Welfare leech Cliven Bundy and the proliferation of Republican racism

By Marc McDonald 

I don't know much about the cattle business. But I'd suspect that if one owns a cattle ranch, your biggest expense by far is buying food for your cattle.

Wingnut hero Cliven Bundy owns a prosperous cattle business. His cattle get to graze for free on publicly owned land. (That's right: all taxpayers, including you and me, are subsidizing Bundy's business.) He refuses to pay the $1 million he owes the government for supplying his cattle with free food over the decades.

In short, Bundy is a government welfare leech. He can't be bothered to pay the same grazing fees that tens of thousands of other ranchers across the West pay every year.

And yet, incredibly, this right-wing asshole has the gall to criticize African-Americans for living off "government subsidies." That, in and of itself, is an outrageous lie. The vast majority of African-Americans in fact never collect any kind of government subsidies (although this is widely believed by the Rush Limbaugh crowd).

Speaking of which, Bundy's comments on African-Americans sent the previously supportive right-wing media scurrying away from Bundy on Thursday.

Which raises a question: why?

After all, the right-wing media and its wingnut followers pretty much all believe what Bundy said about African-Americans. Switch on a wingnut talk radio station on any week day and you'll hear similar views (although perhaps not as crudely or explicitly expressed). I myself have had countless discussions with right-wingers over the years and they all have expressed similar views to Bundy's.

Limbaugh, the de facto spokesman for the GOP has in fact been making racist and offensive remarks about African-Americans and other minorities for many years. So has Fox News.

And yet, Fox News, after strongly supporting Bundy earlier this month, meekly tiptoed from the whole story after Bundy's racist remarks.

(Cross-posted at BeggarsCanBeChoosers.)

America's imaginary lavish social welfare safety net that exists only in Republican minds

By Marc McDonald 

In America, we hate the poor. We really, really hate the poor. We are indoctrinated from birth to hate the poor. Jesus may have said, "Blessed are you who are poor." But America has no time for that Jesus. Our motto is "Screw the poor."

The Century Foundation

As a result, America has never been big on social welfare programs for the poor. Even during the peak years of U.S. social program spending (during LBJ's "Great Society" years), America had a skimpy social safety net, compared to other industrialized nations.

Compared to generous European social safety nets, America these days more closely resembles the likes of Mexico than a modern First World industrialized nation. Jobless benefits, for example, are far more meager and stingy in the U.S. than they are in Europe. In fact, for one reason or another, millions of Americans don't even ever qualify for jobless benefits. (I know: I was one of them. Years ago, I applied for jobless benefits and was turned down.)

The other pillar of the U.S. social safety net, food stamps, is also very meager. I recall recently playing around with the food stamp eligibility program on a Texas state government Web site. I was curious as to exactly how low one's income had to be in order to qualify. I kept plugging in lower and lower income numbers and kept getting a response page that said, "You earn too much to qualify for food stamps." Eventually, I concluded the Web site must be broken. It was only later that I discovered, much to my amazement, that the Web site was in fact working just fine and the Third World-like wages I'd plugged into the search form were indeed considered too high to qualify for aid.

In short, in America these days, if you're poor, you are screwed.

Read more »

Grow the social safety net

By Frank Moraes

We need a bigger social safety net. The other day, Paul Krugman pointed this out by noting our modern economy where everyone is just supposed to get used to the fact that you will have a new job every three years and that insecurity is now normal so get over it. This kind of dynamism requires some kind of bedrock that we can all hold onto. And the only such bedrock comes from the welfare state.

I have a problem with the "new job every three years" idea, even though that has been my life. All this new economic dynamism has mostly been on the part of workers, not companies. It would be one thing if companies only lasted three years. But what happens is that companies that last 100 years no longer show any loyalty to their workers. (Even while they complain that workers don't show enough loyalty to these companies.)

What has really happened in the modern world is that the government long ago declared open season on unions and all manner of other worker rights. So now workers are in the position of beggars, hoping that some company will take pity on them and employ them for a few years.

Of course, the people who want to destroy the social safety net are the same people who want to eliminate worker rights. I was amused earlier in the year when some British Conservative MP claimed that everyone should start their own business. This is absurd, of course. If that happened, there would be no businesses, just seven billion private contractors. But what's interesting in this context is that such a claim implies that people who complain about lack of work should just be able to start their own businesses. "Just take out a loan from your parents!"

I think we are past the point where we can reasonably claim that the right in this country (or just about any other) is an honest broker. They hate the poor. They think the poor are morally deficient. They would prefer that the poor just die off, but as long as they are powerless and hidden, fine.

Krugman is right, of course: now more than ever, we need the social safety net. If companies are going to follow the Gordon Gekko model that profits are all and they owe nothing to society, the government needs to take over. But as long as these business owners have the power that goes along with their profits, they will fight hard to impoverish workers outside their business environment. The smaller the safety net, the more pliant the workers will be.

Eventually, this all ends in a feudal state, of course. So while we still have a democracy, we must fight to empower workers. And that means expanding the welfare state, not just protecting it.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Makers vs. Takers

By Mustang Bobby 

Paul Ryan told an audience a year ago that 30% of the country want a welfare state:

"Seventy percent of Americans want the American dream. They believe in the American idea. Only 30 percent want the welfare state," Ryan said. "Before too long, we could become a society where the net majority of Americans are takers, not makers." (It's not definitively clear whether Ryan said "the welfare state" or "their welfare state." HuffPost originally transcribed it as "their welfare state." Regardless, the comment was made in reference to people on government assistance.)

Ryan's comments were delivered as part of his keynote address at The American Spectator's 2011 Robert L. Bartley Gala Dinner, which the magazine posted online. A reader tipped HuffPost to Ryan's speech, given in November — six months before Romney's videotaped remarks.

This isn't exactly a bombshell; the Republicans have always seen Other People as being moochers and leeches who don't share in the bootstrap mentality and oh by the way they're probably not white, either.

It also explains why the Republicans are having such a tough time selling the idea that they actually give a shit about people, and it makes selling Mitt Romney as an empathetic candidate a little like trying to get an alligator to eat nothing but salad.

This is what real class warfare looks like.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Welfare check

By Mustang Bobby 

The Romney campaign ran a few ads last month perpetrating the lie the President Obama wanted to roll back the work requirements in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. Just about everybody called them out on it, including the major fact-checkers. They still ran with it, though.

But it turns out it wasn't the Democrats in Congress or President Obama who wanted to gut the work requirements. It was the Republicans:

The legislation — H.R. 4297, The Workforce Investment Improvement Act — was unveiled in March by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) and cosponsored by six Republican colleagues. Among them was Education & Workforce Chairman John Kline (R-MN), who passed the bill through his committee in June.

The measure is aimed at streamlining workforce training by letting states slash redundant programs and consolidate them with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) welfare program — into one Workforce Investment Fund (WIF). States would be given so much flexibility that the restrictions in the 1996 welfare law need no longer apply, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

Oops. I guess the Romney campaign didn’t check with their answering service. But why let a good dog-whistle go to waste?

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Mr. Toad's wild ride

By Mustang Bobby

Gary Bauer, the former head of the Family Research Council and for whom the term "evil little toad" was coined, told the audience at the ironically-named Values Voters Summit that the majority of people who vote for Barack Obama are welfare recipients and fraudulent voters:

After his speech, Bauer told TPM "voter fraud is rampant in urban areas" and he expected that to help Obama.

Bauer also told TPM that "there are a lot of people who will vote this November because they depend on government largesse," meaning checks from Washington. He expects those voters to go Obama as well.

"They will vote for their own perceived interests, which is they don't want anybody cutting back the size of the checks," Bauer said.

He then killed a fly with his tongue and hopped back under the rotten log he calls home. 

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Romney's race card and the GOP's new Southern Strategy

By Richard K. Barry

Chris Matthews can sometimes make me crazy, but I was proud of the man yesterday on Morning Joe when he called out RNC Chair Reince Priebus for the particular variant of the Southern Strategy being played out by the GOP with their lies about Obama's supposed changes to welfare rules and equally untrue statements about the reallocation of Medicare funding to Obamacare.

Nothing else is working for Romney, which is why he is playing the "race card," as Matthews correctly pointed out.

There is an excellent piece at The Atlantic Wire by Elspeth Reeve on this shift in strategy.

According to Reeve:

Romney's advisers believe Romney "needs a more combative footing against President Obama in order to appeal to white, working-class voters and to persuade them that he is the best answer to their economic frustrations," The New York Times' Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg reported. And as we pointed out on Friday, if Romney gets 61 percent of the white vote, he wins. If you have any doubt that Romney is playing the race card, check out his YouTube page. There are five ads falsely accusing Obama of gutting welfare reform. The Republican National Committee has put out its own welfare ad. And another three Romney ads say Obama is raiding Medicare to pay for Obamacare. The latter ads show white faces and say "you paid in" but now health care is going to somebody else.

Here's Matthews's exchange with Priebus:

(Cross-posted at Lippmann`s Ghost.)

Mitt Romney and the Nine Commandments

By Richard K. Barry

Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast made the same point recently that I have been making for a while, which is that most of the lying in politics is simply about stretching the truth, not smashing it to bits. So, when Obama's campaign tries to connect Mitt Romney to Bain-related layoffs that happened after 2002, it's not exactly the same as a lie even though Romney left the company after that time, because Romney built Bain Capital and gave it its character.

As Tomasky writes:

There is some little grain of truth there, that "Mitt Romney's company" oversaw such-and-such layoffs, as there usually is in attack ads, even the most vicious ones. The Willie Horton ads were, after all, true. Racist, but true.

We are all used to this kind of campaigning. It's what we think of when we think about the dirtiness of politics. But then Mitt Romney came along and took everything to a whole 'nuther level.

Mitt says things, a lot of things, that are clearly and demonstrably untrue, and that actually takes a little getting used to. Most of us are still able to work up some real annoyance when we know someone is saying something that even they understand is not true. It's human nature. At least, it used to be.

What I'm trying to say is that this is not politics as usual. This is not normal. This is not simply the old saw about all politicians lying. This is a different animal and it should piss us off, all of us, no matter what our political leanings. Is it really a good thing if someone vying for the top political job in the land isn't even going to pretend to care about the truth? Does anyone really want a person like that in that job? Don't answer that.

But this is where we are.

The most recent example is Romney's claim about Obama's changes to welfare rules, which have been presented in new ads.

As Tomasky writes:

The Romney ad campaign says exactly the opposite of what the new rule stipulates. PolitiFact called the first Romney ad “Pants on Fire,” and Glenn Kessler gave it four Pinocchios. But now here they come with a second ad saying that Obama “ended the work requirement.” Plainly and provably not true.

This is part of what the ad says:

Since 1996, welfare recipients were required to work. This bipartisan reform successfully reduced welfare rolls. On July 12th, President Obama quietly ended the work requirement, gutting welfare reform.

These ads make use of images of Bill Clinton signing into law work requirements for people on welfare, and even he says the claims of the Romney campaign that Obama has undone those requirements are untrue.

There is no nuance. This is no stretching the truth. This is a lie. Again.

Here's one of the ads. No, Mitt Romney is not normal, and I do shudder to think what someone who lies so easily would do with the kind of power a president has.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

It's pathological

By Mustang Bobby

Last week the Romney campaign put out an ad that claimed President Obama wanted to remove work requirements from welfare reform. Not only was it a gross distortion of reality -- gee, no surprise there -- it got panned by every reputable fact check group out there, and even PolitiFact, which has a rotten reputation for weasling, called it "Pants on Fire."

So what did they do? Take a wild guess:

Mitt Romney's campaign continued to attack President Barack Obama over welfare reform with the release of a new ad on Monday, once again falsely stating that the president dropped work requirements from welfare.

The ad, titled "Long History," is the second ad from the Romney campaign to claim that Obama has "gutted" welfare. The campaign's previous ad on welfare, released just last week, was widely criticized as inaccurate and debunked by numerous fact checkers.

It's not just a campaign strategy in hopes that the pigeons will fall for it; even when they're called out on it they keep doing it.

No one expects a political campaign to be about the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but come on; this is beyond strategy. It's unreal. 

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Romney's welfare lies refuted by Republican expert

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Last week, I wrote about how, just like with Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall, Jared Diamond wrote an op-ed piece in the Times refuting Romney's characterization of his work.

Well, it's happened again, this time regarding Romney's dishonest claim -- lie, actually -- that President Obama has weakened "welfare-to-work" legislation around the country. And it's coming from one of the key Republicans behind welfare reform in the first place:

Mitt Romney's latest television ad attacks the Obama administration for announcing a "plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements." It's a strong allegation, but according to a former Republican congressional aide who was key to crafting welfare reform in the 1990s, it's also not true.

"There's no plausible scenario under which it really constitutes a serious attack on welfare reform," Ron Haskins, who is now co-director of the Brookings Institution's Center on Children and Families, said in an interview with NPR that aired on Wednesday.

Haskins spent 14 years on the staff of the House Ways and Means Committee's Human Resources Subcommittee, first as welfare counsel to the Republican staff, then as the subcommittee's staff director. In 2002, he was President George W. Bush's senior adviser on welfare policy.

Welfare, formally known as the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, is administered by states within federal rules. Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services invited states to apply for waivers from some rules in order to run "demonstration projects" so that states could "consider new, more effective ways to meet the goals of TANF, particularly helping parents successfully prepare for, find, and retain employment."

Haskins noted that the requirements states have to meet in order to receive the waivers are quite rigorous.

And, of course, it was Republican governors who requested the change, meaning Romney's charge isn't just dishonest but stupid as well.

"Boy, if life were only like this," says Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) after McLuhan thoroughly dismisses the pretentious blowhard.

Well, it's happening more and more, thanks to Romney's ridiculous lies.

**********

Because it's so good, here's the scene again:

Another day, another hypocritical Romney lie -- this time about welfare

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Clearly desperate to turn the page away from a disastrous July, with the polls turning against him and nothing seeming to work, Mitt Romney's new line of attack is that President Obama has weakened "welfare-to-work" legislation around the country. "We will end a culture of dependency and restore a culture of good, hard work," Romney said yesterday in Chicago.

And it's a claim he makes in a new ad. Watch it:

It's complete bullshit -- par for the course for Romney. Now let's turn to my friend Steve Benen for some much-needed truth-telling:

First, a little background. Some Republican governors this year asked the Obama administration for some new flexibility on welfare standards -- the governors had some ideas about moving folks from welfare to work and needed the White House to sign off. Obama agreed -- existing work requirements would stay in place, but states, if they want to, can take advantage of new flexibility when it comes to experimenting with existing law.

This is the sort of shifting-power-to-the-states policy that Republicans are supposed to love. As of [yesterday] morning, however, it's the basis for a new Mitt Romney attack ad.

It's important to realize this is as dishonest an ad as you'll ever see -- in 2012 or in any other campaign cycle...

[T]he ad shows President Clinton signing welfare reform into law in 1996, "requiring work for welfare." The spot then argues, however, that President Obama "quietly announced a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements." The voiceover tells viewers, "Under Obama's plan, you wouldn't have to work and wouldn't have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check.... and welfare to work goes back to being plain old welfare."

We then learn, "Mitt Romney will restore the work requirement because it works."

Romney's lying. He's not spinning the truth to his advantage; he's not hiding in a gray area between fact and fiction; he's just lying. The law hasn't been "gutted"; the work requirement hasn't been "dropped." Stations that air this ad are disseminating an obvious, demonstrable lie.

All Obama did is agree to Republican governors' request for flexibility. That's it. Indeed, perhaps the most jaw-dropping aspect of this is that Romney himself, during his one gubernatorial term, asked for the same kind of flexibility on welfare law that Obama agreed to last month. Romney, in other words, is attacking the president for doing what Romney asked the executive branch to do in 2005.

The entire line of attack is simply insane.

But, again, entirely normal for Romney, who is making dishonesty the central theme of his campaign, more even than his self-aggrandizing plutocracy (tax cuts for the rich, out-of-touch douchebaggery).

**********

As Obama spokesperson Lis Smith explained:

Mitt Romney continues to make statements that he knows are both untrue and hypocritical. The Obama administration, working with the Republican governors of states like Nevada and Utah, is giving states additional flexibility only if they move more people from welfare to work – not fewer. But as governor, Mitt Romney petitioned the federal government for waivers that would have let people stay on welfare for an indefinite period, ending welfare reform as we know it, and even created a program that handed out free cars to welfare recipients. These false and extremely hypocritical attacks demonstrate how Mitt Romney lacks the core strength and principles the nation needs in a President.

**********

And Romney is being called on his lie. For example: 

Salon: As has already been widely noted, the line of attack is complicated by a few problems. First of all, it's not true, or at least wildly misleading. Obama's plan doesn't end work requirement... Secondly, it's a little tricky to slam Obama for handing out waivers when Romney himself supported the exact same proposal as governor of Massachusetts in 2005.

Politifact: By granting waivers to states, the Obama administration is seeking to make welfare-to-work efforts more successful, not end them. What's more, the waivers would apply to individually evaluated pilot programs -- HHS is not proposing a blanket, national change to welfare law.

Time's Joe Klein: How incompetent is the Romney campaign? They keep coming up with these stupid gambits – the last was the lie that Obama opposed early voting for members of the military in Ohio – that are shot down instantaneously (everywhere but in Fox-Rush land)... But there is a larger question here: How stupid does he think we are? Every day brings a mind-boggling act of untruth-telling.

HuffPo: Romney's ad doesn't mention that Republican states sought the waiver policy... The ad also doesn't mention that the Republican Governors Association asked Congress for even broader welfare waivers in 2005, in a letter signed by 29 Republican governors, including Romney.

NBC: But does the memo do what the Romney campaign charges -- that it guts welfare reform, gets rid of work requirements entirely, and would "just send you your welfare check"? Not exactly... The administration's HHS memo certainly does not make it so the federal government will now “just send you your welfare check," as the Romney campaign's television ad asserts.

TPM: But his accusations that President Obama is trying to "gut" the program by waiving its work requirements don't jibe with the administration's actual work guidelines. They also sidestep the fact that Romney himself supported such changes — he was just one of the Republicans who lent similar requests bipartisan support.

ABC: The claim appears to be an exaggeration... another exaggeration... a bit hypocritical... As the Obama campaign has pointed out, Romney signed a 2005 letter to Sen. Bill Frist (along with Rick Perry, Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, Tim Pawlenty, etc.), when welfare programs were being reauthorized under Bush. As the governors lobbied Frist on the bill, they praised "state flexibility."

**********

Look, it's easy to see what Romney's up to. At this point, it's like throwing everything at the wall to see what, if anything, sticks.

And what he's clearly trying to do is tie Obama to welfare deadbeats, an easy (if also straw-man-like target), an evident appeal to the Republican base, both grassroots and elite, that considers the (black, probably Muslim, and certainly unqualified) president an un-American interloper bent on destroying the country. Welfare being a mostly black problem, in their view, that runs counter to the good ol' (mostly white) American value of "good, hard work." (If you think there's some racist dog-whistling going on here, you're right. It's in there, whether Romney himself means it or not.)

Maybe the morons who drool for Fox News are buying it, but there's no way this is sticking. It's so obviously a blatant lie, and all it's doing is reinforcing the rapidly growing perception of Romney as a shameless liar who will say anything to get elected.

Thankfully, voters aren't stupid enough to play along.

To Maine Gov. Paul LePage: Go fuck yourself

By Michael J.W. Stickings 

HuffPo's Amanda Terkel is reporting that the teabagging governor of Maine, Paul LePage, gave the following advice to the unemployed at the state GOP convention on Sunday: 

Maine's welfare program is cannibalizing the rest of state government. To all you able-bodied people out there: Get off the couch and get yourself a job. 

He's an asshole, obviously, something we've known for a long time, but this is also the standard Republican view: People on welfare are lazy shits who don't want to work. They try to prove this by holding the exceptions up as the rule, but their intention is to slash government by cutting support to those who need it most, and to that end they vilify entire swaths of people without any regard for context, so ignorantly enamored are they of their cruel right-wing ideology.

The point is, if there were jobs, they'd be filled. Last time I checked, though, the economy sucks and a lot of good, honest, and decent people are struggling.

LePage, like so many Republicans, obviously doesn't give a shit. The people of Maine really need to put him out of work.

Will economic conservatives learn any lessons from this crisis?

By LindaBeth

Yesterday I wrote about Republicans' victim-blaming rhetoric in their critique of Obama's housing plan. I was not only interested in their rhetoric because of its interesting blaming structure, but also because lately I have been wondering if our current economic crisis might change the way we think about, talk about, and approach public policy regarding the unemployed and working poor. Now that many “hard-working Americans” are being laid off “through no fault of their own,” will the Right rethink their stance on social services for unemployed and working poor Americans?

I suppose this is opposed to the “normal” unemployed and working poor who are in their state entirely through fault of their own. It seems that when structural economic hardships happen en masse, it’s not “their fault”, but when structural hardships perpetually happen to a good fifth of Americans, it is their fault? Or is it when the middle and upper class find themselves un-or underemployed (and thus can’t pay their overconsumption-induced bills), someone else’s is to blame, but when high-school educated, full time workers can’t even break out of poverty, they themselves are to blame? Do not both scenarios arise from corporate greed? Is not the health insurance through employment formula a major factor in both hardship situations? Do we only have sympathy for the middle class who become poor but not for the poor who can’t make it anywhere close to middle class?

It took my own personal struggles to break me free from the American Dream brainwashing I had received from my conservative upbringing. In the spring of 2003, I found myself a new college graduate, with several years in retail management under my belt, and a partner with a Master’s Degree. We moved back to our hometown because he owned a home there with no mortgage. Because we “voluntarily” moved back to the town where he owned a home rather than stay in the college’s town with our part-time minimum wage jobs, we could not qualify for unemployment–or any social service–when 3 months later, we were still unsuccessful in finding jobs in our fields. We shifted to looking for any job, which is more difficult than you think for two fairly educated people. No factory wanted to hire someone with a Master’s Degree. In the end I realized a few things:

1. The system is degrading. It is not very empowering to sit at DSS and beg to be approved.
2. It is not all that easy to obtain social services. You must own so little, or at least look like you do. (46% of all poor families receive no welfare)
3. Our society has no short-term safety net–nothing that covers you between jobs or between college and employment. Unemployment is not so easy to get.
4. Hard work and education does not mean good employment. Life outcomes are not the direct result of one’s self-making.
   

I share my experience because this is what it took for me to understand that (full, or even decent) employment is not a function of personal worth or hard work and that even if our social services are organized poorly, the idea of them–their necessity and our duty as a society to provide them–is non-negotiable.

While pessimistic, I wish that this economic crisis would be the jolt that conservative America needs to rethink poverty in America, to recognize it as structural, and to stop always “blaming the victim.”

(Cross-posted to Speak Truth to Power)

Idiot of the Day: Joe Wurzelbacher (yup, he's still around and still smearing Obama)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Joe the Plumber: welfare queen (and one of the stupidest people in America).

Awesome.

(He was also our IotD here. Everytime he opens his mouth he's an IotD. He needs to fade into obscurity again. Now.)

A thought on economic incentives for having kids

By LindaBeth

As I sit here finishing up the final edits of my Master’s thesis, I had this thought:

The Right tends to argue that our social welfare system provides incentive for single women (a.k.a. “welfare mothers”) to pop out children left and right. This constitutes an abuse of the system.

I’m not saying that’s at all true (and actually the stats on this “phenomenon” are rather skewed: the number of kids women on welfare have is about the same as the general population), but take their argument and consider this…

Yet there are a slew of tax breaks for families with children. Does this not also constitute an incentive to have kids in order to receive unearned money (one could call it welfare, sure!) for those kids? Yet I don’t hear anyone on the right complaining about those..in fact, they usually want to raise them! Yet why should “we” subsidize “their” children?!

Curious, huh?

I guess so-called “incentives” are OK for the “right” kinds of families…

(Cross-posted to Smart Like Me.)