Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
One Bush Left Behind
by Greg Palast 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.
$20 won’t cover the cost of the final book in the Harry Potter series.
If you can’t buy a book nor pay tuition with a sawbuck, what exactly
can a poor kid buy with $20 in urban America? The Palast Investigative
Team donned baseball caps and big pants and discovered we could obtain
what local citizens call a “rock” of crack cocaine. For $20, we were
guaranteed we could fulfill any kid’s dream for at least 15 minutes.
Now we could see the incontrovertible logic in what appeared to be
quixotic ravings by the President about free trade with Colombia, Pell
Grant for Kids and the surge in Iraq. In Iraq, General Petraeus tells
us we must continue to feed in troops for another ten years. There is
no way the military can recruit these freedom fighters unless our lower
income youth are high, hooked and desperate. Don’t say, ‘crack vials,’
they’re, ‘Democracy Rocks’!
The plan would have been clearer if Mr. Bush had kept in his speech the
line from his original draft which read, “I have ordered 30,000
additional troops to Iraq this year – and I am proud to say my
military-age kids are not among them.”
Of course, there’s an effective alternative to Mr. Bush’s plan – which
won’t cost a penny more. Simply turn it upside down. Let’s give each
millionaire in America a $20 bill, and every poor child $287,000.
And, there’s an added benefit to this alternative. Had we turned Mr.
Bush and his plan upside down, he could have spoken to Congress from
his heart.
For more on Bush and education read "No Child's Behind Left" in Armed Madhouse excerpted here.
Writings 
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.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
