Thursday, July 11, 2013
The Dystopian GOP-run State of North Carolina
North Carolina is a perfect example of what the TeaPublicans would do to this country should they grab all the levers of power through any of the means they can contrive.
Here is what has happened to a state that was once a beacon of far sightedness after those who value poor education, intolerance, and tightfistedness took control:
From the lead editorial in yesterday's NYTimes:
After the election of Republican Governor Pat McCrory in January, the GOP took control of both the executive and legislative branches of North Carolina's government and began their tyranny of the majority:
* North Carolina Republicans ended unemployment benefits for 70,000 residents, and another 100,000 will lose their checks in a few months;
* Those who are still receiving benefits will see them cut by a third;
* The length of time for those who need benefits will be slashed from 26 weeks to 12, and NC politicians are doing this at a time when their unemployment rate is the FIFTH HIGHEST in the country.
* NC has severely cut back on spending for public schools; NC spends less now on public schools than it did in 2007, and it ranks 46 in per-capita education dollars. In math and science scores, North Carolina ranked 36 out of the 50 states.
* 10,000 pre-kindergarten slots will be eliminated;
* Services to disabled children are being cut;
* North Carolina repealed the Racial Justice Act, a law that gave death-row inmates a chance to prove their innocence.
* North Carolina Republican controlled government refused to expand Medicaid;
* North Carolina Republican controlled government wants to give billionaires and millionaires tax cuts;
* North Carolina Republican controlled government wants to increase the regressive sales tax;
* To make up for any revenues lost by eliminating the state income tax, North Carolina Republicans propose taxing groceries; [h/t Ducky's Here, see comment section.]
* North Carolina Republican controlled government passed a bill that would close most of the state's abortion clinics;
* North Carolina is rushing to pass voted ID laws that would cut back on early voting and Sunday voting, something that would help working class citizens;
* North Carolina proposes a move to eliminate tax deductions for dependents if students vote at colleges instead of their hometowns--a blatant, stomach-turning effort to reduce Democratic voting strength in college towns in NC.
h/t New York Times editorial
That's just one GOP-run state determined to do its best to make people whose lives are difficult at this time, more miserable. It's a good bet that a majority of the pols in this state, who claim they're on the side of protecting "innocent life," cynically ignore the fact that eliminating and/or cutting back benefits to those who are jobless will impact the most vulnerable citizens: the poor, the elderly, the sick, the disabled, and children.
IMO, those who seek to afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable are monsters. The people who claim they are for protecting "innocent life" are the same who voted to cut back on education, health care, a safety net for the unemployed, and programs for disabled children. Monstrous.
This uniquely Republican vision is one of dystopia for the entire country.
Just look at what they're doing to the states where they are in charge of government.
This is how the GOP looks at people who need food stamps:
Extremely well-fed Rush Limbaugh says taking babies and children off food stamps would be a great way of solving America's child obesity problem! And hey! Dumpster diving is good exercise as well! Har. Har. Har. Extremely well-fed Rush! Making fun of people who are hungry is great sport, innit? Bet your millions of listeners think you are a very large riot!
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24 comments:
For people who don't believe in evolution, they're in an awful hurry to re-instate social Darwinism.
NC has severely cut back on spending for public schools; NC spends less now on public schools than it did in 2007, and it ranks 46 in per-capita education dollars. In math and science scores, North Carolina ranked 36 out of the 50 states.
They seem to have some trouble grasping the concept of "you get what you pay for", too. No doubt they think the private sector can do a better job. Creationist private schools will spring up like mushrooms, like in Louisiana.
North Carolina Republican controlled government wants to increase the regressive sales tax.
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Oh come on Shaw, this is just a reasonable means to make sure everyone receiving unemployment pay their fair share.
They plan to extend the sales tax to groceries.
"Lawmakers phased out the state sales tax on food in the late 1990s, saying that scrapping the 4 percent tax would give low-income families a needed break. Counties continue to collect a 2 percent food tax.
The GOP, which now controls the General Assembly, is pushing to lower the individual and corporate income tax and use a higher state sales tax applied to more things to make up for the lost income tax revenue. Food should be taxed, they say, because grocery spending is dependable."
Well, they also seem to want to make spending on food less dependable for the poor.
Infidel753, the GOP's idea of fiscal responsibility is to stick it to the poorest and most vulnerable--Social Darwinism at its best, as you say.
It's easier to control people who have been beaten down and do not have the resources to even feed themselves than it is to educate a state's citizenry--that, as facts bear out--is a danger to the GOP agenda. The higher the educational achievements of its citizenry in a state, the more likely that state will be a politically liberal one.
The GOP has done its homework: Keep 'em dumb and they'll vote for us.
Ducky,
Thanks for that information, I will put it in the body of this post.
I'm sure it is not lost on the GOPers in NC that the poor will suffer the most from taxing groceries. They don't care. They believe in what has become the GOP mantra: "I've got mine; screw you!"
Look at any culture and see how it treats the poor and the helpless, and that tells you where their values lie.
Even if they call themselves god-fearing Christians, don't believe a word unless you see how they treat their citizens who have the least.
You'll find the meanest toward the poorest are often the conservative/libertarian crowds.
But, tyranny of the majority is fine when the majority is ----------. Fill in the blanks.
Tyranny of the majority, when it makes people's difficult lives more miserable is never acceptable.
We can't keep excusing this sort of thing by saying the other side does it too.
Now that I'm a republican I can see things from their point of view. The reality is they're using a form of social engineering in cutting school funding. They figure most jobs are menial and don;t need any education anyway. And they only exist because a rich republican created it anyway. So why waste money educating freeloaders and our lessers who are only going to work at Walmart or McDonalds anyway?
And think of the jobs created when the richest among us have their taxes cut to zero? They can hire more grasscutters and servants for their homes and country clubs.
Evading the truth, for purely partisan reasons does not fix this pervasive issue either. It in reality only ensures its continuance.
.
Dear Joe "Truth 101" Kelly,
Thank you for clearing things up and explaining the reasons you and your Republican compatriots feel it is patriotic to stick it to the poor and the vulnerable.
Now I understand.
And the beat goes on, and on, and on...
House Republicans pass Farm Bill without food stamps:
"On two crucial issues this week, the extremists who dominate the Republican majority in the House of Representatives made it clear how little interest they have in the future prosperity of their country, or its reputation for fairness and decency.The House will refuse to consider a comprehensive immigration bill that could lead to citizenship for millions of immigrants, Republican leaders said on Wednesday, and will slowly and casually consider a few border-security measures that have no chance of passing on their own.
And, on Thursday, the House passed a farm bill that stripped out the food stamp program, breaking a pact that for decades has protected the nutrition needs of low-income Americans. It was the first time since 1973 that food stamps haven’t been part of a farm bill, and it reflected the contempt of the far right for anyone desperate enough to rely on the government for help to buy groceries.
These actions show how far the House has retreated from the national mainstream into a cave of indifference and ignorance. House members don’t want to know that millions of Americans remain hungry (in an economy held back by their own austerity ideology), and they don’t want to deal with the desperation of immigrant families who want nothing more than a chance to work and feed themselves without fear of deportation."
House TeaPublicans: Trying their best to turn the US into North Korea!
That's what we need, a supporter of Reagan's "voodoo economics" giving us platitudes of rational? wisdom?
This was interesting reading
http://w-dervish.blogspot.com/2013/07/banned-from-3-blogs-as-of-today-should.html#comment-form
The price of LIBERTY is INEQUALITY.
The price of FORCED EQUALITY is SLAVERY to an ALMIGHTY STATE whose power grows more arbitrary corrupt, demanding and abusive with each passing day.
Thank you, "Progressives," for undermining and negating the principles on which this nation was founded, and under which it grew and prospered the early twentieth century.
By falsely equating ever growing distribution of larger and larger amounts of government LARGESSE with KINDNESS, MERCY, JUSTICE and FAIRNESS for ALL you have developed a permanent, and ever-growing UNDERCLASS of useless, human beings who serve as a guarantee of permanent incumbency to your pseudo-righteous, counterfeit charity and costly-hut-ineffective "solutions" to Social Problems.
You look at the world through the wrong end of the telescope, and diminish us severely.
So free stinke believes the price of liberty includes giving tax breaks to billionaires and millionaires and to pay for thos tax cuts, NC, for example, should cut benefits to disabled children?
He is the epitome of distopian thinking and conservatism: The Rotting of America, an America that does not believe in "I am my brother's keeper."
Freedom to his ilk is the freedom to keep people wretched, hungry, and sick, so long as his money isn't used to help them.
A wretched vision for a country that God shed his grace on. He surely missed shedding anything on the miserly, miserable and selfish people who now represent the Republicans/Libertarians of this country.
You may, of course, not believe in "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free..." but many of us do.
We also believe that a country that ignores the suffering of the poor and vulnerable is a country on the road to being a third world dystopian swamp.
That you blame all our problems on one group of people reveals your innate biases and inability to understand that conservatives once believed in universal health care, abortion rights, food stamps, and other safety nets.
It is the conservative/libertarians of today who have abandoned the idea that government CAN and SHOULD be a tool in helping those who cannot help themselves.
We can always do better in weeding out those who cheat and do not deserve the help that desperate people do.
You look only at the dark side of a compassionate, inclusive vision for this country and have become an angry cynic.
That's terribly unfortunate.
Jonathan Chait explains:
"It’s no longer novel that conservative Republicans have positioned themselves to Obama’s left on domestic spending that benefits their own constituencies. We have seen three years of Republicans attacking Obama for robbing Grandma’s Medicare. But at least Medicare is a justifiable program. The existence of farm subsidies is insane, and the fact that a party that hates government so much it engages in a continuous guerilla war of shutdowns, manufactured currency crises, and outright sabotage can’t eliminate it may be the most telling indicator of the GOP’s venality.
They only hate necessary government spending. Totally unjustifiable spending is fine with them."
The reality is our nation WAS FOUNDED on PROGRESSIVE principles!
Yep, that is right! The thought that the common man could govern was very radical; the thought that the common man could rule themselves as well, if not better than a monarch, with their divine right.
The divine right of a monarch asserts that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority, deriving the right to rule directly from the will of God. The king is thus not subject to the will of his people, the aristocracy, or any other estate of the realm, including (in the view of some, especially in Protestant countries) the Church. According to this doctrine, only God can judge an unjust king. The doctrine implies that any attempt to depose the king or to restrict his powers runs contrary to the will of God and may constitute a sacrilegious act.
So, our Founding Fathers, and their enlightened principles were quite Progressive for their times, and sadly for the most part, these times too!
As far as equating government spending with some sense of forced equality that is just stupid considering the tax code and all government spending actually favors corporations and the wealthy, thus not creating or forcing anything close to equality but rather creates an aristocracy that is dependent on government for their vaunted position.
The poor are just street urchins scrambling after food stamps, minimum wage jobs, and unemployment assistance....
In other words, the tea baggers want to take the country back to 1930. Our economic competitors around the world must be jumping for joy.
ORAXX
Freethinker, if I can interrupt your social darwinist wet dream, a necessary component of a healthy society is social mobility.
Give it a moments thought the next time your engrossed in Herbert Spencer.
__ STALIN by STARLIGHT __
The song a leftist sings
Through years of endless springs --
The ripples by the lake at eventide --
The murmurs and the sighs
That two lovers hide --
A great Communist Theme!
That's Stalin by Starlight.
My heart and I agree
The State is everything to me.
~ Anne Animus
Very clever, but after a while, the same old accusation that liberals are Commies gets to be trite and nothing more than a school yard taunt.
As tao pointed out, our Founding Fathers were Liberals. Without liberals there wouldn't be an America.
And I'm pretty confident that if today's conservatives had been around in 1775, they would have backed the conservative Tories and the repressive King.
By their very nature, conservatives want things to stay the same and never change--conserve the old, be fearful of and damn the new.
Without the ideas and the force of Liberalism, you'd still be singing God Save the Queen.
All the conservative blogs I've ever visited had nothing to new to say to me other than the stale and rancid 1950's "COMMIE, COMMIE, COMMIE!"
This is only part of the reason young people are not attracted to today's GOP. Conservatives need to leave the 1950s and start to live in the 21st century where cultural diversity, gay rights, women's rights, immigration reform, just to name a few, are realities.
Implying that people who support those issues are Stalinists puts them on a one-way horse and buggy to irrelevance.
Shaking one's poetic fist at progress won't stop it.
"Extremely well-fed Rush Limbaugh says taking babies and children off food stamps would be a great way of solving America's child obesity problem! And hey! Dumpster diving is good exercise as well! Har. Har. Har. Extremely well-fed Rush! Making fun of people who are hungry is great sport, innit? Bet your millions of listeners think you are a very large riot! "
Rush Limbaugh sounds like he is having a heart attach every time he attempts to say the word "school". And he fails every time to pronounce it correctly. A few remedial years in grammar school might do him a bit of good. someone that raps him on the knuckles with a ruler every time he mispronounces "schedule" also.
Shaw quoted Chait:
"The existence of farm subsidies is insane"
I completely agree. All corporate welfare has to go.
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