The Tipping Point

"It takes only the smallest of changes to shatter an epidemic's equilibrium"
- Malcolm Gladwell

I feel like Lawrence Fishburn at the end of School Daze running around screaming WAKE UP!!! Does anyone see what’s going on? The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved John Robert's nomination as the new Supreme Court chief justice. His confirmation by the Senate is all but guaranteed. Bush still has one more appointment to the Supreme Court. These nominations will shift the court as far right as possible. Supreme Court appointments are for life. This means that long after Bush is out of office, his views, his policies, his ideals and beliefs will live on. Bush is anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-lower class, pro-wealthy, pro-business. He may not ever say it but come on we know he is. That “ preserving the culture of life” shit is just his way of saying preserving his way of life. Our civil liberties are being trampled upon.

A new law called the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention & Consumer Protection Act of 2005 will go into effect in the middle of October that basically prevents most people from filing Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The credit cards companies have been the biggest supporter of this law, yet they keep marketing high interest cards to low-income families. 65% of all bankruptcies stem from unpaid medical bills. A lot of those medical bills come from people who don’t have health insurance. What are you supposed to do? Not go to the doctor or hospital when you’re sick? The government claims the bill will catch wealthy people who file bankruptcy when they can pay their debts, but in doing so they’ve ensnared middle – lower class families who see bankruptcy as their only way out.

This storm was a glaring reminder of the class division in this country. During his September15 speech to the nation, President Bush asserted that poverty in America is mostly restricted to the nation's Southern states. WTF? Those of us out there struggling in New York and Philly, Detroit and Los Angeles, Midwest and Northeast were really surprised to hear that. New Orleans wasn’t an exception to the rule it is the rule. It is a microcosm. For the first time on record household incomes failed to rise for five consecutive years, yet Bush has ruled out repealing any of his tax cuts for the wealthy. Minimum wage has been stuck at $5.15 an hour since 1997 and he’s been making cuts to programs that would help the poor. This administration has constantly focused on making sure the rich stay rich and not giving a thought to the poor getting poorer. If things keep going at this rate there will no longer be a middle class. So many of the programs put in place to help the poor like the Earned Income Tax Credit and Medicaid have suffered under this administration.

“The Republican Congress largely abandoned three decades of bipartisan support for the Earned Income Tax Credit, alleging that the program was rife with fraud. Congress turned back efforts to raise the minimum wage. Cash-strapped state governments slashed their support of Medicaid. In essence, the rich got tax cuts, the poor got cuts in support.”

Before this hurricane the Bush Administration was all set to make sweeping changes and cuts to the federally funded Medicaid program, now there trying to say it’s because of the hurricane. $35 billion in spending was slated to be cut from Medicaid, food stamps, childcare, school training, and other such programs, but they want to extend $70 billion in tax cuts that will only benefit the wealthiest Americans.

The President is now telling us to conserve fuel. Don’t take a trip if you don’t need to. But he just took his seventh trip down to the Gulf. How much fuel is he using each time he departs and returns? He says he needs to be in the region to assess the damage… bullshit. Everything is under water. Damage assessed. See how easy I did that? He just needs photo ops because he knows his polls are slipping. Much like the post 9/11 Gulliani, we’ve been bombarded with images of him, sleeves rolled up, in the trenches.

Now everyone wants to make Michael Brown accountable for all the mistakes made in the aftermath of Katrina. In some ways he is at fault, but he’s just a small fish in a very big pond. The Bush administration chose to fold FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security instead of letting it stand alone as it did during the Clinton administration. The Bush administration chose to siphon money from FEMA’s budget and spend that money on the war in Iraq. The President chose to appoint Michael Brown as the head of FEMA even though he was rather inexperienced for the job. Now they want to crucify him for that inexperience. The President should be blamed just like I blame the people who elected him for a second term.


The theory of memetics tells us that ideas, practices, and messages spread just as viruses do. We need to be a little more aware of what is being spread. We need to stop taking media images and sound bytes as the whole story and dig a little deeper. We need to wake up. We are living in perilous times. The United States is not immune to the things that plague other countries. If anything we are more susceptible then ever. The tipping point is the culmination of a build-up of small changes that effects a big change. That means any one of at any given time has the opportunity to do something. We need to wake up.