In my last article, I shared social activist Sheila Steele’s statement that:

"we need to find a way to get malice into the criminal code and provide severe penalties for it."

I feel that we cannot ignore the malice perpetrated by governmental officials while at the same time we experience the injustice caused by the judicial trend to eliminate punitive damages along with the insidious introduction of Tort Reform. In the presence of neo-conservative newspeak it becomes extremely important to understand the legal meaning of the term "malice." This term should be appropriately understood by all, including the priesthood of the newspeak lawyers.

A cursory search on the Internet provided me with the following common legal definition of malice: "A wicked intention to do an injury Publication of defamatory material 'with knowledge that it was false or reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.'"

Sheila Steele felt there was malice in the prosecution of the Klassen family for the sexual abuse of their foster children. I feel there is malice in President Bush’s assertion that the US economy is recovering because of "the fact that we are now increasing jobs or the fact that unemployment is now down to 5.6 percent."

I appreciate the ongoing writing of economist Paul Krugman mostly because his writings are reasonable to understand and because they are void of the demagogic newspeak so pervasive today. In reviewing the latest books authored by Kevin Phillips and Ron Suskind, Krugman writes

"Since the late 1970s, the top1 (one) percent of the population has more than doubled its share of national income, and the top 0.01 percent has increased its share by a factor of six. Today there is, to an extent not seen since the 1920s, a substantial class of people wealthy enough to form their own dynasties."

With this discriminatory socio-economic background and with the further discriminatory socio-economic policies of the Bush administration it becomes apparent to me that Bush is malicious when he asserts that jobs are now increasing and that unemployment is down to 5.6 percent. This reminds me of the same kind of fraudulent assertion made by our Saskatchewan government when they were cheering up the economic news that Saskatchewan had one of the lowest unemployment rates while they were covering up the fact that the labour force was emigrating to greener pastures. This newspeak is a sham!

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the unemployment rate was at 5.6 percent in January 2004 and that the number of unemployed persons was 8.3 million. The bureau also reports that the ratio of employed people over the total population was 64.4 percent in January 2001 and it was 62.4 percent in January 2004; that is this ratio decreased by 2 percent in three years. We also know that the total population has been increasing in the last many years, however let us consider the reasonable stationary population of 292,500,000 between the years 2001 and 2004.

We should ask president Bush this question: if 8.3 million people were unemployed in January 2004, what happened to those 5,850,000 (.02 x 292,500,000) people who were working in January 2001 and who are not working in January 2004? Did they all retire?

References

Pertinent articles published in Ensign

NBC News Transcript for Feb. 8th. Guest: President George W. Bush http://www.msnbc.msn.com/ID/4179618

Lectric Law Library's on Malice http://www.lectlaw.com/def2/m075.htm http://www.lectlaw.com/def2/m006.htm

Injusticebusters Web site managed by Sheila Steele http://www.injusticebusters.com

Krugman, Paul Books Review. American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, by Kevin Phillips; The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, by Ron Suskind New York Books, Volume 51, Number 3 · February 26, 2004 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16911

deSantis, Mario Honorable Janice McKinnon says: Saskatchewan is the Star of the Nineties December 4, 2000 Ensign, http://www.ftlcomm.com:16080/ensign/desantisArticles/2000_200/desantis277/EcDevNovStats.html

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey Data extracted on: February 10, 2004 http://data.bls.gov/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?data_tool=latest_numbers&series_id=LNS12300000