A Tale Of Two Americas

As the year begins to wind down, and "Best of" and retrospective lists keep popping up - like Time's 'Person of the Year' - there are times we find it hard to get into the holiday spirit.

Sure - the weather outside HAS been frightful, for most of the United States, especially in the DC area the last few days. But it's the tales like that of Dasani, the "Invisible Child" at the focus of a story in the New York Times on Monday, that remind us that - much like England in Charles Dickens' time - America is now a nation in the midst of both the best of times and the worst of times.

In fact, that idea of two Americas is one writer and producer David Simon - creator of the highly successful HBO show 'The Wire' - recently found himself decrying at a conference in Sydney, Australia. Sadly, Simon's perspective on the failures of modern American "capitalism" too accurately reflects a land that someone like Tiny Tim might have been familiar with.

For those living in that America suffering the worst of times, things aren't getting better very fast. While workers who are getting paid "minimum wage" protest for wage amounts they can actually live on, corporate executives and some politicians - who are all wealthier than ever - decry the protestors as troublemakers, and rail against the idea of a living wage as a job killer.

That recent studies show extended unemployment benefits and increased minimum wage levels won't actually destroy jobs, and would in fact help the economy has little to no bearing on the way the party of the rich - the Republican Party - sees the American version of Tiny Tim, little Dasani and her family.

As Paul Krugman pointed out Monday, the Republican answer to the problem of the poor is simple: scream things at the poor like 'Get a job!" Actually helping to create an economy where there are enough jobs that pay living wages for all who want them? Republicans like Sen. Rand Paul believe creating that kind of economy is someone else's job.

In fact, Republican politicians like Sen. Rand Paul are pushing for those going through the worst of times, to get even less than they already do. Sadly, the extremist Republicans aren't the only Scrooges in DC this year.

As Ed Kilgore of Washington Monthly noted on Monday, this year's budget sacrifice by Democrats appears to be the extension of Federal unemployment benefits - meaning that those Americans who've already been struggling to hang on at the bottom edge of the economy might now be cut off, right as the holidays end.

In an America where the stock market is at some of its highest levels ever, where the 400 richest Americans have a higher standard of living than anyone else on the planet, those same 400 richest people are still richer than the bottom 50 percent of Americans combined.

If there is one reason for hope this next year, it is that it is an election year, and - as Greg Sargent noted yesterday, in the 2014 elections, the Dickensian economy so many Americans are living through now may matter more than any other factor in those elections.

If we had any recommendations for the Scrooges in modern America today, we'd suggest they skip ahead in their own storyline to the Ghost of Christmas Future, and learn their lessons now, and not in November of 2014.

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.