SNAP Under Attack, Again...

Food Security Aid is one of the most important strands of the safety net our tax dollars provide. The average monthly SNAP benefit is about is about $287, or about $4.30 per person per day. Conservatives view these benefits as so extreme they just encourage people to live off the dole. Recently the Wall Street Journal noted that the SNAP program is not shrinking along with unemployment rates, another sure sign say conservatives that the benefit "takers" will never leave these programs. The Conservatives will tell you that Snap benefits, formerly Food Stamps, are a bribe, designed to ensure a steady stream of Democratic voters.

SNAP benefits are NOT tied to employment. They are tied to poverty, or to be more precise household income. While there has been a liberalization of eligibility requirements, the Journal article notes in the very last paragraph “The Congressional Budget Office said reinstating eligibility limits would save around $4.5 billion over 10 years.” Benefit increases enacted as part of the economic stimulus amounted to $80 per month for a family of four, about sixty five cents a day per person. Unless Congress takes action this largess will be eliminated in November of this year.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/03/28/1789251/ignore-the-spin-why-food-stamp-enrollment-isnt-shrinking-yet/

You may recall Presidential Candidate Newt Gingrich in the last election cycle making the outrageous claim that African Americans ought to "demand jobs, not food stamps." Approximately 60% of the beneficiaries of the SNAP program are white, but setting that aside, Mr. Gingrich still missed a critical point in his cracker racial outreach program. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that for families with children receiving SNAP benefits 87% are employed within the year they receive benefits. In those households without children 82% worked within a year of receiving the benefit. CBPP goes onto report that more than 60% of SNAP recipients are working while they receive the benefits.

SNAP recipients are already working. The pay they receive is just not adequate for them to pay for the food their families require. The equation seems to be that poor people need both a job and SNAP to survive. Ironically, it appears that the vast majority of poor people would rather work than go hungry or see their children do so. Go figure.  

The reason that SNAP benefits remain at historic highs is that so many are employed at jobs where the wages they earn are not enough to live on. SNAP expenditures are not coming down with the rate of employment-- Which has been reduced by 0.4% in the last six months—because the vast majority of recipients ARE working! All but a small minority of those that receive the benefit for any period of time in a given year work.

The bigger, more critical challenge is that 58% of the jobs in the Obama recovery have been low-pay, low-benefit jobs in the service sector.  These jobs doom people to providing sustenance for their families by relying on the SNAP program. Republicans truly interested in reducing the cost of SNAP ought to be full-on supporters of the living wage movement sprouting up across the country, but the Republican benefactors do not want to pay more to their workers. The party believes that requiring them to do so would be something like Communism. So what are they left with? Paul Ryan has proposed a 17% reduction, an actual cut of projected spending of $135 billion over the next ten years. Since I believe he knows the scope of the challenge (as did the WSJ writer) I’m led to believe that Ryan’s proposals are based in logic that mingles equal portions of impatience, resignation, and ultimately defeat. Is the former VP candidate just giving up on solving any of America’s problems?

Ryan and the Republicans will insist that they do want to help poor people, even as they slash the programs for which they count literally for their family’s survival. Those that make this claim operate in a Republican hierarchy that denies that people go hungry in America. Ben Carson, the great new hope of Republicans, made that exact claim at the C-Pac conference.  Why invest in the truth when making it up is so much easier?

To stimulate the economy Ryan proposes tax code restructuring which would include both cuts in rates and closing some “loopholes”. The plan, a slightly warmed over rehash of the one he and Romney ran on last fall, again claims to remain revenue neutral even as it slashes rates at the top from 39.6% to 25%. Citizens for Tax Justice reviewed the plan and noted that “Even if the wealthy [defined as average income of $3.15 million] gave up all their tax breaks, they'd still wind up paying $203,670 less in taxes [per year]. And if the tax preferences were maintained, their tax burden could be up to $345,640 lighter.” The Republicans and Ryan argue that such a reorganization of the Tax code would liberate the entrepreneurialism of the American people, creating a “roaring job market”. What they fail to explain is how concentrating even more wealth in the hands of an ever smaller group of oligarchs will break the  economic pattern of the past thirty years where ever greater portions of America’s wealth was concentrated in fewer and fewer and fewer hands.

There has been a precipitous decline of the manufacturing base in this country. Union households, once representing one in three American workers, are now less than 10% of the workforce. The good paying jobs that union based factory workers relied on to lift their families are more vivid in sepia toned pictures than they will ever be in Detroit, Flint, or upstate New York for that matter. The median wage has risen 3% in the last 15 years. While inflation has been low, wages have not kept pace with the erosion in purchasing power. In an extended period of stagnant wages everything costs more. Prices for milk, gas and clothes are on a slight but steady upward trend. This has pushed people on the bubble into poverty. It is both simple and tragic, particular so because the deepest belt of Poverty is the rock-ribbed deep south states of the old Confederacy.  Segregation turned out to be a great tool for keeping pressure on low wages. The sons and daughters of the south are still paying for their history. Mississippi, long identified as the state with the most racist excess, has the lowest median income, $36,000, of any state in the nation.

WPA style infrastructure jobs and training and investments in research and technology could form part of an answer. But with the elections over, unemployment is no longer a national priority. Moreover, doing something to lift the plight of the poor is not a Democratic priority. That kind of concern is relegated solely now to the Progressive Caucus. $1.2 trillion in infrastructure investments? Yeah, that’s going to happen. As an alternative, Obama is asking for $50 billion which is so small as to be practically worthless.  

It seems we’re locked in a spiral. The way to our escape as a society and a country is at the moment murky and unclear. Even as the new Pope implores his people to go to “the outskirts where there is suffering, bloodshed, blindness that longs for sight, and prisoners in thrall to many evil masters” our political leaders choose a way of surrender to forces they neither command nor understand. Money over washes our political process in such a way that almost any accommodation to the betterment of the people is met with a walls of bitter resistance, often ironically by those that may have the most to gain by such change.

The cacophony of fear drowns out any sane voice. There is no Dr. King demanding our attention, imploring us to “civilize ourselves by the abolition of poverty.” He has been replaced by the bombastic selfishness of the radio right. Those voices are everywhere and well distributed. Rather than a million strong chorus of voices being raised to solve the country’s problems we have simply settled into our little worlds of self-righteousness. We pick at the scabs of our disagreements, but we expect so much less from our leaders than we ought to.  The left is often knee-jerk in its protection of this president. While I acknowledge the fierce urgency of the moment, I reject the path of rationalizing fear or failure. Maddow, Stewart, and a handful of others aside, too many of us operate merely as blind apologists for an administration that too often fights small fights.   

Bobby Kennedy said, “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” I wonder how America may once again get to the place where dreaming is possible.

Gay Marriage: A Great Day is Coming

It seems many on the right are practically begging the really crazy right to drop their opposition to Gay Marriage. In the past few days Bill O’Reilly and  Reince Priebus made similar remarks. O’Reilly said opponents couldn’t do anything but “thump the bible” which is laughable and shows how callow so much of the opposition is. For the true believers the bible is the whole deal, and thumping it is sort of what they do. Priebus told the party not to act like “Old Testament Heretics” on the subject. Many of us would have said the same thing a decade ago, and Republican operatives would have accused us of being close-minded religious bigots. My, my, my how times change.

A lot of Republicans are having Oh s*** moments. First immigration, now this.

Anyone with a brain, eyes or ears can see the dynamics have shifted. The court may make narrow decisions on the two cases they heard. They could do as little as turn the Prop 8 back to the California courts where it would almost certainly be overturned. Tough the practical effect of legalizing gay marriage in California would be the same, by this reasoning, at least the conservatives on the court could say they didn’t approve gay marriage. That would be cowardly decision, but it is possible. I am no expert, but looks like the Defense of Marriage Act is dead. Knocking this down will not immediately allow gay marriage across the country, but it will make discriminating against committed gay couples in benefits such as insurance immeasurably more difficult and expensive for those that choose to do so.  

Larger issues are at play here. The court will be reviled in some quarters no matter what it decides. In this case I suspect the anger aimed at cramped regressive anti-gay policies may be louder than what the right could muster if the Supreme Court rules across the board to allow gay marriage. Whatever the public anger we see in the wake of bad decisions that maintain marriage inequality, the court is in for something worse, illegitimacy. No matter the decision by 2016, there will be tremendous pressure to revisit whatever limitations that survive this round. With young people supporting gay marriage by 80 to 85% majorities, public opinions are going to continue to swing in the direction of expanded and proper rights for gays. What was a trickle is now a wave and will soon be a tsunami. Ralph Reed, and Hannity, and Mark Levin, and Limbaugh can talk all they want. It's over. It’s so f***ing over. If the court chooses to allow two standards of law, one for gays and one for everyone else, millions of young people are going to say that decision is illegitimate. By extension all these young people will call the court illegitimate as well. Good luck with that.

Many people look at Roe v. Wade and point to the fact that the country was not yet ready for the decision. Ruth Ginsburg a champion of women's rights has indicated some concerns with the way the court decided the decision, essentially granting a new Constitutional right enforceable  nationwide, rather than choosing the more narrow and possible route which was just to overturn the Texas law that was being considered. This would have left it to the states to sort out the mess. Many people believe a narrower decision would have removed a lot of the acrimony that has been sustained for close to 40 years regarding the abortion decision.

While that is a compelling point of view in that case I do not think it will hold in the Gay Marriage cases. This moment is different and generational. There is an ocean between the two sides. Those under 30 not only think gay marriage should be recognized by the state, they think the suggestion otherwise is sort of stupid, a specter of really old and moronically outdated thinking. That's the beauty of being under 30. You get to think things are old and stupid that seemed sane (or something) just a decade earlier. It’s hard to see how the court benefits from having a generation of young people come to decide it's old and stupid. This is especially so when one considers the tide of history on this issue.

I keep thinking about some of the committed gay couples I’ve known over the years. Even as a kid we had an “uncle” who we only learned much later was gay. I think my Catholic, but very tolerant, parents conspired with others of our aunts and uncles to identify him as our uncle so he would be welcomed without penalty or derision into our clan. He lived a committed relationship with another man for a really long time. He passed a few years ago, a lovely man. My brother and I and another fellow rented a duplex apartment in a fine old building in Hoboken for more than a decade. During that entire time, the basement apartment of that same building was rented by a long term committed gay couple. In another place I lived in Hoboken, a man down the hall ministered to and comforted his man, the love of his life, through his terrible agony and eventual death of AIDS. I am not sure all of these couples would have married if the right was available, but there is little doubt in my mind that some of them would have done so.

It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out in terms of divorce rates, numbers of children, their long term performance in schools and careers etc.  I have never understood how conservatives even tried to argue that a house filled with love, no matter the predominant orientation of that love was somehow worse for children than some of the circumstances we see in hetero households they so staunchly defend as the pillar of society.

One thing’s for sure now though. The dynamics have so changed our society is about to undergo a major transformation. In the first weekend Gavin Newsome OK’d gay marriage in San Francisco, the city issued 4,000 licenses to gay couples. Ironically it appears that as the right is widened the people that want to get married are gays. Hetero couples seems increasingly reticent and are marrying later and later. Of course that will change once the backlog is cleared, but there are going to be tens of thousands of gay marriages and that will change us.  In the decades ahead they will do more than read books like “Heather Has Two Mommies”. Heather will write her own book. She will change us and her children, gay or straight, will change us again. We may not get there with the Supreme Courts’ decision this summer, but we will get there soon.

The American Oligarchy and the State of Things

Things are getting really confusing. On Face the Nation last Sunday, House Speaker John Boehner said “We do not have a debt issue right now, but we see it coming. So let’s get ahead of this crisis.” Fair enough, everyone’s entitled to their opinion.

Oh, how quickly we forget. Last year, in October, the then Republican candidate Mitt Romney in  a fundraising message to supporters wrote, "By any rational measure, it's crystal clear we're in the middle of a jobs crisis. My priority is jobs. And from Day One of my presidency, I will lead us out of this crisis." I know, politics, right? Does anyone think he really meant it? Perhaps not. Three weeks after Mother Jones broke the “47%” comments, Romney would have done anything to convince voters he was not planning on using poor people as fertilizer to nurture the soil of his rich friend’s lawns.

Among other Day One promises Romney also pledged to end ObamaCare. In a move certain to set off a trade war which many of his business supporters would not have liked, he also pledged to label China a currency manipulator . He was also going to approve the Keystone pipeline and open every available space to domestic drilling. Then there was welfare reform, 5% discretionary spending cuts, outreach to Congress, labor reform. When we look at the complete gridlock in Washington and how a minority of the majority in one House of Congress has managed to stall progress on almost every single front, it all seems sort of quaint. And embarrassingly naïve.

But let’s not pretend Romney was the only one humping jobs as an election year concern. The Republican platform addressed the issue directly: “The best jobs program is economic growth. We do not offer yet another made-in-Washington package of subsidies and spending to create temporary or artificial jobs. We want much more than that. We want a roaring job market to match a roaring economy. Instead, what this Administration has given us is 42 consecutive months of unemployment above 8 percent. Republicans will pursue free market policies that are the surest way to boost employment and create job growth and economic prosperity for all.”

Since that statement was made the jobs picture has improved from 8.1% to 7.7%. I’m confused. So are we to believe that what was a job crisis then has morphed into a deficit crisis now? Job crisis over, onto the deficit?  

Both the President and the Speaker agree that there is no immediate deficit crisis. Ryan has echoed that. Back in the old days, like oh, say the fall of 2012, everyone seemed to agree that unemployment was major concern, a crisis even.  What happened to that? Black America is still mired in a depression with unemployment just a notch below 14%. Hispanics are only doing slightly better at 9.6%.

The corollary to this is poverty. 50 million in Americans live in poverty. About the same number, a few million less actually (47.0MM), received food security assistance from the government in January. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) has stated that Obama encouraged the growth in the program in order to stimulate the economy. Others have called the program an extension of Obama's "taker" vote buying philosophy. By this reasoning people desperate enough to seek $125 in food aid per month would then be so grateful to Big Daddy government that they would then go the polls to vote Democratic. This argument has the sound of someone who has never needed Food Stamps, or knew anybody that did.

The "taker" argument falls apart when we account for the fact that about 40% of food stamp recipients have a member of the household that works, the clear implication that the wages they earn will not allow them to adequately feed their family. More than 6,000 military families receive food assistance, as do tens of thousands of Wal-Mart employees. All takers I guess. Before we pile all this on Obama, the number of Food Security recipients went from 17 million at the beginning of Bush’s term to 28 million in 2008. The number has been on the rise for a long, long time, largely coinciding with the collapse of the middle class and their relatively well-paying manufacturing jobs. Jobs that have been replaced by low-paying no-benefit service jobs.  A smart  Republican would have noted the high proportion (58%, as reported by CBS News) of these types of jobs that have been part of the Obama recovery. None did.

With so many people in need, and both sides agreeing, at least somewhat recently that jobs, were a crisis concern, why is Paul Ryan, the head of the House Budget Committee proposing a budget that balances within ten years?  I looked through some of what Ryan proposes, and he actually suggests reducing deficit from over 3% of GDP now to below 1% in just two years. In raw dollars he proposes reducing the deficit from just over $800 billion in 2013 to under $100 billion in 2015.

This is where I get confused.

Is this a budget proposal or a Republican campaign platform for 2016?  It would certainly allow them to run on a jobless recovery. Oh wait, they already ran that campaign. Even I was shocked that most of the reduction, the real hard core stuff, comes immediately. Jobs crisis? What crisis? This is a prescription for recession. Even as a liberal I would prefer to see the President offer more forward leaning deficit reductions, especially on Healthcare, if only to quiet the wolves. As Steve Brill’s Time piece points out the amount of waste in the system is staggering. Medicare and Medicaid may be more efficient by a mile than private insurers, but that still leaves billions. Negotiating volume discounts on drugs is but one obvious example. Sad to say this would stymied by deficit hawk Republicans, more interested in protecting their pharmaceutical benefactors than cutting the cost of the programs.

That said the Ryan plan though short on specifics, is just plain mean. It would take the 50 million living in poverty and steer them towards the more comfortable environs of destitution.

The Ryan plan places its full faith in major tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.  This is not polemics it is fact, well obscured by Ryan, but fact nonetheless. Ryan’s 30% cut in Medicaid will have a very profound impact on the poor as would his proposed cuts to Pell Grants.  We can argue as to whether America can afford these programs at current levels, but we ought not to quibble about where the pain of these cuts fall.

Ryan essentially bets that dramatically increasing the wealth of a few million millionaires is the best thing we can do for poor people. Cut the number able to receive food stamps, Pell grants, and help to pay for day care for their kids, and then give the money to their rich neighbors and hope for the best. If Budgets say who you are and what you believe this budget says I don’t give a crap about the poor, working or otherwise, military families, especially those coming back in desperate need of support from the VA, or the state of our educational system. Ryan's budget perpetuates and accelerates the transfer of the nation’s wealth from the middle and bottom rungs of our society to those so far up they cannot see the real suffering around them from the great height of their lofty perch. It is the definition of trickle down. It is a four square argument that says giving more to those at the top is the surest way to aid those at the bottom. I believe the election which just passed is a pretty strong affirmation that this is not who we are, I really do. But this is, nonetheless, a horrific statement of policy.

There are good things in the Ryan Budget, including means testing for Medicare. He takes another whack at Government waste, which everyone knows is a problem, but noone ever does anything about. No real money there, but what the hell. But in a real indication where the money lies, it is mostly just an assault on the poor, middle class, and entitlements. Ryan really has no choice since he wants to fund the tax cuts and balance the budget all at once.

Give Ryan credit for leading with his chin. He wants deep cuts and he wants them now. Well sort of. Much like a Democratic Senator from a purple state expounding on gun control, excuse me if the Ryan plan resonates solely as a political document designed to hit certain buttons with certain segments of the electorate. As a political document it retains his ability to move along with minimal damage to his popularity or future viability as a Presidential candidate without actually legislating or governing.  Nice...

Ryan knows his budget, which continues to receive plaudits for its bravery and honesty with the American people, will never be scrutinized by voters.  Well, alright, that bravery and honesty hokum was more for the 2011 Ryan budget than this one. The Right does not like this budget plan.

Medicaid, pays for healthcare for the poor, but also senior nursing care, and many services for special needs kids in Middle class families. Taken in combination with cuts to Medicare, particularly  a potential raise in the retirement age, this has the potential to have a devastating effect  on those at or near retirement age. Ryan proposes a 30% cut to Medicaid, theorizing that seniors will hit him on Medicare, before they will nail him for Medicaid.

The rights isn't satisfied with hat cut or the overall reduction ins spending. They want more. The Heritage Foundation and others have criticized Ryan’s use of the Fiscal Cliff Tax hikes. Ryan  maintains the tax hikes associated with ObamaCare even as he proposes repeal of the plan, which is of course not gonna happen and is bizarre on the surface.  Either way that's a no go with the Heritage Foundation and other right leaning groups.

Even all that silliness does not go to the heart of Ryan’s plan: Cuts to Medicare. This is where bravery meets political reality and loses badly. A poll conducted by the Kaiser Foundation last April showed a whopping 84  percent were opposed, and 59 percent strongly opposed, to "requiring all seniors to pay higher Medicare premiums.” Americans will accept adjustments to the plan, and potentially some moderately higher costs, but the Kaiser poll makes pretty clear that most expect the government to maintain the plan as is. Structural changes are a pipe dream. No one should know this better than Ryan who demagogued the supposed cuts that Obama put forward on the campaign trail last fall.  

In January, after the elections, the Kaiser Foundation found that 60% were still opposed to further changes to the system. The Kaiser report goes on to note that, “...the past year of debate over the need to make cuts had not greatly altered the general shape of public opinion.” In other words, No Dice. DOA.

The Kaiser Poll also found substantial support for specific elements of ObamaCare, especially Health Insurance exchanges, which addresses the blind fear so many of us have that circumstances at some point will make it impossible to get insurance, except of course through these exchanges. Poll after poll finds that Americans like what ObamaCare does, they just don’t like the program itself. The Republicans know they are on the losing side of this. They constantly  regurgitate the negative poll numbers for  the word Obamacare, even as they ignore the support for so many of the actual elements of the plan. I rcall last fall Romney took a bit of heat for cherry picking parts of the plan obviously favored by the public, even as he repeatedly vowed to repeal the whole deal. What other play do they have?

It does get to be pretty confusing. Why do the Republicans continue to pursue plans that have no chance of passage, and probably wouldn’t even achieve a filibuster proof majority  in a theoretical Republican controlled Senate, which does not exist now, and is, let’s be honest, a long, long ways away?

Could it be all this acrimony has been nothing more than political posturing for the ill-informed followers of fair and balanced? Could it be there is actually no agenda beyond access to power on behalf of the American oligarchs? Is that the state of things?

People keep laughing at the hundreds of millions invested by America’s oligarchy in the last election.  Despite the effective intransigence in the House, everyone keeps pointing to the foolishness of the bets. No one knows for sure but the Koch Brothers “donated” somewhere between $50 and $100 million. Adelson, probably close to $100 million. Texas Home Builder, Bob Perry, threw in for something north of $20 million.  Chemical magnate, Harold Simmons, ponied up $19 million. Another dozen contributors threw in for anywhere between $4.0 million and $10.0 million. A  handful of those supported Obama.   The Washington Post reported last February that just 23 people had fronted over $50 million to the various Republican candidates. This is even before the really big money rolled in.

Why?

Well, let’s see. Obama got his raise in tax rates for those making more than $450,000, but the carried interest deduction remains untouched. Capital gain taxes were adjusted as were taxes on dividends, but we can be sure Warren Buffet will continue to pay a rate substantially below that of his secretary. Those who continue to bury millions in compensation under an impenetrable web of tax lawyers and congressional set asides remain well hidden and off limits.

Over a trillion in corporate profits remains safely protected in foreign bank accounts. Dozens of corporations, including Jack Welch’s beloved GE, continue to earn billions of non-taxed income. Welch, you may recall, claimed Obama was cooking the unemployment numbers in this October tweet: “Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers.” Spoken just like someone who knows what “doing anything” means. GE has paid no corporate income taxes since 2010. In just 2010 and 2011 alone, General Electric earnings were over $25 billion.  Then there’s this: A few days ago the Wall Street Journal reported that GE held over $100 BILLION (with a “B”) in corporate profits overseas, JUST LAST YEAR. Last May CNN reported with some hyperbole that the US now has the highest corporate tax rate if any developed company in the world. To be fair both sides recognize that a 40% rate that no one pays is in no one’s interest. There may be deals out there that lower the rates while increasing revenue and dare we say fairness, but can we please dispense with this charade that suggest that these super high rates are stymying business investment?  

Legislation to address climate change is completely dead, with only Executive action holding out any hope for progress. I doubt that the Koch brothers are offended. I’m sure they see their millions as money well spent, though of course they wanted more. The oil industry continues to receive $5 billion in tax credits and other breaks as encouragement to keep drilling. Last year Exxon had a pre-tax no tax profit of $45 billion. Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans are only too glad to fight that battle for the “American Taxpayer”.

There are lots of footnotes, and yeah buts… to all the stories about corporate taxes, but does anyone really believe that the government has anything like the upper hand is this equation? Large corporations have essentially gamed the system and everyone else is paying for it, especially small and mid-size companies.

Money as always is the root of all evil. The press is full of stories about the incestuous nature of the right wing money machine. Dick Morris and Karl Rove both ran SuperPacs from their well-padded perch on Fair and Balanced. One has to laugh at Rove’s snit with Palin and his outlandish look at poor-man-me “I don't take a dime from my work with American Crossroads. I even pay my own travel expenses, out of my own pocket.” Oh my, he's so giving, a real public servant. Or something.

Rove is worth something north of $6 million. Is he suggesting he’s going to live off that for the rest of his life? Rove, by the way, hammered Palin from his freshly negotiated nest at Fox. Despite News reports to the contrary he signed a contract in January to remain at Fair and Balanced through the 2016 Presidential election. He ain’t going nowhere.

Rove has recently engaged in a fairly public war with the hard right of the party, what even he calls extremists. But last fall the NRA donated $600,000 to Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS. Is there any individual more extreme than LaPierre, any group more out there than the NRA? The state of things? Assault rifle and large magazine bans are unlikely, if not completely dead. Polls show they only garner simple majority support among voters, somewhere between 55% and 60%. Interestingly, the highest opposition comes from those that are shown a picture of the weapons. We forget so easily. Even background checks face an uncertain future, held up by Senator Tom Coburn’s insistence that records for the checks be destroyed, a nod to the paranoid survivalist right.

Immigration is one place where business interests diverge from the base of the Party. Recent events have shown that mainstream Republicans, having spewed their poison for years, are now having a hard time jamming the immigrant hating Jeanie back in the bottle. In response elected Republican officials are floating a plan which would legally sanction a system in America where citizens enjoy one set of rights and support from their government, while undocumented workers, though free from the potential fear of deportation, enjoy a second much lower place. Taxed yes, but without the ability draw from government programs or to vote, and so have representation in the government. Slick one, that. This is how today's conservative reaches out to Hispanics, falsified acceptance masking selfish contempt.  Increasingly it appears that a path to citizenship is a red line, across which few Republicans may cross for fear of a right wing opponent for their party’s nomination for whatever office they hold. Once again the House appears to be a black hole of opposition.

The state of things? You be the judge.

 

The Sequester Blues

As the miniscule flow of cuts required by the sequester of spending starts to take hold across the country, I was struck by the thought that ultimately Americans elected this government. With all the money, and all the cable TV hoo-hah, the political climate we are now enduring is the direct result of our democratic process, the process we selected and the ones we perpetuate with our votes. Even the cascading Big Muddy of unregulated cash brought about by the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision, is really how government works in America today. There are Constitutional methods to overturn Citizen’s United, but the political will even for majorities in the House and the Senate do not exist to bring them forward for consideration, much less approval.

Those actively engaged on both left and right will say “This is not the government I wanted”, and there is of course truth to that, but we should not fool ourselves into thinking that does not mean it is not the government we voted for. For those angry that our leaders no longer lead, and I am one of them, we would do well to remember the random, consequential, and actually pretty limited times that they actually did. Over our entire history for every profound historical event like the Voting Rights acts, which required courage, governance, and superb strategic thinking there is a jarring counterpoint of political faint-heartedness. Roosevelt engaged an isolationist America in a land war in Europe and the World only after a prolonged period of caution. Concerned over public opinion, Roosevelt never addressed America’s involvement in the War from the moral high ground of preventing the impending Holocaust of Jews. Ultimately, United States involvement was precipitated by the attack at Pearl Harbor which led most Americans to feel that without action their very lives were in danger. Narrow self-interest trumps moral high ground nearly every time.

More recently America was provoked into a needless war in Iraq again primarily motivated and perhaps manipulated by concerns about our own security. I watched Maddow’s documentary on the run-up to the Iraq war a few weeks ago. There is little doubt that public opinion was manipulated, and that wild promises were made about the costs and ease of both entry and exit, but anyone paying attention might should have known that. But we would do well to recall that the Iraq War resolutions were supported by 126 Democrats in the House, and 29 in the Senate and so passed by overwhelming votes. Both current Secretary of State Kerry and former Secretary of State Clinton voted to give Bush Authorization to enter the war, the resolution citing the "threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region” that Iraq’s weapons of Mass destruction posed. Who wants to be on the underside of the much discussed mushroom cloud? Considering these votes, despite the revisionist anti-war fervency of later years, there clearly was political will amongst our leaders and the electorate in general to attack Iraq. What germinated from that consensus was a war of choice, against an enemy who it would turn out posed no threat to America, or even our allies.

The Iraq war will cost America something north of a trillion dollars and is already well past $700 billion. Think about that when you hear another Congressman talk about the immorality of the deficits we pass onto our children and grandchildren. What after all is more immoral than a war of choice, fought under false pretense, with the added component of being paid for through deficits financed by the Chinese? Listen as our leaders talk about the “stupidity” of the blunt instrument of sequestration, but remember that whoever proposed it, sequestration was legislation, passed by both Houses of Congress as Part of the Budget Control Act of 2011. Voters, angry with their political leadership, are not lacking in responsibility for these decisions.

The irony of the current moment is both illuminating and infuriating. Despite the attacks we now see in the Supreme Court, most Americans retain great pride in the progress which the country has made in securing racial equality. But I wonder as did Maddow on Jon Stewart’s show this week, how no one’s head explodes when considering the juxtaposition of official Washington erecting a statue in honor of Rosa Parks on the same day the Voting Rights Act comes under sustained attack in the Supreme Court. Scalia’s comments whatever their motivation spoke for the bitter white minority who are just so fed up with the sense of “entitlement” perpetuated by what they perceive to be uppity blacks. Justice Scalia’s resentment speaks for millions of whites angry that the country is no longer theirs, and who see their majority political status slipping away.

For all the talk about huge philosophical differences between the parties, is there any difference more profound than the racial and socio-economic divide? This is precisely who we are.

We can blame our politicians all we want,  but this Government, though greatly gerrymandered through the influence of private interests, and divided along every point of demarcation between one segment of the population and another, that too is who we are. Once a coalition of Americans sought to secure racial equality, ease the suffering of the poor, and build a broadly egalitarian society. Today in America there is no politically determinative consensus to do almost anything. A lot of us have just given up. A heartless selfishness always the province of the privileged now infects voters of all economic backgrounds. We no longer believe we can alleviate the suffering and desperation of poverty, so millions of Americans vote the “Why Bother” ticket and don’t even show up at the polls.  Chronic joblessness brought about by globalization, and an educational system not up to the task of responding to the crisis, does not raise calls for reform that have a chance of effectuating legislation. To the extent that there is fervor often it seems that it is raised to block movement. Americans are far more likely to be against something, than for anything.

America no longer dreams of big things, such that a collation of convenience barely exists to do small things. I read somewhere that in the last term of Congress measures were passed to rename over 100 post offices, which must seem bitterly ironic to a postal worker fighting to survive the financial state of the USPS. Meanwhile the Chinese are graduating more engineers than America, even as they invest nearly a trillion in green energy and another trillion in high speed rail.

Polls indicate broad support for stricter gun safety regulations, measures to arrest the dangers of climate change, immigration reform, AND sane budget solutions, but at least right now, all of these measures are in doubt.  It is easy to place the blame for that at the feet of a Republican minority in the House determined to undermine any efforts at governance, but that somehow seems too easy to me. Most who reject the blaming the House Republicans then make the leap to blaming lack of leadership from the President. The two parties pass the provenance of the sequester around in such a way that one might be start to believe that if the party that suggested it first was finally determined then the way out might also be assured. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Every battle now seems to lead to inconclusive, unsatisfying, results. Barely four months after a 5-million vote victory and the soaring rhetoric of the inauguration press reports increasingly point to Obama’s 2014 congressional strategy to dislodge Republicans in the House.  Why worry about governing, let’s just get on to the next election? I wonder who really cares if Hillary or Biden engage for the Democratic nomination if the result is four more years of this dreck. The media, obsessed with the horserace, winners and losers and so forth, leaves scant time to address the issues for which all of this is so critically important.

No policy disaster ever leads to soul searching or admission of blame. Johnson and Westmoreland, their faults notwithstanding, at least had the humanity to be tortured by their Vietnam era decisions.  Now that 60,000 are dead in Syria can we dispense with the idea that Iraq was fought for some reason other than to prtect our own economic interests? Bush’s bathroom paintings suggests some degree of introspection, but in recent comments neither he nor Cheney see any need to revisit their decision to take the country to War in Iraq. Cheney’s language is more politically inflammatory, but is there really any difference when one considers the results of their folly, not only economic but more importantly human: almost 4,500 dead Americans; over 100,000 Iraqis killed; tens of thousands wounded Americans. Moreover, the country is now so broke and so stingy that veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars wait for months to have their VA claims adjudicated and resolved. Each day about 20 veterans commit suicide. Then there is the $700 billion and counting debt.  VA claims will go on for decades at the cost of billion a year. $85 billion in sequester cuts applied with a dull ax rather than a well-defined scalpel are an insult in the face of such war-time, militarist, folly.

Meanwhile voters, like politicians, see only the fault in the other. We too easily forget that broad determinative political consensus that led—not only to colossal error—but to so much progress over the course of American history. While there is and always has been opposition to almost anything important and enduring America has set out to do, our democracy required that it be overcome and it was. Even the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which led to the Interstate Highway System had opponents in Congress. Both the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed with overwhelming support despite heated, often violently expressed, opposition. Johnson saw overwhelming votes as a requirement to legitimize the legislation in the eyes of the country and the Senate master worked the Chamber like no President since Lincoln. In the streets Dr. King, John Lewis and others subjected themselves to firehouses and attack dogs in Birmingham and later took a horrific beating at the hands of Sheriff Clark and his vigilante posse on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in order to create a climate for passage. Politicians passed the laws its true, but legislation was enacted because a national consensus was in place. Voters that want change, tend to get it. Today division at every level prevents even a consensus for what is needed.

Ignorance is part of the problem. Ignorance is not just limited to the stunning proportion of Republicans, as high as 50% among Mississippi Republicans for example, still questioning the provenance and the religious background of the President. Americans are less knowledgeable about our history than any time in the last hundred years. Forget lagging science scores, studies have shown that American High School seniors are nearly illiterate when it comes to basic knowledge of American History. Despite three 24-7 cable news networks, most Americans don’t know very much about the budget issues being debated. A poll this week showed that only about one in four were even following the sequester drama as it played out. This does not prohibit many from extreme emotional commitments to one side or the other, but extremism is no guarantee of either knowledge or wisdom.

Steven Brill’s brilliant and important article in Time on health care costs garners a fraction of the attention as that generated by the celebrity flavor of the week. An ill-informed electorate is easily fooled or distracted, and then becomes fertile ground for solutions that even when one layer is peeled away are clearly indicated as no solution at all. Healthcare costs are crippling America and will continue to do so whether born by business interests and private individuals (the Republican plan) or whether they are funded in public-private schemes (the Democratic Plan). Yet all or most of the cuts will not touch healthcare and entitlements.

Instead as always the poor, especially women and children, and the working class will bear the brunt of the cuts. I don’t know the accuracy of the CBO claim of job losses totaling 700,000 or so, but if correct that will require six months of recovery in today’s current climate. This is met with nothing but a shrug. Those are not bankers or regional sales managers that are going to be hurt, they are teachers, policemen, fire fighters, park service rangers, home care workers and working parents who will not be able to work for lack of daycare. Since this is the pain we are inflicting, it seems to me that that is where the broad political consensus is. This is the pain we are willing to accept.

Too Big to Fail has metastasized into Too Big to Prosecute or Regulate. Despite bitter anger on both the far left and the far right about that, Too Big to Whatever is where the operational consensus lies now, what both sides, and the deeply invested and entrenched business interests, are willing to accept. America wants both low taxes and expensive, largely unregulated, health care markets, so we’re locked into the inefficient and costly crisis-to-crisis budget management in Washington for the foreseeable future.  Washington could trim almost everything, turning the nation in one massive Pottersville, the fictional home of sleaze and decay at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, but if Healthcare costs and defense are not brought under control, the deficits will continue to soar. Neither Party has honestly spoken to the American people about that.

To be sure deep pocketed financial interests have corrupted dialogue on almost every subject. When was it not so? Slavery and its offspring Jim Crow were, after all, economic models designed to ensure inexpensive labor.  Subjugated African Americans were not only low-cost, their presence provided downward pressure on the wages of whites. It is no accident that the slave states of the Deep South still lead the nation in Poverty and almost every other Standard of Living measure. Poor Southern whites who helped perpetuate the racially segregated status quo in the final analysis also turn out to be among its longest lasting victims.

So I got to wondering yesterday: Where in the shadow of this really stupid, really silly, sequester is the consensus for governance? How might Americans break from the habit of peeking in on the chaos in the Capital, decrying both sides with scorn? How might Americans come to see the actionable role we can and must play in effecting change? How might the vast middle be moved to understanding once again that their own future is inextricably bound to that of the poorest and most needy among us, that this is not only a moral requirement but a practical governing one? These are cynical times indeed, shamefully so, but how might each of us consider our role in creating a more informed debate?

Last week over several plane rides, I read through a pile of articles I had been accumulating on subjects ranging from Wall Street reform to fracking. My wife, laughed at me because the pile had been there so long it was getting close to two inches thick. Included was a series I pulled down from the Sam Harris Blog on guns and violence (http://www.samharris.org/) that really challenged me to reconsider my own point of view. Harris has a complex view of the gun argument. He supports almost all of the reforms out there—background checks, limitations on assault weapons and magazines, and a much higher standard for registration. Despite all this he is highly critical of the misinformed views, statements, and positions of the many gun control advocates, going so far as to point what he perceives to be the essential truth of what many of us believe to be the outlandish statements made by the NRA these last few weeks. All told I read three lengthy essays, about 30 pages in total. The essays were at points infuriating, but they were not dogmatic and his theoretical thread was never less than thought provoking.

Even though Mr. Harris is on that road, more than anything he made me consider turning off the information superhighway, at least onto a somewhat less travelled bi-way, more contemplative and less reactionary. We spent so much time being offended these days it seems we barely pause to decipher what is truly offensive—the hunger of a child or the ignorance of an illiterate boy or girl in his or her junior year of high school- as opposed to what offends our sensibility or political belief system which is in the end, well, just foolish. Bob Woodward’s hoary grandstanding this past week is but one example.

Maybe for me at least, it’s just time to think. Someone else can figure out the sequester.