Jackson Free Press

The 2008 presidential debate at the University of Mississippi is one in a series of three debates leading up to the Nov. 4 general election. All three debates conform to a different narrow theme. The Mississippi debate deals entirely with international relations, a topic undisclosed to even the university until the final weeks leading up to the event. But while Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and Arizona Sen. John McCain slap away at one another about U.S. relations with China, other issues important to Mississippians will go unaddressed this first time around.

How the Country Crumbles
Many issues take a back seat as Russia beats its chest and Wall Street falls to pieces. One of the more forsaken of issues involves the status of the nation's infrastructure.

The Mississippi debate is not the first time the issue will be ducked. Not a single whine of irritation came off the Republican Convention stage regarding the condition of the nation's roads, railways and bridges, despite the proximity of the St. Paul, Minn., convention to the site of the deadly 2007 Minneapolis, Minn., bridge collapse. That bridge toppled into the Mississippi River at the height of Aug. 1 rush hour—the victim of long-standing decay and insufficient upkeep—killing 13 people. Bean-counters can throw that unlucky 13 on the pile of the other 47 U.S. deaths in the last 20 years due to bridge failures—a number that does not include the untold number of deaths due to degraded roads.

The Republicans are not the only party guilty of silence on the issue, though. The situation was hardly any different at the Democratic Convention in Denver, with Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama announcing few specific plans on the matter among his list of goals. This despite the Federal Highway Administration deeming more than 60,000 U.S. bridges as "structurally deficient."

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton addressed the issue earlier this year, proposing an emergency infrastructure plan calling for an injection of $10 billion over 10 years to fix the 60,000 maligned bridges. But even this plan is not enough.

The American Society of Civil Engineers declared in a 2005 report that to fully eliminate every bridge deficiency currently plaguing the U.S. would actually cost more than $9 billion a year, for 20 years. The full cost of such an ambitious plan would amount to $1.6 trillion over a period of five years.

"The average age of a school is over 40 or 50 years. The average age of a bridge is over 40 or 50 years. We spent the 1960s growing our infrastructure, but now we're sort of sitting back and watching it age, like your 40-year-old house needing a new plumbing system or water heater," said ASCE President David Mongan.

The 2005 report cited by Mongan handed a "C" grade to the nation's bridges. The grade for dams, water systems, the power grid and roads earned a "D" and an "incomplete" designation. That's right. The roads of "the world's richest nation" are "incomplete."

That $1.6 trillion that Mongan is calling for isn't easy to come by. The entire GDP of 2007 was $13 trillion, and 65 percent of that is consumed by debt.

Governmental investment in infrastructure has fallen to the wayside, as roads take a back seat to infrastructure building in other places, like Iraq. During the 1950s and '70s, total public spending on America's infrastructure was about 6 percent of the nation's Gross Domestic Product. In the 1980s and '90s, that investment dropped below 2 percent of GDP.

The federal government's personal investment has also dropped dramatically, according to Ed Wytkind, president of the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department.

"The federal government's share of infrastructure investment dropped from 40 percent in the late 1970s, to 25 percent today, forcing more state and local governments to pick up the shortfall," Wytkind said. "The local and state governments don't have the money to cover this extra burden."

Public Education
But who will fix those bridges and roads? Jackson Parents for Public Schools Executive Director Susan Womack said that without a proper education, apparently no one.

"The economy and the war in Iraq has really taken the spotlight, but there really needs to be more discussion on education because it really is the foundation of everything else," Womack said. "How can we have a strong democracy, a productive citizenship? How can we grow our economy, and how can we be better citizens in the global society without a strong public education system?"

Bush actually increased education funding considerably early in his term, increasing it by 78 percent since 2001, according to the U.S. Department of Education. But that figure still hasn't kept up with the demands of the Republican president's No Child Left Behind Act, which couples rigorous testing methods with what critics say is very little financing for improving the test-based approach to education.

Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., from the office of House Education and Labor Committee claims the cumulative shortfall since 2002 for NCLB amounts to $85.6 billion.

Womack said the solution can't stop at backing up to a school with a dump truck full of $100 bills. Any new influx of money has to be aimed very specifically.

"If money needs to do anything, its (to) help reduce class size," Womack said. "That has to be one of our prime goals. If we reduced our class size, we'd see a lot of difference. No Child Left Behind places a lot of value in a highly qualified, passionate teacher, but I think even a highly experienced, well-qualified teacher with a classroom of 25 to 30 kids—with the majority of those kids struggling—is not going to be able to do the same thing that they could do if there were only 15 kids."

Womack said schools need more funding for teachers to parse out the growing population of students, but the U.S. already has its hands full trying to fill the currently vacant positions. Jackson Public Schools, the most densely populated school district in the state, currently needs nine teachers and is already more than a month into the school year. "The teacher shortage is nothing less than a crisis," said Womack.

According to Andrew Mullins, assistant chancellor at the University of Mississippi, it amounts to one hell of a struggle.

"We've got a pretty big social issue working against schools," said Mullins, who also works with the state's alternate route program for certifying new teachers. "There are plenty of people criticizing the money being thrown at schools, but look at what the schools are being saddled with over the last 30 years. They have more kids coming to school from impoverished environments. You have more duties, more health nurses, more counselors—the whole counseling system has changed because of the nature of the students we now work with. … It's not just teaching them to read or write. You have to do everything. You need surrogate parents in the school these days."

For Mullins, the issue of public education is the issue of the new emerging societal structure of the U.S. It usually boils down to the income of the parents.

"[O]ne of the most effective ways to battle our education problems is to get more people into the middle class. Educated people have a way of refusing to be poor. The more you have in the middle class the more likely they are to value education, the more education you have, the more likely you are to be contributing citizens moving to the middle class."

It's a cycle, he says, but that same cycle becomes vicious when adding the factor of poverty to the equation. Impoverished kids value education less, and the resulting insufficient education maintains the cycle of impoverishment.

And the middle class is shrinking.

A Stupid Economy
A 2009 report from the Economic Policy Institute reveals that most American household incomes did not reflect the economy's 18 percent expansion. In fact, real income for the median family fell by 1.1 percent from 2000 to 2006. Hourly wages for a median family grew by one percent, but was obliterated, and then some, by a 2.2 percent drop in annual work hours. Many workers, who would have preferred working full-time, were involuntarily forced to adopt part-time work.

For those who think this movement is typical, hourly wages grew 4.7 percent in the previous business cycle, between 1989 to 2000, while the economy expanded by 4.1 percent. These were two of the predominant factors that determined middle-income growth of 10.5 percent during that election cycle. And while middle-income families may spit at the idea of the 2000-2006 cycle being represented as a period of bountiful growth, the top 10 percent in terms of income felt the genuine results of that growth, according to the report, experiencing 90 percent of the economy's growth. The bottom half of the top 10 percent (meaning the 90th to 95th percentile) saw their incomes grow by about 32 percent. The cream at the absolute top of the bowl saw life get a hell of a lot creamier, with incomes quadrupling and quintupling, bouncing 425 percent—to an average income of $30.5 million.

The report also spoke on the issue of income mobility—or rather, the lack of it.

"When income concentration creates barriers to the resources and opportunities that would enable people to get ahead through their own initiative and efforts, that violates our fundamental sense of fairness," report co-author Jared Bernstein said in a statement. "Americans do not object to unequal outcomes if they mean that some people are working harder and smarter, but we do object if the deck is being stacked by unequal opportunities."

The report states that upward mobility was not a factor in about 60 percent of families during the Bush presidency. The 60 percent that started at the bottom fifth in 2000 are still occupying that unenviable slot in 2008. At least the entropy is universal, though the families at the bottom fifth would hardly call it fair. Way over on the other end of the income spectrum, 52 percent of families that started in the top fifth happily remain in their designated positions as well.

The current administration's rabid view on pushing tax cuts for the wealthy may be cause for some division, with Bush's push for tax cuts on capital gains and dividends being the most blatant example. A May 13, 2008, report by economic fairness advocate group Citizens for Tax Justice, showed that only the wealthiest 1 percent of Mississippians truly benefitted from cuts in capital gains and dividends, despite FOX News pundits hooting the middle class rewards. In fact, the report projects—prior to the September meltdown on Wall Street—that the wealthiest state residents, who make about $796,100 annually, will get 62.7 percent of the tax cuts. The poorest 60 percent of state residents, with average incomes of about $20,600, will enjoy an average tax cut of about $2. Enjoy your can of soda.

CTI Director Bob McIntyre argued against McCain's recent statement that the cuts should not be allowed to expire because "100 million people have investments." Most stock owned by middle-income people—providing they own any—is bundled up in 401(k) plans or IRAs. Owners don't pay taxes on these plans until they retire and begin to withdraw funds, and when that happens, the money is taxed as ordinary income.

"These cuts have nothing to do with the average family's savings or investments, and everything to do with reducing taxes for wealthy investors," McIntyre said, openly criticizing the current economic environment as hostile to wealth building.

The Green Question
The economic environment isn't the only one that needs a magnifier these days.

The Natural Resource Defense Council reported a total of 300 "crimes against nature," by the Bush administration in 2002, from appointing an oil and mining lobbyist as the deputy secretary of the Department of the Interior in 2001, to exempting many power plants from lawsuits for Clean Air Act violations.

In many ways, the current administration has spearheaded a united effort to tear down massive environmental regulations enacted during the height of the environmental movement in the 1970s. More than one story has hit the press over the last few years of anti regulatory political flunkies attempting to undermine policy at the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2008, a former EPA adviser accused the office of Vice President Dick Cheney of altering prepared testimony for the head of the Centers for Disease Control. Advisor Jason K. Burnett alleged that Cheney's office removed sections of testimony, prepared by CDC head Julie Gerberding, related to the health risks associated with global warming.

Burnett said the offices of Cheney and the White House Council on Environmental Quality "were seeking deletions" of sections of the draft testimony describing the health risks. Burnett's letter also said the council requested he "work with CDC to remove from the testimony any discussion of the human health consequences of climate change."

This past June, senior EPA officials accused the Bush administration of pushing them to remove their opinions from an environmental analysis piece claiming that greenhouse gases needed to be controlled. Also, more than half of the 1,600 EPA employees responding to an online questionnaire reported "incidents of political interference" while at work.

In many cases, that interference successfully managed to dictate EPA policy, and even turned up in court as civilians challenged the agency's newfound refusal to protect the environment.

Judge David S. Tatel, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, quoted the Lord's Prayer in a 2006 decision while defining the "absurdity" of the EPA's interpretation of the word "daily."

EPA lawyers arguing for annual or seasonal pollution caps claimed that Congress did not literally mean "daily" when it established a cap on "total maximum daily loads" of pollutants industries could dump into rivers.

"The law says 'daily,Ҕ wrote Tatel in his rejection. "We see nothing ambiguous about this command. 'Daily' connotes 'every day.' ... No one thinks of 'give us this day our daily bread' as a prayer for sustenance on a seasonal or annual basis."

Also in 2006, the EPA tried to use Bill Clinton-style language wrangling to relax pollution standards on power plants, disputing the meaning of the word "any," as in the Clean Air Act's rule requiring older power plants and industrial works to install modern pollution controls if they make "any physical change" that increases emissions.

Judges shot that one down, too.

The environment may have taken backstage in terms of the Mississippi debate, but it played a hard role in the 2006 national elections, as many ex-politicians discovered.

Seventy-one out of the 89 candidates endorsed by pro-environment group the League of Conservation Voters won their elections. The LCV also maintains a "Dirty Dozen" list of politicians that the league considers anti-environment. Members of that list included Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., and Rep. Charles Taylor, R-N.C., among others. Note the word 'included': Nine out of the 13 candidates on LCV's "Dirty Dozen" list lost their elections in 2006.

"Elections have consequences," said LCV President Gene Karpinski in a statement, "and LCV's success in helping elect pro-environment candidates already has reaped environmental policy results.