It doesn't take a degree in rocket science to realize that Laissez-faire economics (synonymous with Free Market economics) isn't free (price wise) or fair at all and that it takes a lot of money to play in this arena. American capitalists become very afraid when one brings up the subjects of Marxism, Socialism, the supplanting of capitalism, and the evolution toward a classless society, hehehe. Why? The pure nature and existence of capitalism means that there always has to be a winner and a loser, an upper class and a lower class, or a bourgeois class and proletariat class. There is no true middle class in the USA--just think about it. The major business periodicals surely do not list the "best of" or the "richest of" people in the middle class.
▪ Rev. Kheti
