Paul Ryan’s Poverty Plan Includes Religion, But No Real Help For The Poor

Author: Rika Christensen November 20, 2013 10:04 pm

 

Will Paul Ryan’s poverty plan actually help the poor, 

or is it more of the same old Tea Party rhetoric 

regarding cuts to the social safety net? 

Congressman Paul Ryan. (R-WI). 

Image from Neon Tommy

In the run-up to the 2014 election cycle, Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) will set his sights on fighting poverty. As a Tea Party crusader, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Ryan’s poverty plan will call for more cuts in the social safety net, and more assurances that such cuts will free people of dependency on the government.
Of course he believes that the social safety net merely creates a culture of dependency. That’s not a surprise at all. To him, government programs designed to help the poor actually hold the poor back. They keep the poor from being able to empower themselves, so they can’t lift themselves out of their bad situation. Government programs are what make the poor lazy, they are why the poor don’t have the will to take charge of their lives.

Paul Ryan’s poverty plan is part of a bigger plan to push the GOP away from hateful Tea Party rhetoric.

Paul 

Ryan’s poverty plan is part of a larger effort to steer the GOP away from the “angry, nativist inclinations of the tea party movement and toward the more inclusive vision of his mentor, Jack Kemp.” There’s an ongoing perception that the GOP doesn’t care about people. That was made clear in RNC Chairman Reince Priebus’ so-called “autopsy report” after the massive failure of the 2012 elections. Paul Ryan’s poverty plan may be the response to the rising poverty rate and increasing income inequality that the GOP has been looking for.

The Washington Post article quotes conservative strategist Bill Bennett on the plan, who says, “You can’t be the governing party unless you offer people a way out of poverty.” This is all well and good, however, when that vision means taking away much-needed help, this type of fight will fail. You can’t maintain an appearance of helping people when you keep cutting the very things that help them in times of crisis.

Contrary to the cold, religious beliefs of people like Paul Ryan, the social safety net is necessary.

The average family is on food stamps for about 9 months. For welfare, 19% of recipients get benefits for less than 7 months, which is about the same as those that get benefits for more than 5 years. 26% get benefits for 2 to 5 years. There is no time period encompassing a majority of welfare recipients.
Bishop Shirley Holloway, from City of Hope, said that Paul Ryan wants people to dream, and people on food stamps don’t dream. Government benefits only speed up people’s downfalls, rather than lifting them up. Ryan himself says that spiritual redemption is what will save people. With that statement, he implies that the social safety net will never save people.
That may be true, but it’s also true that government programs must be there. Paul Ryan’s poverty plan likely will not take this into account. It’s also true that spiritual redemption won’t lift people out of poverty. Some of the most pious people out there receive assistance. People in emergency situations, such as suddenly losing a job or losing the ability to work, need these programs. Besides that, charity experts say that existing charities cannot fill the gaps created by cuts to government programs. When it comes to food, for instance, charities can’t make up the $4 billion per year food stamp cuts that went into effect at the beginning of November. For major disasters, such as the Oklahoma tornadoes and Superstorm Sandy, the donations may be incredible. But these experts say that for “steady-state emergencies” like hunger, there isn’t enough money coming in to compensate for government budget cuts.
If Paul Ryan’s poverty plan focuses on spiritual redemption as the primary path out of poverty, he has a sorry grasp of the actual problem.
His plan will likely boil down to more volunteerism, more charity, more tax credits and even vouchers. In other words, Paul Ryan’s poverty plan is same old story. Get rid of the safety net, cut taxes, and let charity help the poor. There aren’t many details available yet (there actually aren’t any), but it’s easy to figure out at least some of what it will have based on previous attitudes of his.

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Wal-Mart's Employee Food Drive

As the greedy underclass continues to demand a living wage, Wal-Mart generously hosts a food drive for its own employees.  (02:40)

The Colbert Report
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You Might Be Surprised Who Collects on the Tips You Leave at Restaurants

By law your tip is supposed to go to restaurant workers -- often they don't.

 

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Rommel Canlas

November 17, 2013  |  

 

I was asked during a recent interview what happens to the tips we leave in restaurants. Do they actually go to the workers? I said they’re supposed to. Often they don't.
First, tips don't  only go to servers. They are typically shared—with bussers, runners, bartenders, floor captains, and more. These workers receive varying percentages of total tips on top of the abysmally low minimum hourly wage they receive for tipped labor—$2.13 at the federal level, and between $2 and $4 in most states. These workers live off low wages earned from their employers as well as the generosity given by their customers, who decide whether and how much to tip.
By law, restaurants are required to make up the difference between a server's hourly base pay and the federal minimum for all other workers, $7.25. That means restaurants are supposed to calculate how much servers make in tips and ensure that those tips exceed $7.25 per hour on average. This legally required business expense is offset by what's called a "tip credit"—a discount on workers' wages because we, the customers, are asked to pay workers' wages for restaurants.
Having to calculate whether tips actually bring workers' wages up to the federal minimum wage each week can put an incredible burden on small businesses. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. Department of Labor reports a violation rate of 84 percent with regard to the tip credit.
Worse, these workers' paltry earnings are often stolen.
One in five servers reports being forced to share tips with management, according to a national survey conducted by my organization. You might think that happens only with cash, not with credit cards. Think again. Restaurants often deduct credit card-processing fees from workers’ tips.
Philadelphia recently passed an ordinance banning the deduction of credit card-processing fees from tips. When the bill was being debated, a local restauranteur complained that he'd lose $500,000 annually. It was a rare case of unintended honesty. He had been skimming half a million dollars from his workers' tips. Sadly, Philadelphia is just one of a few places to ban tip-skimming.
Workers’ tips are stolen in other ways. One of our leaders, Claudia Munoz, tells the story of having worked at the IHOP in Houston while in graduate school. Her hourly base pay $2.13. The IHOP did not bother making sure that her tips brought her hourly wages up to the federal minimum. It reported that she was earning $7.25 an hour regardless of what she earned in tips. The result? No paycheck. Ever. The real $2.13 an hour paid the taxes on the fictional $7.25 an hour.
Claudia describes not being able to afford food, and being so hungry that she’d wait to get to the restaurant so she could flirt with cooks to get extra food. One evening, Claudia worked an overnight shift at the IHOP, and earned some decent tips. But at the end of the night, a couple walked out without paying the bill. The restaurant's management—though it is illegal—required Claudia to pay for the walkout, which was more than everything she earned that night.
Claudia paid $20 to work for nothing.
What can we do as tippers? First, leave tips in cash. Second, demand that tips go solely and directly to workers, and that workers be paid a full, stable, livable base wage. Don't continue subsidizing an industry that should be paying its own workers. No one should be living off tips.

Saru Jayaraman is the co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Behind the Kitchen Door.

 

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The Next Time a Republican Says They Oppose a Hike to the Minimum Wage, Just Show Them This

November 10, 2013 By Allen Clifton  

“The minimum wage kills jobs!”  

I’m sure you’ve heard this rallying cry from many conservatives.  It’s a line that might sound like it makes sense to gullible Republican voters—except it doesn’t.

Make no mistake about it, our minimum wage and the amount of people on welfare at deeply intertwined.  Welfare, of course, being another issue Republicans endlessly attack, while opposing an increase in the minimum wage.
Let’s just think about that for a moment.  We have a minimum wage that’s so low, many people working full-time at the wage still qualify (and often require) assistance from the government to survive.  Therefore, our minimum wage being at such low levels is forcing millions of Americans to rely on help from the government just to get by.
Now enter the Republican nonsense that the minimum wage kills jobs and that we must make cuts to our welfare programs because there are too many people relying on the government instead of “taking personal responsibility for themselves.”
So basically Republicans oppose any hike in the minimum wage — a hike which would help millions of people no longer require help (or at least as much help) from the government — all while claiming that there are far too many Americans relying on help from the government.
What next?  Are they going to oppose sex education in our schools and access to contraceptives, then complain about the rate of abortions due to unplanned pregnancies?  Oh wait, never mind.
Their ignorant stance on the minimum wage just baffles me.  Sure, a hike would have a negative impact on some areas of our economy.  But here’s a news flash — nothing we ever pass will completely please everyone.  If we cured cancer, think of all the jobs that would be eliminated.  Does that mean curing cancer is a bad thing?
I just love their premise that if we eliminated the minimum wage, suddenly job growth would skyrocket.  How exactly?  By creating a bunch of jobs that pay even less than our current minimum wage?  How exactly is that going to help our economy or the American worker?  Do these conservatives really believe that by paying some lower skilled workers less, that businesses are going to pass these savings on to other workers?

Please.  They’ll do what they always do — keep it for themselves.
So how exactly does it make any sense to oppose a hike in minimum wage all while complaining about the amount of people relying on government assistance?  It’s our ridiculously low minimum wage that’s causing many Americans to rely on government assistance.
This is honestly one of the most ignorant arguments I deal with when talking to Republicans.  They literally will complain about people being on welfare while opposing a plan that would help millions of people get off welfare.
It makes absolutely no sense.
If we raised the minimum wage to a more respectable level, millions of people would make a decent enough living to where not only would they not require government assistance, they wouldn’t even qualify for it.
And don’t give me this nonsense that a raise in our minimum wage would be a “job killer.”  I’m so sick and tired of that damn phrase I could scream.  Everything is a “job killer” according to Republicans.
Tax hikes, “Obamacare,” raising our minimum wage—whenever Republicans need a “go to” talking point, they just throw out the term “job killer.”
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, demand creates jobs—period.  If there’s consumer demand for a product or service, there will be businesses fighting among themselves to provide it.  These businesses will then hire according to what demand dictates.
Sure, many businesses will initially fight against a hike in the minimum wage.  Heck, it might even temporarily cost our economy jobs.  But in the long run, demand will always win out.  These businesses might let go of a few people in a knee-jerk reaction to a raise in the minimum wage, but if they can’t keep up with demand, they’ll be forced to hire more employees.
“Oh, but then prices will go up!”  Excuse me, are prices going down?  Demand often dictates prices as well.  Nobody wants VHS tapes because it’s a dead technology, while Blu-ray and streaming services are the bigger ticket items right now.  How much are VHS tapes compared to Blu-ray or streaming?  Because demand for VHS tapes are next to nothing, prices for these items as a whole are next to nothing.  However, for Blu-ray or streaming services you’ll pay more considering demand for these products is greater.
Well, as long as their prices remain at a price point that consumers find acceptable.  This is just basic economics.  But it’s something Republicans simply seem unable to grasp.
Take a hypothetical VHS vendor.  Then let’s exempt them from “Obamacare,” give them a tax rate of zero and allow them to pay workers $1.00 an hour.  Know how much money they’re going to make?  Probably next to nothing.  Know how many jobs they’ll create?  Most likely zero. And if they did, it would be one job paying $1.00 an hour.
Consumer demand is the driving force behind our economy.  Consumer demand would also increase if we raised the minimum wage as more Americans would have more spending money.  Consumers with more money to spend create more demand, which then creates more profits for businesses which then creates more jobs.
Or we can do it the Republican way — cut taxes, cut benefits, reduce regulations and see all that savings go into the pockets of the rich executives (as they have for the last 30+ years).  Then as consumer spending falls due to the greed of these corporations trying to squeeze every last drop of revenue from every last worker, they’ll continue to eliminate jobs as consumer demand plummets due to low wages and fewer Americans having jobs.
Then, to “create jobs,” these businesses will lobby Washington for more tax cuts with the promise that this time, they’ll actually create jobs.  But what happens when their tax rates are reduced to zero?  How will they create jobs then?  That’s a question Republicans will never answer.
As this all goes on, and millions of Americans continue to rely on our government for help due to a minimum wage that’s simply too low for Americans to get by on, these same Republicans will stand there and push for cuts to those programs as well.
And that’s just how asinine many conservatives truly are.  They claim there are too many Americans overburdening our welfare system, costing taxpayers billions, yet they oppose a hike in the minimum wage which would help millions of Americans get off government programs and become fully self sufficient.
But then again, these are the people who claim their party represents “freedom” while trying to ban homosexuals from having the right to marry whomever they love.
So common sense obviously isn’t a quality most conservatives value.
Image via AP

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O’SNAP! Republicans Caught Taking Food Stamps

O’SNAP! Republicans Caught Taking Food Stamps (List)

Lipstick Liberal


Legislation passed by the GOP-controlled House would cut Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by an additional $5 billion annually and tighten eligibility requirements. A program that for every $5 of food stamps generates up to $9 in economic activity.
1. Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.) collected nearly $3.5 million in taxpayer-financed farm subsidies from 1999 to 2012, including roughly $70,000 just last year in the form of direct payments from Washington, paid for by you and me.
2. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.) received more than $5 million in commodity subsidies since 1995, according to the group’s analysis of data from the U.S. Agriculture Department.
3. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R.Minn) received $250,000 in Federal Farm Subsidies.
4 – 29.  Thirty-Three other Members of Congress received $15 Million Dollars from farm subsidies yet voted to cut food stamps  
30. Wal-Mart Supercenter employing 300 workers cost taxpayers at least $904,000 annually, with profits over $446 billion dollars annually.
*BONUS* Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), fights to keep moochers from not paying their fair share, while allowing the super-rich to hide between $21 and $32 trillion in offshore jurisdictions around the world .

http://winkprogress.com/lipstickliberal/4446/winkend-update-republican-home-cooking/

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10 worst right-wing statements of the week — celebrity quack edition

Vaccine truther and Wall Street Journal "expert" Suzanne Somers has decided Obamacare is a socialist Ponzi scheme

By Janet Allon, AlterNet

Actress and comedienne Suzanne Somers (Credit: AP)

Some really crazy things came out of the mouths of the frothing right wing this week –
1. Suzanne Somers is still an idiot, and the WSJ prints her error-ridden Obamacare hitjob anyway.
While Thighmaster spokeswoman Suzanne Somers has matured since her hit TV show days, her plumpers and politics have pretty much ossified. Her enlightened take on the Affordable Care Act appeared in the Wall Street Journal this week, concluding that it’s “a greater Ponzi scheme than that pulled off by Bernie Madoff.” She wrote 535 hysterical words, in which Lenin came up in addition to Madoff, on the topic of this dreaded “socialized medicine.” By the next day, the Journal had published nearly a fifth as many words in corrections.
But it did not correct the “Ponzi scheme” assertion, which was based on flimsy anecdotes about relatives who had bad experiences with Canadian doctors, and how Somers is hearing on the news that everyone’s premium is doubling and tripling. (Any guesses as to which so-called news channel she watches?)
This piece of rocket science appeared in WSJ’s “The Experts” section, which bills itself as “an exclusive group of industry, academic and cultural thought leaders who weigh in on the latest debates.”
This will definitely be our go-to section for expert analysis henceforth.
2. John Stossel: Women, aka hypochondriacs, should pay more for health insurance.
Fox libertarian spokes-moustache John Stossel became rather mentally unbalanced about the fairness of the Affordable Care Act this week. It’s not fair, he whined, that under the law, men have to pay as much for health insurance as women because “Women go to the doctor much more often than men! Maybe they’re smarter or maybe they’re hypochondriacs. They live longer. Who knows?”
The point is, they’re women, dammit.
Another thing that has Stossel and a number of Republicans really irked is that men have to help pay for pregnancy and maternity coverage, when men can’t even get pregnant. It’s so unfair!
Look, everyone knows that women get pregnant all by themselves, and it’s their fault they got themselves into this fix, and they damn well better get themselves out of it. Hypochondriacs!
3. Concerned Women for America: Very worried that young people might get health insurance.

While women are making bank with this whole Obamacare Ponzi scheme, you know who is getting screwed? Young people, that’s who. Concerned Women for America is very very concerned about that; concerned that young people may actually choose to join a program that will help them afford health insurance.
Concerned Women don’t just get concerned about any old thing. They’re not losing any sleep about silly things like tens of thousands of children going hungry because of the massive food stamp cuts that just took effect. They only get concerned about important things, like how close Miley Cyrus’ butt got to Robin Thicke’s crotch at the VMA Awards.
In an interview this week with the Christian Broadcasting Network, Concerned spokeswoman Alison Howard sent out the alarm bells to “young subsidizers” who might sign up for a “government-run program that’s a complete fail.”
“Complete fail!” she said. So hip with that phrasing!
Then she told those same hip young people, who listen to CBN all the time, to “pray for our nation’s leaders, that they have wisdom and clarity to fix this very broken problem and help us completely heal as a country,” according to Right-Wing Watch.
This praying stuff will be good practice for when you get sick or hurt, and don’t have health insurance.
4. 27 GOP senators vote to disapprove of themselves.

At first glance, maybe this headline actually makes sense. About time these clowns disapproved of themselves for their heartless policies and shameless tactics. But, no, no. No such attack of conscience has hit the Republicans in Congress. What took place this week in the Senate may have set a new low on the moron scale—and these days, that is really saying something. All 27 Republican senators who voted recently to raise the debt ceiling, pay the nation’s bills, and reopen the government (and arguably do their jobs), voted this week in favor of a symbolic “resolution to disapprove” of that vote. All of them.

Apart from making no sense (but when has that stood in the way of Republican politics?) the vote was completely pointless, unless the point was to further illustrate their idiocy.
Actually, the point was as simple as it was hypocritical. (Remember when John Kerry was given hell after saying he was for something before he was against it? At least some time passed in between.)  The point was simply to brazenly give these Republicans political cover, so that Tea Partiers and other right-wing crazies won’t try to unseat them.
5. Marsha Blackburn: Americans must be free to drink from red Solo cups.
Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn made some marvelously on-point comments during the congressional “yell at Kathleen Sebelius” hearing on the bumpy Obamacare roll-out this week.
“Some people like to drive a Ford, not a Ferrari … And some people like to drink out of a red Solo cup, not a crystal stem. You’re taking away their choice,” said Rep. Blackburn.
Blackburn has taken the lead as a defender of Americans’ rights to choose many important things this week, not just red Solo cups. From cheap shoes, clothing and plasticware to insurance plans that don’t cover much of anything, or kick you off when you get sick. Cause we’re Amurricans, damn it. And we’re free.
Yes, she’s a staunch defender of freedom and the rights of all Americans to choose. Except, of course, women’s right to choose whether to have a baby or get contraception. That’s the government’s job.
6. S.C. soup kitchen to atheists: No serving soup for you!
Everyone knows that religious belief and serving food to the poor are inextricably intertwined. Which is why it makes total sense that a group of avowed atheists,Upstate Atheists, were banned from helping out at the Spartanburg Soup Kitchen in South Carolina last week. Since they were not allowed in, they set up across the street to distribute food and other necessities like toothpaste and socks to the area’s poor. And they did this while not believing in god. What an abomination!
Upstate Atheists’ slogan is “Charity Beyond Belief,” but the Spartanburg Soup Kitchen wasn’t buying it, calling the atheists’ mission “counter to the mission of the soup kitchen.” The executive director then added, “They can have the devil there with them, but they better not come across the street.”
We did not know that the devil had branched out into the charity business. Clearly, a rebranding scheme.
7. Minn. Republican party posts, then deletes, unbelievably racist message.
The Chisago County, Minn. Republican party got caught with a deeply offensive Facebook post comparing abortion to slavery this week.
“Pro Choice. Against Slavery? Don’t buy one,” said the caption to a picture depicting a slave auction. MSNBC and radio Host Ed Schultz posted a screengrab of the photo on his Facebook page.
Unsurprisingly, outrage ensued, leading the party to delete the post and deny any responsibility for it. They said their page was made by a “large number of administrators,” who, we guess, aren’t vetted very well.
But they are very, very sorry, and sought to remind everyone that the Republican Party derives from the anti-slavery movement.
Today’s Republican Party always reminds us of abolitionists and Lincoln.
8. Nevada Rep.: ‘Would bring back slavery if constituents wanted it.’
Nevada Assemblyman Jim Wheeler did not get the Republican anti-slavery memo, as evidenced by comments Wheeler made to the Storey County Republican Party in August, according to the Associated Press, that came to light this week.
He said he’d bring back slavery if that was what his constituents wanted. There was a Youtube video of it that now appears to have been taken down. Perhaps someone thinks these comments make him look bad. Even racist. Which, of course, he is not. Why would you think that?
Because he did add that he would find it distasteful to bring back slavery, saying “I’d have to hold my nose … they’d probably have to hold a gun to my head, but yeah.”
That’s how dedicated this man is to public service. He’d be willing to override his own lack of bigotry to represent bigots.
9. Religious broadcasters: It’s simple. Miley Cyrus sold her soul to the devil.
Remember Miley Cyrus’ tongue at the VMA? Remind you of anyone? Someone with a forked tongue perhaps?
It’s a well-known fact that the devil has completely taken over the entertainment industry—Rick Santorum definitely thinks so—so it should not come as a surprise that there was a coded message in Cyrus’ infamous performance. She was announcing she’d sold her soul to the devil, said a pair of religious right broadcasters.
Broadcaster Rick Wiles and anti-rock music pastor Joe Schimmel confirmed this revelation on Wiles’ TruNews radio program this week.
“The American entertainment industry loves perverting the souls of innocent children, [and] they thrive on their wicked methods of defiling children and converting them into little citizens of Babylon. It is the work of the synagogue of Satan. Their latest poster child to recruit little Babylonians is Miley Cyrus,” Wiles said.
Wait, “synagogue”?
He also said he has seen an actual photo of Cyrus licking the ribs of a caped skeleton figure with red eyes and horns, according to Raw Story. An actual photo!
Schimmel agreed, as any reasonable person would. Cyrus, he said, has been “baptized into the Illuminati.” Her dance moves, he added, are demonstrations of “how to have sex with some satanic figure.”
Let us pray for the safe return of Miley Cyrus’ soul.
10. David Conn: Obama similar to Jim Jones.
It was a banner week on Wiles’ TruNews radio program. He also interviewed a very enlightening Jim Jones/Jonestown cult “expert.”
David Conn, the “expert,” is seeing the emergence of another Jim Jones-like figure in our midst—President Obama, who embodies “the re-emergence of the Jones Cult mentality on a grand national level.”
Let’s unpack that for a sec.
“First off, Jones captured the media and Obama captured the media,” Conn explained. Also they both had strange childhoods, and were yearning for father figures. Leaving the plane of reality altogether, Conn added, “Obama’s only father figure was a terribly nasty old man, a pornographer and a child molester and a cocaine user who was an avowed communist.”
Wiles knew just who he was talking about: Frank Marshall Davis. He’s the one who got Obama into cocaine.
Also, both of them, Jones and Obama, had a background of community organizing. Of course, Obama’s cult is Islam, so that’s a slight difference. But otherwise, it’s a no-brainer.
Here, have some more Kool-Aid.

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How America Is Killing the Poor

Lack of access to education, medical care, good wages and healthy food isn't just leaving the worst-off Americans behind. It's killing them. 

 The Guardian / By Gary Younge

November 4, 2013  |  

 

During a discussion at the University of Michigan in 2010, the billionaire vice-chairman of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway firm, Charles Munger, was asked whether the government should have bailed out homeowners rather than banks. "You've got it exactly wrong," he said."There's danger in just shovelling out money to people who say, 'My life is a little harder than it used to be.' At a certain place you've got to say to the people, 'Suck it in and cope, buddy. Suck it in and cope.'"
But banks, he insisted, need our help. It turns out that moral hazard – the notion that those who know the costs of their failure will be borne by others will become increasingly reckless – only really applies to the working poor.
"You should thank God" for bank bailouts, Munger told his audience. "Now, if you talk about bailouts for everybody else, there comes a place where if you just start bailing out all the individuals instead of telling them to adapt, the culture dies."
In the five years since the financial crisis took hold, people have been sucking it in by the lungful and discovering how pitiful a coping strategy that is. In Michigan, the state where Munger spoke, black male life expectancy is lower than male life expectancy in Uzbekistan; in Detroit, the closest big city, black infant mortality is on a par with Syria (before the war).
As such, the crisis accelerated an already heinous trend of growing inequalities. Over a period of 18 years, America's white working class – particularly women – have started dying younger. "Absent a war, genocide, pandemic, or massive governmental collapse, drops in life expectancy are rare," wrote Monica Potts in the American Prospect last month. But this was a war on the poor. "Lack of access to education, medical care, good wages and healthy food isn't just leaving the worst-off Americans behind. It's killing them."
This particular crisis, however, has also accentuated the contradictions between the claims long made for neoliberalism and the system's ability to deliver on them. The "culture" of capitalism, to which Munger referred, did not die but thrived precisely because it was not forced to adapt, while working people – who kept it afloat through their taxes and now through cuts in public spending – struggle to survive. Given the broad framing of economic struggles in the west exacerbated by the crisis, this reality is neither new nor specific to the US. "Over the past 30 years the workers' take from the pie has shrunk across the globe," explains an editorial in the latest Economist. "The scale and breadth of this squeeze are striking … When growth is sluggish … workers are getting a smaller morsel of a smaller slice of a slow-growing pie."
A few days before the bailout was passed, I quoted Lenin in these pages. He once argued: "The capitalists can always buy themselves out of any crises, as long as they make the workers pay." What has been striking, particularly recently, has been the brazen and callous nature in which these payments have been extorted.

Last Friday, 47 million Americans had their food stamp benefits cut. These provide assistance to those who lack sufficient money to feed themselves and their families. Individuals lose $11 (£7) a month while a family of four will lose $36. That will save the public purse precious little – bombing Syria would have been far more costly – but will mean a great deal to those affected. "Before the cut, it was kind of an assumption you were going to the food bank anyway," Lance Worth, of Washington state, told the Bellingham Herald. "I guess I'm just going to go $20 hungrier – aren't I?"

The cut marks the lapse in stimulus package ushered in four years ago. But while the recession is officially over, the poverty it engendered remains. Government figures show one in seven Americans is food insecure. According to Gallup, in August, one in five said they have, at times during the last year, lacked money to buy food that they or their families needed. Both figures are roughly the same as when Obama was elected. This negligence will now be compounded by mendacity.Republicans propose further swingeing cuts to the food-stamp programme; Democrats suggest smaller cuts. The question is not whether the vulnerable will be hammered, but by how much.
The impetus behind these cuts are not fiscal but ideological. Republicans, in particular, claim the poor have it too easy. "We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency," claimed former Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan. "That drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives."
The notion that food "drains the will" while hunger motivates the ambitious would have more currency – not much, but more – if the right wasn't simultaneously doing its utmost to drive down wages to a level where work provides no guarantee against hunger. In last week's paper for the Economic Policy Institute, Gordon Lafer, an associate professor at the University of Oregon, revealed the degree to which conservatives have been driving down wages, benefits and protections at a local level after their victory at the 2010 midterms.
He writes: "Four states passed laws restricting the minimum wage, four lifted restrictions on child labour, and 16 imposed new limits on benefits for the unemployed. With the support of the corporate lobbies, states also passed laws stripping workers of overtime rights, repealing or restricting rights to sick leave, and making it harder to sue one's employer for race or sex discrimination."
That's why 40% of households on food stamps have at least one person working. And the states most aggressive in pursuing these policies, Lafer points out, had some of the smallest budget deficits in the country.
Immediately after Obama's election in 2008, his chief of staff to be, Rahm Emmanuel, said: "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." The crisis didn't go to waste. But it is the right that has seized the opportunity. Not content with balancing the budget on the bellies of the hungry, it is also fattening the coffers of the wealthy on the backs of the poor.

 

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The Republican Party's War on Jesus

The Republican Party's War on Jesus #p2 #tcot pic.twitter.com/4BvmTI4Fi6
— Terrell Lewis (@SgBz) November 2, 2013

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Politics The Republicans' War on the Poor

Politics The Republicans' War on the Poor 

By ELIZABETH DREW | Oct 24, 2013 AT 10:00AM

Republicans are pushing to decimate food-stamp programs.

The way the program to provide the poor with the bare minimum of daily nutrition has been handled is a metaphor for how the far right in the House is systematically trying to take down the federal government. The Tea Party radicals and those who either fear or cultivate them are now subjecting the food-stamp program to the same kind of assault they have unleashed on other settled policies and understandings that have been in place for decades. Breaking all manner of precedents on a series of highly partisan votes, with the Republicans barely prevailing, the House in September slashed the food-stamp program by a whopping $39 billion and imposed harsh new requirements for getting on, or staying on, the program. The point was to deny the benefit to millions.

The Sharp, Sudden Decline of America's Middle Class

Hardly any other federal undertaking – with the exception of the Affordable Care Act – has attracted more hostility from the far right than the food-stamp program. As recently as the mid-Sixties, actual hunger and starvation existed in this country on a significant scale, particularly in the Deep South and Appalachia. In 1967, Robert F. Kennedy took a widely covered trip to the Mississippi Delta, where he was quite evidently shocked at the sight of listless babies with distended bellies who were unresponsive to his touching them or trying to get them to laugh. That same year, a group of doctors took a foundation-sponsored trip to Mississippi and reported, "In child after child we saw: evidence of vitamin and mineral deficiencies; serious untreated skin infestation and ulcerations; eye and ear diseases, also unattended bone diseases secondary to poor food intake; the prevalence of bacterial and parasitic diseases. . . ."

In the years after these devastating revelations, two farm-state senators of different philosophies on many issues – South Dakota Democrat George McGovern and Kansas Republican Bob Dole – joined together to strengthen the program and extend it to more people in need. Over in the House, Thomas Foley, a Democratic congressman from Spokane, Washington – a major wheat­growing area – and later House speaker, was the real legislative hero of the program.

Even before he became chairman of the Agricultural Committee in 1975, Foley had the insight that the way to politically protect food stamps – both in his fairly conservative committee and on the House floor – was to combine the program with agricultural subsidies in the farm bill that came up for renewal every five years or so. The idea was classic if benignly intended log-rolling: Members from urban areas, where unemployment and the need for food stamps is relatively high, would grudgingly vote for the farm bill, while representatives from parts of the country with agricultural interests would grudgingly vote for food stamps. There was a certain substantive as well as political logic in linking nutrition support to farm surpluses – it helped unload excess commodities, while at the same time it could help feed the poor. Grocers also supported the food stamps as a way of selling more goods. (One of the program's greatest fans today is Walmart, which has the distinction of having customers and employees on food stamps.)

In 1979, 12 years after the original report calling attention to the appalling hunger in the Deep South and Appalachia, the Field Foundation sent another medical team to roughly the same areas, and it found that despite no sizable improvement in the condition of poverty, there had been a dramatic reduction in hunger and malnutrition as a result of food stamps and other nutrition assistance. The data shows that while a significant number of nonelderly households left the program as their income improved, the group whose participation had increased the most was the working poor.

"Food stamps are largely responsible for the near-elimination of the severe hunger and malnutrition that was widespread in many poverty-stricken areas," says Bob Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and a bearded, Old Testament-like figure who ran the program during the last two years of the Carter administration and is passionate about it. "Were it not for this program, we would see a lot more chronically hungry people and more illness related to malnutrition and undernutrition."

Food stamps are far from an extravagant benefit. The average allocation is $1.40 per person per meal. (Try it some time.) A few years ago, the program was renamed SNAP, for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, to give it a more positive facade, but that headed off not a whit of anger at the notion that hordes of freeloaders were getting benefits they didn't deserve or were electing to become dependent on food stamps rather than get a job.

In 1996, when Congress revised the separate welfare law, it also placed severe new restrictions on food stamps. Able-bodied adults who weren't raising children were limited to receiving food stamps for only three months out of three years if they weren't working at least 20 hours a week or participating in a job-training program. This grim rule applied no matter how hard they tried to find a job and even if they hadn't been able to get a slot in a training program. An exception could be made if they lived in an area of high unemployment and if their governor requested and received a federal waiver. The average income of these people is about $2,500 a year, or 22 percent of the poverty level.

How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich

The job-training program that's part of the food-stamp law is modest, nowhere near the needed capacity, and other job-training programs the government offers are full, with waiting lists in many areas. But Republicans have resisted significant increases in training programs – if this hurts the economy or large numbers of individuals, so be it. First things first: Undermine Obama's presidency.

In 2009, desperately trying to revive the economy from the crash and understanding that money for food stamps is money quickly spent, Obama proposed that the stimulus bill raise food-stamp benefits for all recipients. These increases were scheduled to die at the end of October. Thus the support level for it had been dropping significantly, despite the fact that the economy hasn't recovered to the extent that had been expected.

Republican Extremism and the Lessons of History

The House's deep slash to the food-stamp program, combined with outlandish restrictions, arose from various impulses. There was, obviously, the long-standing animus within the Republican Party toward poor people, and that's been substantially intensified as a result of the transformation of the party, whose center of gravity has moved south and west. Moreover, a minority of the party in the House, backed by powerful and wealthy outside interest groups, has seized the reins by throwing terror into the ranks that if they don't conform to the Tea Party's agenda, they could face defeat in a primary challenge from the right in the next election. Bob Dole's and George McGovern's time is long gone. Neither the Senate, nor the House, nor American politics are anything like they were in their time. The Republican Party in the Senate contains no Jacob Javits, the late New York senator who fought to protect food stamps. Among the Democrats, there's no Edward Kennedy to champion the causes of the poor, to even enjoy doing battle for them. One of the few unabashed liberals, Tom Harkin of Iowa, is retiring after five terms. Harkin was born into modest means, which he has never forgotten – he needed no lectures about bootstraps.

Adding to the ferocity of the attack on food stamps this year is that Tea Party members had promised that when they got to Washington, they would dramatically cut the size of government, but had little to show for it. Paul Ryan's much-touted budget was actually quite cautious in cutting entitlements in the near term. Medicare and Social Security were too popular, even among the Tea Party's own followers, for Republicans to stick their necks out on those issues. Medicaid is a component of the health-care-reform law, and therefore was being dealt with in another context. That left food stamps.

The idea that the unworthy are cadging off the federal government – at a cost to the right-thinking taxpayers (who, of course, never, ever cheat) – goes deep in our national psyche. Ronald Reagan's frequent evocation of the "welfare queen" driving around in a Cadillac and the "strapping young bucks" said to be dining on T-bone steaks purchased with food stamps touched a racist nerve that is more prevalent in this country than we care to admit.

Through this rhetoric, Reagan helped build the Republican Party's base in the South – with consequences that have lasted to this day. Newt Gingrich, it may be recalled, made a big issue of food stamps in his race for the 2012 Republican nomination, calling Obama the "food-stamp president." But despite Gingrich implying that lazy blacks were the personification of food-stamp recipients, only 22 percent of those who receive food stamps are black (33 percent are white). Of the roughly 47 million Americans on food stamps, nearly half are children.

Policy by anecdote continued into this year's food-stamp debate. This summer, Fox News triumphantly presented an unemployed 29-year-old man from La Jolla, California, named Jason Greenslate, who liked to surf and play in a rock band, and who defiantly posed for the cameras buying lobster and sushi with the food stamps he got from the government. Fox then reportedly distributed the story to House members, and at least one member admitted that it influenced him to vote for a proposal to decimate the food-stamp program.

Until the House took it up this year, the food-stamp program had mostly enjoyed bipartisan support from Capitol Hill. Of all the commissions, committees and ad hoc groups formed in the past few years to propose ways to cut the budget – the sainted (if overrated) Simpson­Bowles, Domenici­Rivlin, the "Gang of Six" – not one of them suggested cutting food stamps.

What's more, the hue and cry about widespread food-stamp "fraud" is belied by the facts. The Agriculture Department reported earlier this year that only 2.8 percent of all food-stamp benefits had been provided to people who were ineligible or had received a larger payment than they should have – and it said that the majority of the overpayments had been the result of inadvertent mistakes by caseworkers or recipients. As for the widespread view that food-stamp recipients are selling food stamps for cash, the department reports that such trafficking involves only one percent of benefits.

The fact that the size of the food-stamp program had more than doubled from nearly $38 billion in 2008 to $82 billion this year of course fed suspicions that there was a tremendous number of new cheaters, or that Obama had loosened the rules for getting on the program. Politicians who made such charges overlooked the fairly obvious fact that beginning in 2008 this country suffered the greatest recession since the Depression. A study published in August by the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research found that most of that increase was attributable to the recession.

None of this got in the way of legislators who lived by homilies about self-reliance when the House took up the issue of reauthorizing the farm bill in June, amid many warnings that the bill was on shaky ground. The Agriculture Committee, which, like so much else in Washington, had been caught up in the House's drift to the right, cut the food-stamp program by $20.5 billion over 10 years. The ranking Democrat, Collin Peterson from Minnesota, cautioned the Republican leadership that this large cut endangered Democratic support for the farm bill and warned that if amendments favored by the extreme right were adopted on the House floor, the whole thing might go down. But Cantor, he of the Southern drawl, icy smile and dagger poised at John Boehner's back, had his own agenda.

Despite these warnings, when the bill came to the House floor, Cantor promoted an amendment sponsored by Rep. Steve Southerland, a Tea Party member from Florida, that imposed harsh and unrealistic new conditions, euphemistically called "work requirements," for receiving food-stamp benefits. Southerland isn't a member of the Agriculture Committee, so this was an end run by Cantor and Southerland around its chairman and Republican membership.

Nevertheless, the Republican leadership was stunned and stung when the farm bill was voted down by the House on June 20th by 234 to 195. Only 24 Democrats supported it and 62 Republicans voted against it – most of them on the grounds that the cuts weren't deep enough. The bill was essentially a victim of the crossfire between the Democrats who thought the food-stamp cuts were too harsh and the Republicans who thought the program hadn't been cut enough.

Cantor, in a bit of a bind, now had to find a way to extricate the leadership from their embarrassment over losing the farm bill. He had two choices: Drop the Southerland amendment, moderate the committee's food-stamp cuts and pass the farm bill with the support of the traditional bipartisan coalition – or appease the far right by splitting the bill into two, which many conservatives had sought. Conservatives were never comfortable with their farm subsidies being polluted by its coexistence with food stamps, and they failed to understand that this had helped their favored agricultural subsidies survive. This would of course make the food-stamp program more vulnerable. Despite the strenuous objections of Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, who, by the strength of his office, would ordinarily be treated with some deference by the leadership, Cantor decided to split the bill. Both bills would have to be passed overwhelmingly – or entirely – with Republican votes. The bipartisan accommodation of more than 40 years was now shelved.

With agricultural interests clamoring for a farm bill to be enacted by the end of September, when the existing program was set to expire, a second one, now consisting of agricultural matters only, was brought up in the House on July 11th, and it was narrowly passed by a vote of 216 to 208. All the Democrats who voted opposed the bill, and they were joined by 12 Republicans.

But Cantor still had to decide what to do with the newly separate food-stamp bill. After a few weeks of quiet meetings with members from both of his party's factions, he threw in with the forces on the right. He awarded the Tea Party radicals a trophy by imposing another $19 billion in cuts to the food-stamp program – on top of the $20.5 billion the Agriculture Committee had already approved.

The GOP's Real Agenda

But his most spectacular and dangerous move was to urge the inclusion of the Southerland amendment. Among other things, this amendment gave hard-strapped states a financial incentive to throw people off the food-stamp program by allowing them to pocket half the federal funds that would have been spent on food stamps and use them any way they wished. This preposterous bribery proposal goes back to atavistic divisions that had bedeviled the food-stamp program in the House from the beginning. (All along, it was more popular in the Senate.) Back in the Sixties, the program was designed to be paid for entirely by federal funds after a huge fight erupted between food stamps' early backers and the Republican-allied "Boll Weevils" from cotton-growing Southern states who wanted states to provide matching funds – which would have been a convenient way to kill the program.

This remarkably mean-spirited food-stamp bill, brought up on September 19th, was passed by a vote of 217 to 210 – even narrower and more partisan than the vote on the farm bill. Every Democrat who voted opposed the Southerland amendment, and they were joined by 15 Republicans, most from districts in the North that weren't safe Republican seats.

Inside the Republican Suicide Machine

The amendment raised an obscure second-term member from Panama City, Florida, a conservative area in the Panhandle, to sudden prominence. But there's strong evidence that Southerland was the instrument of others – in particular, Cantor. Cantor, along with Paul Ryan and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, was a co-founder of the "Young Guns," formed for the 2008 election to search out promising conservative candidates – among them Southerland – and groom them for election. Those who won, and many did in 2010, were expected, according to the Young Guns website, to "play a vital role in keeping our Republican team on offense and help build a lasting and productive Republican majority for the American people."

Southerland has received contributions from Koch Industries and Cantor's Every Republican Is Crucial PAC, which contributed more than $2 million to congressional candidates, most of them highly conservative. Like many Tea Party members, Southerland had no political experience before he ran for the House in 2010, defeating a long-serving conservative Democrat. A prosperous inheritor of a family funeral­home business – his estimated worth in 2010 was nearly $3 million – Southerland is given to homilies about the virtue of hard work and self-reliance. A few days after the food-stamp bill passed, he told a group of unemployed people at a job-training center in Washington, D.C., "I believe work is the greatest gift that you will receive."

The amendment with Southerland's name on it had actually been written by a mysterious and highly conservative organization of 17 state secretaries of human services and workforce agencies called the Secretary's Innovation Group, or SIG, that appeared out of nowhere a couple of years ago and started issuing policy papers and testifying before congressional committees. The thrust of their work reflected the arch-conservative views of Jason Turner, the group's executive director, who had published his own policy papers. In February of this year, Turner testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, where he presented what was to become the Southerland amendment. Southerland was so excited about these ideas that Cantor made him the public face of these schemes for throwing more people off food-stamp rolls and making them inaccessible to many, many others who would otherwise qualify.

As is typical of the groups on the far right that have sprung up or gained new prominence in the past few years, SIG has connections with the conservative Heritage Foundation, where Turner is a visiting fellow. Heritage is run by Jim DeMint, the former South Carolina senator who had managed to annoy many of his Republican colleagues by promoting Tea Party candidates for the Senate (and in the process blowing opportunities for the Republicans to take several seats) before resigning his own seat to take leadership of Heritage earlier this year. Not exactly of a scholarly bent, DeMint has steered Heritage in a far more political direction than before: He was a mentor to Ted Cruz as Cruz conducted his bootless effort to force the defunding of Obamacare, by threatening to shut down the government. Heritage is funded by (unsurprisingly) the Koch brothers and some of the nation's largest corporations, among them defense contractors Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, insurance companies such as Allstate, and drug manufacturers like GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer Inc.

So-called reform groups like SIG use anodyne language that masks their true intent: For example, SIG's stated goal in regard to food stamps is "promoting employment and self-sufficiency for able-bodied, working-age recipients." Who's to argue against that? The problem was its proposals have nothing to do with helping the unemployed find jobs. In connection with its most unusual bribery system, it allowed states to deny or terminate an entire family's food-stamp benefits if a parent wasn't employed or enlisted in a job-training program – even if there weren't any jobs or training programs in the vicinity. It forbade waivers, thus closing the trap on the able-bodied unemployed in areas where jobs are scarce.

In sum, the House-passed food-stamp bill would throw 3.8 million low-income Americans off the food-stamp program in 2014, while reducing benefits to many others. In a statement he issued at the time, Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, ripped into the Republicans for their misleading portrayal of their "reforms" by adding "work requirements." On the contrary, he said, "These provisions would end food-stamp assistance for large numbers of people who want to work, are looking for jobs and will take a workfare or job-training placement, but who cannot find a job in a weak labor market."

Where does all this leave not just the food-stamp program but also the country? Both have been the subject, or the victim, of narrow-gauged fanatics who observe no boundaries and in their recklessness have left a lot of wreckage in their wake. The Senate has passed a unified farm bill containing the food-stamp program. The bill cuts $4 billion from the program by addressing a widely recognized, unintended loophole in the way benefits are paid out. House-Senate negotiations are to occur, and Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow says that the issue won't be over the difference between the figures of $4 billion and $39 billion, but over the policies that produced those figures. She had no intention of meeting the House halfway or accepting its extremist policies. The bribery provision, she says, leaves her speechless.

Even Before the Shutdown, House Republicans Couldn't Get Anything Done

Whatever happens in the short term, the longer-term question is whether the damage done to many areas of governance and policy that reflect long-standing American values and the delicate balances that have kept American democracy going can ever be repaired.

This story is from the November 7th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-republicans-war-on-the-poor-20131024#ixzz2jVNj3URG
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You're Paying A Ton To Subsidize Fast Food's Poverty Wages 

 The Huffington Post  |  Posted: 10/18/2013 2:39 pm EDT  |

 

Taxpayers spend about $7 billion per year to help pay workers who are employed by an industry that rakes in $200 billion annually.
That's because the fast food industry's notoriously low wages force more than half of fast food workers to rely on some form of government assistance like food stamps or Medicaid to get by, a study from the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently found.
An analysis of the Berkeley/UI data from the left-leaning National Employment Law Project breaks down how much low-wages at the 10 biggest fast food chains are costing taxpayers. (Story continues below.)

Infographic by Alissa Scheller for the Huffington Post
These findings reflect the bleak reality of the low-wage recovery. Nearly 70 percent of the new jobs created since the end of the recession have been in low-wage sectors like fast food and retail and they’ve replaced largely middle-income jobs.
Representatives from the fast food industry say the sector is creating millions of jobs that pay competitive wages.
As representatives from Burger King and Dunkin’ Donuts note, many of the chains are largely run by franchisees. Often they operate on slim profit margins, making a wage boost difficult. In a statement made earlier this week, McDonald’s emphasized that the company and its franchisees provide vast numbers of entry level jobs with opportunities for advancement.
The National Restaurant Association, an industry trade group, wrote in a statement that given these factors and others, the Berkeley/UI data and NELP analysis were "misleading."
“(The studies) fail to recognize that the majority of lower-wage employees works part-time to supplement a family income,” Scott DeFife, the restaurant association’s executive vice president of policy and government affairs, wrote in an e-mailed statement.

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