As it turns out, the Chinese government is unhappy with US criticism of their human rights record. They seem to think the US lacks the prerogative to chastise their behavior because “the United States is beset by violence, racism and torture and has no authority to condemn other governments.” I know I’m not the only one who shook my head shamefully at these accusations. As abhorrent as the US human rights record has been in the past, there is no comparison to that of China, especially now that we have a liberal, constitution-loving, law-abiding President like Barack Obama, right? Read More
Friday night, my eyes were glued to to the news, as I awaited any and all emerging details about the possible government shutdown. As outlets began reporting that republicans and democrats had finally reached a deal, I immediately felt a sense of relief. Thank goodness, I thought, so much unnecessary suffering averted. But the relief didn’t last long, because in the pit of my stomach was fear for the many millions of people who will be affected by the $38 billion in budget cuts passed by congress. Unfortunately, the media feels differently, preferring to discuss ad-nausium the budget cut’s political ramifications for the two parties.
The same thing happened when the GOP was determined to shutdown the government if democrats did not sign on to defunding Planned Parenthood. Again, the media’s focus was not on the health of the 3 million people the organization treats every year, by providing cancer screenings, HIV and STI checks, and contraceptives. They focused on how this painted republicans as partisan ideologues, or the democrats as supporters for women’s rights, which party was to blame for the almost-shutdown, and most notably, the consequences this would have on their popularity. Read More
Title X Grants, which fund family planning and other preventive health services, are already prohibited from being used to fund abortions by the Hyde Amendment. Yet, in the face of reality, the GOP and right-wing media continue to trumpet the notion that defunding Planned Parenthood will prevent tax dollars from being spent on abortions. This has repeatedly been discredited since the right renewed their “war on the uterus” (I hope that doesn’t offend you) early this year. But they are still at it, now threatening a government shutdown if funding for Planned Parenthood is not cut from the budget. Read More
Republicans in congress are using the budget cuts debate as a way to slip their climate denying, anti-woman ideology into the bill, while house democrats attempt to meet Republicans, more than halfway, to avert a government shutdown. As of this post there are 7 hours, 55 minutes, and 20 seconds until a possible shutdown if a deal is not reached.
With all of the chaotic drama taking place in congress, where the hell is the President? You know, that guy in the oval office who is supposed to be the most powerful person in the country. Mr. Charming-in-Chief has sat on the sidelines throughout this entire impasse, playing the role of nonpartisan negotiator. This is the moment when the eyes of the country are on Washington, an opportunity that as a democrat, Obama should use to frame the debate.
You would think that during a crucial moment when the entire democratic platform is being viciously attacked, from environmental regulations to reproductive rights, the most powerful democrat in office would be on the front-lines. Instead he has been mostly absent.
Ari Berman at the Nation says it best:
In recent days, Obama has played the role of negotiator-in-chief, huddling with John Boehner and Harry Reid in order to avoid a government shutdown. Yet by failing to thematically challenge the GOP’s cuts or advance an alternative narrative on the economy, he’s made it easier for Boehner to keep demanding larger and larger spending cuts. Even if House Republicans are unhappy with a final agreement, any deal that is struck will include major concessions by Democrats.
In light of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) “courageous” and “serious” 2012 budget proposal, as many establishment pundits have called it, I can’t help but wonder: where on the class ladder does Paul Ryan fall? As it turns out, in 2009 Ryan had a net worth of $590,092 to $2,425,000. That’s a lot of money, way more than most Americans have. So it’s no surprise that Ryan can so easily promote the slashing of Medicaid and privatization of Medicare, as his budget does, since those are services that he will never need. But it’s not just Rep. Paul Ryan.
According to a study by the Center for Responsive Politics released late last year, nearly half of the members in congress — 261 — were millionaires, compared to about 1 percent of Americans. The study also pointed out that 55 of these congressional millionaires had an average calculated wealth in 2009 of $10 million dollars and up, with eight in the $100 million-plus range. A more recent study released last month, found that 60 percent of Senate freshman and more than 40 percent of House freshmen of the 112th congress are millionaires.
Why is this so important? Because very few of our lawmakers know what it’s like to struggle financially. Millionaires can generally afford healthcare without grappling with unemployment, foreclosure, or an empty refrigerator. The majority of our representatives haven’t a clue what the daily lives of the people they represent are like. They are constantly arguing that we all must sacrifice with our pensions, our wages, our children’s education, the security of our communities, while they sit atop piles of money, probably grinning Mr. Burns style.
The wealth divide between “we the people” and our representatives has caused a severe disconnect, one which our country desperately needs to face. These budget cuts amount to class warfare, and the longer we ignore it, the more they are going to take away.
Update: Just when I thought the Ryan Proposal could not frustrate me further, I read this analysis by Paul Krugman:
Ryan is proposing huge (and largely unspecified) spending cuts; but he’s also proposing very large tax cuts, mainly, of course, for those with high incomes. And as you can see, a large part — roughly half — of the spending cuts are going, not to deficit reduction, but to finance those tax cuts.
I guess it’s no surprise Ryan and his fellow supporters in congress are serving the interests of their bank accounts, since they would profit from even more tax cuts for the rich. That this man has the audacity to kill programs that tens of millions of people depend on for their very survival, not to reduce the deficit, as he claims, but to pay for even more tax cuts for his exclusive millionaires’ club, is twisted. This is welfare for the rich, financed by the elderly, disabled, and poor. What a stand up guy.
How far to the right is Obama willing to go in order to compromise? Not to say that compromise is inherently wrong, but it’s important to consider the motive of the side you are compromising with. And when it comes to today’s GOP, particularly the tea-party wing, any effort to compromise automatically pushes everyone to the right. Take the budget cuts as an example:
If their goal was to reduce spending, they would have accepted the Democrats’ offer to cut $33 billion out of the budget for the next six months — the same amount as Republican leaders had originally requested before Tea Party members forced them to double it earlier this year. As the president noted, that offer constitutes the largest cut to domestic discretionary spending in history.
But Speaker John Boehner and his negotiating team have continually moved the end zone. They spurned the specific cuts proposed by the Democrats because they did not end the programs reviled by the Republicans, including education improvements, health care reform and infrastructure rebuilding. They now want a total of $40 billion, a target that just emerged on Tuesday.
This story has been repeated over and over throughout Obama’s 2+ years in office. Late last year Democrats’ compromised with Republicans and renewed the Bush era tax cuts’ for the wealthy, arguing that it was necessary in order to extend unemployment benefits. Perhaps there is some truth to that, but compromising should have been the last resort. They didn’t even bother going to the American people to aggressively make the case against the tax cuts, which would not have been a difficult task, since the tax cuts for the wealthy were unpopular.
This “cave and shift to the right” mentality of the Democrats’ does nothing but strengthen the Republican agenda by pushing the country further to the right, and it’s not surprising. How do you compromise with a person who wants to limit the EPA’s authority to regulate air pollutants harmful to public health, which are estimated to have prevented 130,000 heart attacks, 1.7 cases of asthma, and 160,000 premature deaths last year alone.? I suppose we’ll soon find out, because after the budget cuts have been passed to the cheers of tea-partiers, my guess is that regulation is next. And if the record of Democratic compromise is any indication, it doesn’t look good.
Allison Kilkenny posted an excellent article in the Nation this weekend about how, for many people, budget cuts are literally a matter of life and death. The proposed budget cuts to Medicaid that recently passed in Texas were the most alarming:
The president and CEO of Texas Hospital Association, Dan Stultz, says the budget cuts will permanently maim rural hospitals, and in order for facilities to remain open, they’ll likely have to stop services that are not as profitable, including ambulances and prenatal care. Stultz stresses that lawmakers are cutting prenatal care for tens of thousands of poor women under this bill.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t ambulance services considered life-saving in cases of heart attacks and strokes? What about potentially fatal car crashes? If a child with severe peanut allergies has an airway constricting allergic reaction from exposure, and there is no ambulance available to rush her to the hospital, what should her parents do? And prenatal care? Really?
Keep in mind that these extreme austerity measures are coming from a Republican party that purports to cherish the sanctity of life at all costs. Which is ironic, considering they are creating actual death panels, that will cost real people their lives, all without batting an eyelash.
On the surface, differences between Democrats and Republicans on budget cuts seem oceans apart, given the heightened rhetoric over a looming government shutdown. But in reality, Democrats are just as committed to austerity cuts as Republicans. It’s simply a matter of how much.
The fierce budget-cut battles in congress over a possible government shutdown mask the converging economic ideologies of two corporately owned political parties. They agree on much more than they would like to admit. For this reason, we should not confuse the Democrats’ minor disagreements with Republicans, as them standing up for the little guy. Because standing up for the “people” would require a principled refusal to make draconian budget cuts to social programs during a recession with 9% unemployment.
Let’s not forget that it was a Democrat-controlled congress and white house that renewed the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy last year, while allowing for deregulation and CEO bonuses to continue unabated. It is a Democratic President that led the charge for a 5-year government spending freeze, cuts to heating assistance for low-income families, and cuts to block grants for community development and aid for students. Both Republicans and Democrats are trying to balance the budget on the backs of poor and working people. Both refuse to increase taxes on the wealthy. Both refuse to close tax loopholes, tackle tax havens, or hold Wall Street accountable for sinking the economy.
The true difference lies in rhetoric. To justify budget cuts, Republicans argue condescendingly that welfare queens and the unemployed are lazy parasites draining the federal government’s coffers. Democrats, on the other hand, prefer to lecture the country about how, like a family in tough times, the government must tighten its belt, because that is what responsible households do. The Democrats’ rhetoric may be slightly less patronizing, but it is equally appalling.
Of course there are those on the liberal side who reject austerity cuts, instead calling for more stimulus. But they are few and their voices are drowned out by the “fiscal conservatives” of the Democratic party.
It’s easy to look like a progressive champion of the people when the guy next to you is making the case for cutting food aid to lazy infants. An important lesson to take away from the budget cut showdown is this: have no illusions about the intentions of the Democratic establishment, for they are controlled by the same moneyed interests as their Republican rivals.
Glenn Greenwald has a brilliant post today about why it would be foolish, not to mention illegal (not that it matters), to send weapons to the Libyan rebels, a strategy the Obama administration is seriously considering. While his entire argument is certainly compelling and well worth reading, he makes one particularly significant point that has, thus far, been disturbingly absent from the intervention debate:
The real question is the wisdom of this escalated involvement. How many times do we have to arm one side of a civil war — only for that side to then become our Enemy five or ten or fifteen years later — before we learn not to do that any more? I wrote earlier on Twitter, ironically, that one good outcome from arming the Libyan rebels is that it will lay the foundation for our new war 10 years from now — when Commander-in-Chief George Prescott Bush or Chelsea Clinton announce that we must wage war to stop the Libyan faction from threatening its neighbors and supporting Terrorism (with the weapons we provided them back in 2011). One of the most reliable ways that the posture of Endless War has been sustained is by our flooding the world with our weapons, only to then identify various recipients as our new (well-armed) enemy. Whether this is a feature or a bug, it is a very destructive outcome of our endless and always-escalating involvement in military conflicts around the world.
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