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lee atwater
Trump's Hunger Games
More damage to our nation’s most successful anti-hunger program is on the horizon.
Dec 12, 2019
Approximately 700,000 people are expected to lose food stamps due to the Trump Administration's new rule on time limits and a related work requirement--a rule that will be especially difficult for those lacking transportation, low-wage workers with unpredictable schedules, people living in rural areas, veterans, former foster youth, people reentering the community after prison, and those with no education past high school. In short, some of the people most vulnerable to hunger in our nation, with an average income that is just 18 percent of the poverty line, or about $2350 annually.
And even more damage to our nation's most successful anti-hunger program is on the horizon.
It raises an age-old question: can anyone--the Democratic party, progressive or union organizers, community-based organizations, a revitalized Poor People's Campaign--build multiracial coalitions to overcome the practice of people voting against their own economic interests based on racial animus that is constantly stoked?
Two other rules that are teed up include changing the utility deductions used when calculating a family's net income and benefit levels. It would especially hit northern states in the winter months. Another rule would bar households with more than $2500 in assets--or $3,500 for a household with a disabled adult--from qualifying for food assistance, and undermine states that want to help families with annual incomes greater than 130% of the poverty line, or more than about $26,000 for a family of three. Taken together, the Urban Institute estimates that had all of these proposed changes been in effect in 2018, 3.7 million fewer people would have received food stamps that year and annual benefits would have fallen by $4.2 billion. (Nearly a million students would have also lost their eligibility for free or reduced price school meals.)
The language the Trump Administration used around the release of the newest attack on assistance is akin to a tutorial on how to demonize people who are struggling. "Government dependency has never been the American dream," said Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue in a press release. And in a column for the USA Today, he writes of the need to "move people toward self-sufficiency." If he had pointed out that the average SNAP recipient receives about $4.17 per day the public might realize how ludicrous the idea of a dependency problem is.
The Trump administration's framing is also consistent with a strategy conservatives have used to divide the white and black working class since even before Ronald Reagan's assault on the safety net. As Darrick Hamilton, fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and executive director of The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity put it, conservatives portrayed those who benefit from public spending as black and brown people who were "lazy, unvirtuous and undeserving welfare queens." Indeed Lee Atwater, advisor to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, described this tactic as a way to get the white vote. Republicans could no longer use the n-word, Atwater said: "That hurts you--backfires." Instead, they would create a caricature of people of color abusing assistance, and talk about cracking down on so-called fraud. They would employ "much more abstract" language, Atwater said--often called "dog-whistles"--to communicate that voting for them means "blacks get hurt worse than whites." That racialized myth is now so ingrained in white America's conscience that when Sec. Perdue writes that the new rule will "restore the dignity of work to a sizeable segment of our population" and "do right by taxpayers," many people--and particularly the Republican base--wrongly perceive "leaders" who are "getting tough" with "freeloading" people of color.
Of course, the assumptions people make about who is in poverty--and who is impacted by cuts to antipoverty programs--have literally nothing to do with reality. In fact, there are 17 million white people in poverty, 9 million African American people, and 10.8 million Hispanic people. And, according to the Urban Institute, the loss of food assistance eligibility due to the new work requirement rule "differs little among racial groups." But the households most impacted by the other rule changes waiting in the wings? Non-Hispanic white and Asian--13 percent of each would have lost food stamp eligibility had the rules been in effect in 2018, compared to 8 percent of African American and 9.5 percent of Hispanic households; and 14 percent of African American and Hispanic participants would have received lower benefits, compared to 17 percent of non-Hispanic white households and 22 percent of Asian households.
It raises an age-old question: can anyone--the Democratic party, progressive or union organizers, community-based organizations, a revitalized Poor People's Campaign--build multiracial coalitions to overcome the practice of people voting against their own economic interests based on racial animus that is constantly stoked? Rev. William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, raised the issue in a recent interview: "What happens if a movement is able to help people see how they're being played against each other?" he asked. "You could reset the entire political calculus."
The Trump administration was unmoved by the approximately 140,000 comments it received in opposition to the rule changes--comments from bipartisan mayors, governors, pediatricians, and other interested parties. As with so much else during Trump's reign, the efficacy of the normal political process is gone. It begs the question: what will we each do now to stand up for the right of a nation to be free from hunger?
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Despite Front Seat to Last Four Decades of US Politics, Biden Repeats Claim That GOP 'Epiphany' Coming Soon
"Make it stop."
Nov 05, 2019
Former Vice President Joe Biden, one of the three frontrunners for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, on Wednesday repeated the assertion that if President Donald Trump was not in office the Republican Party would happily work alongside Democrats in Congress and the White House to get things done.
"With Donald Trump out of the way, you're going to see a number of my Republican colleagues have an epiphany," said Biden. "Mark my words. Mark my words."
Biden's comments came as part of a longer soliloquy on rival Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who Biden has been hammering since the senator suggested last week the former vice president was in the wrong party's primary.
"Make it stop," author Elon Green tweeted in response.
The comments follow remarks over the weekend where Biden reportedly said that "the road is clear for significant change."
"The only thing that stands in the way is Donald Trump," said Biden, who served in the President Barack Obama administration. "The only thing."
Blogger Atrios immediately pounced on Biden's rosy view of the GOP.
"Explain why they never had this epiphany when your best friend was president," Atrios tweeted, referring to Republican behavior for the only eight years the U.S. has thus far had a black man in the White House. "Come on."
It's not the first time Biden has made such comments. On May 14, Biden told reporters that once Trump was out of office, "You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends."
At a fundraiser on June 10, Biden again hit the theme of GOP rebirth.
"With Trump gone, you're going to begin to see things change," said Biden. "Because these folks know better. They know this isn't what they're supposed to be doing."
Biden entered the Senate from Delaware in 1973 and remained there until assuming the office of vice president in 2009.
In that time, and this is an incomplete list, Republicans:
- elected Ronald Reagan president after he launched his campaign at Mississippi's Neshoba County Fair in a dogwhistle to white supremacists
- ran on the Southern Strategy, described here in graphic detail by Lee Atwater
- laughed at and mocked the victims of the AIDS crisis
- perpetuated the racist myth of the "welfare queen" to cut benefits for less fortunate Americans
- continued unsupportive and hostile policies toward the LGBTQ community for decades
- pardoned Iran-Contra felons who had lied to Congress
- impeached President Bill Clinton
- oversaw the implementation of a worldwide torture regime targeting Muslims
- said the party's top priority during President Obama's first term was to make the country's first black president a one-term president
- elected Donald Trump president and gave him the highest approval rating in the party for a president in history
Again, this is an incomplete list.
Reaction from progressives to Biden's comments was not positive.
The New Republic's Libby Watson looked at Biden's comments in the context of the campaign the former vice president is running.
"It's been said many times before but getting a healthcare system comparable to the rest of the fucking developed world is not more of fairy tale than the entire Republican party having an epiphany and walking away from... everything they've always been," said Watson.
Policy analyst Alexis Goldstein was flummoxed.
"Imagine living through McConnell stealing a Supreme Court seat and fighting Romneycare-turned-Obamacare to the death, and STILL somehow uttering these words," said Goldstein.
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Trump and GOP Are Blatantly Encouraging Foreign Dictators to Hack the 2020 Election
Which is why Trump and McConnell are working as hard as they can to make sure those foreign oligarchs and autocrats know how much they’ll appreciate that help, should it be forthcoming
Jul 09, 2019
It looks like Donald Trump and the leadership of the GOP are encouraging other countries to hack our upcoming 2020 election.
Donald Trump is sucking up to dictators, strongman oligarchs, and autocrats around the world, while Mitch McConnell is using political brute force to prevent individual states from hardening their election systems. Why?
Looking at the entire picture in context, consider Karl Marx's favorite question: "Who benefits?"
Who benefits when the leaders of countries with sophisticated internet hacking capabilities (North Korea, Saudi Arabia) and no democratic oversight are told by Trump that as long as he's in office he has their backs?
Might Trump and McConnell hope they'll intervene in our election to keep in power a political party that now disdains democracy and a free press, and embraces dictatorial behavior like calling for the imprisonment of Trump's political rivals, and of individuals in the intelligence agencies who have investigated him and the GOP?
Who benefits when countries with world-class internet hacking capabilities and less-than-democratic (Russia) or highly corrupted and oligarch-dependent (Netanyahu, Duterte, Modi) leaders become "good friends" of Trump and/or help Trump build or brand properties in their countries?
Might they intervene in our election directly or indirectly to keep in power an administration that both openly disdains the concept of "liberal democracy" and disrespects leaders of the largely European countries that practice it?
Why would Trump joke with Putin in front of the world about the possibility of Russians hacking American voting systems in the 2020 election? Is he expecting it, or just hoping for it?
Who benefits when mostly "red" states keep their voting systems' defenses down and continue to use 17-year-old technology running on Windows XP operating systems?
Who benefits when McConnell, Pence and Trump work together to make sure that, as CBS News reported this year, "Tens of thousands of voting machines in the United States [will continue to be] vulnerable to hacking" by refusing to fund upgrades?
Who benefits when repeated Democratic Party efforts to harden voting systems are blocked by Republican governors?
There's no ideological argument to be made for America having easily hacked voting systems; it's not something that conservatives like George Will or liberals like Robert Reich would reasonably disagree about.
So what could possibly be motivating Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate, other than the hope that hackers will produce another "red shift" miracle for them?
We already know that the GOP and their partisans on the Supreme Court have done and are doing everything they can to make it hard for Americans--particularly those with darker pigmented skin--to vote or otherwise participate in the political arena.
But that's probably not enough to guarantee the reelection of a man as reviled and unpopular as Trump, and thus keep the parade of corporatist-friendly right-wing judges moving through the Senate into lifetime appointments on the federal bench. They need more--a little help from their friends.
Republicans have been caught manipulating voter rolls; engaging in now-legalized "political" gerrymandering that magically corresponds to race; running ads in social media filled with deception and outright lies; encouraging right-wing violence; and threatening treason charges against American law enforcement officials who've investigated foreign manipulation of our elections.
But it's not working so far. Democrats--particularly progressive Democrats--were the big winners in the 2018 midterms. The GOP needs more help from their friends if they're to reelect Trump and hold the Senate.
Reagan turned the GOP into the Party of the Billionaires, complete with a phony "supply-side" and "trickle-down" story about fantasy economics to sell their merger of state and corporation. But by the end of the Clinton administration, most Americans had figured out Reagan's and the GOP's scam and, since 2002, there's been a curious "red shift" disconnect between exit poll results and the reported totals from hackable voting machines.
There aren't enough really rich Americans to win elections, so Lee Atwater and his business partners Roger Stone and Paul Manafort helped Reagan and Bush bring in the white racist vote. But even with all the American racists, Trump and McConnell must think they need foreign help again.
Jerry Falwell Jr. (and his pool boy?), Franklin Graham, and other multimillionaire "Christian" hustlers brought in the people televangelists have exploited for a generation. But are there enough religiously gullible voters to tip the election to Trump and McConnell? They seem to think not.
Add the homophobes, the xenophobes, the religious bigots, and sexually insecure white men (from incels to gun fanatics), and the GOP may have almost enough votes to win a national election--but they're still haunted by Trump losing the last election's popular vote by 3 million; plus, they no longer have Scott Walker and Rick Snyder to throw Wisconsinites and Michiganders off the voting rolls just before the election.
Trump and the GOP will still need a little help from their overseas friends, just as Trump Jr. reached out to or tried to take help from the Russians, Saudis and Emiratis in 2016. They (and Trump's American billionaire backers) benefited more from what President Carter correctly called Trump's "illegitimate" presidency than anybody else in the world.
Which is why Trump and McConnell are working as hard as they can to make sure those foreign oligarchs and autocrats know how much they'll appreciate that help, should it be forthcoming.
All they need is a little help from their friends, and they're making sure their friends know in advance who will benefit.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
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