“The Politics Of Greed”: It Is Really Important That We Get This One Right
In his op-ed titled Here’s What We Want, Bernie Sanders wrote this:
What do we want? We want an economy that is not based on uncontrollable greed, monopolistic practices and illegal behavior.
Throughout the primary, Sanders has talked about the need to eliminate greed — especially the kind exhibited by Wall Street. That is a sentiment that is embraced by all liberals — especially in an era when the presumptive Republican presidential nominee espouses exactly the opposite.
But the question becomes: what is the role of politics (or government) when it comes to eliminating greed? It is the same question we would ask Christian conservatives who want to eliminate what they consider to be sexual immorality. And frankly, it is similar to questions about how we eliminate things like racism, sexism and homophobia. These are questions about the overlap of politics and morality with which we all must grapple.
At one point during the primary, Hillary Clinton was challenged by members of the Black Lives Matter movement. She said something that goes to the heart of this question.
Look, I don’t believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate. You’re not gonna change every heart. You’re not. But at the end of the day, we can do a whole lot to change some hearts and change some systems and create more opportunities for people who deserve to have them to live up to their own God-given potential: to live safely without fear of violence in their own communities, to have a decent school, to have a decent house, to have a decent future.
It is really important that we get this one right. Just as we don’t want a government that tells us who we can/can’t have sex with, we need to realize that we can’t have a government that calibrates how greedy one is allowed to be. I don’t think that is what Sanders was suggesting. He went on to say this:
We want an economy that protects the human needs and dignity of all people — children, the elderly, the sick, working people and the poor. We want an economic and political system that works for all of us, not one in which almost all new wealth and power rests with a handful of billionaire families.
That echoes what Clinton said about racism. What we want from government is a focus on lifting up those who are affected by things like greed and racism — in other words, to level the playing field.
Personally, I believe that greed — like racism and sexism — are learned. Short of informational campaigns that attempt to educate the public, we can’t legislate a change of hearts. What we CAN do is create laws that legislate against the abuses that stem from greed — like fraud and the monopolization of our economy — just as we created laws to combat segregation and discrimination. Otherwise, it is up to movements like Moral Mondays to organize people around their shared values.
By: Nancy Letourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 24, 2016
“The Real Cost Of Republican Cruelty”: Voters Should Know Who’s Holding Up Their Health Care
With one week remaining before the March 31 deadline for health coverage this year, a Republican filing a lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act has become a familiar, if tiresome, sight.
But Republicans filing a lawsuit against the law on the grounds of copyright infringement? That’s something new.
Yet that is effectively what happened this month in Louisiana. On March 14, the state’s lieutenant governor sued the progressive group MoveOn.org over a billboard criticizing Gov. Bobby Jindal’s refusal to expand Medicaid in the state. The billboard uses Louisiana’s tourism slogan — “Pick Your Passion!” — and adds: “But hope you don’t lose your health. Gov. Jindal’s denying Medicaid to 242,000 people.” The lawsuit claims that the MoveOn ad will “result in substantial and irreparable harm, injury, and damages” to the Louisiana tourism office — as if denying health insurance to the neediest will not cause the state “substantial and irreparable harm.”
Legal experts say Jindal’s ploy has no chance of succeeding, thanks to the First Amendment. (This would be the same First Amendment that the governor passionately invoked in defense of “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robertson’s right to spew racist and homophobic vitriol.)
Jindal’s reason for refusing to expand Medicaid is as specious as his reason for suing MoveOn. He claims, falsely, that the expansion would divert funds that now go to disabled individuals under traditional Medicaid. In reality, the health-care law doesn’t harm the existing program. It creates several programs to improve care for the disabled receiving Medicaid; Jindal enrolled Louisiana in three of them. But this hasn’t stopped him from blaming the ACA for his own bad policies, including cuts he made to state Medicaid funding for pregnant women.
Louisiana isn’t the only state where Republicans are preventing thousands of low-income Americans from receiving health care. In Virginia, where state lawmakers refuse to expand Medicaid, hospitals will face higher costs and reduced services as a result. One million Texans will be denied access to coverage if the state continues to reject the Medicaid expansion. Meanwhile, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant is willing to leave 300,000 of his neediest citizens uninsured. His reasoning? He’s afraid that the law might be repealed, leaving his state no way to meet its commitments — an ironic stance for a Republican to take, since they’re the ones trying to repeal it!
The 19 states that are refusing to expand Medicaid aren’t just leaving low-income Americans out to dry — they’re also leaving billions of health-care dollars on the table. While Bobby Jindal busies himself over a billboard, his state’s internal analysis found that Medicaid expansion would save Louisiana as much as $134 million in 2015 alone.
The real cost of Republican cruelty, however, cannot be measured in dollars and cents, but in people’s lives. Researchers at Harvard and the City University of New York concluded that without the Medicaid expansion, individuals will go without checkups, cancer screenings and treatment for diseases such as diabetes and depression — leading to thousands of premature and preventable deaths.
So much for compassionate or fiscal conservatism.
Amid the misinformation and fear-mongering, however, lies a real opportunity for Democrats to increase support for the ACA and win more races in November.
Consider the recent special election in Florida’s 13th Congressional District, where Republican David Jolly’s victory is being widely interpreted as a rebuke of the Affordable Care Act. Polls suggest that it wasn’t Obamacare that hurt Democrat Alex Sink but the same factor that often hurts Democrats in midterm elections: low turnout.
To combat this, what if Democrats organized a clear, concerted effort to demonstrate how Republicans are denying millions of Americans access to health insurance?
There are already signs that raising awareness is working. The Moral Monday movement, which favors expanding Medicaid, has been getting attention for its protests at public meetings in several southern states. Other states are considering following the lead of New Hampshire, where the state Senate voted, with Republican support, for a modified expansion.
At the same time, progressives should back MoveOn’s brilliant billboard campaign parodying the tourism slogans of not just Louisiana but also Texas, Florida, Nebraska, Virginia and Wisconsin — which are all blocking the Medicaid expansion.
The campaign might consider going to South Dakota, Alaska, Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi and Maine, which have Republican governors, contested Senate races and huge numbers of residents who are being denied access to health care. They need to know who is at fault.
High-profile Democrats running for federal office this cycle should be similarly bold. Voters, especially low-income voters who are most hurt by the GOP’s cruel stance on health care, need to understand just what’s at stake. It’s time for Democrats to run on health-care reform, not away from it — and Medicaid expansion is a worthy place to start. If they need to know how far Republicans have gone to prevent it, there’s a billboard along Interstate 10 in Louisiana that’s a pretty good guide.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 25, 2014
“Targeting Tuners”: If You’re Not Singing Along With Scott Walker, You’re Under Arrest
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is an exceptionally ambitious career politician who loves the sound of cheering crowds in the presidential primary states where he hopes to be a 2016 contender.
But he does not care for the sound of dissent.
In fact, dissident voices bother the conservative Republican governor so much that he has ordered state police forces to begin arresting Wisconsinites—from 85-year-olds to young moms with kids—who dare to join a long-established noontime “Solidarity Sing Along” at the state capitol in Madison. In this summer of protest, crowds have gathered at state capitols nationwide—from women’s rights activists in Austin to “Stand Your Ground” foes in Tallahassee to voting rights champions in Raleigh. There have been mass arrests, especially during the “Moral Monday” protests in North Carolina.
But Walker has distinguished himself by targeting tunes.
The singing, which traces its roots to the mass protests against Walker’s anti-labor initiatives of February and March 2011, has been a steady presence in the capitol for two years. But, this summer, the governor’s cracking down. So far, seventy-nine Wisconsinites have been arrested and ticketed, and dozens more are likely to face charges for singing songs like “Which Side Are You On?” and “On Wisconsin” without following a new set of permitting rules developed by the governor to limit the right to assemble.
It is hard to understand why the governor is so perturbed.
He’s not often in a position to hear what’s going on in the capitol.
Unless, of course, the voices of the singers are loud enough to carry to states like Alabama.
The governor, who makes little secret of his 2016 presidential enthusiasm, is spending this summer traveling to states that are likely to play a role in naming the Republican nominee who will pick up where Mitt Romney left off. He’s already been to Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Nevada, New York, Tennessee and Texas. And he’ll be back in many of those state this fall to hawk his upcoming book, Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge (Sentinel/Penguin), which he’s written with Marc Thiessen, who previously served as chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush. The conservative Washington Examiner says that “according to those familiar with it, might as well come with a ‘Walker for America’ bumper sticker.”
But before he distributes the bumper stickers, Walker is spending his off-year summer vacation on the partisan dinner circuit.
When seventeen singers were arrested Friday at the state capitol, Walker was in Denver keynoting the fourth annual Western Conservative Summit.
Soon he’ll be off to Alabama for the annual Republican Party summer dinner.
He’s already been to the first primary state of New Hampshire and the first caucus state of Iowa.
Walker’s certainly seems to be running.
But he’s not getting much traction.
Against prospective Republican contenders, according to a new TheRun2016 poll, Walker finished eighth with 2.1 percent support among possible Iowa Republican Caucus participants.
There are a lot of explanations for why Governor Walker, despite a very high national profile, attracts so little support. But some of the burden the governor carries undoubtedly has to do with his image as a “divide and conquer” politician who is determined to crack down on teachers, public employees, conservationists, local officials and anyone else who isn’t using his songbook—even going so far as to have grandmothers, veterans, teachers and mothers with children arrested for carrying a tune in the capitol—but who is not very good when it comes to managing his state, maintaining great schools, building a strong infrastructure or creating a climate that encourages job creation.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, July 29, 2013
“You Can’t Gerrymander A Whole State”: The North Carolina GOP’s Extremism May Cost Their Party The U.S. Senate In 2014
Since the GOP took over both North Carolina’s state house and governorship for the first time in more than a century, the state has become a flashpoint, with extremist policies being put into place one after the other, almost as if conservatives were punishing the state for voting for President Obama in 2008.
The right-wing mania seems to have peaked, with abortion laws being injected into any legislation Republicans could get their hands on and the nation’s worst, most blatant voter suppression law.
Republican governor Pat McCrory has said he will sign the new women’s health restrictions — despite a campaign promise not to — and the voting law, though he hasn’t actually read it.
North Carolinians have been gathering every week for Moral Mondays at the state capitol, hoping their protests and the hundreds of resulting arrests will draw attention to the extremism coming out of the quintessential swing state.
But if people aren’t paying attention to North Carolina politics now, they will be, as the battle for the U.S. Senate in 2014 heats up and Democratic senator Kay Hagan defends her seat.
“North Carolina is the closest thing to the tipping point state in the Senate battle,” the New York Times‘ Nate Silver recently wrote.
Silver added, “Although North Carolina is increasingly purple in presidential election years, the coalition of African-Americans and college-aged voters that Democrats depend upon to win races in the state is less likely to turn out for midterm elections.”
And Republicans are well aware of this.
“By all accounts, there is no path to having a Republican majority leader that doesn’t lead through North Carolina,” Thom Tillis, the state House speaker and leading Republican Senate candidate, told the Washington Examiner.
While laws designed to suppress Democratic votes will certainly help Republicans, the controversies invoked by their policies are drawing the attention of the state’s growing unaffiliated voters and the nation.
Some have called North Carolina the “new Wisconsin,” which sounds promising for Republicans who were able to help Governor Scott Walker survive a recall. However, Democrats successfully took back the Senate in those recalls for a brief time, and only lost it again in 2012 due to gerrymandering.
You can’t gerrymander a whole state, and if there is a backlash against the GOP in North Carolina, it could cost Republicans the U.S. Senate.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, July 29, 2013
“The Mean Team Piles On The Jobless”: Our Nation’s Corporate And Political Elites Have Developed An Immunity To Shame
“Come on, team, let’s get mean!”
This is not the chant of rabid football fans, egging on their favorite team to crush the opponents. Rather, it’s the raucous war cry of far-out right-wing ideologues all across the country who’re pumping up Team GOP to pound the bejeezus out of America’s millions of unemployed workers. Far from a game, this is real, and it’s a moral abomination.
I’ve been unemployed before, and I can tell you it’s a misery — all the more so today, when there are far more people out of work than there are job openings. This leaves millions of our fellow Americans mired in the debilitating misery of long-term unemployment.
But that’s not miserable enough for a feral breed of Ayn Randian political zealots who are lobbying Republican governors, legislators and congress-critters to punish the jobless for … well, for their joblessness. In this perverse universe, the conventional wisdom asserts that unemployment benefits and other poverty-prevention programs are sapping our nation’s vitality by allowing “moochers” to live the Life of Reilly and avoid work.
The GOP’s budget demigod in the U.S. House, Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), expressed this dogma in a fanciful homily deriding America’s safety net as “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.” This from a guy whose family’s wealth was gained from government contacts and who has spent practically all of his adult life in the sweet-swaying hammock of congressional privilege, presently drawing $174,000 a year from Old Uncle Sugar.
As ridiculous and just plain mean as this attitude is, it plays well in the insanity that now defines “the debate” in Republican primary elections. So, state after state (as well as Congress) is succumbing to this pound-the-poor, right-wing screed by frenetically slashing unemployment benefits.
Behind this faux-philosophical push are the smiling barons of corporate America. Without jobless payments, you see, desperate millions will be forced to whatever low-wage, no-benefit, dead-end jobs the barons design.
What’s at work here is a profoundly awful ethical phenomenon that has seeped into the top strata of American society: Our nation’s corporate and political elites have developed an immunity to shame.
It has become morally acceptable in those lofty circles to enrich themselves while turning their backs on the rest of us. Even more damning, they feel free to slash America’s already tattered safety net, leaving more holes than net for the workaday majority of Americans who’ve been knocked down by an ongoing economic disaster created by these very elites.
For a look at how shameful these privileged powers have become, turn to North Carolina. Until recently, this Southern state maintained a fairly moderate government with a populist streak, taking pride in its educational system and other public efforts to maintain a middle class. No more. A shame-resistant political leadership has recently taken hold, consisting of corporate-funded Tea Party extremists who loathe the very idea of a safety net.
The new bunch has been gutting everything from public schools to health care, and now they’ve turned on hard-hit citizens who’re out of work. In a state with the fifth highest jobless rate in the country, and with no recovery in sight, the right-wing governor and legislature recently whacked weekly unemployment benefits by a third, leaving struggling North Carolinians with a meager $350 a week to try to make ends meet, while simultaneously eliminating millions of consumer dollars that those families would otherwise be putting into the state’s economy. Then, just to give the jobless another kick, the petty politicians cut the number of weeks people can receive unemployment aid.
This official stinginess automatically disqualified the state from getting $700 million a year for long-term jobless payments from the federal government. Yet Gov. Pat McCrory issued a cockamamie, Kafkaesque claim that the gut-job ensures that “our citizens’ unemployment safety net is secure,” while providing “an economic climate that allows job creators to start hiring again.”
Yeah, we’ll all hold our breath until those “job creators” get going. Meanwhile, the GOP wrecking crew doled out a fat tax break for the corporate elites — for doing nothing. Take from the poor, give to the rich: backward Robin Hood. If ignorance is bliss, McCrory must be ecstatic.
Meanwhile, his shameless immorality has unleashed a growing storm of weekly demonstrations known as “Moral Mondays.” For information about this remarkable citizens’ uprising, link to the North Carolina Justice Center: www.ncjustice.org.
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, July 10, 2013
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