Dancing To The Wrong Tune

While the actions of the conservative mainstream shouldn't be too surprising to anyone anymore, the resistance by many on the political right to accept reality still has a way of shocking us.

Both the fact that the Occupy movement is still growing, and that its general reason for existence is legitimate are both facts we've seen, heard, and read and that most on the far right are attempting to stomp out.

For example, "Biden Warns of More Rapes and Murders If Jobs Bill Is Not Passed," a headline that screams from the conservative 'Weekly Standard' website, is a disgusting attempt to impugn Vice-President Joe Biden. The facts that the V.P. stated yesterday in Michigan aren't unusual. As the economy has worsened, Flint, Michigan's murder rate has climbed as the ranks of its law enforcement personnel have been reduced.

This isn't some wild-eyed statistic. Numbers like these, saying almost the exact same thing, have been common, factually-based knowledge for years.
When there are more people out of work, crime rates go up.

In a sane world, the goal of a normal society in an economic situation like the one currently facing the U.S. would be to do whatever is necessary to increase the number of jobs as fast as possible. Passing a bill which would directly create or save jobs in the public sector and encourage job creation in the private sector would be one rational choice.

Something, perhaps, like the American Jobs Act, proposed by President Obama.

In the U.S. Senate, however, legislators seem to have a different goal. In case you missed it, the U.S. Senate voted on the right to debate the President's bill this week - they weren't even voting on the actual Jobs bill, just the right to talk about the jobs bill - but Republicans effectively filibustered the discussion, so the bill went nowhere.

It's an obvious fact, Republicans don't want the economy to get better. Period. We're not going to beat around the bush about it any more. Far too many Republicans have become dangerous obstructionists, acting as though anything that's good for the President is bad for them. Cowardly centrist Democrats, like Montana's Jon Tester or Nebraska's Ben Nelson, enable those Republicans with wimpy behavior of their own. Nelson and Tester are obviously more concerned with saving their own jobs than they are with saving the jobs of their constituents and putting folks back to work.

Their actions, and the actions of any legislator who stands against a jobs bill right now seem counter-intuitive to us, since two thirds of Americans are in support of President Obama's jobs policies. Further, one of the key provisions of the President's bill - to make sure that the jobs projects are paid for - was to raise taxes on the richest Americans.

Sixty four percent of Americans agree with raising taxes on the rich - and that includes Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. Many of these people may still be out of work in 2012 - and they will certainly remember which Congresspersons stomped on a perfectly viable plan to help more Americans get jobs.

P.H.D. In HHS

For our readers who also pay attention to other Nebraska-based news media, it may have seemed like a homecoming of sorts this week for a story that most Nebraskans would prefer to put behind them.

Instead, no matter how many times Governor Dave Heineman and the heavily conservative Nebraska Legislature attempt to sweep the political, economic, and personnel disaster that is the current Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services under the rug, the filth of failure keeps emerging.

The Department of Health and Human Services - also known as HHS - is back in the news for multiple reasons.

To start with, the Beatrice State Developmental Center - known to many as the BSDC - is back in the spotlight and again, the news isn't good. This time, multiple BSDC staff members were accused of abusing the Center's disabled residents, or simply ignoring abuse of BSDC residents.

According to state Sen. Steve Lathrop, chairman of a legislative oversight committee, the BSDC - and indeed, the entire Nebraska HHS - appears to be sliding into a pattern of cutting corners and overworking staff that got the HHS into serious trouble not that long ago.

If this sounds all too sickeningly familiar, this isn't the first time HHS has failed in its responsibilities of caring for some of Nebraska's most vulnerable citizens.

Understaffing, overcrowding, and abuse previously led the BSDC to lose its Medicaid certification and the Federal funding that comes along with it. The Department of Justice got involved, and the Unicameral set up the commission that Sen. Lathrop currently chairs to look into these charges.

Yet the abuse happened anyway.

We haven't even gotten to the HHS official in charge of Nebraska's failed child welfare privatization project, who is resigning at the end of this week. There's also the ridiculous HHS ruling on a new county jail construction project near Nebraska's capitol city. That HHS ruling could cost Lancaster County hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions of taxpayer dollars, to fix - even though neither the county or the state is responsible for the expensive construction screwup.

We will be the first people to tell you that government - when it's operated properly - is RARELY the problem, and is often the solution.

The Nebraska HHS, however, isn't even close to being operated properly.

HHS's biggest problem seems to be senior executives and managers who insist on blithely blowing past massive cost savings on their crusade to privatize the entire Department, and slashing costs far beyond the point of sanity.

Paying for an adequate number of quality employees could have alleviated many of the problems now facing HHS - and also Nebraska taxpayers. Improving on the state system for child welfare instead of trying to privatize the system seeing to the care of many of Nebraska's most at-risk children also could have saved Nebraska taxpayers a whole pile of money in the long term.

Instead, Gov. Heineman and many of our state senators have been trying to hide the inconvenient truths about how bad Nebraska's HHS system has become by flashing their P.H.D.s - Pile it Higher and Deeper - on HHS's problems.

It's long past time they should make an honest effort to clean up the mess they've made.

Unsurprised

As the Occupy movement has continued to grow, expanding to Denver and Des Moines - and even Idaho Falls - along with hundreds of other places, both inside and outside the United States, the topic has also begun to take a growing share of breath from the media.

For all the arrogance, bluster, and fake surprise being thrown at the Occupy movement from the corporate right, we can honestly say what's happening on Main Street everywhere shouldn't really be a surprise to us or anyone in the legitimate media.

The factors that have caused this movement to finally spark have been building for many years. Take the problem with lobbyists.

Anyone who hasn't been blinded by the right-wing propagandists (that even THEY don't trust anymore) has known for more than thirty years that lobbying and lobbyists have become a real problem in our American form of government - especially over the last decade. Companies that have bought and paid for the best lobbyists apparently seem to have done SIGNIFICANTLY better than their competition or the market over the last decade. The data, released by Thomson Reuters, merely proves what we already knew: that the richest corporations are willing to pay off everyone - including and especially politicians - because in the end, it helps their bottom line.

It was also highly predictable that the money the government gave to bail out the Wall Street banks and investment firms near the end of the Bush Administration could have been used more wisely. As a Reuters chart created by Nobel-prize winning economic journalist David Cay Johnston shows, if the money used to bail out the Wall Street banks and their wealthy corporate friends had been used differently, we could have funded Social Security for another 21 years. We could have funded Pell Grants, at current levels, for over 400 more years, or unemployment benefits for the entire country for another 92.6 years.

Again, we're not surprised. Members of both our media profession and the general American public have seen this kind of fiscal waste building towards events like the Occupy protests for many years now.

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post noted over the weekend that there may have been different things the Obama Administration could have tried over the last couple years to mitigate the circumstances our economy is in now. As Klein discovered on further inspection, the chances are good that no matter what the President had tried, our country would still be suffering from a hangover caused by thirty-plus years of mostly irresponsible governing.

The reasons behind the economic disasters we're all living through range from the relaxation of all kinds of banking regulations, to the near elimination of campaign finance reforms. The end result is a series of events that many Americans have predicted for years, our staff among them.

For far too long, the greedheads on Wall Street, already the cathedral of avarice in America, have been willing to burn their pages of the social contract - the contract that gives every one of us a shot at the American dream  - in exchange for raking in a few more dollars.

What the folks on Wall Street - "the haves" and the "have mores" as former President George W. Bush once called them - never thought would happen would be that the bulk of the American people would finally stand up for themselves, and that the idea of protests would once again catch fire, like they did in the 1960s. That the people might change their own politics directly has been an idea the Wall Street pigs have only had passing nightmares about for some time.

To us, their shock and surprise is just further proof of how disconnected the Wall Street types really are from the reality the rest of us face daily.

There are a great many things this movement can be called - but unexpected isn't one of them.