Seven and a Half Cents

Dear editor:

Back in the 1950s there was a musical comedy show on Broadway (later made into a movie) called "Pajama Game” which featured a song called “Seven and a Half Cents,” that pushed the demand of labor in a garment factory for a small raise in the hourly wage in that amount. It explained that seven and a half cents didn’t “mean a hell of a lot” in the overall pay picture of the average worker, but given every hour, every day that same worker would have his or her entire life changed. That number, seven and a half, is once again important and when counted every hour, every day, for that number of years, has changed our entire lives. I speak about the seven and a half years of the Bush Administration and what it has done to the fabric and life of America.

First look at our current financial situation. Joblessness is up. Personal bankruptcy is up. Home foreclosures are way up. Inflation is up. Home construction has hit a seventeen year low. The value of the American dollar is way down. Our balance of payments with the rest of the world continues to flow out. The national debt is so high, and continues to grow in leaps and bounds, that there is no way that even our great, great, great, great grandchildren will be able to pay it off. And now comes the debacle of Wall Street brought about by a laissez faire attitude of oversight and loss of regulation that threatens our entire financial system. In saving Bear Sterns, IAG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac this administration has spent over $300 billion of our tax dollars. Now add on top of this its plan to save banks and investment firms by taking over their bad debt at an estimated cost to us of half a trillion dollars (or more.) Our government is now becoming the biggest home mortgage holder in the country. Talk about Big Brother and the danger of this situation. But Mr. Bush says that we are financially “basically sound.”

Next is our military. We have been at war for seven years in Afghanistan and there is no end in sight. Even our top military people have said that we, supposedly the world’s greatest and modern service, are not winning this conflict. We bungled this fight by going to another country (Iraq) and starting a conflict that has cost us half a trillion dollars, over 4,000 service deaths and over 25,000 casualties. Our military is stretched so thin that other countries, i.e. Russia, feel they can take advantage of our weakness and do as they please. In addition we now seem to be spreading this disaster to Pakistan. All this thanks to Mr. Bush and his team who only speak of the need for “victory” while bringing us anything but.

And what about our personal freedoms as Americans? Let us just say that our personal freedoms, as guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, have vanished under the guise of keeping us safe. This administration has shown that their so-called need to know trumps any desire for us to have personal, well protected information lives. They talk about our Founding Fathers quite often, but these same men would turn over in their graves if they could see Britain’s King George’s tyranny running amok in Washington today.

Internationally American has done nothing but lose respect from the rest of the world. Guantanamo, our treatment of prisoners (I know, we don’t torture…Ha) and our go it alone policy saying we know better than anyone else, has cost us the respect and leadership we have earned over the years.

All of this, and more, has happened under the watch of the man from Texas. You may say that Congress bears part of this blame, but responsibility rests at the top dog’s door and with the accomplices surrounding him. Don’t forget that six of those congressional years were handled by his own party’s rubber stamp majority. And now there’s a lady from Alaska running around the country talking about the danger of the extreme terrorists who are out to destroy America. Sorry lady, they could never do the damage to our country that George W. Bush has done in just “seven and a half years,” which does “mean a hell of a lot.”