Don’t You Love It When Your Political Adversaries Squabble Among Themselves?

In this corner, we have the over-the-edge budget-slasher (social programs, of course) and self-proclaimed “good Catholic” Paul Ryan. And in the opposite corner, we have the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who despite their overwhelmingly politically conservative leanings… just ask Planned Parenthood, or most women in America… perceive Ryan’s budget as contrary to the teachings of Jesus Christ (more like those of Ayn Rand, they say) regarding assistance to the poor, and aren’t afraid to say so. (Indeed, as far as I can tell, the USCCB aren’t afraid to say anything: they must somehow be judicially assured of retaining their tax exemption as they actively engage in politics. Could their ace in the hole be those six (6) Justices on the Supreme Court who are Catholic?) Tonight, Ryan and the USCCB will go far more than 15 rounds, battling over the classic contradiction built into religious conservatism: call it “budget‑busting vs. Bible‑thumping.”

Here to narrate the fight for our “radio” audience are John Nichols of The Nation and Sahil Kapur of TPM.

Come out fighting and beat each other to a pulp, “gentlemen”!

Oh, and Nichols provides us with the Malapropism of the Week, attributed to Paul Ryan: “Ryan says: ‘The preferential option for the poor, which is one of the primary tenants of Catholic social teaching, means don’t keep people poor, …’ ” Would those Catholic tenants be in Catholic tenements? I don’t doubt for a moment that “tenants” is the word Ryan said.

In Addition To Those In Poverty, Many American Families Are ‘Near Poor’ – What A Surprise!

According to the New York Times, poverty statisticians at the Census Bureau, which compiled the figures at the request of the Times, were surprised at the finding of “51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line.” This is in addition to the 46 million Americans living in poverty (that’s the 2010 figure, the newest I could find).

Anyone who is old and not wealthy, or any non-wealthy parents of young children, could have told them this: all of us know one or more people or entire families in this situation. But if the stats were a surprise, I hope their publication is widely acknowledged. I do not expect that, but hope springs eternal.

The NYT made sure it included lots of dismissive comments from a variety of right-wing organizations, which were especially critical of the use of the intuitive term “near poor.” But anyone who has ever been near poverty knows what it feels like. And in a society that loudly proclaims and projects the good life for everyone, as the US has done for decades, if you’re living paycheck-to-paycheck, even if you’re just barely making it, it feels terrifying.

Mitt the Shit has made it clear that he intends to fund yet another tax cut by shredding the safety net… Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, raising the retirement age, etc. To those who are contemplating voting for Romney, I ask this: are you middle-class? are you doing OK, more or less? are you employed? are you medically insured? is your house paid for? are the kids all graduated from college? Yes to all of that? One final matter: “… you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”

Homelessness: An Old Institution In America

Regular commenter L’Enfant de la Haute Mer pointed to a BBC story (“America’s homeless resort to tent cities“) detailing the plight of a group of people near Ann Arbor, Michigan who have plunged so far into poverty that they can no longer afford to rent homes and are now living in a tent city, an unhygienic cluster of tents, with no sanitary restroom facilities and scant protection against the cold in winter. The article says there are “at least 55” American cities that have witnessed the formation of such tent cities. Not surprisingly, diseases spring up in such encampments as people lack not only sanitary facilities but also medical care. The height of irony is that hospitals, police and a local homeless shelter contact the encampment… asking if they can send them more homeless people. What must it be like to have become a society’s dumping ground for people whom that society’s institutions don’t want to deal with?

I have a personal observation to add to this story. No, I am fortunate that I have never been homeless myself. But this is not the first time this sort of thing has happened in America… in my lifetime. During the terms of the “great” President Ronald Reagan, people in Houston, TX were homeless in large numbers.

At that time, I held a job in the Texas Medical Center, about three miles from my home. I commuted to work by bicycle, riding along bike trails provided by the City of Houston during more prosperous times. In my area, the bike trails ran along the concreted banks of a bayou, about halfway down the bank, parallel to the street that ran beside the bayou, but far enough down that the trails were not visible from a car traveling on the street. The bicycle trails ran under several street bridges.

Each bridge had at least two homeless residents, one living under each end of the bridge. Their possessions were scant… usually a sleeping bag and a backpack; sometimes a battered shopping cart for collecting cans and bottles to sell. Oh, and a lot of them had small alarm clocks. Yes, that’s right: many of these people were obviously employed, but their paychecks did not enable them to afford housing.

Such was the world in Houston in the days of the “great” Ronald Reagan. If you have read this blog long enough to notice how unreservedly I hate Republicans in power, now you know one reason I hate them. This kind of problem is completely amenable to solution in a society as wealthy as ours… but solving it involves taking actions which… for Republicans… require going against their “principles” … their almighty “principles,” which never seem to require them to endure poverty personally. It’s always someone else’s lot to be poor.

I am glad that my principles do not require me to allow people to starve out in the cold. I think my conscience would trouble me if I did that. Such is not the case for today’s Republican leadership, damn them.

Retitled: Komen Foundation Issues Dishonest ‘Reversal’ – UPDATED

Original title: “Komen Foundation Reverses, Will Fund Planned Parenthood Cancer Screenings.”

Well, lah-tee-dah. Komen Foundation didn’t like what happened when it acted as a political organization on behalf of right-wing anti-choice zealots, rather than a charity motivated to save women’s lives. People somehow just didn’t understand why the health of 170,000 women simply had to be compromised so that Komen could stop supporting an organization that (gasp!) was being investigated by a House committee. Imagine that! How narrow-minded must people be, who couldn’t see the overwhelming mandate to let poor women die in the service of… well, in the service of killing an eeeeevil organization! [/snark]

Apparently there’s no word yet on whether Komen had plans subsequently to defund the Penn State athletics department, also under investigation for improprieties, or the Catholic Church, whose little boys… oh, never mind.

I have come to only one conclusion, and I’m afraid a lot of other people have come to the same conclusion…

NEVER, EVER TRUST THE KOMEN FOUNDATION AGAIN!

During the great debacle, I gave Planned Parenthood a small amount of money. Komen Foundation’s retrenchment will not cause me to withdraw that donation. Indeed, since I want the health of indigent women to be cared for into the indefinite future, I will do my small part to see to it that Planned Parenthood’s services… and yes, to all the screaming idiots out there, of course Planned Parenthood runs a separate budget for abortion services… never have to depend on the fickleness of politically driven nut-cases.

Never again!

UPDATE: the Student Activism blog posts a substantial clarification of what the Komen “reversal” really means: in essence, it means nothing, and is a PR move. It announces continuation of Komen’s funding of Planned Parenthood services through 2012, i.e., funding which was already decided… and promises to “preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants.” Right. Anyone may apply for anything, including Planned Parenthood, but with no expectation of being funded. The whole announcement is fundamentally dishonest. Why am I not surprised. A Catholic organization, whose interest in the matter is presumably directly opposite to mine, had this to say:

The president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute calls Komen’s statement “nothing new. We have known and have reported that they are continuing five grants through 2012. This is a reference to that. The second clause about eligibility is certainly true. Any group can apply for anything. It does not mean they are going to get anything.”

As I said… the Komen announcement is fundamentally dishonest.

UPDATE: over two days, Planned Parenthood received $3 million in donations in response to Komen’s original announcement. Whatever Komen intended, they started something that is out of their reach. Fools!

Debtors’ Prison Revived

Welcome to the day after Christmas. Not to harsh your buzz, but things are still worse than they’ve ever been.

Via Michael Moore, we learn from NPR that collection agencies have been employing debt collection tactics that land people in jail. Exactly what debtors are supposed to do from jail to remedy their debt situation is quite beyond my imagination. But this 19^th-century (and earlier) phenomenon has returned. Welcome to the latest abuse of the poor in America, right up there with fraudulent home foreclosures and long-term unemployment past the duration of benefits. Now we have another group of poor people being tossed into jail, where they can neither begin paying off their debts nor (often enough) bail themselves out.

America… Fuck Yeah! USA! USA! … and many of the people who perpetrate this shit call themselves Christians. What was that shortest Bible verse? “Jesus wept”?

President Hopey-Changey Takes A Whack At California Medicaid

David Dayen has the details, and it doesn’t look pretty at all. It’s bad enough for the poor in California; how soon is it coming to a CMS office near you?

AFTERTHOUGHT: this is beginning to scare me quite a lot. If there were ever any doubt that Obama intends to balance the federal budget on the backs of the poor and the elderly, actions like this by his administration dispel that doubt. And it comes at a time when I’m elderly, and headed toward being poor. No, I’m not there yet, but Mr. Obama could well send me there.

A couple of people have mentioned on threads lately that a Democratic Congress does better under a Republican president, because they have no hesitation to oppose that president when he attempts Republican actions. GOP presidents have their own disastrous characteristics… their propensity to interfere with a woman’s right to choose abortion is one… but apart from those things, we have at present a “Democratic” president who is as warlike as George W. Bush, as economically conservative as any right-wing nutjob you care to name (and more economically conservative than Eisenhower or Goldwater), at least as flawed on environmental matters as Bush, and a rampaging disaster on the most basic of civil liberties. Remind me, please: why was I supposed to vote for a Democrat for President in the first place?

By The Rivers Of Babylon, There We Sat Down, Yea, We Wept, When We Remembered…

… how long it had been since we engaged in one of life’s urgent necessities. Here is the wonderful Barbara Ehrenreich:

As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems. Large numbers of people must be fed and kept reasonably warm and dry. Trash has to be removed; medical care and rudimentary security provided—to which ends a dozen or more committees may toil night and day. But for the individual occupier, one problem often overshadows everything else, including job loss, the destruction of the middle class, and the reign of the 1 percent. And that is the single question: Where am I going to pee?

…

Ehrenreich is writing about participants in Occupy movements almost everywhere, but she draws the connection between the presumably temporary plight of those participants and the effectively permanent suffering of the chronically homeless. Unlike the Occupy protesters, the homeless frequently find their very day-to-day existence and minimal basic activity criminalized by city after city. Ehrenreich, in a nutshell, on the matter of urination:

… Public restrooms are sparse in American cities—“as if the need to go to the bathroom does not exist,” travel expert Arthur Frommer once observed. And yet to yield to bladder pressure is to risk arrest. …

I remember a sign in the public library down the street from me. The sign (since removed, I believe) had a list of no fewer than a dozen activities prohibited in the library. Among them were sleeping or even putting your head down on a library table, and washing or shaving your face in the library restroom. The clear intent… they didn’t have to spell it out… was NO HOMELESS PEOPLE ARE ALLOWED USE OF THIS LIBRARY. But I can’t help asking: if there have to be homeless people, where is a better place for a non-disruptive homeless person? City councils, however many GOPers occupy their chambers, might as well get over the fact that criminalizing homelessness without offering effective alternatives just doesn’t work. And hence the Occupy movement, willingly (I’m sure) or otherwise (I doubt), has homelessness as one of its issues. Good. It’s about time someone gave a damn!

AFTERTHOUGHT: I am reminded that I, despite having never been homeless, have probably changed clothes and groomed myself a couple hundred times in public restrooms; it is the common lot of all active performing musicians who work elsewhere than in concert halls. All I can say is that it’s a damned inconvenience, not something anyone would undertake without a good reason. My heart goes out to people who have to do it every single time they clean and groom themselves. Our society owes them better.

 

It Can’t Happen Here?

Like hell it can’t:

London reels from third night of rioting

Matt Falloon
Reuters US Online Report Top News
Aug 09, 2011 06:10 EDT

LONDON (Reuters) – British Prime Minister David Cameron was to hold crisis talks on Tuesday after three nights of riots, looting and arson by masked, hooded youths that wrecked shopping streets in many parts of London and spread to other cities.

…

Politicians and police blamed the riots — the worst in Britain for decades — on criminals and opportunistic hooligans.

But residents in affected areas and some commentators attributed the unrest to local tensions and anger over economic hardship in a city where the gap between the haves and have-nots is growing.

“We ain’t got no jobs, no money. We heard that other people were getting things for free, so why not us?” asked E.Nan, a young man in a baseball cap in Hackney, a multi-ethnic area in east London and one of the worst hit areas.

…

Overnight, as the violence died down, cars piled high with goods drove at high speed through London streets. Witnesses were told of numerous cases of car theft by groups of looters.

…

Some commentators have blamed the rioting partly on cuts in social services being imposed as a result of the government’s tough austerity policies to reduce a large budget deficit. Economic growth is sluggish.

Many looters were from areas of high unemployment and said they felt alienated from society.

…

Cameron is now likely to come under new pressure to do more for poor districts of the capital. He has resisted calls to slow the rate at which he is cutting the budget deficit in order to lessen the impact on youth services and other facilities.

…

Do I need to be explicit about it? When our own already devastating economic situation in America plunges even further into the depths, this will happen here. It is a classic human response when you take away people’s livelihoods and homes. Yes, of course, you can follow British officials’ lead and call them “criminals and opportunistic hooligans.” But if you still have a home, you’d better have good locks on your doors, and keep a close watch for fires… that is, if you’re not already homeless and desperate, out there yourself, ready to wreak havoc.

Austerity is almost always the wrong economic response in a civilized society, because civilization is mighty thin after the first missed meal, or the first night sleeping in the street. Good people will do bad things… count on it.

UPDATE: Apparently there is indeed a share of opportunistic criminality to the riots, including young people using BlackBerry messaging to coordinate hits on particular shops. Don’t get me wrong; I most certainly do not absolve those people of their culpability. But there’s also this:

…

Gavin Poole, director of the Center for Social Justice, said many of the youths involved were from a “lost generation” who faced a life of living in ghettos with little opportunity.

“These are the actions of people who live in chaos, hopelessness and poverty,” he said, quoted by the Press Association.

Their behavior was criminal and should be punished,” he said. “Yet we have to recognize that this mayhem also exposes a broken section of British society.”

…

The British are not the only nation with a broken section of society. Everybody… please keep cool and stay safe.

We Should Have Expected This

… “this” being Democratic acquiescence to major cuts to Medicaid.

David Dayen of FDL:

Well, here we go. The debt limit deal is rounding around to entitlement cuts, and to the surprise of absolutely no one, Medicaid has become the target.

The Medicaid program for the poor is facing significant cuts in an emerging bipartisan budget deal as Republicans seek to shrink entitlements and Democrats protect other priorities […]

…

There are signs of bipartisan support among lawmakers for less drastic changes, such as legislation to give states more flexibility to cut the number of people who can use the program.

What could happen is a loosening of “maintenance of effort” requirements. States have certain obligations on enrollment and benefits that they have to maintain or they risk losing federal funding, and under these new laws, those requirements will be removed, allowing states “flexibility,” which is a euphemism for throwing people off Medicaid. When 41 Senate Democrats vowed never to block grant Medicaid by capping federal expenditures, they pointedly did not talk about maintenance of effort. Any flim-flam about how block granting is unacceptable but MOE is fine should not be considered credible.

This would be brutal for the poor, particularly in Republican states, but even in blue ones. Governors are champing at the bit to cut enrollment and increase cost sharing. State budgets are still strained, and Medicaid is among the highest expenditures. Much of Medicaid spending goes to keep poor seniors in nursing homes, so a lot of the cuts would get targeted there. Which means that you can call this the “Force Your Mother-in-Law to Move In With You Act.”

…

As usual these days, the poor, who presumably provide no campaign funding for congressional candidates, have no advocates in Congress, either Democratic or Republican. They are nobody’s Americans. And once again, the Democratic Party has betrayed the principles of the base that put it in office. I do not believe that this was unavoidable. But in these obscenely greed-driven times it certainly was predictable.

Just call it “why I am no longer a Democrat, reason #1,248,624.”

Marian Wright Edelman To Congress: Don’t Cut Head Start

The venerable Marian Wright Edelman, perhaps the most recognizable children’s advocate in America today, has a simple message for Congress: don’t cut $1 billion from the Head Start program. I’ll let her tell you the particulars; I couldn’t do it nearly as well as she does.