Where Did Ranger George Go?
When you go into America’s national parks, your eyes and soul soak up the experience — majestic mountains, timeless forests, breathtaking canyons, expansive seashores.
But if you look around, you’ll also notice something not so spectacular: rotting facilities, fewer visitor hours, closed-off areas, fewer rangers — all signs of a phenomenal national asset being allowed to deteriorate. Why is this happening? Where is our national leadership?
As a presidential candidate, George W. expressed indignation at the failure to maintain such a priceless system. In 2000, he staged a campaign media event, with the soaring Cascade Mountains as his backdrop, warning in outrage that our national parks are “at the breaking point,” and he vowed to voters that he’d eliminate the $5 billion backlog in needed maintenance to restore the system.
Three years later, Ranger George is nowhere to be seen. The national maintenance backlog is now $6 billion, and Bush even slashed 40% of the repair budget for the very same mountain park that he had used as a political backdrop. And instead of expanding our public parks, as every president for the last century has done, George allowed national-park space to shrink by 187,000 acres last year alone.
He also cut the overall repair budget for Western parks by 28% — diverting much of this money to his right-wing, ideological goal of privatizing our public system, allowing corporate profiteers to replace some 1,700 experienced workers with poorly trained low-wage workers.
Fixing and expanding our wondrous national parks is but one of the crying national needs that could have been met with a fraction of that $325 billion that Bush and Congress just took from our national treasury and so frivolously gave away to the richest people in America. Teddy Roosevelt would be ashamed … but, then, George is no Teddy. To fight for our parks, check out the National Parks Conservation Association at www.npca.org.
Beating the Bush for Health Care
Can you stand hearing a little bit of good news?
It comes from an unlikely source: That massive tax bill that the Bushites just rammed through Congress, giving away at least 325 billion of our tax dollars to a handful of rich American families that neither need nor deserve this windfall.
But sometimes you can find a jewel in a junk pile. Tucked into Bush’s massive giveaway to the Wall Street crowd is a little something that will help folks from our streets. It’s a $20 billion provision to provide emergency aid for states that are grappling daily with our nation’s growing health care crisis.
Nearly every state in America is facing a budget squeeze, and to make ends meet, most legislatures are blindly whacking the budgets for health care programs that provide essential services to seniors, low-income children, people with disabilities, and others without health care coverage. In Texas, for example, legislators “fixed” their budget shortfall by tossing some 250,000 children out of the state health care program — out of sight, out of mind. It’s children like these that the emergency health care money will help.
But this $20 billion jewel didn’t just appear in Bush’s junk pile of a bill — it was placed there through a determined effort led by the men and women of the Service Employees International Union. Half of SEIU’s members are nurses and other health care employees who are on the frontlines of meeting America’s needs, and they are appalled that so many are being abandoned in a country that is so rich — so they forged a coalition with community groups, seniors, and others and launched a “Put Families First” grassroots campaign, bombarding our Congress with thousands of personal appeals for decency, fairness … and sanity.
Insanely, the Bushites opposed this aid — but people power prevailed. When people get organized, we win! To join other fights for good health care, call SEIU: 202/898-3200.
This article appears in June 13 • 2003.