“What Would Jesus Cut?”: Republicans Should Listen To Pope Francis’ Economic Message
Usually poverty gets less attention from the media than global warming, which gets very little. Now the problem is on the front pages and trending on Twitter. Two weeks ago, Pope Francis issued a plea for income equality, and it was President Obama’s turn to discuss poverty last week. Underpaid workers are mounting protests against Wal-Mart and the fast food industry. New Jersey, the District of Columbia and many municipalities have recently increased the minimum wage within their jurisdictions.
Middle-class families are mired in debt because their incomes haven’t increased in the last 20 years while college, energy and health care costs have skyrocketed. Meanwhile, economic royalists are reaping the benefits of trickle-down economics as they harvest the lion’s share of income growth.
The concentration of wealth has become such a problem that wealth is even concentrated among the wealthy. In the recent Forbes list of top earners, 6 of the richest 10 Americans were either Kochs or Waltons. You will find a family portrait of the Waltons beside the word selfish in the dictionary. The Walton family makes billions of dollars every year, but they can’t reach deep enough into their pockets to pay the employees at Wal-Mart a living wage.
Two weeks ago, the pope made a strong statement about the evils of poverty. Pope Francis said “trickle down” economics is a “crude naïve belief in the goodness of those wielding economic power.” Francis wasn’t the first pope to weigh in on poverty. In the shade of economic abuses during the industrial age, Pope Pius VIII called for a “living wage” in his 1891 message “Rerum Novarum,” which roughly translates from Latin into English as “On the New World.” The economic deprivations of our time resemble the abuses of that era. Modern conservatives might note that the abuses of the industrial age led to the progressive populist presidencies of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The policies of those two presidents were the foundation of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Pope Francis’s pronouncement was strong enough to generate an attack from Rush Limbaugh, who described the pontiff’s statement as “Marxist dogma.” Limbaugh should be more careful about calling people names, because if the pope is a Marxist so is Jesus. I don’t know if Rush ever reads the Bible, but he might want to check out the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of St. Matthew. In the sermon, Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven”.
I went to Holy Cross High School in Flushing, Queens, in New York City. Flushing was the home of the famous blue collar fictional TV conservative, Archie Bunker. If Archie had had a talk radio show, he would have been Rush Limbaugh. Many of my schoolmates were from families like Archie’s and had the same conservative beliefs.
One of my teachers was Brother Anthony Pepe. Brother Anthony was not preaching to the choir when he taught that the Gospel of St. Matthew was the gospel of social justice. I don’t know if the good brother had an impact on my conservative classmates, but he made a strong impression on me. Jesus made it pretty clear the only people going to heaven were those who cared for the sick, hungry and infirm.
If tea partiers like Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., want to accuse Jesus of waging class warfare, so be it. The flip side of the Gospel of St. Matthew is Ryan’s path to poverty budget. The Ryan budget would decimate social programs crucial to the lives of middle-class families and the survival of poor families. Ryan says his opposition to abortion is based is based on his Catholic faith but he completely ignores his church’s teaching on poverty. I hope he paid attention to his spiritual leader when he spoke about the dangers of “unfettered capitalism” last month.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, December 9, 2013
“Hey, GOP, Here’s How To Coach Men”: What Republican Operatives Should Be Teaching Their Political Candidates
It was recently revealed that Republicans, presumably in a desperate attempt to resuscitate their “autopsy” after the 2012 election, have been coaching male candidates about how to run against women in elections. The details of the trainings, as reported by Politico, are rather sparse. So it’s up to the rest of us to use our imaginations. Don’t mind if I do…
Thus, below, is my informed rendering of what we might imagine Republican operatives are coaching other Republicans to do or not do in the future to avoid such disasters as Todd Akin, Trent Franks and Saxby Chambliss. And then, because I like to be helpful, I’ve also offered my suggestions for what such operatives might teach GOP candidates instead.
What they’re probably coaching: “Just say rape, not legitimate rape.”
What they should be coaching: Don’t minimize rape. Ever. Don’t defend or try and justify the acts of rapists. Ever. In fact, to be on the safe side, don’t ever talk about rape. Because if you need coaching on how to talk about rape, it’s probably a sign you shouldn’t be talking about it. At all. But what you should do is talk about the scourge of violence against women. Yes, you can use the word “scourge” since you’re an old white guy. And you can talk about how we need to make sure that domestic violence shelters and community health clinics and rape crisis centers and special police units and courts are adequately funded. For added measure, you can also support laws that make sure women who have been sexually assaulted have information about and access to emergency contraception—and for added measure, support access to emergency contraception in general. Because just because a woman didn’t report a rape to a hospital or the police doesn’t mean she was not sexually assaulted and may need access to emergency contraception. Then again, per above, you really should stay away from the details….
What they’re probably coaching: “Try and sound empathetic and respectful.”
What they should be coaching: Actually be empathetic and respectful. Don’t just say you support women, put your policies where your rhetoric (barely) is. Think dealing with an unplanned pregnancy is a difficult choice? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, sometimes it’s complicated—but either way, what makes it really a “difficult choice” is not having any choices about what to do with your pregnancy and your own body. You, Mr. Republican candidate sir, wouldn’t know this—you don’t have a womb, that’s why you’re in this training. So instead of trying to feign compassion for something you don’t actually understand (and don’t actually seem to have compassion for), as they taught you in kindergarten, show don’t tell. Don’t just talk about your commitment to women and their choices, show your concrete support with concrete policies that let women make their own reproductive health decisions instead of you.
What they’re probably coaching: “Talk about pocketbook issues, not social issues.”
What they should be coaching: Stop trying to impose your narrow, personal moral beliefs on others through legislation and then you might actually have some credibility to say that you care about more than just social issues. Plus if you stop trying to cram your moral rectitude down the throats of voters, you might just stop turning off the (incidentally growing) swath of the electorate who are socially liberal, including most women voters. Instead, sure, focus on jobs and the economy. But even there, you might want to pay attention to what voters (including the “takers” in your red states) actually want—and therefore not hang your cuts to food stamps and public education like a decorative albatross around your sagging neck. Instead, you should support expanded access to higher education and, heck, while you’re at it, equal pay measures—to do something about the fact that women still earn $0.77 for every dollar earned by a man. Heck, talk about how that inequality is immoral and women voters will love you!
What they’re probably coaching:“Treat women voters and colleagues with respect.”
What they should be coaching: Actually respect women. You can’t fake this one, guys. When conservatives call a private citizen a “slut” or a courageous female elected official “Abortion Barbie”, even the women who live in the caves with you are reminded of all the nasty names and catcalls they’ve ever endured just for being born with breasts. If you disagree with a woman, do so respectfully—leave out the personal insults and slander. Speaking of respect, it helps to assume that your voters and colleagues of the female persuasion are as smart and informed as your male voters. So, and I’m just spit-balling here, but don’t offer to mansplain the federal budget to your new lady colleague in the United States Senate. Generally speaking, treat women with the same respect you treat men. Or at least the same respect you treat men who own successful businesses, who are mostly white and well-educated. Don’t treat women like fast food workers or folks on unemployment benefits. Or maybe start respecting those folks too… Hey, at least the good news here is, like your approval ratings, you almost have nowhere to go but up.
For more tips, you might check out this awesome TED talk on “emotional correctness” in political discourse. Or check out the #HowToTalkToWomen hashtag on Twitter. Or if you know anyone under 60, have them show you… In the meantime, if you have any questions, don’t bother raising your hand or anything, just interrupt. I mean, can’t teach an old dog too many new tricks, can ya? And we’ll look forward to our next programs—“How To Pretend Like You Have Black Friends” and “How To Mask Your Homophobia With A Dash Of Metrosexual Style”.
By: Sally Kohn, Women in the World, The Daily Beast, December 6, 2013
“Yes, McDonald’s Can Do Better”: More Than Greed, Profitable Fast Food Companies Could Pay A Living Wage
When I was 18, I spent a year and change flipping burgers in one of those restaurants where customers eat from a tray balanced across their car windows. It was one of the three jobs I held at the time, affording a simple budget and enough left over to save up to go to college after a couple of years. I put in hard hours for my employer and it eventually worked out just fine for me. It also makes for a nice story, but one that is embarrassingly dated. The fast food industry in which I worked is not the fast food industry of America today—just ask the thousands of workers on the streets, standing up for same opportunity to get by and get ahead that built the American Dream.
For today’s fast food work force, erratic scheduling makes holding down more than one job impossible—you can’t commit to a second employer if you’re on call for the first. At the same time, low wages barely cover basic household needs, leaving millions of workers in poverty despite being employed, and making saving for the future impossible. And the 18-year-old serving your root beer float? Now she is 29, and likely to have been to college and have a family to support.
What else has changed since I was behind the counter? Oh yeah, fast food companies are making more money than ever.
In our report “A Higher Wage is Possible,” my co-author Amy Traub and I show how Wal-Mart could meet worker demands for a fair wage without passing costs onto consumers. Every year, Wal-Mart directs a portion of its profits to buying back its own public stock, consolidating ownership and increasing earnings per share. If they used that money to invest in their workforce instead, Wal-Mart could offer a raise of $5.83 per hour to all of its 825,000 low wage workers. In addition to pulling thousands of families out of poverty, Wal-Mart would see lower turnover and higher productivity and contribute to economic growth that benefits Wal-Mart, retail, and the economy overall.
Share repurchases have become an increasingly popular business strategy. Last year, McDonald’s Corp spent $2.6 billion on them. YUM! Brands Inc, which includes Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut, spent $965 million. But while the long term value of buying back shares accrue mainly to those executives whose compensation is tied to stock performance, using that money to invest in the workforce would have benefits that apply to all stakeholders—workers, customers, communities, and shareholders too.
A quick calculation shows that McDonald’s and Yum could give raises of $2 to $3 per hour to every U.S. worker at their restaurant locations using just the money they now spend buying back shares. Since the details of their corporate pay structures are not public record, that is a raise applied to even the workers already earning above the threshold of $15 demanded on the streets. If we broke out the low-wage workers, or added in the billions in additional money paid to dividends each year, that raise could go even higher—without costing customers a dime.
There are lots of good reasons why fast food employers should do better for their workforce. It’s a win-win situation for everyone with a stake in the economy—and that is everyone. Moreover, fast food can do better, by using the money now syphoned to the top to invest in their workers and grow the economy.
To people like me who made their way through jobs similar to those of the workers on the street yesterday, the cripplingly poor terms of employment in today’s fast food industry look like more than just greed. It looks like the end of opportunity and the exchange of performance on paper for the substance of the American Dream.
By: Catherine Ruetschlin, The American Prospect, December 6, 2013
“Why I Still Support Obamacare”: A Health Care Safety Net Under The Majority Is Morally Right And In The Interest Of A Stable Society
At the recent New York Times forum in Singapore, Eleonora Sharef, a co-founder of HireArt, was explaining what new skills employers were seeking from job applicants, but she really got the audience’s attention when she mentioned that her search firm was recently told by one employer that it wouldn’t look at any applicant for a marketing job who didn’t have at least 2,000 Twitter followers — and the more the better. She didn’t disclose the name of the firm, but she told me that it wasn’t Twitter.
At a meeting with students at Fudan University in Shanghai a few days earlier, I was struck by how anxious some of the Chinese students were about the question: “Am I going to have a job?” If you’re a software engineer in China, you’ll do fine, also a factory worker — but a plain-old college grad? The Times reported earlier this year that in China today “among people in their early 20s, those with a college degree were four times as likely to be unemployed as those with only an elementary school education.”
Stories like these explain why I really hope that Obamacare succeeds. Say what?
Here’s the logic: The Cold War era I grew up in was a world of insulated walls, both geopolitical and economic, so the pace of change was slower — you could work for the same company for 30 years — and because bosses had fewer alternatives, unions had greater leverage. The result was a middle class built on something called a high-wage or a decent-wage medium-skilled job, and the benefits that went with it.
The proliferation of such jobs meant that many people could lead a middle-class lifestyle — with less education and more security — because they didn’t have to compete so directly with either a computer or a machine that could do their jobs faster and better (by far the biggest source of job churn) or against an Indian or Chinese who would do their jobs cheaper. And by a middle-class lifestyle, I don’t mean just scraping by. I mean having status: enough money to buy a house, enjoy some leisure and offer your kids the opportunity to do better than you.
But thanks to the merger of globalization and the I.T. revolution that has unfolded over the last two decades — which is rapidly and radically transforming how knowledge and information are generated, disseminated and collaborated on to create value — “the high-wage, medium-skilled job is over,” says Stefanie Sanford, the chief of global policy and advocacy for the College Board. The only high-wage jobs that will support the kind of middle-class lifestyle of old will be high-skilled ones, requiring a commitment to rigorous education, adaptability and innovation, she added.
But will even this prescription for creating enough jobs with decent middle-class incomes suffice, asks James Manyika, who leads research on economic and technology trends at the McKinsey Global Institute. While these prescriptions are certainly “correct,” notes Manyika, they “may not be enough to solve for the scale and nature of the problem.” The pace of technologically driven productivity growth, he said, suggests that we may not need as many workers to drive equivalent levels of output and G.D.P.
As the M.I.T. economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee show in their book “Race Against the Machine,” for the last two centuries productivity, median income and employment all rose together. No longer. Now we have record productivity, wealth and innovation, yet median incomes are falling, inequality is rising and high unemployment remains persistent.
To be sure, notes Manyika, a similar thing happened when we introduced technology to agriculture. We did not need as many people to produce food, so everybody shifted to manufacturing. As the same thing happened there, many people shifted to services.
But now, adds Manyika, “a growing share of high-paying services and knowledge work is also falling prey to technology.” And while new companies like Twitter are exciting, they do not employ people with high-paying jobs in large numbers. The economy and the service sector will still offer large numbers of jobs, but many simply may not sustain a true middle-class lifestyle.
As a result, argues Manyika, how we think about “employment” to sustain a middle-class lifestyle may need to expand “to include a broader set of possibilities for generating income” compared with the traditional job, with benefits and a well-grooved career path. To be in the middle class, you may need to consider not only high-skilled jobs, “but also more nontraditional forms of work,” explained Manyika. Work itself may have to be thought of as “a form of entrepreneurship” where you draw on all kinds of assets and skills to generate income.
This could mean leveraging your skills through Task Rabbit, or your car through Uber, or your spare bedroom through AirBnB to add up to a middle-class income.
In the end, this transition we’re going through could prove more exciting than people think, but right now asking large numbers of people to go from being an “employee” to a “work entrepreneur” feels scary and uncertain. Having a national health care safety net under the vast majority of Americans — to ease and enable people to make this transition — is both morally right and in the interest of everyone who wants a stable society.
By: Thomas L. Friedman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New york Times, November 10, 2013
“Terrified That Obamacare Will Succeed”: Why Republicans Are Desperate For A Government Shutdown
The coming battles over budgets, the debt ceiling, a government shutdown and Obamacare are not elements of a large political game. They involve a fundamental showdown over the role of government in stemming rising inequality and making our country a fairer and more decent place.
Anyone who doesn’t see this should be forgiven. The stakes in this battle are almost always buried in news accounts about tactics and obscured by an unquenchable desire across the media to provide the latest take on whether President Obama is growing “weak” and has already become the lamest of lame ducks.
Yes, Obama has work to do in quelling doubts about his leadership. But little of what we’re hearing offers enlightenment as to why this big argument is happening in the first place, and why it matters.
To begin with, this is not just a fight between Republicans and Democrats. The GOP is clearly divided between those who take governing seriously — they still believe in government enough to accept responsibility for keeping it open — and those who see in every issue the “final conflict” that Marxists kept predicting. Stopping Obamacare, in their view, is necessary to prevent the country from reaching the end of the road to serfdom. Compared with this hellish prospect, who cares about shutdowns?
What’s fascinating, and this speaks to the perceived power of the tea party in primaries, is that it has taken only a small minority of House Republicans to push toward Armageddon. The Post’s Lori Montgomery and Paul Kane estimated that roughly 40 conservatives revolted against their leadership’s efforts to keep the government open past Sept. 30. That’s 40 in a 435-member House of Representatives. What’s become of us when less than 10 percent of one chamber of Congress can unleash chaos? What does this say about the House Republican leadership gap?
But it’s also important to understand why the Republican right is so fixated on killing or delaying Obamacare before it goes into effect. Its central worry is not that the program will fail but that it will succeed.
In an interview on Fox News this summer, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) a leader of the stop-Obamacare forces, gave the game away. After ritualistically declaring that “Obamacare isn’t working,” he said this: “If we’re going to repeal it, we’ve got to do so now or it will remain with us forever.” Why? Because once the administration gets the health insurance “exchanges in place . . . the subsidies in place,” people will get “hooked on Obamacare so that it can never be unwound.”
In other words, Obamacare, like Medicare and Social Security, could work well enough and improve the lives of enough people that voters will get “hooked” on it. For fear of this, the tea party’s champions would shut down the government and risk financial calamity over the debt ceiling? Even the Wall Street Journal’s reliably anti-Obama editorial page on Tuesday upbraided the “kamikazes” of the right.
There is a thread running through the antics of the kamikaze caucus. Almost everything it is doing is designed to keep government from acting against inequality and addressing the stagnation or decline of incomes among both poor and middle-class Americans. Foiling Obamacare, which would relieve economic pressure by getting health insurance to 25 million Americans who wouldn’t have it otherwise, is part of this larger story.
As Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted, this week’s census figures showed the poverty rate “remaining unchanged at a high 15.0 percent in 2012” and median household income “unchanged at $51,017, some 8.3 percent — or $4,600 — below its level in 2007, before the recession.”
Things would be even worse without food stamps which, as Greenstein pointed out, kept 4 million Americans out of poverty last year. And what is the House’s main priority this week? To toss 3.8 million people off the program next year. More generally, conservatives want to keep reducing government spending at a time when the unemployed most need public policy that stimulates growth rather than drags the economy down. Continued cuts will mean more economic sluggishness.
It’s hard to decide which is worse: utter indifference on the right wing to the damage that win-at-all-costs politics could cause the overall economy, or its coldhearted effort to block any attempt to ease the burdens on Americans who are struggling. One way or the other, this is what we should be talking about.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 19, 2013
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