Democrats for True Family Values

We hear incessantly about "family values" from the Christofascists and their political whores in the Republican Party, but when analyzed, their so-called family values boil down to being "pro-life" and anti-abortion, anti-gay, and whining about abstinence only sex-education.  None of the policy positions, however, include supporting children once they are born or supporting real families, particularly if those families are headed by single women or women of color. They idealize the mythical nuclear family with a working father/husband and a stay at home mother, ignoring that most families need BOTH parents working to simply survive financially.  In contrast, Democrats are advancing policy proposals that help to support and maintain real families. A column in the New York Times looks at one proposal by Elizabeth Warren - who I deem un-electable (she has burned many bridges already in Virginia in her attacks on Gov. Northam) - which would help real families. Hopefully, other electable Democrats will back similar proposals to exhibit true family values.  Here are column highlights:

For millions of Americans with children, life is a constant, desperate balancing act. They must work during the day, either because they’re single parents or because decades of wage stagnation mean that both parents must take jobs to make ends meet. Yet quality child care is unavailable or unaffordable.

And the thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. Other wealthy countries either have national child care systems or subsidize care to put it in everyone’s reach. It doesn’t even cost all that much. While other advanced countries spend, on average, about three times as much as we do helping families — so much for our vaunted “family values” — it’s still a relatively small part of their budgets. In particular, taking care of children is much cheaper than providing health care and retirement income to seniors, which even America does.

Furthermore, caring for children doesn’t just help them grow up to be productive adults. It also has immediate economic benefits, making it easier for parents to stay in the work force.

So child care really should be an important part of the progressive agenda. Hillary Clinton had a serious plan back in 2016, but the news media was too busy obsessing over emails to pay attention.

[U]nlike purist visions of replacing private health insurance with “Medicare for all,” providing child care wouldn’t require imposing big new taxes on the middle class. The sums of money involved are small enough that new taxes on great wealth and high incomes, which are desirable on other grounds, could easily raise sufficient revenue.
 Child care would be regulated to ensure that basic quality was maintained and subsidized to make it affordable. The size of the subsidy would depend on parents’ incomes: lower-income parents would get free care, higher-income parents would have to pay something, but nobody would have to pay more than 7 percent of income.

So what are the objections to this plan?  I’m hearing from a few people on the left who complain that the plan doesn’t go far enough — that it should involve free, direct public provision of child care, not subsidies to private provision. There’s certainly a case for a more expansive policy. There’s also no chance that it will happen anytime soon.  The perfect here is the enemy of the good.

Meanwhile, on the right there are the usual cries of “socialism,”  . . . .  More interestingly, I’m seeing at least some commentary on the right that doesn’t just push back against the whole idea of making it easier for mothers to work, it wants us to go back to the days when families could “live on one income.”

Realistically, of course, that’s not going to happen, and not just because 30 percent of U.S. children live in single-parent households.  And bear in mind that even as conservatives bemoan the decline of the traditional male breadwinner, they’re pushing policies like Medicaid work requirements that basically force mothers out of the home.

Right now, all of the real contenders for the Democratic nomination are solidly progressive, but so far some seem either under briefed on policy issues — there’s been far too much fumbling over Medicare for all — or too committed to sweeping, maximalist policy visions to think seriously about what they might truly be able to do if their party takes the White House and Senate next year.

Visions and values are great, but Democrats also need to be ready to hit the ground running with plans that might actually turn into legislation.

Wit two working  daughters with young children, I know first hand just how expensive decent child care is and how it can make stay home unemployed seem the better option.  Why give over the raising of your children to others if you final net pay after child care costs is negligible or non-existent.  More Democrats need to get onboard with rational and attainable plains to demonstrate true family values for working class families. 

Republican Delusions of Chaos in the Streets

The Democrat National Convention starts today and it will be telling to compare the image of America that it will project versus the nightmarish image that was painted in Cleveland by Donald Trump and his sycophants.  While America has many problems, the reality is far different from what Trump and company describe as near chaos and danger in the streets, an irony since it is the Republicans' refusal to enact sane gun laws that has facilitated the mass shootings that have rocked the nation.  A column in the New York Times makes the case that crime, especially the murder rate, has gone down significantly and then looks at the psychosis that seems to drive conservative fears that simply are not supported by statistics.  Here are highlights:

Yet there’s no question that many voters — including, almost surely, a majority of white men — will indeed buy into that vision. Why?

Well, I do have a hypothesis, namely, that Trump supporters really do feel, with some reason, that the social order they knew is coming apart. It’s not just race, where the country has become both more diverse and less racist (even if it still has a long way to go). It’s also about gender roles — when Mr. Trump talks about making America great again, you can be sure that many of his supporters are imagining a return to the (partly imagined) days of male breadwinners and stay-at-home wives.

Not incidentally, Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s running mate, used to fulminate about the damage done by working mothers, not to mention penning an outraged attack on Disney in 1999 for featuring a martially-minded heroine in its movie Mulan.

But what are the consequences of these changes in the social order? Back when crime was rising, conservatives insistently drew a connection to social change — that was what the whole early ’90s fuss over “family values” was about. Loose the bonds of traditional society, and chaos would follow.

Then a funny thing happened: Crime plunged instead of continuing to rise. Other indicators also improved dramatically — for example, the teen birthrate has fallen 60 percent since 1991. Instead of societal collapse, we’ve seen what amounts to a mass outbreak of societal health. The truth is that we don’t know exactly why. Hypotheses range from the changing age distribution of the population to reduced lead poisoning; but in any case, the predicted apocalypse notably failed to arrive.

The point, however, is that in the minds of those disturbed by social change, chaos in the streets was supposed to follow, and they are all too willing to believe that it did, in the teeth of the evidence.

The question now is how many such people, people determined to live in a nightmare of their own imagining, there really are.

The GOP's Ridiculous War "for" Women

Unless one is a Kool-Aid drinking Christofascist or utterly motivated by greed and a quest for lower taxes, it is becoming harder and harder for saner and rational women to vote Republican.  The GOP at both the state and federal level is obsessed with controlling women's' bodies and seemingly wants women bare foot and subservient to either their husbands or other white males.   Despite this reality, the GOP is trying to "win back women voters" through approaches that would require one to have had a lobotomy or have the IQ of a trainable mentally retarded individual - Karen, are you listening?  Not surprisingly, most women are not buying the disingenuous propaganda.  Here are highlights from Salon n this GOP idiocy:

In an exciting new development for American politics, the Republican Party ran some spreadsheets and crunched some numbers and — lo and behold — have discovered that women vote. However belated this revelation might be, the GOP is running at this knowledge with everything they have.

Yesterday, high-ranking Republican woman Cathy McMorris Rogers unveiled a bold new campaign to reach out to the half of the population the GOP has been trying to keep broke, barefoot and pregnant. And to prove that they are the party of business and branding, Republicans even came up with a scorching new slogan that’s destined to set the meme-world on fire:  “The War for Women.”

That’s right, they’ve cleverly declared that they are not, as is widely assumed, waging a war on the fairer sex — it’s actually all for them. So now the GOP is fighting against those who are saying it’s a war on women.
[W]omen are working and they are making money and they are buying things. Which means that something has changed since 1953 when Cathy McMorris Rogers was put into the cryogenic chamber from which she apparently emerged just this week. 

Because reliable contraception combined with changing social attitudes and laws making labor markets more hospitable, large numbers of women left traditional forms of female employment and sought careers. They are the reason that today’s commentators can have meaningful discussions about “women at the top.”

That’s certainly not something Cathy McMorris Rogers wants anyone to think about too deeply. After all, she’s adamantly opposed to the birth control mandate in the Affordable Care Act . . . .

Instead of helping women maintain control of their reproduction, the “War for Women” is a hodgepodge of stale policy proposals for weak tax credits, a bill to prevent employers from firing women who ask about equal rights in the workplace (shocking that this is even necessary) and the pièce de résistance: a bill to allow “flex time” in lieu of overtime, an employer’s dream legislation that will lower their bottom line while giving the ladies the illusion that they are “free” to work less. (Flex time should be an addition, not a tradeoff for overtime.)

Meanwhile, as the Huffington Post’s Laura Basset points out, the record shows that in this Congress the GOP blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act — a common-sense initiative that would halt the practice of firing employees who talk about their salaries with their co-workers — and refused to bring bills to the floor that would have provided real childcare tax credits, mandatory paid sick leave and family leave and would have required that employers allow pregnant women certain accommodations in the workplace.

The patented GOP reverence for “life” is remarkably absent everywhere in society except on the sidewalks outside of abortion clinics. If these people are fighting “for” working women, they’ve got a funny way of showing it.

[T]these ongoing assaults on women’s freedom from the courts, as well as the insulting rhetoric coming from conservative pundits and politicians, are only helping women’s groups and the Democratic Party raise more money than ever. It appears that women don’t actually like being exhorted to just “close their legs” and seem to understand quite clearly that the Republican Party agenda is hostile to working families and they and their male allies are putting their money where their mouths are.  

Conservative Lies About "Caring About Children"

Click image to enlarge

As Noted in a previous post, the Christofascists and their political whores in the Republican Party always claim to be concerned about "the children."  Meanwhile, the policies they espouse are the antithesis of those one would back if one actually gave a damn about children and families.  The map above is an indictment of the conservatives who oppose paid leave and other programs that allow mothers to actually care for their children.  Andrew Sullivan notes as follows:

Lest we be too pleased with ourselves for remembering to call mom on Sunday, Ezra reminds us how tough it is for working mothers in the US, who have no guarantees of paid time off to care for an infant or a sick child:

While a handful of states, like California, offer modest paid maternal leave, there’s no federal guarantee of either paid maternal or paternal leave. We make mothers choose between spending a month with their newborn child or keeping a roof over their child’s head. That’s not how it looks in countries that value the work mothers do.

 The hypocrisy of these folks and their robber baron allies is absolutely stunning.

Are Umarried Women the Key to 2014 Midterm Elections?

Despite protests to the contrary, the Republican Party is maintaining its war on women when not temporarily distracted by the GOP's war on the poor.  The GOP opposes equal pay legislation that would protect women and seeks to oversee every intimate aspect of women's bodies, and in some states are pushing for laws that would make it harder for women to escape abusive marriages.   Thus, the claim that the GOP is not anti-woman - other than perhaps those who opt to stay home barefoot and pregnant - simply do not match up with objective reality.  A piece in Politico looks at the role unmarried women may play in deciding the outcome of the 2014 midterm elections.  Here are excerpts:

[M]arital status is one of the strongest predictors of whether a person will vote and for which party, which is why so many progressives and Democrats are paying attention now.

A majority of American households are now unmarried, and nearly a quarter of the presidential-year electorate were unmarried women. But marriage is now politicized too. Nearly 60 percent of those who call themselves Republicans are married and three-quarters of the conservative Republican base are married. By contrast, two-thirds of unmarried women voted for Barack Obama and Democrats for Congress in 2012; two-thirds voted for Terry McAuliffe for Virginia governor in 2013.

But if you want to know why unmarried women are now the focus, it is not because they are assuredly Democrats, or even assuredly voters. In an off-year election, and when so many are struggling economically, unmarried women are no guarantee at the polls.

In our most recent national survey, just two-thirds of unmarried women who voted in 2012 said they were almost certain to vote in November, and 10.5 million unmarried women who voted in 2012 are project to stay home in November.

And in our latest poll done for NPR – conducted jointly by Democracy Corps and Resurgent Republic – the Democrats were ahead by 1 point in the generic congressional ballot (44 to 43 percent), but unmarried women gave Democrats 58 percent of their votes. That sounds high, but it is nearly 10 points below what we would see in a presidential-year election, suggesting that Democrats have some work to do.So, if you are a Democrat and want to change your electoral fortunes in November, unmarried women are the biggest and best opportunity. Right now, these are votes on the table

What unmarried women (widows, never-marrieds and divorcées) share—and what makes them lean so heavily for Democrats—is being on their own, vulnerable economically, at a time when jobs that pay enough to live on are very scarce. That is the main finding of the research we have conducted over the last couple of years. For most Americans, the economy is a challenge every day.

[O]ur research shows that what motivates them to vote are economic issues, particularly those that affect working women and mothers. In Virginia, much of the Democrats’ advertising was focused on abortion and contraception and no doubt increased Democratic support, but it did not raise turnout among unmarried women.

The take away for Democrats is that they must not only stress the issues of equal pay and contraception/abortion, but they must also stress that the Democrats are better for economic prosperity for all and that it is GOP obstructionism/policies that have  deliberately held America;s economy back as the GOP sought to destroy Barack Obama - and millions of Americans along with him.