chasdarwin

Why Conservatives Wrongly Blame Single Moms for the Disastrous Failures of the Right-Wing Economic Model

“Broken homes” are irrelevant when there are so few well-paid jobs with decent benefits.

2012-06-14 chasdarwinLeave a comment

By: Joshua Holland

“We should view lower-income single moms as heroes. Most of them make enormous sacrifices to raise their kids — trying to balance work and parenthood in a society that offers them very little support. Many are forced to forgo opportunity to advance, working multiple jobs just to scrape by. But too often, they’re villified – blamed not only for failing to “keep their man,” but also for America’s persistently high poverty rate and dramatic inequality.

The idea that the decline of “traditional marriage” is the root cause of all manner of social problems is especially prominent on the political Right. Serious research into the causes of wealth and income inequality has not been kind to the cultural narratives conservatives tend to favor, but they nonetheless persist because such explanations have immense value for the Right. They offer an opportunity to shift focus from the damage corporate America’s preferred economic policies have wrought on working people – union-busting, defunding social programs in order to slash taxes for those at the top and trade deals that make it easy for multinationals to move production to low-wage countries and still sell their goods at home – and onto their traditional bogeymen: feminism, secularism and whatever else those dirty hippies are up to.

The single mother, especially the black or brown single mother, plays an outsized-role in this discourse. A compelling body of research suggests that economic insecurity leads to more single-parent “broken homes,” yet the Right clings tirelessly to the myth that the causal relationship is the other way around.

Writing favorably of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, Kay Hymowitz – a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and author of Marriage and Caste in America – set up a rather obvious straw-man when describing what she calls the “single-mother revolution.”

Defenders of the single-mother revolution often describe it as empowering for women, who can now free themselves from unhappy unions and live independent lives. That’s one way to look at it. Another is that it has been an economic catastrophe for those women. Poverty remains relatively rare among married couples with children; the U.S. Census puts only 8.8 percent of them in that category, up from 6.7 percent since the start of the Great Recession. But over 40 percent of single-mother families are poor, up from 37 percent before the downturn.

I have yet to encounter a “defender” of single-parent households who would suggest that they “empower” poorer women. For affluent women heading a household, the story is very different. The fact that she may not be stigmatized as she once was may indeed be empowering. But that’s because studies have found that they don’t lose economic status at all—they maintain their position. That wouldn’t be the case if there was something about being a single mother that inherently led to poorer economic outcomes – if that were the case, single-moms at every income level would fare worse than other women.

We tend to see wealthier single mothers as strong and heroic, juggling work and kids. And they are, but the reason they can do so is that they can afford whatever help they might need — hiring nannies and tutors, or enrolling their kids in after-school programs.

But as Jean Hardisty, the author of Marriage as a Cure for Poverty: A Bogus Formula for Women, notes, it’s a different story for those without means. “Single mothers who are low-income… are constantly criticized by the general public,” she wrote, “and are held accountable for their single status rather than praised for finding self-fulfillment in motherhood. They are usually judged to be irresponsible, or simply unable to meet the child’s needs, including the supposed need for a father or father figure.”

Here, we also need to acknowledge the role of public- and corporate policies that make it harder for women without the means to hire help to juggle work and family life. American workplaces are uniquely inflexible. According to Harvard’s Project on Global Working Families, the United States is one of only four countries out of 173 studied that doesn’t mandate some form of paid maternal leave. The others – Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland – are all developing states. When faced with an illness, or a sick child, 145 countries offer some form of paid leave, and the United States is among the stingiest. The authors note that we offer “only unpaid leave for serious illnesses through the [Family Medical Leave Act], which does not cover all workers.” This is, in part, a result of conservative complaints that mandated leave to deal with family emergencies is an unacceptable infringement on the “free market” – an argument made by the same people who would have us believe that poor single moms earned their poverty by raising kids alone.

The crux of the issue is that while it’s pretty self-evident that having one breadwinner instead of two (or one breadwinner and one parent to raise the kids) is an economic disadvantage — and any number of studies have found that single-parent households (especially single-mother families) are more likely to be poor — this “culture of poverty” narrative confuses correlation with causation.

Hardisty, writing specifically about poor people of color, notes that those living in poverty face tangible barriers to setting up and maintaining a stable, two-parent home:

Race accounts for several barriers to marriage in low-income communities of color. The disparate incarceration of men of color, job discrimination, and police harassment are three barriers that are race-specific. Other barriers are universally present for low-income people: low-quality and unsafe housing, a decrepit and underfunded educational system; joblessness; poor health care; and flat-funded day care . . . are some of the challenges faced by low-income women and men. These burdens make it difficult to set up stable, economically viable households, and also put stresses on couples that do marry.

In 1998, the Fragile Families Study looked at 3,700 low-income unmarried couples in 20 U.S. cities. The authors found that nine in 10 of the couples living together wanted to tie the knot, but only 15 percent had actually done so by the end of the one-year study period.

Yet here’s a key finding: for every dollar a man’s hourly wages increased, the odds that he’d get hitched by the end of the year rose by 5 percent. Men earning more than $25,000 during the year had twice the marriage rates of those making less than $25,000. Writing up the findings for the Nation, Sharon Lerner noted that poverty “also seems to make people feel less entitled to marry.”

As one father in the survey put it, marriage means “not living from check to check.” Thus, since he was still scraping bottom, he wasn’t ready for it. “There’s an identity associated with marriage that they don’t feel they can achieve,” [Princeton sociology professor Sara] McLanahan says of her interviewees. (Ironically, romantic ideas about weddings—the limos, cakes and gowns of bridal magazines—seem to stand in the way of marriage in this context. Many in the study said they were holding off until they could afford a big wedding bash.)

And economic insecurity – and lack of education – also make it more likely that two-parent households will split, creating single moms and dads. In a review of the literature about the primary causes of divorce, Pennsylvania State University scholars Paul Amato and Denise Previti write that “studies indicate that education and income facilitate marital success. Education promotes more effective communication between couples, thus helping them to resolve differences. In contrast, the stress generated by economic hardship increases disagreements over finances, makes spouses irritable, and decreases expressions of emotional support.” Partly for these reasons, they write, socio-economic status “is inversely associated with the risk of divorce.”

Perhaps the most compelling reason to reject the cultural hypothesis pushed by people like Kay Hymowitz is that people with little money have the same attitudes about marriage as those with big bucks. Hardisty cited studies showing that “a large percentage of single low-income mothers would like to be married at some time. They seek marriages that are financially stable, with a loving, supportive husband.”

Poor women have the same dream as everyone else; Hardisty notes that they “often aspire to a romantic notion of marriage and family that features a white picket fence in the suburbs.” But the insecure economic status wrought by three decades of business-friendly “free market” policies leads to fewer stable marriages, not the other way around.”

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

Emphasis Mine

see: http://www.alternet.org/story/155845/why_conservatives_wrongly_blame_single_moms_for_the_disastrous_failures_of_the_right-wing_economic_model?page=entire

… And the Poor Get Poorer

2012-06-14 chasdarwinLeave a comment

By: Alan Grayson

” The Federal Reserve just released its Survey of Consumer Finances, the only government survey of wealth in America. The Survey is conducted every three years. This survey, conducted in 2010, is the first one to reflect the effects of the Wall Street Meltdown in 2008.
How does it look? Bad. Really, really bad.

The median wealth of American families (meaning half above and half below) dropped from $126,400 in 2007 all the way down to $77,300 in 2010. That’s a 39% slide. It puts the median net worth of American families at its lowest level since 1995, fifteen years earlier.

About 12% of American families have a negative net worth. Meaning that they’re broke.

Among Americans with no high school diploma (15 percent of the adult population), median wealth plunged from $34,800 in 2007 to $16,100 in 2010, a 54% drop. That is the lowest level since at least the Fed’s 1983 survey, maybe earlier. So three decades of progress have been wiped out.

Among minorities, median wealth plunged from $29,700 to $20,400. That is the lowest level since 1992. White median wealth is now 540% higher than minority median wealth.

The median value of American homes dove from $209,500 in 2007 to $170,000 in 2010. But the median mortgage was almost completely unchanged: $74,700 in 2007, $74,100 in 2010. So debt payments increased from 7% of income to 11% of income.

In 2007, the bottom 25% had a net worth of $14,800 or less. In 2010, the bottom 25% had a net worth of $8,300 or less, a 44% decline.

In 2007, the top 10% had a net worth of $955,600 or more. In 2010, the top 10% had a net worth of $952,500, a decline of less than 1%.

Let me sum it up for you: In the greatest economic crisis that the United States has faced since the Great Depression, the rich barely lost a nickel. But the poor definitely got poorer. And people in the middle were crushed.

If this continues any longer, then we can invite a priest to administer last rites to the American Middle Class. ”

Courage,

Alan Grayson

Emphasis Mine

Ayn Rand. Just Go Away

For a time, I was a devotee of Ayn Rand’s ideas. Now I see what a pernicious philosophy rational egoism is – and how dumb!

2012-06-11 chasdarwinLeave a comment

From: RSN

By: Victoria Bekiempis, Guardian UK

“Ayn Rand is one of those people whom you just want to go away, but won’t.

I say this not with hate or ignorance, but with deep familiarity.

When, as a self-absorbed college freshman, I first came across the Russian emigre author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, she seemed like the coolest thinker ever – what selfish person doesn’t want to hear that being selfish doesn’t just feel good, but actually is good, too?

I quickly devoured nearly all of her atrocious tomes with a sort of blind hunger – that ferocious pseudo-intellectual reading you do only to confirm your beliefs, if you will. Indeed, I devotedly hung on her every word, even becoming an officer of my university’s Objectivist club. At one point, I may even have been president.

Much to the lament of my philosophy classmates, I was that girl who frequently (and loudly!) argued in favor of Rand’s illogical claims that altruism doesn’t exist; that selfishness is a virtue; and that “rational egoism” is the only right way to live.

Thankfully, I grew out of that phase. Not surprisingly, but a few years of minimum-wage work cleaning up cat faeces, without benefits, and other thankless, unstable odd jobs made me question Objectivism‘s foundations and rekindled an earlier interest in anarcho-syndicalism.

Eventually, leaving Rand was no more different or difficult than, say, leaving a friend who had grown to annoy me over time – sure, I was very intimate with her ideas, but that just gave me more insight into their outright dysfunctionality, and the strength to say “sayonara!”

What’s scary is that so many Americans have not grown out of that mentally puerile phase. Instead, this contingent – now largely comprised of Tea Party radicals – remains mired in her pop philosophy.

(Only now has Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, perhaps realizing that supporting an atheist adulterer might hurt his veep chances, changed his tune from Objectivist fanboy to follower of Thomas Aquinas.)

Granted, it’s doubtful that any political group so suspicious of the intelligentsia would actually read Rand’s 1,200 page magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, but her ideas are clearly being used to justify inequality, giving credence to institutionalized wealth-based elitism.

This has to stop, and stop now. But not just for the reasons that typically get brought up. Anti-Rand commentators have long pointed out both the pragmatic and personal problems with Rand. As evidenced by the Great Recession, for example, anything even remotely close to the unfettered capitalism advocated by Rand plainly does not work.

Also, as evidenced by her personal life, she was more a hypocritical, questionable character than a moral role model. As a teenager in Russia, “she watched her family nearly starve while she treated herself to the theater.” She railed against government benefits but cheerfully collected social security and Medicare. She championed integrity, but bastardized Nietzsche’s best ideas.

And her writing skills aren’t just mediocre; if anything, her penchant for 200-page monologues and wooden characters suggests that they’re non-existent. And she has this thing for rapey scenes; and her approach to BDSM goes for a Mad Men-esque chauvinist chic – not healthy sex positivism.

Of course, all that doesn’t actually say anything about her “philosophy”; it just makes the case that she’s a jerk and a hack. That said, her theory – and summarily, its corollaries – are belied by the abject sketchiness of their most basic premise: rational egoism. Far smarter, more articulate people than me have pointed this out, but what needs to be emphasized is that Rand conflates descriptive psychological egoism (people act in their self-interest) with normative ethical egoism (acting in self-interest is the right thing to do). Part of this “ought-from-an-is”-type assumption is that altruism does not exist – very much the backbone of her belief system.

West Valley College‘s Sandra LaFave does a great job following this line of thought and pointing out why it doesn’t work. The basic claim of egoists, LaFave notes, is that people “always and invariably act in their self-interest”. However, most moral codes call for altruism, which, in egoists’ account, is “demanding the impossible”. Moral codes, so egoists’ thinking goes, should not demand “the impossible”, so we should take up a “more realistic” system such as – ta-da! – ethical egoism.

To accept this conclusion, you have to accept the premise that psychological egoism is a given fact in the first place. To date, neither Rand nor anyone else has been able to prove definitively that the proverbial soldier who dives on a grenade acts selfishly, not altruistically.

Even if, for the sake of argument, we accepted that all acts were selfish, there certainly seem to be a great many unselfish-looking selfish acts (diving on the grenade to save your comrades), as well as selfish-seeming selfish acts (blowing your kid’s college tuition money on a shopping spree.) LaFave points out that this “empirical distinction” renders across-the-board selfishness more of a semantic trick than something that meaningfully describes ethics. Go ahead and claim all human acts come from self-interest, fine. This seems kind of silly, however, when the morality of said selfish acts will still be measured by how altruistic they seem.

Another key concern is that psychological egoism might not be final stage of an individual’s ethical development. We start off selfish, say some theorists, but we must move beyond convention and toward post-conventional social contract and conscience for true moral growth. Even if we were to concede that these foundational problems do not deal a death-blow to Objectivism – which would be very generous of us (yet generous in a selfish way, of course) – it still seems perverse to peg so much on so shaky a foundation.

The kernel of this belief system is nothing more than a philosophically hollow shell. It should absolutely not play a role in policy-making – especially when the end result would be disastrous. I outgrew Rand; now I wish America would, too.”

Emphasis Mine

see: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/11863-focus-ayn-rand-just-go-away

8 Ways Delusional Right-Wingers Are Blowing Wisconsin Out of Proportion

The triumphalism is more a manifestation of conservatives’ wishful thinking than a reflection of any objective reality.

2012-06-10 chasdarwinLeave a comment

From: AlterNet

By: Joshua Holland

“On Tuesday, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker held onto his job with a typical Republican campaign built on trickery, wildly dishonest messaging and a massive budget courtesy of a handful of ideologically like-minded sugar daddies from out-of-state (according to Mother Jones, about two-thirds of Walker’s donations came from outside the Badger State, compared with just around a quarter of his opponent’s).

In the aftermath of the vote, conservatives, proving typically magnanimous in victory, spun the results like a top. They claimed the outcome spelled doom for Obama this fall, marked the death of the labor movement and was a pure reflection of voters’ love for Scott Walker’s economy-crushing austerity policies.

“This is what democracy looks like,” Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch crowed after hanging on to her job. “Public sector unions are over,” rejoiced libertarian blogger Radley Balko on Twitter. The Breitbart kids, furthering a standard-issue conservative lie about unions, happily reported that, “Walker won 36% of Wisconsin’s union households, which isn’t surprising, considering how workers reacted when emancipated from forced dues.” (By law,nobody can be forced to pay union dues – workers in union shops can only be compelled to pay the direct costs of representing them.)

We shouldn’t kid ourselves; it was obviously a serious defeat for the progressive movement. Yet the triumphalism is more a manifestation of conservatives’ wishful thinking than a reflection of objective reality. Here are eight reasons why.

1. Wisconsinites Just Didn’t Like the Idea of Recalling a Sitting Governor

An honest reading of the published exit poll leads to an important conclusion about Walker’s victory that has little to do with unions, Walker’s policies, the economy or any of the other factors that have pundits’ tongues wagging.

Fully 70 percent of those voters polled believed that recall elections are either never appropriate (10 percent) or are only appropriate in the case of official misconduct (60 percent).

The governor won 72 percent of this group. And it’s worth noting that a third of those voters who said “official misconduct” is a good reason to recall a governor voted to oust Walker, who has seen six of his staffers charged with 15 felonies in the “John Doe” probe.

While Walker himself has not yet been charged, reports suggest that the investigation is circling closer to him. Over the past seven weeks, he transferred $160,000 from his campaign funds to a legal defense fund, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. In a recentinterview with AlterNet, John Nichols, associate editor of the Madison Capitol Times, noted that the governor “is now represented by four separate law firms, including two of the top criminal defense law firms. These aren’t firms that deal with election law; these are firms that deal with major crimes.” He survived the recall, but his problems are by no means over.

2. Wealthy Wisconsinites Voted Their Self-Interest

Also belying the spin that this was a referendum on public sector unions is the fact that the wealthiest fifth of the population – the people who have benefitted directly from Scott Walker’s tax cuts (passed during a supposed “fiscal crisis”) and probably worry too much about the social safety net he has ripped apart – made all the difference in the race.

Scott Walker and Tom Barrett were tied among the 80 percent of Wisconsin voters who make less than $100,000 (Walker got 50.2% of the vote, but the poll has a 4-point margin of error). Among the 20 percent who make $100 grand or more, Walker trounced Barrett, 63-37.

3. About Those Union Households

Did unions fail to turn out the vote? No, a third of the electorate belonged to a “union household” – the biggest share in any gubernatorial or presidential race since 2004.

But much has been made about the fact that Walker won 38 percent among that group. It’s a sad reality, but a little too much is being made of it, when you dig into the numbers. As theWashington Post noted, union members voted overwhelmingly for Barrett – by a 71-29 margin. But members of “union households” who don’t belong to a union only supported Barret by a 51-48 margin – not enough to make a difference.

That means that people who have a family member who belongs to a union didn’t feel their loved ones were under attack. Which brings us to…

4. How Could it Be a Referendum on Union Rights When Nobody Ran on Union Rights?

A slim majority of voters approved of Walker stripping the rights of public sector unions. But a final nail in the coffin for the narrative that Walker won on that issue is the simple fact that Barrett chose not to campaign on it. In fact, Barrett touted the fact that he wasn’t labor’s first choice (unions had backed Former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk, whom Barrett defeated in a primary) and bragged on the campaign trail about how he had been a tough negotiator with public employee unions as mayor of Milwaukee. He presented himself as the centrist who can “make tough choices” – basically parroting the case that Walker made in 2010.

That may have been a huge tactical error – hindsight is 50/50 – but it is the case, and suggesting that this election was all about Walker’s union-busting is simply divorced from the reality of the campaign.

5. This Is What Plutocracy Looks Like

It’s not accurate to say that money made all the difference in this race. The two candidates, facing off for the second time in two years, were both well-known by the electorate and the overwhelming majority of voters had made up their minds before the battle commenced.

But it’s also a mistake to dismiss the Walker camp’s ability to outspend their opponents by a 10 to 1 margin. According to the National Journal, the result was that “Walker and his Republican allies have outspent Democrat Tom Barrett and supportive groups more than 3-1 on TV ad buys during the three months leading up to the June 5 recall election.” This is likely the new normal in the age of Citizens United.

6. Very Little Changed From 2010, Except the Number of Voters

Pundits have to blather about what a big contest means, but the reality is that there wasn’t much difference between this contest and the last one between the two men in 2010.

Barrett’s financial disadvantage made it harder for him to get his arguments out, and again, he chose not to run on the very issue that led to the recall in the first place. As a result, the election was a mirror image of 2010, only with more voters going to the polls. Both Walker and Barrett won virtually the same share of the demographics they each held in 2010.

7. A Wisconsin Race That Tells Us Virtually Nothing About November

Immediately after the vote, CNN’s John King wondered whether Wisconsin, a pretty solidly “blue” state, should be moved from the “lean Obama” category to “up for grabs.” Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell said Walker’s win “helps to put Wisconsin in play.”

Nobody can know whether Barack Obama would have had an impact on the race had he chosen to campaign for Barrett. He didn’t. If he had, one might have some reason to suggest that this race was a harbinger of things to come in Wisconsin in November.

As it stands, 51 percent of those voters polled said they’d vote for Obama if the election were held today, compared with 44 percent who’d cast their ballot for Romney. Walker won 18 percent of likely Obama voters.

8. Don’t Forget 2011

None of this is to suggest that Tuesday wasn’t a painful defeat for the forces of progress in Wisconsin. It was. But much of the coverage has focused on Tuesday’s races in isolation, and that’s a mistake.

The picture looks a lot rosier when one considers the entire 16 months Scott Walker has been in office. Since Walker’s draconian union-busting measure passed, Democrats have collected the scalps of four sitting state senators, flipping the upper chamber to their control.

Three Democrats defended themselves against Republican recall efforts in 2011, while defeating two of their opponents. Then, back in March, another Republican targeted for recall, Pam Galloway, abruptly resigned, leaving the senate evenly split between the two parties. At the time, she said she was stepping down to deal with “family issues,” but it was widely believed that she didn’t have the desire to face a tough recall fight. All nine races in 2011 had been carried by Walker in 2010, but Democrats won five of them.

Then, on Tuesday, Democrat John Lehman appears to have picked up a senate seat in Racine County, swinging the chamber to Democratic control (there may be a recount, but he has a fairly solid lead of around 800 votes). Some have painted this as merely a symbolic victory, as it only means that Dems are guaranteed control of one chamber for the next five months, until the November elections. But it is unprecedented for a grassroots movement to unseat three sitting state senators in little over a year, and the movement has had an impact on the state’s governance. As John Nichols told AlterNet, “The significant thing is the recalls of last summer actually prevented some really atrocious things from happening.”

The recalls sent an incredibly powerful signal that a majority in Republican-leaning districts had opted against the policies of the government. What that did when a new Senate was constituted after the recalls was that it convinced a moderate Republican to begin to side with the Democrats on some fundamental environmental issues as well as voting rights issues.

The battle with Scott Walker, a recently elected sitting governor with almost unlimited resources, was always a David vs. Goliath affair. Progressives didn’t pull out a shocking victory, but they have still accomplished something pretty amazing in Wisconsin.

More importantly, the fight isn’t over yet.

Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.alternet.org/story/155778/8_delusional_ways_right-wingers_are_blowing_wisconsin_out_of_proportion__?page=entire

The Right’s New Tactic to Pit the Middle Class Against Itself

A new kind of class warfare is emerging in the Heartland.

2012-06-102012-06-10 chasdarwinLeave a comment

From: AlterNet

(N.B.: the author uses the term ‘midwest’. I don’t like the use of this word for many reasons, among them because it attempts to join together a large, diverse area under one label.)

N.B.: also exit polls demonstrated that the majority of those who voted against recall did so because they opposed recall itself.)

By: Dean Bakopolous

“The failed recall attempt of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker comes as no surprise to most of us liberals in the Midwest, though it still stings. It hurts not only because we failed to boot a corrupt and ruthless governor from the state capitol, but also because it underscores a more troubling phenomenon: A new kind of class warfare is emerging in the Heartland, and it is one the Republicans have been so good at orchestrating in order to win elections.

In the Bible Belt, Republicans have long been able to divide working people (by that I mean anyone who depends on an earned paycheck to stay afloat) on social issues — gay rights and abortion. In the Rust Belt and Grain Belt, that’s been a bit harder, as there is a strong “live and let live” ethic in the Midwest. We like our neighbors and tend to accept, if not value, our differences. We also like our pulpits free of politics; we prefer preachers to be soft-spoken and potlucks are often more important than politics. The overwhelming support for President Obama in Wisconsin in 2008 (he won some very conservative rural counties) proved all that.

What the deep pockets and political might of Scott Walker — and other Midwestern Republican governors — signal is a troubling new trend: There is now a new way for the rich, ruling class to use fear and envy to divide the American middle class, a strategy that doesn’t even need to use the traditional wedge issue of religion.

As Wisconsin’s new political landscape so clearly indicates, conservatives have now managed to vilify plain old working people as elitist fat cats. Librarians, teachers, public employees, and union laborers: Basically, people who earn health insurance and decent wages have suddenly become the things that stagnate an economy and raise taxes, when in truth they, and those wages they enjoy, have been the lifeblood of a struggling post-industrial economy.

But by declaring war on teachers, union laborers, and public sector employees, the well-heeled spinners behind the rise of Scott Walker have managed to make struggling Americans vote against their own best interests out of a sense of fear and envy. Struggling workers — and most comfortable middle-class workers — often to need an identifiable villain, someone who is holding them back from success, in order to vote Republican. If Republicans can present themselves as an enemy of that villain, they win. That’s what happened happened last night in Wisconsin.

America is a great nation, but also a jealous one. In an economic era of struggle, ease is resented. Those struggling to save for retirement and health insurance, those struggling to keep up with property taxes and utility bills, are easily going to be led to a passionate resentment of those who have such things “easy,” as Walker and his spin doctors have been claiming. It’s a lie that these middle class workers have it easy, and it’s a lie that they are the reason behind stagnant wages and dwindling job prospects in Wisconsin. Ironically, it’s the end of a union workforce and the collapse of public oversight of corporate interests that is most to blame for the woes of the working class.

If Barack Obama plans to win in November, he needs to unite two factions of the Rust Belt population: The middle-class of public workers and union members and teachers, and the other middle-class, which ranges from self-made entrepreneurs to struggling service industry workers. How does he do it? With an honest message that points to the real villain: An increasingly greedy corporate culture that stops at nothing in its quest to consolidate power and wealth.

There is, in fact, a 99 percent in this country. But right now, a big chunk of it votes in the interest of the 1 percent. Now is not the time for the corporate-friendly moderate Democrat along the lines of Bill Clinton, one who backpedals on health care and fair wages. Now is the time for a leader who speaks compassionately about the struggles of American families, and speaks honestly about the reasons behind them.

The president seems to have come out of the gate with this message; here’s hoping he’ll take it to the finish line, no matter how the political winds blow. It’s the only path to victory in an increasingly divided and scared nation.

The former director of the Wisconsin Humanities Council, Dean Bakopoulos is the author of “My American Unhappiness” — a political tragi-comedy set in Wisconsin — coming in paperback next month. He now teaches at Grinnell College in Iowa.

Emphasis Mine.

See: http://www.alternet.org/story/155806/the_right%27s_new_tactic_to_pit_the_middle_class_against_itself?page=entire

The Tea Party History of the United States.

Until one understands what is wrong with the above, they have no hope of understanding the USA of today.

2012-06-042012-06-04 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Things were almost perfect during the seventh and eighth years of the Presidency of GW Bush: The Axes of Evil had been subdued (Really?); income tax rates for the highest earners were at a historic low(TRUE); the terrorists had been vanquished(FALSE); income tax rates for the highest earners were at a historic low; the estate (death) tax – (inheriting an estate enables hard working Americans to be successful because of their birth situation) was on life support (TRUE);income tax rates for the highest earners were at a historic low; there was almost no deficit adding to the minuscule national debt (FALSE); income tax rates for the highest earners were at a historic low; access to contraception and abortion for people without means was low (TRUE); and fewer Americans than ever understood Natural Selection in specific or science in general (TRUE). The only dark cloud on the horizon (besides the fact that Social Security was on sound footing) was in housing: some very wealthy people – of the class know as job creators – had been growing our economy by speculating on increasing housing values, which had created a bubble getting ready to burst; and many home mortgages – of a type labeled subprime – had been written because the government forced financial institutions to make loans to people who had no chance of ever paying them back(FALSE). (The job creators dealt with the latter issue by hiding these bad loans in a package of securities, which they – using the best of free market principles – sold to unsuspecting clients) (ALL TRUE). When the housing bubble burst, the shady, worthless securities were exposed, markets collapsed, millions of job were lost (TRUE), many homes became worth less than what was owed on them (TRUE), and then, even worse, a Democrat – and a Black person – was elected President.

The President and his Democratic Party friends came into office and instantly the national debt and the deficit became huge (FALSE),unemployment reached levels almost as high as during the Reagan Administration(TRUE), gas prices skyrocketed, our national defense was compromised, and – horror of horrors – legislation to help people gain access to affordable health care was signed into law (TRUE). Even worse, the policy – begun in the previous presidency – of helping the financial and auto industries by providing low interest loans was continued(TRUE). What could have been worse? Higher taxes? Food stamps and unemployment insurance for those who were living the American Dream until their jobs were destroyed? Higher taxes? Spending tax money on successful military missions? Higher taxes? Strengthening public schools in poor neighborhoods so that some could gain the skills to survive, and even prosper? Higher taxes? Improved access to contraception and woman’s health needs? Marriage equality?

N.B.: taxes on moderate incomes are lower than they were on Jan 19, 2012; the marginal (highest) are unchanged.

Until one understands what is wrong with this tea party perception of history, they have no hope of understanding the USA of today.

Is It Time To Start Taxing Churches?

2012-05-26 chasdarwinLeave a comment

From: Care2

By:Robin Marty

“As institutions of faith, churches are not forced to pay taxes like the citizens and (usually) corporations in the rest of the United States. The original argument was that, like charity, church profits and donations go to doing public good — feeding the poor, caring for the sick and other projects that help to build a better, stronger community, and that those advantages outweigh the tax revenue lost.

Churches have grown to take greater advantage of this exemption. The surge in “televangelism” allowed many corrupt pastors to house themselves and keep themselves in luxury without paying taxes by declaring them allowable living expenses. Megachurches began popping up, buying cheap land to build on and using subsidies and avoiding paying property taxes while still taking full advantage of the services other residents pay out for. Some have businesses on site — coffee shops, book stores, all tax exempt by funneling their “profits” back into the church. Others have taken their earnings both from their businesses and donations and used them to evangelize and increase their missions, supporting the church and recruiting new members.

All of this is legal. And despite the growing stretch of the definitions of non-profit, of charity, and living expenses, most Americans would agree that all of this should be allowed.

But the only firewall that was set up is now breaking down. Churches weren’t supposed to get involved in political issues. No endorsing, no campaigning. It’s a rule that many religious organizations have been tiptoeing to the line on for years. “Family values” religious organizations have sanctioned off 501c4s to allow them the ability to advocate for candidates and issues, with donations kept separately from their main group and taxed accordingly. Pastors and priests have allowed candidates to come in and give testimony during services while winking that they aren’t endorsing a politician or party. And a growing number have actively endorsed despite the law against it, daring the government to come down on them.

Within the last few years, the “evangelical vote” has been a major driving force behind elections, and the United States Council of Catholic Bishops has actively become a political force, sending missives to their priests telling them to preach to the congregation about the evils of the Affordable Care Act, or convincing the Komen Race for the Cure Foundation to drop Planned Parenthood as a group they donate to — a move that would free up more funding to go to Catholic charities and hospitals to provide mammograms.

Apparently, even this hasn’t been brazen enough. So now, one church is collecting donations explicitly to oppose a gay marriage ballot initiative in Maine. The Associated Press reports, “Scores of Maine churches will pass the collection plate a second time at Sunday services on Father’s Day to kick off a fundraising campaign for the lead opposition group to November’s ballot question asking voters to legalize same-sex marriages. Between 150 and 200 churches are expected to raise money for the Protect Marriage Maine political action committee, said Carroll Conley Jr., executive director of the Christian Civic League of Maine evangelical organization and a member of the PAC. Conley is also trying to drum up support for the Maine campaign from religious leaders from around the country.”

Again, totally legal, as long as they don’t advocate for a specific candidate. The churches are following the letter of the law, but not the intent. Religious institutions now get all of the benefits of tax exempt status, but have become one of the most politically active groups in the nation.

Should churches continue to keep their tax exempt status while become key players in elections? Let us know what you think in the comments.”

Emphasis Mine

see:

Can Science Vanquish the Small-Mindedness and Bigotry of Social Conservatism?

Social conservatives are fighting a losing battle — not against a global secular humanist conspiracy, but against the pill, the car, and the Internet.

2012-05-24 chasdarwinLeave a comment

From: AlterNet

By: Michael Lind

“Growing public support for gay rights, including gay marriage, is the latest example of the moral liberalism that has transformed advanced industrial societies in the last few generations. The social traditionalists who claimed to be a “moral majority” in the United States in the 1980s are acting like an embattled, declining minority in the second decade of the 21st century. A few years ago the conservative activist Paul Weyrich declared that the right had lost “the culture war” and called on social conservatives to withdraw from mainstream society into their own traditionalist enclaves.

Many paranoid social conservatives blame the triumph of moral liberalism on a conspiracy of sinister secular humanists, using the media and the public schools to indoctrinate their children and grandchildren in a godless morality. But the truth is that social conservatism has been undermined by technological progress, which has increased the opportunities for freedom in matters of sex and censorship while raising the costs of enforcing traditional norms.

The pill did more to undermine traditional sexual morality than an imaginary secular humanist conspiracy could have done. Advances in contraception, far more than liberalization of abortion laws, not only reduced the costs of premarital sex but allowed married couples greater opportunities to plan their fertility. One result has been below-replacement fertility for most natives of advanced industrial societies, as a result of choice rather than coercion. Given the opportunity, most Americans, like most people in other advanced industrial nations, prefer fewer or no children to the large families of yesteryear. Participation in the modern workforce by the majority of mothers as well as unmarried women would have been impossible, if not for the pill.

By turning parenthood into a choice, rather than the nearly inevitable result of sex within marriage, the pill turned marriage into a relationship between two adults, with or without children, rather than a child-centered institution. This redefinition of marriage, along with social acceptance of growing numbers of heterosexuals who never marry or cohabit without marriage, inevitably undermined opposition to toleration or approval of gay and lesbian unions. Once most Americans stopped listening to priests, preachers and rabbis who seek to prescribe what married couples do in bed, it was only a matter of time before they stopped paying attention to clerical rules about what anyone does in bed.

In addition to the pill, the automobile is another technology associated with sexual liberation. In the premodern village or urban tenement neighborhood or sex-segregated campus, people were under the constant surveillance of family and neighbors. After World War II, access by young people to cars gave rise to institutions like road trips, “parking” in farmers’ fields and the one-hour hotel stay. And automobile-based suburbanization has enabled moral liberalism by creating communities in which people know few if any of their neighbors. Few progressives who long for a return of pedestrian villages want a revival of village surveillance and moral conformity.

If contraceptive technology has already let the horse of moral liberalism out of the barn of traditionalism, communications technology has burned down the barn. As recently as the 1970s and 1980s, Protestant and Catholic pressure groups were able to impose wide-ranging censorship on American television and radio and schools and public libraries. The church lady who insisted on the removal of “dirty books” from the library and organized boycotts of television shows and movies was a powerful figure in American life. Now pornography and graphic scenes of violence can be downloaded on a PC or a phone. Censorship was easy when there were choke points like TV and radio networks and the U.S. Postal Service. But technology has radically altered the cost-benefit calculation. Re-creating something like the older regime of media censorship would require not only North Korean or Iranian-style repression but also a vice squad with a bigger budget than the Pentagon.

The replacement of centralized, heavily censored broadcast media by a seemingly infinite number of channels has enabled far greater realism in cinema and television. Even before the Internet, subscription-only cable television was making possible uses of profanity and sexual explicitness that would never have been tolerated in broadcast television. Older generations may be shocked by graphic language, violence and sex, but it seems unlikely that we will return to the kind of bowdlerized entertainment in which characters said “frigging” and “darn,” in which characters in TV shows and movies did not bleed when shot or cut by swords, and in which the camera discreetly swiveled to the fireplace during romantic encounters.

Premodern societies, including the United States in recent memory, were based on a kind of Orwellian doublethink. There was the real world, populated by people who had premarital and extramarital sex, used contraceptives inside and outside marriage and had abortions, had children out of wedlock, patronized prostitutes and looked at pornography. And there was a fictitious world of literature and cinema and public discourse in which these aspects of life could not be mentioned, or could only be hinted at darkly. Much illicit behavior was tolerated, but occasionally and arbitrarily individuals who were caught were singled out and sacrificed, to maintain appearances. The cultural revolution of recent decades does not mean Americans are less moral than they were in the ages of speak-easies and corner bordellos and vaudeville strip shows. They are just less hypocritical.

Paul Weyrich was right about the culture war. Social conservatives are fighting a losing battle — not against a global secular humanist conspiracy, but against the social consequences of the pill, the automobile and the Internet. Short of reversing the industrial revolution, emptying the cities and restoring agrarian society, after the manner of Pol Pot’s communists in Cambodia in the 1970s, the best hope for social conservatives is to retreat to minority enclaves like those of the Amish. On self-created reservations they can raise their children as they see fit, segregated from mainstream culture and visited, perhaps, by morally liberal tourists nostalgic for an older, simpler way of life. And if their fertility is higher than that of the morally liberal majority, they can hope to take over America by strength of numbers — in 500 or a thousand years.”

Emphasis Mine

see: http://www.alternet.org/story/155552/can_science_vanquish_the_small-mindedness_and_bigotry_of_social_conservatism?akid=8838.123424.AH7LRN&rd=1&t=12

5 Things the Science Doesn’t Say About the Conservative Brain

The science of cognition and ideology has been greeted with a number of common myths.

2012-05-17 chasdarwinLeave a comment

From:AlterNet

By: Chris Mooney

“Recently here at AlterNet, and around the web, there’s been a lot of discussion of the science of political ideology—basically, the differing psychological or even physiological traits that separate liberals from conservatives. (For a scientific overview, see here.) (For a scientific overview of how strongly personality in particular predicts one’s political views, see here.) The debate tends to produce an odd effect: Liberals are intrigued, but many conservatives seem to take it all as an insult–based on a major misunderstanding of what the research actually means.

It’s time to set the record straight. So herewith, we dismantle five major myths about the science of ideology, and what it has to say about conservatism.

1) No, Scientists Aren’t Calling Conservatives Dumb.

Conservatives seem to wrongly interpret the new science of ideology as a slight to their intelligence. On the contrary, research on the differences between liberals and conservatives has centrally focused on personalities and styles of thinking, which is quite a different thing.

The idea is that there seems to be something about liberalism, with its openness to new ideas and new things, that does make liberals more science friendly, and more willing to change their minds over time. However, this is not at all the same as saying that conservatives are stupid. The personality trait in question,openness to experience, does tend to produce a higher verbal SAT score, but not necessarily a higher math score. And that makes sense—openness is about exploring (including through curiosity and reading), and seeing the world in a nuanced way, but not about raw intelligence.

In other words, to distinguish between liberals and conservatives on this personality dimension of openness is not at all to call conservatives “dumb”—rather, it’s to say they see less nuance in the world and are less tolerant of ambiguity, uncertainty and change. It’s about a style of thinking, not about differences in abilities.

But of course, there’s an irony: Maybe it’s because conservatives see less nuance that they wrongly think their intelligence is being insulted, when it isn’t.

2) No, Conservatives Do Not Have a Brain Disorder.

Just as insulting to conservatives—and just as baseless—is the claim made by some (like pundit Jonah Goldberg) that the research suggests there is something wrong with conservatives’ brains.

On the contrary, this science falls within the boundaries of normal psychology, not abnormal psychology. It appears that human beings fall along a spectrum on any number of personality traits—ranging from neuroticism to agreeableness or politeness. The spectrum itself is normal. However, falling at different places on it has political implications—particularly scoring lower on openness to experience, or higher on conscientiousness (which tends to make one more conservative).

Once again, there’s an irony here. Intellectual conservatives think we should have a healthy respect for human nature, and build our societies to reflect it. Well, this research seems to suggest that conservatism itself is part of human nature–as is liberalism. Both seem a core part of who we are. So if you want to respect tradition and our heritage, like a good conservative, you really ought to be pretty psyched about the science of ideology.

Indeed, we can go all the way back to Thomas Jefferson on the matter, whostated of the political parties of his day:

The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed thro’ all time. And in fact the terms of whig and tory belong to natural as well as to civil history. They denote the temper and constitution and mind of different individuals.

Modern science is suggesting that Jefferson was absolutely right.

3) No, All Conservatives Are Not Closed-Minded.

It is certainly possible to see the lack of openness as equivalent to closed-mindedness. In particular, scoring very low on openness to experience isassociated with traits like authoritarianism, or seeing the world in a black-and-white way with little tolerance of difference.

But even if that’s so, not all conservatives are being tarred with that brush. Once again, we’re talking about a spectrum here. What’s more, we’re talking about imperfect correlations, so it is not like every single liberal is more open than every single conservative. On the contrary, the statistics suggest that you will find many open conservatives and closed liberals—and even some outright authoritarians among Democrats.

Think about it this way: If you were betting in Las Vegas, you’d win money betting that liberals are open, rather than betting they are closed. But you still wouldn’t win every time.

What this means is that it is no refutation of the science to say, “But what about my Uncle Albert, who’s a conservative who loves traveling the world and reading long novels?” There will always be lots of counterexamples, but they don’t refute the overall picture.

4) No, This Is Not Biological Determinism.

Another misconception is that because we’re talking about personalities—and personalities are at least partly genetic—we’re asserting a form of “biological determinism.” In other words, we’re saying that liberals and conservatives are “just born that way” and they can’t change their views.

That doesn’t follow. Genes are the basic recipe for making us who we are—but if you’re baking a cake, you also have to consider the type of oven, the temperature it’s set at, how long the cake stays in, and so on. In other words, genes are just part of the equation, and the “environment” remains crucial. If there’s any determinism, it wouldn’t be solely genetic or biological—it would have to be both biological and also environmental.

No wonder that genetic studies suggest that only about 40 percent of one’s political ideology can be traced to the influence of genes. Forty percent might sound like a lot—and it is—but that still leaves 60 percent up to “experience” and the “environment.”

And that, in turn, leaves quite a lot of room for a lot of conservatives to turn into liberals, and a lot of liberals to turn into conservatives, whatever their basic personalities or their DNA.

5) No, Conservatives Aren’t All Bad People.

Most baseless of all is the assertion that conservatives are being morally judged based on this research. If anything, the science points out many conservative strengths.

If you consider personality, for instance, the research suggests that conservatives have somewhat more extraversion than liberals—meaning, they are probably more outgoing—and more emotional stability—meaning, they’re less neurotic on average. Neither can be called bad news for conservatives. Quite the contrary. Having more conscientiousness than liberals, meanwhile, means that conservatives are more task-oriented, goal-directed and disciplined.

In the moral realm, meanwhile, there are traits like loyalty to one’s group or team that powerfully reflect conservatism. This research suggests that, relative to conservatives, liberals are less loyal, worse team players. (The flip-side of this is that conservatives tend to be more tribal in nature.)

All of these traits, by the way, also suggest that conservatives are likely to be more effective in mass politics—which, the evidence suggests, they indeed are.

The conclusion, then, if you’re a conservative who’s concerned about the science of ideology is …well, you might want to look at it more closely. In reality, there’s plenty of bad news here for liberals as well.”

Chris Mooney is the author of four books, including his latest, “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality.”

Emphasis Mine.

see: http://www.alternet.org/story/155337/5_things_the_science_doesn%27t_say_about_the_conservative_brain?page=entire

5 Ways Conservatives are Destroying the Institution of Marriage

Those who think and talk like Rush Limbaugh have championed policies that wreak havoc on the family lives of working Americans.

2012-05-16 chasdarwinLeave a comment

From: Alternet

By:June Carbone and Naomi Cahn

Emphasis Mine

“President Obama’s strong support for same-sex marriage is strong support for the institution of marriage itself. It’s a vital step toward a revitalized institution better equipped to address the needs of today’s families.

Those who think and talk like Rush Limbaugh – who called the president’s statement a “war on traditional marriage” — have championed the policies underlying the real war. Research on contemporary marriage such as Brad Wilcox’s “When Marriage Disappears” showsthat the ability to sustain a long-term, two-parent relationship (with any sex) is increasingly a function of class. Our research in Red Families v. Blue Familiesreveals that it is also the product of a conservative economic program that has wreaked havoc on the family lives of struggling Americans.

We have been consistently stunned, though alas not shocked, by the anguished tones used by those who oppose same-sex marriage and who manage to argue with a straight face (pun intended) that declining marriage rates must somehow be linked to public recognition of same-sex couples. It is time to identify the real reasons for the transformation of marriage – and gay marriage has nothing to do with those changes.

Marriage results from the union of two partners convinced that they are better off together than apart. In times when only men had access to a “family wage” and child care was (and still is) expensive or non-existent, the traditional match involved a trade of men’s higher income for women’s domestic services.

What does marriage rest on today? For many, it rests on a commitment of two people to share their lives, to create a permanent union that provides support for children, and to manage the tradeoffs between careers, finances and services necessary to manage a family. This is an ideal held by both heterosexual and same-sex couples who are more financially secure. But it no longer fits large numbers of working-class couples who conceive children together. That’s because the foundation for their relationships has been destroyed by the very people who accuse President Obama of a war on marriage.

Let’s consider how they have systematically undermined marriage.

1. Attacks on Jobs and Wages. The “traditional” marriage that conservatives are so fond of talking about rested on the ability of a man — any man — to earn a “family wage” in a stable job. Those assaulting unions, like Scott Walker in Wisconsin, have undermined both the family wage and job stability. Job stability has declined in the United States since the 1970s. Dartmouth sociologist Matissa Hollister explained last year that the strongest evidence for this “is decline in long-term tenure among men employed in the private sector.”

2. Attacks on Work/Family Balance. In the absence of male job security, two incomes have been increasingly important to family life. Yet, managing two incomes also involves managing the down-time between jobs. Those characterizing themselves as “conservatives” have led the assault on unemployment benefits, education and work/family balance necessary to flexible family roles. While 178 other countries have paid parental leave, only a few states – all blue – guarantee paid leave in the United States. A few blue states — California, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Hawaii – as well as Puerto Rico — offer temporary disability insurance programs, an option through which a biological mother can “draw on public insurance for pregnancy and childbirth.” In other states, families are on their own. Paul Amato’s 2009 book Alone Together demonstrates that tensions working-class men have experienced due to loss of employment and working-class women’s lack of job flexibility is a major factor in the class-based increases in divorce.

3. Attacks on Women. As Amato’s work documents, managing a world in which many women outearn men requires more flexible gender roles. Yet conservatives have led the fight against women and women’s autonomy. They link same-sex marriage to the remaking of the institution in the gender neutral terms they oppose.

4. Attacks on Reproductive Freedom. The war on women, which focuses on reproductive autonomy, has contributed more to elimination of the stigma against non-marital births than the counter-culture of the 1960s. How? Eliminate the male premium that supported the shotgun marriage and oppose abortion as murder and what’s left are single mothers struggling to make it on their own. If you happened to see the blog discussions of Bristol Palin’s non-marital birth, you may have noticed that neither conservative nor liberal women thought there was much point to Bristol marrying Levi, the birth father. And yet conservatives were more enthusiastic than liberals in congratulating the Palins for their support of Bristol’s decision to keep the child. Fine, perhaps, for a young women with financial resources, but what about those who don’t have wealthy parents?

5. Attacks on the Marriageabity of Men. Studies of marriage and gender relationships show that norms change quickly with gender ratios: marriage rates in most societies go up when men outnumber women and go down when women outnumber men in the marriage pool. (See Guttentag and Secord’s book Too Many Women: The Sex Ratio Question.) That’s because when the number of men that women find attractive as potential mates goes down, those men find they can play the field. The women in their lives come to distrust men more generally and invest less in relationships.

A dramatic new study illustrates the effect by looking at the undergraduate dating behavior of young women on college campuses. The study finds that the more the men outnumber the women on a given campus, the more likely the women are to be in committed, monogamous relationships. Older studies show that high rates of incarceration and the decimation of blue-collar jobs in low-income communities skews gender ratios and depress marriage rates. (See William J. Wilson‘s book, The Truly Disadvantaged.) And, as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett further detail in their book The Spirit Level, higher rates of income inequality (which are directly related to conservative economic policies) increase the rates of alcoholism, depression and criminality and do so even more for men than women. All of these factors tend to remove a large number of low-income men from the marriage market.

At the height of what economists have called the”Great Compression” of the ’50s and ’60s — a time of increasing security for ordinary Americans produced by progressive policies of very high marginal tax rates and a reduction in income inequality — marriage rates soared. On the flip side, what Timothy Noah has described as the “Great Divergence“– a period starting in the 1970s characterized by ever higher rates of income inequality valorized by the right — has weakened the institution of marriage for many.

Who, then, is waging the real war? ”

June Carbone and Naomi Cahn are the co-authors of ‘Red Families v. Blue Families’ (OUP 2010) and ‘Family Classes’ (OUP forthcoming 2012).

see:http://www.alternet.org/story/155414/5_ways_conservatives_are_destroying_the_institution_of_marriage?page=entire