The Decline of North Carolina

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD from New York Times

Every Monday since April, thousands of North Carolina residents have gathered at the State Capitol to protest the grotesque damagethat a new Republican majority has been doing to a tradition of caring for the least fortunate. Nearly 700 people have been arrested in the “Moral Monday” demonstrations, as they are known. But the bad news keeps on coming from the Legislature, and pretty soon a single day of the week may not be enough to contain the outrage.

In January, after the election of Pat McCrory as governor, Republicans took control of both the executive and legislative branches for the first time since Reconstruction. Since then, state government has become a demolition derby, tearing down years of progress in public education, tax policy, racial equality in the courtroom and access to the ballot.

The cruelest decision by lawmakers went into effect last week: ending federal unemployment benefits for 70,000 residents. Another 100,000 will lose their checks in a few months. Those still receiving benefits will find that they have been cut by a third, to a maximum of $350 weekly from $535, and the length of time they can receive benefits has been slashed from 26 weeks to as few as 12 weeks.

The state has the fifth-highest unemployment rate in the country, and many Republicans insulted workers by blaming their joblessness on generous benefits. In fact, though, North Carolina is the only state that has lost long-term federal benefits, because it did not want to pay back $2.5 billion it owed to Washington for the program. The State Chamber of Commerce argued that cutting weekly benefits would be better than forcing businesses to pay more in taxes to pay off the debt, and lawmakers blindly went along, dropping out of the federal program.

At the same time, the state is also making it harder for future generations of workers to get jobs, cutting back sharply on spending for public schools. Though North Carolina has been growing rapidly, it is spending less on schools now than it did in 2007, ranking 46th in the nation in per-capita education dollars. Teacher pay is falling, 10,000 prekindergarten slots are scheduled to be removed, and even services to disabled childrenare being chopped.

“We are losing ground,” Superintendent June Atkinson said recently, warning of a teacher exodus after lawmakers proposed ending extra pay for teachers with master’s degrees, cutting teacher assistants and removing limits on class sizes.

Republicans repealed the Racial Justice Act, a 2009 law that was the first in the country to give death-row inmates a chance to prove they were victims of discrimination. They have refused to expand Medicaid and want to cut income taxes for the rich while raising sales taxes on everyone else. The Senate passed a bill that would close most of the state’s abortion clinics.

And, naturally, the Legislature is rushing to impose voter ID requirements and cut back on early voting and Sunday voting, which have been popular among Democratic voters.One particularly transparent move would end a tax deduction for dependents if students vote at college instead of their hometowns, a blatant effort to reduce Democratic voting strength in college towns like Chapel Hill and Durham.

North Carolina was once considered a beacon of farsightedness in the South, an exception in a region of poor education, intolerance and tightfistedness. In a few short months, Republicans have begun to dismantle a reputation that took years to build.

Sequester Makes TEApublicans Happy: They Get Off Causing America Problems

 E. Henry Schoenberger/Americans against the tea party:

The impact of blind budget cuts is beginning to grind on America.  But Teapublicans are the happiest when their fellow Americans are in pain.  Like dying without health insurance, or starving without food stamps, or not having a job because they vote against jobs bills, or hoping bridges will crumble – which will not affect them because they have god and Jesus on their side.

•  Sequestration is now affecting medicine and promising research.

Sequestration Stupidity Is Genetic, Hitting Front-Line Medical …

St. Louis, a center for cutting-edge medical research, will be hit hard by sequestration cuts.

ST. LOUIS — Of all the blinkered buzz-saw cuts in this year’s $85 billion spending sequestration, perhaps none is as counterproductive — or as flat-out boneheaded — as the one now hitting medical research under way in a refurbished industrial expanse of central St. Louis.

Sequester cuts to the rapidly developing process of turning genetic research into a major 21st-century industry — and saving lives and health care costs — are the equivalent of trying to build the Interstate Highway System with no ramps or the transcontinental railroad without the final miles in the middle.

In one of the most farsighted and successful government projects ever, Congress in 1990 authorized a 15-year, American-led effort to map the human genome and to make the results available, under careful conditions to protect pure science and personal privacy, to the world. Completed in 2003 at a cost of $3 billion, the Human Genome Project has now spawned a range of technologies — from tailored drug therapies for cancer to preventative testing to the new big-data discipline of bioinformatics — which not only are generating jobs, but which hold the promise of dramatically reducing health care costs….

• Sequestration will increase unemployment.  A simple thought that the Teapublican Koch-pawns could care less about – unless it is them.

• It will cause a decrease in defense/Pentagon spending but not result in rational cuts; because the Teapublicans and the Dems who cater to neocons will continue to make awful allocations which inure to the benefit of the industrial military complex at the continuing expense of we the people.  So there will not be a shutdown of bases in Germany or Europe or Japan.  Senseless spending will continue unfortunately.

The Pentagon’s Sequestration Opportunity

“…First, there is a tendency for policymakers to target “low-hanging fruit” such as major weapons programs, force structure and end strength. After all, shedding programs and capabilities can often produce large savings quickly. In contrast, some of the most-needed reforms in the areas of military and civilian compensation and excess bases often take years to realize savings. Moreover, bitter political fights such as the controversial 2005 base closure round still linger in the minds of many on Capitol Hill. The prospect of reforming military compensation – even when conducted in a way so as to not affect currently serving troops and retirees – is always a political lightning rod because politicians refuse to use it as an opportunity to add new benefits while simultaneously changing others. …”

• It is not going to stop government waste by the Congressional Blockaders of the public good.

I Survived Sequestration

 National Review

“This week marks the one-month anniversary of one of the most terrifying events in American history: the sequester. So, with great trepidation, …

“…There has been some real pain, of course, depending on where you look. The White House cancelled some public tours. The National Archives was forced to return to the hours of operation it maintained prior to 2008. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s staffapparently could no longer afford “high quality” meals in the Capitol cafeteria. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released thousands of undocumented immigrants from detention centers — wait, actually, that happened before the sequester started. Meanwhile, some federal officials continue to warn that eventually terrible things really will happen…. The dreaded furloughs of federal workers have turned out to be less than advertised. …”

Teapublicans just want to make the government smaller, they don’t care who it hurts, as long as the Koch Bros and all their other ultra-rich sociopathic greedy narcissist benefactors approve.  And of course Jesus, whose Golden Rule is not for the religious wrong wingers.  The fallout is not over.

For more of Henry’s work, check out his blog The 5th Estate

Buy Henry’s brilliant book from Amazon, about which David Satterfield, former Business Editor of the Miami Herald and 2 times Pulitzer Prize Winner, said this:

The Republican Party's War on Black People?

By Keith Boykin/BET

Ever since President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, African-Americans have held a somewhat different view of government than many white Americans. For whites, especially southern whites, government represented an outside institution taking away their "property" and destroying their businesses. For Blacks, however, government represented an institution that rescued them from the shackles of slavery and finally gave them a taste of the freedom enjoyed by the rest of society.

The memory of Lincoln's policies kept African-Americans in his Republican Party for two generations. That didn't change until President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced a "New Deal" to pull the country out of theGreat Depression with the help of vigorous government intervention. Once again, Black people signed on with the political party that was willing to use the government to help the people in times of crisis, and so they left the Republican Party in droves.

Racial segregation persisted with the help of both parties for another three decades until Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that once again used the government to protect the interests of the powerless. After Johnson stood up for us, African-Americans grew more loyal to the Democratic Party, while Republicans, on the other hand, launched a cynical but successful decades-long "Southern strategy" to recruit disaffected white voters into the GOP.

Given that history, when Republicans complain that the evil "government" is taking away their freedom, Black people know exactly what they really mean. Even though white people are the biggest beneficiaries of government assistance and welfare, rich Republicans who don't give a hoot about the middle-class have cleverly deployed racially coded language to convince some poor and working-class whites that supporting the government means supporting Black people.

Ronald Reagan even constructed a phony image of a Cadillac-driving welfare queen in the projects to convince middle-class white voters that their tax dollars were supporting lazy African-Americans on food stamps instead of bolstering wealthy defense contractors and mostly white senior citizens on Social Security and Medicare.

Now the GOP is at it again. Taking a page out of Reagan's playbook, Mitt Romney is attacking government and trying to convince working-class white Americans that giving tax cuts for the rich will magically create jobs for them too.

Of course, giving out billions of dollars in tax breaks to wealthy people like himself would blow a huge hole in the federal deficit, so Romney's got to pay for his plans by cutting money somewhere else. Thus he re-invents the evil straw man called "government" which is stealing all our money and causing all our problems.

What Romney doesn't want to tell you is where your government money really goes. Two-thirds of the federal budget goes to defense, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and interest on the debt. Only about 13 percent goes to so-called safety net programs, and 78 percent of that amount is spent on whites and other non-Blacks.

Republicans like Romney, the son of a wealthy business executive, love to talk about pulling themselves up from their bootstraps, but by attacking government and education, they're essentially making it harder for African-Americans to pull themselves up.

The unemployment rate for African-Americans stands at 13.6 percent. That's partly because cash-strapped state and local governments cut 280,000 workers last year. And that's also because of larger socioeconomic conditions Republicans never seem to address.

For many years, the only place where Blacks had a fair chance to get a job was in the military or the government. That's why Black workers are a third more likely than whites to be employed in the public sector that Romney wants to cut. Those government cuts are not just faceless bureaucrats at the IRS and DMV; they're real people we know. They're teachers, cops, firefighters, and even toll both operators. Many of them are our sisters and brothers, cousins and uncles, children and parents.

The best jobs policy is education. Americans with college degrees have a very low 3.9 percent unemployment rate. But unemployment stands at 13 percent for those without high school diplomas. Yet Romney wants tocut funding for education, which would help young people of all races go to college and make a living for themselves.

Billionaire and anti-union Las Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson has already spent $35 million of his own money on the Republican presidential campaign. When a rich guy spends that kind of money to affect an election, you can bet he's not trying to protect the middle class; he's trying to protect his own interests. But some middle-class white voters still don't get it. They're so busy buying the Republican spin about Blacks that they don't understand how the rich guys at the top in the GOP are simply exploiting them.

Come to think of it, maybe it's not a war on Black people they're waging, but a war on middle-class and working-class Americans, many of whom happen to be Black, but most of whom are actually white. The overwhelming majority of Black voters already get this. When middle-class white voters wake up, they'll see just whose side the GOP is really on.