Brief thoughts on SNAP

There are a lot of people who work full time, but qualify for food stamps. That, all by itself, is a damning indictment of their employers, and our society at large. And there are others (Walmart comes to mind) who intentionally hire multiple part time employees to fill a single full time position, in order to avoid having to treat those employees as human beings.

So the business model is to pay wages that nobody can live on, and let the taxpayer pick up the tab for the difference. And we do, with food stamps, WICK, section 8 housing, and the rest of the taxpayer funded safety net.

And the right (particularly those who suck their livings off the public tit) has be demonizing these people as somehow less moral, less deserving, less human, than the rest of us, because their employer is an asshole. To some degree this works, a lot of people buy into the 'welfare queen' fiction. But too many still notice that is the employer who denies people a living wage who is really at fault.

Of course the moral solution is to raise the minimum wage, and to enforce that labor laws for businesses like Walmart, so that the employees are actually able to organize without retaliation and intimidation. The right of course would never buy into that, because their constituency does not include people who do actual work.

But fear not, they do have a solution! Kick people off SNAP! Sure their children will be even more malnourished than they are now, but the workers will not be living on the public safety net. No more evil employers!

Don't you wish you had thought of this?

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Why am I writing this story again?

This is the third Christmas in a row that I have written about Barbara, the woman who stands outside the building where I work begging for money.  The first two times were Second and First.

She is thinner now, if that is possible, than the first time I wrote about her.  I have seen her with cuts and bruises, and broken bones.  She has disappeared for days at a time, only to return with stories of being in the hospital.  Sometimes it has been due to illness, and others due to the fragility of aging bones.  But still she clings to existence, such as it is.

She is the face of our steadily declining commitment to the least of us in our society.  She is also the future, if the right wing has their way.  She is no longer any use, so they have no qualms about tossing her onto the scrap heap.  When you and I are no longer of use to them, that is the future they envision for us too.  Of course they would rather we had the decency to just fucking die when we are no longer useful to them.

I know, you think I am exaggerating.  Then how do you explain that, when there are men and women like Barbara, just hanging on by a thread, and they want to cut every service that Barbara and people like her depend upon to survive, while at the same time giving tax breaks to those who want for nothing?

They would tell you (if they had the courage to speak their minds openly) that there is a natural order to things, and that you exist to serve your betters.  It is essentially the same line that you have heard in all class based societies.  If you stand up for yourself?  Then you are instigating class warfare.

It is much like the line used against black Americans during the civil rights movement.  They were expected to stand idly by while they were brutalized, lynched.  But should they stand up and resist, fight back, then they were instigating violence.

Now two years after I first wrote about her, Barbara is still barely surviving on whatever kind of pension she receives and what she gets begging on the streets.  She gave me a Christmas card again this year, thanking me for the help I give her.   I know she has others, like me, who help her out with a few dollars when they see her.  But still, that isn't enough, not even close.

Unless we change, she is not only the present, but the future.

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A business model

To many people, knowing that Mitt Romney made a lot of money with Bain Capital is all they really need to know.  That means he must have done something that benefited the economy, the nation at large.  But that is only because they do not understand the business model of private equity firms.

So for the benefit of those people, I am going to publish a little history lesson, an object lesson that illustrates very clearly what role private equity plays in the world of business.

Mervyns was founded in 1949 by Mervin G Morris.  At it's peak it employed 30,000 people and had 257 stores.  It was acquired in 1978 by Dayton Hudson (now Target) and sold to the private equity firms Cerberus Capital Management, Sun Capital Partners, and Lubert-Adler in 2004.

At the time of the sale, the Mervyns stores were starting to show their age, Dayton-Hudson had been more interested in growing their Target brand than Mervyns.  But the business was still profitable.  It would have taken some work, but it was nowhere near a lost cause.

What happened?  The short version (the long version is a little more complicated but functionally the same), they sold off the real estate and the stores were compelled to lease it back at double the cost.  They sucked out $400 million in cash for themselves and left the company with $800 million in debt.  That was more than the company could survive.

The company was driven into bankruptcy, and 30,000 people lost their jobs.  But it was successful investment because the money borrowed to buy the company was debt to Mervyns, not to the private equity partners.  They got their money, everyone else got screwed.

This is the sort of capitalism that Mitt Romney represents.  It is the sort of capitalism that those who fund the tea party represent.  Yes, it really is legal.  But does this help or hurt anyone except the very few?  It is legal, but is it moral?  Is this really the sort of nation that we want to be?

This is America - a year later

Is this your mother, your grandmother, your sister, your aunt?  Do you know where she is, how she survives?

Last year I wrote a post about Barbara, the woman who stands outside the building where I work, begging.  She is 75, which is 10 years older than my wife, and she is still there.

She has been hospitalized a couple times that I know of in the past year.  Once was for pneumonia, and I am not sure out the other.  It may have been after she was mugged.    Who mugs a 75 year old woman for the change she has managed to beg in the streets?

She is having more trouble getting around these days, and I no longer see her every day.  And when I do see her she is often using a walker, always at least using a cane.  I used to make sure I had some ones in my wallet, so I could always give her a dollar or two when I saw her.  But as she is able to make it out less frequently, I think perhaps it should be fives or tens now.

I have never seen her intoxicated, never smelled alcohol on her breath, so I suspect that her only crime against society was that she didn't make a lot of money.

If you have no children to take care of you, if you have the temerity to live past the age when you can be useful to the machine, then this is what the Republican Party has planned for you.  They are trying to drive down wages so that you will need to spend every penny they pay you to survive.  Then they will deride you for not saving.

Is this really the America you want?  If not, then fucking do something about it.

It has always been here

As was true in Europe, there has always been class warfare in the United States.  The difference is that in this country it has been, for the most part, a one-sided fight.  The middle and lower classes have always been pitted against each other, made to fight over the same scraps.  It is another variation of the game of 'blame the victim'.

When Malcolm X suggested that blacks should respond to violence against them by having guns to defend themselves, that was called advocating violence.  When someone points out that the disparity between the ultra rich and everyone else in society is the largest it has ever been, they are 'instigating class warfare'.

Think about it this way.  When was the middle class was growing, when people were moving out of poverty into the middle class?  What is different about then, than now?

• The income tax rates were higher, particularly for the most wealthy
• Inheritance taxes were higher, which, despite the rhetoric, had little impact on the lives of ordinary Americans.  The tax has never applied to the passing of an estate between a husband and wife, and the amount excluded from taxation for everyone else in 2001 (the earliest date I found in a very brief internet search) was $675,000.
• There were real limits on how many media outlets in the same market a single company could own, so that a real diversity of voices existed.  One or two companies did not control all you see and hear.
• Your tax dollars were not subsidizing the shipment of your job overseas.

Was life worse for you then?  Were your kids likely to find decent jobs when they graduated from college?  Could you actually afford to send them to college without having to bankrupt yourself or make your child hang debt to last the rest of their life around their neck?

Yes, there is class warfare going on..  And we are losing.