Trump’s Potemkin Plan of Action and Recovery

As Donald Trump states that some states are not at risk from COVID-19 and lies and claims he never said the pandemic would be over by April, the grim reality is that every state now as cases of those sick with the virus, in just two weeks 10 million Americans have filed for unemployment - expect another big number next week - and Trump has insanely put his grifter and equally dishonest son-in-law in charge of the response to the national emergency.  Thankfully, the majority of the nation's governors are stepping up and leading in the vacuum coming from Washington. D.C.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at Trump's fantasy world that discounts facts, goes against the advice of true experts, and seeks to gas light Americans.  Worse yet, Trump appears to be playing favorites in doling out desperately needed supplies, favoring states with Republican governors while stiffing those lead by Democrats.   Here are column highlights: 

[I]t now appears that the Trump administration may be playing favorites, distributing supplies to political allies and states important for the president’s reelection campaign. How bad will the fallout be?

Because Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and the hacks and grifters around them lie about everything, there’s no way to come up with an empirical answer as to how much such petty politics, let alone the sheer incompetence, complete lack of planning, and rank corruption, are making this nightmare worse. Everything is a ruse. The administration’s promised numbers of coronavirus tests, masks, and ventilators were all fiction. The real mission of the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort that Trump dispatched from Norfolk was to give him a photo op; it sits in New York Harbor idle, having admitted only 20 patients because of bureaucratic barriers. Even the origins of the White House’s estimated death toll of 100,000 to 240,000 are being questioned by the nation’s leading disease forecasters, reports the Washington Post. Remember Trump’s inaugural address, with its dark portents of “American carnage”? Well, that turns out to be the only Trump prophecy that is literally coming true.

The crucial electoral state of Florida — whose mini-Trump of a governor, Ron DeSantis, endangered the entire country by refusing to call off spring break — has all the medical equipment it has asked for. Desperate states like Colorado, Maine, and North Carolina are reduced to begging for help from a federal government with a depleted stockpile. What these three states have in common is that their governors are Democrats.

No matter. We know from Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair that the latest corona czar, Jared Kushner, has declared that “New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.” The next number that the Trump administration will be lying about is the inventory of available body bags.

But the catastrophic failure of the Trump White House to mobilize government to procure and distribute medical essentials where needed is just the most visible piece of this Boschian landscape of chaos and horror. Now that Congress has enacted a $2 trillion stimulus package, we’re sure to see the Trump family and its kleptocratic cohort play political and personal favorites with economic relief as well. The Trumps are nothing if not impressive in their ability to help themselves and their fellow grifters to every buck not nailed down. . . . . inquiring minds want to know if the administration scheme to have FEMA bid against states for PPE, thereby driving up prices, was sheer dereliction of duty or a concerted effort to benefit war profiteers in or close to the White House.

In the same vein, this week The Atlantic reported that the nonexistent Google testing website hawked by Dr. Deborah Birx in a White House press briefing was assigned not to Google but to a company whose co-founder is Jared Kushner’s brother. (That company quietly scrapped the project even as American casualties spiked in part for lack of the administration’s promised testing.) The Times now reports that the Trump Organization, among other financial machinations, is leaning on Palm Beach County to waive monthly payments on land it leases for its golf club.

Meanwhile, in what is likely to become a national paradigm of unequal relief efforts to come, ordinary Floridians can’t file for unemployment benefits because of an inadequate system and crashing website, both the work of the state’s previous Republican governor (and current senator), Rick Scott. That calamity is surely a preview of the soon-to-arrive train wreck as the Trump administration fails to deliver on Steven Mnuchin’s promise of a speedy distribution of checks to individual households and loans to small businesses.

At this time of emergency and medical need, it is impossible to know which is inflicting the most damage on a suffering American public: the president and his administration’s complete lack of a plan, the incessant lying to create a Potemkin simulation of action, or the politicization and corruption of the various ad hoc schemes Trump and his lackeys are creating on the fly. Trump has taken to speaking of himself as a “wartime president,” but as I’ve said before, the bone spurs that exempted him from military service have now migrated to his brain.

Everyone knows by now that unless Anthony Fauci is speaking, these daily episodes of Trump reality television, running nearly as long as The Irishman (but less well acted), are founts of misinformation that may be dangerous to your health with digressions for self-aggrandizement, political hit jobs, press bashing, and utter drivel.

Network news organizations have started to cut away from them more and more, as they should. Pointing a camera at a news event is not the same thing as reporting on it. Networks can broadcast any effusions that are newsworthy on slight delay — with immediate fact-checking — and go back to reporting actual news happening elsewhere throughout a nation on the ropes. Those who want the whole unedited feed can turn to Fox News while waiting for the next open-mike night from Jeanine Pirro.

The situation is terrifying as is the fact that Trump's base continues to believe the lies Trump propagates and which Fox News (now facing a consumer fraud lawsuit) amplifies. One can only hope that the 12 Republican lead states with no social distancing orders in place suffer exponential increases in virus cases that will perhaps force the willfully ignorant and brainwashed to at last wake up.

Republicans Rage as Florida Becomes a Nightmare for Trump

Republicans Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis.

For more than two decades, the Republican Party has followed what I call a reverse Robin Hood agenda: take from the poor, working class and middle class and give to the very wealthy and big business. It is one reason America has such a lousy social safety net which was pathetic under good economic conditions and which the Coivd-19 triggered recession - some might argue depression - is proving totally inadequate.  Florida - a must win state in the 202 presidential election - is a case in point as the degraded unemployment system (which was further weakened by then governor Rick Scott to save big business billions of dollars) is on the verge of collapse.  Thousands cannot successfully file claims and those who do will find that the benefits they receive are among the lowest in the nation. A piece in Politico looks at the ongoing disaster that with luck will haunt Republicans in November 2020 and beyond. Many Floridians are going to learn that GOP pandering to their prejudices and/or religious extremism does absolutely nothing for them in a severe economic downturn.  Here are article excerpts: 

The staggering unemployment exploding on President Donald Trump’s watch would worry any incumbent running for reelection, but troubles in Florida are injecting an added dose of fear into a jittery GOP.

Already anxious about Trump’s chances in the nation’s biggest swing state, Republicans now are dealing with thousands of unemployed workers unable to navigate the Florida system to apply for help. And the blowback is directed straight at Trump’s top allies in the state, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Rick Scott.

Privately, Republicans admit that the $77.9 million system that is now failing Florida workers is doing exactly what Scott designed it to do — lower the state’s reported number of jobless claims after the great recession. . . . “It wasn’t about saving money. It was about making it harder for people to get benefits or keep benefits so that the unemployment numbers were low to give the governor something to brag about.”

Republican Party of Florida chairman Joe Gruters was more succinct: “$77 million? Someone should go to jail over that.”

With hundreds of thousands of Floridians out of work, the state’s overwhelmed system is making it nearly impossible for many people to even get in line for benefits.

The new online system was part of a series of changes designed to limit benefits. The ultimate goal — which it delivered on — was to lower unemployment taxes paid by Florida businesses. A 2011 analysis done by the Florida Legislature estimated that the changes pushed by Scott would save businesses more than $2.3 billion between 2011 and 2020.

Now, as thousands of people try to get help, the system crashes or denies them access. Nearly 400,000 people have managed to file claims in the last two and half weeks. It’s not known how many have tried and failed.

Most of those who do submit applications won’t qualify for aid, and the benefits that are paid out are among the most meager in the country — a maximum of $275 a week.

“Everyone we talk to in that office when we ask them what happened tells us, ‘the system was designed to fail,’” the adviser said. “That’s not a problem when unemployment is 2.8 percent, but it’s a problem now. And no system we have can handle 25,000 people a day.”

Rep. Charlie Crist, a Democrat who as a Republican governor led Florida through the last downturn, said the state’s current economic catastrophe could doom Trump in the state the president needs if he wants to win reelection.

“If unemployment continues to go up, and if so many people stay unemployed, it’s a nightmare for [Trump] the president in this state,” Crist said. “I should know. When I was governor and I was running for the Senate in the Great Recession — and there was nothing great about it — it was a nightmare.”

An adviser to Marco Rubio’s 2010 Senate campaign didn’t argue.

“We’ve got unemployed, pissed-off people. They can’t get benefits. And when they get them, it’s not going to be enough,” he said. “They’re there for the taking by the Democrats. We killed Charlie with the bad economy in 2010. Democrats are gonna repay the favor.”

Republicans in the Legislature share the blame, said Rep. Jose Javier Rodriguez, a Miami Democrat.

“Rick Scott is the most culpable human being when we look at who’s responsible for the failed system,” Rodriguez said. “But I don’t know of any Republican who resisted these efforts to make Florida the most Scrooge-like state in the nation.”

The Job Layoffs Are Just Starting - A Scary Forecast

The husband and I left Key West the day that bars and restaurants were ordered closed or allowed to open with only severely reduced capacity.  Our last day at our guest house showed 12 empty rooms in contrast to the 100% occupancy on previous trips.  Obviously, the restaurant and tourism workers will be hit hard - as will so many businesses (the husband's salon is closing for two weeks except for selected customers who make pre-arrangements).  My law firm will continue to operate and hopefully can do more through online recordings and title searches. The question obviously becomes one of how will those furloughed or outright fired survive financially, especially if they cannot qualify for unemployment benefits.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the frightening economic forecast that goes far beyond drops in the stock market.  Here are article highlights:

However events unfold, one thing is becoming clear: As the effects of the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S. job market, the damage looks likely to be much deeper and longer lasting than seemed possible even a week ago.

Marriott International, the hotel operator, said Tuesday that it would begin furloughing tens of thousands of employees worldwide. Restaurants, coffee shops, gyms and other small businesses have begun laying off workers outright. On Monday, a flood of inquiries from newly jobless New Yorkers crashed the website for the state’s unemployment insurance system.

With striking speed, Democrats and Republicans in Washington have embraced proposals for cash payments to Americans to help offset the economic damage.

Relatively few companies outside the hospitality industry have announced significant job cuts, with many saying they will continue to pay employees even while they are closed, though often for fewer hours of work than normal.

But that cushion seems unsustainable. Most small businesses do not have the financial buffer to pay workers for long if revenue dries up. And while larger public companies may have access to cash, they also have shareholders who want executives to watch the bottom line.

The scope of layoffs will help determine how badly the outbreak will damage the broader economy. If companies largely retain workers, the downturn could be relatively shallow and the rebound relatively swift. But if people lose their jobs, and their spending power, the damage could mount.

“The question is, do we get trapped in that vicious cycle?” Mr. Challenger said. “Do we get stuck where workers who don’t have wages stop going out to buy things?”

The answer could depend in part on what happens to the retail industry, the country’s biggest private-sector employer and one that was already struggling amid the shift to online shopping.

Grocery stores and big-box chains have seen sales surge as shoppers rush to secure toilet paper, disinfectant wipes and food. And in an indication of how the outbreak has accelerated the shift to online retail, Amazon announced Monday that it would hire 100,000 workers to handle the surge in demand caused by the crisis.

For brick-and-mortar sellers of “nonessential” items, however, the spread of the virus has spelled trouble. A wave of retailers announced temporary store closings over the weekend, . . .

Meanwhile, there is this at Huffington Post:

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin warned Republican senators on Tuesday that the country’s unemployment rate could hit 20% if they failed to act on a proposed coronavirus rescue package and there was lasting economic damage, a person familiar with the closed-door meeting said.

Mnuchin met with senators to persuade them to pass a $1 trillion stimulus package that would send cash to Americans within two weeks and backstop airlines and other companies.

A Treasury official said Mnuchin was not providing a forecast but trying to illustrate the potential risks of inaction.

The Exceptionally Bad State of American Workers

Yesterday was the 4th of July and among the supposedly patriotic talk was much bloviating about American exceptionalism - something that I personally view as a factually unsupported myth.  America is currently under the rule of a Republican Party that has maintained power through gerrymandered districts, a constitutional frame work that that disproportionately gives small, backward states too much power in the U.S. Senate, and pathetic levels of voter turnout - Trump won the vote of less than 30% of registered voters. Not what one can call an exceptional system. For American workers things are even worse and will worsen further if the GOP minority has its way and further dismantles unions and worker protections as if pushes to create a new Gilded Age. Indeed, compared to the rest of the developed world, America is exceptional in a negative sense in how poorly its workers are treated even as wealth inequality soars. An article in the Washington Post looks at this undesirable exceptionalism of America that con only be viewed positively by vulture capitalists and their political prostitutes.  Here are article highlights:

The U.S. labor market is hot. Unemployment is at 3.8 percent, a level it’s hit only once since the 1960s, and many industries report deep labor shortages. Old theories of what’s wrong with the labor market — such as a lack of people with necessary skills — are dying fast. Earnings are beginning to pick up, and the Federal Reserve envisions a steady regimen of rate hikes.

So why does a large subset of workers continue to feel left behind? We can find some clues in a new 296-page report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a club of advanced and advancing nations that has long been a top source for international economic data and research. Most of the figures are from 2016 or before, but they reflect underlying features of the economies analyzed that continue today. In particular, the report shows the United States’s unemployed and at-risk workers are getting very little support from the government, and their employed peers are set back by a particularly weak collective-bargaining system.

Those factors have contributed to the United States having a higher level of income inequality and a larger share of low-income residents than almost any other advanced nation. Only Spain and Greece, whose economies have been ravaged by the euro-zone crisis, have more households earning less than half the nation’s median income — an indicator that unusually large numbers of people either are poor or close to being poor.

Joblessness may be low in the United States and employers may be hungry for new hires, but it’s also strikingly easy to lose a job here. An average of 1 in 5 employees lose or leave their jobs each year, and 23.3 percent of workers ages 15 to 64 had been in their job for a year or less in 2016 — higher than all but a handful of countries in the study. . . . . OECD research found that an unusually large amount of job turnover in the United States is due to firing and layoffs, and Labor Department figures show the rate of layoffs and firings hasn’t changed significantly since the research was conducted.

The U.S. ranks at the bottom for employee protection even when mass layoffs are taken into consideration as well, despite the 1988 Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act's requirement that employers give notice 60 days before major plant closings or layoffs.

And when you lose your job in the United States, it’s harder to find another. Fewer than half of displaced workers find a job within a year, the researchers found — that puts the United States near the bottom of the five countries for which the researchers provided recent data.

Even when Americans do find another job, their earnings don’t recover. After four years, displaced workers are still about 6 percent behind their peers in terms of annual earnings. 

These gaps at the lower end of the labor market can be traced back to weak government programs and hamstrung union bargaining, the report says.  . . . The unemployed, in particular, receive relatively little assistance. U.S. unemployment benefits provide less support in the first year of unemployment than those in any other country in the study, and the maximum length of benefits in a typical U.S. state, 26 weeks, is shorter than in all but a handful of countries. In some states, the maximum benefit length is less than half of that.

Only 12 percent of U.S. workers were covered by collective bargaining in 2016 — among all the nations the OECD tracks, only Turkey, Lithuania and South Korea have been lower at any point this millennium.  . . . These collective bargaining and government support systems might have something to do with another report finding as well: Workers’ share of national income dropped about eight percentage points between 1995 and 2013, faster than anywhere but Poland and South Korea over that time.

This aspect of America's false "exceptionalism" is an embarrassment - just like the occupant of the White House.  The first step in changing it is to vote Republicans at all levels out of office.   In Virginia, it also means ending the state's "right to work laws" that allow employees to be fired without notice and for no reason. 

Child Homelessness Surges in America

As the Republicans seek to destroy the social safety net and self-proclaimed "family values" spend millions of dollars to oppose gay rights, especially gay marriage - all because they claim to be concerned about "the children" - child homelessness is surging in America.  While all these funds are spent on anti-gay efforts, these same "family values" organizations spend nothing on aiding children or families.  The hypocrisy is absolute.  An article in The Daily Beast looks at the surging problem of child homelessness.  The referenced report can be found here. Here are highlights:

The number of homeless children in the U.S. has surged in recent years to an all-time high, amounting to one child in every 30, according to a comprehensive state-by-state report. The report, which will be issued Monday, blames the nation’s high poverty rate, the lack of affordable housing, and the effects of pervasive domestic violence. The report by the National Center on Family Homelessness calculates that nearly 2.5 million American children were homeless at some point in 2013.

The number is based on the Department of Education’s latest count of 1.3 million homeless children in public schools, supplemented by estimates of homeless preschool children not counted by the DOE. The problem is particularly severe in California, which has one-eighth of the U.S. population but accounts for more than one-fifth of the homeless children with a tally of nearly 527,000.

[T]he federal government has made progress in reducing homelessness among veterans and chronically homeless adults.  "The same level of attention and resources has not been targeted to help families and children," she said. "As a society, we're going to pay a high price, in human and economic terms."

Child homelessness increased by 8 percent nationally from 2012 to 2013, according to the report, which warned of potentially devastating effects on children's educational, emotional and social development, as well as on their parents' health, employment prospects and parenting abilities.

[N]either federal nor state housing assistance nor incentives for developers to create low-income housing have kept pace with demand.  "We need more affordable housing or we need to pay people $25 an hour," she said. "The minimum wage isn't cutting it."

"Fixing the problem starts with adopting an honest definition," said Bruce Lesley, president of the nonprofit First Focus Campaign for Children. "Right now, these kids are sort of left out there by themselves."

Lesley's group and some allies have endorsed a bill introduced in Congress, with bipartisan sponsorship, that would expand HUD's definition to correlate more closely with that used by the Education Department. However, the bill doesn't propose any new spending for the hundreds of thousands of children who would be added to the HUD tally.

Yet another example of "American exceptionalism" that the right wing likes to extol.

The Republican War on Workers’ Rights

One of the hallmarks of the Gilded Age of the Vanderbilts, DuPonts, Astors, Rockefellers and others was that unions did not exist and workers rights were few and far between.   It is a situation that the Republican Party is striving hard to again replicate even as it seeks to destroy the social safety net that progressives built over the years.  It is one of the phenomenon that are fueling the growing wealth disparity in America and that have caused social mobility in the USA to now lag behind that of Europe and Canada.  Sadly, too many Americans aren't paying attention and they do so to their own detriment.  A column in the New York Times looks at the GOP's insidious war against workers.  Here are excerpts:

Midterm elections are like fancy software: Experts love them, end-users couldn’t care less. But if the 2010 elections are any indication, we might not want to doze off as we head into the summer months before November. Midterm elections at the state level can have tremendous consequences, especially for low-wage workers. What you don’t know can hurt you — or them.

In 2010, the Republicans won control of the executive and legislative branches in 11 states (there are now more than 20 such states). Inspired by business groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, they proceeded to rewrite the rules of work, passing legislation designed to enhance the position of employers at the expense of employees.

The University of Oregon political scientist Gordon Lafer, who wrote an eye-opening report on this topic last October for the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, looked at dozens of bills affecting workers. The legislation involved unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, child labor, collective bargaining, sick days, even meal breaks. Despite frequent Republican claims to be defending local customs and individual liberty, Mr. Lafer found a “cookie-cutter” pattern to their legislation. Not only did it consistently favor employers over workers, it also tilted toward big government over local government. And it often abridged the economic rights of individuals.

Take the case of tipped workers and the minimum wage. In most states, tipped workers earn an hourly wage that is less than the federal minimum — the federal subminimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 per hour — because they’re supposed to make up the rest in tips. (They often don’t; the poverty rate among waiters and waitresses is 250 percent higher than it is among the general work force.) But non-serving staff who don’t get tips must be paid the minimum wage.

Republican state legislators have devised a way around that. In 2011, lawmakers in Wyoming introduced a bill that would have allowed restaurants and other employers to force their serving staff to pool their tips; tips would be redistributed among the nonserving staff, who could then be paid the subminimum wage.

[C]onservative Republicans supported the right of employers to take money that workers had earned. This disregard for the earnings of workers is only an extreme manifestation of a more common phenomenon among Republican legislators: their indifference to the problem of wage theft. Wage theft refers to the practice among employers of taking money from their employees by illegally paying them less than the minimum wage or not paying them overtime.

One of the causes of this epidemic of wage theft . . . . . is lax enforcement of the country’s wage and hour laws. In 1941, there was one federal inspector for every 11,000 workers. As of 2008, there was one for every 141,000 workers. “The average employer has just a 0.001 percent chance of being investigated in a given year,” Mr. Lafer estimates. Because there is so little risk of getting caught, one-third of all employers who have been found guilty of violating wage and hour laws continue to do it.

Over the last four decades, for example, low-wage workers have been hit hard by the declining value of the federal minimum wage. In the absence of federal action, states, cities and counties have increased the minimum wage or indexed it to inflation (or both) to ensure that it keep pace with rising costs.

Republican politicians in state capitals have tried to check them at every point. Florida, Indiana and Mississippi have banned local governments from increasing the minimum wage. In Nevada, Missouri and Arizona, state legislators tried to overturn constitutional amendments and ballot initiatives. In 2011, New Hampshire’s Republican legislature simply abolished the state’s minimum wage.

The overall thrust of this state legislation is to create workers who are docile and employers who are empowered. That may be why Republican legislators in Idaho, Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, Ohio, Minnesota, Utah and Missouri have been so eager to ease restrictions on when and how much children can work.

What might Adam Smith, often claimed as the intellectual godfather of the American right, have said about these legislative efforts? “Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen,” wrote Smith in “The Wealth of Nations,” “its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.”

 Republicans may claim to care about working families but in truth, they do not give a damn.  The working population needs to quickly wake up to this reality.

Killing the Right Wing Fantasy that Private Charity Can Meet Public Need

Go to any right wing blog and you will find posts whining that the state and/or federal government has should have no role in supporting the poor and needy  Instead, these greed driven screeds claim that private charity should meet the needs of the sick, the poor, the unemployed, etc.  The reality, of course, is that private charity doesn't have the capacity to meet the need for assistance.  The other reality is that government has stepped in to fill these types of needs for many decades.  The so-called welfare state did not suddenly arise out of nowhere in the 1960's.  But, dealing with and accepting historical reality is not something that today's GOP and its Christofascist/Tea Party is exactly known for.  These folks live in a fantasy world.  A piece in Democracy Journal destroys the far rights favored talking points on taking the government out of providing a social safety net.  Here are excerpts:

Conservatives dream of returning to a world where private charity fulfilled all public needs. But that world never existed—and we’re better for it.

[C] conservatives tell themselves a story, a fairy tale really, about the past, about the way the world was and can be again under Republican policies. This story is about the way people were able to insure themselves against the risks inherent in modern life. Back before the Great Society, before the New Deal, and even before the Progressive Era, things were better. Before government took on the role of providing social insurance, individuals and private charity did everything needed to insure people against the hardships of life; given the chance, they could do it again. 

This vision has always been implicit in the conservative ascendancy.  . . . which argued that a purely private nineteenth-century system of charitable and voluntary organizations did a better job providing for the common good than the twentieth-century welfare state. This idea is also the basis of Paul Ryan’s budget, which seeks to devolve and shrink the federal government at a rapid pace, lest the safety net turn “into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”

But this conservative vision of social insurance is wrong. It’s incorrect as a matter of history; it ignores the complex interaction between public and private social insurance that has always existed in the United States. It completely misses why the old system collapsed and why a new one was put in its place. It fails to understand how the Great Recession displayed the welfare state at its most necessary and that a voluntary system would have failed under the same circumstances. Most importantly, it points us in the wrong direction. The last 30 years have seen effort after effort to try and push the policy agenda away from the state’s capabilities and toward private mechanisms for mitigating the risks we face in the world. This effort is exhausted, and future endeavors will require a greater, not lesser, role for the public.

Beyond the need to deflate the imaginary landscape of the contemporary right, there’s also a need for liberals to reform their project. Liberals need to reclaim the public. Liberals need to be able to articulate that the welfare state succeeded in exactly the ways that the private insurance system failed in the Great Depression.

The state does many things, but this essay will focus specifically on its role in providing social insurance against the risks we face. Specifically, we’ll look at what the progressive economist and actuary I.M. Rubinow described in 1934 as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: “accident, illness, old age, loss of a job. These are the four horsemen that ride roughshod over lives and fortunes of millions of wage workers of every modern industrial community.” These were the same evils that Truman singled out in his speech. And these are the ills that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food assistance, and our other public systems of social insurance set out to combat in the New Deal and Great Society.  

Over the past 30 years the public role in social insurance has taken a backseat to the idea that private institutions will expand to cover these risks. Yet our current system of workplace private insurance is rapidly falling apart. In its wake, we’ll need to make a choice between an expanded role for the state or a fantasy of voluntary protection instead. We need to understand why this voluntary system didn’t work in the first place to make the case for the state’s role in fighting the Four Horsemen.

As for social insurance specifically, the historian Michael Katz has documented that there has always been a mixed welfare state made up of private and public organizations throughout our country’s history. Outdoor relief, or cash assistance outside of institutions, was an early legal responsibility of American towns, counties, and parishes from colonial times through the early nineteenth century.  

But there were a few major problems with these [charity or welfare] societies. The first was that they were regionally segregated and isolated. These forms of insurance didn’t exist in places without dense cities, industry, or deep ethnic and immigrant communities. Even in states with large cities and thriving industries like California and New York, only 30 percent of workers had some sort of health-care coverage through fraternal methods. Moreover, the programs were fragmented and provided only partial insurance.

Thus, though they were pervasive throughout this time period, they never provided more than a sliver of actual, robust social insurance. As the Russell Sage Foundation concluded at the time, private societies stand “as a tangible expression of a keenly felt need, a feeble instrument for performing a duty beyond its own powers.”

That need was partly what gave rise to the Progressive movement. Private charity simply didn’t have the breadth and depth necessary to truly respond to the Four Horsemen in this industrializing era, and Progressives saw a greater role for government to address these ills.

There is more to the piece that deserves a full read.  Suffice it to say that the conservatives' fantasy about private charity meeting society's actual needs is a fictional as their claims that America was founded as a "Christian nation."  Conservatives' real goal is to slash social safety net spending so that they can amass more for themselves as the kick the poor, the sick and the unemployed to the curb. Ultimately, selfishness - along with racism and religious based bigotry - is the main motivation behind their quest. 

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.

GOP Congressman Says It's 'Immoral' To Extend Jobless Benefits

Once again we are seeing the hypocrisy of Republicans who wear their feigned religiosity on their sleeves even as they trash the Gospel message by slashing programs benefiting the poor and unfortunate and working to deprive millions of access to health care.  Now, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) - pictured above - has alleged that extending long term jobless benefits is "immoral."  If there is anything immoral, it is the GOP's agenda to make most Americans modern day serfs while the wealthy reap more and more wealth and privilege.  Supporting this agenda all the way, of course, are the "godly Christian" crowd of the far right. Talking Points Memo looks at Sessions' batshitery.  Here are highlights:

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) on Tuesday railed against efforts by Democrats to extend long-term unemployment benefits, which expired at the end of 2013.

"I believe it is immoral for this country to have as a policy extending long-term unemployments [benefits] to people rather than us working on creation of jobs," he said on the House floor, as quoted by the Huffington Post. "A job is the most important attribute, I believe, in a free enterprise system."

Sessions said President Obama spends too much time speaking about the longterm unemployed and to little time facilitating legislation that would help create jobs.

"Too much time we have been hung up on, instead of the creation of jobs, we talk about the symptoms that are related to unemployment, and long-term unemployment," he said. "In this case, the president of the United States thoughtfully articulates the need for us to make sure we help people, but I believe he errs on the side of not pushing jobs bills."

Benefits for those who have been unemployed for six months or more expired on Dec. 28, 2013, leaving 1.3 million unemployed Americans without critical assistance.

Sessions conveniently ignores the reality that he and members of the GOP controlled House of Representatives have blocked every effort by Obama and the Democrats to pass a meaningful jobs bill.  The man is despicable.  More of his bigotry and shady ties can be found here (scroll down)

The GOP: Enemies of the Poor

I get accused of being too hard on Republicans many of whom try to retreat behind claims of "belief in limited government" as an excuse to turn a blind eye to the GOP's raging homophobia and out right hostility to the poor.  I'm sorry, but limited government beliefs do not absolve one from the rest of the baggage that goes with being a Republican nowadays.  Indeed, those who think that it does are to my mind are either hypocrites or downright greedy.  A column in the New York Times looks at the GOP's track record and why the GOP is the enemy of the poor and less fortunate.  Here are excerpts:

Suddenly it’s O.K., even mandatory, for politicians with national ambitions to talk about helping the poor. This is easy for Democrats, who can go back to being the party of F.D.R. and L.B.J. It’s much more difficult for Republicans, who are having a hard time shaking their reputation for reverse Robin-Hoodism, for being the party that takes from the poor and gives to the rich.

And the reason that reputation is so hard to shake is that it’s justified. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that right now Republicans are doing all they can to hurt the poor, and they would have inflicted vast additional harm if they had won the 2012 election.  Moreover, G.O.P. harshness toward the less fortunate isn’t just a matter of spite (although that’s part of it); it’s deeply rooted in the party’s ideology . . .

Let’s start with the recent Republican track record.

The most important current policy development in America is the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamacare. Most Republican-controlled states are, however, refusing to implement a key part of the act, the expansion of Medicaid, thereby denying health coverage to almost five million low-income Americans.

Meanwhile, those Republican-controlled states are slashing unemployment benefits, education financing and more. As I said, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the G.O.P. is hurting the poor as much as it can.

[E]very budget the G.O.P. has offered since it took over the House in 2010 involves savage cuts in Medicaid, food stamps and other antipoverty programs. 

The notion that unemployment is high because we’re “paying people not to work” is a fallacy (no matter how desperate you make the unemployed, their desperation does nothing to create more jobs) wrapped in a falsehood (very few people are choosing to remain unemployed and keep collecting benefit checks). 

The point is that a party committed to small government and low taxes on the rich is, more or less necessarily, a party committed to hurting, not helping, the poor.

Will this ever change? Well, Republicans weren’t always like this. In fact, all of our major antipoverty programs — Medicaid, food stamps, the earned-income tax credit — used to have bipartisan support. And maybe someday moderation will return to the G.O.P.

For now, however, Republicans are in a deep sense enemies of America’s poor. And that will remain true no matter how hard the likes of Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio try to convince us otherwise. 

What brought about this change?  In my view, the rise of the Christofascists within the GOP.  These people are mean spirited and often racists, believing that most of the poor are non-whites and, therefore, disposable.  They may congratulate themselves each Sunday in the pews on their supposed piety, but they are nothing more than foul modern day Pharisees.

 

The Political War Over Poverty

Even as the Republican Party continues to wage war on the poor (through food stamp cuts and ending unemployment benefits among other things), a political war is being waged over who is responsible for the failure of the "War on Poverty."  Most in the GOP continue to blame the poor themselves, claiming that the poor are lazy and shiftless, etc.   They never admit that America's system of capitalism treats too many citizens as disposable trash.  A column in the New York Times looks at this political war over responsibility.  Here are excerpts:

Fifty years have passed since Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. And a funny thing happened on the way to this anniversary. Suddenly, or so it seems, progressives have stopped apologizing for their efforts on behalf of the poor, and have started trumpeting them instead. And conservatives find themselves on the defensive.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. For a long time, everyone knew — or, more accurately, “knew” — that the war on poverty had been an abject failure. And they knew why: It was the fault of the poor themselves. But what everyone knew wasn’t true, and the public seems to have caught on.

The narrative went like this: Antipoverty programs hadn’t actually reduced poverty, because poverty in America was basically a social problem — a problem of broken families, crime and a culture of dependence that was only reinforced by government aid. And because this narrative was so widely accepted, bashing the poor was good politics, enthusiastically embraced by Republicans

[T]he war on poverty has, in fact, achieved quite a lot. It’s true that the standard measure of poverty hasn’t fallen much. But this measure doesn’t include the value of crucial public programs like food stamps and the earned-income tax credit. Once these programs are taken into account, the data show a significant decline in poverty, and a much larger decline in extreme poverty. Other evidence also points to a big improvement in the lives of America’s poor: lower-income Americans are much healthier and better-nourished than they were in the 1960s.

And if progress against poverty has nonetheless been disappointingly slow — which it has — blame rests not with the poor but with a changing labor market, one that no longer offers good wages to ordinary workers. Wages used to rise along with worker productivity, but that linkage ended around 1980. The bottom third of the American work force has seen little or no rise in inflation-adjusted wages since the early 1970s; the bottom third of male workers has experienced a sharp wage decline. This wage stagnation, not social decay, is the reason poverty has proved so hard to eradicate.

[T]he problem of poverty has become part of the broader problem of rising income inequality, of an economy in which all the fruits of growth seem to go to a small elite, leaving everyone else behind.

So how should we respond to this reality?  The conservative position, essentially, is that we shouldn’t respond. Conservatives are committed to the view that government is always the problem, never the solution; they treat every beneficiary of a safety-net program as if he or she were “a Cadillac-driving welfare queen.” And why not? After all, for decades their position was a political winner, because middle-class Americans saw “welfare” as something that Those People got but they didn’t.

But that was then. At this point, the rise of the 1 percent at the expense of everyone else is so obvious that it’s no longer possible to shut down any discussion of rising inequality with cries of “class warfare.” Meanwhile, hard times have forced many more Americans to turn to safety-net programs. And as conservatives have responded by defining an ever-growing fraction of the population as morally unworthy “takers” — a quarter, a third, 47 percent, whatever — they have made themselves look callous and meanspirited.

Republicans are still opposed to extended benefits, despite high long-term unemployment. But they have, revealingly, changed their arguments. Suddenly, it’s not about forcing those lazy bums to find jobs; it’s about fiscal responsibility. And nobody believes a word of it.

Meanwhile, progressives are on offense. They have decided that inequality is a winning political issue. They see war-on-poverty programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and the earned-income tax credit as success stories, initiatives that have helped Americans in need — especially during the slump since 2007 — and should be expanded.

On its 50th birthday, the war on poverty no longer looks like a failure. It looks, instead, like a template for a rising, increasingly confident progressive movement. 

News bulletin: the conservatives ARE callous and mean spirited even as they pat themselves on the back for their piety and alleged support for Christian principles.  They are hypocrites and modern day Pharisees.  That's one of the reasons I want nothing to do with today's GOP.

  

Leading Republicans' States Among Worst Hit by Cuts to Jobless Benefits

The idiocy of the Republican Party base continues to be dumbfounding.   By using religion as a poly and playing upon the inherent racism of the typical aging white evangelical voter, the Congressional Republicans continue to convince the cretins within the party base to ultimately vote against their own best interest.  These fools cannot see beyond the bait of dog whistle racism and claims of religiosity to realize they are being played for idiots.  And they are idiots unfortunately.  A piece in The Guardian looks at the manner in which the cuts to unemployment benefits will hit Republican controlled states.  As I have said before, one truly needs to have a lobotomy to be a Republican nowadays.  Here are story excerpts:

Senior Republican senators including Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul represent some of the states most affected by the controversial cancellation of long-term unemployment benefits, according to a Guardian analysis of data released this week.

Around 1.3 million people lost unemployment insurance benefits last week, after a bipartisan budget deal on federal spending failed to include a reauthorisation of the program. A further 72,000 job-seekers are expected lose their benefits from Saturday, a rolling tally that will continue through the year.

Figures released this week by the Department of Labor, and analysed by House Democrats, provided the first state-by-state breakdown of the first tranche of American job-seekers whose benefits were cut off. The knock-on impact has been estimated to be costing the US economy up to a billion dollars a week.

in addition to the 34 Democratic senators feeling the most pain as a result of of the benefits cuts, there are 16 Republicans.

They include high-profile figures such as Rubio, who represents Florida, where 73,000 job-seekers have lost, on average, $231 a week.

Four in every 1,000 people lost benefits in Kentucky, which has an 8.2% unemployment rate and is represented by McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and Paul, who like Rubio is considered a potential presidential candidate for 2016.

The data is particularly embarrassing for Paul, who in recent weeks has been one of the most visible defenders of the decision to cut the extended jobless benefit programme.

For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations have authorised the extended insurance for job-seekers during times of exceptionally high unemployment.

On Saturday, President Barack Obama used his weekly address to urge Congress to reinstate jobless benefits – specifically drawing attention to Republicans with high unemployment rates in their states.
"Republicans in Congress went home for the holidays and let that lifeline expire," the president said. "And for many of their constituents who are unemployed through no fault of their own, that decision will leave them with no income at all."

A Senate vote on a bipartisan bill to reintroduce the benefits is expected early next week, possibly as soon as Monday. The bill has been authored by Democrat Jack Reed and Republican Dean Heller, who represent the two states – Rhode Island and Nevada respectively – with the highest overall unemployment rates, both at 9%. Their bill reintroduces the benefits for three months, allowing Congress time to find a more permanent fix.

The battle over unemployment benefits is expected to dominate Capitol Hill when both houses return next week. On Tuesday, Obama will host several long-term job-seekers who lost their benefits in the East Room of the White House.

 The sad truth is that most Congressional Republicans do not give a rat's ass about the average American.  Oh, they give lip service that they care, but actions speak louder than words.

Poll: Strong Public Support For Extending Unemployment Benefits

Whike the Republican Party continues its war on the poorest Americans, a new poll finds that contrary to the GOP sound bites, a new National Employment Law Project (NELP) poll finds that 55 percent of Americans believe the emergency unemployment Compensation program should be extended.  In fact, only 34% of Americans - a percentage that roughly corresponds with the percentage of Americans who identify as "born again" Christians - oppose extending the program.  Think Progress looks at the findings and the fact that, unlike today's GOP, most Americans are not ready to throw their fellow citizens on the trash heap.  Here are article highlights:

A majority of Americans believe Congress should restore the federal unemployment insurance program that it allowed to expire in the recent budget deal, according to a new poll. The details of the survey further suggest that voters stand ready to punish lawmakers who block an extension — something several Republicans have indicated they are prepared to do.

Overall, 55 percent of Americans believe the Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) program should be extended compared to 34 percent who say it should end, the Hart Research Associates poll found. Among women, 61 percent approve of the program and just 28 percent believe it should cease.
The findings reinforce a Public Policy Polling release from earlier this week which looked at specific House districts held by Republican members. That poll found over 60 percent support for extending EUC in five Republican districts including Speaker John Boehner’s southwestern Ohio seat.

EUC expires on Saturday. For 1.3 million current recipients who have been looking for work for longer than the 26 weeks for which most states will provide unemployment benefits, that will mean their lifeline evaporates immediately. Another 800,000 job-seekers are projected to exhaust their state benefits and turn to the federal EUC program over the next three months. Thanks to multiplier effects, the cancelled benefits will also lead indirectly to almost a quarter-million layoffs for people who are currently working. That’s nearly 2.4 million people harmed in the coming months by the expiration of EUC.

The GOP's War on the Poorest Americans

It's Christmas Day and once again I am struck by the rank hypocrisy of conservatives and their flunkies in the Republican Party who blather about honoring Christian principles and repeat the myth that America was founded as a "Christian nation" even as they espouse policies that are the antithesis of the Gospel message.  Indeed, they make the Pharisees of the Bible look like upstanding, kindly folks in comparison.  It is little wonder that 1/3 of the generations under age 30 - the so-called "Nones" - have walked away from institutional religion.  Simply put, these "godly Christians" are horrible, heartless, selfish people.  Why would anyone decent want to subscribe to their claimed beliefs which they disregard daily.  An editorial in the New York Times looks at the GOP's war on the poor - a war that the Christofascists support.  Here are excerpts:

This is a harsh season for Americans struggling to afford food. Last month, the long lines at food pantries across the country grew longer with the expiration of the boost to food stamp benefit levels included in the 2009 economic stimulus plan. Those lines are apt to grow even longer thanks to the refusal of House Republicans to renew extended unemployment benefits as part of the recent budget deal. 

And if that isn’t sufficient pain for the neediest, Congress is getting ready to make another big cut to nutrition aid when it returns in early January. 

Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat of Michigan and the chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and Representative Frank Lucas, a Republican of Oklahoma who leads the House Agriculture Committee, are close to a deal on a farm bill that is said to include an increase in crop insurance subsidies for farmers and a more than $8 billion cut in food stamp benefits for the poor over the next 10 years. 

That cut, about double the one contained in the Senate version of the farm bill, is more modest than the devastating $40 billion reduction in the farm bill passed by House Republicans that would have denied benefits to about 3.8 million people in 2014, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Still, the compromise deal, driven by the Republican obsession with cutting the food stamps program, will leave many Americans worse off than before. 

The deal being finalized would not kick people off the rolls, but it would end a practice used in some 16 states to boost food stamp benefits. That change would reduce benefits for 850,000 of the nation’s poorest households, according the Congressional Budget Office, with the cut falling particularly hard on seniors, disabled people and working-poor families with children. 

The households affected currently receive higher food stamp benefits (on average around $90 a month) under a practice known as “heat-and-eat,” which is intended to prevent poor families from having to choose between heating fuel and food.

Some Democratic lawmakers and antihunger advocates say the $8 billion cut being contemplated in the compromise deal is necessary to get the food stamps program reauthorized by both the Senate and House and that keeping the cuts to that level would be a political defeat for right-wing Republicans, who sought to do much more damage. That may be true, but it’s not much consolation for people lining up at food pantries because their inadequate monthly food stamps allotment has run out. 

The Budget Deal's Biggest Losers: American Workers

In today's America, wealth inequality is rising and more and more families are struggling to maintain their standard of living. And for the working poor, the picture is even more bleak.  Especially in the wake of the budget deal in Congress which throws the most needy under the bus - or perhaps onto the trash heap.  Of course, leading the charge to trash the poor are the Republicans and their party base that pretends to support Christian values while acting worse than the Biblical Pharisees.  A piece in the New York Times looks at how American workers are the budget deal's biggest losers.  Here are excerpts:

The pundit consensus seems to be that Republicans lost in the just-concluded budget deal. Overall spending will be a bit higher than the level mandated by the sequester, the straitjacket imposed back in 2011. Meanwhile, Democrats avoided making any concessions on Social Security or Medicare. 

But if Republicans arguably lost this round, the unemployed lost even more: Extended benefits weren’t renewed, so 1.3 million workers will be cut off at the end of this month, and many more will see their benefits run out in the months that follow. And if you take a longer perspective — if you look at what has happened since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2010 — what you see is a triumph of anti-government ideology that has had enormously destructive effects on American workers.

One of the truly remarkable things about American political discourse at the end of 2013 is the fixed conviction among many conservatives that the Obama era has been one of enormous growth in government. . . . . Once Obamacare is fully implemented, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it will add only about 3 percent to overall federal spending. And, if you ask people ranting about runaway government what other programs they’re talking about, you draw a blank. 

Meanwhile, the actual numbers show that over the past three years we’ve been living through an era of unprecedented government downsizing. Government employment is down sharply; so is total government spending (including state and local governments) adjusted for inflation, which has fallen almost 3 percent since 2010 and around 5 percent per capita. 

And when I say unprecedented, I mean just that. We haven’t seen anything like the recent government cutbacks since the 1950s, and probably since the demobilization that followed World War II. 

[T]the most obvious cuts have been in education, infrastructure, research, and conservation. While the Recovery Act (the Obama stimulus) was in effect, the federal government provided significant aid to state and local education. Then the aid went away, and local governments began letting go of hundreds of thousands of teachers. Meanwhile, public investment fell sharply — so sharply that many observers refer to it as a “collapse” — as state and local governments canceled transportation projects and deferred maintenance.

There are three things you need to know about these harsh cuts. 

First, they were unnecessary. The Washington establishment may have hyperventilated about debt and deficits, but markets have never shown any concern at all about U.S. creditworthiness. In fact, borrowing costs have stayed at near-record lows throughout. 

Second, the cuts did huge short-term economic damage. Small-government advocates like to claim that reducing government spending encourages private spending — and when the economy is booming, they have a point. The recent cuts, however, took place at the worst possible moment, the aftermath of a financial crisis. . . . government cutbacks simply swelled the ranks of the unemployed — and as family incomes fell, so did consumer spending, compounding the damage. The result was to deepen and prolong America’s jobs crisis.

Finally, if you look at my list of major areas that were cut, you’ll notice that they mainly involve investing in the future. So we aren’t just looking at short-term harm, we’re also looking at a long-term degradation of our prospects, reinforced by the corrosive effects of sustained high unemployment. 

So, about that budget deal: yes, it was a small victory for Democrats. It was also, possibly, a small step toward political sanity . . . . the larger picture is one of years of deeply destructive policy, imposing gratuitous suffering on working Americans. And this deal didn’t do much to change that picture.