The hard times of winter are here. There are people living on the streets and under bridges because our government has failed. Should the average person complain or stay silent as not to be singled out by abusive government agents. These Gov. agents are not bad people but it is a natural act to harm those that correct what is perceived to be the right way. Gov. agents do not like to be told what to do. The people grant HUD and different Gov agencies public money to do a job. Is it possible to spend the money in a more efficient manner? Can we solve or control homelessness by using the money in a more practical manner? Should homeless people be allowed to tent on public land? Does the public realize that 25 percent of the homeless are disabled Veterans. Disabled because of where these hero’s have been and what they have seen. Can we ignore or limit the use of public land or money to help these people in hard times.

Here’s your question, class:

In his State of the Union, the President asked Congress for $300 million for poor kids in the inner city. As there are, officially, 15 million children in America living in poverty, how much is that per child? Correct! $20.

Here’s your second question. The President also demanded that Congress extend his tax cuts. The cost: $4.3 trillion over ten years. The big recipients are millionaires. And the number of millionaires happens, not coincidentally, to equal the number of poor kids, roughly 15 million of them. OK class: what is the cost of the tax cut per millionaire? That’s right, Richie, $287,000 apiece.

Mr. Bush said, “In neighborhoods across our country, there are boys and girls with dreams. And a decent education is their only hope of achieving them.”

So how much educational dreaming will $20 buy?

-George Bush’s alma mater, Phillips Andover Academy, tells us their annual tuition is $37,200. The $20 “Pell Grant for Kids,” as the White House calls it, will buy a poor kid about 35 minutes of this educational dream. So they’ll have to wake up quickly.

Early in the morning of October 22nd last fall several hundred people quietly arrived on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Many of us were organized into affinity groups. There was the anti-capitalist bike block. There were Iraq Veterans Against the War. There was the group of people dressed in polar bear costumes agitating through a portable sound system. There were the young people from Students for a Democratic Society in their yellow Campus Climate Challenge t-shirts. There was the Separate Oil and State group. And there were Code Pinkers, some wearing giant bobble-heads of Cheney, Bush and Rice.

We were united behind the short but clear slogan: No War, No Warming!

*End the war for oil in Iraq and all future wars for oil and natural gas.

*End the addiction to oil--and coal and natural gas--that are driving the heating of the earth, the climate disruption which will inevitably lead to more and more wars as our ecosystem and economies are devastated.

*Shift government resources--our tax money--from support of fossil fuels to support of a deep- and wide-ranging, jobs-creating, clean energy revolution

In November, 1992, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton defeated Republican incumbent President George Herbert Walker Bush for the presidency by running his campaign on a simple theme: “It’s the Economy, Stupid.” The Bush Recession of 1990-1991 had largely disappeared by late 1992, but millions of manufacturing and middle-class jobs had disappeared, replaced largely by fast-food and service employment at minimum wages and without health care for workers. All Clinton had to do was to cal for the federal government to create employment growth opportunities.

Sixteen years later, we now have another Bush in the White House, who presides over a failed economy. What’s truly bizarre is that all of the Republican presidential candidates who are running to replace Bush are in deep denial that America has lurched into an “economic recession.”