The Republican Party's War on the Poor

The Republican Party and its most reliable base, evangelical Christians, bloviate endlessly about their supposed support for "Christian values" and worship of the Bible and its admonitions.  Yet the policies they pursue and support are diametrically opposed to Christ's principles and values as laid out in the Gospels.  Indeed, Matthew 25:41-46 states as follows:  

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. ⁴² For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, ⁴³ I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ ⁴⁴ Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ ⁴⁵ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ ⁴⁶ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

The dishonesty and hypocrisy of these Republicans and evangelical Christians is truly mind numbing.  A column in the New York Times underscores just how far apart the Gospel message and the evangelical Christian/Republican agenda have become.  Here are column highlights: 

America hasn’t always, or even usually, been governed by the best and the brightest; over the years, presidents have employed plenty of knaves and fools. But I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like the collection of petty grifters and miscreants surrounding Donald Trump. Price, Pruitt, Zinke, Carson and now Ronny Jackson: At this point, our default assumption should be that there’s something seriously wrong with anyone this president wants on his team.

Still, we need to keep our eye on the ball. The perks many Trump officials demand — the gratuitous first-class travel, the double super-secret soundproof phone booths, and so on — are outrageous, and they tell you a lot about the kind of people they are. But what really matters are their policy decisions. Ben Carson’s insistence on spending taxpayer funds on a $31,000 dining set is ridiculous; his proposal to sharply raise housing costs for hundreds of thousands of needy American families, tripling rents for some of the poorest households, is vicious.

And this viciousness is part of a broader pattern. Last year, Trump and his allies in Congress devoted most of their efforts to coddling the rich; this was obviously true of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, but even the assault on Obamacare was largely about securing hundreds of billions in tax cuts for the wealthy. This year, however, the G.O.P.’s main priority seems to be making war on the poor.

That war is being fought on multiple fronts. The move to slash housing subsidies follows moves to sharply increase work requirements for those seeking food stamps. Meanwhile, the administration has been granting Republican-controlled states waivers allowing them to impose onerous new work requirements for recipients of Medicaid — requirements whose main effect would probably be not more work, but simply fewer people getting essential health care.

The interesting question is not whether Trump and friends are trying to make the lives of the poor nastier, more brutal and shorter. They are. The question, instead, is why.

Is it about saving money? Conservatives do complain about the cost of safety net programs, but it’s hard to take those complaints seriously coming from people who just voted to explode the budget deficit with huge tax cuts. Moreover, there’s good evidence that some of the programs under attack actually do what tax cuts don’t: eventually pay back a significant part of their upfront costs by promoting better economic performance.

For example, the creation of the food stamp program didn’t just make the lives of recipients a bit easier. It also had major positive impacts on the long-term health of children from poor families, which made them more productive as adults — more likely to pay taxes, less likely to need further public assistance.

The same goes for Medicaid, where new studies suggest that more than half of each dollar spent on health care for children eventually comes back as higher tax receipts from healthier adults.

So what’s really behind the war on the poor? Pretty clearly, the pain this war will inflict is a feature, not a bug. Trump and his friends aren’t punishing the poor reluctantly, out of the belief that they must be cruel to be kind. They just want to be cruel.

Glenn Thrush of The New York Times reported, “Mr. Trump, aides said, refers to nearly every program that provides benefits to poor people as welfare, a term he regards as derogatory.” And I guess you can see where that comes from. After all, he’s a self-made man who can’t attribute any of his own success to, say, inherited wealth. Oh, wait.

Seriously, a lot of people both in this administration and in Congress simply feel no empathy for the poor. Some of that lack of empathy surely reflects racial animus. But while the war on the poor will disproportionately hurt minority groups, it will also hurt a lot of low-income whites — in fact, it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?

GOP: Poor People Aren't Real Americans

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Another piece in the Daily Beast caught my eye because it sums up the agenda of today's Republican party and its war on the poor - even as GOP elected officials such as Paul Ryan disingenuously claim to honor and live by "Christian values."  They hypocrisy of such individuals and the party as a whole is breath taking.  And at the state level, things are no better.  Here in Virginia, Virginia Republicans are threatening a state government shut down rather than accept federal money and provided health care access to roughly 400,000 working class Virginians.  Apparently, these cretins and hypocrites have forgotten that the GOP forced federal shutdown did not exactly turn out well for the GOP.  In any event, here are article highlights:

It’s not about the budget, and it has nothing to do with concern about drugs—it’s about harassing a particular class of Americans who need help.

Looks like its time for another season of America’s favorite political sport: demonizing folks on welfare. 

Last month, the RNC announced that welfare would be one of the top issues they want to hammer home in the 2014 midterms. And on the local level, this isn’t just bumper-sticker campaign slogans, its being put into place as policy.

Here’s the deal: Beginning July 1 in Mississippi, anyone applying for welfare will be subjected to a questionnaire asking whether they use drugs. If their answers reveal possible drug use, they will have to pee in the cup. If they fail, they will have to undergo treatment in order to get paid.

Mississippi’s bill was signed into law after a federal judge in Florida ruled the state's drug testing plan for welfare recipients was unconstitutional. But that hasn't stopped other Republican lawmakers for going the tried and true route of demonizing those on welfare. It’s as if no other class of people in America does drugs.

The Michigan Senate passed a bill similar to Mississippi: if you are deemed suspicious of drug use, you must take the test. If you refuse, no assistance.

[I]n America, there is no greater political sport than to demonize those on welfare.

Politicians, largely Republicans, are good at playing up the class warfare by castigating the poor as being the reason why everything is bad in America. . . . .  Because it is easier to beat up on the helpless. And that's what such bills are about.

Today's GOP - That Old-Time Whistle

As a former Republican I am continually sickened by the increasing racism that seems to have become a main plank of the GOP.  Worse yet, many GOP politicians are making less and less of an effort to even try to disguise the dog whistle messages being sent to the ugly base of the party.  While not all GOP politicians are racists, it is disturbing that far too many seem to have any problem being involved with outright racists.  A column in the New York Times looks at the disturbing phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.’s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that he’s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what he’s talking about.

So it’s comical, in a way, to see Mr. Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Oh, wait.

Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn’t matter. He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People. 

Indeed, race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics.

We are told, for example, that conservatives are against big government and high spending. Yet even as Republican governors and state legislatures block the expansion of Medicaid, the G.O.P. angrily denounces modest cost-saving measures for Medicare. How can this contradiction be explained? Well, what do many Medicaid recipients look like — and I’m talking about the color of their skin, not the content of their character — and how does that compare with the typical Medicare beneficiary? Mystery solved.

Or we’re told that conservatives, the Tea Party in particular, oppose handouts because they believe in personal responsibility, in a society in which people must bear the consequences of their actions. Yet it’s hard to find angry Tea Party denunciations of huge Wall Street bailouts, of huge bonuses paid to executives who were saved from disaster by government backing and guarantees.

Right-wingers rage against tales of food stamp abuse that almost always turn out to be false or at least greatly exaggerated. And Mr. Ryan’s black-men-don’t-want-to-work theory of poverty is decades out of date.

In the 1970s it was still possible to claim in good faith that there was plenty of opportunity in America, and that poverty persisted only because of cultural breakdown among African-Americans. . . . . But over the past 40 years good jobs for ordinary workers have disappeared, not just from inner cities but everywhere: adjusted for inflation, wages have fallen for 60 percent of working American men. 

And as economic opportunity has shriveled for half the population, many behaviors that used to be held up as demonstrations of black cultural breakdown — the breakdown of marriage, drug abuse, and so on — have spread among working-class whites too. 

These awkward facts have not, however, penetrated the world of conservative ideology. Earlier this month the House Budget Committee, under Mr. Ryan’s direction, released a 205-page report on the alleged failure of the War on Poverty. What does the report have to say about the impact of falling real wages? It never mentions the subject at all.

And since conservatives can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the reality of what’s happening to opportunity in America, they’re left with nothing but that old-time dog whistle.

Sadly, racism and hypocrisy have become two of the main pillars of today's GOP and the conservative movement in general.  It is a disgusting truth that those on the right refuse to admit. 

Racism, Sexism, And The 50-Year Campaign To Undermine The War On Poverty

While there have been some successes in the "War on Poverty" launched in 1964 by Lyndon Johnson, many goals have not been realized in large part because of conservatives' efforts to defeat the effort.  That effort continues today as we witness the Republican Party seeking to cut food stamps, killing unemployment benefits and resisting Medicaid expansion.  A piece at Think Progress looks at the war against the poor that has helped to keep America with an embarrassingly high poverty rate.  Here are excerpts:

It has been 50 years since Lyndon Johnson first declared that the nation could, “for the first time in our history,” conquer and win a war on poverty, pledging a “total commitment by this President, and this Congress, and this nation, to pursue victory over the most ancient of mankind’s enemies.” In the years that followed, lawmakers weaved a social safety net that still endures to this day, providing educational opportunities for low income Americans, retirement and health care security to the low income and elderly, and food assistance to the hungry.

But following World War II and the rise of the Civil Rights movement, welfare programs opened to African Americans, triggering a counterattack from conservatives in both political parties who sought to portray these programs as wasteful, unnecessary, and encouraging government dependence.

Beginning in 1964 and stretching through today, conservative leaders systematically undermined the programs that shaped Johnson’s War on Poverty, frequently deploying racist and sexist arguments to take away public assistance from the poorest Americans. Their rhetoric didn’t directly undo these social programs, but it chipped away at their foundation and altered Americans’ perceptions about the proper role of government. ThinkProgress spoke to six American historians of the Johnson era about the evolution of racist and sexist attacks against social welfare programs, some of which can still be heard in the debates in Washington today.

Reagan: “She wanted a divorce to get an 80 dollar raise.”
In 1964, Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act, establishing the Office of Economic Opportunity, to run Johnson’s “community action program.” The initiative established a “community action agency” in each city and county to coordinate all federal and state programs designed to help the poor. Most Republicans voted against the effort, arguing that “it would be wasted money, it would be used as pork,” Michael Katz, a University of Pennsylvania professor and the author of The Undeserving Poor: America’s Enduring Confrontation with Poverty, explained. With the Republicans united against it, Johnson pushed through the program by appealing to southern Democrats who were very fearful of any federal program, “but who had very poor white constituents and saw that as a benefit,” Julian Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton University said. “In the end, the initial War on Poverty was passed not with Republicans, but around them.” 

Reagan tapped into the anxieties about the role of women during that day, suggesting that they would divorce their husbands to receive more government assistance:

Now—so now we declare “war on poverty”… But seriously, what are we doing to those we seek to help? Not too long ago, a judge called me here in Los Angeles. He told me of a young woman who’d come before him for a divorce. She had six children, was pregnant with her seventh. Under his questioning, she revealed her husband was a laborer earning 250 dollars a month. She wanted a divorce to get an 80 dollar raise. She’s eligible for 330 dollars a month in the Aid to Dependent Children Program. She got the idea from two women in her neighborhood who’d already done that very thing.

“The image is not just of poverty, the image is of moral depravity,” Jeremi Suri of The University of Texas at Austin noted. “The presumption in Reagan’s rhetoric, and it’s not too below the surface, is that these mothers are single mothers because they’ve done something wrong, so they’re an easy target. It’s easy to make the argument that this woman who [had apparently been] immoral in the way she behaves…and we as a government should not encourage that kind of immoral behavior.”

Nixon claims the War on Poverty programs led to race riots, “violence and failure across the land.”
By the late 1960s, as racial riots erupted in the nation’s biggest cities, Republicans and even conservative and liberal Democrats began to characterize Johnson’s programs as wasteful and saw it as the source of racial turmoil. “After 1966, Republicans are accusing the War on Poverty for being the reason for all of the rioting taking place in places like Detroit, arguing that it’s actually causing more problems than it’s solving and part of a law-and-order problem that becomes very big in the 1960s,” Katz says.

Reagan seizes on “the continued backlash against civil rights” to oppose welfare programs.
By the time he makes a second bid for the White House in 1980, “Reagan really ingeniously pairs [the conservative argument about welfare government dysfunction] with the continued backlash against civil rights,” Orleck said. The candidate kicked off the general campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, not far from where the bodies of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney were found. As Bob Herbert explained, “The case was still a festering sore at that time” as some of the conspirators “were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day.” Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.”

Indeed, the characterization built off previous claims that some women, particularly black women, were acting like welfare queens, cheating the system by collecting multiple Social Security and welfare checks, earning an annual income of “over $150,000.”

“In this discussion, every time you hear ‘woman,’ what you’re really hearing is single black woman,” James Galbraith, of the University of Texas, explained. “This was not an effort that was aimed at single white women… The stigmatization was very much targeted at poor women, and on poor black women specifically.”

There's more and the piece deserves a full read.  It's not a pretty picture but it seems to ring true. We continue to see the GOP engaging in the same tactics even today.

The GOP War on the Suburbs

If one looks at the agenda of the modern day Republican Party, its main focus is on tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and a severe slashing of social programs and government infrastructure spending.  Ironically, these policies increasingly attack the suburbs which are the trues battleground for political victory.  Outside of rural areas and wealthy enclaves, it's the suburbs that elect Republicans.  Yet despite this reality, poverty is increasing in suburban areas and the GOP is adverse to any policies that might help the battered middle class.  The question becomes one of when will suburban voters realize that the GOP is actually their enemy.  A piece in Politico looks at the changes over taking the suburbs and the damage being done by the GOP's policies.  Here are excerpts:

[S]uburbs define our politics, too. While city dwellers overwhelmingly vote Democratic, and residents of small towns and rural areas vote for Republicans by large margins, suburbs are the quintessential political battlegrounds.

But now suburbs are helping define another American phenomenon: poverty. Over the past decade, America’s major suburbs have become home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country. Between 2000 and 2011, the number of poor residents in suburbia grew by almost two-thirds, or 64 percent — more than double the pace of poverty growth in the large cities that anchor these regions. For the first time, more poor people in America live in suburbs than in big cities.

Despite poverty’s increasing suburbanization and bipartisan character, it is not exactly catching fire as a key issue on Capitol Hill. One recent debate in which poverty has surfaced most prominently concerns the reauthorization of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, with the House GOP leadership advancing a proposal to cut $40 billion in spending over 10 years. The burden of those cuts would fall more squarely on suburbs than ever now that 55 percent of SNAP participants in major metro areas live in suburbs. Programs like SNAP, the Earned Income Tax Credit and Medicaid already deliver the majority of their benefits to suburban communities, many of which are squarely in the GOP column.

The ways in which the current system approaches initiatives such as neighborhood economic development, community health centers and affordable housing construction are often a poor fit for suburban areas where poverty is more spread out, public and nonprofit capacity is thin and hundreds of small municipalities routinely compete with one another rather than collaborate to address shared challenges like growing poverty.

 

Over the past few decades, poverty has become an increasingly structural feature of the American economy. In all likelihood, suburban poverty is here to stay. The battleground character of suburbs could set the stage for more ideological trench warfare and gridlock over federal anti-poverty policy and a suburban replay of the challenges that have beleaguered our inner cities over the last few decades. Or it could spur a bipartisan effort to convert top-down federal programs of old into support for new bottom-up solutions to urban and suburban poverty alike. The future of suburbs — as an American ideal and political keystone — may hang in the balance.

Weekly Protests Against Republican Extremism in North Carolina - Deja Vu for Virginia?

If Virginians want a glimpse of what a Cuccinelli/Jackson/Obenshain administration would look like - especially with the GOP controlling the House of Delegates - they need only look across the border to North Carolina where the North Carolina GOP is busy implementing a Christofascist/Tea Party agenda which is a wet dream for the extremists in today's Virginia GOP.  Programs for the poor and unemployed are being slashed, voter disenfranchisement and extreme restrictions on all abortions are the rule of the day.  The Daily Beast looks at how some North Carolinians are waking up to the nightmare that has swept North Carolina and taking to the streets in weekly protests.  I hope Virginians are watching and will not make the mistake of trusting the Virginia GOP with Virginia's future.  Here are story highlights:

The protests are called Moral Mondays, and are staged by a coalition led by the NAACP and other progressive groups to speak out against the Republican legislature that they say is working behind closed doors to push an extreme agenda.

But Moral Mondays have also attracted a grassroots collection of teachers and students, retirees, stay-at-home moms, and blue collar workers from across the political spectrum who told me Monday the same thing I heard from Tea Party protesters in 2009-- that they did not recognize the government representing them and that they were tired of doing nothing about it.

In a state that had come to be known as a swing state in the Deep South, which Barack Obama won in 2008 but lost narrowly in 2012, the first Republican legislature in more than 100 years has moved to cut funding for public education, unemployment and Medicaid; added new requirements and funding for voter-ID laws; eliminated the earned income tax credit and worked to loosen laws limiting fracking in the state.  Earlier this year, the legislature added major new restrictions to abortion services, first as a rider on a bill outlawing Sharia, and then as a clause on a motorcycle safety bill.

"We may not all agree on the issues, but the fact remains (the legislators) did not ask us.  It's like we don't matter," she said. "I guess they think we're all stupid and we're not seeing them and we're just going to sit back and not do anything, but I'm not sitting back."

Before the protests, the women went to Christian Faith Baptist Church, where the Rev. William Barber, the president of the North Carolina NAACP, led a training session on civil disobedience and instructed protestors on the finer points of getting arrested. But he also put the agenda of the North Carolina legislature, especially the new voter-ID laws, in what he saw as the context of history for his audience, which was mostly white.

"We know we are in a war for the ballot," he said."Raleigh is our Selma.The general assembly is our Edmond Pettus Bridge."

There's more that deserves a read.  What is happening is ugly, but then ugliness and greed and heartlessness are the norm in the GOP today.  Virginia soccer moms need to stop worrying about PTA meetings and childrens' sports teams and get out an vote against the GOP ticket here in Virginia if they want their children's schools to have future funding.

Bill Clinton's Speech Taking Down Romney

Bill Clinton just did a masterful job of calling Mitt Romney (and Paul Ryan) a liar.  No mincing of words, simply calling him out for telling deliberate lies.  It gets directly to the issues of the hypocrisy and betrayal of the Gospel message by the Republicans that drives me crazy.  Andrew Sullivan has some good bullet points in his live blogging.  Here is a sampling:

[B]y being a former president and exposing the shameless lies perpetrated by Romney, especially on welfare reform, he was able to say things no one else could. I don't buy the argument that Obama is more liberal than Clinton and never have. But for those who do, tonight was a brilliant reminder of the things that unite them. 

11.18 pm. Republicanism today is failed arithmetic. Clinton is really bringing this home - intellectually. It is not a series of platitudes; it is a series of arguments rebutting last week's entire convention arguments. It has far more policy substance than Romney's or Ryan's speeches. And it has the added benefit of being true.

11.15 pm. Clinton is now equating Obama's plan with Bowles-Simpson. And when you spell out the Romney plan as it exists, it does not add up. And it's perverse. Cutting revenues as a way to cut debt when revenues are at 50 year lows is not a policy. It's madness.

11.11 pm. Now the important passage on Romney's massive welfare lie. The requirement was for more work, not less. Bill Clinton is the perfect man to rebut this lie. I wonder if it will have some serious blowback for Romney. A former president has called him out on a clear lie.

11.10 pm. Now he's telling seniors that slashing Medicaid means slashing home-care for the elderly.

10.51 pm. Clinton's summary of Republican malfeasance these past four years is simply liberating. Liberating because it is true: their moral and intellectual and political degeneracy is our biggest challenge. And he is directly comparing his re-election to Obama's. And he's being as honest as he can: no one could have repaired the full damage of the 2008 crash in four years - but the green shoots are there.

10.49 pm. Genius: "We left him a total mess and he hasn't cleaned it up fast enough so we should get back into power".

 
I haven't always liked Bill Clinton, but he did a wonderful job of exposing the abject lives that are the norm in today's GOP and the Romney-Ryan campaign.

Why Romney/Ryan and the GOP Are Bad for Women

I continue to be shocked by some members of the LGBT community that I know who "like" Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan on Facebook.  Do they really not understand what a Romney/Ryan victory could do in terms of setting back LGBT civil rights progress?  And the same holds true for women who just don't seem to grasp that the extremist GOP agenda is not woman friendly.  One can only hope both groups of GOP leaning individuals wake up and educate themselves before election day or, if they don't, that they stay home and do not vote.  A piece on CNN lays out why women need their head examined if they intend to vote for anyone in the GOP in November.  Here are excerpts:

The image makers were in overdrive at the Republican National Convention this week. They finally had their candidate but now they had a problem: The guy wasn't likable. And nowhere was that problem more acute than with women voters.

Concerns about Mitt Romney's slash-and-burn economic approach at Bain Capital, coupled with displays on the campaign trail of his stunning lack of empathy had shaken confidence among women voters. Add in the wound reopened when Senate candidate Todd Akin spoke aloud the GOP's twisted ideas about women and rape and pregnancy, and the mandate to the handlers was infinitely clear: Make every night Ladies' Night at the Mirage in Tampa.

Then, in a deluge of red, white and blue balloons, the pretty show ended and the workers began to dismantle the Mirage, leaving the harsh sunlight of the day-after to reveal the intractable reality of what a Romney-Ryan presidency would mean for American women.   

Women voters care most about the economy and jobs. But with a critical caveat: nine out of 10 women say that a candidate must "understand women." To do that requires an acknowledgment of two things: that women's economic security -- by almost every measure -- still lags behind that of male counterparts and that their economic security is inextricably tied to their ability to control their health, including reproductive choices. And on those points, no illusions and tradesman's tricks can obscure the fact that the GOP agenda fails the test.

While Romney's jobs plan is still notoriously vague, with little to offer other than a regressive nod to trickle-down economics, Paul Ryan has been frighteningly clear that his top priority is essentially dismantling our government -- a fixation projected to result in a whopping 4.1 million lost jobs over two years. Even the lucky few women who hold or get jobs under a Romney-Ryan administration are likely to be paid far less for equal work. In the aggregate, women are paid on average 77 cents on the dollar to men, but Romney still refuses to support the Lilly Ledbetter Pay Check Fairness Act.

The 24 million women who live in poverty in America span all ethnic groups, with single moms twice as likely to be poor as single dads. Still, Ryan has proposed cutting nutrition assistance to these households, often the only thing that stands between them and malnutrition.

Adding insult to injury, Romney's Republican platform includes an extremist anti-abortion amendment that removes exemptions even for rape and incest victims. A party that eliminates a woman's right to choose while at the same time cutting pay, jobs, and access to health care and food security exposes a bizarre and dangerous lack of understanding of the challenges facing American women.