“A Majority Of Minorities”: We The People And The New American Civil War
The vitriol is worse is worse than I ever recall. Worse than the Palin-induced smarmy 2008. Worse than the swift-boat lies of 2004. Worse, even, than the anything-goes craziness of 2000 and its ensuing bitterness.
It’s almost a civil war. I know families in which close relatives are no longer speaking. A dating service says Democrats won’t even consider going out with Republicans, and vice-versa. My email and twitter feeds contain messages from strangers I wouldn’t share with my granddaughter.
What’s going on? Yes, we’re divided over issues like the size of government and whether women should have control over their bodies. But these aren’t exactly new debates. We’ve been disagreeing over the size and role of government since Thomas Jefferson squared off with Alexander Hamilton, and over abortion rights since before Roe v. Wade, almost forty years ago.
And we’ve had bigger disagreements in the past – over the Vietnam War, civil rights, communist witch hunts – that didn’t rip us apart like this.
Maybe it’s that we’re more separated now, geographically and online.
The town where I grew up in the 1950s was a GOP stronghold, but Henry Wallace, FDR’s left-wing vice president, had retired there quite happily. Our political disagreements then and there didn’t get in the way of our friendships. Or even our families — my father voted Republican and my mother was a Democrat. And we all watched Edward R. Murrow deliver the news, and then, later, Walter Cronkite. Both men were the ultimate arbiters of truth.
But now most of us exist in our own political bubbles, left and right. I live in Berkeley, California – a blue city in a blue state – and rarely stumble across anyone who isn’t a liberal Democrat (the biggest battles here are between the moderate left and the far-left). The TV has hundreds of channels so I can pick what I want to watch and who I want to hear. And everything I read online confirms everything I believe, thanks in part to Google’s convenient algorithms.
So when Americans get upset about politics these days we tend to stew in our own juices, without benefit of anyone we know well and with whom we disagree — and this makes it almost impossible for us to understand the other side.
That geographic split also means more Americans are represented in Congress by people whose political competition comes from primary challengers – right-wing Republicans in red states and districts, left-wing Democrats in blue states and districts. And this drives those who represent us even further apart.
But I think the degree of venom we’re experiencing has deeper roots.
The nation is becoming browner and blacker. Most children born in California are now minorities. In a few years America as a whole will be a majority of minorities. Meanwhile, women have been gaining economic power. Their median wage hasn’t yet caught up with men, but it’s getting close. And with more women getting college degrees than men, their pay will surely exceed male pay in a few years. At the same time, men without college degrees continue to lose economic ground. Adjusted for inflation, their median wage is lower than it was three decades ago.
In other words, white working-class men have been on the losing end of a huge demographic and economic shift. That’s made them a tinder-box of frustration and anger – eagerly ignited by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and other pedlars of petulance, including an increasing number of Republicans who have gained political power by fanning the flames.
That hate-mongering and attendant scapegoating – of immigrants, blacks, gays, women seeking abortions, our government itself – has legitimized some vitriol and scapegoating on the left as well. I detest what the Koch Brothers, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, Rupert Murdock, and Paul Ryan are doing, and I hate their politics. But in this heated environment I sometimes have to remind myself I don’t hate them personally.
Not even this degree of divisiveness would have taken root had America preserved the social solidarity we had two generations ago. The Great Depression and World War II reminded us we were all in it together. We had to depend on each other in order to survive. That sense of mutual dependence transcended our disagreements. My father, a “Rockefeller” Republican, strongly supported civil rights and voting rights, Medicare and Medicaid. I remember him saying “we’re all Americans, aren’t we?”
To be sure, we endured 9/11, we’ve gone to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we suffered the Great Recession. But these did not not bind us as we were bound together in the Great Depression and World War II. The horror of 9/11 did not touch all of us, and the only sacrifice George W. Bush asked was that we kept shopping. Today’s wars are fought by hired guns – young people who are paid to do the work most of the rest of us don’t want our own children to do. And the Great Recession split us rather than connected us; the rich grew richer, the rest of us, poorer and less secure.
So we come to the end of a bitter election feeling as if we’re two nations rather than one. The challenge – not only for our president and representatives in Washington but for all of us – is to rediscover the public good.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, November 5, 2012
“Why Should You Vote?”: Visualize Romney World And Move America Forward
My wife, Jan Schakowsky, and I are friends with a wonderful woman named Bea. Bea is now 95 years old. Bea was born in 1917.
She was born in a country where women couldn’t vote. In some areas of the country, just fifty years before, slavery had been legal. Collective bargaining was not recognized under the law. Poverty was rampant — especially among the country’s oldest citizens.
Bea was born in a country where there was an unimaginable gulf between a few fabulously wealthy oligarchs, and the masses of ordinary people. It was a country where only a tiny fraction of the population ever went to college — or even graduated from high school — a country were hardly anyone was considered “middle class.” It was a country where there were few regulations to protect health and safety on the job, no national child labor laws, no federal minimum wage, and very little to prevent corporations from recklessly destroying the environment.
Bea was born in a country where people of color were considered second-class citizens and discrimination against them was enshrined into law — a country where gays and homosexuals could be prosecuted for their sexual orientation.
Bea was born in the United States of America.
Over her lifetime, Bea has been involved in many of the great social movements of our time — movements that helped transform our country into the envy of the world.
She was active building the labor unions that build the middle class. won a living wage, weekends and a 40-hour work week, pensions for retirement, and the passage of Social Security and Medicare that ensured a retirement free of poverty.
She marched with the civil rights movement that gave people of color an equal status in American society.
Bea became a public school teacher and helped educate an ever-expanding number of ordinary Americans — watching more and more of them go on to college to fulfill their dreams.
She was part of the women’s movement that demanded equal status and equal pay for women — as well as the right for women to control their own decisions about contraception and abortion.
This year, Bea — at 95 years old — is working on a phone bank to turn out voters for Barack Obama. She says that if Mitt Romney and the Republican Right win the election on Tuesday, they have made clear that they absolutely intend to destroy all of the things for which she has struggled her entire life. She’s right.
Mitt Romney has demonstrated over the years that he has only one real core value: his own success.
Throughout his career, Mitt has demonstrated that he will do whatever is necessary to benefit himself — and his investors. At Bain Capital he didn’t flinch when it came to destroying other people’s jobs and lives if it would make him and his investors money.
Now his “investors” are the oligarchs of the Republican Right — people like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson — who, between them, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get him elected. Many are the same people who funded the Tea Party movement. Others are the Wall Street hedge fund barons whose recklessness collapsed the economy and came very close to recreating a Great Depression.
These people — and their Tea Party allies in Congress — have shown the country that they have no intention of compromise. They are intent upon rolling back all of the things Bea has fought for — on sending us back to the Gilded Age. They truly believe that America would be a better place without labor unions. They want to eliminate Medicare and replace it with vouchers of ever-shrinking value that pay private insurance companies.
They want to be free to despoil the environment, do away with public education, eliminate jobs, cut wages, and continue to appropriate every dime of economic growth that is generated by our increasingly productive labor force.
As President Obama said in the second presidential debate, they want send us back to the foreign policy of the 1980’s, a social policy of the 1950’s and an economic policy of the 1920’s. They believe in a society where the law of the jungle reigns supreme — where you look out for yourself above all else — where, if you believe you are your brother and sisters’ keeper, that we shouldn’t leave anyone behind, that we should have each other’s back — you’re simply a chump.
If Mitt Romney becomes president, Republicans keep control of the House and win the few seats necessary to control the Senate, there will be nothing to restrain them from making their vision of society a reality in America — from taking America backward to a time most of us cannot imagine.
What are some of the things a President Romney has promised to do?
- Eliminate Medicare and convert it into a voucher for private insurance — ending the most popular and successful health care program in American history and raising out of pocket costs for seniors by6,500 a year.
- Privatize and cut Social Security – handing over the Social Security Trust fund to Wall Street and eliminating guaranteed benefits.
- Appoint — most likely two — Supreme Court justices who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, outlawing abortion rights — and most likely make the Court a firm ally of unrestrained corporate and Wall Street power for generations.
- Repeal Wall Street Reform. Return us to the pre-crash law that would allow Wall Street to once again run wild, gamble with more and more exotic financial instruments, make a fortune for itself — and once again wreck the economy.
- Repeal ObamaCare. That by itself would end the promise that no one will ever again be bankrupt by a sudden illness. It will return us to a very recent time when someone who has a pre-existing condition can be denied insurance coverage – and that insurance companies can call the shots when it comes to your health care.
- Pass the Ryan Budget. That would mean slashing critical federal expenditures that benefit the middle class and those who aspire to the middle class, like cutting Medicaid that pays for health care for the poor, children and those in need of nursing homes or home care — and slashing funds for education and college grants.
- Increase military spending by two trillion dollars above the amount requested by the military leadership. That might benefit big defense contractors, but it would make it practically impossible to reduce the giant federal deficit.
- Give the wealthy an additional 5 trillion dollar tax cut and pay for it by increasing the effective tax rate paid by the middle class.
- Stop funding for Planned Parenthood and any other family planning programs that we fund around the world that use their own funds to pay for abortions.
- Try to pass the “Personhood” Amendment that would effectively outlaw all abortions and many forms of hormonal contraception.
- Allow many of the same Neo-Con foreign policy advisers who got us into the Iraq War to once again take control of American foreign policy.
- Veto the Dream Act that would allow young people who were brought to America as children to apply for citizenship.
- Eliminate the Presidential Directive that prevents the deportation of Dream Act-eligible young people.
- Empower people like Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who wrote the Arizona “papers please” law and now serves as Romney’s chief adviser on immigration.
- Slash environmental regulations and investment in clean energy development.
The list goes on and on.
But worse than the individual initiatives that Romney and Ryan have made clear they would undertake, is the attitude they would bring to decision-making.
Romney’s true views were laid bare in the now famous “47 percent video” where he explained how he could not convince 47% of Americans to take responsibility for their lives — people like retirees who worked all of their lives for their Social Security and Medicare — people like veterans who risked their lives for the country — people like the disabled — in fact, pretty much anyone who doesn’t agree with his “we’re all in this alone” view of American society.
If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are elected on Tuesday, they will turn back the clock on progress in America. If they are allowed to do so by a Republican House and Senate, they would return us to a time we could scarcely imagine.
For those who believe in a society where we’re all in this together, Tuesday’s election is the mother of all battles.
But if we all vote, we will win — it’s that simple. If you care about the future society we leave to our children; if you believe that we can once again have an expanding, robust middle class; if you believe that the American Dream is not dead and that our children should be able to look forward to more opportunity than was available to their moms and dads — there is no excuse not to vote.
We simply cannot allow the millions of right wing special interest money to buy America’s democracy.
Where you can, vote early. Regardless, get to the polls. If you need to stand in line, stay there until you vote. Everyone who is in line will have a chance to vote, even if the lines are long.
However it turns out, Tuesday will mark a decisive, historic turning point in American history. Together, if we all vote, we have the power to continue America’s progressive tradition. We have the power to move America forward, not back. We have the power to assure that at this decisive moment we once again bend the arc of history toward justice.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post Blog, November 4, 2012
“The Moral Case For President Obama”: The Exercise Of Conscience And Judgment
We’ve talked a lot of policy on the Dish this election cycle – airing legitimate differences on how to handle foreign policy, or taxes, or how best to run a healthcare system. And that’s absolutely part of an election, and I fully accept the validity of the views of those who legitimately disagree with me on what are essentially prudential judgments. I’ve supported Democrats and Republicans in my adult life, for different prudential reasons at different moments in time. In politics, I’m a conservative; not an ideologue.
But there is another dimension to politics and it’s about morality. Some issues are not subject to prudential or utilitarian reasoning, but are fundamental a priori moral questions. Let me cite three areas where I think the difference between Obama and Romney is a deep and moral one and requires the exercize of conscience as well as judgment.
The first is universal access to healthcare. I’ve long been a fan of the great parts of America’s private healthcare system: its treatment of patients as customers they want to keep, as opposed to human beings they are simply mandated to treat; the innovation of the pharmaceutical companies in a free market; private hospitals and doctors. But the fact that tens of millions of human beings cannot afford access to this often excellent private healthcare, even in a basic form, remains, to my mind, a scandal. That there are two nations in this country – one with the security of healthcare and one with no security at all – remains, to my mind, a moral disgrace.
That view comes ultimately from my Catholic faith. But it also comes from my surviving a plague and seeing so many die in often unbelievable neglect. It comes from realizing that if I encounter a sick person, every particle of my being wants to see that person get care, and it’s only by looking away that I can ignore this core truth. It comes from understanding that as someone with a pre-existing condition, I would be bankrupted if I ever lost insurance through an employer. And I am so much more privileged than so many.
I don’t believe in the kind of socialized medicine they have in my home country, where the government really does run the industry. But I do believe as a core moral principle in universal access to basic healthcare in wealthy countries.
This election is really asking you: do you believe everyone should be able to have access to private health insurance or not? When I examine my conscience, my answer has to be yes.
I believe in equal human dignity, and denying someone medicine to live healthily denies that dignity. To run a campaign in favor of removing that kind of security for tens of millions of Americans and replacing it with nothing remotely comparable is simply, deeply, morally wrong.
Torture is also a non-negotiable issue for me. It is simply unacceptable. It is the negation of the West’s entire founding principles. Any candidate of any party who supports it rules himself out for me on that ground alone. Romney will bring it back. He will make America a torturing nation again. He would employ the former war criminals of the dark years of Bush-Cheney and legitimize them still further. He would reinforce the idea, propagated by Cheney, that torture is a “no-brainer”, giving comfort to every vicious dictator on the planet to do the same. This was not the case in 2008, when both candidates disavowed torture, and one of them had actually suffered by the exact torture techniques approved by Bush-Cheney.
Finally, I cannot reconcile a pre-emptive war against a country that only has the technical ability to make a nuclear bomb, but has not weaponized it or threatened its use, with any reading of just war theory.
I have no illusions about the evil in the Tehran regime. This page was obsessed with the suppressed Iranian revolution three years ago and covered it like no other. I despise theocracy perhaps more than any other form of government – because it is a blasphemy as well as a dictatorship. But when the Supreme Leader of that theocracy publicly declares as religious doctrine that using a nuclear bomb is a sin, and when the opposition in Iran favors the nuclear program as a matter of national pride, and when Iran’s nuclear capability would still be no match for Israel’s massive and fully actionable nuclear apparatus, then pre-emptive war is morally unconscionable. To use an expression like “mowing the lawn” to decribe such acts of war that would kill countless people makes me sick to my stomach.
If the Iranian theocrats were to constuct an actual nuclear bomb and directed it toward other countries, I still would favor containment. I believe in the doctrine of deterrence. But I can see, given the evil nature of the regime, especially its disgusting anti-Semitism, why some may disagree with that view, including the president. I can also see why the Jewish people, given the enormities they have suffered and the extraordinary achievement of their dynamic, tiny state, would lean on the side of extreme caution. But to launch a war with necessary ground troops and brutal bunker-busting bombs simply because a country has the technical capability to enrich enough material for a nuclear bomb – that’s immoral. It’s unjust. When that country poses no threat to the United States itself, it’s way outside the parameters of a just war.
Romney favors such a pre-emptive war based merely on Iran’s capability. Obama favors it based on the actual decision to construct a nuclear weapon. Both, I believe, are morally troublesme, from a just war perspective. But Romney’s is far worse. I’m no pacifist. But I also deeply oppose war except in self-defense with as few civilian casualties as is possible.
I’m not citing civil rights issues, but they of course factor in. The GOP’s institutional bigotry toward gay people and our lives and families and its stated intent to keep a whole class of us disenfranchized from the basic right to marry the person you love appalls me. But I understand this is a state matter, not a federal one. And I’m addressing presidential decisions here. I endorsed George W. Bush and Bob Dole who explicitly opposed marriage equality. Heck, I supported a Democrat named Barack Obama who did at the time as well. But I believe in federalism on this. And always have.
On the universality of access to healthcare, on torture, and on pre-emptive war, my conscience therefore requires me to withhold support for the Republican candidate. I disagree with him on many prudential policy grounds – but none reach the level of moral seriousness of the above. Yes, a lot of this comes from my faith in the teachings of Jesus and the social teaching of the Catholic tradition in its primary concern for the poor and weak and the sick – rather than praising, as Romney and Ryan do, the superior morality of the prosperous and strong and healthy. But on all three topics, a purely secular argument also applies, simply based on the core dignity and equality of the human person, and the fragile advances we have made as a civilization against barbarism like torture.
That matters. It matters in a way that nothing else does.
By: Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Beast, October 26, 2012
“Willfully Ignoring Everything Romney Has Said”: Log Cabin Republicans Kidding Themselves About A Romney Supreme Court
I’m not surprised that the Log Cabin Republicans have gone against the best interests of LGBT Americans in endorsing Mitt Romney. Responding to their rationalization would normally not be worth the time, but one of their attempts at self-justification deserves a response. They claim, “Those who point fearfully to potential vacancies on the United States Supreme Court, we offer a reminder: five of the eight federal court rulings against DOMA were written by Republican-appointed judges. Mitt Romney is not Rick Santorum, and Paul Ryan is not Michele Bachmann.”
The Log Cabin Republicans have willfully ignored everything Mitt Romney has said about the Supreme Court.
Romney has said that he will appoint Supreme Court justices and lower court judges in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who are both adamantly opposed to protecting the rights of gay people under the Constitution. Both dissented in Lawrence v. Texas, the ruling that ended criminal sodomy laws. In his dissent, Scalia accused the Court’s majority of signing on to the “homosexual agenda.” These are the kind of justices that Mitt Romney has promised to nominate to the Supreme Court.
We can also look to Romney’s choice of Robert Bork to lead his judicial advisory committee, a clear signal that he’s ready to cede judicial nominations to the religious right. Bork has vehemently disagreed with every pro-gay-rights decision the Supreme Court has ever made, and he even claims that marriage equality will lead to “man-boy associations” and “polygamy.” This is who Romney has picked to advise him on judicial nominations.
Romney doesn’t just support amending the Constitution to prohibit marriage equality, an amendment that every justice would be obliged to enforce. Everything Romney has said about judicial nominations indicates that he will appoint Supreme Court justices and lower court judges who will do lasting damage to the rights of all Americans — including LGBT people. No LGBT American or anyone who believes in equality should be fooled into thinking otherwise.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post Blog, October 23, 2012
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