The Republican Vision for a Static Future

David Brooks in his newest Op/Ed for the New York Times wrote in support for a lot of what Paul Ryan is advocating in his current budget. The op/ed is reasonable, as David Brooks usually is, but it ignores an enormous hole in the entire Republican side of the budget debate, revenue.

Perhaps it's indicative of how successful progressives have been in getting the message out to the public that there is an enormous disparity in the amount of money earned by the wealthy and their respective tax burden that Republicans have stopped talking about the 'Bush Tax Cuts'. Or maybe the message about the almost just as disgusting, that despite the supposedly stifling corporate tax rate that many major corporations pay nothing in taxes and even get rebates in tax money from the government has been heard.

The message from the Republicans seems to have changed from one of cutting taxes to reforming the tax code. They can't make an argument that somehow the wealthy are suffering or that somehow keeping the Bush Tax cuts has changed anything significantly in the progress towards creating jobs when the statistics just don't support their rhetoric.

More importantly, in terms of corporate tax rates, the media has picked up on the fact that corporations are getting tax money in rebates and are getting big kickbacks from the government, like in the case of oil companies. I think the Democratic politicians are starting to frame the argument correctly as they bring these mainstream headlines to their constituents with the message 'why do you have to bear the brunt of the tax revenue'. By insisting that the pain be spread around, which is of course something the Republicans say as they slash crucial public programs aimed at helping the poor and elderly but include even more kickbacks and taxbreaks for corporations, Democrats can regain the focus as the party of the people.

Morality, America and the Hypocrisy of Exceptionalism

We have a problem in America with morality. It's not just because of moral relativism, or what conservatives like to call 'secular humanism' which is their catch phrase for 'socialism'. We have become a morally bankrupt country. I say this as a person who is a reformed Catholic, but who spent my entire childhood and adolescence indoctrinated in the teachings of Christ. I was never a WWJD kid, nor was my family ever conservative in their religious beliefs or practices. In fact, the Christ I was raised to believe in was a loving and forgiving God who befriended the leper and prostitute, was humble in the face of poverty and preached the the values of charity and compassion to all. Also, as far as I know the ordination process for Catholic priests involve vows of Charity and Humility as well as Chastity and Obedience.

All of that translates into a firm believe in the dignity and equality of all people. Those are inalienable rights, aren't they, that all 'men' are created equal? And just as our country has lauded itself on its freedom and equality it has practiced horrible acts of degradation against people who were 'other' or different. This is a problem that's been pervasive in our society and still saturates every level of citizenry. I'm not just talking about slavery, and overt and institutionalized racism. I'm also talking about the subjugation of women, the oppression of ethnic and religious groups, and the demonetization and vilification of sexual minorities and the differently abled. This system of oppression and discrimination only becomes more complicated when considering the structures of political and economic power and their interaction with those minority groups. Add to that the regional cultural differences in all of those things and you have a overwhelming matrix of complexities in social interaction and in our understanding and advancement of civil rights and freedoms.

Perhaps always there has also been an underlying opposition force that is an anathema to those fundamental ideals we have enshrined in the Declaration of Freedom, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution. That oppositional force might vaguely be understood as the thirst for power. That thirst is greater in those who already have some, thus leading them to seek more and requires them to control more and more of the political and social system in order to acquire it. In itself this could be defined in part as hubris, certainly it is antithetical to the teachings of compassion, charity and humility embodied in the Christ story. None of us are immune to that thirst, even if it comes from a place of absolute altruism and hope, because especially for those who seek some kind of political recognition or some ability to fulfill the American purpose of the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, true freedom and equality seem so far away without power.

Politics is, of course, about power. I think those who are entrenched in politics, especially those with the expectation of significant gains or losses, lose perspective on the consequences of their actions and of the quality of their actions. Those with a lot to gain or lose, or those who have invested significant resources in the pursuit of a political outcome, the more desperate they get to achieve their end the more likely they are to compromise or outright disavow their supposed principles and beliefs. Hypocrisy is among the most common embodiments of this. It is perhaps one of the most insidious symptoms of the pursuit of power and results in the spread of lies, untruths and the inspiration of cruelty.

The problem of Hypocrisy has become so pervasive in our social and political discourse that there are large groups of people who cannot recognize it even when it is pointedly exposed across our diverse media outlets. There is a large minority in this country who are so indoctrinated in the belief of their own righteousness and who have gone so far in shaping their worldview to justify their own hypocrisy that they refuse to acknowledge or believe it when confronted in the most truthful and thorough way. Those who practice hypocrisy and most often are conscious of it at least in some small way, but their desire for power and their own hubris prevent them from correcting it. In fact many of those who regularly practice hypocrisy and the spreading of falsehoods and untruth have no interest in correcting those errors and merely plow forward continuing those practices.

What are the results of hypocrisy and lies in the pursuit of power? A political system and social situation where those too self-assured of their own righteousness select out those things most comfortable to their self-righteousness and ego, which don't challenge their world view and absolute determination to excuse their own core failings. They create, promote and support organizations and commercial entities that encourage and propagate untruths and which represent provable and irrefutable falsehoods as fact. They believe stories and arguments based on fictitious evidence and outright lies even when they contradict their own supposed values while excusing and justifying that belief through even more hypocrisy and lies. They allow their better judgment and their sense of compassion for fellow human beings to be overridden by the atmosphere of fear and intolerance created for them by those in control of power and who seek to acquire more.

The Tea Party is an example of all of this. The Tea Party, at least in theory, is a libertarian collection of individual groups around the country who represent themselves as 'grass-roots' and as concerned singularly with taxation and the role of the federal government in our society. In reality this 'movement' is a propaganda machine of several small and very well funded organizations commandeered by elements of the radical Christian Coalition and Christian right which we saw rise to power during the 1980's and 90's. While chest thumping about taxation, the size of government and its spending habits those same candidates and leaders were reaching out to their core social conservative base with the same regressive messages and policy positions we've seen over and over again. They won because they were able to weave fiction after fiction of a government out of control, politicians too concerned with power and unconcerned with the will of their constituents, and of a black socialist consumed with destroying America. So much of that is exemplified by the slogan 'It's Time To Take Our Country Back'. Take it back from whom? Who has stolen it?

While polling data from multiple polls illustrated the racial and religious/ideological position of the Tea Party, it also illustrated that the majority of Americans were most concerned about the economy and jobs. Not debt, but jobs. Republicans wove the fiction that somehow out of control spending and too much regulation were choking businesses, hampering the creation of new businesses and killing jobs. That lie is apparent to anyone who can access the internet and read. The true culprit in preventing the expansion of small businesses were the banks who wouldn't give out business loans or lines of credit so businesses could expand. These were the same banks whose blind greed lead them to create instruments for tremendous profit at high risk. The same banks who then were bailed out by the government, and taxpayer, with little oversight or accountability and vastly loosened regulation only to continue the risky practices and hoarding of wealth. Not one of the executives responsible for the creation of the instruments and subsequent crash of our economy has been held criminally responsible.

Even more galling, however, is the crass disregard shown by politicians who represent themselves as Christians and whose messaging and political persona advocates 'traditional family values'. These politicians make careers on demonizing and marginalizing whole groups of people. They make money on the fear and prejudices of others by spreading falsehoods and encouraging the un-education of their constituents. Meanwhile these politicians have proven themselves again and again to be unable to stand the scrutiny of their own rhetoric. Even when Democrats do become embroiled in sex scandals they rarely come under as much media examination or suffer as many public consequences as Republicans. This isn't because the media is so biased towards liberals. It is about hypocrisy and lies, and about the desire to retain power. That's why we have Republican senators who are publicly scrutinized for extramarital affairs resulting in bribery and cover-ups, or for patronizing prostitutes. It is why representatives choose to resign rather than suffer the backlash from their online sex activities or sexual misconduct with underage male pages.

Most galling of all, however, are the national leaders who represent themselves as the vanguard of some fictional 'moral majority' about to sweep away the rot of secular humanism, again, codeword for socialism. These people make enormous sums of money speaking on the topic of morality and its role in shaping our core values, on pressing a radical political position that has little to no basis in reality but which draws together the fears and prejudices of people too purposely uneducated about the world around them to be able to make the distinction between truth and untruth. They take advantage of the ignorance of people too willing to justify their own failings in their Christian beliefs and personal values to examine those messages with any sense of justice beyond its application to themselves.

I don't mean to place all the blame on the conservative politicians and pundits, however. Their voter base and those who blindly agree with their lies and aggressively and purposefully ignore their hypocrisy are just as culpable. Many of these people, as far as I can tell, make no effort to investigate the veracity of the lies bile these people spew. They are so convinced of the truth of their own convictions, in their own righteousness and of their own self-concerned worldview that they allow the politicians and pundits to prey upon their legitimate anxieties over the economy and an increasingly complex and dangerous world. They allow themselves to be manipulated and to twist those values we supposedly hold so dear beyond all recognition or rational understanding. They buy into the rhetoric that we are somehow exceptional just because. That American is somehow the freest, greatest and morally purest nation in the world. They pay no attention to the flaws because they need the comfort of that ignorance so badly in order to cope with their own failings and the failings of their beliefs. They then promote candidates and causes that are grievous violations of those 'American values'.

Also to blame are 'liberal' politicians and Democrats for failing to take a greater role in determining the rhetoric of the public discourse. The idea that Republicans could perform such a complete con on the American people as to make 'entitlements' the common nomenclature for Social Security and Medicare is an indictment of their failure. While they may be the party most concerned with the working and middle class, and with the general welfare, failing to sell the message is as big a problem as failing to act on it. It is a problem when the far-right is able to take nearly complete ownership of the words 'patriot' and 'liberty' when they are neither patriotic nor believe in real and genuine and true liberty. When they do not recognize the reality of liberty and the reality of its honest application. This is perhaps an indication of the extent to which hypocrisy and the pursuit of power has taken hold in that party as well.

Ultimately, after all of that, I have this to say: We deserve better, we deserve more, we have the right to to BE more than this. We deserve politicians who don't just listen to the people and run in fear from necessary and important work because of polling. We deserve politicians genuinely willing to make a case for and take action in the interests of all of the American people. We deserve a land where no one is made to feel less than simply because they do not resemble, either in look, belief or relationship, those around them. We deserve a nation where we make honest steps to live up to the commitments we espouse of educating our children and giving everyone the opportunity to achieve, not just because of some quota or affirmative action, but because they work hard, have talent and have earned it. We deserve a nation where compassion and charity towards others aren't just hollow words used in a church, but result in real action and substantive change to the benefit of the poor, the vulnerable, the disabled and the oppressed. We deserve to become the nation we have always wanted to be by the fruits of our own labors, the achievements of our own talent, and the quality of our spirit.

We deserve better, I deserve, you deserve it, and our future deserves it.

Budgets, Jobs, and the Economic Narrative

We are in an economic crisis in this country, but the mortgage woes that are still plaguing millions of Americans are only a symptom of a broader issue. These are at play because of a conflict between corporations and workers. As corporate regulation, and of course the companion tax burden on the wealthy, have loosened over the past few decades, we have seen the decline in American production and of course labor jobs. Over the past few decades the narrative, however altruistic it may have been, that we could pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and that with hard work the average worker could get ahead has been nothing but that, a narrative, a sitcom like Good Times.

Although we it is just now starting to become apparent because it is now shifting burdens of taxes and public responsibility for the state of the overall job market and mortgage investment market onto upper middle class people, this is just a consequence of the disappearance of labor. It's not just a problem of 'buying American', either. It is also not just a problem of American products costing more because the production costs are higher due to salaries and benefits. That may be in part true, but that is as much an excuse as it is to blame the job loss on the 'Great Recession'.

Ultimately this is a game of redistribution of wealth, the same concept that Michelle Bachmann and the unfortunately un- and mis-educated people who believe her nonsense use to stir up fear among white middle class people nearing retirement. Wealth redistribution has been happening for decades. It has just been in the opposite direction of what Bachmann uses to spread fear. How can I justify this claim? Because the middle class isn't disappearing, it has disappeared. Meanwhile four hundred people own more wealth than more than half the rest of the population combined. CEO's of corporations who used to make around seventy times the average employee salary now make somewhere in the ballpark of a thousand times that. They are getting bonuses in the hundreds of millions, their investment friends managing hedge funds and making billion dollar salaries, meanwhile most Americans, including myself, are struggling. That's how I can say that wealth redistribution is already here and has been going strong for decades.

What does this mean for budgets? Well, since forty percent of this country, both in the lowest economic classes and among the wealthiest elites, don't pay any taxes or get all their taxes back in refunds, that means that the middle class is bearing the brunt of the majority of the tax burden. This happens precisely because of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and corporations that the Republicans have put in place. It is also obvious to those who can follow the logic as Republican politicians profess the same nonsense that the corporate lobbyists and CEO's are crying about, that higher taxes will kill jobs. Well tax cuts create deficits. Particularly when there are some programs, namely Medicare and Social Security, that Americans refuse to budge on and which comprise the majority of any spending our government does, and there isn't enough revenue coming in. It is also readily apparent to anyone paying attention to actually legitimate news stations who point out the consistently rising profits of major corporations. Those corporations aren't creating the kind of jobs that really pay, that's a generalization but it is generally true, and certainly not in a way that reflects a real investment when compared to those record profits.

Those manufacturing jobs are not coming back, and not because we don't buy products or because we are paid to much, but because companies that make things are too interested in profits. And, given the disastrous effect of the Recession on pension and investment plans that make up the majority of the investments of the middle class in those companies, the primary beneficiaries of their increased profits are the same wealthy who then complain that higher taxes would kill jobs. The same wealthy who also get tax breaks with the excuse that somehow they stimulate the economy by investing in companies that aren't bringing their production jobs back to the US. They instead squirrel it away in foreign banks and buy property in other countries so that they aren't taxed on income that would otherwise be circulating in and boosting the US economy.

When you have a labor force composed largely of people with lower levels of education who don't have the skills to work in mid-level management than you need jobs for them. If they don't have jobs and that is who the mortgage companies and investment banks are selling their products to, that means that they are unable to fulfill, ultimately, the financial obligation of those mortgages. That is especially true when they are walking a thin line already when they are employed. That line disappears and they fall into the abyss of debt when they lose their job.

And not only did the manufacturing jobs disappear ten years ago with the advent of NAFTA, though I would argue it started long before then as companies exported labor to China and Taiwan and other places in Asia, but in the last ten years we've seen the phenomena of the so called white-collar jobs, the call centers and customer service support jobs relied upon by a lot of middle class people, disappear as they've been exported to India and Pakistan. The US has become so semi-consciously aware of it that it has become a joke that we call customer support lines and reach people with hyper-American names but with foreign accents. Companies have even been using the fact that they have created call centers here in the US as a subtle advertising ploy to take advantage of the anxiety we have over those jobs being 'outsourced'. And what a terrible name for corporate America to use in place of calling it what it is, cutting spending on employees by contracting out good jobs to companies they pay far less in order to boost profit margins somewhat artificially.

So while it might be fair to blame the Recession and blame the investment banking industry for the woes of our economy and the job market, the jobs were disappearing a long time before then. Their greed in trying to get greater and greater profits by cutting costs exacerbated the problem, and then their even greater greed in taking advantage of a population increasingly desperate to live out the fantasy of the 'American Dream' which we have been brainwashed to buying into with bad mortgages.

This isn't all because of Republicans. Democrats were in power for two years before the crash and had greater influence in Congress even two years before that. NAFTA was also a product of the Clinton administration, and almost none of it has been dealt with under the Obama administration. And Barney Frank was intimately involved in the loosening of restrictions on mortgage investment that was partially responsible for all the faulty mortgages. It's hard for me to criticize him, though, because as a gay American and a progressive I do believe that he is a strong voice to represent both those constituencies. I'd like to think that instead it was bad decision making on his part and more political gaming than ideology.

What is abundantly clear is that Democrats have lost their way as a national party. The Wisconsin union fight has proven that. While the national Republican party backed Scott Walker within a few weeks of the fight, only a handful of national Democrats, and most of those Wisconsin Democrats, became vocal about the issue. The national party has yet to really make a strong campaign about the union busting going on in a dozen states throughout the Great Lakes region and the Midwest, and that is a problem. The labor movement is the traditional heart of the Democratic party. Progressive policies on civil rights and energy aside, labor issues are the ones that draw the most people into the fold because the majority of people in this country see jobs and labor issues like the minimum wage and employee benefits as core American values. The Republicans were able to capitalize on the anxiety people had because of the incredible losses in the job market during this past election, but those are issues central to Democrats. The fact that the Republicans were able to take that message from the Democrats during this last cycle is a clear indication that the party has gone too far away from that base.

The party, I think, is picking up on that, and is starting to wake up to the incredible political force of the labor movement. We saw some of that when the unions in Nevada stumped like mad for Harry Reid during the last election. It was because of them that he had the money, and even more importantly the 'ground game' with people canvasing and making phone calls, that he was able to pull off a win in an incredibly tough election. And this is not about 'conservative' Democrats versus 'liberal' Democrats. Labor issues are liberal issues. Even more than that the labor movement and the way they see labor rights as basically civil rights is the way to make people understand the value of civil rights in general. Conservatives have controlled the overall narrative about unions for decades and have convinced people that somehow they are better off without unions. While unions aren't blameless in this narrative, they have done things publicly that ended up pushing people against them, the questions around job creation and even more importantly salaries and benefits should be things that we are all talking about.

Unions are vital to some industries, teachers especially rely on their unions to help fight for fair wages and benefits in one of the toughest industries in the country. However, people have started seeing them as the province only of manufacturing industries and teachers rather than as representative of working people everywhere. Wisconsin, as I've described before, is a great catalyst, however. Since most of Americans, including Republicans, favor the rights of collective bargaining, and really genuinely understand the consequences of employers having all the leverage in salary and benefits discussions, it is no surprise then that there is so much push back. As I've also said before, the question shouldn't be why public employees make so much, but why the wages and benefits of the average American worker are so meager by comparison. I understand that when salaries and benefits of public employees are combined that they seem to have such a better deal than most people. But why is that? Why do people believe blowhards like the commentators on FOX News when they try and demonize public workers for it? Why aren't people instead demanding that their own compensation be better? I mean, it is obvious from the salaries and benefits of executives and the wealthy elite that there is plenty of money to go around.

But many politicians, especially in the Republican party, aren't interested in that discussion, aren't interested in people framing the debate in that way instead. They prefer to make deep cuts into the state education budgets, like in Florida, and giving away all of it in property tax cuts and corporate tax cuts. I believe their argument is that the corporate tax breaks draw in corporations and create more jobs. But what kind of jobs are they creating? And where are they? Although it is heartening that jobs are being created by the dozens and even hundreds around the country, when there are more than twenty million people in the labor force who are either unemployed or underemployed, that isn't a positive sign. It is also not a positive sign that the jobs being created aren't jobs that pay well enough to help people emerge from the debt they've incurred in the last three years or to resume anything like the lifestyles they'd had before. They're not jobs that help people get out of foreclosure. To keep their homes.

No, the economic narrative shouldn't be about union benefits or even about the tax burden on the middle class. The narrative should be about jobs and job creation. It should be about real solutions that will put millions of people back to work, not just create a few hundred jobs here or there by giving enormous tax breaks to the wealthy and to corporations while making enormous cuts in the programs that most Americans desperately need and rely on. That isn't a Democratic idea or a Republican idea, that is an American idea, and if the Democrats are the only ones who are genuinely interested in addressing it, than they need to move away from the debates about health care as related to the poor that they've been losing for three years and instead return to framing it in the context of working people, workers rights, and the core values that kept them in power for generations.

When Democracy Breaks Down

As angry as people were in the election of 2010, as disenchanted with the status quo of government and of the entire process, now they are seeing the results of misinformation mixed with apathy and anger. While there are problems with the Democratic party, mostly stemming from the corporate interests that people who watch MSNBC have been hearing about for years, but which became much more prominant and obvious after the SCOTUS decision on Citizens United.

What we see now, however, is the result of that mix of anger. Many people in this country allowed their anger and apathy towards the party in power to override their ability to understand distinctions between Democrat and Republican. Perhaps it isn't just coincidence that we are having this fight now after such a huge economic crisis, as it mirrors the same hard times our country had during the early part of the twentieth century. People became scared about their personal finances and because it is always easier to blame a problem on someone rather than solve the problem they were swayed by the anti-worker and anti-Middle Class interests. Those corporate interests have always opposed unions and workers rights, have always opposed fair wages and benefits, which we take for granted today and only came about because of unions.

We now have so much access to media that the people who are at best misguided in their ideas about the role of the government and of fiscal policy and most cases are much more likely corporate shills cannot hide their heavy handed tactics anymore. They cannot hide their moves and legislative proposals anymore. Technology has seen that we are able to have mass dissemination of information very quickly and dissemination and knowledge in the hands of the working and Middle Class can only spur on the kinds of protests and the kind of workers movement which gave us a Middle Class in the first place.

The differences between the two parties, the distinction that people have been unable to recognize for so long, is now readily apparent. The Republican Party cannot pretend to have any interest in 'Main Street' or the workers of this country. They cannot pretend or hide behind the shield of rhetoric anymore. They are for cutting government programs most Americans rely on every day, such as public schools, and relaxing every law or restriction on their corporate bosses that keep them from making as much money as possible. We see this in Wisconsin, where every single Democrat in the the state senate fled the state and has remained absent for three weeks despite all the threats and consequences. When Democrats stand on principle, it is with workers.

This is not to say that all Democrats are created equal. This is no to say that there isn't serious reform needed in campaign finance law, laws that have been relaxed more and more lately in spite of all the rhetoric from both parties every election cycle to work for reform, and even more so by Citizens United. What's ironic about that name is that it is characteristic of all the major conservative PACs right now. They take names like Americans for Prosperity and parade around PR materials with clip art of crowds in protest, but when the money is traced, when it can be traced, it leads to major corporations and individual billionaires. Even though these are conservative groups, there are enough Dems who seek funding from places like financial investment firms and banks that a false equivalency can be drawn by conservative pundits. There are, however, very different realities in campaign funding for Democrats and that for Republicans. Funding from the supposedly huge money of progressives like George Saros is also very very very different from the funding by the Koch brothers.

Ultimately this union fight in Wisconsin and other states is galvanizing unions, the one major political force that the vast majority of working Americans have to counteract the money of the extremely wealthy, and bringing out the best in the Democratic officials at the state level. The question is will Democrats on the national level, who are embroiled in issues that are pandemic to the entire country as well as the world, pick up on this awakening labor movement and recognize it for what it is: Their BASE? Will they take the opportunity to use this to draw that distinction they couldn't last time? It is so clear in the body of the Wisconsin 14 and their distinction from the Republicans in the Senate who held an illegal committee meeting in an attempt to maneuver the legislation only dealing with union rights through into law even without the Democrats. I think this will bring focus onto those elected officials on the national level who are truly interested in standing up for the base and those who aren't.

This fight is going to return the party, which has gotten so lost in the midst of federal issues, to the core principles it stands for. Then we voters, whatever our typical voting habits, are going to have to turn blinders on to the messaging coming from the Republicans. We are going to have to show them through out vote that we were in fact paying attention.

Michael Moore said something interesting tonight on Rachel Maddow's show, that this country is not broke. This is something that has been said over and over again by progressives, but since those who are unemployed or who are suffering because of the economic disaster are hurting so badly they didn't listen to. We are not broke. We have the most robust and largest economy in the world. The Republican narrative that somehow our government has gotten so large and so unwieldy and so reckless with money is largely untrue. We don't have a spending problem in this country, we have a revenue problem in this country, and the reason why most Middle Class people are hurting and why they were convinced with that garbage about tax cuts is because the wealth is now concentrated at the top. Even the Republicans admit our Middle Class is disappearing. Rather than identifying the real problem, however, the rich people who have been sucking it up and who were responsible for the reckless investments that led to our Recession, they convince most people that somehow those rich people are just simple Americans, that they are in just as much trouble, are suffering just as much, and that they don't deserve to be taxed anymore than the working class.

That's a lie, it's fiction and it's an outright negligent lie. Four hundred Americans now possess as much wealth as fifty percent of this country combined. That accumulation of wealth is staggering, and it came about because the taxes that should have been levied against them, but which weren't because they had already paid for politicians to keep the money flowing in, have steadily been lowered over and over. That money that they have absorbed is the money from the pensions of workers that then disappeared during the Worldcom scandal, during the Berney Maddoff scandal and the tax money we used to bail them out after they caused the economy to collapse. That money isn't going back into the economy like Republicans say it will. It's going into more investments that are safe and high yield so it makes more money. Meanwhile more than ten million people are out of work and another twenty can't find jobs that pay well.

Those tax cuts mean that the top 2%, which owns 80% of the wealth of this country, is the gap that is causing the deficit. There are, of course, spending issues, first among them the two wars we are still involved with. That doesn't mean killing programs so many people rely on. Why Americans didn't recognize that as a consequence of the Republicans becoming the majority I don't know. Maybe people aren't as intelligent as I hope they are. But the end result is that those programs put in place to help the needy and vulnerable, to make sure we have clean water and air and that everyone has access to education, those programs, rather than the defense budget, are what are being cut and it will only make the recession hurt that much more. Meanwhile Eric Cantor stands in front of cameras in his thousand dollar suit and cocky grin telling us we are broke. We are only broke because he and his rich friends didn't want to pay an extra 3% of their yearly income in taxes so that the government could provide services for everyone.

Reality is cold and simple now. Republicans want to privatize everything, want to strip all workers of their rights so they can't object when an employer cuts their benefits or lowers their wages at will, they want us to think that we can't afford basic services and that somehow by cutting taxes on our shrinking wages that we are benefiting. They want us to have private fire services though that service won't happen if we don't pay our yearly dues. They want us to ignore the air pollution giving us headaches and nose bleeds and causing our cancers and just go about our daily lives as though nothing is wrong. They want us to ignore the serious problems in our education system, our failing schools and the warped and backward curriculum self-righteous ultraconservative divorcees running for office tell us is the truth and right and to pretend that somehow we aren't being controlled by their corporate and religious doctrines when they restrict us from having medically necessary treatments and procedures, blocking us from being with the people we love, and putting us in jail for suggesting that somehow there is a better way to live.

THAT is Tea Party America, and we deserve better than that.

Never to Low to GOP

So here's reality: Republicans control many of the states in this country with the worst education systems, the biggest fiscal crises, the lowest income earners and the least skilled and educated people. In order to galvanize the fear of those people into greater gains for their vision of an America in which the state abdicates most if not all of the services we have come to rely on, even utilities such as water, they have created this narrative that starts with the notion of a fiscal crisis.

Yes are most of the states facing budget shortfalls? Yeah, they are, and part of the reason for it is because taxpayers are having to makeup the cost of the pension money of public workers that was lost when markets crashed two years ago. Those pensions were contractually negotiated years ago. Those people have earned their money. Now should contracts be renegotiated, maybe, but is it the responsibility of public workers to give up benefits that were contracted to them and that they've earned?

What is more, this narrative of fiscal crisis, accompanied by genuine deficits, has allowed people to buy into this idea that tax cuts are the answer to everything, to job creation, as well as to their own personal financial woes. Historically tax cuts have never worked to create jobs, and historically the majority of people suffer when the government has to cut programs that are vital to the lives of most Americans. (See my previous posts about union busting and public education).

So what is the balance, here, if people rely on basics like emergency services and public education, not to mention road repair and basic utilities like water? How are we going to make up that deficit if cutting from the budget is not enough? It's simple.

This whole narrative, this whole idea that we have no money, that we're broke, that we already are running in the red, all of it is because we are not taking in enough revenue, not on the state level and not on the federal level. Now is there fat to trim at all levels? Yes, bureaucracies need streamlining, programs not meeting goals need to be revisited and retooled. But make no mistake, the real answer involves raising taxes. No one likes that idea, though, but so many people seem to think that if we raise taxes on one tax bracket it's bad for everyone. That is just categorically untrue. The taxes of all go up because Republicans refuse to raise taxes on the top 2%, something that is overwhelmingly popular with the American public when faced with the choice of cutting from Medicare, Social Security or Education.

But what is even more damaging are the budgets proposed and likely to pass in states like Michigan and Florida. Florida, the governor is going to cut $1.75 billion dollars from public education, with most of it coming from K-12. $1.6 billion of that will be to pay for tax cuts for corporations and for property tax cuts. That means only $150 million will be left over to help cover any state budget deficits. According to the Palm Beach Post, that means the average teacher salary would lose more than $2,300 while the average property tax break of about $45.

In Michigan the governor would raise tax rates on the elderly and poor and in Georgia the legislature is trying to apply sales tax to the fund raising efforts of the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts, so that Girl Scout cookies are taxable. All of this goes on while making public worker unions into the easy targets for the public campaign to justify cuts to corporations that are not hiring jobs and to the wealthy who are not only not hiring but also investing that money into financial instruments that make more money while not supporting any substantive growth to the economy.

So the point of this piece is, really? You're going to tax grandma and Girl Scout cookies but you aren't going to increase the taxes on the 400 people who own more wealth than more than 50% of the rest of the country?

Lies Our Leaders Tell Us: Unions Are The Enemy

There is a problem in our country that has been brewing for a while, and it's all wrapped up in things I've talked about before. Corporations have, through their own media outlets and through the politicians they've paid for, convinced us that out lives are better off with lower taxes for all, that lower taxes means more take-home pay while lower corporate taxes stimulates job growth, and that cutting spending on 'unnecessary' programs like schools where teachers are paid disproportionately to the difficulty of their job are the ways to accomplish this miracle of personal savings. We've seen the messages that the Tea Party organizers and Republican law makers have told us, that we deserve to keep more of our hard-earned money, that we should be able to save more of our own money, and that we know how to spend our money better than the government.

The only part of any of that that is true is that we deserve the money we work so hard to make. We don't, however, save anything when taxes are cut because all those frivolous government programs that Republicans are so quick to identify as wasteful help to keep our cost of living down. The fact is that the government spends our money better than most of us do. When so many people were duped into subprime mortgages and spending money on houses they couldn't afford to own, that means that there are a whole lot of people out there who don't know how to invest their money wisely. That's okay, most of us aren't financial geniuses, I am certainly not. That's one reason why those subsidies that go to green energy research, to grants for students, toward investments in future growth, those are all important and those are all things that the Tea Party driven Republicans seek to cut.

But right now probably the biggest fight is over the idea of unions. Politicians tell us that public worker unions are responsible for so much of state deficits across this country. Well, in fact, in Wisconsin, the governor's corporate tax cut is exactly what's caused the deficit in that state. Moreover, cutting collective bargaining rights for workers has no fiscal impact and he's said that himself. Even further, according to Forbes magazine, a conservative publication owned by one-time Republican Presidential Nomination contestant Steve Forbes, Wisconsin state employees actually pay for their entire pension and health benefits themselves, the only thing the taxpayer money is used for is to pay their salaries.

So, the discussion still goes on with conservatives trying to convince the public that somehow public workers' unions are to blame for the fiscal problems of their states. The rhetoric, however, stands firm even as the legitimate conservative press picks it apart with actual facts, since what it is really based on is the 'public employees have such a sweet deal'. People in interviews have actually been saying that, as though the public employees are criminals who are steeling from taxpayers, or that they are somehow corrupt because they are making more than the many unemployed workers in this country.

Their wages haven't changed so much since before the economy melted, though, and neither have their benefits. Most of those union contracts only become problematic when, like now, governments seek to renegotiate so the employees get less. And no, they don't have the only hard jobs in this country, and no they aren't work any more or less than other workers with comparable skills and jobs in comparable industries. So the question isn't why do they have so much and such a sweet deal, the question is, why do so many other people have so much LESS? Why is it that we are settling for fewer and fewer benefits while corporations are posting record profits? Why is it that we are letting them tell us that requiring corporations to pay wages that aren't just decent but that might actually be good along with benefit packages that provide real security for people would kill business and force them to move more jobs overseas when they're not creating jobs to begin with?

Even more than that, why have we as a nation settled for a situation where the average American salary has only seen a 2% growth over the last twenty years for those making less than $250,000 while that growth in income has skyrocketed for those above that line? Why have we allowed ourselves to be convinced that somehow wage adjustments for cost of living equal an actual benefit rather than the bare minimum when factoring inflation into our cost of living? A raise for inflation isn't a raise or a bonus, it's not a reward for hard work.

Unions are the ones who fight for against all those things. They're the ones who helped bring about a set work week so that we aren't expected to slave away for sixty, seventy or eighty hour weeks without any benefits and without overtime. They are the ones who fight for safe work environments and family leave for new parents and for those caring for sick relatives. So why would we fight against unions? How is busting the unions in the public interest when raising tax rates on corporations making billions of dollars in profits every year, who are posting record profits every quarter? And honestly, is anyone implying that teachers have easy jobs? Cause on FOX News they constantly bring up the fact that teachers only work 9 months a year...oh except for all the workshops they have to do to keep up their licenses, the conferences they have to attend, and the fact that every teacher I've ever known has had a second job during the summer and on weekends during the year. Are they really saying that the job of a CEO at a major corporation is harder than the job of a high school teacher in a poor inner city school? Really?

The governor of Wisconsin, along with Republicans across this country, say that state workers should be making their share of the sacrifices. Well...I don't see CEO's of banks losing their jobs, and they're the ones who got us into this mess. I don't see rich people making any sacrifices at all, as Charlie Sheen takes private jets to the Caribbean to party it up with teenage hookers. I don't see Congressmen living at all within the kind of salary that an average American makes. They have money budgeted to them for travel to and from their home district as well as to pay staff and for their office supplies and everything except for their own living expenses while in Washington. So why do Congressmen make more than $150k a year? They're public workers too, and they get government health care and pensions just like the Wisconsin state workers.

But who are the people who have the ability to bring these issues to legislators, who have the political power to be able to make the voices of workers heard? Unions. That's why people unionized to begin with. The only way people who don't have the money of the Koch brothers can make their voices heard in a democracy now dominated by corporate money is by pooling their money and man power, and that's what a union is.

So really, the discussion should be shifted away from why are these workers making so much money and why the rest of us aren't. Why aren't we all in unions? The unions have had such huge power in certain industries, so why aren't all private and public employees unionized? Because corporations know that if they can bust up unions they can pay workers less, cut jobs and benefits without repercussions, and make more money doing it. So why are we fighting the union employees in Wisconsin when we really should be organizing unions for labor people all across this country. The Tea Party, which has been bought and paid for by the Koch brothers and designed by Karl Rove, want to play the 'take our country back' game and point to anyone who thinks people should be paid a fair wage and that poor children shouldn't have to starve because oil companies want a tax break, we the rest of us can play that game too. We want our country back from the corporations that have been convincing people too ignorant or uneducated to recognize that they've been bought into servitude and the politicians that have been their corporate shills.

Teachers' Unions, Special Interest, Corporate Welfare and The Taxpayer.

We are at a very interesting place in this country right now because of the public discourse on so many social and fiscal issues and the increasingly apparent reality that we are becoming an impoverished nation. Despite efforts in the last twenty years to let free market systems drive down consumer prices through competition, to improve the quality of health care by shifting Medicare beneficiaries into the private insurance market, and all the supposed benefits of lower tax rates, our country has become poorer, further behind and less educated with each passing day. So what's the problem? The problem is that the myth that free-market capitalism and an economy driven by it benefits all the people who live in and depend upon that economy.

It is just a fact that the programs that have allowed the largest number of people to climb out of poverty, which helped create a middle class, that made this country strong in the aftermath of economic catastrophe and war during the early twentieth century were pro-labor and progressive programs built upon socialist philosophies. While corporate elite and the culture of conservatism have used the examples of dictatorships having no real relation to socialist philosophies to define those philosophies and the people who espouse them as radical, our country has benefited and come to depend upon socialism in order to thrive.

When I say progressive and pro-labor programs I mean labor unions, which are largely responsible for child labor laws, a forty hour work weak, health and retirement benefits, etc., Social Security, Medicare, and let's not forget about it, the Public School System. These are programs built on the idea that all people should be considered equal not just as political entities when it comes to voting, but as political entities in the way they are represented in labor disputes, in access to education and to opportunities that allow them to live out of poverty. They are built upon the principle that if you do work hard that you have the right to benefit with compensation and a right to improve your quality of life.

Public School especially is meant to everyone in this country to have access to an education no matter their background. Public schools were started as a means of giving people the opportunity to better their circumstances in the face of overwhelming disparities between them and those who control the environment of their labor. As our country has become increasingly diverse and as our population has grown the school system has become an increasing financial burden on the government and an increasingly complex system to manage. It has also been one of the most difficult fields to work in because while everyone demands quality education, they do not seem interested in making a legitimate commitment to financially and morally supporting those who those upon whom those demands are made.

Teachers have an incredibly difficult job. Not only has our culture become hostile towards education, and children raised in an environment of disrespect for the education system or for the need for and benefits of an education, but the responsibilities of teachers have increased with the increasing rates of poverty and stress in home environments. The conversation then becomes one of poorly performing teachers, of course which distracts from the many other issues plaguing the education system, not the least of which are the peripheral social issues that impact it so greatly. We see the effects of these peripheral issues so poignantly when we look at the disparity between the schools in poorer urban neighborhoods and those in wealthy suburbs. Somehow that comparison gets removed from the broader discourse as conservative politicians see an easy target for necessary spending cuts to offset their policies of tax cuts.

It is basic economics that you cannot spend more than you take in or you get a deficit. So the question becomes either 'why are you spending so much' or 'why aren't you making enough'. With conservative politics and politicians setting the tone of the discourse for the entire field of politics basically for the last thirty years, we have been stuck on that first question, and with the idea that somehow we have to cut out 'unnecessary' spending in order to sustain a healthy economy. One of the major problems with that is what is deemed unnecessary are always social programs that benefit the majority of the population. The reason for this is that it is politically expedient for a political movement in which evangelical Christianity partnered with corporate interests for the sake of overcoming the political party actually concerned with the general welfare of working people.

Because Scott Walker is trying to bust public unions, and because it has been the vanguard of a movement by conservative politicians throughout the Great Lakes region and elsewhere, it has constantly been in the news. Recent polls say that the majority of people in Wisconsin as well as the majority of people in this country favor unions and collective bargaining rights. This is in spite of the fact that the governor and his colleagues have made a vociferous case to their citizens of blaming public workers, who are of course part of the evil big government conspiracy to control the lives of regular people. This is a symptom, of course, of the 'big government' versus 'little government' argument and that somehow smaller government translates to greater financial security for the individual.

The problem with that is that most Americans depend on and take for granted the things that larger government provides, such as fixing roads and providing emergency services, not to mention Social Security and Medicare. The people most dependent on Social Security, the people it was initially set up to benefit, were the people without the means to save for their own eventual retirement. This is still true. People who depend most on the program are those whose jobs didn't offer pensions or retirement accounts and who weren't able to invest in a retirement plan on their own. Many Americans fall into this category. Something similar is true for Medicare where the beneficiaries are mostly people who no longer work and receive health benefits from their employer and who can't afford or don't qualify for private insurance. Ironically, in 2010 when polls were exploring the phenomenon of the Tea Party, those two programs were the two things people absolutely refused to give up or take cuts in. In fact they thought we should see increases in these programs. Those programs make up two-thirds of the national budget.

Corporations, however, don't have any interest in the public welfare or social programs. Because they are entities whose purpose is to make money, because they benefit from an uneducated population that can be paid little and either don't know they have potential for higher compensation or the right to ask for it, and because they need targets for cutting spending to offset their lack of tax responsibility, public employees and especially teachers become easy targets. One of the arguments, though, has some merit, since an employer needs to be financially stable in order to provide jobs and pay salaries and benefits.

Because of the economic crisis this has been difficult. Because corporations seek greater and greater gains each quarter and regard that as a mark for the health of their companies, especially when it is a signal to investors as to whether to invest in the company or not, they need to find ways to cut costs as a means of boosting profits. If a company can't do that in one area they may move to another area, and that means that large corporations can threaten to leave a state and that threat is real because they have the leverage of many jobs to use against politicians. Because we've created an economy dependent on large publicly financed corporations rather than a diversified base of private companies we have allowed them to dictate the terms of their own regulation and legal responsibilities. We don't hold them accountable at all for making threats like this, nor for cutting and running when they see they can make more money by moving somewhere else.

Thus Republicans can make the argument that tax cuts for corporations are necessary, that they create or retain jobs, along with their general ideology of lower taxes all in concert with shrinking government. A necessary component of this is cutting spending, then. Public sector employees are a politically expedient sacrifice on both fronts, and especially teachers since education of children is a very emotional issue for most people and the quality of education in our country has been seen as a problem for some time. Dissatisfied parents then vote for people who identify the teachers as the problem with the system since teachers are for parents the most immediate face of the system.

The overall disaster with all of this is that education suffers when teachers are laid off and class sizes increase. That means fewer students succeed and then fewer become productive and skilled workers and our general labor force and the citizenry as a whole becomes less educated. Less educated people make fewer demands for their own rights and welfare and thus perpetuate a system where they are taken advantage of for the benefit of someone else. Usually this results in a small, very wealthy population, and a large portion of the population who are poor, without much in between.

Because our population is aging, and the bulge in the population are people of the 'baby boomer' generation, I can understand why Social Security and Medicare are such priorities and how the rhetoric of 'cutting taxes' in the interest of saving more money is attractive. The question is, are you really saving more money when you have lower taxes? Does it really benefit you and your community?

Average wages for the general work force who earn less than $250K has only risen by 2% over the last thirty years, while the average earnings for those above that mark have skyrocketed. All this time prices have increased everywhere. There is an incredible amount of financial burden placed on consumers and the shrinking Middle Class. Especially in the past ten years this has been during a time when we have supposedly been benefiting from the savings of tax cuts. So when are those benefits going to kick in?

In a free market system tax cuts are the answer to everything. But if a business can save more money via tax cuts why would they hire more people? Especially if they are a company which produces nothing except financial instruments like investments that don't exist except on paper and are almost entirely the province of the already wealthy? In a free market system competition is supposed to be able to solve the problems in the health care industry, by driving down insurance premiums and improving the quality of care, but the goal of the insurance industry is not to pay out benefits, but to make money. It only benefits when people are paying their premiums and when fewer and fewer people can afford private insurance where there is no collective ability to choose among competitors for the best price, they will have to raise the cost of premiums to cover that loss.

Plus, we have already seen deregulation of industries, such as the banking industry, and the result was a melt-down of our economy. financial institutions took on high risk investments with high yields because they made money very quickly. The same was true before the Great Depression in the credit industry. That is why those regulations that were more recently loosened were put in place. Loosening them was supposed to help stimulate business and give corporations the opportunity to create more jobs, but in the meantime we've seen not just manufacturing jobs go away. Many of us have seen the call-center and customer service jobs disappear as well over the last ten or fifteen years. Manufacturing has been disappearing for decades, but those white-collar jobs that were staples for college graduates everywhere are gone now too, and they are not coming back.

Corporations don't have an interest in creating jobs. Because their shills, who are mostly Republicans, have dominated the discourse over the last thirty years, they have been allowed to dictate to us the means by which we govern ourselves. The conflict comes when we are asked to make noticeable sacrifices and when those sacrifices infringe on values so fundamental that they are nearly universal. These values may not be expressed in the same way by all people, but they are realized in programs like Social Security, Medicare and Public Education. We should refuse to accept sacrifices when it comes to education.

The question shouldn't then be 'why are we spending so much'. The question is, why aren't we taking in enough? And I'm not talking about income tax, that just puts more of the burden on individual citizens. The question is, and especially after the financial meltdown that brought to light the staggering amounts of money made by financial institutions and corporations, why aren't corporations putting in their fair share. Most corporations have philanthropic divisions that do good work in helping to support communities, but for the most profitable businesses, that money isn't much more than PR to cover up the lack of real investment by many of companies in the communities of consumers they sell their products to. It means nothing to a corporation that hands out $10 million or even $100 million a year when their end of year profits are in the $10's of billions over and above whatever expenditures they take on, including that philanthropy.

To ask them to shoulder some of the tax burden for programs that most Americans depend on doesn't amount to a big sacrifice. Getting them to pay up when so many Americans have voted in ignorance for the party that greedily takes advantage of the money of those corporate interests is something else entirely.

The Conservative 'Reality', or Facts v. 'facts'

There is a real problem in the news and political discourse today. There is what Rachel Maddow calls a 'self contained conservative media universe'. It's no secret that have a deep brain-love for Rachel Maddow, and although I don't trust her implicitly, she is in my opinion the most reliable pundit anywhere on the air. Now I'm a huge fan of Anderson Cooper and some others, but as a pundit, even with the clear political perspective with which she presents new stories, no one is as faithful to checking facts, to correcting herself when she gets it wrong, and despite having a clear progressive opinion she gives as fair of an interview as anyone on the air anywhere.

So, when I listen to Real Time with Bill Maher and she is on the panel I get excited. When, however, the guest who was a Republican strategist and Washington Post columnist calls one of Ronald Reagan's economic advisors a lapsed Republican, that is disturbing and a problem. It goes a long way to show how comically irrational the politics of the party has gotten. What maybe even more disturbing, and a trend that may have been going on since politics began, is the use of completely different statistics and facts by opposing sides of the political discourse. While facts from the Huffington Post or Salon.com may be questionable because of the habit of those two news organizations for using propaganda. When Rachel uses facts, however, and they are clearly verifiable and from relatively non-partisan groups like the Congressional Budget Office, and then someone refutes those facts, denies them, calls them illegitimate, that is a problem. Using different statistics, citing different polls, that is one thing. Claiming completely different numbers as from the same source is a problem.

It is incredibly irresponsible and completely unacceptable for members of legitimate media outlets to use erroneous facts or making up facts of their own undermines the entire arena of discourse. We cannot have any kind of discussion which results in solutions, nothing constructive and only rhetorical clashing if there are no facts that are considered solid, and specifically when there are no sources above dispute when their facts support one side or another. With Rachel, at least, I have seen her support conservative positions and respecting facts that dispute positions some consider progressive positions. When sources are delegitimized just because they are sources cited by Rachel or other progressives, then there is no way to have dialog.

Something that deeply angers and frustrates me is that the 'false equivalency', when conservatives represent their lack of action against the dangerous elements of their political parties as equivalent to the lack of action among progressive or liberal political parties. The same things happen when we discuss campaign funding, saying there is just as much if not more money funneling into Democratic campaigns as there is funneling to Republicans. That is just not true. The facts are not true, and we can see it in ways that don't revolve around the party reporting figures, we can track the actual spending of the campaigns, we can also track the ad space in print, radio or on television airing conservative ads. Moreover they identify themselves as victims of attacks from the left, they claim that they are seeking collaborative efforts and bipartisan conversation, but when you watch where their positions are, they refuse to budge, refuse to compromise, and refuse to even have discussions unless their opponents compromise their position or agree to major concessions before discussion can begin. That is not compromise. We saw it with a number of aspects of the health care legislation, and even more obviously in the tax debate.

Do we have rhetoric on all sides, yes. Is the rhetoric as vitriolic on all sides, perhaps. Is there a side whose media representatives are clearly more interested in reporting on and representing true facts, empirical data, and true realities, yes, and it's not the side that sides with FOX News or Republicans.

Took a hiatus now back with a vengeance: IA & Gay Marriage, Republicans & Rape, Republicans & Green Energy,

It's been a while since I have posted, but now I'm back with things to say. Rather than posting individual topical posts, I'm going to go through the gamut in one, so here goes:

Iowa's legislature has voted by large margins to pass a constitutional amendment, which will now go before the voters, to ban all same-sex marriages, civil unions, and domestic partnership laws within that state. There are a whole host of reasons that this is a problem, not the least of which was because the supreme court decision in that state that legalized same-sex marriage resulted in a hateful and bigoted campaign that successfully removed three of its justices from the bench during the last election. More than that, Iowa is at times a progressive state. It voted for Obama in both the primary and in the general election in 2008. It is also a neighboring state of my own home state of Minnesota. The LGBT community had hoped that the legalization of gay marriage in that state signaled a shift in politics on the issue. Of course those radical social conservatives who helped fuel the sweeping election of Republicans into Congress also ran one of the most hateful and disgusting campaigns in recent memory against it, and managed to inspire fear in enough Iowans that they voted out three state supreme court justices, including the chief justice.

There is a silver lining on the way, I think, with the federal suit against Prop 8 which will hopefully clear the appellate court soon. That case, I believe, will sweep away all legislation throughout the country that bans same-sex marriage. It is also a case that brilliantly and articulately presents the case for the legalization of same-sex marriage, proving arguments against it to be irrational by definition and to not be substantive legal arguments. That alone, the case built against Prop 8, is enough to make the suit worthwhile, and advocates across the country should be including language used in the briefs and arguments made by the lawyers for the case to rebut and repudiate all those who are virulently pushing for discrimination. Studies have shown that children raised by gay parents suffer no harmful effects because of their parent's orientation. Moreover, children raised by lesbians are statistically more likely to be successful in school and psychologically stable than either those raised by gay men or by heterosexual couples. That is proof that the argument for child safety is not based on fact or sound reason, i.e. irrational. It is also irrational to argue that the principle purpose for the civil contract of marriage is procreation and that same-sex couples should not be allowed to marry because they cannot procreate. Not only is that not true, it does nothing to inhibit individual's actual reproductive capability, but it also calls into question the millions of couples who either choose to not have children or are unable to have children.

In addition, the speech delivered by Zach Wahl eloquently identifies the amendment as outright discrimination. His speech illustrates the unequivocal similarities between gay married couples in committed relationships and their families, and those families of married heterosexual couples. He provides an example of at least one family where the same-sex parents raised a successful, motivated, and intelligent child who is likely to succeed in life and plainly states that he was sure if he was the child of one of those legislators at the hearing, that they would be just as proud of him as his mothers were. It is an illustration of how the amendment then calls into question whether the families of same-sex couples are real families, and also tells them they are not as worthy of either full citizenship or legal recognition. He points out that voting for the amendment was truly and inarguably a vote for discrimination.

The next thing that I wanted to talk about was the recent abortion legislation presented in Congress. Rachel Maddow pointed out some time ago, before the elections, how the large number of high profile Republican candidates this last cycle who expressly did not support the exception to outlawing abortion in cases of rape or incest was evidence of how radical the shift in conservative politics was. That used to be the standard tagline, the moderating factor to a candidates otherwise staunchly right-wing stance on abortion. Now it has become part of the standard for the social conservatives that took over the Tea Party from whatever actual independents were out there. Everyone talked about taxes this past cycle, but the fact remains that the electorate, and specifically the Tea Party cowed Republican Party, advanced radical social conservative politics in a historic way.

Now the legislation proposed seeks to end federal funding of abortions through social programs such as Medicaid, limiting the definition of rape to 'forcible rape'. Those who are victims of statutory rape, then, do not qualify for funds. It also forbids use of federal tax benefits, such as the pre-tax money set aside in an account for medical purposes. The implications of this are broad, especially in cases of date-rape or spousal rape by a married partner. I have no doubt in my mind that if they could erase the incest exception as well, they would do so. In spite of the rhetoric from progressive women's groups for the last twenty years about threats to Roe v. Wade, Republicans are ideologically at the point where they feel they have a referendum approving their efforts to make that a reality.

Update: The Republicans have now removed the language that classified only certain types of rape as part of their 'no federal funding for abortions' bill. It is also important to note that actual abortions are less than ten percent of their actual activity. Also, there was already legislation in place that made federal funding for 'abortion' illegal. The funding received by Planned Parenthood was for the purpose of and used for many other health services provided to women, especially to minorities and the poor.

In spite of the rhetoric from Republicans that their first priority would be jobs and debt has proven a lie. Their priority, the bills they've put for first, have been about health care and abortion. Once more the discussion about health care can shift from the idiotic rhetoric about death panels and constitutionality toward discussing the real issues that went into shaping that legislation. We can discuss the quality of care, we can discuss the price of care, the price of insurance, qualifying for insurance or qualifying for keeping their insurance rather than being denied coverage or having coverage being cancelled because of illness. We finally are able to discuss coverage for children and health care options for families struggling financially.

The Republican Congress and moreover the Republican attorneys general and governors are turning away federal money meant to help implement the changes, some of which was money meant for state social services. So, here's the problem: What are they going to do instead? Let's say that the constitutional question goes their way and the health care legislation is overturned altogether. What are their ideas and what are they going to do to address the staggering costs of health care? I just listened to Real Time With Bill Maher and somewhere in the last couple shows the conservative, a Republican strategist, said ideally the government wouldn't have anything to do with paying for health care, meaning cutting Medicare and Medicaid altogether, and even businesses wouldn't have to offer insurance and individuals would have to buy insurance directly from providers out of pocket.

My answer to that last is, What? Really? Has that strategist every had to try and get health insurance out of pocket? I was lucky to sign up for insurance during a push a few years ago when BlueCross BlueShield was offering options to try and get twenty-somethings on insurance. Before that, however, I was on Cobra after losing my insurance from my employer. That insurance was $450+ dollars a month for insurance I payed less than $100 for while insured threw work. That premium was also low because I was a single person. For someone over the age of forty, for anyone trying to carry kids on their Cobra policy, that price becomes staggering. So, really? A party who is against any government regulation, will they just rely on the good will and altruism of insurance companies to offer low premiums and make sure that people are going to get the care they paid into and quality care?

If anyone thought that or thinks that Republicans are at all interested in the middle class or saving America from economic disaster, can you really gloss over these things? I'll deal with the 'facts' v. reality in another post. That's it for now, though.

Surviving Republican

Dear Republican Party:


You have won back the House of Representatives in an election year rife with unrest over the economy and jobs. To do so, however, you activated the farthest reaches of the right wing electorate and by doing so gave legitimacy to a kind of crass disregard for truth and facts that is outright dangerous for this countries future. Even more than that you have given legitimacy to candidates and a movement that actively spurn the value of education and being or becoming educated. You have demonized and marginalized large groups of minority voters, minorities who statistically are fast growing parts of the electorate. All of this in the name of politics.

It would be unwise, however, to believe the rhetoric of your recent victory speeches in saying that this was a referendum on the overall policies or agenda of President Obama. You should also not think that it is somehow a show of support for your own party agenda. While it is politically expedient to posture in front of the media, polls say that more of this country supports the Democratic Party than they do your party, that most people like the individual policies of the president and the Democrats more. What you should take this election as a referendum on is job creation. Tax cuts are nice, and they are important, but without putting people back to work, it doesn't matter to them what their tax rates are. They want a job or want to not fear over keeping their job.

Another mistake would be to waste time talking about 'Obamacare'. If the Democrats had done an effective job selling the message of the legislation to the American people from the beginning, you would never have gained the upper hand in the media. Much of what the bill does is supported by the American people. Of those who do not support the overall legislation there is a significant number who think it did not go far enough. It would be dangerous for your party to mistake the slogans and spin of Rush Limbaugh and FOX News as fact or as the prevailing sentiment of most of the country.

What is also a mistake is not to listen to moderates like Rudy Giuliani. It is time for your party to stop allowing candidates to run racially divisive campaigns. It is time for you to ease up on the social agenda that has dehumanized and degraded gays and lesbians. You have already lost the culture war on those issues. The country is becoming more diverse rather than less and more accepting of LGBT people and their civil rights. You will loose this part of the debate and history is already attesting to that. As Meghan McCain says, if you want to be relevant as a party in the future you have to not alienate massive portions of the electorate in the minority and young voters in order to guarantee the vote of a proportionally smaller group of white heterosexual Christian voters.

So what's the solution? For now, concentrate on the message of fiscal conservatism that was supposedly the hallmark of the Tea Party. If you think you can balance the budget and get the economy going again with conservative policies, do it. Set aside the social agenda many of the arch-conservatives in your party are proposing and really just concentrate on budgets. One of the other things that was consistently of concern to voters was the gridlock in Washington, which means the stalling and partisanship. You cannot complain about partisanship and point fingers if you have an opportunity for true compromise.

Does that give you cover with the Tea Party? For many it would, as fiscal issues is a #1 topic on everyone's mind. What will be more problematic, however, getting nothing done except trying to make Obama a one term president or getting something done that you can actually run on as an accomplishment? The choice is yours, but 2012 is not going to be all about tearing down the Obama agenda and administration, nor will it be all about the Tea Party, which prevails in a midterm but can't hope to rally the entire party for a presidential election. But either way, don't choose the few, choose the many, choose all of us.

Why did I go into $110K in debt for an education?

There is an issue in this country with education. I'm not talking about education with a capitol 'E' as in the Dept. of Education, or even the problems facing our schools or us fixing the system and become a leader in the world in terms of education. I'm talking about a basic belief that has come through clearly in this election that education is evil. While we say education is key to the future, we tell our children that if you want to be successful and happy you need an education, if you want to climb out of poverty or have options for a career you have to get an education. Everything about our individual and societal future depends on education.

So what's the problem? The problem is that because of disparate groups in this country galvanizing in the 1990's around the Republican Party, because they felt validated by the election of a president who did everything he could to endear himself to the American people by pretending he wasn't one of the wealthiest presidents from one of the most privileged backgrounds in our history, and lately by the Tea Party and their attacks on Barack Obama. Thanks to Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Christine O'Donnell and Sharon Angles, we now have a social and political narrative that tells us that if you are educated, if you are intellectually above average and successful because you are talented and innovative and intelligent, and if you have any inkling about the makeup of Congress, current events or READ, than you are elitist. Not only are you elitist, but you are out of touch with the rest of the country and unfit to lead in any legislative or executive office anywhere in the country. Because Sarah Palin couldn't name a single newspaper or magazine off the top of her head in the Katie Couric interview in 2008, because she couldn't handle questions from any news outlet except FOX News and the conservative media, everyone but those friendly stations became the 'Lame Stream Media'. Thanks to those and others, disseminated through the media exposure and organizing of the Tea Party movement over the past several years, being a person with an education in this country makes you of less value.

Now, it has been true for a long time that intellectuals are often targets for totalitarian regimes, for fascist societies and political movements. Intellectuals think about things, and argue things and talk to other people about things. When intellectuals then disagree with a movement or regime they have to be silenced lest they foster unrest that erodes that regime or movement's power base. If that regime or movement is overtly and ideologically oppressing their people or if they are enforcing policies that have a broad reaching negative impact, more and more intellectuals speak out against that movement or regime. That is what we have here and it gets more and more insidious.

One topic that floats out among social conservatives in this country, and it floats around on all levels of government, is about the administration of our public schools. A central aspect, philosophically, to this topic is the issue of teaching 'Intelligent Design', which in reality is another word for creationism, the teaching of biology through the Biblical narrative of God creating the Earth and universe and all things and all creatures. This has been a point of contention over and over again in local and state school boards with parents advocating its teaching in place of evolution, or at the very least as a 'viable' alternative to evolution. At the national level, one of the areas of the budget most Republicans are willing to cut, or at least they say this as they're campaigning, is the Education budget. Sharon Angles and a number of other fringe candidates even want to dismantle the Department of Education. Christine O'Donnell mentioned, in reference to teaching ID (creationism) in public schools, that all those curriculum decisions should be made on the local level, that everything should be on the local level.

There aren't general education standards in this country, despite all the testing to grade schools and districts on their proficiency rates. There are, however, standardized tests required by colleges and universities. Why? Because they want to see that a student is able to handle the academic requirements, that they are a desirable candidate for their school, and that they have long-term potential to become successful in the world, thereby reflecting well on their alma mater and donating money as an alum. Whether or not this is a major hurdle for students in this country based on race and socioeconomic status, it would only become that much harder when there is no nationally funded government agency to help support the administrative infrastructure for testing. It would only become that much harder by removing even the appearance of some national standard of education and putting curriculum on the local level.

Of course conservatives want the curriculum decisions to be placed on the local level. They want religious to conservatives to have more control over their kids' education, they want to have more control over the 'moral' or 'social' issues brought up in the schools. Evolution then wouldn't be the only thing for the chopping block. Another perennial issue is 'sex education', or what the rest of us know as health class. Effectively they probably would be most comfortable to return education in this country, and some have said this explicitly, to that of the 1950's. All of that is representative of the incredibly romanticized version of that period in history that many in this country believes in. They may want this for many reasons, too many for me to speculate, but the effect would be to indoctrinate all of our children in a worldview that isn't even recognizable to our modern world. It would ignore the empirical evidence of climate change and the effects of industrialization on the environment, convince children that industries have our best interests at heart as they cut costs to produce food more cheaply, all while promoting the idea that America is the greatest country in the world to the exclusion of everyone else, not just that we can but that we have the right to take unilateral action in the pursuit of our own perceived national interests.

Not incomprehensible is the connection between these conservative ideas of 'local' control and the religious fundamentalism that has become pervasive throughout the Republican Party. It has allowed people of generally less political knowledge, awareness on current events, and general education to congregate around some very well funded party leaders masquerading as outsiders. The rhetorical device of 'educated elite', especially representing them as all from New England, sits really well with working and lower class voters in other parts of the country, and especially in rural areas. These voters then were duped into trusting candidates whose own funding can be traced directly to insider political action groups and often directly to enormously wealthy individuals and corporations. Their own lack of political knowledge and savvy let them vote against their own interests in candidates who we are now seeing turn against some of their own campaign messages and a party interested in nothing but obstruction and further economic problems. At odds with this are the many labor unions who activated their traditionally Democratic base and supported Democratic candidates with money and people-power. These unions recognize the connections between corporate interests and financial groups and the deeply held principles of the Republican Party's conservative agenda antagonistic to the working class.

Where does that leave us as a country? Well, on climate change for instance, 151 nations signed the Kyoto Protocols back in the late 1990's. President Clinton abstained, as did India and China, because it called for a large reduction in fossil fuel emissions. That means that 151 nations, including all of the industrialized nations we call allies and who have historically stable economies and governments, recognize the threat of global climate change resulting from global warming and its involvement in destroying ecosystems and the environment. With every new Republican member of Congress stating during their campaigns they do not believe in global warming, and with several of them looking to hold public high profile hearings to prosecute the 'hoax' of global warming, how can we even think about being competitive in any meaningful way. When evolution, a central principle to all of science, the cornerstone of the field of Biology and it's resulting disciplines, and to the field of genetics so crucial to the fight of diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's, how can we expect to progress in any of the sciences when it is not just questioned by our politicians, but policies put in place that discourage it from being included in classrooms and promoting religiously inspired doctrine instead?

Something that gives me hope, and something that has always made the socially conservative politicians in this country call academia 'liberal', is that in universities and colleges, you are required to prove your points by citing sources, defending sources, defending theories and hypothesis and the process you used to develop those from the evidence you collected. In science, for instance, you are required to present all of your evidence and facts in a structured way and cite any sources. If there is anything faulty in your research methodology, in the quality of the sources or in the logic in whatever argument you're making, your professor gives you a lower grade, talks with you about how you went about your work, or helps to correct errors to strengthen your work. Other fields of study follow similar methods, they call it critical thinking, and it requires you to think beyond just the words on a page, to develop connections and ideas with other material or sources you've read or encountered, and to argue your point in a clear and convincing way. We all have to go through this when we go through a college or university education. We all may not be at a school with the same level of academic intensity, not all of us are able to compete at the same academic level or are interested in pursuing a very academic career path or studies, but we are all challenged to learn and think beyond the superficial.

That is what really is at the heart of the whole idea of 'educated elite', which then translates to 'liberal elite', or if it's about a schism between Sarah Palin and the real Republican Party, the 'establishment elite' or 'Washington elite'. Somehow it's always about 'elite', and how the 'elite' is bad. Well, when you are dealing with multinational corporations, with international trade or political policy, when you are dealing with micro- and macroeconomic issues, with stabilizing and incredibly diverse economy and understanding the intricacies of a multicultural and multilateral approach to prosecuting a war, instead of just sending planes to bomb the hell of out whomever, don't you want the elite? Doesn't 'elite' mean the best, the highest order of whatever it's being applied to?

Of course some random housewife with a mediocre education and no policy background will never be considered to be qualified to become president. Running the nation isn't anything like running a household, despite whatever she might say. Stabilizing the world's largest economy during major global economic uncertainty is nothing like balancing a family checkbook or paying household bills. No, 'common sense' solutions have absolutely no place in Washington, D.C. because that's where we want the smartest, brightest, most talented people in the fields of economics, political science, law and international trade to be and to be working. Sarah Palin is a million miles from any of that. And if an ignorant housewife with no business experience and who has no political skills at all other than being an agitator within her own party can become president, then what the hell did I take on $110K in student loan debt for?

When I would vote for a Republican president

There is a problem with the modern Republican party, I've talked about it a lot and firmly believe it. The current politics of the Republican Party do not represent the conservative values espoused by their own rhetoric. We see it most clearly in the campaigns for national office among the varied districts around the country: Conservative Christian social values issues trump economic and domestic policy issues. When the races get close or competitive, Republicans fall back on those old wedge issues of abortion, gay marriage, gun rights and separation of church and state.

Now, just to get this out of the way, the separation of church and state is fact, it is irrefutable by any thinking rational person and has repeated precedent over centuries of law. There is no turning away from that even with a neo-con dominated high court. The values of freedom of religion is so fundamental to this nation, it was one of the primary reason for immigration to this country in the first place. All those people who deny outright the separation of church and state or insist that it isn't what the founders intended are either deluded to the point of lunacy or they are playing so far to the right that they may as well be playing to a fascist party. Yet, in a crazy election year like this, we see it among far too many candidates.

As for those others, they are part of the rhetorical 'Guns, God and Gays' routine that Karl Rove designed as the presidential and national Republican strategy for the 2004 election. Notice, however, that the election in 2006, possibly a part reaction to that election, saw a sweeping wave of Democratic candidates elected into office. It is also a device that played strongly to the Christian elements of the Republican platform by bringing evoking their fears of a secular nation that turns away from faith and even persecutes those of faith, the supposedly warring sides of what Bill O'Reilly terms the 'culture wars'. Those advocating this kind of conflict then become the 'culture warriors'.

The hypocrisy then becomes the parallel messages of 'freedom and liberty' used by conservative candidates matched with socially conservative message of restricting rights for all minority people. It is the blending of the message of an overreaching government infringing upon the private lives of citizens while espousing the exact same infringement the conservative movement is against, only against the groups they purposefully exclude from full citizen-hood. As long as groups agree with their ideological stance, they are represented by the conservative message, those who disagree are deemed un-American and enemies of freedom.

What that message effectively does is pit those people who have strong Christian faiths, notice they are never reaching out to other people of even similar faiths such as the Jewish community, while at the same time purposely courting the 'white vote' by excluding minority people of conservative Christian faiths, i.e. African Americans and Latino people. Those groups, from a conservative faith perspective, should be sympathetic to the Christian Republican cause on many social issues, yet they largely and historically voted Democrat. What about that rationale makes sense ultimately boils down to the 'white vote' and institutionalized racism. They hate being called racist and fight against that name, but when they campaign on the principles of exclusion in part by using what Rachel Maddow identifies as the 'Southern Strategy' employed during the 1960's and inciting fears of white people, there really can't be any other name for it.

Ultimately the effect of this strategy and this type of rhetoric is the denial of full citizen-hood to many minority groups. They play on the fears of less educated and less affluent white people, particularly in South and the Western United States, fears of becoming the minority in this country, of preferential treatment to racial and ethnic minorities to the detriment of the rights of white people, and to the enforcement of 'socialist' values such as 'wealth redistribution'. It is the same rhetoric that would have denied African Americans the right to vote and enforced segregation in schools and public places. It is the same rhetoric that on a non-superficial level enforced the idea that somehow people of darker skin were less-human and less deserving of the rights enjoyed by a white majority.

But the messages of the conservative white Christian political movement are not ultimately compatible with the message of 'freedom and liberty'. What it is conducive to is the politics of exclusion, of the continued institutionalization of 'freedoms and liberties' for white people, a principle which can't be construed as anything but outright racism and homophobia. It is also a message that numerous 'liberal' or 'moderate' Republicans are against. While many of these Republicans are conservative on fiscal issues, they are at least moderate on social issues. They are also often Republicans from historically Union states. By Union, I am referring to the label of the northern states during the Civil War. Yes, it is ludicrous, but the rift between these two cultural ideals goes further back even than that. Many people from the South are proud of their Confederate roots, roots they see as upholding the principles of freedom and states' rights. They see themselves as representing an oppressed group rebelling against a tyrannical federal government, romanticizing the culture of that time, and ignoring the rampant hostility toward and racist treatment of African American people. It is a sentiment that still supports outright and institutionalized racism in parts of this country and it is a belief system many conservative political candidates court while running for office.

Given the current political climate, and particularly the recent issues that the LGBT community is having with President Obama, although it is extremely unlikely, if there was a Republican candidate who was even moderate on social issues, I would have to strongly consider whether or not to vote for them. I, of course, voted for Obama in 2008. Unlike many of the progressive young people who voted based on the idea that he would radically change the way that Washington operates, my family has been involved with politics for a long time, I knew that the fundamental machinations are almost impossible to change. I said to people at that time and continue to believe that the most important thing that has happened with President Obama was that we finally had a president who moved the rhetoric and policies of this country out of the realm of the conservative Christian movement and back to the mainstream. We finally had a president who was openly supportive of the rights of LGBT people and still is a very vocal advocate for the recognition of our civil rights. Unfortunately parts of his record, especially of late, do not match his words. And given the almost certain climate of Washington in the near future, which is going to gain more conservatives in Congress, it will be almost impossible for him and the progressive base to have any movement forward through legislation, it is going to have to be through the courts. Unless the Senate is able to sway some of the moderate Republicans after the elections are over, and especially after the military study is finished, to end the filibuster on the Defense Authorization Bill with the provision on Don't Ask, Don't Tell included, Obama's appeal of the current case overturning the decision will end any possible repeal of that policy in the near future. If a Republican wins the White House in 2012, it will almost certainly be another decade before that policy is repealed. How, then, can we support a president, however vocal he is about his support for the LGBT community, when in the hour of critical success for our rights, he decides to turn his back on the best chance for that policy to end.

I don't want to vote Republican ever. I disagree with so many principles of their agenda. It is also likely that it will be dangerous for the progress of this country to vote for the candidate who receives the nomination in 2012. It will, however, be a hard decision if a socially moderate candidate is put forward and the economic plan of the progressives in Washington are not successful. Lowering taxes is clearly not the answer, which was evident during the first six years of the Bush presidency when the Republicans controlled Congress and he instituted huge tax breaks that ultimately only stimulated an even further (upward) redistribution of wealth toward the super rich. If the future president is able to institute some of the public works projects, projects that were enormously successful in the past and are proven ways of getting much of the labor industries back to work, than it might be worth it to see a change from a president who overall has, in an attempt to make genuine bipartisan policy decisions, shown a disheartening lack of leadership. As Rachel Maddow has said, it became obvious early on that the Republicans were going to prove a huge roadblock toward every major piece of legislation introduced on behalf of the president, so why didn't he go all out and just go for the full on progressive agenda like a public option in the health care act? It may be time to find a new candidate.