Rush Limbaugh on “this domestic violence stuff” and the NFL: “If we keep feminizing this game we’re going to ruin it”
This weekend, the vice chairman of the Arizona Republican Party resigned after his comments about sterilizing Medicaid recipients were publicized by state Democrats. “You put me in charge of Medicaid, the first thing I’d do is get Norplant, birth-control implants, or tubal ligations,” Russell Pearce said on his radio show, according to a transcript from the Arizona Republic. “Then we’ll test recipients for drugs and alcohol, and if you want to [reproduce] or use drugs or alcohol, then get a job.” Pearce is a former state senator, and the author (or co-author, since the legislation was drafted in heavy consultation with the private prison industry) of Arizona’s sweeping anti-immigrant law, SB 1070. Arizona’s Republican nominees for governor, secretary of state, attorney general and its Congressional candidates denounced Pearce’s remarks. “This was a mistake,” Pearce wrote in a statement announcing his resignation. “This mistake has been taken by the media and the left and used to hurt our Republican candidates.” Pearce’s proposal was abhorrent, but it also laid bare the dehumanizing logic of Republican programs that punish the poor. If the GOP wants to distance itself from punitive and invasive policies that hurt low-income families, they should look in the mirror and start slowly backing away from their reflections. A few things here. Pearce’s idea isn’t new. The United States has an ugly history of forced or otherwise coerced sterilization against people of color, the poor and others considered “unfit to procreate,” including rape victims and people with disabilities. Between 1907 and 1980, nearly 65,000 Americans were sterilized under state-sponsored programs. In total, 31 states had sterilization programs that directly targeted welfare recipients. North Carolina recently acted to compensate victims of its forced sterilization program, which specifically targeted black women and children. (And last year, theCenter for Investigative Reporting revealed that nearly 150 women in California’s prison system were sterilized between 2006 and 2010, often without their knowledge or consent. The state legislature acted this year to end the program.) That said, Pearce isn’t the only Republican to float the idea of coercively sterilizing welfare recipients in recent years. And his proposal is hardly the only assault on low-income families in the state. Arizona, you’ll remember, is where Shanesha Taylor was arrested after leaving her children in the car so she could attend a job interview. Taylor, like so many other mothers in the state, struggled to find reliable and affordable childcare after her state representatives gutted programs and funding for such care, as Annie-Rose Strasser of ThinkProgress reported at the time: In the past four years, [Arizona] has cut 40 percent of its total child care budget, $81 million, which led to an estimated 33,000 children who would otherwise be eligible for subsidized care to go without it. (By the numbers, that’s less than California — but Arizona’s population is about one fifth of the Golden State’s.) Between 2012 and 2013, there was a decrease in the number of children served for every single child care program in the state except for Child Protective Services. Pearce also proposed mandatory drug testing for Medicaid recipients. Which is not so different than a policy the state adopted in 2009, imposing mandatory drug-testing for welfare recipients state officials had “reasonable cause” to believe were using drugs. According to data from 2012, after nearly 90,000 drug screenings, one person was found to have failed a drug test. Arizona makes a useful case study, but is hardly the first or only state to impose policies designed to scrutinize and punish poor people for being poor. And Pearce’s proposal of forcibly sterilizing Medicaid recipients is just a more extreme articulation of existing policies that punish poor women for having children. Earlier this summer, Slate’s Jamelle Bouie wrote extensively about the racism of family cap laws, which deny additional benefits or reduce the cash allowances to families who have additional children while receiving public assistance. As Bouie pointed out, these policies do very little other than to make poor people poorer and punish black mothers (and are embraced as policy in both red and blue states): A 2006 report from the Urban Institute found that family caps increase the “deep poverty” rate of single mothers by 12.5 percent, and increase the deep poverty rate of children by 13.1 percent. It’s easy to see how this works. In Maryland, a state without family caps, the average benefit for a single-parent family of three is $574. If, while receiving that benefit, the parent had another child, it would rise to $695, a 17 percent increase. By contrast, in Virginia — where the benefit for a family of three is $389 – it would stay the same (as opposed to growing to $451). And when you consider the generally low benefit levels of family cap states — in Georgia, the average monthly benefit for a three-person household is $280, in Mississippi it’s $170 — what you have is a recipe for greater poverty. Given the extent to which welfare families — like their high-income counterparts — have a hard time planning their pregnancies, this is little more than punishment for being poor. After all, we don’t have family caps for the mortgage interest deduction. You’ll find the same kind of stigmatizing and punitive policy embraced by Republicans at the national level. Paul Ryan’s poverty plan relied heavily on proposals to monitor the behavior of low-income families and punish them for noncompliance with their “contracts.” As Annie Lowrey wrote recently over at New York magazine’s Daily Intelligencer, the proposal “threatens to punish the poorest and most unstable families for their poverty and instability.” Social programs that monitor and stigmatize low-income families, economic policies that keep women in poverty, cuts to already scarce food assistance programs and a tooth and nail fight to deny people basic healthcare have been disastrous for poor families. The point here isn’t to minimize what Pearce said. It’s just to connect it to what the rest of his party has done. Katie McDonough
This is an interesting article. To me it highlights the current state of our political system. Each side is about coercion. The right wants to coerce people into "good" behavior and the left wants to coerce people into "good" behavior. I fundamentally believe that coercion is the most destructive social and economic behavior possible. Society has always had some level of confiscation of private property through taxation so it is unrealistic to expect coercion to disappear entirely but I think these ridiculous statements about sterilization are a symptom that the coercion of private property is at the upper end of the range.
With Winter Fast Approaching, Three Governors Slash Funding for Heat and Food For some U.S. families, the winter can bring hard economic choices. Heat is a major seasonal expense for those living in cold climates, and many struggling to get by on government assistance or poverty-level wages often have to make a choice between paying the heating bill and buying food. State Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Programs, or LIHEAP, attempt to solve this dilemma by paying for heat so that there’s more money left over for food in the winter months. Three Republican governors—Chris Christie in New Jersey, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and Rick Snyder in Michigan—are cutting heating assistance programs and thereby blocking residents from receiving increased SNAP benefits, the federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (also known food stamps). As part of a nearly $1 trillion farm bill passed last February, federal lawmakers raised the minimum state heating assistance contribution from $1 to $20 per family in 16 cold-weather states and the District of Columbia. Now states must give residents at least $20 per year for home heating in order for the U.S. government to kick in money for food stamps—an average of $1,080 a year, according to Bloomberg News. “Heat and eat” provisions acknowledge that families often have to choose between buying food and paying heating bills—to pay the heat or eat, as it were. Many people on both sides of the issue believed that most of the cold-weather states affected would opt-out of the funding. This would mean a reduction in benefits for 850,000 households—about 4 percent of food-stamp recipients—and result in over $8 billion in funding cuts for SNAP. This is one-third of the savings promised by the farm bill. In most affected states, that’s not how things played out. As of today, 13 states and the District of Columbia have agreed to pay the higher heating subsidy in exchange for the food-stamp funding or have said they will do so in the future. New Jersey, Michigan, and Wisconsin are the only ones who haven’t. About 20 percent of the food-stamp recipients targeted by the new farm bill “heat and eat” loophole live in New Jersey, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Though New Jersey funded LIHEAP when it was only $1 per household, in August, Gov. Chris Christie vetoed a General Assembly measure that would have brought $54 in federal money for every dollar the state spends on heating assistance. He objected to the provision because it does not require recipients to show proof that they need heating assistance. “Distribution of benefits without regard to actual heating and cooling expenses as envisioned in this bill is clearly impermissible,” Christie said in a letter to the state’s General Assembly when he announced the veto. Many have speculated that refusing federal money is a calculated move for Christie as he considers a presidential run in 2016. By saying no to food-stamp subsidies, he can present himself as a conservative who takes tough a stance on government aid. He’s so tough, he’s willing to let people go hungry, apparently. One New Jersey resident, 72-year-old Fred Bruker, saw his food assistance go from $138 a month to $15, according to Bloomberg News. This means Bruker is eating less, and he says he’s lost five pounds in the past month. But, as TakePart reported back in March, the good news is that most state officials have responded to the new “heat and eat” provisions by bolstering their funding for heating. This means that in many cases, residents get more food and heating assistance overall. In Oregon, households could qualify for more SNAP benefits if they also were eligible for heating assistance. The state is paying the higher heating subsidy so that 141,000 households can continue to receive food stamps. Holding onto the SNAP funding makes a lot of economic sense for these cold-weather states. Vermont, for example, increased its heating subsidy at a cost of $400,000, but that means the state will receive $15 million in SNAP money for 19,000 homes, Slate reported in July. In 2012, SNAP helped lift 4 million people above the poverty line. And food stamps don’t just help low-income people eat. They bolster local economies. According to the Department of Agriculture, every $5 in SNAP funding leads to $9 in economic activity. Nicole Pasulka
The net economic effect of this is that money flows through poor people into the hands of energy company owners and CEOs. Hard to see how artificially subsidizing demand for food or energy helps the economy. It all flows to the oligarchs in the end in the form of higher prices, more demand and out of the average US citizen in the form of a weaker US dollar.
Timewarp: Joseph McCarthy and the Pinkos . . . GOP state senator: Islam “is a cancer in our nation that needs to be cut out” Oklahoma lawmaker John Bennett says Muslims want to destroy the West "from within," dismisses idea of Islamophobia