Bevin to Quadriplegics: Get Up and Get to Work, You Lazy Takers!

No, I am not kidding.

Bevin's supposed to make a "major healthcare announcement" at - though he's unlikely to have much of an audience as Frankfort is supposed to get hit with an ice storm plus four inches of snow by then.

Governor I Got Mine Fuck You is eager to be the first governor to take advantage of new rules from the Orange Loser forcing everyone off Medicaid and into the salt mines, no exceptions.

In a letter to state Medicaid directors Thursday morning, the Trump administration announced that it would allow states to require Medicaid recipients to participate in a work program or other form of approved “community engagement” in order to retain their health benefits. While there will supposedly be exceptions for disabled people, allowing states to implement the work requirement is a terrible idea. As a disability lawyer and disabled person myself, I know this policy change will be disastrous for my community in a number of important ways.

My first concern involves the eligibility process. According to the Washington Post, states will be able to decide for themselves who qualifies as “disabled” for the purpose of being exempt from the work requirement. No matter how broad they define the category, there will be disabled people who do not qualify for the exemption even though they should.

I know this from experience. Indeed, in my role as an appeals lawyer for people applying for social security disability, I often deal with similar problems. The Social Security Administration acknowledges that its standard for social security disability eligibility is “very strict.” Many people who eventually do qualify for benefits have to go through several appeals that can take years. And even if the standard for Medicaid work-requirement exemption is much more lenient than the standard for social security, it still grants the state a mechanism requiring people to fight for coverage they should be entitled to.

And what about hundreds of thousands of bedridden seniors in nursing homes? Medicaid pays 80 percent of nursing home bills in this country. Maybe those oldsters could push brooms from their beds.

Also half of all childbirth costs.  Maybe the most efficient path there is not to expect newborns to actually haul coal, but just turn them into cold cuts for starving disabled miners to eat.

Cutting Medicaid - and that's what this is, a massive cut in the health plan that supports children, the elderly and the disabled - is eating our seed corn.

But Bevin and his butt buddy don't care about that; they only care about eliminating every Democratic program that give working people a chance to survive in a libertarian economy - and good reasons to vote against repugs.

Hey, only 14 calendar days - 10 working days - to file to run for office in Kentucky's 2018 elections.  Many fine seats still have no Democratic candidates!  Don't let them go begging!

QOTD: Paying the Bills

S&P just downgraded Kentucky's bonds because we're refusing to tax the filthy rich and use the money to create a working economy instead of a feudal one.

Undercover Blue at Hullabaloo:

We seem prepared to strip America to the walls looking for places to cut pennies before we'll own up to our responsibility and tax ourselves for what we get and to maintain it. Highways, water systems, good schools, endless wars. We expect them. We demand them. We just refuse to pay for them, and then blame the deficits on the poor. Or else on waste, fraud, and abuse, the inexhaustible zero-point energy of conservative pseudo-economics.

Or to clean up after ourselves. Barack Obama is in Alaska this week talking about climate change and the need to do just that:

I have come here today, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and its second-largest emitter, to say that the United States recognizes our role in creating the problem, and we embrace our responsibility to help solve it.

Don't hold your breath waiting for the personal responsibility crowd to accept any.

The Kansas Catastrophe Matt Bevin Plans for Kentucky

So, now that Jack Conway has conceded the Kentucky Governor's race by running the same repug-lite campaign that boosted Alison Lundergan Grimes to a 15-point loss against the most hated man in the Commonwealth, what are we likely to suffer under Governor Matt Bevin?

Give the repug piece of shit credit: he hasn't tried to hide it.  He's going to turn Kentucky into Sam Brownback's Kansas.

And what's so bad about that, you say? Just that in four years Sam Brownback managed to turn a functioning U.S. state into fucking Haiti.

From the Atlantic:

Kansas's Failed Experiment

The state's budget problems didn't go away after Governor Sam Brownback's reelection—they got worse. Will the lesson of tax-cuts-gone-awry give Republican candidates pause in 2016?

Russell Berman Apr 9, 2015

Surviving a tough reelection race, as Sam Brownback did in Kansas last year, can often be a cleansing experience for a governor. It should certainly bring relief. After all, Brownback managed to earn a fresh nod of support from voters despite a messy first term marked by a fiscal embarrassment of his own making.

Yet three months later, the humbling in the heartland goes on, much to the frustration of a Republican governor and one-time presidential contender who hoped to make Kansas the national emblem of conservative governance. Brownback's hard-fought victory on election day won him another four years, but it did nothing to fix the problem that nearly cost him his job: the state's finances. Kansas's budget has for months resembled a wallet with a hole in it—every time the state's bookkeepers peek inside, they find less money than the government thought would be there. Just a few days after the November election, the Kansas budget office revealed that revenue projections were off by more than $200 million, bringing the budget gap facing Brownback to $600 million in all.

The yawning deficit is widely blamed on the deep income tax cuts that Brownback, along with a Republican legislature, enacted during his first two years in office. They not only slashed rates, but more importantly, they created a huge exemption for business owners who file their taxes as individuals. By Brownback's own description, the tax plan was a "real live experiment" in supply-side economics, with the idea being that lower taxes would spur investment, create jobs, and refill Kansas's coffers through faster growth. Yet even under the most charitable analysis, revenue has plummeted much faster than the economy has expanded. 

"He’s lived and died by this philosophy, and it’s becoming more and more obvious that it is not going to be successful."

Now, Kansas's red ink has left the governor red- faced. Brownback is asking Republican state lawmakers to slow the income tax cuts over the next few years, raise taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, overhaul school funding, and divert money from the state's highway fund in order to balance the budget. It's not as if he's abandoning his conservative economic philosophy—he still wants to replace the state's income tax entirely with consumption taxes over time. And like any politician on the ropes, he is preaching patience. "These things take time," he said last month. He also acknowledged the toll his stumbles have taken on his image. "We're in Lent season, so I'm giving up worldly things, like popularity," he joked to a small crowd. Brownback has blamed the budget shortfall in part on automatic increases in education spending (a subject of a long-running court dispute), and he's cited a recent uptick in job growth as evidence that the tax cuts, on the whole, are working. "Kansas is on the rise, and the state of our state is strong," the governor proclaimed in an annual budget address in January.

 Oh, it gets worse. And it's getting even worse than that.

Kill the Reaganism Poison

There's much more to the conservative freakazoid rot that is undermining the nation, but "Reagan" is an accurate and convenient short-hand

Fifth in a series by D.R. Tucker.  Read them all.

The disease of Reaganism—the disease that said government couldn’t do anything right, that government got in the way, that government was bad and evil—has killed far more Americans than Ebola ever did. That disease directly led to bridge collapses in Minnesota, levee breaches in Louisiana and derailed trains in Pennsylvania.

Reagan officially may have had five children, but he fathered so many bastards in American politics and culture. Reagan’s obliteration of the Fairness Doctrine led to the rise of Rush Limbaugh’s nationally syndicated program, as well as a slew of Limbaugh imitators, while progressive radio voices were pushed to the margins. Reagan created the culture of irrationality and extremism on the right; when you hear Ted Cruz or Mike Huckabee or Ben Carson spout off, you’re hearing the baby talk of Reagan’s ideological offspring.

“I gave up when they elected Ronald Reagan president,” Steely Dan singer Donald Fagen stated in a 2006 interview. “I’ve never watched political news since then. I figured that if the American public elected Ronald Reagan — if they can be duped on that level — then it’s really not worth paying attention to. Like H.L. Mencken said, ‘No one ever lost any money underestimating the American public.’”

I can certainly understand Fagen’s frustration—and I’ve certainly quoted Mencken myself!—but with the cult of Reaganism having led to the disaster in Pennsylvania, it’s time for a national commitment to reverse course and bring an end to this rotten legacy.

Don Henley only scratched the surface when he called Reagan ”the tired old man that we elected king” in 1989. Reagan was a malevolent figure whose poison still flows through the American bloodstream.

Yet we have the antidote, an antidote that can prevent the body of our democracy from dying. We have the ability to lift the curse of Reaganism, an opportunity to heal the wounds that deranged man inflicted.

We can get big money out of politics. We can fight harder for fairer wages, reproductive choice, sharp reductions in carbon pollution, equal treatment for women, and the restoration of confidence in government’s ability to do good by and for the people. We have it within ourselves to send Reaganism to the dustbin of history.

I certainly understand how people can feel despair about what Reaganism has done to this land. I expressed such despair myself two weeks ago when I predicted that this country would fall to pieces on racial fault lines. Yet there’s still reason to hope, still reason to believe that a better day can come if we fight and work and dream for it.

We can get America back on track. We can get America to move past the selfishness, irrationality and recklessness of Reaganism. We can get America to move once again towards liberty and justice for all.

What If the Poor Decide to Use All The Guns They Can't Eat?

At some point, the insistence of the repugs and guntards on preventing the poor from spending their tiny welfare allotments on anything except guns is going to backfire.

Rude Pundit:

If you're middle-class, you can negotiate your way out of a great deal of the grief. If you're poor, you are subject to the whims of a justice system that seeks to punish you for existing.

At some point, we're going to have to do something about how we treat the poor in this country. If the nation doesn't, if politicians continue to ignore the issue of poverty, the poor might just realize that all those guns the NRA has guaranteed they can bear might have another use.  And the United States will have no one to blame but itself.

Things It's Hard to Believe Most People Don't Understand

Yeah, I'm a liberal elitist and so are all my friends.  You know why?  Because we know what's true.

PZ Myers:

Here’s a great list of 9 things many Americans just don’t understand — I’ve distilled it down to just the main headings, but you should read the whole thing.

1. Universal Healthcare Is Great for Free Enterprise and Great for Small Businesses
2. Comprehensive Sex Education Decreases Sexual Problems
3. American Exceptionalism Is Absolute Nonsense in 2015
4. Adequate Mass Transit Is a Huge Convenience
5. The Bible Was Not Written by Billionaire Hedge Fund Managers
6. Learning a Second or Third Language Is a Plus, Not a Character Flaw
7. Union Membership Benefits the Economy
8. Paid Maternity Leave Is the Norm in Most Developed Countries
9. Distrust of Oligarchy Is a Positive

You know who doesn't understand these obvious things, and you know why they don't. So what do we do about it?

Taxes Aren't Just About the Money; They Level the Playing Field

Taxing the billionaires out of existence and the millionaires into humility will solve so many more problems than needed revenue.

Mike Konczal and Bryce Covert at the Nation:

Taxes don’t just produce revenue; they are capable of restructuring how the whole economy works. That the decline in the highest tax rates has insidiously created our runaway inequality is explored in a recent paper by economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Stefanie Stantcheva, who set out to investigate the relationship between tax rates and the top 1 percent in several key countries.

For example, the top marginal tax rate in the United States was over 70 percent between the New Deal and the Reagan Revolution, but has been below 40 percent since then. The top tax rate in England went from 80 percent to 40 percent during the 1980s. These are also the two countries with the largest growth in inequality.

As shown in the graph, there’s a strong correlation between the growth in pre-tax income inequality and the decline in tax rates. The argument that economists usually put forward to explain this is a conservative supply-side argument: when people are taxed less, they work harder and thus make more money.

But there’s a more plausible—and more worrisome—explanation: wages are the result of bargaining in which the relative strength of each side is influenced by tax policy. As tax rates decline, executives have more reason to fight for higher salaries for themselves, especially through actions like stacking their corporate boards. Boards and other institutional interests are motivated to pay out the new wave of superstar salaries, since they aren’t being taxed away.

 Read the whole thing.

Why Should Any Freakazoid Have to Obey Any Secular Laws At All?

Because that's the real goal of lawsuits like Hobby Lobby.

It's Gilead, bitches. 

Digby:

In fact, it's worse than that. It's not about religious employers. It's about any employers being mandated to offer this coverage --- to offer any coverage. It's just one incremental step in a long term strategy to create a legal structure for corporations and other organizations to "opt out" of participating in government mandated programs on the basis of "conscience." SNIP I'm going to guess that this will end up like the Hyde Amendment. It also made no sense when it was enacted, and Democrats tried for years to stop its yearly re-authorization --- until they finally gave up and we had President Obama proclaiming that it was a "tradition" to make sure poor women did not have insurance coverage for abortion and negotiated the possibility away permanently in the ACA.

The social conservatives never give up until they get their way on these women's issues. It's fundamental to their cause. The fight has now expanded from abortion to birth control which is now a subject of controversy despite the fact that nearly 100% of women in the nation have used it (which makes nearly 100% of women "sluts" according to right wing haters.) And if there's one thing the history of the past few decades of legislative battles has taught us it's that when push comes to shove, the Democrats will use "controversial" women's rights as a bargaining chip and tell the ladies they'll have to take one for the team.

It's pretty to think that these latest polling numbers which show Republicans suffering electorally because of their inability to appeal to women will make the Democrats stiffen their spines and recognize that they have to dig in their heels on this. And I suspect they will --- as long as it doesn't mean they have to compromise on something else they care about. Women's issues are always on the table.

Poverty Capitalism

The wealthy have always fed off the bodies of the poor, but it took capitalism not only to raise exploiting the poor to a fine art, but to make doing so appear as civic virtue and fiscal responsibility.

Thomas Edsall in the New York Times:

Sentinel is a part of the expanding universe of poverty capitalism. In this unique sector of the economy, costs of essential government services are shifted to the poor.

In terms of food, housing and other essentials, the cost of being poor has always been exorbitant. Landlords, grocery stores and other commercial enterprises have all found ways to profit from those at the bottom of the ladder.

The recent drive toward privatization of government functions has turned traditional public services into profit-making enterprises as well.

In addition to probation, municipal court systems are also turning collections over to a national network of companies like Sentinel that profit from service charges imposed on the men and women who are under court order to pay fees and fines, including traffic tickets (with the fees being sums tacked on by the court to fund administrative services).

When they cannot pay these assessed fees and fines – plus collection charges imposed by the private companies — offenders can be sent to jail. There are many documented cases in which courts have imprisoned those who failed to keep up with their combined fines, fees and service charges.
“These companies are bill collectors, but they are given the authority to say to someone that if he doesn’t pay, he is going to jail,” John B. Long, a lawyer in Augusta, Ga. active in defending the poor, told Ethan Bronner of The Times.

A February 2014 report by Human Rights Watch on private offender services found that “more than 1,000 courts in several US states delegate tremendous coercive power to companies that are often subject to little meaningful oversight or regulation. In many cases, the only reason people are put on probation is because they need time to pay off fines and court costs linked to minor crimes. In some of these cases, probation companies act more like abusive debt collectors than probation officers, charging the debtors for their services.”

Like the municipal fire departments who depend on "subscribers" rather than tax dollars and end up watching while taxpayers' homes burn to the ground, this is just another way that austerity economics ensures that the rich never have to pay their fair share.

And as always, austerity kills.

Poverty capitalism and government policy are now working on their own and in tandem to shift costs to those least equipped to pay and in particular to the least politically influential segment of the poor: criminal defendants and those delinquent in paying fines.

Last year, Ferguson, Mo., the site of recent protests over the shooting of Michael Brown, used escalating municipal court fines to pay 20.2 percent of the city’s $12.75 million budget. Just two years earlier, municipal court fines had accounted for only 12.3 percent of the city’s revenues.

What should be done to interrupt the dangerous feedback loop between low-level crime and extortionate punishment? First, local governments should bring private sector collection charges, court-imposed administrative fees and the dollar amount of traffic fines (which often double and triple when they go unpaid) into line with the economic resources of poor offenders. But larger reforms are needed and those will not come about unless the poor begin to exercise their latent political power. In many ways, everything is working against them. But the public outpouring spurred by the shooting of Michael Brown provides an indication of a possible path to the future. It was, after all, just 50 years ago — not too distant in historical terms — that collective action and social solidarity produced tangible results.

Read the whole thing.

Privatizing Public Space

Of all capitalism's horrific crimes against humanity, the worst may be destroying the very idea of public space that no individual or corporation can deny to other people.

David Atkins at Political Animal:

On one hand this seems like a cross-section of American entrepreneurialism combined with high-tech democratization similar to using Uber or Lyft for transportation, or buying a hot restaurant reservation via smartphone app.  

But on the other hand it’s a very personal and physical representation of a disturbing trend toward the privatization of public space. There’s something fundamental about using a public space for free or low cost as long as you need it, then ceding it to the first comer for their own use. That’s the principle of the commons. What happens when you allow people to start becoming mini-grifters, overstaying in public spaces in order to make a quick buck off the next person who can afford to pay their price for public space at the expense of those who cannot?

What happens when those people then hire other people to sit in public spaces and sell them? That’s almost a textbook case of tragedy of the commons combined with rent-seeking abuse by unscrupulous hucksters.

As of now San Francisco is stopping the practice, which is sure to cause howls of protest from libertarian types. But what other choice is there? And isn’t this the perfect encapsulation of why regulation is needed if the public spaces, parking and otherwise, are going to survive?

QOTD

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

The world is certainly still a dangerous place, and military jobs are important. But so are the jobs that educate our children, repair our roads, serve the disadvantaged, reduce greenhouse emissions, and otherwise benefit the common good. Poverty, rampant inequality and climate change are all clearer and more present dangers than any non-nuclear military threat from China or Russia. Anyone who claims otherwise is an ignoramus or a con artist. Why is it OK for a Republican to vigorously defend every Keynesian taxpayer-funded military job, while trying to slash the jobs of teachers and railway workers so billionaires like Donald Sterling can pay less in taxes?

Real Patriots Pay Taxes

More than any flag-waving, parading or fireworking you can do on the Fourth of July, nothing proves your true worth as an American like paying the taxes you owe to the federal government, even when it spends that money wasteful shit like Mitch McConnell's salary. Don't like the government? VOTE TO CHANGE IT.

Ed Kilgore nails it in this piece, in which he concludes:

Painful as Tax Day might be, and however unhappy we may be with this or that policy or practice of the federal government, this is indeed our government, and there’s no “country” beyond its jurisdiction to which we may pledge allegiance. So today’s a day for flag-waving, not just tax-paying, and one for rededicating ourselves to engagement in the civic and political processes, not seceding to some imaginary Republic of our own devising.

Of course he's referring to the Nevada morons, about whom I agree wholeheartedly with Juanita Jean:

Why the hell are they supporting a law breaker?  This Cliven Bundy crazy old fart says he doesn’t recognize the federal government.  Well hell, it’s on your money and your flag and your national weather service and your Bureau of Damn Ranch Management.

Get your damn cattle off my land, you crazy old fart.

The Crime of Feeding Homeless People

Make no mistake; this is precisely what the repugs want: poor people dead from starvation, and those who want to help them in jail.

A pastor determined to live out the Bible’s dictate that we feed the poor was shut down by local police because he didn’t have a permit to serve food.

Twice a month, Rick Wood, a pastor at The Lord’s House of Prayer in Oneonta, Alabama, gets in his truck and drives around Birmingham with more than a hundred hot dogs and bottles of water, handing them out to the homeless. Wood has been serving those in need for the past six years because he wants to put Matthew 25:35-40 — “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink,” a scripture verse he has plastered on the side of his truck — into action.

But last month, Wood was stopped from handing out food by local police because he was in violation of a new city ordinance, passed in December, that regulates food trucks. The new regulation requires food trucks to get a permit, which can cost as much as $500. Though the ordinance is specifically targeted at retail food vendors, rather than charities, the city nevertheless used it to block Wood.

He was livid. “That makes me so mad,” Wood said in an interview with ABC 33/40 News. “These people are hungry. They’re starving. They need help from people. They can’t afford to buy something from a food truck.”

The pastor accused Birmingham of wanting “to chase them out of the city.”

ABC 33/40 News’ video has more:

If you read this blog, you know I cut religious people not a micrometer of slack for any reason whatsoever. But when their humanitarian and Democratic actions speak louder than their freakazoid beliefs, they will find me beside them in the trenches every time.

Militarization of Small-Town Cops Brings Tragedy

I don't understand how I can maintain a reputation for being naiive when stories like this just leave me paralyzed with shock.

Alternet:

For nearly half a century, the general trend within America’s police precincts has been toward greater militarization, a transformation initiated by the culture wars of the 1960s and facilitated by the war on drugs, fear of inner-city crime, and anxieties over the threat of terrorism.

Fear of drugs, crime and terrorism have been used to justify the expansion of SWAT programs and the acquisition of military grade weaponry and vehicles in America’s smaller towns. Citing previous work, investigative journalist Radley Balko writes that the number of SWAT teams in municipalities with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 “increased by more than 300 percent between 1984 and 1995,” and that 75% of all of these towns had their own SWAT teams by the year 2000. Small precincts acquired wartime weaponry and a warrior culture was engendered among community police.

The ACLU is currently working on a major investigation to illuminate the extent of militarization across America. Here are four shocking examples of militarized police in America's small towns. 

1. Keene, New Hampshire

A town with a murder count of two since 2009, Keene’s city officials surreptitiously accepted a $285,933 grant from the Department of Defense in 2012 to purchase a Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Truck, or BearCat.

The grant was offered through the 1033 program, which was signed into law in 1997 and created a pipeline for the DOD to pass surplus military gear to local police precincts. It may seem preposterous that a sleepy New England town would need to commandeer a tank intended to withstand IED attacks, but in the post-9/11 era, nearly any degree of militarization can be justified with the threat of terrorism.

“We don't know what the terrorists are thinking,” warned Jim Massery, sales manager for the creator of the Bearcat, Lencor Armored Vehicles, to investigative journalist Radley Balko, before questioning whether residents who took issue with the BearCat “just don’t think police officers’ lives are worth saving.”

A series of town meetings led by city councilor Terry Clark revealed a sizable number of city residents opposed the local SWAT’s acquisition of a BearCat. “This is an agreement between the government and arms dealers, essentially,” noted Clark after a representative for Lencor revealed that the transfers of military equipment allow them to tap into the DOD’s $34 billion terrorism budget.

Despite resistance, the Keene police department put the BearCat to use, starting in the fall of 2012, and it was used 21 times as of summer 2013: 19 times for training exercises, once in response to a barricaded person and once in response to a person threatening suicide.

Surrounding cities have signed pacts with Keene to borrow the BearCat when needed, and support throughout the state for similar vehicles remains strong: A state bill to halt the purchase of military equipment by New Hampshire police departments was shot down in late March, making it likely that more departments will seek BearCats from the DOD, in addition to the 11 that already have them.

 Have you ever laughed at your local deputy?  Complained about the speed of your town's first reponders? Questioned the intelligence of the chief of police, even jokingly?

You should probably seriously consider moving to another state. Far away. Where you will keep your mouth shut

To protect and to serve. But only those who do as they are told.

Michigan Guilty of Pre-Meditated Murder of Detroit

Because this is what elected repugs do.

Crooks and Liars:

This is one way to kill a city -- short its tax revenue by millions. On purpose.

MLive:

Michigan communities have missed out on some $6.2 billion in statutory revenue sharing payments over the past decade as lawmakers and governors diverted funds to fill holes in the state budget, according to a new report from the Michigan Municipal League highlighting losses by community.

Detroit, the state's largest city, lost out on $732 million in revenue sharing between 2003 and 2013, according to the report. Twenty two other cities -- from Grand Rapids to Wyandotte -- saw the state divert at least $10 million in sales tax revenue that local leaders believe they should have been entitled to.

[...]

However, local leaders say the state has not honored a statutory provision (see: law) that requires it to appropriate additional sales tax dollars to communities based on a standard formula. Over the course of the past decade, those "raids" have added up.

“You can look at pretty much any Michigan community and see where they might be today if the statutory revenue sharing had been fully funded,” Samantha Harkins of the Municipal League said in a statement.

“For example, look at Flint, which is now under an emergency manager. Flint will have lost $54.9 million dollars by the end of 2014. The deficit in its 2012 financial statements is $19.2 million. Flint could eliminate the deficit and pay off all $30 million of bonded indebtedness and still have over $5 million in surplus. In Detroit, a city facing the largest municipal bankruptcy in history, the state took over $700 million to balance the state’s books.”

Over $700 million. Think of what Detroit could have done with that money. Investments in the city could have been made that would have attracted more business. Instead they cut back on every service there was, closed schools, and effectively closed shop while the state balanced its books on the backs of desperate cities there.

Pathetic management. I don't care who is responsible, Republican or Democrat. There's no excuse for a state failing to abide by its own laws.

Anti-Poverty Means Anti-Rich

Let's start by taxing billionaires out of existence.

Peter Marcuse in a letter to The Nation:

Re Greg Kaufman’s “Building an Anti-Poverty Movement” [Feb. 3]: It’s good to call attention to the shameful way our economy exploits the poor and how inadequately our government responds. But calling the problem “poverty” focuses on just half of it. It accepts the idea that the poor are responsible for their own problems, and families can pull themselves up through hard work and “climb the ladder of opportunity” (Obama in the State of the Union address), perhaps with a little help up from government. It’s an idea Nation writers reject. But they skirt the fact that you then have to confront the reality that the poor are so poor because the rich are so rich.

The focus on poverty can help avoid exactly that conclusion. Criticizing the rich smacks of “class war” and raises uncomfortable questions about the 1 percent and whether they deserve to reap so disproportionate a share of the wealth that increasing productivity provides them.

Seriously addressing inequality rather than only poverty would undercut the president’s justification of inequality in the State of the Union message­—that “we don’t resent those who, by virtue of their efforts, achieve incredible success.” Even if their efforts come from financial and employment practices that cause widespread joblessness and that very poverty that is being attacked?

Tackling poverty involves tackling inequality, tackling the wealth of the rich as well as the poverty of the poor. An anti-poverty movement needs to be willing to say that, out loud.

 The super rich are anathema to democratic society.

The Cost of Libraries

ummagumma.co

We can maintain civilized society without guns, without oil/coal/gas, without billionaires, without religion and even without repugs. We cannot maintain civilized society without libraries.