“Meet Our Modern-Day Scrooges, Proud As Can Be”: Where’s “The Ghost Of Christmas Yet To Come” When You Really Need Him?
The holiday season is that time of year when the news pages take on a softer edge, as editors, photographers, and reporters strive to convey the spirit of fellowship and concern for the less fortunate embodied by the Salvation Army bell-ringers and the end of year charity appeals that fill out mailboxes and in-boxes. The Washington Post ran a short article on a homeless 11-year-old girl named Christmas Diamond (yes, really) who, facing a year without presents, was still thinking dreamily of a paint set she got two years ago; a few days later, the paper ran a heartwarming follow-up on the dozens of gifts that readers had dropped off at her shelter. Many papers ran articles on the plight of the 1.3 million long-term unemployed who lost their extended federal benefits over this past weekend. The New York Times annually outdoes everyone with its “neediest cases” stories, written explicitly as inducements for readers to give to its charitable fund.
It’s enough to make one think we’re turning into a nation of sentimental Tiny Tims. Luckily, we still have the letters to the editor in the Wall Street Journal, whose readers are strikingly eager to give expression to their inner Scrooge even at the peak of yuletide. Consider this remarkable sampling from just the past few days (emphasis added):
…Even if Congress passed a law that decreed all incomes must be equal, the inequality the president laments would continue as individuals spend their equal incomes unequally. Individual choice is fundamental to American freedom and liberty, yet it leads to inequality of outcome. Should the government therefore fix inequality by dictating every choice an individual makes?
The logical terminus of such egalitarianism is totalitarianism.
Patrick Hall
Chattanooga, Tenn.
What’s wrong with income inequality? In a society where its most productive members are incentivized to produce as much as they can, the economy grows. The people who benefit the most from economic growth aren’t the high-income producers; it is the poor who benefit most. The difference between being unemployed and dependent versus employed and self-sustaining has enormous impact on one’s life. If you want to improve someone’s life, raising the other guy’s taxes or health-care insurance premiums isn’t the way to do it. The way to do it is to create jobs.
The doctrine President Obama self-righteously pushes is to strive for income equality. However, morality is a doctrine under which people experience the consequences of their behavior. Disincentivizing wealth creation, which is what President Obama seeks, is immoral and imposes misery on the underclass. That is what we should be discussing.
Michael O’Guin
McKinney, Texas
Barton Swaim (“‘Giving Back’ to Our Sanctimonious Selves,” op-ed, Dec. 20) misses the central insult of the words “giving back.” While giving generously to the needy and to the talented is a long American tradition, the term “giving back” suggests a prior “taking away,” i.e., theft. That single adverb “back” embodies the core conceit of the modern progressive liberal: that wealth is theft, requiring atonement; that unequal wealth—the fruit of a successful meritocracy—is criminal; that “society” is the only rightful owner of all that any individual can build and earn.
Give back our language!
Phil Harvey
Hampton Falls, N.H.
Mr. Swaim is so focused on questioning the sincerity of our small acts of giving that result from political and corporate marketing during the holidays that he fails to see the detriment that the constant pounding of phrases like “giving back” and “social responsibility” have on a free society.
Since one cannot “give back” what one has not previously received, this phrase implies that society has bestowed wealth on an individual instead of him having created or acquired it from his work and merit. “Giving back” is the twin brother of “you didn’t build that.” Likewise, one cannot be deemed “responsible” for someone to whom one has no obligation. “Social responsibility” implies that an individual has an obligation toward society, which he must fulfill. That is the cornerstone of socialism.
Mr. Swaim believes that the problem with the “giving back” phenomenon is that nothing is required from the individual but “minor, outwardly visible gestures.” On the contrary, let’s hope that it stays that way: that nothing is required from the individual and that “giving” always remains a voluntary gesture.
Fiamma Truuvert
London
…The economic reality is that the poorest Americans, with government subsidies and benefits, have better lifestyles today than did the poor at any other time in American history or anywhere else in the world. There is deprivation and pain, but life generally is better. In addition, there still is a remarkable amount of economic mobility in America despite pitiful public schools in most cities and severe cultural disadvantages (e.g., out-of-wedlock births, and low marriage rates) in poor minority communities.
Finally, no matter what we do collectively, we will never eradicate poverty unless Jesus mis-spoke two millennia ago. We can improve safety nets and try to reform public education, but there will always be a bottom 20%….
Jim Fitzpatrick
Hampton, Va.
The cover of the Journal on December 26, the day the first of these letters ran, featured a large photo of altar boys in violet robes standing among the 70,000 people gathered at St. Peter’s Square to hear Pope Francis deliver the traditional Christmas Day message. Francis’s message included this line: “Looking at the Child in the manger, Child of peace, our thoughts turn to those children who are the most vulnerable victims of wars, but we think too of the elderly, to battered women, to the sick…”
In other words, to all those people “experiencing the consequences of their behavior.”
Where’s the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come when you really need him?
By: Alec MacGinnis, The New Republic, December 30, 2013
“The GOP’s Insane Race Strategy”: A Monstrous Injustice, Shoulder-To-Shoulder With The Worst Villains In American History
Over at TMS today, Harold Pollack highlights a stark paper from Perspectives on Politics. The Republican shameful record on minority voting during the 2012 election was a common story on the left. But after closer study, the results are in, and they aren’t pretty:
Our results indicate that proposal and passage are highly partisan, strategic, and racialized affairs. These findings are consistent with a scenario in which the targeted demobilization of minority voters and African Americans is a central driver of recent legislative developments.
Harold unpacks the study:
Bentele and O’Brien’s statistical analysis of 2006-2011 data makes plain what was already pretty obvious. Republican governors and legislatures have sought to hinder minority turnout for partisan purposes. States were especially likely to pass restrictive voting laws if Republicans were politically dominant, but where the state observed rising minority turnout or where the state was becoming more competitive in the national presidential race. Variables that capture the strategic value to Republicans of minority voter suppression are more powerful predictors of restrictive voting legislation than is actual incidence of voter fraud.
And sure, as Harold says, this is utterly disgraceful. But perhaps the most baffling aspect about this kind of behavior is that it doesn’t even work anymore. The GOP lost in 2012. Trying to systematically disenfranchise people along racial lines is a monstrous injustice that puts you shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the worst villains in American history. But if it doesn’t even work—and in fact inspires a larger overreaction, as seems to be the case, what is the point?
I think, as Josh Marshall suggested awhile ago putting this phenomenon in historical context, that these are longstanding political habits the downsides of which have only recently come into focus, as the country becomes steadily less white:
Does this mean the GOP is ‘racist’? No. At least not in its entirety. But it benefited mightily from it. What it means is that our politics is significantly framed around the politics of race and, on balance, it’s been a winning issue for the GOP for the 40 or 50 odd years since white Southerners moved into the Republican party and created a powerful electoral anchor for the party. They raised their sails to the winds of racial animosity and it worked in spades. For decades, you got more white votes pushing this brand of politics than you lost in minority votes. It was a good political bargain. But as the racial composition of the electorate changed, we reached a tipping, one that became visible in sharp relief in 2012.
It’s hard to know from the outside just what combination of wishful thinking, epistemic closure, belief in fake voter fraud, etc., motivates this kind of behavior. But it has to be true that the actual party operatives designing and pushing through these measures which are so obviously aimed at minority citizens know exactly what they’re doing. Here’s hoping that in the future, they’re cynical enough to know that strategy has run its course.
By: Ryan Cooper, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 30, 2013
“Time To Get A Life”: Republicans React To Benghazi News
The article The Times published on Benghazi this weekend infuriated many Republicans, who ran screaming to television studios.
Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, who has made a special crusade out of the attack on the American diplomatic and intelligence compound in Benghazi, was asked on “Meet the Press” to justify Republican claims that Al Qaeda agents planned and executed the operation. (The article found no evidence that Al Qaeda was involved.)
Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC put her finger on the political question when she asked Mr. Issa why Republicans “use the term Al Qaeda.” After all, she said, “you and other members of Congress are sophisticated in this and know that when you say Al Qaeda, people think central Al Qaeda. They don’t think militias that may be inspired by Bin Laden and his other followers.”
“There is a group there involved that is linked to Al Qaeda,” Mr. Issa said. “What we never said — and I didn’t have the security to look behind the door, that’s for other members of Congress — of what the intelligence were on the exact correspondence with Al Qaeda, that sort of information — those sorts of methods I’ve never claimed.”
I’m still trying to parse that sentence.
On Fox News on Sunday, Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan insisted the story was wrong in finding that “Al Qaeda was not involved in this.”
“There was some level of pre-planning; we know that,” he said. “There was aspiration to conduct an attack by Al Qaeda and their affiliates in Libya; we know that. The individuals on the ground talked about a planned tactical movement on the compound — this is the compound before they went to the annex.”
For anyone wondering why it’s so important to Republicans that Al Qaeda orchestrated the attack — or how the Obama administration described the attack in its immediate aftermath — the answer is simple. The Republicans hope to tarnish Democratic candidates by making it seem as though Mr. Obama doesn’t take Al Qaeda seriously. They also want to throw mud at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who they fear will run for president in 2016.
Which brings us to one particularly hilarious theme in the response to the Times investigation. According to Mr. Rogers, the article was intended to “clear the deck” for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said today that The Times was “already laying the groundwork” for a Clinton campaign. Other Republicans referred to Mrs. Clinton as our “candidate of choice.”
Since I will have more to say about which candidate we will endorse in 2016 than any other editor at the Times, let me be clear: We have not chosen Mrs. Clinton. We have not chosen anyone. I can also state definitively that there was no editorial/newsroom conspiracy of any kind, because I knew nothing about the Benghazi article until I read it in the paper on Sunday.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, Editorial Page Editor, The New York Times, December 30, 2013
“A Warning For Republicans In 2014”: Francis Proves Fighting Yesterday’s Culture War Is Folly
What a difference a year makes. And what a difference a pope makes. At Christmas services this year, the priest at our local church told the families gathered for the children’s pageant that Jesus loves and is represented in everyone, including gays and lesbians. Our local church isn’t Jesuit, nor particularly liberal, but before Pope Francis stepped up with a new message of inclusivity, none of us had ever expected to hear anything like that at church, let alone at Christmas Eve mass. The congregation cheered.
The priest also pressed his core Christmas theme that the greatest joy we will experience is the joy we feel when serving others. Serving the poor is another significant shift in focus that Francis has brought to reinvigorate the church. Surely, there is no message more central to Jesus’ teaching and the Christian tradition than serving others and loving humanity, and, yet, prior to Francis’ ascent, it was a message eclipsed by a Catholic Church bent on fighting culture wars and chastising those who stray from its teachings. All too often, serving the poor had taken a backseat to the Church’s war on abortion and gay marriage.
Francis called an end to those culture wars, urging bishops to spend more time healing their flock and less time fighting political battles. He started a revolution by answering a reporter’s question about gay priests with the question, “who am I to judge?” and then later, elaborating, urged bishops to drop their “obsession” with gays, abortion and contraception and to create a welcoming church that is a “home for all.” Recently, Pope Francis removed a conservative American cardinal from a key Vatican committee after the cardinal said, “One gets the impression … that [the Pope] thinks we’re talking too much about abortion [and gay marriage.] But we can never talk enough about that.”
Instead of focusing on political fights, Francis is urging a renewed focus on serving the poor, pushing his cardinals to abandon their “psychology of princes” and get out of the lavish Vatican. He, himself, has rejected the posh apartment, cars and wardrobe of previous popes to live, travel and dress simply and humbly. He celebrated his recent birthday with homeless men, and has drawn attention for kissing and embracing a severely disfigured man and washing the feet of girls in a juvenile jail. Surely, there is no Catholic leader this Christmas who is closer in his own practices to the teachings and life of Jesus. In retrospect, his selection of his papal name seems perfectly apt: Francis of Assisi, the 13th-century patron saint of the poor.
Where the previous Catholic Church hierarchy had denied communion to elected officials who voted to give poor women the right to terminate unwanted pregnancies, the current pope exhorts that communion is open to all and not to be treated as “a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”
What a difference a year makes. Actually, it’s been a mere nine months.
There are some lessons here for Washington. And for the Republican party in particular.
The first lesson is how quickly things can change. Republicans starting 2014 giddy about the coming elections for Congress may not want to count their chickens before they’ve hatched. Much of their giddiness rides on the poorly handled roll-out of Obamacare and resulting negative public opinion about both health care reform and the president. But the federal website – healthcare.gov – is rapidly improving. Although only about 30,000 people were able to enroll in the launch month of October, the same number was able to enroll in the first two days of December, alone, with nearly 1 million people enrolling in December overall.
Americans are starting to find out for themselves what affordable, high-quality health care looks like without pre-existing conditions, lifetime limits and caps on coverage, now that insurance companies no longer call the shots. And they like it. Over this year, word will spread around America about people too young for Medicare – but too old and sick to find a new job or to buy individual insurance – who finally have insurance, or kids with cancer who finally get care, or women who don’t lose their insurance simply because they become pregnant or get breast cancer. And, as that word spreads, minds will change. Republicans who gloat today over projected victories in November based on their presumption of public distaste for Obamacare are vulnerable to a quickly changing future.
The second lesson to take to heart is that culture wars may not be as popular as those waging them think. No doubt many American bishops leading the war against gay marriage and contraception believed the majority of their flock, as well as their fellow Catholic leadership, was behind them. Today, they are shocked to hear words of chastisement from the Vatican and surprised at how Francis’ message of inclusivity and economic justice is garnering sky high public approval ratings – from 88 percent of American Catholics and three-quarters of non-Catholic Americans, in a CNN poll shortly before Christmas – and landing him on the cover of Time and other magazines as person of the year.
Just like their political allies among conservative American bishops, Republican obsessed with social issues are somewhat out of touch with the general public, yet they remain unaware of this critical fact. And this is their Achilles heel. They were surprised on election night this year to find their extremism rejected at the polls in Virginia, Alabama and elsewhere, and they continued to believe they lost because they had not pushed their extremist agenda harder – out of touch with the polling that showed American voters rejected extremism and favored leaders willing to work across the aisle to forge compromise and get results.
Republican leaders obsessed with so-called family values while simultaneously breaking up undocumented families, slashing food stamps and cutting off unemployment insurance will be as disappointed in November as conservative American bishops were this fall when they discovered they were out on a limb in their culture wars without sufficient backing among either their flock or their colleagues in Rome.
By: Carrie Wofford, U. S. News and World Report, December 30, 2013
“Thank A Postal Worker”: The Assault On This Constitutionally-Mandated Service Service Must End
Postal workers are giving it their all this holiday season, as cards and packages and returns must be collected and delivered amidst ice storms, snowstorms and wild temperature drops.
They deserve our thanks in 2013.
And our support in 2014.
Postal workers are still under assault from political slackers in Washington—like House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa, R-California, and the wrecking crew he has assembled to diminish the United States Postal Service to such an extent that it can be bartered off to the highest bidder.
That assault has made this holiday season even tougher. Under pressure from USPS executives and privatization-prone members of Congress, the service has implemented closures and forced reductions in hours. That’s led to delays in some regions. “Much of the delayed mail is in areas where plants and post offices have been consolidated or closed or where hours at post offices have been reduced,” explains Debby Szeredy, the executive vice president of the American Postal Workers Union.
True, the Postal Service had a significantly better Holiday season than FedEx and UPS, both of which were on the naughty list amid reports on how “packages that were supposed to be delivered in time for Christmas didn’t make it to their destinations.”
But the Postal Service can’t maintain universal, high quality service if closures, consolidations and cuts continue.
The assault on this Constitutionally-mandated service service must end in 2014.
It is true that the Postal Service faces challenges. But is wrong—and, frankly, absurd—to suggest that the only fix is downsizing. That’s precisely the wrong route. Schemes to cut services and sell off parts of the service begin with the false premise that its current financial challenges are evidence of fundamental flaws.
In fact, the Postal Service reported an operating profit of $600 million for the 2013 fiscal year.
Unfortunately, despite the operating profit, the Postal Service balance sheet showed a $5 billion “loss” for the 2013 fiscal year.
Why? “Only because of an unprecedented and onerous requirement imposed by Congress that it pre-fund 75 years of future retiree health benefits in just 10 years,” as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders notes. “No other business or government agency is burdened with this mandate.”
Ending the mandate and requiring the Postal Service to operate along the lines of the most responsible private businesses would make the USPS viable.
Indeed, the service could thrive if members of the House and Senate were to embrace the proposals of Sanders and Congressman Peter DeFazio, D-Oregon.
Sanders recognizes what the rest of Congress should: “The way to save the Postal Service is not to dismantle it piece by piece, but to allow it to generate more revenue by offering new and innovative products and services that the American people want.”
Those reforms embrace many of the proposals advanced by National Association of Letter Carriers President Fredric Rolando in a July letter to Congressman Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the Government Oversight and Reform Committee. In it, Rolando writes that comprehensive postal reform must:
1. Stabilize the Postal Service’s finances by reforming or eliminating unwise and unfair pension and retiree health financing policies that have crippled the Postal Service’s finances since 2006.
2. Strengthen and protect the Postal Service’s invaluable first-mile and last-mile networks that together comprise a crucial part of the nation’s infrastructure.
3. Overhaul the basic governance structure of the agency to attract first-class executive talent and a private-sector style board of directors with the demonstrated business expertise needed to implement a strategy that will allow the Postal Service to innovate and take advantage of growth opportunities even as it adjusts to declining traditional mail volume.
4. Free the Postal Service to meet the evolving needs of the American economy and to set its prices in a way that reflects the cost structure of the delivery industry while assuring affordable universal service and protecting against anti-competitive abuses.
There is a future for the United States Postal Service. And for the letter carriers and other postal workers who are hustling to deliver cards and packages this week.
In this holiday season, thank a postal worker. In 2014, tell Congress that it is not just possible but necessary for the United States to have a strong Postal Service.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, December 27, 2013
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