The Occupy Movement, “the 99 percent,” has, ironically, been hijacked by a small minority within its ranks. I speak of a small percentage of Occupiers who are okay with property destruction. As we saw in Oakland over the weekend: They’re okay with breaking windows, trashing city buildings and throwing bottles at the police. In short: They are not nonviolent. They are willing to commit petty criminal acts masked as a political statement.
These are Black Bloc tactics and they’re historically ineffective at spurring change. The now Gingrich-vilified Saul Alinsky in 1970 said the Weather Underground (the terrorist wing of the anti-war movement) should be on the Establishment’s payroll. “Because they are strengthening the Establishment,” said the “professional radical” Alinsky. Nothing kneecapped the call for the war to end quicker than buildings being bombed in solidarity with pacifist sentiments.
Here’s the key point: Occupy is not an armed conflict – it’s a PR war. Nonviolent struggle is a PR war. Gandhi had embedded journalists on his Salt March. He wasn’t a saint. That was a consciously cultivated media image. He used the press and its power to gain sympathy for his cause. What he didn’t do is say he was nonviolent “unless the cops are d*cks,” a sentiment voiced at Occupy. Nonviolent struggle has nothing to do with how the cops react. In actual nonviolent movements they welcome police overreaction because it helps the cause they’re fighting for.
At some General Assemblies this issue is referred to as “diversity of tactics.” It means basically if you’re not okay with property damage, but if someone else is, you’re not going to stand in the way. To a liberal ear it sounds like affirmative action or tolerance. It sounds like diversity of opinion – it’s not. It’s 3,000 people peacefully marching and two *ssholes breaking windows; which becomes 3,000 people breaking some windows in news reports.
Violent tactics taint everyone involved evenly – consenting or not.
Property destruction is not only a bad PR move (it costs taxpayers and small business owners money) it’s not constitutionally protected Free Speech. It’s also not what democracy looks like. The First Amendment specifically states the right to peaceably assemble to redress grievances.
Moreover the destruction of property is exactly what Occupy is protesting against; it’s what the banks took from us. Occupy has pointed out the criminality of the banks and the seeming collusion with government to take wealth and property away from working people and give it to the wealthy. So protest property crimes, by committing crimes against property? It’s nonsensical.
Destroying property destroys moral authority. You can’t rail against Bankaneers while trashing a City Hall. You can but you lose. Then the cops look justified in their show of force. Being quiet is seen as consent and being in solidarity with Oakland is standing with their well-documented embrace of “diversity of tactics.”
Occupy should denounce violence and property damage. There should be a statement that Oakland doesn’t speak for the movement as a whole. Holding solidarity marches against Oakland police brutality is exactly what that sounds like. It sends the message that Occupy is happy to cost the Oakland taxpayers millions in damages. If Occupy is to succeed it has to purge the extreme (read: ineffective waste) elements now commandeering the movement.
Some have emailed me and asked if the people who autonomously did these acts of vandalism and violence were “undercovers” or extreme anarchists. My response has been their goal is the same and their tactics are the same, so why does it matter? If they’re undercovers trying to undermine the movement then disavow them. If they’re anarchists who believe they are a part of Occupy, disavow them. The distinction means little if the endgame and the solution are the same.
It’s not true that no one speaks for Occupy. Those using violence are speaking far louder than the “people’s mic.” They need to be purged, or the the entire movement will be marginalized.
One of the richest men in the country, ranking in the 0.006 percent of Americans, likes to accuse the President of creating an “entitlement society.” Mitt Romney, the heir apparent, next in line GOP nominee … is against entitlement.
When I hear “entitlement society” I think, “country club.” But When Mitt uses that phrase he doesn’t mean rich guys like him, given all the advantages of wealth, who are now enjoying its comforts – he means the rest of us. Yes, Mitt is against an “entitlement society” because that involves too many people and not just him and his ilk. It’s not the “entitlement” he contests – it’s the entire “society” part.
At the Monday Florida debate last week Mitt noted that under Gingrich’s tax plan Mitt would pay no taxes at all. Gingrich responded with, “Well, if that — and if you created enough jobs doing that — it was Alan Greenspan who first said the best rate, if you want to create jobs for capital gains, is zero.”
So rich people whose money makes their money (it’s literally capital gaining) are so fortunate they get to hire other people to pay taxes for them? Rich people with their alleged mythical power to create jobs even get to outsource their tax obligations to poor saps working for a living?
This is the prosperity gospel as a Super PAC-funded marketing blitz. Money is next to godliness and poverty is the fault of the poor for not being better people.
It’s as if Jesus were a CEO and the Romans job-killing communists.
“Contrary to the President’s constant disparagement of people in business,” former George W. Bush budget director Gov. Mitch Daniels said in his State of the Union response last week, “It’s one of the noblest of human pursuits.” This is one of those phrases you (usually) will only hear in business school (funnier if it was one of those rip-off for-profit colleges). Business is one of the noblest of human pursuits? Noble as in aristocratic? That phrase, “noble pursuits,” is usually applied to an avocation not paying much but rewarding in other ways: teachers; firefighters; nurses; foster parents; soldiers; community leaders; social workers; mentors; rescue workers; care givers; farmers. Or to anyone who’s honest, shows up every day and works hard. That’s a noble pursuit.
Are the wealthy really so sensitive they need Mitch Daniels to make them feel better about themselves in a spiritual sense? What they’re doing not only pays off with privilege and cash – it also has to be venerable from a moral perspective? How much reward does one group need? They own everything and they also need to be thanked?!
The rich are not just over-paid – they’re over valued. And generous welfare recipients.
As Senator Tom Coburn points out in his damning Nov. 2011 report, “Subsidies of the Rich and Famous,” we are a wealthfare state. It reads, “This reverse Robin Hood style of wealth redistribution is an intentional effort to get all Americans bought into a system where everyone appears to benefit.” In other words: We subsidize the rich by telling the poor to pay their fair share.
It’s been a strange three years under the Obama administration. First the GOP was against empathy. Yes, the party had to vehemently opposed seeing the plight of your fellow human beings because Obama was for it. Now their new hot button word? Fairness. Obama used the word fairness in his third State of the Union. And now the GOP has decided to be against fairness and celebrate inequality as being the thing that makes America great.
It’s as if Jesus were a CEO and the three wise men were shareholders.
The prosperity gospel is not America. It’s not democratic. It’s not even Christian. It’s greed warped into being a virtue by the greedy.
The rich aren’t better, they’re just richer.
Mitt Romney’s hurdle in winning the love/respect/admiration/fear of his party can be summed up in one photo: It was taken by his son, Tagg (doesn’t Sarah Palin have a kid with that name?) and put on Twitter this week. It’s of Romney and his wife Ann, presumably in a hotel basement, side-by-side pouring detergent into washing machines. Mitt is, of course, wearing a starched button up shirt and jeans, which is what people who never do laundry think people would wear when they do laundry. (Personally, if I have a clean starched shirt and jeans that’s an indication I don’t need to do laundry yet.) “Nothing like the glamorous life on the road,” the intermittent front-runner’s son tweeted with the pic.
This photo comes in the same week as Romney’s tax return where we learned Romney doesn’t actually work. He is in fact, as he’s claimed, unemployed. His money…makes his money. Millions and millions. He pays a tax rate of 13.9 percent – far lower than your average laundromat owner.
Which leads me to ask: Why is Mitt being photographed doing his laundry? Were there no Dukakis tanks available?
Apparently pleased with his Average Joe “real street” cred, Romney happily explained the image to NBC News, “We do our laundry at least once a week, because we’ll be on the road for 30 straight days. Who else do you think is going to do our laundry?”
When you are a multi-multi-millionaire, I can think of millions of people who could do your laundry. Isn’t Romney taking away jobs by washing his own clothes? First he outsourced American jobs, destroyed companies while the CEO at Bain Capital – now his quirky down-homeness is denying a gig to a professional fluff and folder.
When you don’t actually think about the plight of working people, you can assume you’re connecting to their “kitchen table” concerns by saying you have to do laundry at least once a week. We all do our laundry that much. Mainly because if you’re middle-class (or the former middle-class), you don’t have weeks worth of clothes; therefore you wash clothes all the time. It’s like saying you pay your bills at least once a month. Or you fill up your car with gas at least once a week. Or you worry about money at least once every other day. For normal people, this goes without saying, but for a candidate trying to appear normal, well, let’s just say it doesn’t wash.
Speaking of which, does one really, as the GOP-dubbed “vulture capitalist” with holdings in the Cayman Islands and some Swiss bank accounts want to have oneself associated with the word “laundry”? If you’re admittedly doing accounting tricks to pay as little U.S. taxes as possible, don’t you want to avoid a word synonymous with rich guy malfeasance? “I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more,” said Romney at the NBC debate on Monday night in Florida.
Right: Millionaire plus laundry equals accidental editorial cartoon.
What’s next for this guy? Dressing up as a pirate and walking through foreclosed neighborhoods?
Also do you really want, as a Mormon candidate, to open up a conversation about separating whites from colors?! Gah!
The photo op was like answering a question no one asks: Who does your laundry? No one cares. A millionaire former-CEO insisting on doing his own cleaning is either lying or not a very good CEO.
A great politician can be all things to all people: an Elite, an Everyman; a Soldier, a General; a Fighter, a Thinker. A bad one can just pander and grovel for everyone’s approval. “You like that? Me too.”
Hey look guys, I’m doing my super-normal-every-week laundry. As the 3,000th richest man in the country, who else is going to do my laundry, am I right?
I mean, there’s being clean cut and then there’s just…oh never mind.
The plan for the four month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street was the first national direct action by the movement thus far, a protest called Occupy Congress or #J17. Activists from all over the nation were to convene on the West Lawn of the Capitol for a National General Assembly (GA), followed by some teach-ins, a visit to the Rayburn House Office Building (where congressmen work) and a march to the White House. The plan was to speak directly to their members of Congress about the issues that brought them to D.C.
Not exactly radical. And far from revolutionary.
And that’s really the thing with Occupy: Yes there have been nearly 6,000 arrests in the last four months — a much higher concentration that for other movements in recent American history, such as the anti-nuclear power protests that resulted in around 2,000 arrested over a two year period in the mid-1980s. And yes, some demonstrators wear handkerchiefs over their faces, like early celluloid bank robbers (or anarchists). And yes, they chant, “mic check” and yell, getting people like Karl Rove to say things like: “Who gave you the right to Occupy America? Nobody!” But what they want at this point seems a piece with what any number of goo-goo D.C. worthies work for each day: a more representative democratic government.
“It’s not a coincidence that Congress’ approval rating is near 1 percent,” read OccupyDC’s Twitter feed. Indeed.
The Occupy movement argues — and has tons of evidence to back it up — that the U.S. government is overly concerned with the needs and desires of the wealthy and corporations and has less regard for, well, the little people.
Around 2,000 Occupiers from all over the country showed up on a soggy Capitol Lawn on Tuesday morning. Depending on who you asked, this was either way bigger than they expected or utterly disappointing. At one point last year, a call went out for an ambitious encampment of 1 million tents to be staked down on the National Mall, but that plan appeared to have been largely abandoned by Tuesday. For a movement inspired by the stagnant economy, getting that many activists on buses was always going to be a challenge, for simple monetary reasons, leading to some push-back against the idea of a mass national event at all. SEIU organized an Occupy Congress type of event last month called Take Back the Capitol. That action, according to attendees, had more people, more people of color and less energy. They had buses and numbers; just not the enthusiasm. One reason is that it was, well, organized, and it’s hard to accuse Occupy of being…well organized.
After an afternoon of large GAs on the lawn of the Capitol building, the Occupiers made their way to the doors of the Rayburn building. They briefly took the exterior balcony, hanging signs on a railing only to be quickly chased away by Capitol police. They chanted and cheered and hollered…then all stood in line patiently to get through building security. Once inside the building, the previously boisterous group split apart, becoming suddenly deferential inside congressional offices. Raucous on the outside; concerned average citizen on the inside. One California Occupier I followed walked into his congresswoman’s office and asked quietly, “We’re doing this correctly right? Asking these people to represent us?” He then went on to tell the staffers that his parents cannot retire and will have to work until they die.
I would describe most left-leaning activists as having the angst of artists, the interests of policy wonks and the emotional state of your average 7th grader. Which means all social movements at moments feel chaotic, like they’re about to detonate or implode. The Internet only makes this worse. There’s a near constant trickle of fear, rumor and hype among the protesters. They worry about everything and have control over none of it. For Occupy Congress, the big concern was that “autonomous anarchists” would show up and cause property damage. They’d break windows or do something that would stain the entire movement as vandals…or worse.
This did not happen last night. No windows were broken. There were six arrests. The “Black Bloc” threat didn’t show up.
And Occupy Congress did manage to pull off a massive protest on the steps of the Supreme Court. This was not planned and had it been, it likely wouldn’t have happened. It’s illegal to demonstrate on the steps of the highest court in the nation. In October, Cornel West, on the day of the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, held a sign reading, “Poverty is the worst form of violence” and was swiftly arrested in “solidarity with the Occupy Movement.” Tuesday, with only a handful of Capitol Police around over a thousand Occupiers rushed the steps of the Supreme Court. There was no way for the police to arrest that many people in a massive act of civil disobedience. The protesters then stood on the steps, cheering and chanting for a few moments, before just as swiftly leaving for the White House.
Had they known what they pulled off by accident was so unusual in the post-9/11 world, they might have stayed longer on the steps of the building where Citizens United was decided, facing arrest and forcing a point about the Court. Instead, the “leaderless” movement traipsed down Pennsylvania Avenue to the current home of President Obama.
It’s an apt metaphor for Occupy: Their tactical victories are, as they admit not “overly planned.” They don’t have paid linguists who study framing with focus groups to target key demographics. They are just convinced they’re right about the extreme wealth inequality (the worst in the industrialized world) in America and don’t know what else to do about it.
So, the nation’s problems have them occupied at this point … just not overly organized.
Original piece is here.
Who would have guessed we’d have a national conversation about urinating on corpses? And worse yet to have people with a media megaphone attempting to defend it. The video of four marines desecrating the remains of a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan surfaced on YouTube last week.
The first thing worth noting is this treatment of war dead is absolutely against the Geneva Convention. The second thing is we threw out the Geneva Convention when we invaded Afghanistan.
Which leads me to the following conclusion: It’s time to end this war. It’s time to leave.
President Dwight Eisenhower, in his 1963 memoir, noted that in Vietnam “the mass of the population supported the enemy.” This was an insurmountable obstacle (at the time) for the French and an ominous foreshadowing for a full-scale American conflict to come. A war the U.S. would engage in for 20 years through five presidents and an estimated 200,000 dead or wounded American soldiers.
Yet that is where we are with Afghanistan: The population is not on our side. I was recently on a television program with Michael Hastings, a reporter at Rolling Stone on Afghanistan. He said some of the Afghans still think they are fighting the Soviets (a nine year war which ended in 1989).
That is the best indication this war, for us, is unwinnable: We don’t really know who we’re fighting there and they don’t really know who they’re fighting there.
We’d actually have to educate people as to who it is they are trying to kill first…in order to “win their hearts and minds.”
We’ve been in a country called the graveyard of empires for a decade. Last year General David Petraeus announced his COIN or counterinsurgency strategy, integral in Iraq, would be implemented in Afghanistan too. The pillars of a COIN strategy are “security, political and economic.” Or as Petraeus wrote in the field manual “Success in COIN operations requires establishing a legitimate government supported by the people.” Basically, nation building. We have to build a nation that will be stable, legitimate AND support the U.S. How does that happen? More time; more soldiers; more money.
Just one decade is not enough to make little progress in a country whose last successful conqueror was the Mongols…roughly 800 years ago. And whose type of government historically can be best described as tribal.
Front-runner for the Republican nomination Mitt Romney said in his New Hampshire primary victory speech, “He [Obama] doesn’t see the need for overwhelming American military superiority. I will insist on a military so powerful no one would think of challenging it.”
We have the largest navy in the world (twice as big as the second largest) and we’re in a ten-year-long struggle in a landlocked country.
This is a Romney “let them eat cake moment.” Oh we’re not winning with the biggest military in the history of the planet? The solution is to make it bigger!
Enough. Eisenhower, the last five-star general to be President of the United States, warned Americans upon his leaving office of the “military industrial complex.” Part of this complex is the insistence of “listening to the commanders on the ground.”
The commanders still insist we can win if we just try harder, stay long and commit more troops. But this is in their nature. Asking commanders on the ground if we should continue with a war is like asking a football coach if we should continue to have football games. Of course they say yes, they’re professionals and this is their livelihood. Their opinion should be treated as such.
In 2008, Obama was the recipient of more donations (6:1) from soldiers serving overseas than his opponent, former POW, John McCain. It was specifically because then-Senator Obama spoke of ending the Iraq War.
Iraq is over. Let’s end our involvement in Afghanistan too.
Republicans have a wide variety of conservative white males now vying to be their nominee. No really. Bear with me:
They have former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich summing up the worst of the ‘90s GOP. Not only did he shut down the government during his tenure, he attempted to oust a president for doing what Gingrich was doing at that very moment. The Speaker investigated Bill Clinton for hanky panky with an intern (a paid one – FYI – oh the ‘90s were a golden age) while Gingrich was messing around with a Capitol staffer; soon to be his third and current wife, Callista.
I’ve stopped using the word “hypocrite” for people like Gingrich. It’s a 75-cent word no one cares about. A better term is “fraud.”
Gingrich enjoys going after people for the things he’s guilty of; like when he said we should lock up Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd. Gingrich described them as “the politicians who profited from the environment and the politicians who put this country in trouble.” This was before it was disclosed Gingrich was paid $1.6 million by Freddie Mac for what any reasonable person would call lobbying. (He maintains it was anything from being a celebrity to being a historian that “earned” such a paycheck.)
He’s now attacking Mitt Romney for “making people unemployed” at the leverage buyout firm Bain Capital, while not mentioning Gingrich was on the advisory board at a competing leverage buyout firm Forstmann Little after his stint as Speaker.
Fraud.
But don’t worry, Republicans also have a sample of the worst of their party from ‘00s: Rick Santorum. Now Santorum believes your uterus doesn’t have a right to privacy. If Santorum has his way, women’s private parts are up for public scrutiny and federal regulation. He’s also bravely stood up for states being able to ban birth control and not wanting to make black/blah people’s lives better by giving them someone else’s money.
But Santorum ranks among the worst of the Bush Era because of a blah spot on the Grand Old Party called: The Terri Schiavo case. In 2005, Schiavo was in a decades-long vegetative state; her husband wanted to abide by her wishes and not keep her alive by artificial means. Her parents disagreed. They went to court. Then Congress got involved. Then the President of the United States at his home in Crawford boarded Air Force One on Easter to fly to Washington to sign legislation to “save Terri.”
Santorum was at the bedside of Terri Schiavo (uninvited) to make a national spectacle of himself. How’d he get there? Walmart corporate jet. Why was this Pennsylvania senator in Florida? Outback Steakhouse fundraiser. So an industry toady uses his corporate favors to publically moralize our most intimate issues? He’s pro-life, with the caveat of being pro-er-big-big-business.
A few months later in that same year, nearly 2,000 Americans died in Hurricane Katrina without a special session from Congress or a visit from Santorum. It’s hard to embrace the sanctity of life while corpses float along the streets of an American city. Santorum lost his seat by 17 points the next fall.
So worst of the ‘90s, worst of the ‘00s and just to add diversity – the cartoon of an absurd GOP future: Rick Perry.
All that really needs to be said about Perry is he was finally able to list all three agencies he’d cut while president and got a nearly standing ovation from an otherwise subdued New Hampshire crowd last Saturday at ABC’s debate. As they say in Texas, Perry is all hat and no…
“Uh … I can’t … sorry … oops.”
Which leads us back to the 1 percent (tipper) representing, Mitt Romney. Because all the other candidates remind us of bygone ethics violations, shameful hysterias, China or Ron Paul, the GOP looks like they’re stuck with Romney. But they do not love him.
His campaign has been like the rehearsal dinner for an arranged marriage: kind of sad, kind of inevitable – fun to watch from another party.
Feign shock while you read this: the latest Rasmussen Reports survey finds just 5 percent of “Likely Voters rate the job Congress is doing as good or excellent.”
Yes, 5 percent of Americans think Congress is doing a good job. Which means 5 percent of those polled didn’t understand the question.
Right after taking his comically oversized gavel, Speaker of the House John Boehner stated, “Hard work and tough decisions will be required of the 112th Congress. No longer can we fall short. No longer can we kick the can down the road. The people voted to end business as usual and today we begin to carry out their instructions.”
Translation: All the other Congresses have fallen short. We are going to be better than all of them. Hilarious foreshadowing ensues.
Boehner’s first act was to have (parts of) the U.S. Constitution read out loud on the floor and the entire (non-amended parts) of the document put into the public record for the first time. Why hasn’t it been done before? Maybe because it took 90 minutes of precious session time to not accomplish anything. Sense a theme?
On that same day incumbent Congressman Pete Sessions (R-TX) and freshman Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA) took their oaths while watching C-SPAN at a fundraiser. They had to be sworn in later since it violated the Constitution to just raise your hand at the TV.
So this devotion to the founding document was all for show – a way to waste time giving lip service to patriotism while giving real fidelity to money. That’s the theme.
A theme consistent with pizza being a vegetable because Congress is an over-boiled, over-processed, unappealing lump.
The 112th Congress is at its halfway point. And even if you don’t care about opinion polls and refuse to believe more people approve of scabies in principle – look at their track record: This Congress is only responsible for passing 80 laws so far. That’s it. Eighty. And 13 of those “laws” were naming courthouses and post offices. Other Congresses have passed five times the amount of legislation in their tenures. The 108th Congress with Republican majorities in both houses wrote 498 laws in their two years. The 111th with Democratic majorities made 383 public laws.
We’ve had to endure the threat of a government shutdown every three months. Think about it: April the government was going to shut down over defunding Planned Parenthood. Again in August over the debt-ceiling. In September it was to hold up disaster relief. And another shutdown was barely averted in December with a spending bill attached to the payroll tax cuts. As a direct result of this Congress’ squabbling our credit rating was downgraded by Standard and Poors. That is, in fact, “ending business as usual.”
If we take out all the partisanship – all the pontificating of what Congress should or should not do – the facts are they’re doing NOTHING but filling space, waiting out the clock and still threatening a work stoppage. Basically the worst of public salaried workers is the 112th Congress on a productive day.
And this “nothing” is not appealing to Republican voters. It’s not making Democratic voters happy. It’s not making Independents overjoyed. In fact it’s uniting us all to a solid voting bloc – 95 percent of the country – who thinks this Congress has failed to do its job.
It’s failed America.
How do you get a Congress that is unanimously reviled? It’s simple: get voted in by the American people only to adhere to the needs of lobbyists and moneyed interests justified with cockeyed ideology passed off as “principles.” Oh and do it during the worst economy in several generations.
How’s that working out?
We like risk and reward. The gold rush was as much a motivation to be a pioneer as was the more noted religious freedom. Poker is actually considered a sport. Yes, poker players are athletes according to the U.S. government. It’s the one sport you can train for while chain smoking in a tracksuit.
But like every wine connoisseur will think they have nothing in common with a wino; we celebrate gamblers but not degenerates.
We don’t like people who lose and continue to place bets only to lose again. But here is the Republican Party wrapping up their year as unapologetic gamblers with America’s fate in their greasy hands.
And they’re on a losing streak.
“Ten thousand bucks?” proposed Mitt Romney to Rick Perry on a debate stage earlier this month. Yes, Romney couldn’t have said: “You are lying, Rick.” Couldn’t have said: “There you go again.” Couldn’t have countered with the fact Perry seems to get basic civics wrong and can’t list more than two things at a time – Mitt Romney had to make a wager; a wager for nearly a year’s pay for a minimum wage worker.
But this is what you do when you have a problem with gambling. This is what happens when you pass that invisible line from “risk taker” to “intervention subject.” When you lose – instead of contrition or reassessing your philosophy or re-thinking your lifestyle – you double down and hope to win. When your policies fail you prescribe those same policies as the solution.
It’s like a homeopathic remedy; put a hot compress on a burn. Sell your ideas as a remedy for the turmoil your ideas cause.
For example:
The housing bubble burst the entire world’s economy because there were too few regulations. The GOP double down? Fewer regulations!
There are Americans who live with dirty air and water. It’s been widely documented that fracking has caused earthquakes and taint well water. GOP double down? Kill the Environmental Protection Agency.
The rich have never been richer. Wealth inequality is worse in the U.S. today than that of the slave-owning Roman Empire. GOP double down? Protect all tax cuts for the wealthy and propose new ones.
Unemployment plagues America. Long-term unemployment is becoming acutely painful. GOP double down? Cut the federal workforce!
America is losing faith in their government. Republicans say government can’t do anything right. GOP double down? Be the most ineffective Congress you can be. Currently Congress’ approval rating is just above the margin of error.
When you double down – you lose twice as much – twice as quickly. And that sums up Speaker John Boehner’s tenure just perfectly. If Congress were an actual casino they’d be required by law to at least have Gamblers Anonymous pamphlets available. “Did you ever gamble until the deficit was $15 trillion and still vow to keep the Bush Tax Cuts? Call us.”
“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” famously said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell at the beginning of the lowest rated Congress in the history of the institution. Which to me is the biggest gamble of them all. It’s the notion that politics is a Zero Sum game. That if Obama loses – the GOP therefore wins. It’s just not true. Who loses are the people who always lose when it comes to Republican policies: the poor and the middle class.
That’s who’s bearing the brunt of the first gambling losses – and now the double down.
It’s us.
My first job was cleaning the group home I lived in. True story. I participated in the Summer Youth Employment Program part of the Job Training Partnership Act passed during Reagan’s first term. It was a War on Poverty federal program considered to be an economic stimulus and a way to keep teenagers off the streets. I was in foster care and had just barely turned 14; I went to a few seminars on job skills and was given a job “super cleaning” for minimum wage ($4.25). I pulled in about $75 a week…before taxes.
I learned two things at that job: one, horizontal blinds are a malevolent plague on society; and two, Republicans don’t care about people who work.
No, Republicans, in general, and disgraced former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, specifically, concern themselves with their fickle “job creators” not the staple of the American economy: job workers.
The overpaid, overfed, and over-hyped Gingrich said to an audience at a Nationwide Insurance luncheon earlier this month, “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works, so they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday.”
Gingrich is willfully ignorant of the fact you can work and still be “really poor” in this country. You can show up every Monday and do your job faithfully and STILL not make a living. If you work full-time at the federal minimum wage you’ll pull in $15,000 a year before taxes (and yes, they do take social security, state and federal taxes out of those paychecks). Add children to the equation and it’s worse than the working poor – it’s the working impoverished.
Now 49 million Americans live in poverty – with 2.6 million falling into the category last year. That’s 16 percent of Americans. There are more Americans living in poverty than there are Canadians on the planet.
Gingrich is trying to equate poverty with a moral shortcoming. It’s a warped offshoot of the prosperity gospel – riches are a sign of god’s love – poverty is a sign of his indifference.
But also in this richer-and-therefore-holier-than-thou diatribe of Gingrich’s is an attempt to bust unions. He suggested firing union janitors to hire children to clean their own schools. Yes, a janitor with a job that pays him enough to live on is, in Gingrich’s eyes, a problem. In the call for hiring children and ending child labor laws is the call to end working for a living.
All the anchors of a middle-class living (pensions, benefits, decent salaries) are being dubbed “luxuries” by Republicans, to be sacrificed so magical “job creators” can be cajoled into saving us all.
Because, really, the greatest threat to America is that janitors are paid too much. Please. Wealthy janitors are, to borrow Gingrich’s phrase, “an invented people.”
Gingrich has a dark vision for a Shining City Upon a Hill: where poor children work in place of union labor. It’s basically the 20th century played in reverse.
Working (even scrubbing toilets) should mean making a living. If someone who works is still eligible for food stamps and government assistance – it’s really the employer who is federally subsidized. These “job creators” are taking advantage of government programs so they won’t have to cut into their profit margins to pay living wages.
The best example of this is also the biggest private employer in the country: Walmart.
If Newt and his Republican same-thinks want to go after Welfare Queens and those who don’t value work – go after the Walmart heirs. According to economist Sylvia Allegretto in 2007 the six Walmart heirs own more than the bottom 30 percent of Americans. And that was four years ago when their wealth was estimated at $69.7 billion, now it’s thought to be around $93 billion.
Will Newt take them on? No, Gingrich is showing his courage as a K Street custodian by kicking the little guys. Because really, it’s not that poor children need jobs to make them better workers – it’s that jobs need to be better to adult workers.
Is this kind of bravery to take on the least powerful (and some imaginary) among us resonating with Republicans?
Well, he is the new front-runner.