All posts tagged Mother Jones
I'm not always wearing my full habit...
“And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I’ll walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America. Because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.”
— Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), 2007
Tie your shoelaces Sir?
Indeed, and can I wash your feet when you return home?
(Source: youtube.com)
Screwing the Poor | Mother Jones
It should come as no surprise that Republican budget cutting fever focuses pretty heavily on programs for poor people. Republicans don’t care much about poor people, after all, and Exhibit 1 is their preferred focus for cost cutting in the healthcare arena. Suzy Khimm reports on this, for example:
Leading Republicans in Washington and in the states have set their sights on the federal health care program for the poor, aiming to slash funding and roll back Medicaid, just as Democrats are preparing to expand it to millions more Americans….”I’m sure that’s what [Republicans] are going to do,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La), “and they won’t be the first group that, when first the sign of trouble appears, they want to gut programs for the sick, the elderly and the children.”
Medicare is for old people, and old people vote Republican. Medicaid is for poor people, and poor people don’t vote Republican. So naturally Medicaid is in the crosshairs.
Undercover Nun knows it isn’t true that conservatives hate our most vulnerable groups. The truth of the matter is that conservatives believe that private citizens and organizations should be responsible for helping these people, and that government should stay out of it. Progressives believe that the government can leverage economies of scale and scope to support our vulnerable citizens, and that this strengthens the entire nation. Progressives don’t deny that we should all participate in this very important work, but believe that the government is in a good position to set up a nationwide framework for delivering important services.
I believe that the progressive approach is the more practical approach, which makes it superior. The conservative approach is a wonderful ideal, to be sure, but we aren’t very faithful about taking care of our poor, our sick, our children, and our elderly. Poor people threaten our sense of comfort. The mentally ill frighten our security within our own minds. Elderly men and women scare us, because we know that we’re headed in that direction and we don’t want to. So we try to throw guilt-money at crises, but we don’t get our hands dirty with the quotidian work of caring for those who most need help.
Undercover Nun also believes that it damages the progressive agenda to say such absurd things as Republicans don’t care about the poor. We know it’s untrue, so all it does is build misdirected anger and frustration. There are so many things we should be angry about, so many injustices, so many assaults on the well-being of all people. But angering politicians because we unfairly slander them is not a good use of our time, money, and resources.
Progressives are better than this. Progressives stand up for the poor not because we believe conservatives don’t care about them, but because we recognize that the conservative approach is insufficient to care for the poor.
