There
will be limited or no blog posts in the coming week as the Wrongologist and Ms. Oh So
Right visit Cuba. This trip is part of a US Government-sanctioned visit. There
are way more Americans visiting Cuba than you might think. According to cubaabsolutely, some
500k Americans traveled to Cuba in 2011 on a sanctioned basis, and at least
another 100k visited without authorization, via a third country.

That’s
huge: 600k visitors who (let’s say) stay on average for 7 days. That’s 4.2
million US tourist days per year. Cuba limits tourist expenditures to
$179/person/day. If people spend their limit, that’s $752 million/year spent
by Americans in Cuba each year.

Not
chump change.

But alas,
Internet use is highly regulated. And based on our cold war status, US mobile phones
do not work there, the US dollar is not accepted and US credit cards cannot be
used. There are work-arounds for some of those issues, but no simple solution
works for the Internet, or for the lack of SMS-based communication, so limited
or no blog posts.

According
to The
Guardian, Cuban and US representatives
met today in Havana for a new round of restarted migration talks. From The
Guardian:

The most recent discussions in Havana occurred last September,
and focused on mail delivery. One issue that may come up this week is Cuba’s
recent banking woes at its diplomatic missions in Washington and at the UN.
M&T Bank, which had processed Cuba’s diplomatic banking in the US, moved to
sever the relationship in late 2013, prompting Havana to suspend nearly all
consular services in the country.

While in country, we will be meeting with staff from
the Ministry of Health, (MINSAP), visiting the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) and participating in discussions
to learn about the training and education of medical professionals in Cuba. We
are meeting with staff from the Cuban
Society of Nurses (SOCUENF). SOCUENF is a scientific society,
non-governmental organization under the National Council of Scientific
Societies of Public Health Ministry of Cuba, whose primary purpose is to raise
the scientific and technical level of its affiliates.

We are also meeting with the staff at Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual (CENESEX).
This is the National Center for Sexual Education and is best known for
advocating tolerance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues on the
island.

We are also doing some
fun things, seeing a Cuban jazz show and meals at some of the private
restaurants in Havana.

Sadly, we will be unable to bring home a pristine ’56 Chevy
Bel-Air or any Cuban cigars.

Also, we will not be meeting with Raul or Fidel.

It may be tough to post over the next few days with the holidays and all. Sunday Cartoon Blogging will still appear tomorrow, and maybe a few other things leading up to the New Year. Here is a Christmas card that appeared in the Wrongologist’s snail mailbox:

Not a conspiracy theorist, but Bo and Sunny have suspiciously similar signatures…

Enjoy the next 10 days, after all, our do-nothing Congress will be, well, doing nothing!

Yesterday
the world bid goodbye to Nelson Mandela. Readers of the Wrongologist Blog may
remember that he and Ms. Oh So Right visited South Africa in 2012. You can read
about the visit to Soweto here.

Nelson
Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi were the three great moral
icons of the 20th Century. All were reviled in their own time by the
domestic power structure in their home lands, each inspired people all over the
world. Each appealed to the best in the rest of us; that is what made them
transcendent global figures.

Mandela,
like the others, fought the institutions of racism and/or colonialism. Their emphasis
on love and forgiveness made it easier for each to form alliances with sympathetic whites
within their country’s power structure.

Beyond
simply inspiring their people, each won a great victory in their countries.

Of the three, Mandela
suffered the most personal hardship. Much of his moral authority came from the
decades he spent as a prisoner. He was the only one to hold public office and
the only one to die a natural death.

We
visited Mandela House in Soweto. The Mandela House is located at 8115 Orlando
West, on the corner of Vilakazi and Ngakane Streets. Vilakazi Street is the best known street in Soweto. It is
the only street in the world where two Nobel Peace Prize winners have lived:
Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Mandela lived at #8115 and Tutu about 50 yards
down the street. Mandela’s home is now a museum, where Ms. Oh So Right took this photo of the Mandela
bedroom:

In
his book, The Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela wrote the following
after his return to his home in Soweto after his release from 27 years in prison
in 1990:

The
house was built in 1945, part of a Johannesburg initiative to build new houses in Orlando.
Mandela moved into the house in 1946. Winnie, his second wife, moved into the
house in 1958. She lived in the house with her daughters while Nelson Mandela
was in jail, until she was exiled to Brandfort by the government in 1977, where
she remained under house arrest until 1986 before returning to Soweto.

Mandela
lived in the house for only 11 days after his release from prison in 1990, the
family, however, continued to occupy the house until 1996.

More
from Mandela:

There
is a high-end shopping mall in Sandton, which is an upscale part of
Johannesburg. It is packed with shoppers of all races.

In
the “Nelson Mandela Square” in the center of the Mall, there is a
larger-than-life statue of Mandela.

The
Wrongologist had a coffee at an outdoor café, the Caffe Della Salute, and
watched locals, of all races, stop to take a family photo at Mandela’s feet. All
smiled and hugged their family members.

It
is striking to think that on the Mall in Washington DC, the Statue of Martin
Luther King, Jr. also depicts a larger-than-life representation of our
non-violent revolutionary, and Americans of all races also snap a photo at the
feet of our great man.

Starting
in 1972, the US House of Representatives tried to pass legislation to create
economic sanctions against South Africa until Apartheid was ended and Mandela
released. It was only taken up in 1985, and then passed in 1986 as The
Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986. The Congress had to override
President Reagan’s veto of the bill, and a Republican-led Senate did just that.
Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was one of those who voted to override, while Dick
Cheney voted against the House resolution.

The
sanctions were repealed in July 1991 after South Africa met the preconditions
of the act.

How
quickly we forget that Mandela was thought to be a terrorist well into the 1980’s
by many. Margret Thatcher had called the African National Congress
(ANC), Mandela’s party, a “typical terrorist organization”.

William
F. Buckley in 1990 on the release of Mandela:

(Finland Station is a
train station in Saint Petersburg, Russia handling transportation to destinations including Helsinki. The station is most famous for being the place
where Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia from exile in Switzerland on April
3, 1917 just ahead of the October Revolution.)

There
is an Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg that offers an education on the subject
of Apartheid. It also delivers a similar emotional impact to the Holocaust
Museum in Washington DC. There is a quote by Nelson Mandela on a wall outside
the Apartheid Museum:

Perhaps
his greatest legacy was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that allowed
the stories of the Apartheid era to be told. Although few whites in South
Africa took part in the process, it offered a cleansing and a release for most
people in the country and allowed them to move on peacefully.

Had
another leader been the one released from prison, it is quite likely that the
transition from Apartheid would have been bloody and violent.  

Today is the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s
assassination. A tsunami of books, blogs, movies and TV reports are now hitting
the beach. They dissect every element in the story of John F. Kennedy.

How do we remember JFK, that sad day and the legacy of his
presidency? Everyone has a story; each has an opinion about the man, the
assassination and the times since his death. Today, the Wrongologist will share
his thinking, and asks that you also share yours.

In a sense, his assassination marked the beginning of the end of
America’s optimism: The inspiring promise of an exciting future began to die that
November day 50 years ago, along with Kennedy.

In the early 1960s,
many in America were willing to believe that JFK was someone who would “get the
country moving again”. Action and dynamism were central to Kennedy’s appeal.
During his 1960 presidential campaign, he called out the Republicans for eight
years of stagnation:

Kennedy gave urgency
to the idea of pursuing a national purpose—the New Frontier, a great American vision.
In 1960, which was just 15 years after the end of World War II, momentum
had been slowly building in the United States, fueled by anxieties about our
rivalry with the Soviet Union and by optimism about the dynamic performance of
the American economy. Kennedy
embodied certainty. His orientation was toward the future, rather than the
past.

A member
of the “Greatest Generation”, Kennedy had survived great difficulty, and
he had confidence as did others of that generation, that they could build a
better future.

How
different JFK was from the Baby Boomers who followed him: Even today, Boomers
are nostalgic for their youth; they look backward more than forward. They may
be remembering the loss of JFK, and with him, much of their idealism. Now, as
they enter their dotage, many are blaming the mess they’ve made on others.

Growing up, the Wrongologist believed that America could do
anything. He had worked in the civil rights movement. He worked to help elect
Kennedy, doing door-to-door canvassing on Long Island in 1960. He graduated
from high school in 1961 and was in college in Washington, DC, sitting in class
when JFK was killed in 1963. He watched Lee Oswald get shot live on TV. He was
drafted and went into the military in 1966. Then, with Lyndon Johnson presiding,
came the escalation in Vietnam. And in 1968, the Tet Offensive, the
assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the riots, Lyndon Johnson’s “I shall not
seek” speech, when he pulled out of the race for a 2nd term as
President, opening the path to Richard Nixon.

1968 was a fulcrum year for America. We were stumbling toward
the unknown. Young demonstrators, certain of the essential rightness of their
worldview, were arrayed against an establishment that also had moral certainty
about their opposite worldview.

In a sense, there is a direct line from JFK’s death to Ronald
Reagan. In between, we had a succession of presidents who could not articulate
a vision for the country, who did not truly command respect globally, who did
not leave the country in a better place than they found it.

We experienced Nixon and the Mai Lai massacre, the Kent State
shootings, price controls and Watergate. Then, Ford and the fall of Saigon. Carter
gave us the oil embargo, the Iran hostages, 18% prime loans, and gas shortages.
Carter made America feel insecure, opening the door for Ronald Reagan.

Reagan sold the American people a new vision and an ideology of
lower taxes and small government. His optimism helped him capitalize on the
Kennedy legacy. 29% of Dems who voted
for Carter in his 1st term voted for Ronald Reagan. Kennedy and Reagan shared
an anti-communist fervor. In 1963, Kennedy said that he was a Berliner, meaning
that we would never accept the USSR controlling East Germany. In 1987, Reagan
said “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”, thereby capturing some of JFK’s Berlin
magic.  

Millennials have no real concept of
what has been lost. They have no memory of believing that anything was possible
with hard work and a little luck. They have no memory of good union wages, of ordinary
workers buying a new car every 2 years, of plentiful summer jobs that paid college
students today’s equivalent of $21/hour. Few have seen lower middle class stay-at-home
moms keeping house in the home the family owns.

We
have had 9 presidents since John Kennedy. Were any truly great? Which if any, changed
the course of history? It is arguable that both Reagan and G.W. Bush changed
the course of America, but it was not for the better.

Did
any of these presidents, with the possible exception of Johnson, make America a
better place to live?

Thinking
about Kennedy, it was his handling of the Cuban missile crisis that is his
legacy. He saved the world from what was a real threat of a nuclear war. Today,
we think that nuclear war couldn’t happen, but in 1962, it could easily have
happened, given Khrushchev and our military. This was the nation’s closest
approach to WWIII and nuclear holocaust.

When people recall
JFK’s domestic record, they think of civil rights, especially the struggle to
end segregation. Jim Crow was still flourishing in the Deep South. It is important
to remember that Kennedy was elected President just 6 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision
by the Supreme Court. That decision said racially separate schools were not
equal schools under the Constitution.

Ferment over civil
rights began before JFK was elected president. President Eisenhower sent the
101st Airborne Division, and later the Arkansas National Guard to enforce
school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas in September, 1957. Yet, when Eisenhower
tried to pass a civil rights bill in 1957, Senator
Kennedy voted with southern (segregationist) Democrats against the bill.

He was thus thought
of as a “moderate” on the civil rights issue when he ran for
President. He only partially overcame that label during the 1960 campaign, as 32% of black votes went to Richard Nixon in 1960.

JFK did not live long enough to be a great president. He was a conservative Democrat,
anti-communist and a political realist. He skillfully surfed the wave of popular
opinion. His most memorable quality was his charm, that was attractive to many
Americans. 

His
violent death came at a time of great upheaval for the country that was being driven
by civil rights and Vietnam. Death propelled him into mythology for many
Americans. Many believe that he would have side-stepped the problems of the
mid-to-late 1960s. Many believe that he would not have escalated our
involvement in Vietnam, for example.

But,
it is likely that he would have dealt with these issues similarly to Johnson and
Nixon, had he lived. A different question is: Would Nixon have become the next
President if JFK lived? If not, where would we be now?

So, on this day, what
do you remember?

Was JFK a great
president?

Do you believe Oswald
acted alone?

What’s
Wrong Today:

There seems to be a
deal emerging between Iran and the P5+1 Group, who have been negotiating about
Iran’s nuclear program. As this is written, US Secretary of State Kerry is in
Geneva, soon to be joined by the French, German and British foreign ministers.
The Russian minister, Lavarov, is on his way. Word is that there may be an interim deal signed with Iran in the next few
days. 

At the
same time, it appears that there is a move
by the US away from Israel. This seems to be happening for multiple
reasons, but the flash point appears to be the intransigence of Mr. Netanyahu,
who can’t seem to get behind any peace initiative with his neighbors.

After trying many times to get Mr. Netanyahu
to accept serious negotiations with the Palestinians, this week, Mr. Kerry finally
started to talk tough: On Thursday, he criticized Israel’s
decision to build 5,000 new housing units in East Jerusalem and other
settlements, after announcing the release of a group of Palestinian prisoners.
Kerry said settlement expansion sends a message that “perhaps you’re not really
serious,” during an interview which aired on Israel’s Channel 2, as well as in
Palestinian media. Mr. Kerry:

Kerry added an additional warning to
the Israeli public. He urged making peace “with a [Palestinian] leadership that
is committed to non-violence,” otherwise Israel “may wind up with [Palestinian]
leadership that is committed to violence.”

Second, Mr. Netanyahu after two
meetings with Mr. Kerry this week called the emerging deal with Iran a
“historic mistake” and a very “bad deal”
(video). He appears to be losing the ear of the Obama Administration, if not
those of Republicans in DC. All
this was said in front of a group of visiting US lawmakers, according the NYT.
Despite his objections,
the Iranian deal may still go forward, so
Israel is getting a diplomatic beat
down even as a temporary deal with Iran is in the making.

Iran’s new government
showing a friendlier face and explaining its nuclear program in English while maintaining its basic
position on its program, is giving the US a chance to back down somewhat from its increasingly
untenable position. It may be that the current sanctions will soon
begin to be difficult to maintain. Robert Einhorn, a former State Department
official who supports the administration’s negotiating strategy, recently dismissed
Mr. Netanyahu’s maximalist position (total elimination of enrichment
activities) as “not achievable”. The NYT reported that he told the following to the Israel Project: “I
don’t think any Iranian government could sell that deal at home”. He also said:

The other party
against a deal with Iran is Saudi Arabia. They view Iran as their major Middle
East competitor. Yesterday, the BBC had an article about the Saudi’s quest to acquire Pakistani-built nuclear
weapons.

There is nothing new
in the piece. That the Saudis financed those weapons and could have short-notice
access to them has been known for decades. However, the BBC relaunched the
story with this:

The BBC
talks about a “NATO-decision maker”, but the quote is from an Israeli.

So, are the Saudis gearing up to create a new
balance of nuclear power in the Middle East? Are they
calculating that, with sanctions lifted, Iran will export more oil, earn more
foreign exchange and bankroll their nuclear weapons program before the West can
respond? Is the leak about Saudi nuclear weapons an implied threat to the P5+1?

As the
Wrongologist reported last week, Saudi
Arabia’s foreign policy is undergoing significant shifts. It made a decision
not to accept the UN Security Council seat, and criticized the US policy in
Syria. The Middle East situation has simply become less predictable. In some ways,
Sunni Saudi Arabia is the Taliban with mega-bucks.

Moreover,
Saudi has a newly discovered missile site. It was revealed in July, 2013 by IHS Jane’s
Intelligence Review.
They reviewed images showing a surface-to-surface missile base deep in the
Saudi desert, with capabilities of hitting Israel or Iran. The base, believed
to have been built within the last five years, gives an insight into Saudi
strategic thinking at a time of heightened tensions in the Gulf. It is designed
for Saudi Arabia’s arsenal of DF3 missiles, which have a range of 1,500-2,500
miles and can carry a two-ton payload. The Telegraph provided this map
demonstrating the range of the Saudi missiles:

The Telegraph reminds us that a confidential
diplomatic cable revealed in the 2010 “WikiLeaks” disclosures said
that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia repeatedly exhorted the United States to
launch military strikes against Iran’s nuclear program and “cut off the
head of the snake”.

We
now know that the Saudis have ballistic missiles minus warheads ready for
action. It is a crafty move. The Saudis can to continue as a signatory of the NPT
(Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), potentially pass any inspection and at the
same time, be 30-60 days away from being a member of the nuclear club. Interesting. That is exactly the Iranian strategy
that worries Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Still, it
is doubtful that Pakistan is ready to send nuclear weapons to Saudi Arabia
today. They are friendly with Iran and Pakistan’s reputation suffered the last
time they assisted other countries with nuclear weapons technology sales by AQ
Khan, (with governmental support), to North Korea, Iran and Libya.

If Pakistan
did transfer nuclear weapons to Saudi Arabia, the Saudis would have to withdraw
from the NPT. Any US military sales to either Pakistan or to Saudi Arabia would
have to stop. Also, Saudi Arabia has no need today for nuclear weapons. It can
wait to see if Iran’s program will be blunted through diplomatic means.

The Saudis
are constantly calibrating the costs and benefits of all of their
relationships. The bet here is that they are a long way from calling in their nuclear
chit from Pakistan. But it clearly serves Israel and Saudi Arabia to have another
proliferation story front and center while US and Iran sit down in Geneva.

There is a
change going on in the US’s relationship with the Islamic world, as Sunni Islam
becomes more extreme and sectarian conflict grips the Middle East. The West may
be starting to back the Shia minority as a counter balance, thus the warming
relationships with Iran. Perhaps the Obama Administration sees the wisdom in a
balance of power, even if old friends are angered.

Realpolitik
in action.

What’s
Wrong Today:

Members of
Tea Party claim their movement springs from and promotes basic American
conservative principles such as limited government and fiscal responsibility.

But research
by University of Washington political scientists Christopher Parker and Matt
Barreto argues that the tea party ideology owes more to the paranoid politics
associated with the John Birch Society of our past than to traditional American
conservatism. Parker and Barreto authored a book titled “Change They Can’t Believe
In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America,” (2013, Princeton
University Press).

At the
heart of their book is a nationwide telephone survey in early 2011 of 1,500
adults (equal numbers of men and women) across 13 states. The results illustrate where members of the tea party and
conservatives part ideological ways. Asked if they think
President Obama is “destroying the country,” 71% of self-identified tea party
supporters said that statement was true, compared to 36% among all
conservatives.

Other survey results:

• 75% of tea party conservatives
  said they think President Obama’s policies are socialist while 40% percent
  of non-tea party conservatives held that view
• 27% percent of tea party
  conservatives said they think President Obama is a practicing Muslim,
  while 18% of non-tea party conservatives took that view
• 75% of tea party respondents said
  they wish President Obama’s policies to fail, compared with 32% of conservatives

Parker calls the tea
party a continuation of what political scientist Richard Hofstadter in the
1960s described as “the paranoid style in American politics,” characterized by
exaggeration, suspicion and conspiratorial fantasy.

Here
is what Richard Hofstadter wrote
in 1964:

Hofstadter
quoted the original Ted Cruz, Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1951:

More about the role of delusions comes
from a New Economic
Perspectives blog post entitled “Now is the
Time to Cast off Delusions” written
by Michael Hoexter about how shared delusions prevent us from meeting in the
middle on our big problems. Here are a few of the Hoexter’s 11 Shared
Delusions:  

Shared Delusion #1: Society
is a Market

Conservatives assume that society is a
market or must act like a market to function optimally. Individual
policy proposals, like the school
reform movement that operates under the banner of “school choice” and
“parent choice”, show this belief system. 

Shared Delusion #3: Government
is Never Effective or is Second Best

A standard belief by the right wing is that
government is always incompetent. While exceptions are found in the praise
of police or military organizations, the view of civilian government is always
as a bumbling, incompetent institution. They speak of the mistakes and
inconveniences of the federal government while the triumphs of government are those
of the military or some other “exceptional” individual within government.

Shared Delusion #4: Authority is Always Illegitimate

The concept of authority itself is always treated
as illegitimate.
The idea of authority having legitimacy is seen as tantamount to incipient totalitarianism, or, of giving up on egalitarianism or
democracy. The questioning of climate scientists’ authority in the area
of climate is the most significant and damaging example of this seemingly
democratic impulse (“anybody can be a climate scientist”). 

Shared Delusion #7: There is no Non-Partisan Data

 

There is a belief
that data does not exist independent of an interpretive framework that
represents a particular interest. This idea has now become the reality
of the Right. The mentality on the Right has led them to dispute every
issue and policy as if there is no non-partisan reality basis to
the argument. Whenever they argue that incomplete data is automatically false
data and therefore it’s OK to invent and/or cherry-pick whatever facts,
pseudo-facts, or non-facts we want, the post-rational Right think they are on the
path to political dominance.

Go read all of Hoexter’s
post. But the real question is, how can we deal with them?

They will not
be discarded easily by the post-rational Right. The first step is for
people to want to discard them.
They must have some motivation in order to do that. Maybe the Shutdown or the
Debt Ceiling crisis can provide such a motivation, if we could agree on a plan
that might save our fragile economic recovery. 

Here is a
small step towards greater clarity of thought: Contrary to Republican claims, the deficit is not increasing—it peaked in 2009 and
has been dropping ever since, declining by $200 billion last year with
another $450 billion drop projected this year. These numbers do not have a
partisan bias:

Maybe they are thinking about the debt, but the
deficit is down
35% from this time last year. In Washington, the shrinking deficit has
altered the debt limit discussion, which Republicans now prefer to link to
concessions that are only loosely related to overall spending reduction. Like
Obamacare.

Moreover,
House members continue to say that there will not be a financial crisis if we default
on October 17th. Republicans believe that we don’t have to pay every
bill as it comes due. They believe that
Mr. Obama is lying to them about the downside outcome in this crisis.
In fact, Pew reports
that 54% of Republican voters think that American can breach the debt limit “without
major problems”. They think the real problem is America having a Greece-type
collapse.

The
risk of a collapse of the world’s largest economy feels more real to them than certainty
of our borrowing costs rising as a result of a default.

For the past 5 years, all conservatives talked about was how we needed
“certainty” for markets to create the jobs we need. Where are those
who were caterwauling about certainty today? They are busy creating a massive
level of uncertainty.

Instead, they
are hand-wringing about the evils of public insurance exchanges where people
can pick and choose from a menu of
private health care plans. Private Plans.

Oh, the socialism!

Delusions
abound in the land.

What’s
Wrong Today:

Congress
is back and working for the American people. Well, not for those people who are
broke and hungry in America. For many of those people, the food stamp program,
known as SNAP, has been the one
thing between them and starvation. House Republicans, with Majority leader Eric
Cantor (R-VA) leading the charge, want to cut food stamps. That effort is described on Cantor’s Blog:

The Nutrition Reform and Work Opportunity Act that Cantor
wants to enact would limit SNAP eligibility to only 3 months in three years,
plus demand the SNAP beneficiaries work or get into a job training program of
at least 80 hours a month. It cuts $40 billion from SNAP over the next 10
years.

The
current plan is to couple this three-year nutrition bill with the House’s
five-year “farm-only” farm bill that passed in July and send them to conference
with the Senate-passed five-year farm bill, which includes $12 billion in SNAP
cuts.

Some data
for you fact hounds: According to the USDA, 46.6 million
Americans are on SNAP assistance, averaging
$133.41 in benefits per month. The total cost of this program is $78
billion/year. Yet, House Republicans along with some Democrats want to deny food stamps to more adults.
What’s worse is the implication that there is work or job training out there for
these people. That is actually a lie. There
is no additional funding for jobs or job training to be provided under this
bill.

In
addition, many people receiving food stamps also are working, but their wages
are so low they still qualify for food stamps.  

Eric
Cantor is pushing this in the House without holding a single
Congressional hearing. The GOP leadership even bypassed the Agriculture Committee, even though food stamps
are under their purview. This
week, the House is expected to vote on legislation to cut SNAP by roughly 5%.

The Center on
Budget and Priorities showed just how much harm to millions of Americans
the Republican attack on food stamps would cause. The people the proposal would
cut off SNAP include:

• 2 – 4 million poor, unemployed,
  childless adults who live in areas of high unemployment — a group that has
  average income of only 22% of the poverty line (about $2,500 a year for a
  single individual) and for whom SNAP is, in most cases, the only
  government assistance they receive;
• 1.8 million people, mostly
  low-income working families and low-income seniors, who have gross incomes
  or assets modestly above the federal SNAP limits but disposable income —
  the income that a family actually has available to spend on food and other
  needs — below the poverty line in most cases, often because of high rent
  or child care costs. Some 210,000 children in these families also would
  lose free school meals;
• Other poor, unemployed parents
  who want to work but cannot find a job or an opening in a training program
  — along with their children, other than infants.

As of September
2013, 46.6 million people are on food stamps. That’s about 15.1% of the US
population, or 1 out of 6.6 people today need food stamps. Additionally, about 20% of Americans, one in five, has trouble affording enough
food. The ranks haven’t swelled because America is a bunch of slackers. The
reason is wages have not grown and there are not enough jobs.

The
average food stamp benefit per person is $133.41 a month, or $4.45 a day. Assuming
most people need three squares, this amounts to $1.48 per meal.  Think
about making a meal for $1.48.

The real
question is why, when America just saw the top 1% get to the point where they earn 19.3% of all income,
a level not seen in a 100 years, why are Republicans in the House so hell bent on attacking the hungry in the United States?

In July, the
Wrongologist wrote
about the Republican motivations passing the farm bill, which contains the SNAP
provisions:  

Food
stamps are actually only about 2% of the overall federal budget. So making sure
a segment of America’s population suffers cannot be simply due to budget cost-cutting
reasons. So where does this desire to screw the poor come from?

It seems
the battle where the hungry are pawns is over proposed cuts to farm subsidies
and the attack on food stamps is in retaliation for efforts to cut subsidies to corporate
farmers. The same conservatives pushing starvation in America happen to
live in districts where farm subsidies pull in $3 billion a year. Additionally,
farm subsidies are a boon to Wall Street. So please quit calling agri-business
corporations “farmers.” These businesses that collect
millions of our tax dollars in corporate welfare are not farmers, they are
welfare queens.

Ferd Hoefner,
policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, said:  

The poor are
always first up for attacks by government. They do not make any campaign
donations, and they don’t have lobbyists. Isn’t any Congressional agenda in the
last 20 years simply a matter of following the money?

After all
is said and done, the move by Cantor and his gang on food stamps doesn’t add
up, except for the farm subsidy lobbyists.  

When it
comes to the Congress doing the right thing, the only moral code House
Republicans seem to know is the pass-code
to their bank accounts.

What’s Wrong Today:

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee heard testimony Tuesday about the potential use of military force in Syria. Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey all testified. The hearing lasted about 3½ hours. At the conclusion, the Committee said they were close to producing the text of a resolution to authorize Mr. Obama to bomb Syria.

Unfortunately, that was way too long for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) who, reported WaPo, decided to play poker and Japanese Casino online 2019 on his smart phone during the hearing: 

McCain tweeted:

Top of Form

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Of course Johnny Volcano lost, that’s what he does best. But he had his defenders in the press. Andrea Mitchell tweeted:

@SenJohnMcCain acknowledges getting caught on cam playing iphone poker at senate hearing on #Syria -can you blame him? 3 hrs +4:2p.m. Tue, Sep 3

Apparently, the hearing bored BOTH McCain and Mitchell. And yes, Andrea, we CAN blame him. The committee is talking about whether to authorize aggression against Syria that will certainly kill people, but the Senator couldn’t pay attention? These pols can’t even take a possible war seriously?

We can all agree that Secretary Kerry is repetitious and drones on and on, but when they are proposing bombing strikes on a country that is no threat to us, paying attention is a job requirement.  

Andrea Mitchell is defending poor old Senator dose and drool? Apparently her attention span isn’t all that good either. She proves right there that the main stream media are as disconnected from the public as are the politicians.

Despite what John and Andrea thought, there were reasons to listen carefully to what was said at the hearing. Below are extensive quotes from Empty Wheel, an indispensable blog on NSA, privacy and government overreach. Marcy Wheeler (empty wheel herself) outlined some important lessons learned from the testimony:

Lesson #1: We’re going to war so we don’t lose some friends

John Kerry twice said that if we don’t bomb Assad we’ll lose friends and/or allies. ”If we fail to act we’ll have fewer allies.”

That admitted something that has been acknowledged — usually not in print — in DC. We’re doing this not to retain our general credibility, but to retain “credibility” with Saudi Arabia and Israel. Credibility with Saudi Arabia is important, I presume, because they continue to sell oil in dollars and buy lots of military toys — including $640 million of cluster bombs that undermine everything the Administration says about humanity.

Credibility is important with Israel because if they don’t believe we’ll attack Iran if they need us to, they’ll just attack on their own. Here’s confirmation of something that had already been confirmed but somehow is getting trotted out again today: the US had to stop Israel from unilaterally attacking Iran last year. (Update: As Max Blumenthal notes, AIPAC’s statement in favor of war mentions Iran more than Syria.)

Lesson #2: The friends we do have don’t want anyone to know they are our friends

At one point, when Kerry was asked who in the region support[s] us, he deferred to closed session…This is likely about protecting Jordan, where we’re staging covert operations, which would make an easy target for Assad. Kerry implied Jordan supported this action, though was pretty coy about it. Still, back when we attacked Saddam in 1991, he still had WMD. His neighbors knew that. But they were willing to openly support our attack on him. Not this war.

/snip/

Lesson #5: Whatever comes out of this resolution is separate from effort to oust Assad

Kerry and Obama have both said these attacks will be limited and don’t aim to oust Assad. But it became clear over the course of the hearing (as witnesses tried to balance those like McCain and Ron Johnson, who wanted more war, and those like Tom Udall, who wanted limits) that in addition to this strike there’s the pre-existing policy of increasing our support to the rebels, effectively to oust Assad. So while this strike is not about regime change, it exists on top of a strategy that is about regime change.

/snip/

Lesson #7: The Administration claims it has evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” against Assad

Both [Sen] Menendez and Kerry both claimed we have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt against Assad. Kerry even noted that’s the standard we use to send people away to prison.

Neither one, of course, explained why we weren’t referring (nor trying to — it would take a Security Council referral) Assad’s crimes to the International Criminal Court. But as they did with Anwar al-Awlaki, they believe that declaring something “beyond a reasonable doubt”…is sufficient and they don’t need to wait for UN inspectors or real juries.

It seems likely that the Senate will pass a resolution empowering Mr. Obama. It sure is weird how our politicians can act all warm and bipartisan when there are either people to kill or rich people to throw money at.

When it comes to anything else, both political parties are sworn enemies! How do we rid ourselves of these tools? A pox on both their houses.

It’s quite amazing to witness this normally clandestine love affair between the Democrats and Republicans blossom in public view. This bursting into bloom only happens, though, when public opinion reveals the lovers’ hand, like with TARP or now, with Syria.

Please, somebody buy Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama World of Warcraft so we can go back to worrying about unemployment and not our “credibility” with Israel.

50th anniversary of MLK’s “I have a dream” speech, civil
forfeitures, proliferation of militarized police, Manning is sentenced.  Build your own homily from the quote below from
Bertrand de Jouvenel. As you pull it
together, remember that you are speaking to a nation of sheep who think they
are wolves…

On the 50th anniversary of MLK’s speech, not everyone shares his aspiration for better wages and the right of all citizens to vote:

Former Egyptian president Mubarak has been released from prison and placed under house arrest. If he could run in the next presidential election, how many votes would he get?

Does democracy have ANY chance in Egypt?

Why Obamacare rage is driving some in Congress to risk a government shutdown:

Teahadists make their presence felt to establishment Republicans:

Morality and Proportionality ought to let us be a nation that can differentiate between crimes:

Gandhi said
it:

Mr. Obama,
Mr. Leno and Mr. Putin:
 
On the “Tonight
Show” President Obama reminded Jay Leno that Mr. Putin was an officer in
the KGB.   He also said that he has told Putin the cold war is
in the past. Sadly, he only wishes that was true. 

Mr. Obama
punted on a summit that was going nowhere.

George W. Bush said he
looked into Mr. Putin’s eyes and sensed his soul. He seemed to think that he
and Putin were kindred spirits.

If Mr. Obama
looks into Mr. Putin’s eyes, he’s likely to see a thermostat with a
temperature that’s dropping. Putin has boxed Mr. Obama’s famous ears on Iran’s
nukes, the mess in Syria, Snowden, gay rights at the Olympics…..oh, and there’s
the stolen Super Bowl ring.

Congress, tired from doing
nothing, downshifts to relax:

When do these people work?

NSA finally
gets the idea:

Sensing a
threat, our government goes into a shell:

Bezos
gets a paper route. John Henry, owner of the Red Sox buys The Boston Globe. He paid less than he pays Dustin Pedroia, his Red Sox shortstop.
That’s our market economy at work!