The Truth About the Debt Ceiling

By Helen L. Burleson, Doctor of Public Administration

The President of the United States cannot say what I’m going to say. I am going to say it loud so that it resounds all over this land.

Racists, racists, racists! Racism is alive and SICK in America. Racial hatred is alive and SICK in America.

Can I prove it? Yes, I can.

I am 81 years old so I have lived through 13 administrations of presidencies: some weak and ineffective, some strong and yet neglectful; and yet a few, passionate, caring and humane.

These Republicans and Libertarians today are still fighting the Civil War! There is Texas where the governor is Republican Rick Perry. This Southern state wants to engrave the Confederate flag on the license plates of all the citizens in the state. There are Southern boards of education including, but not limited to Tennessee, Texas and Virginia who want to rewrite the text books either to omit slavery or to revise and rearrange history to fit their biased views. These three states all have Republican governors. The Tea Party, a group of extreme right-wing conservative theorists are among the proponents of this revisionist, altered version of American history. There are those semi-literate legislators, like Republican Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota, who say the Founding Fathers fought to eliminate slavery. There’s a Southern governor, Republican Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, who knows nothing about slavery and racial tensions in the South. Ignorant! Yes, that’s a part of it; but, the main thing is their psyche. Taught at an early age to look down upon and to hate people of African descent, this hatred is buried deep, deep, within the throes of every fabric and fiber of their beings. Just as a light weight object put into a glass of water will float to the top, no matter how long racism has been festering in their bodies, confronted with a president of African descent, the covert racism rises to the top. All of the subliminal messages weighing them down for years since infancy, now surface; and unabashedly, they would rather see this Nation, this Democratic Republic crumble as long as they can blame this Black man and cause his Waterloo! This is not my position. This is not my inference. This is exactly what some of these racists legislators have said. There is concrete evidence that they said it. I don’t have to make it up or falsify what they said, it is there on video preserved for the lifetime of this Nation for the whole world to see that a group of racists legislators, like Republican Congressman Mitch McConnell, are so determined to make the presidency of President Barack Obama, a one-term presidency that they frankly, as Rhett Butler said, …don’t give a damn,,,”

Collective bargaining came into existence in Wisconsin; but Republican Governor Scott Walker, a governor influenced by Libertarian billionaires, destroyed it with the stroke of a pen. Social Security signed into law by Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the more effective, caring and humane presidents, is about to undergo the chopping block despite the fact that workers have paid into the system all of their working years. Medicare and Medicaid, humane programs signed into law by Democrat President Lyndon Baines Johnson, designed to aid the elderly, the infirm and women, infants and children are about to come under the blade of the guillotine!

These programs benefit people most of whom have worked on minimum wage jobs all of their working years. Some of them are unmarried and/or divorced women, failed by the declining education system, find themselves unprepared to find work that will sustain themselves and their children.

Combined with racism is also classism; and, viewed and pursued by some, they are one and the same. Classism divides Americans by social strata with three defined levels: upper class (those with wealth accumulated either by top earning occupations or by inheritance), middle class (those who are either professional, have managerial positions or government workers with wages above the minimum income level, sometimes referred to as white collar workers), and lower class (those who work in production whose manufacturing jobs for the most part have been shipped overseas, often referred to as blue collar workers). Then there’s the undefined and often ignored underbelly of society who are invisible because they make no demands on society. They are the ones who roam the streets at night or sleep over the grate or under bridges, in bus stations or wherever they can lay their heads as they use what little belongings they have as a pillow under their heads. They are the unemployed, the homeless and hopeless, many are former military personnel who served their country all the while being neglected by their country. Many Americans of African descent have managed to escape the net and the web woven that would keep them out of the middle class, have benefited from these social programs after retirement years which has sustained them, along with their pensions,and have managed to remain middle class.

As one legislator decried, “This is class war!” Yes, it is! Though some semi-literate, misinformed legislators called President Obama an elitist, it is they, many formerly poor boys, who through their positions living off the dole of the citizenry, now look down on the very people from whom they rose. There are some ill reared and ill bred who call the President of the United States, a liar! Because my mind is alert and fertile, I challenge any American to refute any of the facts that I am stating. Never in the history of this country has an American President been openly disrespected as has President Barack Obama. One “pretender to the throne,” Republican part-time governor, Sarah Palin, while in India spoke derisively about the President while on foreign shores, all the while saying that this is inappropriate. One thug of a legislator, Republican Congressman Joe Wilson, of South Carolina, called out, to President Barack Obama, “You lie!” during the State of the Union Address. Just the other day in July, 2011, another barnyard pig of a legislator, Republican Congressman Joe Lucas, of the 8th District of Illinois, called the President of the United States a liar.

Of course American ethics, morals and morality have gone to hell in a hand basket; but, when this same “pretender,” Sarah Palin, featured on the cover of a major magazine, Newsweek, dressed inappropriately in a tight sweater opened a bit too much, then the world can see for itself the depravity and degradation of American principles and the American people.

As Republican President Abraham Lincoln stated eloquently, “ A house divided against itself, cannot stand,” we have reached that fork in the road and America is on the path to destruction at the hands of a few, petty, pampered, pretty boys who in their efforts to appease their “masters” are driving this country off a cliff!

Until we get a Secretary of Psychiatry to free racists of the hatred they are harboring, America will not prosper. America is already close to being displaced by China as the world’s greatest power; and, this is only because of the pure unadultered racism pervasive throughout this land.