“It’s Galling Season Again”: The GOP’s Phony New Compassion
When someone in any social cohort decides to act like Ebenezer Scrooge, it’s easy and quite natural for everyone else to fall into the role of Bob Cratchit. This is what several Republicans are now doing in reaction to Mitt Romney’s remarks about Barack Obama and his “gifts” to his core constituencies. But Republicans allegedly competing for the loyalties of the 100 percent is a movie we’ve seen. It doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work for a straightforward reason: free-market solutions to many of the problems faced by the 47 percent simply don’t exist. The GOP has no answer to these problems, and it really doesn’t want to have any. But, boy oh boy, are we about to enter a galling period of hearing them pretend otherwise.
In fact, it’s already started. Bobby Jindal kicked this off by saying in response to Romney, “We need to continue to show how our policies help every voter out there achieve the American dream.” Marco Rubio weighed in with the reassuring news flash that, in fact, he does not think there are “millions and millions of people in this country that don’t want to work.” Fellow Floridian Rick Scott—bless him, the Rick Scott who ripped off Medicare before he became governor and has tried to block Democrats from voting since occupying the office—says Republicans have to say that “we want to take care of every citizen of our state.” Scott Walker, Haley Barbour, Michael Steele, Susanna Martinez, and others have made similar remarks. All well and good. So now, let’s match this lovely rhetoric to the Republican record of the past decade or so.
Let’s start with health care, a big problem in the lives of many 47 percenters. True, the GOP, when George W. Bush was president, passed the Medicare prescription drug-coverage bill. That was mostly a good thing, although the bill didn’t pay for the program and it created the famous doughnut hole problem that is finally being solved by Obamacare. What else beyond that? Most obviously, they opposed the subsidized coverage for millions of working poor that is at the heart of Obamacare, defenestrating their own proposal (the individual mandate) while doing so.
And how about S-CHIP, the health plan for poor children? Children! They fought it tooth and nail. It was supposedly an imposition on private insurers who were positioned to offer similar coverage. Yet of course, they did not do so. If they had, there’d have been no need for S-CHIP in the first place.
The one health care idea they’ve come up with, health savings accounts, are widely known to be riddled with problems. They work fine until people really need ongoing care, kind of like a car that gets you where you’re going on normal days but won’t start during emergencies. Yet they tend to have very high deductibles, and people can still be thrown off if they get really sick. This is the GOP’s great contribution to addressing the health needs of the working class.
What other problems do the 47 percent face? Hardship in old age surely ranks up there. It’s they, after all, who depend wholly or mostly on their Social Security checks (which average about $1,400 a month) to get by. And what did they see Republicans try to do on this front? Privatize it—a proposal so unpopular that it died with almost no support in Congress from even the GOP, and this after Bush spent weeks barnstorming for it. People clearly don’t want Social Security privatized—just as they don’t want Medicare voucherized.
What else? Paying for college? Oh, the GOP record here is particularly stellar. Republicans in Congress spent loads of political capital fighting the Democrats’ effort in 2010 to lower student-loan interest rates. The Obama student-loan reform has been widely hailed—in addition to helping students by offering lower interest rates, it actually saves taxpayers money by eliminating the middleman (private lenders). This year’s GOP platform called for undoing the reform and going back to the old system, which, wouldn’t you know it, is the position of the big banks.
Believe me, I could go on and on and on for pages. The bottom line is this. These private-sector “solutions” Jindal and others invoke to the problems faced by people of limited means already exist. They have either been implemented and been seen to fail (or at least create big new problems), or they’ve not been implemented because a wary public knows better and has risen up to say no.
Government programs were created for a reason: needs arose that the private sector wasn’t responding to. There was no profit to be made, or not enough, or too much risk to be assumed, in providing health coverage to working-class people and their children, who were more likely to have health issues and be expensive to care for; in offering student loans to people who might not be able to pay them back; et cetera. There just were not and are not practical free-market solutions to these problems. That’s why government stepped in.
If the entire Republican Party were made up of nothing but David Frums and David Brookses, maybe well-designed and good-faith market-based attempts to address some of these problems could have a chance. But the actually existing Republican Party is more accurately represented by another David—Vitter, the Louisiana senator—who dismissed S-CHIP as “Hillarycare.”
And it’s Vitter rather than the other Davids who typifies the party because that is how the party’s voting base wants it. The darkly amusing thing about all this distancing from Romney is that in truth, all he was doing was expressing the views of the overwhelming majority of the party’s conservative base, which rose up in a mighty rage in 2009 against these “moochers” and their “gifts.”
I wish Jindal and the rest of them luck, in spite of it all. If they’re sincere and serious, we’ll have a very different Republican Party five years from now from the one we’ve known. In the meantime, permit me my skepticism. They don’t have good solutions to working people’s problems because the record shows that at bottom, they don’t really want to solve them.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 18, 2012
“A Conspiracy Of Thousands”: How The GOP Plans To Block The Black Vote
I can’t identify too many threads that connect every single election I’ve ever covered. But one feature has been a constant through every election I’ve seen up close, from New York City Council elections to mayor to governor to senator to president: efforts to suppress the black vote, and, often enough, the Latino vote. I’ve seen the fliers, heard the robocalls, been at the polling places with the mysterious malfunctioning machines. No one ever knows exactly who does these things, and yet everyone generally knows. Republicans. And now we may be getting some proof. Former Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer said for the first time on national television Thursday—to Al Sharpton, no less!—that his party is up to its neck in denying citizens the right to vote.
Greer—and I should say up front he’s under indictment; more on that later—was deposed by lawyers for the state GOP in late May for a civil case that will likely be heard after his criminal trial. He was specific. At a December 2009 meeting, “the political consultants and staff were talking about voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting.” They also discussed—and this is lovely—how “minority-outreach programs were not fit for the Republican Party.” But with Sharpton, he really cut loose: “There’s no doubt that what the Republican-led legislature in Florida and Governor Scott are trying to do is make sure the Republican Party has an advantage in this upcoming election by reducing early voting and putting roadblocks up for potential voters, Latinos, African-Americans to register and then to exercise their right to vote. There’s no doubt. I was in the room. It’s part of the strategy.”
He also shot down the rationale for the new Florida law, this ginned-up “voter fraud” business: “In three and a half years as chairman in Florida, I never had one meeting where voter fraud was discussed as a real issue effecting elections. Never one time…It’s a marketing tool. That’s clearly what it is. There’s no validity to it. We never had issues with it. The main purpose behind it is to make sure that what happened in 2008 never happens again.”
The party’s current leaders, whom for good measure he called “whack-a-doo, right-wing crazies,” say he’s lying, and naturally they note that his credibility is open to question. He’s accused of funneling party money to himself, about $125,000. He’ll stand trial sometime this fall. Obviously, we don’t know whether he’s guilty of that. But we do know that in every single election in this country where the black vote matters, these mysterious things happen in African-American neighborhoods in the run-up to the election and on Election Day itself. We never know exactly who does it, but it’s pretty self-evident that it isn’t Democrats.
Conservative pundits like to whine from time to time about how blacks “reflexively” or “unthinkingly” pull the Democratic lever. Well, what exactly do they expect? Yes, yes, some Republicans in Congress supported the civil-rights and voting-rights acts. Fine. But those Republicans don’t exist anymore. The racists left the Democrats and joined the GOP, and that’s when—in the late 1960s—these voter-suppression efforts began.
The more you wrap your mind around it, the more astonishing the moral deficiency becomes. Think about it. Every election come the warnings that if you haven’t paid your telephone bill yet or what have you, you won’t be permitted to vote. Something that like, which I saw all the time in New York City, can be pulled off by a handful of ne’er-do-wells, and the party leaders themselves can maintain plausible deniability.
But what’s going on around the country this year requires the assent of officialdom. This is a conspiracy of thousands of people, Republican Party operatives in every state in the country (except those where the black vote is small enough not to matter), all of them agreeing that denying the most fundamental civic right to a group of citizens because they vote the wrong way is a good idea—and knowing that they can get away with it because, after all, it’s “just” “those people.” Imagine that Democrats had decided to proceed along these lines in America’s rural precincts. Something tells me that the country’s great law-enforcement agencies and media institutions would have managed to get to the bottom of it then—and that the Democratic Party would have ended up all but destroyed.
Just lately, John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky have been promoting their new book claiming to document vast treachery at the polls. The meme has developed on the right in the last few days that felons elected Al Franken to the Senate. Hennepin County (Minneapolis) Attorney Mike Freeman rebutted their charges this week. I can’t swear that Freeman is correct, but look—that was the most contested and pored-over election recount in the modern history of this country. It took nine months to determine the winner. Does it really seem likely that if massive fraud existed, state election officials (representing both major parties, by the way) weren’t able to ferret it out in nine months?
It’s a sick and sickening situation, and it delegitimizes everything else about the Republican Party. I can understand how someone believes in limited government or low taxes. I can understand how someone could oppose affirmative action. I cannot understand how any individual can be anything other than abjectly ashamed to be associated with a political party so thuggish as to try to rig elections like this and then at its conventions have the gall to invoke Abraham Lincoln and hire lots of black people to sing and dance and smile, to make up for their absence among the attendees. A black mark indeed.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, August 13, 2012
“A Systematic Effort”: Florida’s Former GOP Chair Says The Party Had Meetings About “Keeping Blacks From Voting”
In the debate over new laws meant to curb voter fraud in places like Florida, Democrats always charge that Republicans are trying to suppress the vote of liberal voting blocs like blacks and young people, while Republicans just laugh at such ludicrous and offensive accusations. That is, every Republican except for Florida’s former Republican Party chairman Jim Greer, who, scorned by his party and in deep legal trouble, blew the lid off what he claims was a systemic effort to suppress the black vote. In a 630-page deposition recorded over two days in late May, Greer, who is on trial for corruption charges, unloaded a litany of charges against the “whack-a-do, right-wing crazies” in his party, including the effort to suppress the black vote.
In the deposition, released to the press yesterday, Greer mentioned a December 2009 meeting with party officials. “I was upset because the political consultants and staff were talking about voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting,” he said, according to the Tampa Bay Times. He also said party officials discussed how “minority outreach programs were not fit for the Republican Party,” according to the AP.
The comments, if true (he is facing felony corruption charges and has an interest in scorning his party), would confirm what critics have long suspected. Florida Gov. Rick Scott is currently facing inquiries from the Justice Department and pressure from civil rights groups over his purging of voter rolls in the state, an effort that critics say has disproportionately targeted minorities and other Democratic voters. One group suing the state claims up to 87 percent of the voters purged from the rolls so far have been people of color, though other estimates place that number far lower. Scott has defended the purge, even though he was erroneously listed as dead himself on the rolls in 2006.
As Vanity Fair noted in a big 2004 story on the Sunshine State’s voting problems, “Florida is a state with a history of disenfranchising blacks.” In the state’s notoriously botched 2000 election, the state sent a list of 50,000 alleged ex-felons to the counties, instructing them to purge those names from their rolls. But it turned out that list included 20,000 innocent people, 54 percent of whom were black, the magazine reported. Just 15 percent of the state’s population is black. There were also reports that polling stations in black neighborhoods were understaffed, leading to long lines that kept some people from voting that year. The NAACP and ACLU sued the state over that purge. A Gallup poll in December of 2000 found that 68 percent of African-Americans nationally felt black voters were less likely to have their votes counted fairly in Florida.
Former Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, who has since become an independent and is rumored to be considering his next run as a Democrat, wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post recently slamming Scott’s current purge. “Including as many Americans as possible in our electoral process is the spirit of our country. It is why we have expanded rights to women and minorities but never legislated them away, and why we have lowered the voting age but never raised it. Cynical efforts at voter suppression are driven by an un-American desire to exclude as many people and silence as many voices as possible,” he wrote. A recent study from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School found that voter ID laws disproportionately affect poor, minority and elderly voters.
By: Alec Seitz-Wald, Salon, July 27, 2012
“The Consequences Of Austerity”: Rick Scott’s Tuberculosis Scandal
On March 26 this year, Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott signed a bill that slashed the state Department of Health’s budget and closed a state hospital where bad cases of tuberculosis were treated. Nine days later, the federal Center for Disease Control (CDC) detailed in a report that Florida was experiencing its worst TB outbreak in 20 years in Jacksonville. Since then, the governor’s office has either ignored or suppressed news of the outbreak, and it rushed ahead with plans to close the TB hospital as local officials kept information about the outbreak from the public. This, all according to an excellent investigation by the Palm Beach Post’s Stacey Singer, who was stymied by state officials at every turn when she tried to learn more about the outbreak and about why the state hadn’t responded to it in a concerted way.
While the CDC report came out after Scott had signed the law, the strain of TB responsible for the outbreak had been identified as early as 2008, and the report only existed because local officials in Duval County requested federal help in dealing with the overwhelming uptick in new TB cases. Meanwhile, the Duval Health Department is also a victim of budget cuts. In 2008, when the TB outbreak was first identified in an assisted living facility for people with schizophrenia, the department had 946 staffers and $61 million in revenue. “Now we’re down to 700 staff and revenue is down to $46 million,” Director Dr. Bob Harmon told the Post.
The fact that the outbreak began where it did and that it has so far spread mostly among homeless people, mental health patients and drug addicts who encounter each other in soup kitchens and shelters may have made the issue seem less urgent to state officials. Setting aside the dignity of all human life, there is already evidence that the disease has spread beyond the underclass and is continuing to grow, unmonitored, in the Sunshine state. The governor’s office did not comment for Singer’s story, and the state health department has stuck to its message that statewide TB cases are down over last year, suggesting the closure of the hospital was valid. (The hospital closed at the end of June.)
The case underscores the real human consequences of austerity budgeting and conservatives’ drive to slash government whenever possible. Since austerity came into vogue with the Tea Party beginning in 2009 and was then put in place nationally after the Republican wave in 2010, there have been countless examples where cuts or attempted cuts impact preparedness. After the the Japanese tsunami, it was noted that Republican budget cuts targeted the agency responsible for tsunami warnings. The same was true about earthquake monitoring after a temblor struck the eastern seaboard (though funding was restored). House Majority Leader Eric Cantor also tried to hold up disaster funding for tornado and earthquake cleanup, demanding it be offset with cuts elsewhere. Republicans’ proposed budget last year would have cut funds for the CDC and food safety monitoring. Meanwhile, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal spoiled his big national debut in 2009 when he gave the GOP rebuttal to President Obama’s first state of the union address in which he attacked supposedly wasteful spending on volcano monitoring in Alaska. Just a month and a half later, a volcano erupted in Alaska that threatened Anchorage.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, July 9, 2012
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