The State of the Union

Last night I stayed up to listen to George W Bushes State of the Union address. While it did not contain anything that was surprising, there were three aspects that I found frustrating. The first was the Bush stance on Climate Change. While there appears to be a recognition of the reality of climate change, under bush, there will not be any real or substantive action until countries like China and India start tackling climate change as well.

Well China is, while china is doing this in part as the PR for the Olympics, there is also a recognition that a changing climate is already causing problems. Desertification, Drought, Floods and its having an economic impact too. That is why China is building the largest solar power station in the world in the Gobi Desert.

The difference really is that the US has a Gross Domestic Product of fifteen trillion Dollars, while Chinas economy is still only two and a quarter of a trillion dollars. If China can do it I am sure that the US could, and in my opinion should, be doing much more.

The other aspect of the proper gander of this speech was when Bush talked about overseas aid. Because of religious interference, the US refuses to fund or support any project that promotes the use of condoms as a way of tackling HIV/AIDS. Even though the world health organisation and a myriad of other specialists know that the use of condoms is the only was that the spread of HIV/AIDS can be halted. This stance, by Bush, is based upon an ideology that's akin to the belief that the earth is flat. Don't get me started on natural selection!

Over the years of listening to the world service, reading books, and talking to people involved in development, the one aspect of development that has the greatest benefit is family planning. Empowering and educating women actually has the greatest positive effect on the health, economics and productivity of the developing world. Therefore, the US dictating that aid will only be given to peoples and projects that comply with the morality (the word that Bush used in the speech) of the religious right (wing), is not only wrong but adds to the problems that the developing world has. Further, it adds (Rightly or Wrongly) to the impression that America is pushing an anti Moslem agenda.

Lastly was the way that the US has dealt with current financial crisis. The US economy has some serious structural problems. Over recent years it has been on a spending spree, this has been funded by borrowing. Here in the UK we have done the same, so we are not guilt free here. While borrowing can really help people archive more sooner, borrowing has to be repaid. The problem is that this borrowing has come from overseas, predominantly China and South East Asia. That means that now Americans are busy working to boost the economic standing of China, Korea, Japan etc.

This was why in the 1970s in the UK we had to sort out the structural problems of our economy as during the Second World War we had borrowed so much from the US. It was only last year that we finally repaid that money. The US now has a similar problem, with government borrowings of three trillion dollars, that's twenty percent of the US economy, America has to work harder just to pay off the debt.

Further as US business has transported industries and jobs overseas, cutting the taxes of the richer citizens will do little to help this problem. Had Bush given the money to the poorest people in the US then you would have seen that money spent and injected into the US economy and not spent on servicing overseas debt.

I never expected much from Bush and I was not disappointed, given all the problems in the world it would have been great if the speech had not been full of idealogical rhetoric and had more substantive action.