The Real Threat to Heterosexual Marriage: The Economy and Straight Men

If one listens to the Christofascists and the professional Christians who have made a cottage industry out of demonizing gays, educated single women, and of course, racial minorities, the number one threat to straight marriages is loving same sex couples getting married in civil ceremonies.   Indeed, same sex marriages according to the Christofascists threaten Western Civilization itself.   Interestingly, the Pew Research Center has released the results of a new study that find that the real threats to marriage are (i) the bad economy - which is a result of the GOP policies the Christofascists support - that prevents young men from finding decent, steady jobs, and (ii) a shortage of non-dead beat young men.  The take away is that if the Christofascists truly support the "sanctity of marriage" - which they don't - they would be supporting jobs programs, infrastructure investment, and economic stimulus programs.  A piece in Salon looks at the Pew findings.  Here are excerpts:

In 2012, a record one-in-five Americans 25 or older had never been married, the Pew Research Center reported today. This wasn't surprising, as matrimony has been on a decline for decades now. However, Pew did offer an extremely elegant, two-part illustration of the role economics have played in that process.

Part I: What are America’s young, unmarried women looking for in a mate? A steady job.

Part II: What do young, unmarried men lack? Steady jobs. For every 100 never married women between the ages of 25 and 34, there are just 91 employed and never-married men the same age. Where once America had a surplus of working single men, now it has a shortage.

A dearth of eligible bachelors isn't the only reason marriage has been on the wane. Young people are getting married later in part because they spend more time in school. Back in the day, couples got hitched, then got settled financially; today, they prefer to get their finances in line first. Oh, and then there's birth control, changing social mores about sex out of marriage, etc.

But economics are an obvious and unavoidable dimension of the issue. That's why it's far-fetched to think we can revive the institution of marriage in a meaningful way without addressing the underlying forces that have left young men in such shabby financial shape.  

 Despite these realities, don't expect the Christofascists to change their politics or cease demonizing gays.  The real threat that gays - and our increasing acceptance in society - is that we make it harder and harder for Christofascists to continue to cling to their myth based religious beliefs.  For those afraid of thinking for themselves, nothing is more terrifying than facing the reality that much - if not most - of the Bible is fiction.   Adam and Eve never existed, so get over it!!

Senate Reaches Possible Deal To Restore The Jobless Benefits - Will the GOP House Kill it?

This blog looks at hypocrisy on many fronts.  Outside of religious institutions and misnamed "family values" groups, few organizations provides more examples of hypocrisy than the Republican Party which claims to embrace Christian values even as it presses policies that are the antithesis of the Gospel message.  Nowhere is this hypocrisy more egregious than  the GOP's treatment of the poor and the unemployed who are viewed as disposable garbage even as the GOP and its"godly folk" supporters congratulate themselves on their feigned piety.  Now, the U.S. Senate has structured a compromise that would restore unemployment benefits to millions of the long term uninsured who were kicked off of benefit back around the Christnas holiday.  The question will now be whether or not the GOP controlled House of Representatives kills the effort.  Here are highlights from Think Progress:

After yanking the safety net out from underneath two million Americans in December, Congress may finally be ready to restore jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed. At least, for a few months, if the Republican-controlled House will agree to take up a long-awaited Senate compromise.

A group of senators reportedly agreed to a compromise that would reinstate the federal emergency unemployment compensation (EUC) program on Thursday afternoon. The deal would apply retroactively, meaning that the two million job-seekers who have gone without EUC checks since Congress let the program expire on December 28 would see back payments from the program. But, going forward, the agreement only extends the program by five months, meaning that it would lapse all over again in late May without a more permanent fix.

The EUC program, which serves those who have exhausted state-level jobless benefits but are still looking for work, was a casualty of Congress’ determination to reduce deficit. Even though conservatives in Congress have a long history of supporting the EUC program, they blocked an extension of it this time around by insisting that it be paid for through spending cuts elsewhere.

Lawmakers couldn’t agree on a method to pay for the program — which, like other safety net programs, actually saves the economy money on the whole by boosting the consumer spending that fuels job creation — and the program was left to expire.

At the time, 1.3 million people relied on those benefits. As the weeks passed and more job-seekers exhausted state aid, that number has climbed up over 2 million. A cumulative 2.3 million children live with unemployed parents who saw their federal benefits cut off.

Thursday’s deal shows that Congress’s obsession with deficit reduction hasn’t changed. The Senate deal pays for its brief EUC extension by allowing companies to continue under-paying into their pension funds, as well as extending some customs fees that were set to expire, according to a National Journal report on the compromise.

As Senators left the jobless without benefits over the last 10 weeks, the Congressional Budget Office reported that Washington had already slayed its deficit dragons; the nonpartisan agency now projects a budget deficit of just 3 percent of GDP this year and 2.6 percent of GDP next year.

In the meantime, the loss of federal benefits sucked billions of dollars out of state economies, which made the road back to gainful employment even longer for the long-term jobless.

The GOP's Corrosive Push for Austerity

To listen to GOP demagogues one would think they gave at least a slight thought about the lies they are destroying as their policies continue to create a permanent under class.  The true focus of the GOP is the wealthy and the incredibly selfish members of the Christofascist/Tea Party base of the party.  These folks truly do not care about the fellow citizens despite all their self congratulatory back patting and feigned piety.  An op-ed in the New York Times looks at the society cost that the GOP obsession with budget cuts and lower taxes is fueling.  It's not pretty and the future consequences will be even uglier as wealth disparities continue to soar and social mobility decreases.  Here are column excerpts:

F.D.R. told us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. But when future historians look back at our monstrously failed response to economic depression, they probably won’t blame fear, per se. Instead, they’ll castigate our leaders for fearing the wrong things.

But while debt fears were and are misguided, there’s a real danger we’ve ignored: the corrosive effect, social and economic, of persistent high unemployment. And even as the case for debt hysteria is collapsing, our worst fears about the damage from long-term unemployment are being confirmed. 

Now, some unemployment is inevitable in an ever-changing economy. Modern America tends to have an unemployment rate of 5 percent or more even in good times. In these good times, however, spells of unemployment are typically brief. Back in 2007 there were about seven million unemployed Americans — but only a small fraction of this total, around 1.2 million, had been out of work more than six months. 

Then financial crisis struck, leading to a terrifying economic plunge followed by a weak recovery. Five years after the crisis, unemployment remains elevated, with almost 12 million Americans out of work. But what’s really striking is the huge number of long-term unemployed, with 4.6 million unemployed more than six months and more than three million who have been jobless for a year or more. Oh, and these numbers don’t count those who have given up looking for work because there are no jobs to be found. 

It goes without saying that the explosion of long-term unemployment is a tragedy for the unemployed themselves. But it may also be a broader economic disaster.  The key question is whether workers who have been unemployed for a long time eventually come to be seen as unemployable, tainted goods that nobody will buy.  .   .   .   .   there is, unfortunately, growing evidence that the tainting of the long-term unemployed is happening as we speak. .   .   .   .  a rising number of job openings doesn’t seem to do much to reduce their numbers. It’s as if employers don’t even bother looking at anyone who has been out of work for a long time. 

[W]orkers who reported having been unemployed for six months or more got very few callbacks, even when all their other qualifications were better than those of workers who did attract employer interest.   So we are indeed creating a permanent class of jobless Americans. 

And let’s be clear: this is a policy decision. The main reason our economic recovery has been so weak is that, spooked by fear-mongering over debt, we’ve been doing exactly what basic macroeconomics says you shouldn’t do — cutting government spending in the face of a depressed economy. 

It’s hard to overstate how self-destructive this policy is. Indeed, the shadow of long-term unemployment means that austerity policies are counterproductive even in purely fiscal terms. Workers, after all, are taxpayers too; if our debt obsession exiles millions of Americans from productive employment, it will cut into future revenues and raise future deficits. 

Our exaggerated fear of debt is, in short, creating a slow-motion catastrophe. It’s ruining many lives, and at the same time making us poorer and weaker in every way. And the longer we persist in this folly, the greater the damage will be.

The Abandonment of the Unemployed

It's a sad commentary on the state of U.S. politics that there seems to have been a near complete abandoment of the unemployed. The most glaring disconnect is, of course, amongst Republicans and their Christianist allies who give great lip service to worshiping religion and the Bible, but who seem to have utterly forgotten the Gospel message of giving aid to the poor and unfortunate. Too me, it is yet another aspect of so-called conservative Christianity becoming an increasingly self-centered and hate based belief system where anyone outside the Christianist tent is deemed expendable - if not in need of eradication. Many are unemployed through no fault of their own - I have a friend who lost his job in the mortgage industry who spent months looking for work before securing a less than desirable job. Rather than deal with this serious problem, the GOP prefers to defend DOMA and push insane bills like that of Randy Forbes discussed in previous pot this morning. Paul Krugman has a column in the New York Times that looks at this disturbing phenomenon. Here are some highlights:
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More than three years after we entered the worst economic slump since the 1930s, a strange and disturbing thing has happened to our political discourse: Washington has lost interest in the unemployed.
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Jobs do get mentioned now and then — and a few political figures, notably Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, are still trying to get some kind of action. But no jobs bills have been introduced in Congress, no job-creation plans have been advanced by the White House and all the policy focus seems to be on spending cuts.
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So one-sixth of America’s workers — all those who can’t find any job or are stuck with part-time work when they want a full-time job — have, in effect, been abandoned.
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[W]e’re well on the way to creating a permanent underclass of the jobless. Why doesn’t Washington care? Part of the answer may be that while those who are unemployed tend to stay unemployed, those who still have jobs are feeling more secure than they did a couple of years ago.
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Yet polls indicate that voters still care much more about jobs than they do about the budget deficit. So it’s quite remarkable that inside the Beltway, it’s just the opposite. What makes this even more remarkable is the fact that the economic arguments used to justify the D.C. deficit obsession have been repeatedly refuted by experience.
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I still don’t know why the Obama administration was so quick to accept defeat in the war of ideas, but the fact is that it surrendered very early in the game. In early 2009, John Boehner, now the speaker of the House, was widely and rightly mocked for declaring that since families were suffering, the government should tighten its own belt. That’s Herbert Hoover economics, and it’s as wrong now as it was in the 1930s. But, in the 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama adopted exactly the same metaphor and began using it incessantly.
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So who pays the price for this unfortunate bipartisanship? The increasingly hopeless unemployed, of course. And the worst hit will be young workers — a point made in 2009 by Peter Orszag, then the White House budget director.
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So the next time you hear some Republican declaring that he’s concerned about deficits because he cares about his children — or, for that matter, the next time you hear Mr. Obama talk about winning the future — you should remember that the clear and present danger to the prospects of young Americans isn’t the deficit. It’s the absence of jobs. But, as I said, these days Washington doesn’t seem to care about any of that.

Will Obama Seize the Opportunity and Be a Leader? I'm Not Holding My Breath

One of the great frustrations for me - and many others that I know - with the Obama presidency is that we thought we were voting for someone who would be a leader. Instead of the leader we had hoped for, we got a generally spineless follower who is all about pretty statements and zero action. To make matters worse, Obama continues to reach out to those who would not only bite his hand, but would preferably see him driven from office as an utter failure. Even Pavlov's dog figured out reality more rapidly than our faux fierce advocate int the White House. The irony is, of course, that the GOP is in many ways - other than formulating anti-Democrat and anti-liberal slogans - in total disarray and the party base is a case of the inmates now being in control of the asylum. Even Lindsay Graham, a/k/a the Palmetto Queen, sees to viable 2012 GOP presidential candidate among the current field of would be candidates. Making the GOP effort more difficult is the fact that to secure the votes needed in a primary from the GOP base, a candidate must espouse views that may well make them radioactive to the larger electorate. Frank Rich in his column in the New York Times looks at the lay of the land and asks whether or not Obama will seize the opportunity at hand. Sadly, based on his past obtuseness, I suspect the answer is "NO." Here are column highlights:
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THE G.O.P. has already reached its praying-for-a-miracle phase — hoping some neo-Reagan will emerge to usurp the tired field. Trump! Thune! T-Paw! Christie! Jeb Bush! Soon it’ll be time for another Fred Thompson or Rudy groundswell. But hardly had CPAC folded its tent than a new Public Policy Polling survey revealed where the Republican base’s heart truly remains — despite the new civility and the temporary moratorium on the term “job-killing.” The poll found that 51 percent of G.O.P. primary voters don’t believe that the president was born in America and that only 28 percent do. (For another 21 percent, the jury is still out, as it presumably is on evolution as well.)
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The party leadership is no less cowed by that majority today than it was pre-Tucson. That’s why John Boehner, appearing on “Meet the Press” last weekend, stonewalled David Gregory’s repeated queries asking him to close the door on the “birther” nonsense. (“It’s not my job to tell the American people what to think,” Boehner said.) The power of the G.O.P.’s hard-core base may also yet deliver a Palin comeback no matter what the rest of the country thinks of her. In the CNN poll nearly two weeks after Tucson, Republicans still gave her a 70 percent favorable approval rating, just behind Huckabee (72 percent) and ahead of Romney (64 percent).
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An opposition this adrift from reality — whether about Obama’s birth certificate, history unfolding in the Middle East or the consequences of a federal or state government shutdown — is a paper tiger. It’s a golden chance for the president to seize the moment. What we don’t know is if he sees it that way. As we’ve learned from his track record both in the 2008 campaign and in the White House, he sometimes coasts at these junctures or lapses into a pro forma bipartisanship that amounts, for all practical purposes, to inertia.
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Obama’s outspokenness about the labor battle in Wisconsin offers a glimmer of hope that he might lead the fight for what many Americans, not just Democrats, care about — from job creation to an energy plan to an attack on the deficit that brackets the high-end Bush-era tax cuts with serious Medicare/Medicaid reform and further strengthening of the health care law. Will he do so? The answer to that question is at least as mysterious as the identity of whatever candidate the desperate G.O.P. finds to run against him.

Why Are a Recoed Number of Americans Living In Poverty?

The caption of this post comes directly from a Time article that looks at the abysmal state of the "American Dream" in the aftermath of 8 years of misrule by Chimperator Bush and the GOP Congress. Yes, Obama has dropped the ball and dropped it badly. But the main obstacle to helping fellow citizens are Republicans and members of the Tea Party who care nothing for the poor, the sick or the homeless - even though the vast majority of them outwardly wrap themselves in the flag and religion. Indeed, most of the Gospel message is ignored and/or thrown into the trash by these self-centered hypocrites. I enjoy money and the good life as much as the next person, but I do NOT condone leaving families homeless and hungry while I strive to hoard money and possessions for myself - all as I wear religion on my sleeve. Unfortunately, the media - including Time - are all too reticent to go after the Christianists and the GOP and label them to be the frauds, liars and hypocrites that they are based on objective fact. Here are some story highlights:
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The US Census Bureau is out with its annual report on poverty and incomes today and the results are striking: The number of people living in poverty in the US is at an all time high. The last time this many people were living in poverty in the US was in the late 1950s. In 2009, 43.6 million people lived on the equivalent of less than $5,500 a year. That was up from 39.8 million Americans in 2008. The 2009 number means that more than 1 in every 7 Americans live in poverty.
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Why is poverty a worse problem in this recession? It comes back to the particularly sticky unemployment problem this time around. Poverty is certainly not helped by jumps in unemployment, but the big driver of poverty is not just joblessness but persistent unemployment. And people loosing their job and not being about to get back into the workforce has been a particularly bad problem in this recession. In August, the percentage of unemployed people who have been out of a job more than six months was 42% [See chart below]. Second, income equality is a lot worse in the US than it used to be. The Census measures inequality by something called the Gini index. Back at the beginning of the 1980s, the Gini index stood at 0.374. It is now 0.458. That's a jump of 22%. And when you have more people living on the edges of the income scale, unemployment can quickly push the people on the bottom into poverty.
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The problem is these two issues, long-term unemployment and income inequality, while made worse by recessions, are not just recession problems. They are the result of big structural problems in the economy. Recovery or not, high poverty rates may be with us for some time.

Are the Democrats Trying to Lose in November?

Frankly, my frustration with Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats seems to increase almost every passing day. It's to the point that it seems they want to lose horrifically come November's mid-terms. Otherwise, why would a party that still holds commanding majorities - at least for now - in Congress (1) fail to push for needed jobs legislation and (2) have a president who simply refuses to get on the bully pulpit and go on the attack against Republican obstruction and flat out lies. And why aren't they tying the tea party crowd and Sarah Palin - which a majority of Americans deem scary - firmly around the GOP's neck? Frank Rich looks at the potential coming debacle and the terrifying policies the GOP would bring in should they triumph in November largely because the Democrats have sat on their hands, demoralized their own base and done little to prove they can deliver effectively on campaign promises. The entire approach to the Party base has been you need to support us because they other guys are worse/scary. It is driving me crazy. Here are highlights from Rich's column:
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The 2010 campaign against the Bush administration is in full cry, with President Obama leading the charge. The Republicans are “betting on amnesia,” he confidently told the claque at a recent fund-raiser. . . . Sounds plausible, but it’s Obama who’s on the wrong side of that bet, to his own political peril.
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Betting on amnesia is almost always a winning, not a losing, wager in America. Angry demonstrators at health care town-hall meetings didn’t remember that Medicare is a government program, and fewer and fewer voters of both parties recall that the widely loathed TARP was a Bush administration creation supported by the G.O.P. Congressional leadership.
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The president is also wrong when he says that every single current G.O.P. idea is a Bush idea. Many are not. And those that are not are far more radical. A political campaign built on Obama’s faulty premises cannot stand — or win.
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Bleak as this picture looks for the Democrats, it is so only up to a point. No one knows what will happen on an Election Day almost three months away. One encouraging sign for the party in power is the over-the-top triumphalism of the right.
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But rather than wait for miracles or pray that Bushphobia will save the day, Democrats might instead start playing the hand they’ve been dealt. Elections, the cliché goes, are about the future, not the past. At the very least they’re about the present. It’s time voters were told just how far right the G.O.P. has lurched since Bush returned to Texas. And the White House might also at long last — at very long last — craft a compelling message, not to mention a plan, to offer real hope to the jobless.
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Some 16.5 percent of America’s workers are now either unemployed and trying to find a job, involuntarily working part time, or have stopped looking for work altogether. That figure doesn’t even include the many Americans who’ve had to settle for jobs for which they are overqualified.
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[W]hat we can discern of the Republican “ideas” lying in wait almost makes Bush’s conservatism actually seem compassionate. The public is largely unaware of this because the conservative establishment in both Washington and the press has been relentless in its effort to separate the G.O.P. from the excesses of the Palin-Fox-Beck-Breitbart bomb throwers and from wacky Tea Party senatorial candidates like Sharron Angle of Nevada and Rand Paul of Kentucky.
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The leaders who would actually take over should the Republicans regain Congress are far closer to the revolutionaries than most voters imagine. . . . . Once that election is won, the road will be clear and the ideologues will take over the asylum. Ryan’s radicalism will be abetted by the new House speaker, John Boehner, who didn’t even wait for the BP well to be plugged to announce that “a moratorium on new federal regulations” would be “a great idea.”
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In the theoretically more sober Senate, the G.O.P.’s rightward shift is arguably even more drastic. . . . . Now we have a Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, joined by such onetime “moderates” as John McCain and Charles Grassley, calling for hearings to “look into” the 14th Amendment. That Reconstruction landmark, guaranteeing citizenship to anyone born in America, was such a prideful accomplishment of the old Party of Lincoln that the official G.O.P. Web site has been showcasing it to counter the Republicans’ current identity as a whites-only country club.
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The Hispanic-bashing has gotten so ugly that Michael Gerson, the former Bush speechwriter, wrote last week that Graham and McCain “may never fully recover” their reputations.
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But even if the Democrats sharpen their attack, they are doomed to fall short if they don’t address the cancer in the American heart — joblessness. This requires stunning emergency action right now . . . The Democrats have already retreated from immigration and energy reform. If they can’t make the case to Americans like Alexandra Jarrin that they offer more hope for a job than a radical conservative movement poised to tear down what remains of the safety net, they deserve to lose.

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The thought of the Republicans back in charge is indeed frightening. Political junkies of the middle and left know this, but too amny voters who don't start paying attention untill the last minute do not. The Democrats need to do something now to show they can actually govern and carry the attacks on the GOP as well. Relying solely on the latter will be a disaster.

Highly Skilled And Out Of Work - Long-Term Joblessness Spreads in Middle Class

This Washington Post story (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/20/AR2008012002368.html?nav=hcmodule) looks at a trend that has been very much under reported. While there have been many stories on job growth, few have taken the time to look at what those new jobs entail. Far too many are jobs at the bottom end of the pay scale meaning that when high skilled workers loose their jobs for whatever reason, they often much take jobs which offer significantly less pay and often no benefits. Since the Chimperator lives in a bubble and knows no one of ordinary means, he is clueless about this worsening trend. All of this bodes ill for a quick turn around in the economy. It likewise shows how bankrupt the GOP has become when efforts are being made to put anti-gay marriage initiatives on the ballot in Florida and Indiana rather than attempt to tackle the growing economic mess over taking the country. Here are some story highlights:

In November, nearly 1.4 million people -- almost one in five of those unemployed -- had been jobless for at least 27 weeks, the juncture when unemployment insurance benefits end for most recipients. That is about twice the level of long-term unemployment before the 2001 recession.

The problem is ensnaring a broader swath of workers than before. Once concentrated among manufacturing workers and those with little work history, education or skills, long-term unemployment is growing most rapidly among white-collar and college-educated workers with long work experience, studies have found, making the problem difficult for policymakers to address even as it grows more urgent.

"What has happened is a polarization of the labor market. It was very strong at the very top and very strong until recently at the bottom," said Lawrence F. Katz, a labor economist at Harvard University. "But in the recent weak recovery, and now recession, demand has been very weak" for jobs in the middle.

The growth in long-term unemployment has occurred even as displaced workers have taken bigger pay cuts to reenter the job market. A 2004 study found that workers who lost a job in 2001 to 2003 took an average pay cut of 17 percent in their new jobs, more than double the average cut of those displaced in the late 1990s.

"When people are losing good jobs these days, they have a very hard time getting back to the type of job they had before," said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group that presses for more generous unemployment benefits.

It seems like for the skilled worker who has experience and credentials, finding a job that matches their skill and experience is like reaching for the brass ring on the carousel," said Howard H. Marshall, manager of the Baltimore County Workforce Development Center in Hunt Valley. "A lot of people are grabbing for it, and only few will get it."