The GOP War on the Suburbs

If one looks at the agenda of the modern day Republican Party, its main focus is on tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and a severe slashing of social programs and government infrastructure spending.  Ironically, these policies increasingly attack the suburbs which are the trues battleground for political victory.  Outside of rural areas and wealthy enclaves, it's the suburbs that elect Republicans.  Yet despite this reality, poverty is increasing in suburban areas and the GOP is adverse to any policies that might help the battered middle class.  The question becomes one of when will suburban voters realize that the GOP is actually their enemy.  A piece in Politico looks at the changes over taking the suburbs and the damage being done by the GOP's policies.  Here are excerpts:

[S]uburbs define our politics, too. While city dwellers overwhelmingly vote Democratic, and residents of small towns and rural areas vote for Republicans by large margins, suburbs are the quintessential political battlegrounds.

But now suburbs are helping define another American phenomenon: poverty. Over the past decade, America’s major suburbs have become home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country. Between 2000 and 2011, the number of poor residents in suburbia grew by almost two-thirds, or 64 percent — more than double the pace of poverty growth in the large cities that anchor these regions. For the first time, more poor people in America live in suburbs than in big cities.

Despite poverty’s increasing suburbanization and bipartisan character, it is not exactly catching fire as a key issue on Capitol Hill. One recent debate in which poverty has surfaced most prominently concerns the reauthorization of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, with the House GOP leadership advancing a proposal to cut $40 billion in spending over 10 years. The burden of those cuts would fall more squarely on suburbs than ever now that 55 percent of SNAP participants in major metro areas live in suburbs. Programs like SNAP, the Earned Income Tax Credit and Medicaid already deliver the majority of their benefits to suburban communities, many of which are squarely in the GOP column.

The ways in which the current system approaches initiatives such as neighborhood economic development, community health centers and affordable housing construction are often a poor fit for suburban areas where poverty is more spread out, public and nonprofit capacity is thin and hundreds of small municipalities routinely compete with one another rather than collaborate to address shared challenges like growing poverty.

 

Over the past few decades, poverty has become an increasingly structural feature of the American economy. In all likelihood, suburban poverty is here to stay. The battleground character of suburbs could set the stage for more ideological trench warfare and gridlock over federal anti-poverty policy and a suburban replay of the challenges that have beleaguered our inner cities over the last few decades. Or it could spur a bipartisan effort to convert top-down federal programs of old into support for new bottom-up solutions to urban and suburban poverty alike. The future of suburbs — as an American ideal and political keystone — may hang in the balance.

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The Real Sins of Sodom and Gomorrah - An Indictment of the Far Right

This blog often looks at what I deem to be hypocrites and hypocrisy.  It's something that makes it impossible to not talk about the Republican Party, the Christofascists and those who strut about with religion on their sleeves.  Especially those who incessantly condemn gays by grasping a few selective Bible passages and then twisting them to condemn others.  A piece in Formerly Fundie looks at the hypocrisy of too many Americans and points out that the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah really applies to them, not necessarily gays.  The author is kinder than I am because he fails to specifically target the far right Republicans and the Christofascists/Tea Party.   But what he describes is them, plain and simple.  Here are highlights from the post that is dead on target:

On election day in 2012, I received an e-mail from someone who had been my friend for 16 years. He had been growing dismayed with the changes I went through during my 4 years at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, especially my new-found passion for biblical social justice, my advocacy for the poor, and my defense of immigrants. Having spent years wrestling with scripture at seminary and working that out within the context of a community of believers, I broke with conservative politics for the first time in my life, and voted to re-elect Barack Obama. This, clearly, was the last straw in what I thought was a life-long friendship.

His reference of “sins so grave”, was the sin of “sodomy”, which he claims Obama is guilty of (via his support of Gay Marriage). This caused me to realize that in American Christianity, we have completely lost sight of the biblical sin of sodomy– which in the Bible, had a completely different meaning than what it does now.

[T]he most direct reference regarding the sin of Sodom in the Bible,  is what helps us no longer view this story as being about someone else:

Ezekiel 16

⁴⁹ “‘Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. ⁵⁰ They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.”

Here we have it…

Sodom was arrogant.

Sodom was overfed.

Sodom was unconcerned for the poor and needy.

Sodom was disdainfully proud (haughty).

Am I saying that the sins of Sodom are absent sexual immorality? Certainly not. Please don’t misread this post. The point of this article is that too often, we find a story of sin and judgment and find a way to make it about themwhen really it includes us.

The story of Sodom, includes us. Their sins are our sins.

We are arrogant and haughty.

We don’t like the word arrogant, so instead we use a term called “American Exceptionalism” to express how different and special we are. ² During the Presidential Elections, I was disgusted by the nationalistic arrogance expressed by both candidates. I cringed as I heard President Obama say that “America is the greatest country on earth”, and wanted to yell “heretic” when I heard Romney say that America was “the hope of the earth.” ³

As a world traveler, I learned early on that Americans are perceived as “rich, loud, and proud” by the rest of the world, and this is not an unwarranted stereotype.

We are overfed.

While 870 millionpeople go hungry in the world and early 5 million children die every year due to malnutrition, America throws nearly half our food in the trash.

We have more food than we know what to do with, so we toss it away at a rate of 400lbs per person, per year.

We live in the country of “bigger and better” while 1 of 4 children in the world is stunted due to lack of healthy food.

We are unconcerned for the poor and needy.

This isn’t to say that we’re not concerned at all; I know a lot of Americans who do great things for the poor and needy among us and around the world.

However, as a culture, we are not nearly as concerned as we should be and far too many of us are concerned only for ourselves. Just look at the cultural shift which has occurred in our nation in the past few years with the birth of the Tea Party– a party who’s basic platform is: “leave me alone and get your damn hands off my money”. As Americans, we want what is ours. We are intoxicated with protecting our money and our “rights.” While the rest of the world is living on dollars a day, eating two bowls of rice and having to drink water tainted with human feces, we’re concerned with making sure that our pizza arrives hot enough, that we get a great parking spot at the mall, and advocating to ensure we don’t have to wait for a background check before we buy our assault weapons.

We fight against ensuring the poorest among us have access to healthcare, so that we can keep more of what’s “ours”.

As I write this, the US House of Representatives is pending a vote to cut $20 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which would put nearly 2 million people off a program designed to help them out of poverty. Meanwhile, we have no problem with runaway military budgets, over-the-top executive salaries, unscrupulous lending practices, and tax reductions which tend to benefit the wealthy.

We might not all be unconcerned, but a good portion of American culture is unconcerned– just like Sodom.

It's no coincidence that the cult of American exceptionalism, obesity and poverty combined with a lack of social programs/safety nets tend to be the worse in the Bible Belt.

 

On election day in 2012, I received an e-mail from someone who had been my friend for 16 years. He had been growing dismayed with the changes I went through during my 4 years at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, especially my new-found passion for biblical social justice, my advocacy for the poor, and my defense of immigrants. Having spent years wrestling with scripture at seminary and working that out within the context of a community of believers, I broke with conservative politics for the first time in my life, and voted to re-elect Barack Obama. This, clearly, was the last straw in what I thought was a life-long friendship. - See more at: http://www.formerlyfundie.com/sodom-gomorrah-a-story-about-us-and-not-for-the-reasons-you-think/#sthash.llhDOYlL.G6xSp2iq.dpuf

On election day in 2012, I received an e-mail from someone who had been my friend for 16 years. He had been growing dismayed with the changes I went through during my 4 years at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, especially my new-found passion for biblical social justice, my advocacy for the poor, and my defense of immigrants. Having spent years wrestling with scripture at seminary and working that out within the context of a community of believers, I broke with conservative politics for the first time in my life, and voted to re-elect Barack Obama. This, clearly, was the last straw in what I thought was a life-long friendship. - See more at: http://www.formerlyfundie.com/sodom-gomorrah-a-story-about-us-and-not-for-the-reasons-you-think/#sthash.llhDOYlL.G6xSp2iq.dpuf

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Republicans Against Reality

One of the Republican Party's biggest hurdles in the coming years is overcoming the control of the party grassroots by those who live in an alternate universe from objective reality.  Yes, once again I am talking about the Christofascists and Tea Party nutcases who now make up much of the GOP base.  Science and knowledge continue to advance and the demographic make up of the country continues to change, yet the GOP base wants to return to a 1950 world when minorities were subservient (and segregated in the South), gays were invisible, and unwarranted deference to religion was perhaps at its height.  Paul Krugman looks at this GOP disconnect from reality in a column in the New York Times.  Here are excepts:

Last week House Republicans voted for the 40th time to repeal Obamacare. Like the previous 39 votes, this action will have no effect whatsoever. But it was a stand-in for what Republicans really want to do: repeal reality, and the laws of arithmetic in particular. The sad truth is that the modern G.O.P. is lost in fantasy, unable to participate in actual governing. 

I may believe that Republicans have their priorities all wrong, but that’s not the issue here. Instead, I’m talking about their apparent inability to accept very basic reality constraints . . .

Am I exaggerating? Consider what went down in Congress last week. 

First, House leaders had to cancel planned voting on a transportation bill, because not enough representatives were willing to vote for the bill’s steep spending cuts. Now, just a few months ago House Republicans approved an extreme austerity budget, mandating severe overall cuts in federal spending — and each specific bill will have to involve large cuts in order to meet that target. But it turned out that a significant number of representatives, while willing to vote for huge spending cuts as long as there weren’t any specifics, balked at the details.

Then House leaders announced plans to hold a vote cutting spending on food stamps in half — a demand that is likely to sink the already struggling effort to agree with the Senate on a farm bill. 

Then they held the pointless vote on Obamacare, apparently just to make themselves feel better. (It’s curious how comforting they find the idea of denying health care to millions of Americans.)

In other words, Republicans, confronted with the responsibilities of governing, essentially threw a tantrum, then ran off to sulk. 

How did the G.O.P. get to this point? On budget issues, the proximate source of the party’s troubles lies in the decision to turn the formulation of fiscal policy over to a con man. Representative Paul Ryan, . . .  What’s happening now is that the G.O.P. is trying to convert Mr. Ryan’s big talk into actual legislation — and is finding, unsurprisingly, that it can’t be done. Yet Republicans aren’t willing to face up to that reality. Instead, they’re just running away. 

When it comes to fiscal policy, then, Republicans have fallen victim to their own con game. . . . . For a long time the Republican establishment got its way by playing a con game with the party’s base. Voters would be mobilized as soldiers in an ideological crusade, fired up by warnings that liberals were going to turn the country over to gay married terrorists, not to mention taking your hard-earned dollars and giving them to Those People. Then, once the election was over, the establishment would get on with its real priorities — deregulation and lower taxes on the wealthy.

At this point, however, the establishment has lost control. Meanwhile, base voters actually believe the stories they were told. . . . .  And the party establishment can’t get the base to accept fiscal or political reality without, in effect, admitting to those base voters that they were lied to.

What makes this frightening is that Republicans do, in fact, have a majority in the House, so America can’t be governed at all unless a sufficient number of those House Republicans are willing to face reality. And that quorum of reasonable Republicans may not exist.

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Eric Cantor and House GOP Seek More Cuts in Food Stamps

One of the things that always strikes me about the House Republicans is that they constantly prostitute themselves to the Christofascists and proclaim their worship of Judeo-Christian morality, yet then push policies and positions that are 180 degrees opposite of what the Gospel message would have one do.  Instead of feeding the hungry, aiding the sick, etc., the GOP seeks to demolish the social safety net and throw millions of Americans on the trash heap.  The hypocrisy is amazing.  Equally stunning is the fact that the mainstream media never calls them on this hypocrisy.  Now, in keeping with its war on the poor and needy, the GOP House is seeking further slashing of the food stamp program.  Politico has high lights:

House Republicans are proposing to double their food stamp savings to nearly $40 billion by rolling back waivers for able-bodied adults and targeting funds to states that are willing to impose greater work requirements on the parents of young children.

The prime mover is Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) who helped jettison the nutrition title from the House farm bill last month and is now trying to write his own version before the House goes to conference with the Senate.

The prime target appears to be able-bodied beneficiaries under 50 years old and without dependents — a population that has grown significantly since 2008 because of the bad economy and increased state waivers of a 20-hour-a-week work requirement.

By rolling back these waivers, large savings are possible, essentially by forcing millions off the rolls if they don’t find work after three months. Unless approached with some care, the impact could be severe in areas of chronically high-unemployment, such as the Rio Grande Valley, poor urban areas and Indian reservations, for example. And the final details of the bill have not been made public.

A second area of more modest but still controversial savings would come from using federal funds to pressure states to take a more aggressive welfare reform-like approach imposing work requirements on able-bodied parents with young children.

Currently Washington provides a 50 percent match for states that spend their own funds for employment and training programs for food stamp recipients. As proposed now, the bill would only provide this aid if the state is willing to operate welfare reform-like work activities for mothers with children over 1- years-old.

This is a significant expansion of the current food stamps work rules, which exempt mothers with children under 6.

Peterson said his great fear is that the Cantor effort will only raise the stakes on the food stamp cuts to the point where any compromise with be unacceptable to conservatives and make it harder for Democrats to step back in and help pass the final report from the House-Senate conference.

Cantor is a vile individual and an embarrassment to Virginia. 

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Publix – Employee Owned Company Touted By Forbes As ‘Wal-Mart Slayer’

I will readily admit that I do not like Wal-Mart and deliberately go out of my way to never spend a penny at that retailer.  In many ways Wal-Mart defines what is wrong with much of corporate America nowadays: employees paid serf like wages and greed the main motivation for management and shareholders.  I simply have not desire to in any way subsidize such a company.  Thus, it was interesting to come a cross an article the suggests that Wal-Mart may have met its match in Publix, a Florida based retailer that we frequent when we are in Florida.  Publix is employee owned and stresses both customer service and paying employees a living wage.  Here are highlights from the article:

Walmart, its very name brings with it an image of a soulless corporation, a company which abuses its employees down so much that they will rip the company to shreds on their own internal website when asked. A company reliant on government assistance to keep its employees able to even eat. It is a recipe for disaster. And those who follow the teachings of Milton Friedman and other objectivist economists would try and explain that this is absolutely required for a successful company. But don’t tell that to Publix, which now sits as the most profitable grocer in the United States, holding a remarkable 52.8% of the grocery market in highly competitive Florida, against Walmart’s 14.5%.

How does Publix do it? Are they even more soul crushing, seeking to demoralize employees to the point that they are wage slaves, like McDonald’s does? The opposite, Publix is an employee owned corporation. You read that right, employee owned. The company does well, then the employees do well. This gives your average employee of Publix a stake in improving the companies bottom line, thanks to regular dividends. They do this by retaining customers, through excellent customer service. Even Forbes magazine has come to recognize that the Publix business model is a “Walmart Slayer.” And to add to the fears of the Beast of Bentonville, Publix is expanding into new markets, just as other companies are copying the Publix model.

Publix, through its focus on its staff and customer service, is able to beat Walmart’s shareholder returns, with a compound growth of 18% per year, as opposed to Walmart’s 10.5%. Of course, Walmart is a publicly traded company, while Publix is owned by its employees, so if someone wishes to invest in Publix, they would first need to begin working for Publix, and their rate of ownership is based on their wages. This encourages the hardest workers, those who dedicate themselves to the company, giving them a real stake in the company as they labor.

Publix began 1930 by George Jenkins, and was mocked by other grocers when he opened for offering amenities like chairs to relax in and air conditioning for the customers, combined with award-winning customer service. His store prospered during the Great Depression due to this employee and customer centered model of doing business.

The tragedy for Walmart is that the very model which Publix is an excellent example of, was once touted by Sam Walton himself. He firmly believed that workers who were invested in the company became more motivated, and motivated employees brought in happy customers. Sam Walton would be spinning in his grave if he were to read what the employees of his company thought of it today.

Walmart may have met its match, and its name is Publix.

Disclosure:  My past client, Michael Moore - of the Moore v. Virginia Museum of Natural History - is the stepson of one of George Jenkin's heirs.  She's a wonderful lady and an ardent gay rights supporter.

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Quote of the Day: The Heartless and Mean Spirited GOP

In addition to needing a lobotomy and/or the IQ of a cretin, in order to be a Republican nowadays one needs to be at best morally bankrupt and/or one who holds the Gospel message of Christ - a figure the GOP base claims to revere - in utter contempt.  How else to explain the GOP House's passage of massive corporate handouts to corporate farming while eliminating any funding for food stamps.  Isn't feeding hungry children core to the Gospel message?  Michael Kinsley describes today's GOP well in a piece in The New Republic.  Here is the money quote:

[T]he Republican-controlled House has chopped off and discarded food stamps. (The program is now called “SNAP”—an acronym for something or other.) It’s like amputating a gangrenous limb, then keeping the limb and discarding the rest of the body.

Forget about kids going to bed hungry. (Melodramatic, but accurate.) Can this possibly be good politics? Are there actually people out there waiting for a candidate who will kill the food stamp program? It takes your breath away. The Republicans have now cornered the heartless vote. But are there enough heartless people in this country to counterbalance the sane people fleeing the other way?

The net effect of the farm bill, as it stands now in the House, is to take money away from a successful program for making sure that no one starves, and giving it to a variety of programs whose goal is to raise the price of food, for the poor and everyone else. Even if you only care about how things look, this does not look good, it seems to me.

As I have said many times, the GOP has become something truly ugly.  And the transformation began when the Christofascists hijacked the party grass roots.  The sickness continues to fester.

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The GOP’s "Principled" Suicide

Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker floats back and forth between la la land apologies for the Republican Party to clear eyed recognition that the GOP is drifting further and further into extremism and likely long term political death.  In a column in the Washington Post she is back in reality based mode and lambasts the GOP controlled House of Representatives for passing a farm bill devoid of any provisions for food stamps.  Here are highlights:

Republicans seem to be adopting the self-immolation tactics of principled martyrs.  Of course, principled or not, you’re still dead in the end.

At this stage in the second term of the president they couldn’t defeat, Republicans seem more like stubborn children refusing to come out of their rooms for supper, even though the alternative is going to bed hungry.

This simile is unavoidable in light of the House’s passage of a farm bill without any provision for food stamps — the first in 40 years. The move prompted fantastic outrage from Democrats, notably Rep. Corrine Brown (Fla.), who shrieked: “Mitt Romney was right: You all do not care about the 47 percent. Shame on you!”

Republicans argued that they’d prefer to deal with agricultural issues in one bill without the leverage of a welfare program.

These two programs historically were tied together in the spirit of — watch out now — compromise. And, though food stamps certainly will be funded, probably at current levels, through some other vehicle, Republicans managed to create yet another partisan problem where none existed and opened themselves up for gratuitous criticism.   Was this really the right fight at the right time?

The wrong time would be in the midst of the politically life-altering debate on immigration reform. Again, congressional Republicans want to parse reform in pieces, excluding the 11 million or so immigrants here illegally, instead of dealing with reform comprehensively, as the Senate has done — and as most Americans think necessary.

90 percent of life is picking your battles, and congressional Republicans keep picking the wrong ones. This is not true of all. Former Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has joined Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.) to push comprehensive immigration reform.

Republicans are not shooting straight when they insist that the Senate bill’s path to citizenship is de facto amnesty. As paths go, it’s a 13-year pilgrimage along a precipice lined with bramble bushes — taxes, fines and various burning hoops through which one must leap in order to stand in line. Hardly rose-petal strewn.

Republican intransigence is further compounded by the echo chamber of the Tinker Bell Coalition — the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol and National Review’s Rich Lowry, who recently co-authored an editorial urging Republicans to drive a stake through the heart of immigration reform.
These are the same two who thought Sarah Palin would be the perfect running mate for John McCain.
. . . fairy dust has a way of contaminating the Republican Way of Thinking. Before you can govern, you have to win. And before you can win, you have to offer something people want to buy.

What Republicans are selling appeals to an ever-diminishing market that doesn’t even include their erstwhile allies in business and industry. And their self-immolation may prove to have been nothing more than a bonfire of vanities.

Ouch!!!  She's right, of course.  Increasingly the House GOP cares nothing for what a majority of Americans want or think.  It's all about pleasing the spittle flecked Christofascists and the knuckle dragging Neanderthals of the Tea Party.

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GOP Excludes Food Stamps from Farm Bill

For a political party that falls all over itself pretending to honor - indeed worship - Christian values, the passage of a GOP Farm Bill yesterday that excluded any funding for Food Stamps (which were described as one of "some extraneous pieces") demonstrates that the hypocrisy of today's Republicans is now complete.  How is one honoring the Gospel message of feeding the hungry and caring for the poor when one votes for passage of legislation that kicks their poor and hungry to the curb?  These modern day Pharisee truly would like to see the poor just die off and disappear.  Especially if they are non-white.  Mitt Romney's "the 47%" comment did indeed show today's real GOP.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this disgusting display of GOP hypocrisy and selfishness:

There was a rare moment of candor on the House floor this week.  Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.), a committee chairman and the man who led House Republicans to their majority in 2010, was explaining why he and his colleagues decided to drop the food stamp program from the farm bill. 

“What we have carefully done is exclude some extraneous pieces,” he said.  Extraneous? For almost 50 years, food stamps have been part of the annual farm bill, and the $80 billion spent on the program keeps tens of millions of Americans, about half of them children, from going hungry.

Without a single Democratic vote, House Republicans narrowly passed a bill that, if allowed to stand, would provide hundreds of billions of dollars in agriculture subsidies but not a dime for the hungry. Happily, Americans are unlikely to starve as a result of Thursday’s vote because the Senate won’t allow the House’s farm bill to become law if the food stamp program isn’t restored.

But as a political matter, the food stamp folly shows just what a difficult situation Republican leaders find themselves in. For the second time in two days, they had been forced to placate conservatives in their own ranks by taking a position that alienates crucial segments of the electorate.

On Wednesday, the House GOP caucus huddled and determined that, because of conservatives’ objections, they would not take up the bipartisan Senate immigration bill, or any major immigration legislation, anytime soon.

. . . . inviting new charges that Republicans are hostile to racial minorities — 36 percent of food stamp beneficiaries are identified as white — and the poor. 

Today's "conservatives" - most of whom describe themselves as "godly Christians" - are horrible people who care nothing about others and add daily fuel to why one would never be described as a Christian.  

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