The Stink of the New Republican Revolution

From The Nation: the powerful who deplore working class people who aren’t working are the ones who are getting rid of the jobs those people used to rely on.

The last time jobs went away was in the 30s, and FDR created the New Deal to help save working people from disaster. Now Newt Gingrich is bragging how Trump and the Republicans are planning to rip out everything FDR put in place. Reported by ThinkProgress.

Paul Ryan, the pious, serious-looking Republican who rules Congress is the guy who will take the big knife to the safety net. What do you call someone who benefits from a program and then takes it away from other people who need it? Hypocrite. Yeah, Ryan is a class-A hypocrite. He plans to take away Social Security from working people but he grew up on Social Security benefits. The whole hypocritical story reported by Alternet.

Republicans find working people useful for gaining power but are happy to ditch them when it’s convenient–––and they find it’s always convenient to ditch working people. In this time of Christian devotion they seem to think Jesus preferred rich people and disliked the poor. I’m not sure which part of the New Testament this is drawn from but it certainly shapes all of GOP policy––Praise God! The New Republic summarizes the Republican Revised Standard Version of the New Testament.

Notice the bad smell coming from North Carolina? Is it the hog industry’s vast lakes of pig poop or is it the politics? The politics do stink in NC. The Republicans redrew the voting districts to confine majority Democrats into a permanent legislative minority. A ghetto project if there ever was one. But this year a Democrat defeated the Republican for the governorship. The legi answered by stripping the governor’s office of its staff and its powers. PeeeeeeYeeewwwww. A lot of the Republicans’ power (and money) comes from the hog industry. Maybe the pig should replace the noble elephant. Of course the pig is much nobler than what we are seeing in this failed state.

Bill Moyers on the stink of North Carolina's hog-manure Republicanism.

SLATE on the Republican coup in NC.

Meanwhile, in another failed state, Wisconsin…. Republican governor Scott Walker, the college dropout who is busily turning the University of Wisconsin from a premier university into a second rate one, is now reshaping all state bureaus and departments so all their information conforms to his belief that climate change is a Chinese hoax, and the environment does best when we fill the air and water with industrial waste.

UrbanMilwaukee on the Republican censoring of the state environmental scientists.

Did Welfare Reform Worsen The Depression In Working Class Incomes?

I am inclined to think that Bill Clinton based his “end of welfare as we know it” on optimism. He knew that, contrary to the negative press workers got from the business press, workers preferred to work. It gave them dignity and an income and a value to their families. Because he lived among people whose lives had an upward trajectory Clinton believed that was the nature of things.

The welfare rolls had become a pool of joblessness. Described that way it’s hard not to think of the situation being caused by the welfare safety net. Was it as self-perpetuating as it was described, or was it, perhaps, simply that a certain number of working age people were always going to be unemployable or underemployed for lengthy periods regardless of willingness to work. Were they, as a class, to blame for their situation. There are people who will always be hard to employ or find it difficult to stay employed. There is a spectrum of capability; it is not simply a matter of will and character or the lack of it. These people deserve to eat and have a place to live because they are Americans, and the government is the last resort for that. Often their unemployability is due to the trauma of military service or simply caused by traumatic events or disease which we know tend to be underdiagnosed and under-treated among the poor.

Clinton signed welfare reform but the Gingrich Revolution is the author of this term-limiting of welfare. They spoke in the same hearty American language of optimism but also in a different American language of punitiveness and judgment. Conservatives tend to be more binary in how they assess problems, and more willing to blame the ones needing help. Clinton wanted to achieve innovations and reform perceived problems. He believed welfare reform might solve the problem of persistent unemployment. It actually may have hidden the problem, and created another.

There is another tendency among conservatives to believe ending the spending solves the problem it was being spent on, but even if people with problems and limitations that make them harder to employ die off sooner (and less expensively, and thus more efficiently in conservative terms) new people with these difficulties are born and enter the work force each year. There are some problems that can’t be solved but require palliative care. Think of some categories of unemployment like chronic leukemia, which has to be treated but cannot be cured and doesn’t go away.

Did the end of welfare as we know it exacerbate the degradation of working class prosperity Americans had enjoyed for two generations?

This long depression in working class incomes dates roughly to the Reagan administration and the careful neutralization (and Reagan’s cheerful co-opting) of organized labor, but may it also have been deepened and lengthened by the removal of this durable safety net? The welfare safety net didn’t assume that one’s joblessness was only temporary––an optimistic view that everybody can find a job if they look for one. That everyone is capable of work their whole life. That anyone not working is malingering or of poor character. It might have carried a stigma but it didn’t withhold help.

The removal of the reliable safety net (which had no mechanism for shutting out the least employable) left various deterrents to people who needed assistance. (The taxpayer could wash his hands of those deterred from seeking help; problem solved.) Workers could wear out the government’s tolerance for their inadequacies even if the inadequacies didn’t go away. Eventually the govt would label them as incorrigible and undeserving. Thus simple need became a stain on your character, making it even more difficult to find employment and keep it.

When the safety net was taken away it also increased the desperation of the pool of less employable people at the bottom. Did this increased desperation and larger pool of people who could no longer find help depress wages? How could it not? I’ve read about the wage-depressing effect of undocumented workers willing work longer for less money because of their insecure status here, but the removal of the safety net was probably a much greater depressant on wages. Both increased the labor pool and increased its desperation. In a sense workers who weren’t working but not starving were like union workers who could strike because there was a union fund for that. Greater desperation helps employers.

I believe the lagging minimum wage is a result of a labor market that is tilted to favor employers in more ways than most Americans realize: by declining union organizing, by the presence of less demanding undocumented workers, and by the desperation caused by the loss of a safety net, each leveraging the others.

The Gingrich World of Aristocrats and Serfs

There's a very cynical calculation that goes through every Republican mind, a dollar calculation. If you're a rich Republican it's how long and hard you can get people to work for how little and how little you can get away with paying in Lincoln's hated income taxes on the earnings your underlings are sweating out for you. If you're a poor Republican you obviously can't do calculations.

John Nichols of The Nation magazine converted Gingrich's calculation about poor children and "overpaid" school janitors to a simple equation using Gingrich's income as a metric. What it boils down to is plain fat ugly rich man's greed and prejudice.

Nichols summation of Gingrich Mathematics is worth posting wherever you post things: "Even in a party where cruelty is now considered a political virtue, there is something unsettling about a man who collected $30,000 each month to offer an hour of historical counsel to Freddie Mac administrators attacking elementary and secondary school janitors who, according to fresh Bureau of Labor Statistics data, earn a mean wage of $13.74 an hour, or $28,570 per year."

So Newt, who earns $30,000 an hour to "advise" bankers and financiers about history thinks school janitors are overpaid. In the old way of things Newt imagines he would have been one of the overseers on a horse watching his peasants till his land, and his peasants' children too, preferably peasants of a different color and owned instead of paid.

In Gingrich's world of aristocrats and serfs with government regulations and taxes happily out of the way, we get back to the world that our Founding Fathers fought the revolution to overturn. The nasty brutish world of European aristocracies and poor people who fled in ships to these savage shores. This country wasn't founded to evade taxes or to "liberate" the rich. Those who think taxes are evil actually think society is evil, or are rich enough to think society is unnecessary. George Washington thought otherwise when he mounted an army to collect taxes from recalcitrant citizens in western Pennsylvania. Education? Jefferson left his presidency off his tombstone but included his founding of the University of Virginia. (He had no grand plans for making poor students work as janitors.)

Thomas Paine had this to say about citizens' obligations to the public good. He took a dim view of the very rich, of people like Gingrich and his clientele:

"All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came."

Lizz Winstead (the creator of the Daily Show, who by the way grew up in my neighborhood) takes a shot at laughing Gingrich out of the race. Which may be unwise. He's such a monster we could do worse than keeping him around.