Tag: United States

Everything You Need To Know About Obama’s Gun Violence Prevention Proposals

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From: Think Progress

By: Annie-Rose Strasser

“In a press conference on Wednesday, President Obama outlined a sweeping effort to prevent gun violence in the United States. Surrounded by children who had written him letters voicing their desire to see gun laws passed, Obama announced that he will sign 23 executive orders and bring a set of proposals to Congress.

The President referenced one child’s letter that read, “I know that laws have to be passed by Congress, but I beg you to try very hard.”

“I promise that I will try very hard,” he said.

Obama also condemned lawmakers who vocally resist any new gun measures, pointing out that the gun policies of Ronald Reagan were more reasonable.

The initiatives cover everything from mental heath, to gun safety, to blocking the most deadly firearms from making it to market. Here are some of the most important efforts the President introduced today:

1. Making background checks universal. Obama wants every single gun owner to go through a proper background check, so it can be determined whether they have a criminal history or diagnosed mental illness. He wants Congress to close the gun show loophole that allows people at gun shows, and private buyers of used weapons, to avoid getting checked. He will also, through executive action, urge private sellers to conduct background checks, even if they aren’t mandatory.

2. Improving state reporting of criminals and the mentally ill. While all states are required to report to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) people who should not have access to guns, some states are sluggish about putting the data into the system. Obama will put more money into the hands of the states so that they can improve their reporting systems, and issue stronger guidelines to let states know when they should report people. Obama will also, through Presidential Memorandum, work to make sure agencies are regularly entering data into NICS.

3. Banning assault weapons. This is likely the most difficult battle Obama will undertake. He wants to reinstate the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, which outlaws military-grade weapons, like the AR-15 used by Newtown gunman Adam Lanza and by Aurora Theater gunman James Holmes. Obama wants Congress to pass the ban, and close some of the loopholes identified in its 1994 iteration.

4. Capping magazine clip capacity at 10 bullets. A military-grade weapon is dangerous, but so are its accessories: Obama proposes banning all extended magazine clips that hold over 10 bullets. Huge magazine clips allow a gunman to fire off hundreds of rounds without having to stop, even once, to reload. The high-capacity magazine ban was also part of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban.

5. Purging armor-piercing bullets. The sale of armor piercing ammunition has been banned for quite some time, but is still legal to posess such bullets. Obama is calling on Congress to outlaw ownership and transfer of these bullets, instead of just the sale. Those who oppose any gun laws try to spin a ban on armor piercing bullets as a ban on deer hunting ammunition, but such ammo has the ability to penetrate bullet-proof vests, and is more colloquially known as “cop killer bullets.”

6. Funding police officers. Obama wants Congress to reverse its course of austerity for public employees by approving $4 billion to fund police enforcement around the country.

7. Strengthening gun tracking. In order to track weapons that are used for crimes, Obama will issue a memorandum mandating that all agencies trace back firearms. This means that any agency in the country must trace guns used in crimes back to their original owners, as a way to help collect data on where criminal weapons are coming from. Obama will also ask Congress to allow law enforcement to do background checks on guns seized during investigations.

8. Supporting research on gun violence. Obama hopes to be able to gather more information on gun violence and misuse of firearms, and use that data to inform the work of law enforcement. He also wants to restart research, which has been long blocked by the National Rifle Association, on how video games, the media, and violence affect violent gun crimes. The Centers for Disease Control will immediately begin these efforts, but Obama also is calling on Congress to add $10 million to the pot of funding for such research.

9. Encouraging mental health providers to get involved. In order to make sure that those with homicidal thoughts are unable to access the weapons with which to kill, Obama seeks to encourage mental health professionals to alert authorities to such people. He will clarify that doing so is not in violation of patient privacy laws. He also wants to dispel the idea that Obamacare prevents doctors from talking to patients about guns.

10. Promoting safe gun ownership. The administration will start a “responsible gun ownership” campaign to encourage gun owners to lock up their firearms. He will also work with the Consumer Product Safety Commission to make sure safes and gun locks on the market are effective. He’s also calling on the justice department to help him come up with new gun safety technology.

11. Funding school counseling. Obama is calling on Congress to fund the positions of 1,000 news school counselors. The funding will come both through the already-existent COPS Hiring Grant, and through a new Comprehensive School Safety program that Congress will need to sign off on. The latter would put #150 million into funding for new counselors and social workers in schools.

12. Encouraging safe, anti-bullying school environments. Over 8,000 schools could receive new funding — $50 million — under Obama’s plan to encourage safer school environments. Obama wants to help at-risk students by creating a “school climate survey” that will collect data on what services students need, and to remedy any problems by putting professionals into schools. The administration will also issue guidelines on school discipline policies.

13. Recognizing the mental health needs of low-income Americans.Medicaid recipients already qualify for some mental health services, but Obama would like to expand that service so that low-income Americans have the same access to professional help as those who have money to pay for it on their own. Obama will issue a directive to heads of state health programs, enforcing “mental health parity” — the idea that mental health should be treated as a priority as important as physical health.”

Emphasis Mine

see: http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/01/16/1456381/obama-gun-proposals/

 

I Was a Teen Conservative: How I Learned That Life Is Too Complex for Right-Wing Ideology

Speaking for the Arizona delegation at the Democratic Convention this past summer, Goldwater’s granddaughter cast her state’s votes for Barack Obama

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From: The American Prospect, via AlterNet

By:Steve Erickson

“Barry Goldwater was my first political hero. The most antiauthoritarian figure in mainstream American politics, who said what he thought without giving a damn, he looked and sounded as Western as Arizona, the state he represented in the Senate. Goldwater and John Kennedy hatched plans in the White House—for what they assumed would be their upcoming presidential campaign against each other in 1964—to travel the country in the Arizonan’s small plane that he flew himself, stopping off at airports in the middle of nowhere to debate one issue or another before taking off again. This two-fisted, free-flying persona made Goldwater the kind of politician that film director Howard Hawks might have come up with; by comparison, government couldn’t help appearing soullessly oppressive. Great Society liberalism had become the norm by the mid-1960s, and this reinforced Goldwater’s iconoclasm, striking a politically attuned, insistently nonconformist teenager as utopian, in the same way that Kennedy embodied idealism for so many others of my generation.

Utopia was in the air where I grew up, though I wouldn’t have identified it as that any more than I could have told you who Howard Hawks was. L.A.’s San Fernando Valley was the no man’s land between rural and suburban, between Wild West and space-age futurism. Ranches sprawled on the other side of the biggest road that ran near my house; three miles away, in the same part of the Valley that would become the porn capital of the world a couple of decades later, were makeshift frontier towns built for Westerns by the Hollywood studios. Overhead, the purple vapor trails of rocket tests streaked the skies. Kennedy’s race to the moon built the modern Valley; every father of every kid I knew worked, as did my own dad, for the bursting aerospace industry—-Lockheed, Hughes, North American, Rockwell. The progress that cut swaths through the Valley brought a disruption matched only by earthquakes. A new freeway (which eventually would be named after President Ronald Reagan) took our house, leaving just the swimming pool that was proof of my parents’ upward mobility; the pool was given to the next-door neighbor whose house fell outside the freeway’s path. This sort of upheaval was too common to be traumatizing.

My mother loved Goldwater, too. She took me to a Goldwater rally at the Los Angeles Convention Center, and on the morning of the ’64 election, I recall her peering through my bedroom door, gently trying to prepare her sensitive teenage son for the likelihood that our man Barry probably wasn’t going to make it that day. An outspoken liberal in her youth, she was the more ideological of my parents, both of whom grew up Franklin Roosevelt Democrats. In the election of 1948, she missed being old enough to vote by 11 days; my father voted for Harry Truman. Though he remained a Democrat in name, he never voted Democratic again. In the next election, both my parents cast their ballots for the Republican nominee, Dwight Eisenhower, after which began the rightward political trajectory of so many New Deal children, which would accelerate in response to the tumult of the ’60s. In my father’s case, this evolution accompanied the economic ascension that went with swimming pools built and forsaken, while my mother shared with many Americans an alarm that Soviet communism was winning the Cold War, sabotaging democracy and free enterprise. My fascination with politics derived from an interest in the drama of American history; by the time I was 12, I was writing stories about Abraham Lincoln and Nathan Hale (an enthusiasm for patriots making the ultimate sacrifice may be discerned here). I could recite the Gettysburg Address and name all the presidents of the United States in order and the opponents they defeated. Enthralled by Thomas Jefferson’s maxim that “government is best which governs least” (lately there’s some question whether he said this), I believed that the Bill of Rights is the greatest political document ever written, and I still believe it today, even as I take greater note over the years that it was written less as an addendum to the Constitution than as a rebuttal, by the Constitution’s greatest skeptic, its so-called father, James Madison.

Since the liberalism of the time was as smug as the conservatism of the future would be sanctimonious, I was secretly pleased when a history teacher in high school called my opinions “dangerous.” What teenager doesn’t want to be dangerous, especially when he’s so undangerous in so many other ways? The conservatism I embraced was a whole greater than the sum of the parts, the emphasis on individual freedom trumping stuff that I considered to be fine print. While I never liked the sound of a welfare state, I was enough of a softy to have balked at denying help to people who needed it; to the extent that I understood it, the idea that arose from the Great Crash of 1929—that there should be a division between commercial banks and investment banks, without which the great crash of 2008 later became possible—sounded perfectly sensible and, if anything, like a conservative idea. I didn’t really know what the Tennessee Valley Authority was or what it meant that Goldwater mused openly about selling it off. Goldwater mused openly about a lot of things that I took with a nuclear silo worth of salt. When he made jokes about lobbing missiles into the men’s room in the Kremlin, I thought it was funny, something that now mortifies me; I was too immature to understand that a presidential campaign might be better off with a little less humor out of Dr. Strangelove, that election year’s most talked-about film. I never believed that Goldwater was going to start a war, as suggested by an infamous Democratic television ad of a small girl plucking a daisy while counting down to Armageddon, because I didn’t think he was crazy. I had more faith in his prudence than he gave anyone reason to have.

While my hero worship remained unabated, I was troubled that summer of ’64. Liberals recoiled when Goldwater declared at the Republican Convention in San Francisco that “extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice,” but I understood the statement on its face; Tom Paine and Patrick Henry, not to mention Jefferson, said the same thing, more or less. If I was barely savvy enough, however, to comprehend Goldwater’s provocation, the mob fury that gripped the convention was harder to ignore. Rendered in images all the more unseemly by the crude black and white of television, the delegates cascaded verbal abuse at Goldwater’s defeated rival for the nomination, New York’s moderate governor, Nelson Rockefeller. More instinctually than I could articulate, I had the feeling maybe these were people I wouldn’t want to be in the same room with. No ideology holds the patent on rage, and in the years to come, scenes as ugly were played out by the political left. But though I was still too young to fathom what was meant by the better angels of our nature, I did experience my first sense of political alienation, and it was from those who I thought were on my side.

Meanwhile, a month before the convention, on the momentum of Kennedy’s martyrdom, the Senate passed the Civil Rights Act. This was the single most momentous piece of legislation since the same institution approved the 13th Amendment ending slavery a century before. Twenty-nine senators voted against the law; Goldwater was one of them. Following World War II, Goldwater had desegregated the Arizona National Guard that he founded and was a forceful proponent for integrating the nation’s military forces as well. In the Senate he had supported every previous civil-rights bill, including the ’64 bill in an earlier, less expansive form. I understood the constitutional rationale behind Goldwater’s vote, which was that the government shouldn’t have the power to dictate the conduct of a private business. Even at the age of 14, however, I had the unambiguous impression of some bigger picture being missed. While I didn’t question Goldwater’s motives, the motives on the convention floor that summer were transparent: There was little doubt that much of Goldwater’s support was racist and that much of what was being expressed on the floor was white wrath. I’m keenly cognizant of how self-serving it is to overstate this now. I was a naïve white kid with half a century between then and this article to cover my tracks. So let’s say that the rightness of the cause of racial justice was too manifest, too bright a line for one not to finally choose a side. In contrast with black people being hosed down on TV and beset by vicious dogs and vicious sticks swung by vicious cops, rhetoric about states’ rights sounded hollow.

Politics is always personal. It would be disingenuous to suggest that the changes I was going through, especially at the ages of 18 and 19, were entirely philosophical. Suffice it to say that when I glanced back over my shoulder at my first 17 years, I didn’t much like what I saw—someone rigid and judgmental, with politics to match. None of this examination took place inside the hermetic seal of my own thinking and feeling; a cultural explosion rocked the decade around me. The facts of the civil-rights movement became as inexorable to me as worries about democracy and totalitarianism. The national dilemma of race, and that dilemma’s resolution, became crucial to my evolving patriotism; not having had a single acquaintance before college who was African American, now I was living with African Americans in the college dormitory. Jeffersonian individualism remained my ideal, but there were more and more examples of how sometimes only the dreaded federal government had the power to protect the freedom of the individual from states and localities. Over and over, the notion that government necessarily becomes more responsive and better suited to protecting liberty the farther down the line from federalism it gets was proved irrefutably false.

By the end of the ’60s, it was clear that the conservatism I so ardently adopted was wrong about the two great issues of the day, civil rights being the first. The other was a war in Southeast Asia that no military or political figure was capable of explaining, a war for which every guy I knew was fodder. One night in 1969, three weeks before Christmas, a great raffle was held in Washington, D.C., in which my fate was drawn from a glass jar. All men of draft age received a number that would determine how soon, if ever, they would be called up for service and combat. Mine was 345, a very good number as numbers went in a situation that nonetheless underscored the absurdity of the lottery and the war itself. The proposition of bolstering an inept and crooked Indochinese country for the sake of American national security was one that few in the country accepted any longer, and when four students were murdered by the National Guard on a campus in Ohio the following spring during a demonstration against the war, what died as well was the last semblance of support for the war and an ideology that justified it. To a Jeffersonian, the brandishing of state power in order to conscript people to fight in a faithless conflagration and then to oppress the right of assembly stipulated by the First Amendment was repellent.

The 1960s were a Rorschach decade. No interpretation of the era’s inkblot is altogether wrong. Conservatism and liberalism were realigned in the process, creeds reassessed; liberal Democrats first escalated the Vietnam War, while some conservatives suggested that if this was an endeavor we couldn’t win, we should withdraw. But while the likes of Goldwater raised ever more blunt questions about the war and the draft, the vast majority of self-identified conservatives supported the state. Up to a point, this was an understandable response to what many ordinary Americans perceived as growing turmoil; faced with chaos, people like my parents had different ideas than I of what was to be conserved. None of this, however, changed the fact that in its deceit about the war’s unfolding and what was and wasn’t at stake, the state itself bore accountability for much of this chaos, and in the conflict between freedom and order, while the Jeffersonian conservatism that I signed up for gave the benefit of the doubt to freedom, a new conservatism now chose order. This state-imposed order was manifested by duplicity in the form of government misinformation and intimidation and surveillance, as well as by an implicit lack of faith in America itself—in an American’s right to know, in the American fabric’s ability to weather such fraying of and even rips in the national life. “If it takes a bloodbath,” Reagan said upon quelling a demonstration at the University of California, Berkeley, during his first term as California’s governor, “let’s get it over with,” a battle cry that not long before would have confirmed everything about the state that conservatives feared.

Ronald Reagan was the conservative Jesus for whom Goldwater proved to be only John the Baptist. Reagan came to the attention of conservatives when he made a speech for Goldwater a week before the ’64 election, advancing the case for Goldwater’s candidacy more powerfully than Goldwater had. Over the next 16 years, Reagan became the personification of a hybrid conservatism forged by times that tested everything. This fusion crossed an eloquence on behalf of liberty with a new trust in the power of the state; deserting the ideal of individual freedom, now conservatives automatically registered protest against the war and on behalf of civil rights as leftist insurrection. While Reagan’s election as president in 1980 appeared to be the apotheosis of what Goldwater started, in fact conservatism and the new president each were remaking themselves in the image of the other. Under Reagan the national debt and size of the federal government exploded; the Justice Department paid a purposely ominous attention to what adults read and watched; the war on drugs grew more ruthless; cynicism about science, particularly as it had to do with the environment, grew more pronounced; antagonism to the freedom of women to make choices about their bodies grew more vehement.

Most striking, three impulses distinguished the new right. The first was how the right’s enmity toward centralized state power was matched by an adoration of centralized corporate power. This constituted an abandonment of the principle of a truly free marketplace—with entrepreneurship and the flourishing of small business becoming more constrained and difficult—- and the overarching principle of decentralization. The second impulse was the displacement of liberty as conservatism’s core priority by a new priority, “values,” by which the right invariably meant sexual behavior, predominantly the sexual behavior of women and homosexuals. The third new impulse was most profound. This was a reconceptualization of the republic as one in which citizens are bound not by a Constitution in which God isn’t once mentioned, euphemized, or alluded to but by an unwritten Christian covenant that implicitly subjects free will to an organizing ethos that’s unmistakably theocratic. What was a freedom movement became an authority/wealth/religious movement. The new conservatism now spoke of the Bill of Rights with thinly veiled contempt. Conservatism continued to pay lip service to freedom in the abstract even as the only freedoms in the specific that it defended with urgency were the right to make a profit and to own a gun. If the language of conservatism, as given voice by President Reagan, hadn’t changed, its very essence had transformed, within two decades of Goldwater’s defeated run for the presidency.

In college I had doubts about everything, and then doubts about the doubts. I didn’t become a leftist: I wouldn’t have contemplated for two seconds putting a poster of Mao on my wall any more than I would have put up one of Hitler, and I found a lot of the revolutionary sentiments in pop music that I otherwise loved simplistic or silly. Calling the United States “fascist” was outrageous and reckless, a neutering of the word’s power by its careless use. I believed the testimony of history was that a managed capitalism made more people free and happy than did communism.

Some of the left-wing ideologues I knew reminded me of the right-wing ideologues I knew, including the one I had known best: me. The extent to which ideology hijacks independent thought, refracting an issue through the lens of an already-settled bias, was all the more disturbing for how long it took me to see it. Ideology is pathological: It provides a psychological structure posing as a theoretical one. This is why fervent communist intellectuals of the 1930s could become fervent anti-communist intellectuals of the 1950s—they didn’t change at all. They became anti-communist communists. In our own day, Keith Olbermann is a left-wing version of Glenn Beck and vice versa; you can switch their soundtracks and notice no difference in body nuance or facial expression or voice inflection, because the inner emotional wiring is the same. The harder a line that ideology hews, the more that right and left have in common, sharing a penchant for rewriting the past to vindicate whatever version of the present each prefers to trust. Stalinists flatly deny that the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 ever happened, in the same way that leaders of the contemporary right recast American history in terms of a mind-set that regards information as an elite conspiracy, science as a plot against God, and the earth as a subversive entity.

Where this story leaves me at the end isn’t really important, but since it began as my story, I should finish it. I’m keenly aware that my present identity as a political nomad may be no less about my ego than knee-jerk obstinacy was in my adolescence, that perhaps I repeat the pattern of my youth in reflexively staking out the vantage point of a contrarian. My politics were right when the country was left, and then moved left as the country moved right. The most flattering conclusion is that my previous life as a teenage right-winger inoculates me to ideology altogether. Consistency isn’t always the hobgoblin of a small mind: Every amendment in the Bill of Rights can’t be interpreted so broadly as to extrapolate from the fourth not simply a right to privacy but to an abortion, while at the same time the Second Amendment is strictly construed as being about a militia rather than the larger freedom of the citizenry not to be disarmed by the state. In turn, the Second Amendment can’t be interpreted broadly, ignoring the actual language, while the other nine are interpreted narrowly. At a social gathering following 9/11, I was dismayed that friends to the left of me condemned what I considered George W. Bush’s legitimate military action in Afghanistan, given the complicity of the Taliban in its alliance with al-Qaeda; the war against Iraq, on the other hand (having nothing to do with al-Qaeda or 9/11 or phantom weapons), made me angrier than anything that any American government has done.

I have my own kids now. Despite gratifying evidence that my 15-year-old son knows who the Koch brothers are, the allure of memorizing all the presidents in order escapes him. My seven-year-old, on the other hand, was reported by neighbors to be heard railing at her playmates, “And don’t even get me started on Paul Ryan!” I honestly believe my children are best served by a free politics that needs two wings to stay airborne and a push-me/pull-you tension between what is a right and what is a privilege, what is entitled and what is not, what reasonably progresses and what responsibly conserves. As recently as five years ago, I voted for a Republican for statewide office, and 12 years ago in the California primary, I voted for a Republican for president. I’m sorry to say that I don’t foresee doing it again. While the man in the middle clings to the vanity of fair-mindedness, contending that both sides are equally right and wrong, perfectly balanced by perspectives that are equally valid and flawed, conservatism has too irrevocably exhausted not just its philosophical credibility but any moral mandate. Run amok, the authoritarian, corporate, and theocratic impulses that were troubling a quarter-century ago have become appalling and indisputable.

Caught between know-nothingism and a faux populism that disguises a predisposition to favor the financially powerful against the disenfranchised, the new right is born of that awful howl that rose from the convention floor in San Francisco and so startled me. This is the ferocity that animates the right’s most prominent spokesmen in politics and electronic discourse. Some will argue it’s gratuitous to characterize a movement in terms of its gratuitousness—debate audiences cheering executions and booing gay soldiers in Iraq. I don’t think so anymore. At its most unforgiving, the incontrovertible id of today’s conservatism insists that an American president is not really an American and not really the president and tries to reject not solely his ideas but also the very fact of him. Over the past four years, the right, exuding bad faith at best and collective psychosis at worst, has intended not merely to end a presidency but to discredit its existence. Even before conservatism betrayed itself so conspicuously I’m not sure my right-wing teenage self thought conservatism was about shipping 12 million Latinos out of the country or supposing that people stupid enough to get sick when they can’t afford it should die. Pressed on the point, I should like to think that I would have allowed that being a country involves the sustenance of a social contract and the recognition that we’re more than 300 million free agents who happen to be roaming the same piece of real estate.

As for Barry Goldwater, before his death he became an exile from the movement that once was his. Following his presidential run, he continued to strike positions in accordance with a Jeffersonian big-individual/-small-government code. He called for an end to the draft. He became an ardent environmentalist. He supported the Voting Rights Act. He promoted legalization of marijuana. He championed gay rights. He espoused abortion rights. He engineered President Richard Nixon’s resignation for having used the levers of power to harass innocent Americans. He advocated (well, mused openly about, as was his wont) the nomination of black Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Jordan for vice president in 1976. He lobbied for the Supreme Court’s first female justice. He blasted Reagan for the 1987 Iran-Contra scandal (“the goddamned stupidest foreign-policy blunder this country’s ever made”). He admonished George H.W. Bush for running a shallow campaign against Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988. He endorsed Democratic congressional candidates in the early ’90s. He defended President Bill Clinton from trumped-up Republican charges of corruption. His denunciations of the religious right grew more bitter (“Do not associate my name with anything you do—you’re extremists, and you’ve hurt the Republican Party much more than the Democrats have”), and his consternation grew at how the rest of the party became caught in the undertow: “A lot of so-called conservatives today don’t know what the word means,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1994. When Republican nominee Robert Dole went to get Goldwater’s benediction during the 1996 campaign, hoping to shore up his conservative credentials while the news cameras rolled, Goldwater could be seen and heard by millions telling Dole, somewhat wryly, “We’re the new liberals of the party. Can you imagine that?”—not what Dole had in mind. By the time he died in 1998, Republicans had begun a whispering campaign that Goldwater suffered from dementia. Speaking for the Arizona delegation at the Democratic Convention this past summer, Goldwater’s granddaughter cast her state’s votes for Barack Obama.”

Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/i-was-teen-conservative-how-i-learned-life-too-complex-right-wing-ideology?akid=9800.123424.1vpgxH&rd=1&src=newsletter760676&t=11

Why God, Family and Tradition Do Not Equal Happiness

Conservatives are freaking out about the death of the traditional family. But the family appears to be getting better.

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From: The Guardian, via Alternet

By: Jil Filipovic

“Are we living in a post-familial age? According to a new report, The Rise of Post-Familialism: Humanity’s Future? , the answer is yes: the traditional family unit is slowly dying out as more people choose to forgo children and even marriage. As a result, society is economically imperilled, lacking the necessary workforce to support older generations. We’re also “values-challenged”, entering a brave new world of materialistic indulgence, selfishness and protracted adolescence.

Sounds awful, doesn’t it? Luckily, almost none of it is true.

People around the world are indeed delaying childbearing and marriage, and larger numbers of people never marry or reproduce at all. But that is not synonymous with a moral decline, or selfish decadence. It represents an uptick in women’s rights, a commitment to creating the family one wants, and wider choices for everyone.

It’s no shock that the drop in the number of children a woman has came along with the advent of the birth control pill. The countries with the highest birth rates aren’t just highly religious; they’re poor, have abominable human rights records and lack access to reliable birth control. Contrary to New York Times columnistRoss Douthat’s position , it is not in fact the country with the most babies that wins: if that was the case, Nigeria would be running the show.

Despite the clear correlation between reproductive rights and prosperity, the report’s author, joined by conservative commentators, laments the decline in childbearing because, as David Brooks says , it represents a rise of individualism and personal freedom – and that’s a bad thing. Brooks writes:

“People are not better off when they are given maximum personal freedom to do what they want. They’re better off when they are enshrouded in commitments that transcend personal choice – commitments to family, God, craft and country.”

But the moral case against individualism and choice doesn’t have legs. It’s a moral good when people have a wide array of choices and increased personal freedom – not just for the individual, but also for children, family and society. And the evidence backs that up.

Valuing tradition, family and God doesn’t automatically translate into healthy families or economic prosperity. Just look at the United States: the states that most idealise the conservative model do have higher birth rates, earlier marriage, higher levels of religiosity and more consistent church attendance. They make up consistent conservative voting blocks. They also have the highest levels of divorce in the country, the highest poverty rates , the highest teen pregnancy rates , the lowest child health ratings and the lowest education levels . On the other hand, the states that champion “liberal values” do have later marriage rates and lower birth rates. They’re also richer and better educated, the children that reside in them are healthier and families split up less often.

And contrary to the assertions in both the report and the commentary surrounding it, a lower birth rate does not actually mean that individuals end up voting to support only the interests of affluent childless singles. Quite the opposite: the social safety net is much stronger in liberal, supposedly individualistic, lower-birthrate blue states. An array of choices seems to mean that people respect and support a variety of paths.

The rest of the world tells a similar story. There are obviously myriad complex factors that play into a nation’s success, but the places where people are the healthiest and the most economically stable are the relatively liberal nations that provide for social welfare while allowing many different models of family to flourish.

Meanwhile, the arguments in favour of a return to the traditional family remain unconvincing, and even insulting. For example, NYT columnist Ross Douthat accuses single people of being “decadent” [4] in their selfish singledom (an argument neatly taken down by Ann Friedman [10]). In the report itself, the authors project a nobility on to staying at home and “sacrificing” for one’s family, as opposed to young people who show “an almost defiant individualism” and “indulge themselves in hobbies, fashion or restaurants”. Singapore pastor Andrew Ong says that the child-free media culture is “about not growing up”.

Listening to these guys, you would think that kids are an awful drag, that raising a family requires (almost entirely female) sacrifice, and that such hardship simply must be endured for … something they don’t quite specify. By contrast, they seem to think that single people are in a perpetual adolescence, out partying, eating and drinking until, I suppose, we get ours by dying alone with our cats.

That’s not making much of a case for marriage and babies, is it?

In reality, most of these selfish singles are in fact eventually getting married and having babies. They’re just doing it later [11]. The result is that these selfish late procreators are wealthier, their marriages last longer and their kids are healthier. How awful.

Investing in future generations is crucial, but conservatives seem to value not so much investment as major personal sacrifice in the here-and-now that results in poorer outcomes for everyone involved. And for what? So that future generations can grow up to sacrifice themselves too? Feminists and other liberals aren’t against supporting children and making the world a better place. We just realise that the best way to do that isn’t by making ourselves collectively miserable, but by actually taking steps to improve society for everyone, now and later.

One of the ways we’re doing that is by making it easier for women to choose to have children. Demanding that women sacrifice everything for child-rearing isn’t exactly getting the young ladies to line up, but that’s what our current employment model is based upon. It is actually exceedingly difficult in much of the world for women to achieve highly in a career while also having a thriving family and personal life. Our current employment model is based on a family economy with a male partner who is able to work full time, and a female partner who stays at home and tends to the children. Women are now in the workforce in unprecedented numbers – but the workforce hasn’t adjusted to give people much time for anything other than work. And conservatives have championed this model, praising folks who do multiple jobs just to make ends meet or work 80 hours a week. High-achieving men still often have wives who stay home. What happens, then, is high-achieving women either “opt out” and let their husbands do the bread-winning, don’t get married or decide that they want to have kids later or not at all. And the economy suffers for it.

But young single people don’t just want to slave away at work all day, and we don’t have someone at home taking care of the rest of our lives. We also want a work-life balance. We may not be going home to children, but we want to pursue our hobbies, spend time with the families we’ve created and engage with our communities. We realise there is much more to life than just work – but we also think there’s much more to life than a traditional family.

That kind of push-back could be the key in making work-life balance a reality. Historically, women’s work has been undervalued and disrespected. One reason “work-life balance” is discussed but not actually executed is because, I suspect, it’s women – and the most disrespected and undervalued group of women, mothers – who that balance is perceived to benefit. So what if this new group of highly effective, highly motivated, hard-working young single people are now demanding more balance and reasonable work hours and leave policies? Everyone benefits.

Women today also want relationships that are mutually supportive and egalitarian, something they might struggle to find – but not for the reasons conservatives seem to think [12]. Lots of men haven’t caught up, and still want wives who will be subservient and financially dependent. For men, getting married and having kids comes with increased social status and emotional benefits, not to mention actual salary increases and workplace opportunities. For women it’s the opposite: motherhood brings with it lost income and opportunity. There simply aren’t enough subservient women who are willing to put themselves in financial, social and sometimes even physical peril to have a “traditional family”.

Despite its reliance on rightwing values, there is much to be gleaned from this report. It identifies a place where liberal feminists worried about gender equality and conservatives worried about fertility rates can come together to promote both of our goals. Make reproductive freedom a priority, including the right to have healthy babies. We do this by promoting healthcare that covers the family planning tools that lead to healthy, wanted pregnancies. Federally mandated parental leave and other family-friendly policies like state-sponsored childcare would also make it easier for women and men to work and raise families. More affordable housing programmes would make it more plausible for parents to stay in the places where they choose to live, and where they have put down their social roots and earned their stripes at work. Real investment in public education would relieve much of the financial burden for parents who want their children to have the same opportunities they did.

Finally, support a variety of lifestyles and choices. When the traditional family model isn’t something that everyone is expected to personally sacrifice to create, we can construct and implement policies that benefit actual families, in all of their incarnations. When they are not a crass economic contract where financial support is traded for housekeeping and child-rearing but instead a unit based on love, respect and mutual support, marriages last longer. The conservative and religious promise that there is only one best way to live, one that requires temporal sacrifice and is justified solely by obligation but will be rewarded by happiness in the afterlife, but it doesn’t actually lead to good outcomes here on Earth.

Family isn’t dead. It’s just getting better. Expanding its definition and allowing people to choose their own happiness model is just making it more highly valued than ever.

Emphasis Mine

see:

 

The morning after

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From:The New Republic

By: Johathan Cohn

“The pundits are unanimous. Mitt Romney had more energy, offered more specifics, and may even have come across as more empathetic. I agree and polls suggest voters saw it the same way.

The debate may not change the dynamics of the election. But if I knew nothing about the candidates and this was my first exposure to the campaign, I’d think this Romney fellow has a detailed tax plan, wants to defend the middle class and poor, and will take care of people who can’t find health insurance.

Problem is, this isn’t my first exposure to the campaign. I happen to know a lot about the candidates. And I know that those three things aren’t true. Romney has made promises about taxes that are mathematically incompatible with one another. He’s outlined a spending plan that would devastate the middle class and (particularly) the poor. And his health care plan would leave people with pre-existing conditions pretty much in the same perilous situation they were before the Affordable Care Act became law.

My standard for candor in politics is whether candidates have offered the voters an accurate portrait of what they’ve done and what they are proposing. Tonight, Romney did precisely the opposite. And that really ought to be the story everybody is writing, although I doubt it will be.

Some details:

1. Taxes. President Obama repeatedly described Romney’s tax plan as a $5 trillion tax plan. Romney repeatedly took exception. The figure is correct. Romney has not given many details about his tax plan, but it’s possible to extrapolate from his promises and the Tax Policy Center, a project of the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute, did just that. Crunching the numbers, they determined that his proposed rate cut would cost… $5 trillion.

Romney has said he would offset those cuts by closing loopholes. The Tax Policy Centerhas analyzed that promise and found that it is mathematically impossible, unless Romney raises taxes on the middle class or lets his tax plan increase the deficit—neither of which Romney has said he’s willing to do. Romney has challenged the Tax Policy Center conclusion and did so again tonight, referring mysteriously to “six studies” that supposedly prove he’s right. He’s also been cryptic about what deductions he’d cut and, tonight, even suggested maybe he’d back away from some of the cuts if the numbers didn’t add up—although, as always, he was so vague that the statements could mean absolutely nothing.

I wish Obama had pressed him on this inconsistency even more directly than he did: “OK, governor, you say you can offset the $5 trillion cost of your tax plan. Tell us how, with real numbers. Are you getting rid of the home mortgage deduction? The exclusion for health insurance? Be straight with the American people about what you are proposing.” Obama didn’t do that, but it’s a question Romney has never been willing to answer.

2. The deficit and spending cuts. Asked by moderator Jim Lehrer how he’d cut the deficit, Romney outlined his plan for cutting spending. It included three main provisions.

First, Romney said, he’d repeal the Affordable Care Act. He’s serious about that, I presume. The problem is that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the health care law reduces the deficit. Repeal it and the deficit goes up. Then Romney said he’d review programs and cut all that are non-essential, singling out PBS. Well, fine. That’s pennies on the budget. It wouldn’t be nearly enough to make a meaningful dent in the deficit.

After that, Romney mentioned “turning programs over to the states.” Here there is real money, particularly if Romney includes Medicaid, which will soon eclipse Medicare as the government’s most expensive health insurance program. But Romney suggested this would work because the states are more efficient. This is what he usually says. The implication is that the states can spend a lot less on the programs without dramatically reducing services.

That’s nonsense. Medicaid already pays less than every other insurance program, private and public. Cutting more from the program would inevitably force states to reduce whom or what the program covers. A year ago, when the House Republicans proposed a similar scheme, a Kaiser Family Foundation report by Urban Institute researchers crunched the numbers and determined that the Medicaid cut would mean between 14 and 27 million people would lose health insurance.

By the way, the researchers assumed states would deal with declining Medicaid money exclusively by cutting eligibility for the able-bodied and non-elderly. In fact, most of the program’s money goes to the disabled and elderly. Most likely, they’d feel at least some of the pain.

3. Medicare: Over and over again, Romney attacked Obama because the Affordable Care Act reduces Medicare spending by $716 billion. As you probably know by now, Paul Ryan’s budget made the exact same cut. And less than a year ago, Romney was praising this budget to the hilt.

But there’s another problem here: Romney’s own budget numbers don’t add up. Remember, he’s promised to cap non-defense spending at 16 percent of GDP. And he’s said he won’t touch Social Security. If he walls off Medicare, too, that would mean even sharper cuts across the board. How sharp? The Center on Budget and Policy Prioritiesran the numbers. If Medicare is getting that $716 billion back, he’d have to cut other programs by an average of a third by 2016 and in half by 2022. Non-discretionary defense spending, which “has averaged 3.9 percent of GDP and never fallen below 3.2 percent,” would fall to 1.7 percent.

That’s simply not realistic. I have no problem believing Romney would cut domestic program deeply; his willingness to endorse the kinds of cuts he has specified, to Medicaid and food stamps, tell you everything you need to know about his priorities. But these figures are the stuff of fantasy. Either Romney can’t restore the Medicare dollars as he says or he’s not living up to his promises on deficit reduction.

The real shame of the exchange was that Romney’s own plan got so little attention. Again, I wish Obama could have pressed Romney harder, or explained more clearly, why the voucher scheme he proposes would likely end the guarantee Medicare now makes to seniors—and why current retirees, as well as future ones, would feel the impact.

4. Health care and pre-existing conditions. Yeah, this was the part when I jumped out of my chair. Obama said that Romney’s alternative to Obamacare wouldn’t protect people with pre-existing conditions. Romney said it would. Sorry, but Romney is just plain wrong here. I’ve written about this before, so I’m just going to quote something I wrote previously:

Romney, like most Republicans, has long favored “continuous” coverage protection. But, for complicated reasons … this protection is relatively weak unless it includes the sort of substantial regulation and subsidies that Romney, like most Republicans, has opposed. As a result, such protection would do very little for many of the people who need it most. Among other things, as Sarah Kliff points out … “There are tens of millions of Americans who lack continuous coverage.” (A typical example would be somebody who lost a job, couldn’t keep making premium payments, and let coverage lapse.)

For people in this situation, Romney and the Republicans have traditionally said they favor coverage through “high-risk pools.” But high-risk pools are basically substandard policies: Although they cover catastrophic expenses, they leave people exposed to huge out-of-pocket costs. They also tend to be underfunded, because they cost a lot of money but serve only a small number of people. …

So what would this mean in practice? Imagine for a second that you have cancer, diabetes, or Parkinson’s. With the coverage you’re likely to get form a high-risk pool, chances are that you’ll continue to struggle with medical bills. You’ll end up going into financial distress, just to cover your health are costs, unless you decide to start skipping treatment. And that’s obviously not a very good idea. These policies are better than nothing, for sure. But what you really need is comprehensive insurance and way to pay for it—in other words, the kind of protection that the Affordable Care Act will provide, starting in 2014, unless Romney and the Republicans repeal it.

I don’t want to pretend Obama was always as forthright as he could have been, any more than I want to suggest he was the more adept debater tonight. At one point, Obama talked about letting tax rates on higher incomes return to Clinton-era levels as essential to reducing the deficit. That’s true. But a truly serious approach to deficit reduction would let all taxes, even those on more modest incomes, return to Clinton-era levels (albeit after the economy is on sounder footing). Obama decried Romney’s plan to leave seniors “at the mercy of the private insurance system” but those are strong words from a guy whose own health care plan relies heavily on insurance plans, albeit with a lot more regulation than most conservatives like.

Still, these are tiny transgressions compared to Romney’s, which also included misleading statements about the origins of the deficit and claims of a jobs plan that is, if anything, even more unspecific than his tax plan. And I worry that nobody will call him on it.

As part of its post-debate analysis, ABC News asked correspondent Jonathan Karl to play the role of fact-checker. He picked out one statement from each side and rated it “mostly false.” But the Obama statement Karl picked was the description of Romney’s tax plan as costing $5 trillion—a figure, again, that comes straight from the Tax Policy Center. That’s not “mostly false.” If anything, it’s “mostly true.” Then Karl talked about Romney’s pre-existing condition promise, which really is “mostly false.” Sigh. ”

Update: Steve Benen and Greg Sargent noticed the same thing, so that’s a start.

follow me on twitter @CitizenCohn

Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/108125/romney-debate-details-tax-medicare-pre-existing-contradictions-deceptions#

Don’t Tell Anyone, but the Stimulus Worked

Republicans learned a lesson from the stimulus that Democrats didn’t expect: unwavering opposition, distortion, deceit and ridicule actually work, especially when the opposition doesn’t put up a fight. The lesson for Democrats seems equally clear: when government actually works, let the world know about it.

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Source: NY Times

Author: David Firestone

“Republicans howled on Thursday when the Federal Reserve, at long last, took steps to energize the economy. Some were furious at the thought that even a little economic boost might work to benefit President Obama just before an election. “It is going to sow some growth in the economy,”said Raul Labrador, a freshman Tea Party congressman from Idaho, “and the Obama administration is going to claim credit.”

Mr. Labrador needn’t worry about that. The president is no more likely to get credit for the Fed’s action — for which he was not responsible — than he gets for the transformative law for which he was fully responsible: the 2009 stimulus, which fundamentally turned around the nation’s economy and its prospects for growth, and yet has disappeared from the political conversation.

The reputation of the stimulus is meticulously restored from shabby to skillful in Michael Grunwald’s important new book, “The New New Deal.” His findings will come as a jolt to those who think the law “failed,” the typical Republican assessment, or was too small and sloppy to have any effect.

On the most basic level, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is responsible for saving and creating 2.5 million jobs. The majority of economists agree that it helped the economy grow by as much as 3.8 percent, and kept the unemployment rate from reaching 12 percent.

The stimulus is the reason, in fact, that most Americans are better off than they were four years ago, when the economy was in serious danger of shutting down.

But the stimulus did far more than stimulate: it protected the most vulnerable from the recession’s heavy winds. Of the act’s $840 billion final cost, $1.5 billion went to rent subsidies and emergency housing that kept 1.2 million people under roofs. (That’s why the recession didn’t produce rampant homelessness.) It increased spending on food stamps, unemployment benefits and Medicaid, keeping at least seven million Americans from falling below the poverty line.

And as Mr. Grunwald shows, it made crucial investments in neglected economic sectors that are likely to pay off for decades. It jump-started the switch to electronic medical records, which will largely end the use of paper records by 2015. It poured more than $1 billion into comparative-effectiveness research on pharmaceuticals. It extended broadband Internet to thousands of rural communities. And it spent $90 billion on a huge variety of wind, solar and other clean energy projects that revived the industry. Republicans, of course, only want to talk about Solyndra, but most of the green investments have been quite successful, and renewable power output has doubled.

Americans don’t know most of this, and not just because Mitt Romney and his party denigrate the law as a boondoggle every five minutes. Democrats, so battered by the transformation of “stimulus” into a synonym for waste and fraud (of which there was little), have stopped using the word. Only four speakers at the Democratic convention even mentioned the recovery act, none using the word stimulus.

Mr. Obama himself didn’t bring it up at all. One of the biggest accomplishments of his first term — a clear illustration of the beneficial use of government power, in a law 50 percent larger (in constant dollars) than the original New Deal — and its author doesn’t even mention it in his most widely heard re-election speech. Such is the power of Republican misinformation, and Democratic timidity.

Mr. Grunwald argues that the recovery act was not timid, but the administration’s effort to sell it to the voters was muddled and ineffective. Not only did White House economists famously overestimate its impact on the jobless rate, handing Mr. Romney a favorite talking point, but the administration seemed to feel the benefits would simply be obvious. Mr. Obama, too cool to appear in an endless stream of photos with a shovel and hard hat, didn’t slap his name on public works projects in the self-promoting way of mayors and governors.

How many New Yorkers know that the stimulus is helping to pay for the Second Avenue subway, or the project to link the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central? Almost every American worker received a tax cut from the act, but only about 10 percent of them noticed it in their paychecks. White House economists had rejected the idea of distributing the tax cuts as flashy rebate checks, because people were more likely to spend the money (and help the economy) if they didn’t notice it. Good economics, perhaps, but terrible politics.

From the beginning, for purely political reasons, Republicans were determined to oppose the bill, using silly but tiny expenditures to discredit the whole thing. Even the moderate Republican senators who helped push the bill past a filibuster had refused to let it grow past $800 billion, and prevented it from paying for school construction.

Republicans learned a lesson from the stimulus that Democrats didn’t expect: unwavering opposition, distortion, deceit and ridicule actually work, especially when the opposition doesn’t put up a fight. The lesson for Democrats seems equally clear: when government actually works, let the world know about it.

Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/opinion/sunday/dont-tell-anyone-but-the-stimulus-worked.html?src=recg

Top Ten Clint Eastwood Empty-Chair Falsehoods

You can’t see me, but I’m talking to Clint Eastwood sitting spectrally in an empty chair, and I am replying to his confused rant.

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From: RSN

By: Juan Cole

“You can’t see me, but I’m talking to Clint Eastwood sitting spectrally in an empty chair, and I am replying to his confused rant.

1. Mr. Eastwood, you called the failure to close the Guantanamo Bay penitentiary a broken promise. President Obama was prevented from closing Guantanamo by the Republicans in Congress, which refused to allocate the funds necessary to end it. Do you remember this Washington Post headline, “House acts to block closing of Guantanamo”?

2. Mr. Eastwood you called “stupid” the idea of trying terrorists who attacked New York in a civilian courtroom in New York. But what would have better vindicated the strengths of America’s rule of law, the thing about the US most admired abroad? Mr. Eastwood, perhaps you spent so many years playing vigilantes who just blew people away (people who in the real world we would have needed to try to establish their guilt or innocence) that you want to run our judicial system as a kangaroo court.

3. You complained that there are 23 million unemployed Americans. Actually there are 12.8 million unemployed Americans. But there are no measures by which W. created more jobs per month on average during his presidency than has Obama, and there is good reason to blame current massive unemployment on Bush’s policies of deregulating banks and other financial institutions, which caused the crash of 2008. 

4. You criticized President Obama for giving a target date for withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan of 2014, and alleged that Romney said, “Why don’t you just bring them home tomorrow morning?” But George W. Bush set a target date of 31 December, 2011, for withdrawal from Iraq, and did so in negotiation with the Iraqi parliament. Was that also a bad idea? Have you considered that NATO allies and the government of President Hamid Karzai may have demanded an announced withdrawal date as a prerequisite of continued cooperation with the US there? And, just for your information, Gov. Romney hasn’t called for US troops to withdraw from Afghanistan immediately.

5. Mr. Eastwood, you made fun of Joe Biden as the ‘intellect of the Democratic Party.’ Vice President Biden was chair or ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for decades, helped to save the Bosnian Muslims from genocide, and passed the Violence against Women Act. I haven’t always agreed with him myself, but he has been among our more thoughtful contributors to American foreign policy. You, on the other hand, like to pretend to shoot down large numbers of people over the course of a violent two-hour fantasy.

6. You criticized President Obama for ‘talking about student loans.’ The Republican Party, especially Paul Ryan, wants to take away the government-backed loans on which millions of students depend, at a time when student indebtedness is at an all-time high. Just because some people are way overpaid for play-acting doesn’t mean that ordinary people don’t need student loans to get the credentials that allow them to make a better life for themselves. 

7. Mr. Eastwood, you criticized President Obama for saying he is an ‘ecological man’ but flying in Air Force One. Under President Obama, non-hydro forms of green energy in the United States have doubled from 3 percent of electricity production to 6 percent. Obama’s tax credits have been a big reason why. In contrast, Mr. Romney wants to get rid of credits for wind energy, which will hurt the Iowa economy, e.g., and is in the back pocket of Big Oil, so that he will stand in the way of green energy. I think doubling renewables rather offsets an occasional jet ride. And, it is Obama’s policies that will get us to the solar-driven airplane, not Romney’s.

8. You made fun of Obama because he has a law degree from Harvard. I just want you to sit in your empty chair for a while, and think about that.

9. You called Mr. Romney a ‘stellar businessman,’ but his business appears to have been to send American jobs to China.

10. I don’t know who suggested to you that you address us at the end and say, “Make my day,” with the implication that we should vote Romney-Ryan. But what I remember is, that phrase is a threat you are going to do bad things to us.”

Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/13255-focus-top-ten-clint-eastwood-empty-chair-falsehoods

Top 5 Fibs In Paul Ryan’s Convention Speech

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From: TPM

By: Brian Beutler

Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s headlining speech at the GOP convention in Tampa Wednesday night touched on many of the election’s defining issues. But it was also filled with prevarications — not just recitations of the conventions “you didn’t build that” theme, but on the very policy matters that have endeared him to the political establishment in Washington.

The speech effectively rallied his supporters in the audience. But on the merits it was chock full of misstatements of fact that undermine his reputation for brave, big ideas — which has hastened his rise through the ranks of the GOP.

Here are the top five examples:

Medicare

Ryan forged his reputation in large part by drafting and advancing an unpopular plan to dramatically cut and privatize Medicare. Though he didn’t mention that plan once on Wednesday, he included it in his last two budgets, both of which preserved the Affordable Care Acts cuts to Medicare — taken mostly from overpayments to private insurers and hospitals.

Instead, Ryan once again dubiously accused President Obama of being the true threat to Medicare.

“You see, even with all the hidden taxes to pay for the health care takeover, even with new taxes on nearly a million small businesses, the planners in Washington still didn’t have enough money. They needed more. They needed hundreds of billions more. So, they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama. An obligation we have to our parents and grandparents is being sacrificed, all to pay for a new entitlement we didn’t even ask for. The greatest threat to Medicare is Obamacare, and we’re going to stop it.”

Obama did use those Medicare savings — in the form of targeted cuts in payments to providers, not in benefits to seniors — to pay for the health care law. Ryan’s budget calls for using them to finance tax cuts for wealthy Americans, and deficit reduction. But by now calling to restore that spending commitment to Medicare, Ryan and Romney are pledging to hasten Medicare’s insolvency by many years.

Ryan said the Obama presidency, “began with a perfect Triple-A credit rating for the United States; it ends with a downgraded America.”

US Credit Rating

Standard & Poors downgraded the country’s sovereign debt rating in 2011 because congressional Republicans, of which Ryan is a key leader, threatened not to increase the country’s borrowing authority — risking a default on the debt — unless Democrats agreed to slash trillions of dollars from domestic social programs and investments. Ryan even briefly toyed with the idea that the country’s creditors would forgive default for “a day or two or three or four” as long as Democrats ultimately agreed to GOP demands.

Janesville GM plant

Ryan criticized Obama for — yes — not using government funds to prop up an auto plant in his district.

“A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years,’” Ryan recalled. “That’s what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day.”

Ignoring the inconsistency of a Republican chastising Obama for not bailing out more auto manufacturers, the plant in question closed before Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

Debt Commission 

Ryan chastised Obama: “He created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.”

Ryan sat on that commission. He voted against it. Following his lead, so did the panel’s other House Republicans.

Protecting the poor

Near the end of his speech, Ryan claimed the campaign’s top priority is protecting the poor. “We have responsibilities, one to another — we do not each face the world alone,” he said. “And the greatest of all responsibilities, is that of the strong to protect the weak.”

Just under two thirds of the dramatic spending cuts in Ryan’s budget target programs that benefit low-income people. That plan also calls for large tax cuts for high-income earners.

Emphasis Mine

see: http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/08/ryan-risks-reputation-with-misleading-nomination-speech.php

 

What’s the Matter With White People? Longing for a Golden Age That Never Was

In her new book, Joan Walsh discusses the complex story of why many in the white working class turned conservative.

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From:Salon, via AlterNet

By: Andrew O’Hehir, Joan Walsh

“Joan Walsh’s family, as she writes in her new book “What’s the Matter With White People? Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was,” [4] participated in two of the great migrations of 20th-century American history. Joan was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., but mostly grew up in suburbia (first on Long Island and later in Wisconsin). As that happened she watched many of her Irish-American family members morph from bedrock New Deal-JFK Democrats into Nixon-Reagan Republicans. In her book, Joan tries to wrestle with this legacy as honestly and forthrightly as she can, without betraying either her family’s complicated lived experience or her own passionate commitment to social, racial and economic justice.

“What’s the Matter With White People?” is sure to provoke much discussion during the fall campaign, with its personal and historical approach to one of the most toxic issues in American politics: How and why the white working class became the Republican base, in defiance of its own economic interests, and whether the Democrats can ever win it back. Along the way it’s also a family memoir that captures a specific period in the history of Irish-American assimilation, one that resonated strongly with me (and will also with you, if you have immigrant roots), and an account of Joan’s somewhat improbable rise to fame as an MSNBC commentator, which came about in large part because she embraced her working-class, Irish Catholic roots. Joan revisits many of the questions of the bitter 2008 Democratic campaign between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – which thrust issues of race and class back into the national consciousness – and argues that Obama now has the opportunity to embrace a broad, inclusive economic agenda that can both win this year’s election and help to heal the nation’s worsening caste divide.

But this isn’t a book review, for obvious reasons. Across a dozen years or so as Salon colleagues, Joan has been my co-worker, my boss and then a co-worker again (as well as a TV personality). We have had a number of late-night political debates, mostly friendly and occasionally argumentative. (One of those was about the fate of Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 presidential election, which took place when we were barely schoolchildren.) To stereotype both of us ruthlessly, Joan’s passion is the muddy trenches of politics, full of blood and compromise, while I’ve spent most of my journalistic career watching from the ivory tower of culture, with the other pointy-headed intellectuals. I am profoundly grateful to her for not mentioning, amid all the rough-and-tumble in her book, that Iwrote  [5]a fervent Salon article defending my vote for Ralph Nader in the 2000 election. (Want someone to blame for eight years of Bush? Mea culpa.)

Over the years we’ve picked up that we have strikingly similar Irish-American family histories, and strikingly dissimilar approaches to framing the major issues of the day. Joan’s father and my father were both the children of recent immigrants, and were born two years apart in adjoining New York neighborhoods. Both were the first kids in their extended families to go to college and break through to the middle class, and both remained liberal Democrats as many of their relatives drifted into the Reagan coalition. While Joan was born in Brooklyn and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years, I was born in the Bay Area and now live in Brooklyn. That’s where we met for lunch, in a lovely, tree-lined, multiracial neighborhood that looks like a 3-D Obama commercial, to talk about what in fact is wrong with white people.

So is there anything in this book that you’re anxious about your family reading?

Of course. Any time I’ve written anything about my family, people get upset about focusing on the negativity. I say in the book that I once called the Christian Brothers [monastic order] “foster care for the Irish poor,” and that remains a point of contention. I soften it a little bit in the book, but that’s still not popular in my family. Over the years I’ve tried to be more sensitive. And yet I still don’t think you send your kids off at 12 or 13, the way my grandparents did, if you have the wherewithal to support them.

There’s a scene in my book where my brother’s black friend is not made welcome by someone in my family, and people may be unhappy about that. We’ve had a lot of these discussions before. Once I started reengaging with my family, we revisited some of it. I am struck by the extent to which I probably acted like an entitled know-it-all, or a superior, self-righteous little ass, throughout my teens and 20s. Hopefully it wasn’t much longer than that. I understand things differently now.

I’m sure you know that anecdote by the novelist Mary Gordon, who describes going to her father’s funeral and having one of her aunts, who was a nun, come up to her and say, “Mary, you know we all hated your book.”

My father really wanted to be a writer, and at a certain point he said to me that what stopped him was this very Irish thing, where he always heard a voice in his head saying, “Who do you think you are?” Right after he died, that Mary Gordon essay ran, examining the relative lack of accomplished Irish-American writers. She literally says it’s that voice: Who do you think you are? There’s a lot of that.

You write about the fact that your father was the first person in his family to go to college, and also about the fact that he remained a liberal Democrat when many others around him didn’t. Both of those things describe my father too, and many other people. This is a tricky thing to discuss, but what’s the connection between higher education and voting for Democrats?

Sticking to my father’s family, the three boys who went to college, all because they went away to religious orders, turned out to be Democrats. The three siblings who didn’t turned out to be Republicans. When I’ve said that before, it can sound like I’m saying, “Oh, the smart ones became Democrats,” and I’m not saying that at all. What I realized writing this book was that liberalism in my family could seem like a form of class privilege. We were in the suburbs, we were isolated from the changes in New York. Of course my values are firmly held and my father’s were too. But it’s easy for us to think that integration is great and school busing is great, because those things did not affect us, by and large.

But that division is very important. Obama’s real problem right now is not exactly with working-class whites. That’s shorthand for a lot of things. It’s really with non-college-educated whites. Those are the people in our society who feel the most besieged, and in every poll they’re the most pessimistic about their chances and the chances of their kids. Somehow, for a lot of complicated reasons, they’ve come to associate their problems with what the government has done for other people but not for them.

You know, on the left we often talk about the absence of social class in the American conversation, and no doubt we should talk about that more. But I’ve come to believe the division in this country is often more a system of cultural castes that is not purely economic.

Yeah, I agree. It’s cultural caste and it’s isolation, including self-isolation. You often hear this about isolated black neighborhoods, but it can be just as true about isolated white neighborhoods, where people never go into the city and live in a lot of generic fear. And when you don’t go to college you’re just not exposed to different ways of thinking and different people. Even if you go to an all-white Christian college, you’re likely to come away with somewhat different attitudes than if you never do it at all.

On the subject of white people, one who’s been in the news a fair bit lately is Paul Ryan. Obviously he comes from a very different social background than Mitt Romney. But he’s been proclaimed as “working-class” by many commentators, and you dispute that.

Absolutely. He is a child of privilege and comfort, born into a construction business run by his family in Janesville, Wis. I think Paul Ryan is a great example of what drove me to write this book. It has been so vexing to me, and so mysterious, that wealthy or upper-middle-class white people, especially Irish Catholics, have become the face of the white working class when they never spent a frickin’ day in the working class in their lives. And that goes for Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Pat Buchanan and Paul Ryan. Ryan’s not as associated with the racism and the really nasty stuff, but his politics are just as nasty. His beliefs and what he wants to do are just as divisive and damaging.

But without irony, last weekend we saw him hailed as the white working-class addition to this ticket. And again, it works. I think it works in part because the media is so removed from any kind of working-class roots themselves that they don’t think about what that means. What that has come to mean is not that you lack a college education and work your ass off doing manual labor. It’s come to symbolize being closed-minded about abortion, being hyper-pro-military, being religious, being culturally very conservative. It doesn’t have any class content at all.

How much does the Romney-Ryan ticket represent a doubling down on whiteness? You can’t get any whiter than those two guys, and I don’t just mean their skin color or cultural background. They both seem like people with no experience of diversity, no relationship to the changing nature of America.

I think the Republicans doubled down on whiteness, and I think they have a problem. It could be a winning strategy, temporarily. They are making decisions that, well, it’s not great that Latinos and Asians don’t like us, but we have to double down on that base. This could get us through 2012, and we’ll worry about 2016 later. I would think that, as a Republican, you would think it’s a problem that nine out of 10 self-identified Republicans are white, in a country that’s about 60 to 62 percent white right now. One of our two major parties is a white party! It’s not named the white party, and I’m not going to call it a white supremacist party. But it’s the white party, and they don’t seem to give a damn about that. I think that’s a demographic and political and social disaster.

In the long game, they probably still have a shot at Latinos and Asians. If the people in the Republican Party who are not racists come together and say, OK, we have to write off African-Americans for a while, but we’re really going to make a play for these other groups — I mean, they have to do that. Otherwise, it’s demographic extinction. But for 2012, their only hope is to double down on whiteness and play Paul Ryan’s “makers and takers” card.

So in telling the long and complicated history of how American working-class whites became the Republican base you go pretty far back into history. One of the things you start with is Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676.

Bacon’s Rebellion was basically English, Irish and black indentured servants — the slave codes hadn’t been enacted yet — rebelling against the colonial Virginia elite. You realize really quickly that there are no pure good guys in any of these stories. Bacon’s Rebellion is always hailed as the first multiracial coalition in American history — you know, Howard Zinn loves it! Well, they really came together to fight the Indians. That part maybe isn’t so ideal. But this was what the colonial slave-owning masters really feared. They had imported not just Africans, but indentured servants from Britain and Ireland, creating this army who, if they banded together, could topple the power structure. So they created the slave codes, which made Africans slaves for life. They started enforcing the terms of indentured servitude, which meant whites could be free in seven years, you got a gun, you got some grain. You were given white status, basically — and even if most people didn’t get those things, there was the idea that you would get them. They made intermarriage between whites and blacks illegal. They went to a lot of effort to make sure that people didn’t see what they had in common.

So you would agree with one of the central analytical points about American history as seen from the left, that it’s a long history of elite groups finding ways to pit workers of different races against each other, as a way of holding power.

I think that’s pretty accurate. I think it’s a way that people in power keep power. It’s obviously something in human nature that we’re susceptible to, whether it’s people at the top or at the bottom. It must play to something not so great in our natures, that we’re easy marks for that kind of divisiveness. Now, it’s not a conspiracy — it’s not like the Koch brothers have been handed tablets that have come down over the centuries. It only looks that way!

And then there’s the darkest moment in the whole history between African-Americans and Irish-Americans, which was the New York City draft riots of 1863. You draw an interesting parallel between those terrible events and the inner-city rioting of the 1960s.

Yeah, I really wonder how many people know about that. That began when a lot of Irish Catholics who were drafted during the Civil War rebelled against it.

Many of them were fresh off the boat, and felt they had no dog in the fight.

That’s right. For one day, it was essentially a workers’ riot, with Germans and other immigrants involved. Then it became a religious riot and — sadly, tragically and horrifically — a race riot. [At least 100 African-Americans were murdered by whites.] It was vicious. Now, there were places where Irish people protected black people, and in the black-Irish downtown neighborhood there were no murders, but for the most part it was an act of despicable savagery. You can’t excuse it, but it has to be understood as the desperation of people at the bottom who are being pitted against this other group at the bottom, and being told that this other group is above them: “You’re going to go fight for them.”

To the “whiteness studies” people [in left-wing academia], this was the Irish trying to prove that they were American, but in fact it postponed the Americanization of the Irish by at least a decade. The words that were used by the New York Times and other thought-leaders of the day was that the Irish were animals, they were savages. It’s so striking that almost exactly 100 years later, when African-American neighborhoods began going up in flames, my family and many other people used those words to describe black people: animals and savages.

Sure. Many white people all across America used that language, I’m afraid.

Almost no one saw the correspondences, almost no one said, “Hey, that’s what we were called.” There was no linking of the two things, yet before the Watts riots [in Los Angeles in 1965], the largest civil insurrection in American history was the New York City draft riots, with the Irish playing that role. To left-wing groups, the draft riots are a despicable act of savagery and racism, and to right-wing groups the ’60s riots were a despicable act of savagery and destruction. There’s no conversation that bridges the two.

Where did your personal and political interest in race come from? People who know you from TV may not know this, but race relations and racial justice and the intersection of race and economics have been enduring issues throughout your career.

Well, I don’t think I was even in kindergarten when my father started discussing the civil rights movement with me. For both my parents, that was the moral issue of the time. We watched it all on TV — the fire hoses and the dogs — and we were horrified. One day when we were alone, my father explained to me that we were “black Irish” and that meant we were possibly descended from Spanish or Moorish invaders, with dark hair and hazel eyes as opposed to the redheads and blonds. We should not look down on “those people” because we might be them. I never thought that I was black or that I would suffer discrimination or anything.

This is not you explaining that you’re really black.

No, this is not my way of explaining that I’m actually black. I have tried! I don’t get very far, so I gave that up a long time ago. I’m not, and it didn’t enter my consciousness that way. It was “do unto others,” in a really vivid rendering. I just continued, even after it was no longer fashionable, to think that racism and particularly poverty were the moral issues of our time. Ironically, I’ve lived in California for more than half my life, and California is really complicated for the black-white racial paradigm. It doesn’t really work there. Certainly in San Francisco, where you can see the black school superintendent clashing with Chinese parents, or in Oakland, where we had black and Latino parents sparring, it became clear to me that there was not going to be this natural people-of-color coalition that would transform American politics. Strife is the natural state, and we’re all tribal to some extent.

We need models of cooperation and a social future that don’t rely so much on race, and do not view whites as always being the people on top, the oppressors, the haves. The inability to parse the meaning of what it means to be white today — nobody was even trying to do that. The same impulses that caused me to be concerned about racial justice for black people caused me, later in life, to become more sympathetic to white working-class people and poor people. For those people to be told that they have white privilege, that there’s never a situation in which they are the underdog, that’s preposterous.

You write that when you first became a TV commentator, you were aware of the fact that your white working-class background was, in effect, a card you could play. But then, as you started doing it, the role became real for you. Is that fair?

Yeah, I think that’s true. The impulse to describe myself as a working-class Irish Catholic was there, and I recognized that it gave me entree to the debate. It shocked people.

Right. Being a San Francisco liberal doesn’t carry the same cachet.

No, it doesn’t, for better or worse. And then, increasingly, I felt I was speaking for people who otherwise were being represented by Pat Buchanan or Paul Ryan. It’s a stretch to call me working-class, although my mother and father were both very much working-class, or even poor. By the time I came along, we lived in Flatbush [a Brooklyn neighborhood of modest single-family houses] and my dad had gone to college, and the rest of my life was a steady, lovely climb upward. My cousins are very much working-class, they work for Con Ed, they are cops, firefighters, steamfitters, teachers. So there really weren’t a lot of people like me in that debate.

In the book, I write a lot about the experience of the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, where I felt that white working-class people voting for Hillary Clinton was exclusively explained in terms of racism, and I didn’t think that was true. Do I deny that some of it was racism, maybe a lot of it? No. But there was a lot more, and I thought it was unfortunate that debates about the two candidates’ economic policies were completely lost in charges of “You’re racist” and “You’re sexist.” It felt like going back to the ’60s again for a while.

That was a pretty hot and heavy campaign, and you don’t completely excuse yourself of all possible misdeeds.

No. As much as I wanted people to understand that the white working-class vote for Hillary represented class interests, I was also caught up in the first lady-president thing. I was shocked by that! I would have told you that didn’t matter to me at all. I didn’t start out supporting Hillary, but that became my own kind of tribalism. I felt that people weren’t really acknowledging her historic dynamic, and my tribalism got engaged, and that’s almost never a good thing.

You know, I really felt for Geraldine Ferraro, even though every time she tried to explain what she said it got worse and worse. And there was that crazy woman, Harriet Christian, screaming that Hillary had been robbed by an “inadequate black man.” I included a paragraph in a piece where I tried to explain what she meant, and there was really no explaining it. That particular cry from the heart — I should have left that alone, and explained how I felt. There are people to this day who, if they want to say that I’m a racist, point to that one paragraph I wrote about Harriet Christian. So I apologize. I was wrong.

There are so many historical benchmarks along the way, from Bacon’s Rebellion and the draft riots and onward. In more recent times, we have Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act 1965, New York City’s white ethnic voters rejecting civilian oversight of the cops in 1966, and then the Democratic Party blowing itself up in 1968, when the white working class crosses over to vote for Nixon. Is that a very rough outline?

Very rough but largely accurate. But one thing I didn’t realize was the extent to which a lot of the white working class, especially Irish Catholics, left the Democratic Party much earlier. Some of them left with Al Smith [the Democratic presidential nominee in 1928]. The Al Smith story fascinated me!

Al Smith is a fascinating figure in American history. More than a footnote, but less than a whole chapter. First Catholic politician on a national scale; first Catholic presidential nominee.

Right. He attracted black votes, he began to put together the New Deal coalition by keeping Southern whites but beginning to attract both Southern and Northern blacks. His defeat was an incredible victory for nativism and anti-Catholic prejudice, and a lot of Catholics didn’t recover. So when he didn’t get the nomination four years later, and it went to that Yankee aristocrat Roosevelt, the Irish mistrust of the elite was catalyzed. They were putting us down again! Pat Buchanan’s father left the party at that point, and some people in my family left the party. I had always believed that everybody voted for Kennedy on both sides of my family. But a lot of them had voted for Nixon — in 1960! They had also been pulled away by Joe McCarthy, another sad moment, and by profound fear of Communism. In some ways that’s reassuring to me.

You mean because it wasn’t just about race.

Exactly. It predated the civil rights revolution, and a lot of it had nothing to do with race. Yet there’s no way that the turmoil of the ’60s wasn’t a large part of it. Because the white working class came back to Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and they remained in play, let’s put it that way. And then the party split itself in half in ’68. When Hubert Humphrey becomes the face of reaction, the guy who introduced the civil rights plank in 1948 — when he becomes the worst collaborator with Republicanism and imperialism that we have, you have a problem.

You and I have had that conversation before, and I’m somewhat sympathetic to that point of view from this historical distance: the idea that when the left turned away from Humphrey in 1968, it was a moment of tragedy and lost opportunity. But given everything that had gone wrong — the assassinations, and his fatal association with Johnson’s failed presidency and his refusal or inability to speak out against the Vietnam War — I still can’t see how it could have turned out differently.

One thing I try not to do, which at times is unsatisfying, is to go back and say, “This is what should have happened.” I’m really looking at what did happen. We live with this complicated and awful legacy and what do we do with it now? If I could have voted back then — I don’t know. My father did vote for Humphrey, somewhat reluctantly. Had I been a voting-age person back then, I very well might not have. The antiwar movement was on the right side. Those movements were necessary, and probably a lot of the chaos and falling apart was necessary too, because society’s coherence was based on a lot of things that we couldn’t tolerate anymore. It was natural that we pulled it apart, and the question is, how do we come back together? The Obama coalition was a first step, but we still haven’t done it.

You know, I was on the floor of the Republican convention in 1992 when Pat Buchanan made that famous speech about the “cultural war” in America, and I still think that was a moment of twisted brilliance on his part. You and I may feel that he’s on the wrong side of that war, but he correctly perceived that the people you’re writing about feel themselves cut off and divided from the mainstream of American society, especially the educated, multicultural people on the coasts and in the big cities. Moreover, they’re right to perceive themselves as being on the other side of a caste divide, and nobody really knows how to bridge that gap.

Absolutely. It took us a while to get here, and it’s going to take us a while to get out. We can start by talking about it differently, using less divisive language. Not writing them off, even if we can’t win them back. It made me nervous in 2011 when there were stories about how Obama could win without Ohio. They’re not talking about that anymore, and remember that Obama won the white working class in Ohio. He didn’t win it nationally, but he won it in Ohio. It wasn’t as though the “Hillary voters” were unreachable, or unable to see what he offered versus John McCain. And I think they’ll be able to see what he offers versus Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. The way we sometimes congratulate ourselves on being the Obama coalition — you know, we’re younger, we’re fun and flirty, we’re colorful, we’re on Twitter! — there’s no place there for 50-somethings who’ve lost their jobs and will never get the same kind of job back, and who can’t afford college for their kids. I think there are ways to talk about these issues that should give us a better chance than when we’re fighting on a culture-war level.

I think the president has begun to talk about it that way. You know, in the 2008 campaign, the hope and change stuff — “We’re the ones we’re waiting for” — had an edge of elitism. I don’t believe Barack Obama is an elitist, but the campaign could take on the fervor of the better class of people doing what’s best for America, and that’s never good. Those were the times I was worried, and I’m not seeing that in the 2012 campaign.

One thing I talk about a lot in the book is the idea of the golden age that never was. We made the political decision in this country to create a middle class, out of fear of communism and domestic unrest and fascism. The powers that be decided that it was better to flatten income and inequality, to have a 90-something percent top level of marginal taxation. There were engines of the middle class — mortgage insurance, highway construction, public universities, college funds — and those were political decisions. One problem is that people don’t see them that way, and another problem is that they didn’t help nonwhite people nearly as much.

This great apparatus that created the middle class excluded black people for a long time, and the suburbs had restrictive covenants, where certain people couldn’t buy even if they had the means. So we left a lot of people out, and all these white people got a lot of help. Government made all these decisions to help people that were colorless and odorless, and just seemed to be the background, like the air in this restaurant. People didn’t even identify them as government help, and then you get a situation where minorities say, “We didn’t get what you got,” and white people say, “We didn’t get anything! We worked for everything we got!”

It’s a fundamental divide of understanding, where you really need to change the terms of the conversation. And that’s where I think the president has been brilliant. There’s a new debate, where we have to recognize all the things government did to make an earlier generation of success possible. We stopped doing those things 20 or 30 years ago, and we have fallen into a horrible economic and social decline.

Another fascinating tangent in your book is the material about Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who himself grew up in poverty and later became this controversial sociologist and then a U.S. senator. When I think about Moynihan’s recommendations to LBJ in the mid-’60s, urging a New Deal-scale public employment project to lift poor African-Americans toward the middle class – well, if that had been done, we’d be living in a different country today.

I completely agree. Moynihan once proposed that we have twice-daily mail delivery, to add hundreds of thousands of new jobs, and here we are talking about slashing the Postal Service. He understood that jobs were money but also that jobs were social fabric, jobs were pride. I fret about how much I praise Moynihan in this book! I know that someone is going to come up with something he said sometime –

His language can sound patronizing or paternalistic.

Right. But I think that’s a really important moment, when Michael Harrington and Moynihan are in the Labor Department and they’re proposing this massive public works project. It gets rejected because Johnson is spending billions of dollars on the war. If those recommendations had been adopted, I think things would have been very different. I defend welfare, but the idea that we were going to let society’s most marginal, vulnerable people live on welfare, raise their children alone and not have to work — first of all, it led to incredible isolation, and second of all, it was never realistic. As women from all other classes were surging into the workforce, whether they wanted to or not, the way we administered welfare at that time was a recipe for social resentment and all kinds of unintended consequences.

So, yeah, We’rput me down for a massive public employment program back in 1964, or in 2012.  W e not going to solve these problems without looking at government as the employer of last resort, and we are at last resort. African-American teen unemployment is ridiculous. These problems are just as urgent as they were then. Some of the solutions are the same, and some are different. And my last word about Moynihan is that everything he said about black people he also said about his own people. He knew that we had been on the bottom and had colluded in keeping ourselves on the bottom to some extent. Poverty, oppression and nativism had forced the Irish into ghettoes, and some had a culture of poverty that made things worse.

This is tricky to talk about, but it would be great if we could: The way that African-American poverty is on a continuum with white immigrant poverty. Some people will argue that Moynihan had no business opining on the problems of African-Americans, and that’s problematic. He did so fully believing that he could do it because his people had the same problems. If we can’t talk about that and see the common bond, we’re screwed.

You make a persuasive case, in many ways, for supporting President Obama and the Democratic Party – and you know how difficult it is, on a personal level, for me to say that! But how do you respond, at this point, to what we might call the Glenn Greenwald issues? The expensive and dubious overseas military adventures, the drone assassinations, the erosion of constitutional liberties – all the stuff from the Bush administration that we thought would go away and mostly hasn’t.

You know, I’m very disappointed on all of those fronts, and to some extent on economic fronts as well. When we’re talking about why the white working class left the Democratic Party — well, the Democratic Party left the working class around the same time. The Democratic Party drew the conclusion that government was being blamed for all these problems and so they were no longer going to be the party of government. They moved away from economic populism and greater inclusion, and they began courting business. They ceded the argument to Republicans, they joined the deregulation brigade, they signed on to the argument that entitlements are a problem and we’ve really got to cut Medicare and Social Security.

So the Democratic Party was no longer the party of working-class people and working-class ideas. There are lots of reasons to be unhappy with the Democratic Party and Barack Obama. I’m just stuck being a “lesser of two evils” person. In Chris Hayes’ book “Twilight of the Elites,” he argues that progressives are divided into institutionalists and insurrectionists. I’m such an institutionalist! I still call myself a Catholic, because they’re not going to drive me out. I call myself a Democrat because the DLC is not going to drive me out.

I don’t think Mitt Romney is going to change any of the civil liberties policies that I find abhorrent. The only thing for the left to do is build up its strength, and organize at the congressional level and the local level. We have obviously not been successful in building our case that this kind of continued military adventurism makes us less safe, and that we can afford a different way. Trashing Barack Obama is not the way to win people over to our side. On those issues I am really disappointed, but having him go away in January wouldn’t make anything better for anyone.

Emphasis Mine

see: http://www.alternet.org/whats-matter-white-people-longing-golden-age-never-was?akid=9229.123424.5prb96&rd=1&src=newsletter694379&t=5&paging=off

Happy Birthday Medicare!

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Medicare

What is Medicare?

Medicare is a national social insurance program, (like Social Security) administered by the U.S. federal government since 1965, that guarantees access to health insurance for Americans ages 65 and older and younger people with disabilities as well as people with end stage renal disease. As a social insurance program, Medicare spreads the financial risk associated with illness across society to protect everyone, and thus has a somewhat different social role from private insurers, which must manage their risk portfolio to guarantee their own profit – if not solvency.

A brief history.

In 1965, Congress created Medicare under Title XVIII of the Social Security Act to provide health insurance to people age 65 and older, regardless of income or medical history. Before Medicare’s creation, only half of older adults had health insurance, with coverage often unavailable or unaffordable to the other half. Older adults had half as much income as younger people and paid nearly three times as much for health insurance. (Medicare also spurred the integration of thousands of waiting rooms, hospital floors, and physician practices by making payments to health care providers conditional on desegregation.)

Success

While the USA does not have good results (compared to other industrialized nations) in measures such as average life expectancy and infant mortality, we rank well in the measure of those who reach 65 living until 85.

Medicare administrative overhead costs (2%) are well below the overhead of large companies that are self-insured (5-10%), health insurers offering coverage to small employers (25-27%), and individual insurance (40%). Insurers offering coverage in “Medicare Advantage” plans spend up to 16.7% on profit and overhead.

Who is eligible?

As above, Americans ages 65 and older (who have been legal residents of the United States for at least 5 years ) and younger people with disabilities as well as people with end stage renal disease.

What is covered?

There are four parts to Medicare: types A, B, C, and D.

Part A (hospital insurance) covers inpatient hospital stays (at least overnight), including semiprivate room, food, and tests, and brief stays for convalescence in a skilled nursing facility if certain criteria are met.

Part B (medical insurance) helps pay for some services and products not covered by Part A, generally on an outpatient basis, e.g. doctor visits.

Part C With the passage of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, Medicare beneficiaries were given the option to receive their Medicare benefits through private health insurance plans, instead of through the original Medicare plan (Parts A and B). As Part C cost the government about 14% more than traditional Medicare, it is being phased out, as per the ACA.

Part D (prescription drug plans)went into effect on January 1, 2006. Anyone with Part A or B is eligible for Part D. Part D is not ‘human friendly’ because it covers prescriptions up to a cost point, then no long covers them until another cost point is reached (the coverage gap or ‘donut hole’). Part D did not allow for negotiation of prescription prices, but this and the coverage gap are addressed in the ACA.

Who benefits from Medicare?

Those eligible above, and their children and/or other family members, as the latter do not have to bear the cost for the care!

How is it funded?

Medicare has several sources of financing. Part A largely is funded by revenue from a 2.9 percent [payroll tax] levied on employers and workers (each pay 1.45 percent). Until December 31, 1993, the law provided a maximum amount of compensation on which the Medicare tax could be imposed each year. Beginning January 1, 1994, the compensation limit was removed. Part B is funded in part by premiums paid by the recipient (about $100/month).

Changes under the ACA.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) of 2010 made a number of changes to the Medicare program. Several provisions of the law were designed to reduce the cost of Medicare. Congress reduced payments to privately managed Medicare Advantage plans to align more closely with rates paid for comparable care under traditional Medicare. Congress also slightly reduced annual increases in payments to physicians and to hospitals that serve a disproportionate share of low-income patients. Along with other minor adjustments, these changes reduced Medicare’s projected cost over the next decade by $455 billion.

Due to the passage of the ACA Medicare’s unfunded obligation over the next 75 years declined from $13.4 trillion to $3 trillion.

The ACA also made some changes to Medicare enrollee’s’ benefits. By 2020, it will close the so-called “donut hole” between Part D plans’ coverage limits and the catastrophic cap on out-of-pocket spending, reducing a Part D enrollee’s’ exposure to the cost of prescription drugs by an average of $2,000 a year.  Limits were also placed on out-of-pocket costs for in-network care for Medicare Advantage enrollees.  Meanwhile, Medicare Part B and D premiums were restructured in ways that reduced costs for most people while raising contributions from the wealthiest people with Medicare. The law also expanded coverage of preventive services.

What does Medicare Cost us as a nation?

As a share of GDP, Medicare cost is expected to increase from 3.6 percent in 2010 to 5.6 percent in 2035 and to 6.2 percent by 2080. That is, a mere 4% – 6 % to provide health care for our old and disabled citizens.

Why is Medicare Under attack?

This is not an easy point to address from a non-partisian standpoint! If one has as a dogma that no government program can be successful, then counter examples of very successful programs such as Medicare and Social Security are a threat. If one believes that Medicare is a major drain on our finances (it isn’t), then one might view it as an opportunity to cut spending. It revisits the failed privatize Social Security efforts of the last decade. The major causes of our current debut are the reduced tax rates on high incomes, and two wars.

From Politifact:

“Barack Obama has slashed Medicare by $500 billion. Mitt Romney and House Republicans want to end Medicare. And a new board is going to ration care so Washington can waste more money. 

Believe any of that? You shouldn’t.” (Politifact)

Information from many sources, including:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)

5 Ways Republicans Have Sabotaged Job Growth

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By Jeff Spross, ThinkProgress, via Alternet

“New numbers released on July 6 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the economy added a mere 80,000 jobs in June. That’s down from an average of 150,000 jobs a month for the first part of the year, and far too little to keep up with population growth.

Republican intransigence on economic policy has been a key contributor to the sluggish recovery. As early as 2009, Republican fear-mongering over spending and their readiness to filibuster in the Senate helped convince the White House economic team that an $800 billion stimulus was the most they could hope to get through Congress. Reporting has since revealed that the team thought the country actually needed a stimulus on the order of $1.2 to $1.8 trillion. The economy’s path over the next three years proved them right. Here are the top five ways the Republicans have sabotaged the economic recovery since:

1. Filibustering the American Jobs Act. Last October, Senate Republicans killed a jobs bill proposed by President Obama that would have pumped $447 billion into the economy. Multiple economic analysts predicted the bill would add around two million jobs and hailed it as defense against a double-dip recession. The Congressional Budget Office also scored it as a net deficit reducer over ten years, and the American public supported the bill.

2. Stonewalling monetary stimulus. The Federal Reserve can do enormousgood for a depressed economy through more aggressive monetary stimulus, and by tolerating a temporarily higher level of inflation. But with everything from Ron Paul’s anti-inflationary crusade to Rick Perry threatening to lynch Chairman Ben Bernanke, Republicans have browbeaten the Fed into not going down this path. Most damagingly, the GOP repeatedly held up President Obama’s nominations to the Federal Reserve Board during the critical months of the recession, leaving the board without the institutional clout it needed to help the economy.

3. Threatening a debt default. Even though the country didn’t actually hit its debt ceiling last summer, the Republican threat to default on the United States’ outstanding obligations was sufficient to spook financial markets and do real damage to the economy.

4. Cutting discretionary spending in the debt ceiling deal. The deal the GOP extracted as the price for avoiding default imposed around $900 billion in cuts over ten years. It included $30.5 billion in discretionary cuts in 2012 alone, costing the country 0.3 percent in economic growth and 323,000 jobs, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute. Starting in 2013, the deal will trigger another $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years.

5. Cutting discretionary spending in the budget deal. While not as cataclysmic as the debt ceiling brinksmanship, Republicans also threatened a shutdown of the government in early 2011 if cuts were not made to that year’s budget. The deal they struck with the White Housecut $38 billion from food stamps, health, education, law enforcement, and low-income programs among others, while sparing defense almost entirely.

There have also been a few near-misses, in which the GOP almost prevented help from coming to the economy. The Republicans in the House delayed a transportation bill that saved as many as 1.9 million jobs. House Committees run by the GOP havepassedproposals aimed at cutting billions from food stamps, and the party has repeatedly threatened to kill extensions of unemployment insurance and cuts to the payroll tax.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, those policies — the payroll tax cut, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and discretionary spending for low-income Americans — have the highest multipliers, meaning more job boosting potential per dollar.”

Emphasis Mine
see: http://www.alternet.org/story/156321/5_ways_republicans_have_sabotaged_job_growth