The Politics of Cruelty

I'm coming off of my Thanksgiving week high, settling down, and what's the first thing I think of when I get back to my desk to do some writing?  Cruelty. Institutional cruelty, at that.  Political cruelty.  The kind of cruelty that knows no bounds and fears no punishment.  A new kind of cruelty, right out in the open and expecting rewards.  The New America, courtesy of the Tea Party, the Koch Brothers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

I had a lovely week.  Our dinner was great, I avoided Black Friday, we celebrated a good man's birthday, and our 350 mile trip back home was uneventful.  No wind or snow or traffic jams, and the ferry, our lifeline, was running on time.

Maybe it was because of that fine respite--I don't know--but at my desk those thoughts about where we are on the inhumanity front kept coming through. 

If there is a catalyst, I blame Joe Arpaio, the infamous, publicity-seeking sheriff of Arizona's Maricopa County.  He's the guy who thinks it's cute to keep his prisoners in pink underwear.  He stays awake nights trying to come up with ideas to humiliate and demoralize the inmates in his care.  He gets a real kick out of it and never misses a chance to publicly tighten the screws.

To save money, Arpaio says, he feeds his prisoners only twice a day on between 15 cents and 40 cents a meal.  The meals are vegetarian, no salt and pepper.  He's working on charging them a dollar a meal, because, he says, "Everybody else has to pay for their food, why should they get freebies?"

Last Wednesday he took the time to tweet his Thanksgiving menu: 

"Thanksgiving menu is all set! Hope the inmates give thanks for this special meal being served in the jails tomorrow." 

 

Five ounces of turkey soy casserole and donated brownies.  56 cents a meal.  Did he do it to save money?  Sure.  Did he have to do it?  No.  (Did he eat it himself?  Have you seen him?)

But Joe is small potatoes compared to the various Federal, state and local leaders busy thinking up ways to stick it to the little guy.  Governors refusing Federally endorsed Medicaid for their citizens.  A $40 billion cut in food stamps.  A fight to block minimum wage hikes.  Cuts in unemployment benefits.  Cuts in Veteran's aid.  Cuts in public education.  Complete and total neglect of crumbling infrastructure.  Refusal to recognize the Affordable Care Act, along with a hearty wish that that damned website would just die already. 

Cruel, cruel, cruel, cruel, cruel, cruel, cruel, and cruel.  Every "no" vote, every obstruction sentences hundreds of thousands to needless suffering.  But because that kind of cruelty is now the American version of politics-as-usual, some of us rail (and not for the first time) while some of us cheer, but in the end, the power is no longer with the people.  Endless, needless, avoidable suffering and nobody goes to jail.  

Except Joe Arpaio, but only long enough to torment his inmates for yet another day.  Then he gets to go home, where nothing can hurt him.  Ever.

Peace in Our Time Here on Our Shores

[A] just peace includes not only civil and political rights — it must encompass economic security and opportunity. For true peace is not just freedom from fear, but freedom from want.
It is undoubtedly true that development rarely takes root without security; it is also true that security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine they need to survive. It does not exist where children cannot aspire to a decent education or a job that supports a family. The absence of hope can rot a society from within.

President Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize speech, Oslo, Norway, 12/10/09

As I listened to Barack Obama speak those words midway through his speech in Oslo this morning, they hit me like a ton of bricks.  I don't know if he planned it, or even realized it, but he was talking as much about the plight of Americans as he was of any other citizens of the world.

We are at war here, and we're losing the battle to save ourselves.  The Barbarians are living among us (though not beside us, since their communities are gated fortresses), using  innocuous, often American-sounding names in order to hide the fact that they are busily working from within to destroy the very fabric of our lives.

They go by many monikers -- plutocrats, Fat Cats, moguls, tycoons, Big Cheeses,  Moneybags, Wheeler-dealers, Head Honchos. . .and those are just the nice terms.  (Some of them used to be called "Captains of Industry" but since that ship has sailed, they don't answer to that anymore.)

They do their work right out in the open--no fear--because there are enough  partners-in-crime among the high mucky-mucks in our nation's government to keep them safe and happy.  The enemies of the people don't have to resort to bearing arms or setting up artillery.  No strafing from the air, no carpet-bombing, no picking us off from the roof-tops.  After years of pretending that all of their seemingly destructive actions are for our own good, they've got us right where they want us.

You really have to hand it to them--they vanquished us with nothing more than obfuscation and clever lies--that and vaults overflowing with ill-gotten gains.

They used the tactics of every enemy worth its stripe--first  the stroking ("Let us make as much as we can and we'll make sure it trickles down to you."), then the cajoling ("We're a capitalistic country. You understand about free markets, don't you?"), then the intimidating ("The government will turn us all into Socialists.  Communism won't be far behind."), and finally the outright war ("If you don't let us have our way, we will destroy you--we have the Chamber of Commerce and the entire Republican Party on our side.  You have only what we've allowed you to have.  Chew on that for a while.")

So consequently we have the sort of country that Obama decried in his Oslo speech:  Citizens without access to enough food or medicine, reports of dirty water, an educational system ranking lower than some third world countries, capable men and women rooting around for jobs that will keep their families intact.

We are those people.  The people that other, richer countries are either pitying or trying to ignore.  The people who had it all and gave it away.  The people who can't muster up the will to fight the enemy within our own borders.  The people who may ultimately lose it all.

As Obama said this morning, "An absence of hope can rot a society from within". He was the champion of hope and we bought it to such a delirious degree, we lifted him into the White House and took to the streets wildly cheering our good fortune. 

Our hope, if not absent now, is at least preoccupied.  We need it back if we're ever going to take care of our own business again.  We need the man who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize today to come home and lead us out of this.  We'll fight as hard as we can, but we can't do it without a leader.  He is it, and it's time he took a good, long look at the one country whose problems he can actually do something about.

Ramona

(Cross-posted at Talking Points Memo here.)

To Hell with Hunger, Palin's got a book out

The magnitude of the increase in food shortages -- and, in some cases, outright hunger -- identified in the report startled even the nation's leading anti-poverty advocates, who have grown accustomed to longer lines lately at food banks and soup kitchens. The findings also intensify pressure on the White House to fulfill a pledge to stamp out childhood hunger made by President Obama, who called the report "unsettling." 
(Amy Goldstein, Washington Post, 11/17/09)

_________________________________________

Every morning I get email alerts from the Big Papers about stories they've published that day.  Yesterday I was skimming the list of articles in the Washington Post, and I saw this:  America's Economic Pain Brings Hunger Pangs.

I read the story and was, as anticipated, duly appalled beyond belief.  This is America and we're talking about hungry people numbering in the millions.  "Hungry" does not mean starving.  It means a scarcity of food.  It means food this morning but what about tonight? It means food today, but what about tomorrow?  It means a rumbling in the stomach because food has to be rationed.  It means that as a country we're following a road we thought we had left behind.

Children in Soup Line - 1930s

So on more than a whim, I pulled up the WaPo website to see where this story fit on their main page, and--guess what?  It wasn't there.   The two top-read stories yesterday morning were about--guess what?  Sarah Palin's book tour blitz.

This week is National Hunger and Homeless Awareness week--not that anyone would notice.   The unofficial event is coordinated and co-sponsored by the National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness.   (In order for it to be official, somebody in the ranks of government would have to recognize hunger and homelessness as a real problem.  Though Obama called the hunger report "unsettling", I don't see any emergency mobilizing going on. It's simply another report among many that causes them to shake their heads and make promises they sincerely believe in, but about which they have no idea how to even begin addressing.)

This is the first paragraph of Goldstein's article:  "The nation's economic crisis has catapulted the number of Americans who lack enough food to the highest level since the government has been keeping track, according to a new federal report, which shows that nearly 50 million people -- including almost one child in four -- struggled last year to get enough to eat."

Fifty million people, including one child in four, didn't have enough to eat last year.  You can cite rampant unemployment, you can blame illegals, you can certainly put the finger on outsourcing and off-shoring, but the report touches on a major factor that nobody wants to talk about:  insufficient wages. 

"The report's main author at USDA, Mark Nord, noted that other recent research by the agency has found that most families in which food is scarce contain at least one adult with a full-time job, suggesting that the problem lies at least partly in wages, not entirely an absence of work." 

So while we talk about "joblessness" and the impact of hundreds of thousands of jobs lost each and every month, we tend to forget that homelessness and hunger also comes to people struggling to make a living in a job market that is increasingly hostile to them and to their families. There are working people living in their cars, for God's sake.

When millions of able-bodied workers with practical skills and functioning brains are reduced to fighting for menial jobs that pay peanuts, under circumstances that not a one of us could have foreseen even 10 years ago, we have to finally admit that for most of us, life in America is not the recurring pleasant dream but the absolute nightmare.

So here I go again:  Jobs, jobs, jobs that pay, pay, pay. . . a living wage, dammit. We can start like this:

We can build factories and roads and bridges and schools and libraries and railroad stations and we can fill those places with art by American artists.  We can put our young people to work maintaining and creating parks and waysides and scenic overlooks.  And we can send our best writers and photographers out on the road to chronicle the Second Coming of the Great Depression. This is history in the making, and it is history repeating itself.  These are real people who, many of them, come from families who were in this place before.  Many of them worked hard and created a life swank in the middle class, only to be dropped back into the dark places of their forebears.  I'm guessing they're ready and eager to get to work.

It goes without saying that we will need to pay our people a living wage for the necessary work they do.  But in turn, they will once again be able to pay their fair share of taxes, they will once again be consumers, and they will once again be shareholders in an America that welcomes and rewards their efforts.

But in the meantime we have to feed people who don't have enough food, we have to house people who are homeless (even as their former homes sit empty), and we have to stop pretending that millions of people without hope for a future is a situation that, given enough time, will right itself.

It's not going to happen without a whole lot of pushing and shoving.  The very thought of a New New Deal sends Corporate America reaching for their buggy-whips.  Back!  Back!  You can have our billions when you pry it from our cold, dead hands!

So.  All Right.  There's a crowbar around here somewhere. . .

Ramona