Shutdown hunger games

 Over a century ago Will Rogers, famous for both his acting and pithy social commentary, quipped, “Ten men in our country could buy the whole world, and ten million can’t buy enough to eat.”   Were he alive today, he would have to amend it to say that while 10 men can still buy the whole world, 42 million can’t buy enough to eat.

Because President Trump, while hosting a lavish “Great Gatsby” themed party at his resort in Mar-a-Lago, directed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to withhold SNAP benefits from 42 million children, veterans, and seniors, all while boasting about his new marble bathrooms and gilded ballroom.  

These kinds of gross displays of extreme wealth against a backdrop of desperate poverty have become a common feature of American life today.  A cursory look at how some of the richest people are presently fairing gives us a sense. 

Jim Walton, heir to the Walmart fortune, saw his wealth rise by192 per cent since Trump’s corporate tax breaks were enacted in 2017.  According to Americans for Tax Fairness, this translates to an additional $80 million in just eight years for Jim Walton.

By contrast, a young woman working as a cashier at Walmart recently told me that she was worried about how she is going to feed her nine-month-old baby after WIC benefits were taken away.  She said she works as much as she can at $11 an hour, but her Walmart wages are not enough to afford formula and food, so she relies on WIC to ensure her baby is getting enough to eat.  Accounting for inflation she is making even less in real wages over the same time period Mr. Walton’s fortunes have skyrocketed.  

How do we understand the level of precarity facing millions of people like her when today America’s 916 billionaires have now amassed $8 trillion, a 172 per cent increase since the enactment of the 2017 Trump tax law?  

Joseph Stiglitz gives an answer from his perspective as a Nobel prize winning economist.  In The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future he points out, “There are two ways to become wealthy: to create wealth or to take wealth away from others. The former adds to society. The latter typically subtracts from it, for in the process of taking it away, wealth gets destroyed.”  From this perspective, the extraction of wealth from working people is what is fueling today’s extreme levels of poverty and wealth inequality. 

This extraction and concentration of wealth is made possibly by the policy decisions made by those in power, and to that, Will Rogers has a related quip: “America has the best politicians money can buy.”  As illustration, West Virginia’s entire congressional delegation voted for the “Big Brutal Bill” which permanently extended Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cuts, partly paid for by cutting health care and food access for West Virginians and other struggling Americans. 

Yes the Federal Government is still shut down as President Trump and our representatives in Washington refuse to side with Democrats and restore the premium tax credits that allow West Virginians to access health care.  Even so, the Administration can designate contingency and carryover funds to keep SNAP running, as the USDA has done during previous shutdowns. It can also transfer funds from other accounts to make up any shortfall.

In open letter to West Virginia’s four senators and representatives and signed by over 40 food banks, churches, and advocacy groups, they stated, “Allowing SNAP and WIC payments to lapse and hunger to deepen during a shutdown is a policy choice and a preventable cruelty.”

These same groups also requested that each of our senators and representatives sit down as soon as they can with West Virginians who are experiencing the crushing stress of whether or not they will have enough food for their loved ones to eat.      

If our leaders continue to prioritize wealthy donors and the corporate elite over the thousands of West Virginians struggling to afford health care and food, then you can count on Will Rogers for some final words of wisdom: “The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.”  So let us not forget next time.  

This column by Lida Shepherd, director of the American Friends Service Committee WV Economic Justice Project, appeared in today's Charleston Gazette-Mail.

Big bad ugly bill

 British author and poet George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”

While confronting the monstrosity of the so-called “big beautiful bill” that recently passed the House of Representatives, one might imagine Orwell hollering at us from the past, “Did I call it or what?”

If this bill didn’t have life or death implications for millions of Americans, we could almost laugh at the recent image of moneyed politicians, victorious after the bill narrowly passed the House, their pockets lined with corporate cash, standing behind a sign that reads: “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

But nothing funny nor beautiful can be found in a bill that adds trillions of dollars to the national debt, strips health care and food assistance away from millions of Americans, all to pay for an extension of tax cuts, the lion’s share of which benefit the wealthiest one per cent. 

How could we be fooled into not seeing that this budget bill is what economics columnist for the Washington Post Catherine Rampell calls “a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich”?  

At over 1,000 pages, I’ll concede that the bill is big, which is by design.  The sheer volume of it, the number of programs and tax policies it touches makes it difficult for most of us to understand all the implications of a budget bill this size.  My friend and colleague with American Friends Service Committee Rick Wilson has often quipped, “Taxes and budgets are boring. Breathing is boring too until someone starts choking you, in which case it’s fascinating.”

We should be fascinated – and equally horrified - by what is in this bill. According to Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, two-thirds of the proposal’s tax cuts benefit only those earners in the top quintile of income brackets.   

Cuts to the corporate tax rate, which decreased from 35 per cent to 21 per cent after the tax cuts were originally passed in 2017, would be made permanent.  Those corporate tax cuts have helped drain our federal coffers.  From 2018 to 2021, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the top corporations in the US saved a combined $240 billion in taxes.

This massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich is made plain by the fact that the tax cuts would be paid for largely by cutting people off Medicaid and SNAP.  

Words like “waste, fraud and abuse” hide the bill’s true aims.  Stereotypes of an unworthy poor person are updated.  President Ronald Reagan used the racialized trope of “welfare queen” to defend welfare reform in the 1980’s.  Today Speaker Mike Johnson describes “29 year old males sitting on their coach playing video games” to gin up anti-poor resentments and peddle the myth that food and health care are luxuries only for those who are deserving.

Political dog whistles are used to support radical changes to the Medicaid program via “Medicaid work requirements” that would, by design, drown people in bureaucratic paperwork.  Quite cynically those who support this bill are not hiding the math: the tax cuts will be offset in part by the number of people projected to be cut off Medicaid.   

The Congressional Budget Office’s latest cost estimate shows that the Medicaid provisions would increase the number of uninsured people by 7.6 million. Over 90,000 people in West Virginia would eventually lose health care coverage.  

When Arkansas instituted work reporting requirements, more than 18,000 people lost Medicaid coverage, mainly due to failure to regularly report work status or document eligibility for an exemption. 

The hypocrisy of the proposed reporting requirements is staggering.  As New York Times columnist Ezra Klein points out, so-called work requirements are “an effort to weaponize the very bureaucratic inefficiency that they otherwise pretend to condemn and root out — against the weakest and most powerless segment of society: people who do not make enough money to get health insurance.”

“Medicaid work requirements” sound good which again is by design. The language obscures the fact that two thirds of people who receive Medicaid via expansion under the Affordable Care Act are already working full or part time.  The other third of people are not working due to caregiving responsibilities, unaffordable child care, or any number of life complications that crop up, particularly when facing economic hardship every single day.  

Orwell concludes in his essay on politics and language, “One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase into the dustbin where it belongs.”

I surely hope that the better and wiser angels of our nature carry the day, and that we all jeer loudly enough to send the “one big beautiful bill” into the dustbin where it belongs.  

(This op-ed by Lida Shepherd appeared in the Charleston Gazette-Mail)

Why we fight

 "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”--Stephen Jay Gould, 1941-2002/

That pretty much sums the answer to "why we fight" for me.

"Let all who are hungry come and eat"

Time is running out for WV Governor Jim Justice to veto HB 4001, a mean-spirited bill that would take away food from thousands of poor West Virginians, stress local charities, and take millions of dollars from our economy.

Lots has been said and written about this, but the one that moves me the most is this op-ed by Charleston Rabbi Victor Urecki in the Charleston Gazette-Mail. He reminds us that at the sacred Seder meal celebrating Passover, the original freedom holiday, it's customary to pray, "“Let all who are hungry come and eat. Let all who are needy come and celebrate with us.”

The whole thing is well worth reading, but here's just a bit that moved me.

At every Passover Seder, my revered teacher of blessed memory taught me that, at the beginning of the meal, we break one matzah and take the larger piece and wrap it for the end of the meal; we eat only the smaller piece as the meal begins. This is done to remind ourselves of the needs of the poor. He taught me that those who do not know where their next meal will come from never eat a full “loaf”; they worry that, tomorrow, they may not have bread to eat.

People in poverty are always insecure without a safety net. I will cherish that lesson as a moral obligation to act. We who live with abundance should never forget what it is like to be worried about food and translate that custom into a call for action to end hunger in our communities.

...
May the doors of compassion be open in our state, and may we declare: May all who are hungry come and eat.

I hope his words move Governor Justice as well.

May all who are hungry come and eat.

Gnats and camels

A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Washington Post found that Christians, especially white evangelicals, were more than twice as likely to blame poverty on lack of effort by the poor compared with nonreligious Americans.

That’s a dramatic departure from the first 1,500 years of Christian history. Not to mention over a thousand years of Judaism before that.

In fact, concern for justice for the poor is one of the unique features of the Jewish religious tradition, out of which Christianity grew.

Apparently for some Christians, somewhere along the way, economic factors morphed from being a part of life to being the main event. And wealth got conflated with salvation and righteousness, while poverty was linked to sin and damnation.

That’s not how it all started.

Deuteronomy, the final biblical book of the Jewish Torah, states that “There should be no poor among you.”

Mosaic law called for periodic and radical cancellation of debts and redistribution of land to level social inequality. It wasn’t voluntary. The divine call was for justice, not charity. Landowners were even forbidden from gathering in all of their harvest; the remnants were to be left for the poor to glean.

The prophets regularly denounced the wealthy and powerful. To use just one of many examples, Isaiah asked: “What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?” They didn’t hold back from denouncing kings, including good ones like David and bad ones like Ahab.

As Thomas Cahill wrote in The Gifts of the Jews, “This bias toward the underdog is unique not only in ancient law but in the whole history of law. However faint our sense of justice may be, insofar as it operates at all it is still a Jewish sense of justice.”

This bias toward the underdog is also central theme of the New Testament, showing up as early as the song Mary sang in Luke after being told she would bear a child: “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.”

Jesus wouldn’t just say “Blessed are the poor.” He also said “woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry.”

Here again, examples could be multiplied. Consider the epistle of James: “Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you ... Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.”

That continued in the Orthodox and Catholic tradition. St. Ambrose (337-397), who helped convert Augustine, said “You are not making a gift of your possessions to poor persons. You are handing over to them what is theirs. For what has been given in common for the use of all, you have arrogated to yourself. The world is given to all, and not only to the rich.” And “It is the hungry man’s bread that you withhold, the naked man’s cloak that you store away, the money that you bury in the earth is the price of the poor man’s ransom and freedom.”

St. John Chrysostom (349-407) preached “Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours, but theirs.”

St. Basil (330-379) said: “Are not thou then a robber, for counting as thine own what thou hast receivest to distribute? It is the bread of the famished which thou receivest, the garment of the naked which thou hoardest in thy chest, the shoe of the barefooted which rots in they possessions, the money of the penniless which thou hast buried in the earth. Wherefore then dost thou injure so many to whom thou mightiest be a benefactor.”

St. Gregory the Great, aka Pope Gregory I, (540-604) said “When we attend to the needs of those in want, we give them what is theirs, not ours. More than performing works of mercy, we are paying a debt of justice.”

Say what you want about early and medieval Christianity, but bashing the poor wasn’t part of the deal.

In today’s world, far be it from me to deny that there may be a slacker or two out there (most of which are not poor). But myopic views of poverty neglect some huge events that have taken place in front of God and everybody for the last few decades.

These include the decline of unions and workers’ power; trade deals that benefit corporations not communities; tax cuts to the wealthy; budget cuts; a minimum wage lagging behind inflation, privatization, and the growth of big money in politics, all of which has led to record levels of inequality.

Studies have shown that most recent income growth has gone to the wealthiest 99.999 percent, even while the share going to low and middle income Americans has declined.

As The New York Times reported, “Only a few decades ago, the middle class and the poor weren’t just receiving healthy raises. Their take-home pay was rising even more rapidly, in percentage terms, than the pay of the rich.” Today, however, “The basic problem is that most families used to receive something approaching their fair share of economic growth, and they don’t anymore.”

Ignoring these massive injustices while nit-picking at the real or imagined small flaws of low income people is pretty much exactly the kind of thing that Jesus had in mind when, using a drinking metaphor, he accused some misguided religious people of his own day of “straining out gnats and swallowing camels.”

Unfortunately, it looks like camels are still on the menu.

(This ran as an op-ed in the Gazette-Mail. Please be kind enough to overlook the fact that I put the two numbers in the wrong place.)

The whole widow/orphan thing

While WV's deeply religious Republican legislature contemplates legislation that would make it harder for workers maimed on the job or their widows and orphans to have access to legal remedies, I decided to let my fingers go walking through the Bible. Here's what I found...and it's very incomplete.

* Exodus 22:22: “Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan.”

*Deuteronomy 10: 18 “For the LORD your God is the God of gods and the Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God who does not show partiality nor take a bribe. He executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and shows His love for the alien by giving him food and clothing.”

* Deuteronomy  24:17 ”Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge.”

*Deuteronomy 27:19 "’Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow’." Then all the people shall say, ‘Amen!’"

* Isaiah 1:17 “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.”

* Isaiah 1:23 “Your rulers are rebels, partners with thieves; they all love bribes and chase after gifts. They do not defend the cause of the fatherless; the widow's case does not come before them.”

* Jeremiah 5:27-29: “Like a cage full of birds, so their houses are full of deceit; therefore they have become great and rich. They are fat, they are sleek, they also excel in deeds of wickedness; they do not plead the cause, the cause of the orphan, that they may prosper; and they do not defend the rights of the poor. Shall I not punish these people?' declares the LORD, 'On a nation such as this shall I not avenge Myself?”

* Malachi 3:5: "’So I will come to put you on trial. I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive the foreigners among you of justice, but do not fear me,’ says the LORD Almighty.”

* James 1:27: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”


Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be a pattern here, although some elected officials don’t seem to have gotten the memo.

In any case, the final vote on this bill will be one to watch. And to remember.

Who is just?

El Cabrero is on the run and under the weather today, but I did manage to find this great quotation from Plato. I think it's a keeper.

...he who really and naturally reveres justice and really hates  injustice is discovered in his dealings with that class of men to whom he can easily be unjust.

 You really can tell a lot about people by how they treat the less fortunate. Worst of all are those who grovel to those above and terrorize those below.

Don't bee a stranger

When I was a small child, our family lived next to the kind of people who probably don't exist anymore. They were an elderly couple, the Richmonds, and they were what I can only describe as bedrock Appalachians, real mountain people. They knew all the old ways and skills of survival.

The man, Hinton, knew where to find fish in the river. He hunted for ginseng in the hills. And he claimed--and I believed--that he could follow honeybees to their hives. Hinton attempted to educate me about the benefits of honeybees. I was a hard sell since these creatures seemed to have been designed specifically to sting my feet when I played barefoot outside.

It took me a while to get the memo, but eventually I became a bee fan. I was sad to learn of the recent unprecedented decline in the bee population due to a mysterious syndrome known as colony collapse disorder. This was bad news not just for bee-keepers but for the many plants and crops that the bees pollinate.

Eventually, this hit home. For the past two summers, I don't recall seeing a single honey bee at Goat Rope Farm. I am pleased to announce that they are back and were as welcome to me as the return of a long lost friend. I hope they stick around.

TALKING SENSE. Here is Paul Krugman doing battle with bad economic ideas.

FAUX NEWS. Here's a look at 14 propaganda techniques used by a certain "fair and balanced" news network.

FROM EVIL TO HEROISM. Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford psychologist of prison experiment fame, is trying to see whether heroism can be taught. (Search Goat Rope archives in upper left hand corner for several posts on Zimbardo's work.)

A SENSE OF FAIRNESS AND JUSTICE may be innate in humans. Too bad some people apparently didn't get the memo.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A la carte

El Cabrero is about to hit the road for a few days but here are some items that caught my eye:

ROCK ON, ROCKEFELLER. West Virginia's senior senator Jay Rockefeller takes on plans to arbitrarily cut the federal budget at the expense of working and low income people.

NO LOVE FEAST. Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) found his plan to torpedo Medicare was a tough sell on a tour of his home state.

THE BACK DOOR PLAN. Here's more on the splendidly bad idea of global caps on federal spending.

AFTER OSAMA. Will scaling back military engagements and spending be on the agenda?

FAIRNESS ON THE BRAIN. A sense of justice (however apparently dormant at times) seems to be innate. Scientists may even have found its location in the brain.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The ultimatum game--don't monkey around with it

Don't offer this guy a bum deal.

A classic experiment in behavior economics challenges the image of people as rational agents who always act in their own material self interest. It's called the ultimatum game and it works like this:

there are two players, one with say $10 and the other with nothing. Player A decides how to split the money and makes a take it or leave it offer to Player B. Player B can either accept what is offered or veto the whole deal.

While it would technically be in Player B's rational interest to accept whatever is offered, even if it's only $1, most people in that position insist on a fairer division, even if it means walking away from a bad deal with nothing at all.

In most games, the average amount offered was $4.71. When people in Player B's position were asked what the lowest amount they would take would be, the average answer was $2.59. As Michael Marmot put in in The Status Syndrome,

"Players were prepared to tolerate a degree of inequality if the absolute reward to them was great enough. But if the inequality increased sufficiently, or the absolute rewarded went down enough, the game wasn't worth it, and they opted for both getting nothing."

That's also the way some monkeys play it. James Surowiecki in an old New Yorker column relates the following:

...the primatologists Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans B. M. de Waal released a study showing that female brown capuchin monkeys seem to have a sense of fairness, too. Pairs of capuchins had been trained to give Brosnan pebbles in exchange for slices of cucumber. This idyllic monkey market economy was disrupted, though, when the scientists changed the pay scale, rewarding one monkey with a delicious grape and the other with the same measly old cucumber. Exposed to this injustice, the capuchins who were given cucumbers often refused to eat; forty per cent of the time, they stopped trading entirely. Things got worse when one monkey in each pair was given a grape for doing nothing at all. The other monkeys often responded by tossing away their pebbles; eighty per cent of the time, they stopped trading. The capuchins were willing to forfeit cheap food simply to express their displeasure at their partners’ unearned riches.

The point was not—as some of the news coverage suggested—that capuchins are innate sharers. (The capuchin who got the grape showed no inclination to give it up.) The monkeys want to distribute things fairly, not equally. They seem to believe that there should be a clear connection between work and pay. One variation of the ultimatum game shows that humans feel this way, too: instead of randomly assigning the proposer role, the researchers had the participants take a trivia quiz beforehand, and the ones who did best became proposers. Not one of their offers was rejected; apparently, people believed that a proposer who might be worthy of his status deserved to keep more of the money.

Our sense of fairness, in other words, demands that there be at least some relationship (however tenuous) between accomplishment and reward...

It looks like a sense of justice is a primate thing.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, justice lost a round yesterday in the US Senate finance committee. WV Senator Jay Rockefeller's public option amendment to the Baucus health care reform bill was voted down. It's not over yet as there is still a chance to amend the bill on the floor or when the House and Senate meet to reconcile their bills.
Here's a big Goat Rope "Thank You!" to Rockefeller for fighting the good fight.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION of the 1930s might have had a silver lining, according to this scientific study. Thanks to a certain hermit for passing this along.

IN THE HOLE. Economist Dean Baker takes on the deficit here.

ADVICE FOR PARENTS OF YOUNG CHILDREN: talk early, talk often.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

JUSTICE AND COMPASSION

"It is impossible (fortunately) to have justice without compassion, but it is possible (unfortunately) to have compassion without justice. That sequence of justice and compassion is, therefore, significant. We are back, in fact, with the distinction between, on the one had, individual good or evil and,on the other systemic good or evil. Where there is justice without compassion, there will be anger, violence, and murder. A thirst for justice without an instinct for compassion produces killers. Sometimes they are simply believers in a Killer God. Sometimes they are assistant killers of a Killer God. But compassion without justice is equally problematic. In any unjust system, there are people needing immediate assistance. And even in an perfectly just system, there would still be those who would need compassion. But compassion, no matter how immediately necessary or profoundly human, cannot substitute for justice, for the right of all to equal dignity and integrity of life. Those who live by compassion are often canonized. Those who live by justice are often crucified."

John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity