Left Out In The Cold

As icy, wintery weather covers most of the U.S., Congress looks to be busy back in DC this week, getting ready to pass its own flurry - one made of last minute amendments and budget bargaining. Unfortunately, it looks as though Senator Rand Paul remains a perfect example of the modern Republican Party's ability to miss the true meaning of the season.

Sen. Paul insisted this weekend at a speech in Detroit - a town decimated by the selfish excesses of Wall Street and sabotaged by the GOP - that unemployment benefits are a "disservice" to workers. That's a convenient, if not cold, position for a member of Congress who would prefer to see unemployment benefits for millions of Americans left out of the proposed Federal budget agreement.

Indeed, Sen. Paul isn't alone among Republicans in Congress, or even among Republicans at the state level, in his zeal to hit poor Americans while they're already down. Nebraska's Republican governor, Dave Heineman, is also looking to act like a bad Santa, whacking the uninsured as a way to welcome in the new year.

Heineman, already attempting to plow the way for right-wing extremists in 2014's political contests, is pushing for yet another income tax cut, and "prison reforms" that would shovel millions in public funds to private prison contractors. All this during Heineman's lame duck year, even while he continues to ignore the massive cost to citizens in his state of refusing the Medicaid expansion.

Heineman's refusal to expand Medicaid for the poorest in his state might come off as just another standard Republican act of cruelty, if other conservative Republican governors like Jan Brewer of Arizona and John Kasich of Ohio hadn't already accepted and implemented the Medicaid expansion part of the ACA.

Thankfully, last week, Nebraska state Senator Jeremy Nordquist decided to stand up to the hypocrite Heineman, by starting a petition to get the Governor to forfeit his own insurance which is subsidized by Nebraskans - at least until the Governor agrees to allow low-income citizens in his state access to their insurance, which would also be subsidized by taxpayers.

After all, shouldn't the Governors of states have to live under the same rules of Obamacare that everyone else has to?

What the state Senator from Nebraska is fighting to close - and the GOP Governor there is fighting against closing - is the Medicaid service gap, created by the right-wingers on the Supreme Court, and Republican Governors like Heineman, who are more concerned with idealogy than reality.

The reality is that hundreds of small hospitals and medical centers, mostly in rural areas across the U.S., have been receiving subsidies for years from the Federal government. Under the old, broken system of health insurance, those hospitals took the payments to help cover their costs, due to the millions of uninsured Americans they collectively serviced.

Under the Affordable Care Act, however, all Americans are supposed to have health insurance, through either private insurers or Medicaid - meaning the Federal government no longer has to pay out those extra subsidies. In states like Nebraska and Georgia that have refused the Medicare expansion funds, without private insurers or Medicaid paying the bills of the uninsured, the small rural hospitals can't afford to stay open. In places like rural Georgia, hospitals are already closing, as Republican obstruction of Medicaid funds has run those small businesses into the ground.

If you're noticing some similarities between urban Detroit, rural America, and Republican policies that enrich their friends while gutting American businesses, then maybe you're not as blinded as GOP politicians like Rand Paul and Dave Heineman wish you were.

Unfortunately, that clarity of vision won't help those ultra-poor uninsured Americans, who will be left out in the cold without Medicaid expansion.

Truth is cold comfort when you're on the outside looking in.

Knowing When - And How - To Act

Nelson Mandela was not a saint.

For those who knew him, including former Washington Post South Africa Bureau Chief Paul Taylor, Nelson Mandela was every bit the positive, quiet, thoughtful, introspective leader that the world knew.

But as Taylor noted Thursday on the occasion of Mr. Mandela's passing, Mr. Mandela, "…was also cunning, iron-willed, bull-headed, contemptuous — and more embittered than he let on." What Nelson Mandela knew, seemingly above all else, was how and when to deploy all his resources, of both kindness and strength, to achieve the political goals he wanted.

We've sometimes thought that the former President of South Africa, and prisoner for 27 years, could have held lessons for the U.S. Congress in how to use the tools of wise governing. After all, if Mandela could guide his own country past the end of apartheid without serious violence, while uniting two highly divergent groups of people? He might have actually been able to get Republicans in Congress to get off their butts and DO something.

No matter what you may have thought of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, there is no arguing that he was truly one of the most gifted world leaders ever. Even the satirical newspaper, The Onion, acknowledged this with their headline late Thursday, 'Nelson Mandela Becomes First Politician In History To Be Missed.'

For all of the amazing moments in his life, the one thing that has always stuck with us about Mr. Mandela was his insistence that hatred - of his captors, of his political enemies, even of those who'd rather have seen him dead - was simply an ineffective tool for most situations in life.

Nelson's quotes about leadership reflected that. Even if just a few of our favorites are pulled together, they cut right to the core of what it means to be a great leader:

"If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner." 

"Great anger and violence can never build a nation." 

"A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but it's lowest ones."

That last quote is one that we wish Congressional Republicans would keep in mind, as they run away from the mess they made of the Affordable Care Act, while ignoring the needs of millions of unemployed Americans in their budget discussions.

Still - we shouldn't scream, yell, and bang our fists on tables about the obstructionist Republicans. As Mandela also was quoted as saying, "Long speeches, the shaking of fists, the banging of tables and strongly worded resolutions out of touch with the objective conditions do not bring about mass action and can do a great deal of harm to the organization and the struggle we serve."

Having the wisdom to know when and how to act made Nelson Mandela a true leader for the ages.

We can only hope that today's leaders, both here and abroad - and the leaders of the future - will take some of that wisdom to heart.

Naked Inequality

From time to time, when uncomfortable topics come up in professional or personal discussions, Americans often have a tendency to shy away. Many folks will simply clam up or try to change the subject, while others will try to mock the subject, effectively shaming others into changing the topic of conversation.

As Greg Sargent noted of President Obama's historic speech on Wednesday, in the midst of a massive number of unprecedented political moves against him and his policies, this President has chosen to make yet another ambitious move - to push forward against the rising tide of economic inequality in the U.S. today.

Not surprisingly, and as both Greg and Ed Kilgore of Washington Monthly pointed out, many of our colleagues in the media - especially those on the right - will simply write off President Obama's comments and intentions for action as another distraction from whatever easy, empty political firestorm they'd rather cover.

As the President made abundantly clear on Wednesday, however, economic inequality in America is "the defining challenge of our time."

The President addressed several key parts of that challenge, including stagnant incomes for lower- and middle-class Americans, and stagnant or even diminished economic mobility. The same "trickle-down ideology" that Pope Francis recently blasted as a proven failure, was also cited by President Obama as a key force that has caused America to stop investing in our infrastructure, weakened the power of American workers, and has crippled much of our educational system over the last thirty years.

As President Obama nearly always does, he didn't simply state the problems at hand and note his opposition to them. He came prepared with several solutions that he boldly laid out, including a substantial increase to the minimum wage, a position that over three-quarters of Americans already agree with the President on.

That shouldn't be surprising. Not only has the minimum wage in America not kept pace with inflation, but the median average wage for U.S. workers also recently fell to the lowest level in fifteen years. Sadly, none of the thousands of fast food workers slated to protest in over 100 cities across America on Thursday would likely be surprised by these statistics.

What the President also made clear on Wednesday was that the wealthiest Americans have broken the social contract better known by most people worldwide as 'The American Dream.' That violation, due to the naked ambition and greed of Americans like those lining the criminal canyons of Wall Street, has nearly wiped out the premise that so many Americans console themselves with, whether in hardship or prosperity.

That premise is this: It is no longer a given that Americans can become anything they want anymore regardless of the economic class into which they were born - a fact the President noted on Wednesday is far out of sync with the vision of America's founding fathers.

As economists from Paul Krugman to Joe Stiglitz have pointed out, Americans must make a choice when it comes to the issue of economic inequality. As uncomfortable as that subject is, President Obama chose to tackle it head-on in Wednesday's address, noting that Americans cannot simply remain clothed in ignorance if we expect to be the kind of 'nation of opportunity' many still claim that we are.

As President Obama clearly reminded us all on Wednesday, it's time Americans made it that way once again.