“A Pope’s Pointed Message”: Our Sacred Responsibility Is To One Another
“Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories, which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.”
That passage is not from some Occupy Wall Street manifesto. It was written by Pope Francis in a stunning new treatise on the Catholic Church’s role in society — and it is a powerful reminder that, however tiresome the political trench warfare in Washington may be, we have a duty to fight on.
The full implementation of Obamacare matters. Raising the minimum wage matters. Reforming a financial system that, as Francis noted, “rules rather than serves” matters. Hearing the anguished voices of those left hopeless by poverty matters; answering their pleas with education, health care and employment matters even more.
Francis, the first Jesuit and first non-European in the modern era to be named pope, clearly intends to make a real difference in the world — too much of a difference, it appears, for some conservatives: Sarah Palin, a born-again Christian who attends a nondenominational church, said recently that Francis’s open-arms attitude on social issues “has taken me aback.” Would that a few more words might take her all the way aback to the obscurity from which she came.
Francis’s remarks on economics and poverty came in a 50,000-word Apostolic Exhortation, released Tuesday, that gives the clearest vision to date of how he sees the church and how he intends to reshape it. In its boldness, the statement suggests that, just as Pope John Paul II played a political role in the fall of communism, so might Francis try to help shape events by obliging the faithful to recognize, and resist, a growing pattern of inequality throughout the world.
“To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed,” Francis wrote. “Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase; and in the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.”
Francis explicitly calls for “financial reform,” though he wisely does not lay out a policy agenda. But in a passage likely to make libertarians want to hide amid the dense thickets of Ayn Rand’s prose, where no light can penetrate, Francis wrote that “the private ownership of goods is justified by the need to protect and increase them, so that they can better serve the common good; for this reason, solidarity must be lived as the decision to restore to the poor what belongs to them.”
The basic positions Francis takes on economic and social justice are not new; all recent popes have expressed a similar critique of modern capitalist society, including John Paul II, whose views on poverty and the need for community are often conveniently overlooked by those who would paint him as Ronald Reagan in robes.
But no recent pope has been so forceful in denouncing the “idolatry of money” and making the inexorable rise of inequality one of the church’s central concerns. Francis intends his message to be heard. I hope leaders everywhere, and especially in Washington, are listening.
Jesus commanded his apostles to give to the poor. Yet many elected officials who claim to follow Jesus’s teachings are determined to keep the poor from receiving health care, food assistance, housing subsidies and a host of other benefits. Inequality is celebrated as a virtue. Life, we are told with a shrug, is sometimes unfair.
But for Christians, Francis reminds us, life is supposed to be as fair and compassionate as we can make it. Money is a false idol, a golden calf. Our sacred responsibility is to one another.
Amen, Your Holiness. Amen.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 28, 2013
“The Poison Of Ideology”: Republicans Have Even More Pain In Store For Their Base In Poor White Real America
Rick Santorum is right. Not far right, crazy right, piously right or, on most issues, never right. He is all of those things. But under the rubric that even a blind pig can find an acorn every now and then, the moral scourge of the Republican Party is on to something — a greater truth.
Earlier this summer, Santorum said Republicans look like the party of plutocrats, stiffing working people and the poor. The 2012 convention, he noted, was a parade of one-percenters, masters of the universe and company owners.
“But not a single — not a single — factory worker went out there,” he said. “Not a single janitor, waitress or person who worked in that company! We didn’t care about them.”
They still don’t care, and the darkening events of what looks to be an autumn of catastrophic failure by a Congress stuffed with extremists will prove Santorum’s point ever more.
Late Thursday, despite pleas from Catholic bishops and evangelicals, the Republican-dominated House passed a bill that would deprive 3.8 million people of assistance to buy food next year. By coincidence, this is almost the exact amount of people who have managed to remain just above the poverty line because of that very aid, the Census Bureau reported a few days ago.
A Republican majority that refuses to govern on other issues found the votes to shove nearly 4 million people back into poverty, joining 46.5 million at a desperation line that has failed to improve since the dawn of the Great Recession. It’s a heartless bill, aimed to hurt. Republicans don’t see it that way, of course. They think too many of their fellow citizens are cheats and loafers, dining out on lobster.
Certainly there are frauds among the one in seven Americans getting help from the program formerly known as food stamps. But who are the others, the easy-to-ignore millions who will feel real pain with these cuts? As it turns out, most of them live in Red State, Real People America. Among the 254 counties where food stamp use doubled during the economic collapse, Mitt Romney won 213 of them, Bloomberg News reported. Half of Owsley County, Ky., is receiving federal food aid. Half.
You can’t get any more Team Red than Owsley County; it is 98 percent white, 81 percent Republican, per the 2012 presidential election. And that hardscrabble region has the distinction of being the poorest in the nation, with the lowest household income of any county in the United States, the Census Bureau found in 2010.
Since nearly half of Owsley’s residents also live below the poverty line, it would seem logical that the congressman who represents the area, Hal Rogers, a Republican, would be interested in, say, boosting income for poor working folks. But Rogers joined every single Republican in the House earlier this year in voting down a plan to raise the minimum wage over the next two years to $10.10 an hour.
The argument holding back higher pay — a theory that Republicans accept without challenge — is that raising wages for the poorest workers would be bad for companies, and bad for hiring.
But experience debunks this convenient political shelter. Washington State has the highest state-mandated minimum wage in the country, $9.19 an hour, and an unemployment rate that has been running below the national average. It’s not all Starbucks, Amazon and Microsoft in Seattle, either. In the pine-forested sliver of eastern Washington, a high-wage state bumps right up against low-wage Idaho. Fast-food outlets flourish in Washington, the owners have said, because they can retain workers longer, while Idaho struggles to find qualified people to hold entry-level jobs.
Costco, they of the golf-cart-size containers of gummy bears, has long paid wages and benefits well above the industry average for big-box stores, and it hasn’t hurt the bottom line. The stock is up 79 percent over the last five years. Costco, to its credit, is urging Congress to raise the minimum wage. But that’s one big business Republicans will not listen to, because it breaks with the heartless credo of the new G.O.P.
The movement for higher minimum pay is raging through the states just now, with ballot initiatives and legislation plans. The people, in this case, will have to circumvent a Congress bent on actively trying to hurt the poor.
Republicans have more pain in store for their base in poor white America. Shutting down government, for one, will cause a ripple effect that will be hardest on those living paycheck-to-paycheck. The biggest obsession, the Moby-Dick of the right wing, is making sure millions of people do not have access to affordable health care. This week, Republicans drew the line for any doubters: they will wreck lives to blow up the health care law.
You have to wonder where this animus for those in the economic basement comes from. It’s too easy to say Republicans hate the poor. Limousine liberals can seem just as insensitive. And if Republicans were offering some genuinely creative approaches to helping the 26 million Americans who self-identified as “lower class” in a recent survey, they would deserve a listen. Tax cuts, the party’s solution to everything, do nothing for people who pay no federal income tax.
What’s at work here is the poison of ideology. Underlying the food assistance fight is the idea that the poor are lazy, and deserve their fate — the Ayn Rand philosophy. You don’t see this same reasoning applied to those Red State agricultural-industrialists living high off farm subsidies, and that’s why Republicans have separated the two major recipient groups of federal food aid. Subsidized cotton growers cannot possibly be equated with someone trying to stretch macaroni into three meals.
But Republican House leaders do have some empathy — for themselves. National Review reported this week that Representative Phil Gingrey, a hard-right conservative who wants to be the next senator from Georgia, complained in a private meeting about being “stuck here making $172,000 a year.” To say the least, he doesn’t yet qualify for food assistance.
By: Timothy Egan, The New York Times, September 19, 2013
“Blessed Are The Rich”: Charles Koch Is Such A Clueless Visionary
One thing I’ve come to value in the last couple of years is the altruism and keen economic insights of the fourth-richest man in America: Charles Koch.
Even though Koch was raised rich and has now amassed a personal fortune of about $34 billion, he recently gave us a deeper sense of his true worth, measured not in dollars, but in values.
“We want to do a better job of raising up the disadvantaged and the poorest in this country,” he declared. Excellent thought — FDR couldn’t have put it better! Noting that a big problem for the poor is that the Powers That Be “keep throwing obstacles in their way,” Koch cut to the chase, saying, “We’ve got to clear those out.”
Yes, Charlie, I’m with you! Clear out such barriers as the offshoring of middle-class jobs, union busting, poorly funded schools and the lack of affordable health care, housing and child care.
But, alas, that’s not at all what Koch had in mind as obstacles to be cleared out. Rather, he proposes to “help” poor people by eliminating — ready? — “the minimum wage.” Why? Because, explains this clueless son-of-the-rich, having a wage floor “reduces the mobility of labor.”
In case you don’t dwell in the plutocratic, narcissistic, Ayn Randian fantasyland where the Kochs hang out, “labor mobility” is right-wing psychobabble for social Darwinism. Remove all remnants of America’s economic safety net, they coldly theorize (while wallowing in their nests of luxury), and the poor will be “freed” to become billionaires.
As Charles puts it, if the disadvantaged had no protections in the workplace and no government programs to ameliorate their poverty, they would then have to scramble just to live, thus freeing them from reliance on society’s helping hand. Freeing them to do what? Well, Koch says, they could then “start a business … drive a taxicab … become a hairdresser.”
What a visionary he is! Where you and I might see people trapped in debilitating poverty, Charles sees a Brave New World of billionaire hairdressers!
But he’s not the only 1-percenter having utopian visions for hard-hit Americans. For example, I can’t begin to tell you how grateful America’s homeless people are going to be once they hear about Andy Kessler, who has been thinking long and hard about their plight, selflessly seeking ways to eradicate intractable poverty.
Kessler is a former hedge-fund whiz, which means he was in the business of making … well, money. Beaucoup bundles of it. But having seen his 16-year-old son volunteer at a homeless center, he was motivated to develop a plan to solve homelessness — and here it is: Stop dishing out soup to those people, and shut down all those damn shelters!
The homeless problem, he recently wrote in an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal, stems from “all this volunteering and charitable giving” by do-gooders like his son. Homeless folks ought to be working, he lectured, but they’re not, “because someone is feeding, clothing and, in effect, bathing them.”
Golly, Andy, I recall that Jesus said something about our Godly duty to feed and clothe the needy — and even to wash the feet of the poor.
But apparently, Jesus just didn’t grasp the essence of true morality. “Blessed are the rich!” is Kessler’s spiritual mantra. “Where does money come from … to help the unfortunate?” he asked. And yea, I say unto thee, the Holy Hedge-Funder answered his own deep question: It comes from “someone (who) worked productively and created wealth.”
Thus, he sagely concluded, the answer to poverty, to truly helping the poor, is not to pamper the takers, but to provide more tax breaks for the makers of wealth (like him) — the ones who produce “good old-fashioned economic growth.”
Wow, what a role model this guy is for America’s youth — including that misguided boy of his! Wouldn’t you like to buy Andy and Charles for what they’re worth … and sell them for what they think they’re worth? That would fund a whole lot of homeless programs.
By: Jim Hightower, the National Memo, July 24, 2013
“Family Struggles”: McDonald’s Employees Don’t Need Financial Planning, They Need Raises
McDonald’s recently partnered with Visa to put out what they call the Practical Money Skills Budget Journal (pdf), a “helpful” tool for McDonald’s employees to keep track of their earnings and expenses. There have been a flurry of responses to the “McBudget” including realistic comparisons, snarky analysis, and talk of unicorns as a means for transportation. Others have defended the budget, claiming that it gives low-wage workers the necessary tools for financial planning.
Coincidentally enough, we also recently released an online tool related to family budgets—along with Elise Gould and Nicholas Finio, we developed EPI’s Family Budget Calculator, a measure of just how much income it takes for families to buy the necessities for an adequate but modest lifestyle. Our basic budgets include the cost of rent, food, health care, child care, transportation, other necessary expenses and taxes in each of 615 communities across the country. While families at these budget levels may be able to pay their bills and put food on the table, our family budgets imply a pretty austere lifestyle. There is no savings, no vacations, no cable or internet service, and, certainly, no restaurant visits.
The EPI family budgets look at six different family types, ranging from a one-parent, one-child households to a two-parent, three-child households. When you combine what we found in our rigorous family budgets with the McDonald’s budget, some startling results stand out. Meeting the goals in the McDonald’s sample budget requires a monthly net income of $2,060, which is $816 less than what a one-parent, one-child household needs in rural Mississippi, where the post-tax cost of living is lowest. And it is $1,397 less than the median one-parent, one-child family budget. One could argue that our family budgets (which presume the presence of kids) are not particularly relevant to McDonald’s employees, on the grounds that minimum wage workers tend to be teenagers themselves. But that would be wrong. We have shown before that the bulk of the minimum wage workforce are adult employees working at least 20 hours per week, not teenagers or part-timers looking to make a little extra spending money.
Ironically, by suggesting that someone needs a monthly net income of $2,060 to meet their sample budget, the McBudget implies that one 40-hour week minimum-wage job is severely inadequate, and that even two full-time, full-year minimum wage workers would fall short of even this unrealistically low standard. This may be why the McDonald’s budget suggests a second job. A full-time, full-year worker would need to earn about $15.00 an hour (before taxes) to reach this budget level, or would have to work more than 40 hours each week. The McDonald’s sample budget is also underestimating (often radically) many basic necessities, such as rent and health insurance ($20 per month!), and missing others, like child care, that are essential for sustaining employment. (Since its original release, they have increased the heating allowance from $0.00 to $50.00 per month.)
What these two budgets make clear is that the struggles of tens of millions of American families to make ends meet is not a failure of financial planning, it’s a failure of financial resources. Even if McDonald’s employees meticulously track all of their expenses, they will still fall short of what is necessary to make ends meet, let alone actually be able to save $100 every month, as the McDonald’s budget suggests. It’s tempting to believe that all America’s low- and moderate-wage workers need to get by is better life skills, when in fact what they really need is a raise.
By: Hilary Wething, Economic Policy Institute, July 18, 2013
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