Don't Make Me Look

I ask myself what it is I want done about "the homeless problem"?

• How do we house everybody?
• Can we house everybody?
• How do we identify the causes &/or the remedies?
• and and and

When I hear somebody either fretting about "those poor people", or spouting off about "lazy bums", I don't know if they want to do something positive about it, or if they just don't want to see it - like they want to sweep up "the undesirables" and dispose of them.

These problems of homelessness - and migration - and the cycle of poverty, ignorance, and crime are just going to get worse.

In fact, these problems are starting to accelerate as Climate Change picks up the pace.

And as the problems driven by migration due to Climate Change increase, so will the political desire for a "strong hand to keep it all in line."

Weirdly, as efforts to solve problems become more dependent on collective action, we get more resistance from the "rugged individualist" crowd, while at the same time, they push for a strong leader to bring us all together to make the bad things go away - or something like that. It's all very contradictory, and the harder I try to make sense of it, the more it hurts my brain.

Crisis is the surest way to get people to give up their individuality and knuckle under to top-down authoritarian rule.

Seems pretty clear that's why we hear Republicans telling us about

1. Crisis at the border
2. Crisis of crime
3. Crisis of illegal immigrants
4. Crisis of National Debt
5. Crisis of inflation
6. Caravans
7. Fentanyl
8. Cartels
9. MS13
10. Dangerous vaccines
11. Antifa
12. 5G mind control
13. Weather weapons
14. (go to #1 above)

We hear about nothing but one crisis for a few days, and then it's on to next, and then on to the next, and on and on and on, until the rubes are ready to start it over.

Enough of this crap already. I'm sick to fuckin' death of this attempt at Government By WWE Promo - we tried that - it's bullshit.

Given me calm, competent, believable leadership, along with an opposition party that can offer something other than cruelty, immiseration and death.

Paraphrasing Bill Clinton:

These are our problems.

Can you help us solve them?

These are our opportunities.

Can you help us seize them?

These are our fears.

Can you help us ease them?

These are our dreams.

Can you help us achieve them?

Just Going For Better

On people's problem with virtue signaling:

Are you complaining that I believe myself to be virtuous, or is it just that I'm stating my values, indicating I think those values are virtuous, and you object to that?

Are you saying you're in opposition to those values, and that we need to hash it out?

We should talk.

Some takeaways:

1. It's not poverty in America. It's poverty by America
2. LBJ's War On Poverty reduced the number of poor Americans by 45% in about 10 years
3. FDR's Social Security has cut Elder Poverty by 90% in some states
4. Biden's COVID Rescue Plan cut childhood poverty by more than 50% - in about 8 months
5. 38 million Americans live below the poverty line
6. 12 million kids live in poverty - almost 1 out of every 6
7. It's very expensive to be poor in America

Stop speaking the language of Scarcity, and start realizing the language of Plenty.

Ms Amy Jo Hutchison

A little over a year ago, and what have we heard from guys like Joe Manchin (D-WV)?

Not much more than "Gee whiz, it's just too expensive to help anybody"

The cost of treating someone's cholecystitis in the local ER because they couldn't afford their gallbladder meds is a lot higher than just caring for that patient on the preventative side of things.

At first blush, I'm amazed at how stoopid "the smart guys" can be when it comes to understanding the basics of risk management and harm reduction and preventive medicine.

But these are not smart guys behaving stupidly - these are smart guys taking these actions (or non-actions) for reasons that just aren't as apparent to us as they should be.

So the huge extra cost of treating that gallbladder attack instead of preventing it becomes part of the scheme to capture profit by externalizing cost.

Privatized income and socialized outlay.

Letters From The Real America

The National Review:

Operation Santa Is a Horror Story About American Poverty
Children have written requesting money for their parents, a bed to sleep in, and a better wheelchair to help them get around. There’s nothing feel-good about it.

On a cloudy Christmas Eve in 1907, Mary McGann, a 10-year-old Irish girl living in Hell’s Kitchen with her younger brother and mother, wrote a letter to Santa Claus. “I am very glad that you are coming around tonight. My little brother would like you to bring him a wagon which I know you cannot afford. I will ask you to bring him whatever you think…. Please bring me something nice (sic) what you think best,” she asked. “P.S. Please do not forget the poor.”

The letter never made it to Santa; it was discovered 90 years later stashed in between the bricks of the tenement’s fireplace. But that same year, the New York City branch of the USPS informally implemented “Operation Santa,” an unusually whimsical government program that allowed Postal Service employees (and volunteers with the “Santa Claus Association”) to respond, as Santa, to the thousands of New York children attempting to contact St. Nick. Postmaster Frank Hitchcock would integrate the program in 1912 to include the entirety of the Post Office, making “Operation Santa” an official government program. After 1940, the program allowed charitable organizations, private firms, and laypeople to “adopt” the letters of kids living in poverty and fulfill their Christmas wishes. The film Miracle on 34th Street references the endeavor, and Johnny Carson made a habit of reading some of the letters on The Tonight Show. The program has grown to the point where it connected 13,000 children to donors, a total that may well be doubled in 2020. This year, the letters have been digitized, and if you’re interested in adopting a letter, you can go to the Operation Santa website and browse through the hopes and desires of thousands of children across the country.

But what these letters demonstrate, far better than any PSA or statistical model, is how violent American poverty truly is. They also provide a counterbalance to the ways childhood poverty is depicted in popular media, where poor kids often serve as a way for a protagonist to demonstrate their generosity, from Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol to the demented poverty porn of the holiday pop hit “Christmas Shoes.”

Scrolling through the photocopied and slightly redacted letters—inscribed with the chunky block letters unique to children—one is confronted with brief yet startling descriptions of desperate need:

Dear Santa, I want one thing. (sic) I been a good girl and I want to ask you if you please get me a power wheelchair. My wheelchair is very old and it does not want to work. I am very sad. Please Santa, bring me a power wheelchair. I don’t want nothing else.

“Dear Santa ... My wish is money for my (sic) perents. $100 dollars would help us a lot. They are having a rough time with the bills.”

“Dear Santa, how are you and your reindeer? It must be cool riding a sled in the sky.... this year for Christmas I would really like a couch that is also a bed. The reason I would like a couch with a bed is because I have a[n] apartment that only has one room. My parents sleep in the living room on the couch and they always wake up with back pain. My dad works a lot, so his back pain stresses him out.”

Even prior to the pandemic, the United States lagged other developed nations in child poverty levels. More than one out of every five American children lives in poverty, according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development data. As the pandemic continues to exacerbate the underlying crisis of American poverty, 45 percent of all children now live in households that have recently struggled with routine expenses, according to a report out this month from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, or CBPP. Black and Latino households have been especially impacted by the economic starvation that the mishandling of this pandemic has wrought, and these populations were already disproportionately likely to grow up poor.

But it’s long been easy for most upper middle-class people to ignore poverty, especially child poverty. Americans like to think of themselves as generous people; we don’t want to imagine that there are little girls writing to Santa for a new wheelchair.

When the political scientist and activist Michael Harrington wrote The Other America, his seminal 1962 study of American poverty, he intentionally undercounted the amount of poor citizens because he thought his readership would not accept such astonishing numbers. He couldn’t even believe it himself: “I had all the statistics down on paper. I had proved to my satisfaction that there were around 50,000,000 poor in this country. Yet, I realized I did not believe my own figures. The poor existed in Government reports; they were percentages and numbers in long, close columns, but they were not part of my experience. I could prove that the other America existed, but I had never been there.”

Operation Santa wasn’t intended as a means to expose people to the stark realities of material deprivation. But it’s unnerving to realize just how many of these letters there are. Each one represents a failure of the American system and a failure of the ideology that says that anyone who is poor has failed.

“We don’t want to be responsible for them. A very wise historian, Michael Katz, wrote that ‘poverty is the third rail of American politics.’ We don’t like to talk about poverty in America, and we don’t like to deal with it,” Jeff Madrick, a veteran journalist and author of Invisible Americans: The Tragic Cost of Childhood Poverty, told me.

“And I’m including the Democrats here,” Katz continued. “Democrats hardly ever talked about child poverty until recently. And I include Hillary Clinton, in that she didn’t mention child poverty very much in her 2016 electoral campaign. The reason is not merely that they are insensitive, but they think it’s bad for electoral politics, because people don’t want to hear about it.”

The irony is that childhood poverty is expensive. For all the bipartisan efforts to reduce cash payments to poor families and the constant hand-wringing about federal deficits, chronic child impoverishment costs the United States a trillion dollars, or 5 percent of our GDP, annually. Madrick explains that the human and economic cost manifests in a variety of ways: lower high school and college graduation rates, lower productivity at work, higher healthcare costs and incarceration rates, and rampant mental health problems caused by the stress and trauma of impoverishment.

Thanks to Operation Santa, Vicky, the girl who asked for a new power wheelchair, may be connected with a charitable organization that can help her. Many thousands of poor people will be helped in this way by holiday-season generosity. But the needs of impoverished children can’t be met by charity alone; the scale of poverty is too massive. Even the Gates Foundation, a titan in the private philanthropy world, admits this. In All the Money in the World, a 2008 look at the 1 percent, Patty Stonesifer, a former chief of the foundation, is quoted as saying,“Our giving is a drop in the bucket compared to the government’s responsibility.”

The solutions to child poverty are not mysterious. Socialists, liberals, and leftists have long advocated for more generous benefits to families that would alleviate some of the financial burden many parents currently shoulder alone. Last year, Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project released “The Family Fun Pack,” a comprehensive family welfare plan that would dramatically supplement the immense costs of raising a family in the United States: material supplies and paid parental leave are paired with free pre-K, childcare, health care, and a $300 monthly allowance. “The easiest solution to the problems posed by family life under capitalism is to levy broad-based taxes and then use the revenues from those taxes to fund a set of benefits that provide resources to families with children,” Bruenig wrote.

Even more moderate Democrats have backed proposals that could radically reduce child poverty. On the campaign trail, Joe Biden endorsed expanding Section 8 housing vouchers to cover all families who qualify, which would effectively cut child poverty by a third. Kamala Harris’s LIFT the Middle Class Act would replace the Trump-era tax cuts with large tax credits to low- and middle-income households who work.

Other ideas include making the child tax credit fully refundable, which would help extremely low-income families, and boosting SNAP (commonly called food stamps), according to Danilo Trisi, the Director of Poverty and Inequality Research at CBPP, explained. “Expanding SNAP benefits will do a lot in terms of also reducing child poverty because the way that SNAP is structured, it does not reach those families with the lowest incomes,” Trisi said.“Between housing assistance, tax credits, and food assistance, any of those three things could really make a significant dent on poverty.”

America’s political and economic institutions have left children like Vicky in impossible conditions. What the Operation Santa letters show us is that not only is her struggle a common experience for millions of American children but that their circumstances are artificial. Poverty is not some abstraction or a phenomena only relevant during the holidays but rather a material consequence of deliberate policy choices. It would be possible for the government to make a serious effort to alleviate childhood poverty, but it’s a task far too big for Santa.

A few dozen American billionaires got almost a trillion dollars richer during the "economic crisis" caused by this pandemic, while another 8 million Americans fell below the poverty line.

-------

the word "Obscenity"

has lost its meaning. 

GOP Guiding Principles

Another tasty bit unearthed - never tho't I'd see the day when I had to tag C-SPAN as NSFW.

One Of The Problems

Whooo yeah - sure glad I chose to be born white, and middle class, in the American suburbs.  Best decision I ever made.

I realize folks who post this crap on social media aren't consciously going outa their way to be shitty. This is not intended to be mean-spirited. Indeed, it's supposed to be a good Life Lesson for all those mopey little pity puppies out there who just need to buck up and put on their big-girl panties and lace 'em up and get in there and blah blah blah.

But the lack of intent to be shitty doesn't make it less shitty for someone not born to the dominant demographic.

We start with a (mostly) appropriate feeling of pride and gratitude where our own situations are concerned, but we end up with the kind of bullshit attitude that poor people are poor - and they have all those poor people problems - because they're somehow morally deficient.

And that ends up making us say some of the stoopidest fucking things:

Fresh Info

From an interview with Annie Lowrey at The Atlantic:

Angus Deaton studies the grand questions not just of economics but of life. What makes people happy? How should we measure well-being? Should countries give foreign aid? What can and should experiments do? Is inequality increasing or decreasing? Is the world getting better or worse?

Better, he believes, truly better. But not everywhere or for everyone. This week, in a speech at a conference held by the National Association for Business Economics, Deaton, the Nobel laureate and emeritus Princeton economist, pointed out that inequality among countries is decreasing, while inequality within countries is increasing. China and India are making dramatic economic improvements, while parts of sub-Saharan Africa are seeing much more modest gains. In developed countries, the rich have gotten much richer while the middle class has shriveled. A study he coauthored with the famed Princeton economist Anne Case highlights one particularly dire outcome: Mortality is actually increasing for middle-aged white Americans, due in no small part to overdoses and suicides—so-called “deaths of despair.” (Case also happens to be Deaton’s wife. More on that later.)

(This is what Blue Gal refers to in The Professional Left podcast this week - click that link or scroll down a little to listen)

Lowrey: You have made the argument that OxyContin deaths are deaths caused by rent-seeking. Talk me through it.

Deaton: I don’t know if you read Sam Quinones’ book, which is terrific, called Dreamland. It’s a wonderful book and he spent a lot of time in some obscure part of Mexico where a bunch of people had not been selling drugs before and took to selling drugs and had a much better delivery system. Sort of like Walmart of drugs! They’d deliver to your house and give you discounts, and they wouldn’t use guns. At the same time, he’s contrasting this with OxyContin and the pharmaceutical companies. The parallel is that here are two sorts of drug dealers. And one of them is doing it under the license of the United States government.

A lot of the drugs that were pushed in the early phase were being prescribed to people who were poor enough to be on Medicaid. A lot of these people were addicted to OxyContin—Sam actually describes a town in Indiana where the currency is OxyContin units. They’ve stopped using money and they’re using grams of OxyContin!

Lowrey: It’s not a bad currency, right? Easy to carry around. Stable price. Fluid market.

Deaton: There’s enough of this being prescribed for every American to have a supply for a month! So it’s not like it’s scarce. Nicholas Eberstadt makes this very cute remark about how this gave a whole new meaning to “dependence on government.” It’s a very nice essay. Eberstadt tries to be the nicest of the AEI guys.

There's also a piece of the puzzle that fits well, and reinforces part of the argument of "The Forgotten American" as a driver in the election.

WaPo Hangs In

It seems pretty weird, but WaPo is starting to do some real reporting all of a sudden.

In response to a question about his party’s plan to increase the cost of health insurance, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) suggested that people should “invest in their own health care” instead of “getting that new iPhone.” He doubled-down on the point in a later interview: “People need to make a conscious choice, and I believe in self-reliance.” Of course, Chaffetz is wrong. But he isn’t alone.

While he has been met with justifiable derision for the comparison (Christopher Ingraham walked through the math for us, pointing out that a year’s worth of health care would equal 23 iPhone 7 Pluses in price), the claim he is making is hardly new. Chaffetz was articulating a commonly held belief that poverty in the United States is, by and large, the result of laziness, immorality and irresponsibility. If only people made better choices — if they worked harder, stayed in school, got married, didn’t have children they couldn’t afford, spent what money they had more wisely and saved more — then they wouldn’t be poor, or so the reasoning goes.

This insistence that people would not be poor if only they would try harder defines the thinking behind the signature welfare restructuring law of the Clinton era, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. It’s the logic at the heart of efforts to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, to drug-test people collecting unemployment insurance or to forbid food stamp recipients to buy steak and lobster.

Since the invention of the mythic welfare queen in the 1960s, this has been the story we most reliably tell about why people are poor. Never mind that research from across the social sciences shows us, over and again, that it’s a lie. Never mind low wages or lack of jobs, the poor quality of too many schools, the dearth of marriageable males in poor black communities (thanks to a racialized criminal justice system and ongoing discrimination in the labor market), or the high cost of birth control and day care. Never mind the fact that the largest group of poor people in the United States are children. Never mind the grim reality that most American adults who are poor are not poor from lack of effort but despite it.

The reason poor people are poor has nothing to do with how they manage their money.

Poverty is not a moral deficiency.

Being poor enough to require assistance from government doesn't mean poor people like it where they are.

And and and

Stop blaming poverty on the poor.

Today's Quote

"When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatize those who let people die, not those who struggle to live."

--Sarah Kendzior

hat tip = Facebook friend LM-M

Feed A Child

Reaction to this ad has become what I have to consider an almost perfect snapshot of what's wrong with our "conversations" whenever we try to talk about any of the increasing number of Elephants In The Room.





The point is that way too many pets get way better treatment than way too many kids, and maybe we could do some tiny little thing to change that just a tiny bit(?)  Maybe we could just think about it?  Seems pretty simple.  But to hear some of the reaction, you'd think the ad was actually advocating in favor of keeping children as pets - or that black kids are dogs - or that - what exactly!?!

Seriously, when did everybody get so fuckin' stoopid?

Check out the Feed A Child website, or make a contribution of 20 Rand (SA only) by texting "child" to 40014.

You can make a contribution from elsewhere using PayPal.

Helping

I don't know what to do about schools or poverty or unemployment or healthcare or crime.  I don't even know what to call it; this combination of symptoms that indicate a pervasive and (if history is any guide at all) generally fatal disease of the body politic.

Can we call it The Cycle of Shitty?

How 'bout Disintegrating Empire Syndrome due to Electoral Dysfunction?  Quick - somebody call Pfizer and threaten to give them billions of tax dollars if they don't develop a new pill to take our minds off our troubles.

I just don't know.

But I'm fairly certain that we can't keep following along blindly, buying into the bullshit of Austerity and Tough Love and Economic Shock Therapy - all of which are just manufactured terms used to keep us off-balance and to hide the fact that our "leaders" either have no workable solutions or they're determined to rule rather than serve.  Either way, not a happy choice.

Here's what I think I know:
You don't keep a guy from getting run over by a cement truck by shoving him out into traffic.
Translation - You help people by helping them - you don't help them by not helping them.  (and I can't believe ya have to say it out loud like that, but fuck me - I guess maybe ya do)

Here's my message for the guys who put up the federal budget - that's Paul Ryan in the House and Patty Murray in the Senate:
The only thing worse than a government that spends too much is a government that doesn't spend enough - so figure it out, assholes.

Gene Robinson at WaPo:

Alleviating stubborn poverty is difficult and expensive. Direct government aid — money, food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance and the like — is not enough. Poor people need employment that offers a brighter future for themselves and their children. Which means they need job skills. Which means they need education. Which means they need good schools and safe streets.

The list of needs is dauntingly long, and it’s hard to know where to start — or where the money for all the needed interventions will come from. It’s much easier to say that culture is ultimately to blame. But since there’s no step-by-step procedure for changing a culture, we end up not doing anything.

And just to be clear about Paul Ryan's dog-whistle crap about some kinda "...tailspin of culture, in our inner cities...", let's try to remember what Brother Jay Smooth teaches us:

What It Ain't

This is not entitlement:

This is entitlement:

Food Stamps Theater

It seems like the Repubs in Congress are just all about doing nothing but making symbolic gestures - mostly of the raised middle finger variety.

The House voted yesterday to cut $40 billion from SNAP (food stamps) over the next ten years.  First off, it really doesn't "sound like all that much" (we're still gonna spend $700-800 Billion in those 10 years), but when you look at how little help SNAP provides for individual households, it's a real blow.

Center on Budget Policy and Priorities:

The 2009 Recovery Act’s temporary boost to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits is scheduled to end on November 1, 2013, resulting in a benefit cut for every SNAP household. For families of three, the cut will be $29 a month — a total of $319 for November 2013 through September 2014, the remaining months of fiscal year 2014.[2] That’s a serious loss, especially in light of the very low amount of basic SNAP benefits. Without the Recovery Act’s boost, SNAP benefits will average less than $1.40 per person per meal in 2014. (See Table 2 for estimates of the size of the SNAP cut in each state in fiscal year 2014.) Nationally, the total cut is estimated to be $5 billion in fiscal year 2014.

It seems unlikely that Congress will enact legislation to remedy this problem, as President Obama and some members of Congress have proposed. Consequently, states need to prepare for the benefit cuts — including determining how they will provide information about the upcoming benefit reduction to participating households and other stakeholders as well as how to manage increased client inquiries when the cut takes effect.

So yeah, it sucks but it prob'ly doesn't make any real difference because the thing has practically no chance in the Senate - Debbie Stabanow has been calling it "a monumental waste of time", which it most certainly is.

It's just standard issue bullshit.  Repubs get to cast a feel-good vote to show their wealthy contributors how willing they are to get all hard-ass and tough-lovey, while further stoking their constituents' sense of being victimized by those rotten undeserving illegal aliens and welfare cheats; and their Democrat enablers.  And nothing but the date and the time will change.

But there're a few questions I keep thinking somebody in "the press corps" might wanna ask Eric Cantor or John Boehner or any of these jag-offs who can't manage to get Ayn Rand's dick outa their mouths long enough to think about what happens to actual flesh-and-bone people who have to live with the results of these fever-dream hallucinations they keep trying to enact into law.

(I know - silly me - actually thinking one of these Press Poodles might figure out how to do his job; and expecting a certain brand of politician to behave like a mensch).

Here's one question: In a year's time, do you think the cuts you're proposing will cause  fewer people to be poor?
And another: What's your plan if by some crazy happenstance your plan doesn't reduce the number of people in need of food assistance?

Here're some more:

• Will the cuts in Food Stamps lead to more grocery stores being opened in poor neighborhoods?
• Will there be jobs in those neighborhoods?
• Will the people who live in those neighborhoods have reliable ways to get to those jobs?
• Will the banks make capital available so all those newly minted poverty-level entrepreneurs can start the bidness of their dreams, thus inventing jobs for themselves instead of relying on somebody else to give them jobs? 
• An awful lot of families who rely on Food Stamps include children - are those kids supposed to get jobs (or create their own jobs) too?
• Do the kids need to be drug tested?
• If the parents test positive, do the kids lose their benefits as well?

One more: How long do you think it'll be before somebody in one of those neighborhoods decides to beat you with a broom handle the first chance they get?

Flame Up

Sister Simone Campbell:



Not crazy about mixing church with politics, but when somebody finally figures out that Jesus is no Republican, it's good to let her speak - to remind the followers what lies are hidden in all the bible-thumping bullshit coming from certain usurpers and false prophets.  And to get "good Catholics" back to doing what's right for them to do.

(and BTW: this is what a real Conservative looks like and sounds like)