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The U.S. House and Senate fought over the extension of unemployment benefits for the last six months of 2002. Bush was nowhere to be seen on the issue, even though Senator Don Nickles later startled the troops by announcing that the president had supported the bill all along. “That was the first time anybody had heard that,” said a Senate staffer who worked on the bill. “And try to find it in the Record. It’s not there.” Members of Congress are a lot dumber than they make themselves sound in the Congressional Record. They routinely edit what appears there, mostly to clean up their grammar and syntax. Nickles’ line about “the administration” supporting the benefits bill was “redacted” from the Record.

(To observers of the legislative process in Austin, the fight over the federal unemployment bill was remarkably similar to the time in 1999 when Bush killed the James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes bill in Texas. Several Bush surrogates in the Texas Senate worked to kill that bill. For Bush it wasn’t about race, it was a religious-right litmus deal; he would have let it pass if gays and lesbians had not been included under the protections in the act. After the bill was safely deader than Monty Python’s parrot, a Republican senator popped up to announce that the governor had been for it all along.)

While Bush avoided the nation’s unemployed, pressure for extending benefits continued to mount throughout 2002. The lame-duck Congress reported for duty in January 2003, and the extension was passed in one day with the president’s approval. That was when Oklahoma’s Senator Nickles popped up to deliver the president’s ex post facto endorsement of a bill he had never lifted a finger to support. “The president was very interested in having this thing passed,” said Nickles. “And really, I think he was interested in having it passed earlier rather than later.” Earlier would have been, uh, earlier. In time for Julia Jeffcoat.

She would have gotten additional benefits if Congress had passed a bill earlier, or included a reach-back provision picking up the million unemployed workers who had already exhausted their benefits. That would have required nothing more than a wink and a nod from the president and a muzzle for Tom DeLay. Yes, it would have cost an additional $3.4 billion, according to Jessica Goldberg of the Center on Budget Policy Priorities. “Less than four tenths of one percent of the president’s ‘stimulus package,’ ” Goldberg said. “And there was twenty-five billion dollars in the federal Unemployment Trust Fund, which can be spent on nothing else.”

OK, so Dubya did better than his old man and signed a bill that got some help to workers. But in January 2003 he was still promoting his $337 billion dividend tax giveback to rich investors. Two million jobs had disappeared since he took office two years earlier. The unemployment rate in Philadelphia was 8 percent. A million workers had exhausted their benefits while there was $25 billion in the trust fund set aside to cover them.

And Julia Jeffcoat was walking south on Broad Street, her face set hard against the wind, with no idea where to find her next meal.

3.

Class War

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

—MATTHEW 19:24

Too many young people today do not have the same hope for the future that I did when I was growing up. When I was a child, I was full of hope and expectation. Today, there are far too many children in this country who feel trapped in hopeless poverty. They have no expectations.

—B RAPOPORT

Everybody does better when everybody does better.

—W. F. “HIGH” HIGHTOWER, DENISON, TEXAS

OK, so Bernard Rapoport is not an “average American.” Just for starters, he’s the only Jewish, socialist insurance millionaire in Waco, Texas. He’s worth a few units—that’s Texan for a hundred mil. Just to give you an idea, he’s lost at least a unit since the stock market started tanking, and while he ain’t exactly enthusiastic about the result, except for wishing he still had the