By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
Stung by the historic defeat in last year’s presidential election, the GOP has embarked upon a relaunch of its ideology. RNC chair Reince Priebus has approved a strategy paper (click to read) composed by Republican bigwigs Henry Barbour (Haley’s nephew) and Ari Fleischer that makes a remarkable discovery:
The Republican Party must be the champion of those who seek to climb the economic ladder of life. Low-income Americans are hard-working people who want to become hard-working middle-income Americans. Middle-income Americans want to become upper-middle-income, and so on. We need to help everyone make it in America.
Yep, the party who deifies the man who made lots of political hay denigrating mythical “welfare queens,” and whose successors famously referred to President Obama as the “Food Stamp President” has figured out that in this democracy votes still trump principles — even long-held despicable ones. Republicans, it seems, can read a demographic map and, due in large part to the anti-poverty positions they have rammed through Congress (sometimes with the help of Democratic presidents), the Nation is mostly poorer. In 2010, 15.1 percent of all persons lived in poverty. The poverty rate in 2010 was the highest poverty rate since 1993. That’s about 46 million Americans living below the poverty line.
Poverty in America charts remarkably close to the party in power — at least for some population groups. In the 1950s, overall poverty was an astonishing 22.4%. A steady decline through the 1960s was fostered by the much maligned, but factually effective, “War On Poverty” of the Kennedy, Johnson (and yes), the Nixon Administrations. Poverty bottomed out in 1973 with the rate standing at roughly 11%. During the ensuing decade, poverty remained more or less constant at between 11.1 to 12.6%. Then came the right-wing Reagan Revolution in 1980 where being poor was somehow seen as akin to being criminal. Reagan made that connection explicit for any GOP dolt too dull to spew the bile on their own, and the “War To Resume Poverty” was on. During the 80s, the US poverty rate climbed steadily back to 15.2% representing about 35 million Americans. Reagan was an unrelenting slasher of programs such as Aid To Families With Dependent Children (AFDC), and subsidized housing. But, Reagan was careful not to hurt programs for the elderly who formed a core of the Republicans’ voting base. In fact, the poverty rate for US citizens over 65-years-old actually steadily declined from its high point in the 1960s.
Came the 90s and the Clinton Administration. Poverty again made a sea change and began declining. Such factors as the growing economy had its effect, but Clinton was a proponent of Reagan’s policy of “workfare” and his historic reform of welfare undoubtedly hindered that process despite the overall poverty rate decline to 11.3% in 2000. Predictably the poverty rate has increased under succeeding Republican administrations to its 2010 level.
The effects of poverty haven’t hit across the board as many know. Here’s how the National Poverty Center explains the level of poverty for various socio-economic groups:
The poverty rate for all persons masks considerable variation between racial/ethnic subgroups. Poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics greatly exceed the national average. In 2010, 27.4 percent of blacks and 26.6 percent of Hispanics were poor, compared to 9.9 percent of non-Hispanic whites and 12.1 percent of Asians.
Poverty rates are highest for families headed by single women, particularly if they are black or Hispanic. In 2010, 31.6 percent of households headed by single women were poor, while 15.8 percent of households headed by single men and 6.2 percent of married-couple households lived in poverty.
There are also differences between native-born and foreign-born residents. In 2010, 19.9 percent of foreign-born residents lived in poverty, compared to 14.4 percent of residents born in the United States. Foreign-born, non-citizens had an even higher incidence of poverty, at a rate of 26.7 percent.
What the Republicans have discovered — with a cold slap across the face in 2012 election — is that these populations vote. As they become larger segments of the voting class, their impact is made known. How else to explain the plethora of GOP backed voter fraud laws requiring picture id? Republicans know full-well the group least likely to own a car and hence possess a readily obtainable picture id are the poor.
Predictably, the Republicans paint a rosy picture of this sad demographic in the strategy paper:
The nation’s demographic changes add to the urgency of recognizing how precarious [Republicans’] position has become. America is changing demographically, and unless Republicans are able to grow our appeal … the changes tilt the playing field even more in the Democratic direction.
Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson takes the issue head-on: “One of the biggest brand challenges for the GOP is to credibly demonstrate they are a party for everyone, not just the rich.” Take that Gov. Romney and your 47% quip. Here’ s the exiting polling from the 2012 election by income level. Note the disparity:
The old GOP canard about low-income folks not voting has finally been exposed for what it was. One of the reasons the Republicans were so astonished at their loss at the polls was their belief the American people would punish Obama for the bad economy. Central to that tenet was that low-income groups were most affected by the bank-driven recession and would throw the bums out. That political calculation was turned on its head as poor whites joined poor ethnic voters to elect Obama.
Thus the GOP stands at a cross-road between their extreme right-wing, every-man-for-himself ideology and recognizing political reality. Wrought by policies they espoused, the poor have roared back to take away what the Right deems most important of all — an unfettered, perpetual deed to the White House. Some in the GOP haven’t gotten the message yet, like firebrand Paul Ryan. Ryan recently announced his plan to slash $1.4 Million from Medicaid. A paltry amount by Washington standards but hugely important from a symbolic point of view. To add some insult, the staunchly religious Ryan (who claims the budget is closely in line with his Catholic upbringing) proposed 3.3 trillion dollars in budget cuts over a ten-year span with a full 66% of that amount coming from programs specifically designed to aid the poor, all the while reducing taxes on the wealthiest Americans. In addition his plan –passed by the House this week but rejected by the Senate — would severely limit eligibility for most other programs. You can read about the specifics of the plan in the Huff Post article here.
All in all, the GOP has quite the conundrum. Accede to the most radical elements of its party and watch its political power ebb, or embrace the view of more moderate elements and accept a “Big Tent” strategy. The decision hinges mightily on the feelings of the poor — a circumstance that could not be more irritating for the party who helped create them.
Source: Salon; Huff Post; National Poverty Center, and throughout
~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
OS,
The letter and video were powerful.
This open letter to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was written by Thomas Young, a dying veteran. Young is now on hospice care. Timmy, what kind of fishing lures do you recommend for Tom Young?
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To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young
I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.
I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.
You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.
I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.
Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.
I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.
I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.
I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.
My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.
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Journalist Chris Hedges recently interviewed Tomas Young at his home. Read it at the link………………if you have the guts.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_crucifixion_of_tomas_young_20130310/
Republicans can’t stand to see all the poor people they have created with their spectacularly failed trickle-down economic policies. The poor are simply considered collateral damage.in the GOP fight to give more to the mega wealthy….
Timmy:
What’s your view on disabled veterans? Ability to work either limited or nonexistent. Walking wounded, literally, with physical and mental problems proximately caused by Republican elective wars.
Gonna solve their problems by teaching them to fish?
I was going to link to stories with headlines such as this one from 2005: “GOP Rejects Added VA Hospital Funds – Los Angeles Times”
Could not post them because there were more than two million hits on Google. What, in your opinion, do we owe combat veterans?
What do we owe the elderly who do not have enough in their Social Security check to live on? If you hang around the pet food aisle of a supermarket long enough, you will see older people, shabbily dressed, surreptitiously studying pet food cans to see which have the most nutrition at the lowest price.
Timmy, what kind of fishing lessons do you recommend for the young single mother who is confined to a wheelchair because of a crippling disease?
Mespo,
It aways amazes me that people believe that everyone has an equal shot to be successful.
Well said Gene.
Timmy:
You’re priceless. Give a man a fish in the digital age? Ever heard of workfare? We address yourvplatitude already. Care to try again with other Republican talking points?
Mmmmm . . . cake.
Timmy:
The poor should find ways to help themselves.
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Like by eating cake? And what shold their children do? Or the elderly poor? Or the disabked poor? Or the mentally challenged poor?
Are you related to Marie Antionette? Btw how much did you pay in federal taxes last year?
“Say the word “plunder” when explaining what has happened to the American middle class.” – Dredd
Yep.
“Wealth creation is the only way to eliminate poverty, the superior system for wealth creation is capitalism.
More economic and political freedom is the way to reduce or eliminate powerty, not less.” – Bron
What I expect from you and completely and utterly wrong. The pillaging of the middle class, once protected by laws that restrained bankers and financiers, is brought to you by the rush to deregulation that started under Reagan that have systematically dismantled the protections put in place by the New Deal after those same corporate criminals wrecked the economy in the 20’s and caused the Great Depression. Regulated capitalism is the best method for generating wealth because it constrains bad actors in positions to damage the economy at scale. Laissez-faire capitalism is the problem, not the cure. Left to its own devices, laissez-faire capitalism is a recipe for social self-immolation as those with no sense of ethics or social responsibility fall upon our society like zombies on fresh meat in the name of personal profits, damn the consequences. Laissez-faire capitalism has brought this country to its knees twice already. Learn the lessons of the patterns of history or be doomed to repeat them. It is also an open door invitation to Italian style fascism. And we all know how fascism ends. Badly for everyone.
You think all forms of socialism are the Devil because you’ve been fed and willingly ate a huge line of bullshit for years.
A form of socialism is the only thing that will save us at this point. Whether the fetters on bad actors are loose (democratic socialism) or firm (any of several other variations on socialism) is a matter of preference. However, letting the monkeys run the ape house is not taking care of society and its general welfare.
And taking care of society’s general welfare is a Constitutional mandate.
“I would vote for Obama for a third term before I voted for Jeb Bush, 2 of them are enough.” – Bron
And this is why I am ever thankful for the 22nd Amendment, but I get where you are coming from. However, consider that Obama has done easily as much damage to the Constitution as the Bush family and that he did so based on bold faced lies to do the exact opposite once elected. Then reconsider that statement.
Indigo Jones – in re “Voting for Yourself” Strategy for protest voting.
I like it.
Anon
The Republican Party is the only party who does want to help the poor. You never help someone truly by giving them something. Give a man a fish and he eats for a day but teach a man to fish he eats for a lifetime.
The poor should find ways to help themselves. We as a nation have a 16 trillion dollar debt and Obama’s plan will increase it to 25 trillion before he gets the deficit under control. Now if that doesn’t show how bad we are financially then those of you who believe that government is their savior, pitch in with all of your money and let the rest of us run the nation out of the mess we are in by not only balancing the budget but by decreasing the debt and eliminating the deficit completely.
Lawrence
No apology needed but appreciate the courtesy. All toward a good discussion.
Mark,
Wonderful post. “Then came the right-wing Reagan revolution of 1980 that made being poor akin to being a criminal.”
Regan was truly a transformative president, in the most destructive way. Government as the enemy, poverty as equivalent to criminality and sloth, a war on organized labor and user fees as a way to shift tax burdens onto the working class while at the same time re-structuring the tax code to benefit the investment class.
This country is still recovering from the Reagan revolution. It pained me to hear Obama reference Reagan during some of the past campaign. I will rejoice on the day when the weight of historical opinion recognizes Reagan for the destructive force he was. And to think that the Reagan faithful were proposing his addition to Mt. Rushmore is too much to bear. We will sooner recover from eight years of Bush/Cheney than we will from the eight years of Reagan/Bush.
The Captalist In Chief:
Bush II on
Bill & Ted’sAyn Rand’s Bogus Journey to become one of the 300 (1% of the 1%):It also dove tails with what Indigo Jones said about The Articles of Confederation.
nick and Darren,
Thanks for your clarifications. I apologize for my confusion.
SwM,
Tex, on the other hand, would be positively ecstatic if Hillary got the nod. He is a huge Hillary fan. Our bank account would suffer. 😉
SwM,
I’d like to think so but there is Biden to consider and they seem to be “placing” him. In that matter, they can be as short sighted as the Republicans.
Don’t get me wrong … I’d be happy with either choice.
Indigo Jones 1, March 24, 2013 at 12:39 pm
@ Dredd, Bron
…
Article IV of the Articles of Confederation begins:
“The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse among the people of the different states in this union, the free inhabitants of each of these states, paupers, vagabonds and fugitives from Justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states.”
Note, “paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice” are “excepted” from the “privileges and immunities of free citizens.”
Not only to blacks and women not count, but hippies and the poor are classed with criminals.
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That is why Ayn Rand moved here to Hollywood from her “homeland” Russia.
She thought she would help the Republicans turn the place back into the place governed by those Articles.
They are working hard to tear the hell out of our nation in the process.
Blouise, I think it is Hillary’s if she wants it.