Is it just me, or does the recent rash of anti-LGBT measures remind other people of Finding Nemo?
If memory serves (and at my age, it may not) the “Dory” character would be pursuing a goal when suddenly she would be distracted by something unrelated and unimportant. Her head would swivel, and shouting “squirrel,” she’d forget what she’d been doing and follow the distraction instead.
Sort of like Mississippi, one of the most recent states to enact homophobic legislation.
Mississippi
> Well-being index score: 63.7
> Life expectancy: 75.0 years (the lowest)
> Percent obese: 35.4% (the highest)
> Median household income: $37,095 (the lowest)
> Percent with high school diploma: 82.3% (3rd lowest)
Nowhere else in the U.S. did people feel as negative about their work environment as in Mississippi. But this was just one of the problems facing state residents. Respondents were among the most likely in the nation to lack access to basic necessities. More than a quarter of people surveyed in the state indicated they did not have money for food at some point in the previous 12 months, while nearly as many lacked money for health care. By a number of measures, the state was one of the absolute poorest in the nation. The median income in Mississippi was just $37,095 in 2012, lowest in the U.S. Also, 24.2% of people lived below the poverty line, more than in any other state. With limited access to basic needs and poor healthy behaviors, the state was among the worst in the nation in physical health assessments. Last year, no state had a higher obesity rate than Mississippi. In 2010, no state had a higher rate of death from heart disease or a lower life expectancy at birth than Mississippi.
So–rather than keeping their eye on the task at hand–which should be ameliorating these appalling negatives–Mississippi’s lawmakers chose to yell “squirrel!” and point to the (nonexistent) menace posed by that state’s gay and transgender citizens.
This actually seems to be a favored tactic in several states, including Mike Pence’s Indiana. (Not very good at governing? Quick–pick a distraction!)
As someone recently noted, the current bathroom hysteria is particularly misdirected, since there is no record of any transgender misbehavior in a public restroom–something you certainly can’t say about Republican lawmakers’ public restroom activities.
In fact, the more we learn about the private conduct of our most homophobic “family values” office-holders, the more interesting it gets: Dennis Hastert (recently convicted of abusing young boys when he was a coach) led the fight against same-sex marriage–not to mention the effort to impeach Bill Clinton for his sexual improprieties. In Alabama, Robert Bentley, another “pious” GOP Governor of a backward state who supports “religious liberty” legislation, is embroiled in a tawdry sex scandal. And so it goes.
What do you do when you’re caught with your pants down–either literally or figuratively?
Evidently, the Indiana GOP has announced that Governor Mike Pence will be running for re-election on his record. Jeff Cardwell, Indiana’s Republican Party Chair, is quoted as saying (presumably with a straight face) “He has a very strong record.”
Well, it certainly smells strong…
The Democrats’ response has been pretty predictable. A media release pointed to several documented aspects of the Governor’s “strong” record: Indiana’s per capita income is 38th in the U.S., thanks in part to repeal of the Common Construction Wage; the damage done by RFRA; Indiana’s rank of 46th in quality of life; Pence’s decisions to decline an 80 million dollar grant for pre-kindergarten, to cut funding for public schools and to wage unremitting war on the elected Superintendent of Public Instruction; his responsibility for Indiana’s infrastructure woes, including poor supervision of contractors that facilitated acceptance of substandard asphalt; his understaffing of DCS that nearly crippled that department while putting vulnerable children at risk; the damage he has done and continues to do to the state’s reputation by rejecting Syrian refugees and signing an insane and punitive anti-abortion bill…
And of course, the Democrats couldn’t resist another mention of JustIN, Pence’s tone-deaf proposal to establish a “news bureau.”
But if you are really interested in seeing the “record” that Mike Pence plans to run on, in all of its fulsome “glory,” you should revisit a recent post from this very blog. I began by listing all the reasons Hoosiers should not re-elect our Pastor-in-Chief, and then I challenged readers to fill in the blanks, to tell me what I had missed.
Forty-two of them did.
Together with the list in my post, the comments provide a pretty comprehensive picture of what Mike Pence has done to Indiana. (Much more comprehensive than the Democrats’ press release but to be fair, no one would read it if it had been that long.)
This post would also be too long if I included everything listed in the prior post and its comments, but here are just a few that the Democrat’s media advisory left out…
He’s made war on Planned Parenthood, denying poor women life-saving health services and facilitating the HIV outbreak in Scott County. Meanwhile, he diverted money from medically-appropriate clinics to “pro life” organizations.
He has enthusiastically supported privatized prisons. (Couldn’t have anything to do with campaign contributions, could it?)
He refused to expand Medicaid even though the feds were paying for it.
He refused to apply for the SNAP time limit waiver, for which Indiana qualified, resulting in benefit cuts to an estimated 65,000 individuals.
Vastly increased logging in state forests, among other assaults on the environment….
There’s a lot more in the original, but you get the idea.
On the original Star Trek series, when Mr. Spock was confronted with a new and unexpected bit of information, he would raise one Vulcan eyebrow and intone “fascinating.”
I don’t have a Vulcan eyebrow, but “fascinating” was my reaction to a 2013 academic paper written by Johannas Haushofer and Jeremy Shapiro, with the not-very-sexy title “Household Response to Income Changes: Evidence from an Unconditional Cash Transfer Program in Kenya.”
Stop yawning, because this is important. And fascinating.
In the U.S., lawmakers (and not just right-wing ones) have long taken a punitive approach to the poor. Even self-labeled “compassionate conservatives” like former President George W. Bush have proposed programs that would “help welfare recipients develop middle-class values.” (Because clearly, if you are poor, you must be morally defective.) American attitudes toward the needy have their roots in 15th Century English Poor Laws that prohibited “giving alms to the sturdy beggar.”
American social welfare programs built on that model have numerous, demeaning—and costly—restrictions on eligibility. After all, if “we” don’t watch “them,” they’ll cheat us hardworking taxpayers.
Most recently, a number of state legislators have piled on; convinced that any assistance allowing recipient discretion would “obviously’ lead to imprudent choices, they have even passed rules about what welfare recipients can buy at the grocery store with their food stamps.
Imagine what would happen if we simply sent poor people some cash! (Um…perhaps like Social Security…?)
Well, it turns out we don’t have to imagine it; an NGO called “GiveDirectly” has been doing just that in Kenya. GiveDirectly chooses beneficiaries at random; the only criteria is income below poverty level. The organization is rigorously evidence-based, and the paper I came across is one of several independent research projects examining the results.
So what happened?
Recipients spent more on health and education. Alcohol and tobacco expenditures did not increase. The researchers found
no evidence for an increase in tension within households, no significant spillover effects on non-recipient households, and no general equilibrium effects at the village level, with the single exception that we observe an increase in female empowerment at the village level. Together, these findings suggest that simple cash transfers may not have the perverse effects that some policymakers feel they would have, which has led for a clear policy preference for conditional cash transfers or in-kind transfers.
I came across this article because I have recently become aware of psychological studies connecting poverty with a host of deleterious psychological consequences, and I was exploring the literature reporting on those consequences for a book I’m writing. (I had previously understood the link between insecurities of various kinds and social unrest, but I was unaware of this particular line of research.)
As an article in New America Weekly reported, the human brain has specific reactions to any form of scarcity; it seems that cognitive capacity can only be stretched so far. This has been dubbed the “bandwidth tax,” shorthand for the proposition that scarcity inhibits the brain’s ability to focus on multiple tasks. This isn’t a big surprise to anyone who has agonized over whether to use her limited funds to buy baby formula or see the pediatrician.
Interestingly, the levels of stress associated with poverty can be assessed physically; people produce a “stress hormone” called cortisol, levels of which can be measured.
Haushofer and Shapiro measured them.
Transfer recipients experience large increases in psychological well-being, and several types of transfers lead to reductions in levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
Apparently, cash transfers to desperately poor people are followed by increased access to education and medical care, and lowered levels of a stress hormone that interferes with good decision-making.
As Indiana’s primary approaches, it’s time to look at the 2016 election landscape as objectively as possible.
None of us is truly objective, of course. I look at the “still standing” Presidential candidates from the perspective of someone who teaches public administration, supports civil liberties, and has had a fair amount of first-hand political experience. I’m also old enough to have some historical perspective. Those attributes, for good or ill, shape my opinions.
It will come as no shock to anyone who has followed this blog that I find all of the Republican candidates appalling. Donald Trump is arguably the most ignorant person ever to win a Presidential primary. He quite clearly knows nothing about the world, the Constitution, about how government works, or policy…And worse, he’s aggressively uncurious about any of those things.
Ted Cruz, a Dominionist, is actually more dangerous than Trump. The term “Dominionism” comes from Genesis, in which God gives Adam and Eve “dominion” over the Earth and its animals; it’s the belief that Christians are biblically mandated to control all earthly institutions until the second coming of Jesus. Sometimes called Christian Reconstructionists, Dominionists like Cruz believe biblical law should replace secular law. Cruz opposes abortion even in the case of rape or incest; is unalterably opposed to equal rights for the LGBT community and promises to appoint Supreme Court Justices who agree with him.
Fortunately, neither of these characters is likely to win a general election. Polls suggest that most Americans detest Trump, and even his colleagues in the GOP loathe Cruz. John Kasich would be a far more effective candidate, but not because his policy views are significantly more palatable. He is a hard-right ideologue, but he does actually know what government is and (at least compared to the other two) exhibits some human compassion.Not enough compassion to keep him from closing all of Ohio’s Planned Parenthood clinics and depriving poor women of health care, but some.
Which brings us to Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders–either of whom, despite their flaws, would be massively preferable to any of the GOP candidates.
I have never been a big Hillary fan, not because I believe the rap about her “dishonesty.” (Let’s get real: Republicans have spent millions of dollars for 20+ years throwing everything but the kitchen sink at her–if anything had been there, we’d know it.) My criticism is that she is a defensive and awkward candidate–in fact, she reminds me in that respect of “Poppy” Bush, who was always much more interested in governing than campaigning. As a result, she often doesn’t seem authentic. She is basically a technocrat who lacks Obama’s (and Sanders’) ability to inspire.
That said, she may be the most qualified person ever to run for President. She has seen government from multiple perspectives–from the White House, to the Senate, to the State Department. I don’t agree with every vote she’s ever cast or every position she’s ever taken, but let’s be fair: no one with a resume that long and varied is going to avoid positions with which I disagree.
I initially welcomed Bernie Sanders’ candidacy because I saw Hillary as too cautious on the campaign trail. Without his prodding, she was unlikely to address several issues that, while divisive, needed to be addressed. Despite the fact that their voting records and positions are very similar (she’s always been more progressive than Bill), Sanders pushed her to publicly discuss issues she might not otherwise have highlighted in the campaign.
So what about Bernie? He’s been able to generate lots of enthusiasm. He has raised a limited but important set of issues that we need to be talking about. I tend to agree with him about most of his “signature” issues: we should have universal health care, free higher education, more economic equity. But if lightning were to strike, and Bernie were somehow to become the nominee (of a party he doesn’t belong to, I should note), it’s pretty obvious he would not be able to deliver. As Paul Krugman recently wrote (in a must-read analysis):
On many major issues — including the signature issues of his campaign, especially financial reform — he seemed to go for easy slogans over hard thinking. And his political theory of change, his waving away of limits, seemed utterly unrealistic.
People who understand how our government works (or doesn’t) recognize that we have this pesky system called “checks and balances.” We don’t elect a monarch who gets to wave a magic wand for four years (it drives me nuts when people on the left–evidently oblivious to the degree of Republican obstruction he’s faced–criticize Obama because he didn’t do everything he said he wanted to do).
Elect either Hillary or Bernie–it won’t matter unless Democrats control the Senate and have far more sway in the House. Having great goals and values won’t matter if there is no realistic path to their realization. Civically-literate partisans understand that. (There’s a reason that Bernie’s wins have all come in states that allow independents to participate in the Democratic primary or caucus, while Hillary has won an overwhelming majority of registered Democrats.)
There isn’t going to be a revolution. Perhaps there should be, but it isn’t going to happen.
Americans are stuck with a system that is not working, and we need to put people in charge who know that fixing it requires mastery of boring and annoying details, people who are prepared for a hard, long, maddeningly incremental slog. Like her or not, that’s Hillary.
Bernie may be a one-note Pied Piper. Hillary may be uninspiring. But a President Trump, Cruz or Kasich, abetted by a Republican Congress, would be a disaster from which this country might never recover.
Vote like your grandchildren’s lives depend on it, because they do.
Political Animal had an interesting item a few days ago, pointing out that American businesses are increasingly uncomfortable with the supposedly “business-friendly” strategies being pursued by the GOP.
It isn’t just business’ pushback against retrograde anti-LGBT measures, either; recently, 51 New York millionaires asked Governor Cuomo to raise their taxes, and there has been a mass exodus of large corporations from ALEC–mainly as a response to that organization’s denial of the reality of climate change.
Most recently, several corporations have expressed concern about participation in this year’s GOP convention–at least, if Trump looks likely to be the nominee.
The discomfort of savvy businesses with the increasingly radical positions espoused by Republican officeholders has led President Obama to pursue an interesting strategy:
When President Obama initiated his “pen and phone” strategy, a big part of the effort was aimed at convincing the private sector to do what Congress refused to tackle: raise the minimum wage, embrace paid family leave, hire veterans, ban the box, implement policies that mitigate climate change, expand access to broad band, etc. The President’s recent trip to South by Southwest was a call for engagement of the tech industry in addressing challenges like improving access to voting and countering ISIS recruitment strategies online. Interestingly enough, he’s had more success with these efforts than he has with Republican legislators.
If these trends continue, we may finally be seeing what some in the punditry have long been predicting– collapse of the never-comfortable alliance between the pro-market, pro- business, “country club” Republicans who are generally fiscally conservative and socially moderate (or even socially liberal), and the Religious Right extremists who have come to account for so large a portion of the GOP base.
The 2016 election may be the last for the GOP in its current iteration. We can only hope that–once the smoke clears–America ends up with a responsible, adult center-right party that can engage productively with the Democrats’ center-left philosophy, and once again give conscientious citizens a thoughtful and meaningful policy debate.
