Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
The Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis at Inequality.org writes—Poor People’s Campaign: We Refuse to Allow Politicians and Big Corporations to Balance State Budgets by Denying Rights:
From the beginning of this pandemic, the response of our elected officials has prioritized private profits over saving lives. Kentucky Senator and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell came out in opposition to federal support for state budgets, specifically mentioning state pensions as unworthy of being bailed out. In doing so, he signaled his support for using this crisis, and budget crises in states across the country, as an opportunity to abdicate responsibility for paying millions of workers benefits they’ve worked for their whole lives.
New York’s Governor, Andrew Cuomo, responded to McConnell’s comments by doubling down on the lie of scarcity and on divide-and-conquer politics. He tried to pit New York against McConnell’s home state of Kentucky, calling Kentucky a “taker” from the federal budget. At the same time, Cuomo is proposing to cut billions of dollars from education, health care, and other social programs in New York while refusing to consider increasing taxes on the wealthy in the state — people whose wealth depends, more clearly than ever, entirely on the very essential workers who will be most devastated by these proposed budget cuts.
We cannot fall for this cynical attempt at misdirection. Indeed, leaders from the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival in Kentucky and in New York have come together to respond to McConnell and Cuomo and expose their lies, saying:
As a movement of poor people, we are all too familiar with rhetoric that paints recipients of aid as a burden, while ignoring the structural injustices that create wealth and poverty. Perpetuating divisions between urban and rural areas is damaging to us all. At the center of all these issues is not the red or blue divide, but actual people and their lives. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, 1.6 million Kentuckians and 8.6 million New Yorkers were poor or low-income, including the majority of children in each state. Both our state governments and the federal government have failed to respond to our demands, setting the stage for deepening poverty, suffering, and death. This is not a state against state issue, and regardless of contributions, we are being forced to exist within an economic framework that time and time again, throughout history, functions to protect wealth over life.
The truth is there is enough. Billionaires in the United States have seen their wealth increase since the pandemic set in. Trillions of dollars have been funneled to corporations, either in direct handouts or through nearly zero-cost loans. Recently closed hospitals are sitting empty, along with millions of homes and hotel rooms, and millions of pounds of food are being destroyed. The lie of scarcity is a screen for policies that undermine not only our human rights to health, housing, food, and our other basic needs, but also our democracy.
In the coming months, as state governments across the country put together their budgets for the next year, the true extent of this immoral opportunism will become even clearer. Sharp declines in usual sources of state funds, like sales and income taxes, along with increased strains on already resource-starved programs like Medicaid and unemployment insurance, will leave states in severe budget crises. [...]
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“Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.”
~~Herman Melville, Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs (1854)
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—Kagan Filibuster? All Part of the GOP Plan:
TWI's Mike Lillis catches Mitch McConnell mid flip-flop. Last month, he ruled out a Republican filibuster of any Obama nominee, unless that person had "really bizarre views."
But today he's saying that "it's way to early to be making a decision about the issue of whether there should be a 60-vote threshold on the nominee." Way too early, because it's not like they've already been through a nomination process for Kagan when she received confirmation as Solicitor General, or as Lillis put it, as if she "just arrived in a coffee can from Pluto."