The central issue is SECURITY: National Security, *Economic Security* and Environmental Security. The central question is "Are you safer today than you were four years ago, or even the day after 9/11? Is America safer today than four years? Geopolitically? Economically? Environmentally?" Appalachia would be a wonderful place to begin asking that question...
Jesse Jackson, Chicago Sun Times: In Washington, George W. Bush hails the economy as strong. ''My plan is working,'' he says. In McClellentown, Pa., people know better. Good jobs are going abroad; unemployment is up. Pennsylvania has lost about 159,000 manufacturing jobs since Bush took office. Nearly 70,000 workers in Pennsylvania have exhausted their unemployment benefits while looking for a job that can pay the rent or mortgage....It is time to change course. We need a plan to reinvest in America. Make Appalachia the center of investment in renewable energy. Build schools and make college affordable for all who earn it. Repeal the perverse tax breaks and incentives that reward companies for moving jobs abroad.
Appalachia holds a mirror to America. What kind of country are we? When we call on the sons and daughters of Appalachia to fight, what commitment do we make to them in return? Surely it cannot be that we will spend $200 billion on defeating and rebuilding Iraq, even as we starve investment in schools and good jobs in southern Ohio. Appalachia is too often ignored, but it tells a stark truth. It is time for America to listen.
Restore the Timeline, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.suntimes.com/output/jesse/cst-edt-jesse08.html
What Appalachia says about U.S.
June 8, 2004
BY JESSE JACKSON
The hills of Appalachia have a hard truth about them. This is God's country -- stark, untamed, rich in coal, scarred by man. In Appalachia, reality hits you in the face like a hard fist and exposes the rhetoric of Washington for what it is.
In Washington, George W. Bush hails the economy as strong. ''My plan is working,'' he says. In McClellentown, Pa., people know better. Good jobs are going abroad; unemployment is up. Pennsylvania has lost about 159,000 manufacturing jobs since Bush took office. Nearly 70,000 workers in Pennsylvania have exhausted their unemployment benefits while looking for a job that can pay the rent or mortgage.
In Washington, George W. Bush celebrates his education reforms and pushes to put public money in private school vouchers. In Appalachia, kids travel two hours on the bus one way to get to school. Those schools need resources to attract good teachers and update textbooks and technology. Soaring college costs make it harder for children of Appalachia to get the college educations that they need.
The people of Appalachia understand it. They know that the children raised in the affluent suburbs have a separate and unequal opportunity to succeed. Those children get the good teachers, the modern schools and the advanced courses. Their children are left behind not for lack of intelligence or hard work but for lack of opportunity.
But when this nation goes to war, the young men and women of Appalachia are among the first to respond. These are proud people who volunteer to defend their country. When their children are photographed humiliating and torturing Iraqi prisoners, they are stunned. They support their commander in chief. But they aren't about to believe that their kids did this on their own without pressure or orders from above. And they are right about that.
Black lung disease still kills in Appalachia. Life is shorter; many are crippled from the mines that still dot these hills. But fewer people have health care, and ever more are underinsured, a serious illness away from bankruptcy. Companies are cutting health care benefits for retirees and hiking prices on workers.
This week, I am joining with union leaders -- Cecil Roberts of the United Mine Workers, Gerald McEntee of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers, Leo Gerard of the United Steelworkers -- on a bus trip through the hills and valleys of southeastern Ohio, West Virginia and western Pennsylvania.
Our purpose is to expose the reality of poverty in America. Most poor people are not on welfare; they work every day. They are not African American. They tend to be white, young, female and single. They take the work they can get. They do the hard jobs.
They make up beds in fancy resorts. They clean the rooms. They bathe the sick in hospitals, but when they get sick, they cannot lie down in the beds they make up every day.
Washington calls on them to defend the nation. They pay the price in blood for the hubris and miscalculations of our leaders. Yet when they come home, Washington turns its back. The Bush White House insists that we cut taxes on the wealthy rather than invest in the poor. Ship jobs abroad, outsource hope in these hills, and call it prosperity.
It is time to change course. We need a plan to reinvest in America. Make Appalachia the center of investment in renewable energy. Build schools and make college affordable for all who earn it. Repeal the perverse tax breaks and incentives that reward companies for moving jobs abroad.
Appalachia holds a mirror to America. What kind of country are we? When we call on the sons and daughters of Appalachia to fight, what commitment do we make to them in return? Surely it cannot be that we will spend $200 billion on defeating and rebuilding Iraq, even as we starve investment in schools and good jobs in southern Ohio. Appalachia is too often ignored, but it tells a stark truth. It is time for America to listen.
Posted by richard at June 12, 2004 08:23 PM