By Seth Wessler

Earlier this week the New York Times reported that even as many states have skyrocketing unemployment, their welfare rolls are shrinking. As a researcher for a racial justice think tank, I’ve been traveling the country collecting accounts of how this recession is playing out in the lives of every day people. Millions who are out of work, losing homes and struggling to stay afloat are nevertheless denied access to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The punitive rules established after twenty years of racially coded frenzy to “end welfare as we know it” have left Americans with no safety net during this deepening economic crisis.

TANF replaces the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (to insert the “temporary”) and its creation relied on mythologized images of the “welfare queen” driving Cadillacs conjured by Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. This kind of racial scapegoating, the politics many believe we outgrew with Obama’s election, vilified welfare recipients (who have always been mostly white) and led to rules that are so complicated and punitive that many struggling families cannot get the help they need. Now that all of us – not just people of color– are in recession free fall, there is nothing available to catch us. To fix TANF, we will have to put aside racial stereotypes to do what is best for the largest number of people.

When Welfare Reform passed in 1996, our macro economic outlook was optimistic and the rhetoric of “personal responsibility” was ubiquitous. The welfare rolls plummeted and conservative and liberals alike declared success. But unknown numbers of families (we mostly stopped counting) were left underemployed, underpaid and unable to comply with punitive regulations. According to Robert Wharton, the president and chief executive officer of the Community Economic Development Administration, “Ten years into welfare reform, caseloads may have decreased, but the number of people living in poverty has not”. Welfare reform set up countless barriers to access. The most egregious of these are punitive work requirements and 5-year maximum time limits for lifetime eligibility.

One of the places I stopped in my travels was Detroit. Michigan has the highest unemployment in the country, passing 10 percent last month. Detroit has been hit even harder. Yet, reports the Times, the state cut its welfare rolls over 13 percent last year. In Michigan rules, like those in many states, public assitance to working. A 30-year-old woman I met, lets call her A, lost her job as a teacher’s assistant in a Detroit area public school, and then lost her TANF because she was no longer working. Now she has neither job nor welfare, and she’s facing foreclosure with her four children. I heard dozens of examples like this. People who couldn’t find a job, or even a decent volunteer opportunity, without childcare, transportation, and more help than the new welfare system provides.

A society cannot survive without a safety net and we don’t have one during the worst economic crisis in decades. TANF needs serious reconsideration including a rescinding of punitive work requirements and an end to the time limits that cut people off after 5 years total enrollment. We need to ensure that families have access to supplementary benefits like food stamps, fully subsidized child care, transportation and housing assistance and we need to remove debilitating eligibility requirements that exclude many documented immigrants and people with past involvement with the criminal justice system. To do these things Americans have to be willing to move past their racial stereotypes about people of color and welfare.

The country recently came together in a proud moment to inaugurate our first president of color. We did so by putting our racial divisions aside in the name of collective economic self-interest. Now we need to do the same by rebuilding a system of support for everyone.

Seth Wessler is a Research Associate at the Applied Research Center. See more at http://www.arc.org/content/view/541/

While the details haven’t been disclosed, it appears that the powers that be are considering a plan to bail out Wall Street…in a big way…on the backs of the American taxpayer. Troubling as this sounds, it may be the only viable solution. Regardless of the eventual solution, one thing is clear, the losses will be large.

I want to focus on an analysis of the aftermath and the philosophy that led us to this point. I want to do so because I lived through the Savings & Loan scandal and I’ve been convinced for more than two years that the housing bubble, the artificially low interest rates, the lack of proper oversight, and the associated paper “equity” borrowing it fueled would lead to this type of meltdown.

Having established this backdrop, I want to make the case for driving a stake through the heart of trickle down economics, tax cuts for the wealthy, and the meme that the “tax and spend” Democrats are fiscally irresponsible.

Here’s the deal. The existence of large sums of money in the U.S. economy is a given…it has always been there and it will likely continue to be there (though eight years of GOP malfeasance will make digging out from under the enormous debt a formidable obstacle). With that said, we must begin to consider politics and the inevitable debate about what we will do with the money.

By and large, the party that succeeds in holding power and driving public sentiment gets to decide where the money goes. Without a doubt, the GOP has won this battle for the better part of the last thirty years. In doing so, they have succeeded in attaching the “tax and spend” label to the Democrats…driven primarily by highlighting the Democrats desire to fund and insure existing safety net programs (Social security, Medicare, Welfare, and Unemployment benefits…as well as expand others (Healthcare).

At the same time, the GOP has chosen to foster an economic structure that is weighted towards large corporations and the wealthy. Part and parcel of this approach has been the undermining of labor unions, the refusal to increase minimum wages, the willingness to ignore the huge number of uninsured, allowing the influx of illegals to provide cheap labor, and a willingness to accept the growing divide between the haves and the have nots.

So let’s step back for a moment to the S & L scandal (the late 80’s, early 90’s)…the last instance when profits were privatized and losses were socialized. Rampant real estate speculation and a lack of regulation of the financial industry made a number of investors very wealthy while saddling taxpayers with approximately 123 billion dollars of debt. As an aside, it should be noted that numerous investors were building commercial properties and apartments with no intention of ever managing them…they were simply milking the unregulated financial system.

Now let’s take a look at the GOP’s objections to any form of universal healthcare put forth by the Democrats. The argument suggests that it would cost anywhere from 60 to 100 billion dollars annually. At the same time, it must be noted that the Bush tax cuts enacted in 2001 have been projected to cost 2.5 trillion dollars over ten years…and we’re also spending approximately 120 billion dollars annually on the war in Iraq. As to the costs of the current Wall Street bail out, it’s difficult to determine the damages. For the sake of this argument, I’m going to estimate that the final tally will approach a trillion dollars.

Now lets calculate the total dollars these items represent. If we assume that only half of the tax cuts were unwarranted (they went to the very wealthy), we have 1.25 trillion. Let’s add in 600 billion for five years of the Iraq war (we’re being conservative). That leaves the 120 billion lost on the S & L scandal and the trillion dollars we’re assuming will be lost on the Wall Street meltdown. Taken together, this totals just under three trillion dollars.

OK, now lets see how many years have passed since the S & L scandal. We’ll use 1985 as our start date (again we’re being conservative), which equates with 23 years. For this exercise, we’ll go ahead and round that to 25 years.

If we take our 25 years and assume it would have cost 100 billion dollars per year to fund universal healthcare, that brings us to a total of 2.5 trillion dollars. Note that the use of 100 billion per year is also an extremely conservative number as it would have been far cheaper to provide in the earlier years.

As you can see by a simple review of the numbers, we had enough money to fund universal healthcare for the last 25 years…with nearly a half trillion dollars to spare. Unfortunately, we didn’t have universal healthcare. Instead, those of us that have had healthcare insurance, paid for it for 25 years…and we also received a meager tax cut for the last seven years. If you look at the total dollars the average family received in tax cuts for these seven years, I suspect one would be lucky if it would have paid for three or four years of healthcare insurance (we’re completely ignoring the deductibles and copayments).

So if we look at the rhetoric of the GOP for the last 25 years, they want us to believe that any consideration of universal healthcare would have been irresponsible. They’ve repeatedly told us that the Democrats would raise taxes and spend money we didn’t have…on programs we couldn’t possibly afford.

However, if we look at the numbers above, the only thing we received for supporting this philosophy for managing our government’s finances (our money), was minimal tax cuts…promised nearly every election cycle (surprise, surprise?). At the same time, those in charge squandered three trillion dollars of our money on tax cuts for the extremely wealthy, an unwarranted war, and two episodes of enabling unregulated and painful financial disasters.

In the end, you can slice it any way you like…but you can’t disregard the fact that the money was there to provide universal health care…or any number of other programs designed to benefit all Americans. In the interest of being fair, all of the blame can’t be placed on the GOP, since the Democrats went along with many of these ill-advised expenditures…or the policies that enabled them.

Regardless, it’s also true that the Democrats frequently did so because voter sentiment demanded it. In other words, voters bought into the rhetoric that the GOP would let us keep more of our money and the Democrats would undoubtedly take more of it away from us. Since we know that all politicians cater to the whims of voters in the hopes of winning elections, it’s no wonder the Democrats have acquiesced and appeared amazingly weak. They’ve been on the wrong side of the argument and they’ve failed to convince voters otherwise.

That brings us to where we now stand. If we voters fail to recognize what has happened in the last 25 years as a result of enabling the rhetoric and the policies of the GOP, we do so at our own peril. It’s time for us to demand that our money be spent on programs that serve the greater good; not the ones that line the pockets of the greedy and the wealthy. The money is there…it has always been there…it’s time we elect politicians that have the interests of all Americans at heart…politicians who will be honest stewards and spend our money wisely.

If we don’t, let me be the first to predict the next financial scandal. Unless we choose a different course, it will invariably happen as soon our memory of the last one fades and we resume our role as gullible voters who settle for false promises and paltry tax cuts. Rest assured, once the coast is clear, the greedy will gladly step in and bust the bank again…while their bullshitting benefactors turn a blind eye.

Cross-posted at Thought Theater

I’ve been out of the loop for the past few days, and yesterday evening I wanted to catch up on the chatter in the progressive blogosphere. But as I hit a few of the blogs that I visit on a regular basis, it wasn’t the election chatter that caught my eye. My attention was consumed by a new advertisement that’s been rolled out on some A-list blogs (see the screen capture to the left). The creative aspect of the ad hit me with the force of a ton of bricks:

Up Yours, Baby Boomers

My initial reaction, as a card carrying member of the baby boomer generation? “Whoa. You talkin’ to me, buddy? You got somethin’ to say? Let’s take it outside and discuss. I might be on the shorter side in stature, and getting a bit long in the tooth, but I think I can hold my own in a smackdown. So, why you dissin’ me, baby? WYFP? Ready to go?

Why did I get my ass up in the air? Because in my view, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation advertisement sets up a very pressing national problem as a generational wedge issue…

(more…)

I try to avoid making unequivocal assertions…but if my instincts are correct, I’m not taking much of a risk in predicting that the calamity that will define this Bush presidency will not be the Iraq war. As with his father’s presidency, it will be the economy. Yes, the Iraq war will be factored into the equation that facilitated one of the worst recessions in modern times, but numerous other missteps will receive far more attention.

With the Savings and Loan scandal of the late 80’s as my point of comparison, I expect the magnitude of this recession to be much deeper and far more complex. Frankly, the fact that we survived events like the S & L scandal and the tech bubble have only contributed to the lackadaisical policies that have fostered an air of invincibility. This false confidence has resulted in a deadly conflation of economic poisons that will place a strain on our financial fortitude that hasn’t been witnessed since the Great Depression.

For months, the Bush administration has sought to convince the American public that the economy is sound. Unfortunately, the hollowness of those assurances expands exponentially with each new report. Today’s news is awash with further warnings of economic uncertainty. The President’s remarks, in response to the growing storm clouds, simply highlight the mindset that has typified his inclination to ignore information that doesn’t comport with his rose colored rhetoric.

Unfortunately, I fear this president suffers the misconception that he can tackle this systemic economic malaise in the same manner he addressed the many miscalculations that have plagued the prosecution of the Iraq war. Sadly, brute force has little relevance when it comes to the economy. As with the troop surge, the attempts by the Federal Reserve to pump more money into the economy in order to prop up flailing financial institutions fails to address the dire dynamics that underly the debacle.

Let’s pause to review the observations of others.

From The Wall Street Journal:

It is a very logical progression. Peloton, Carlyle, Focus — hedge funds and other non-deposit-taking financial institutions (NDFIs) are now being hit by the credit crunch, which had so far been mainly confined to mortgage lenders and the banks.

The Federal Reserve has reacted. Its Term Securities Lending Facility aims to encourage investment banks and prime brokers to lend to NDFIs and so relieve those parts of the credit market it cannot reach with its rate cuts and loans to banks.

So far its liquidity injections have got no further than the banks. Now it hopes to reach higher. Unfortunately, it won’t work.

The Fed is like King Canute with a difference — it is trying to halt an ebbing tide rather than a rising one. Its liquidity injection seems huge at $200 billion (with perhaps more to follow), but it is still only equivalent to one-third of the expected losses in the NDFI sector.

Moreover, the Fed’s readiness to accept almost any asset at just below face value as collateral will prevent price discovery. That means the U.S. financial system will remain burdened with uncleansed balance sheets that penalize future lending and economic growth.

Creating a lot of liquidity does not resolve an issue of solvency, which is now the driver of credit contraction. All the Fed will achieve is a dollar that will be further debased and inflation that will be higher. It cannot stop the process of deleveraging and asset price decline.

The credit crisis is unfolding as we expected, but more slowly than anticipated, because of the actions taken by central banks (mainly the Fed) and the U.S. government to allay its effects. The wholesale socialization of credit has meant that government and central bank measures account for 70% of new credit since last summer.

But these policy measures will not prevent asset-price deflation or credit contraction, which are functions of risk appetite and general readiness to maintain current levels of gearing throughout the economy. The non-bank sector has the potential to inflict more damage on the system than banks, because it has a much smaller capital cushion for a much more volatile and risky balance sheet.

Credit contraction translates through the financial system into a reduction in available credit for the non-financial corporate sector, and thus into reduced investment and growth in the real economy. The size of that contraction can be estimated from the leverage ratios of the financial sector and their impact on real GDP growth.

We estimate that nonfinancial corporate debt ultimately will have to shrink by 11%-12%. This will generate a decline of five percentage points of real U.S. GDP growth and push the U.S. into recession. Europe’s real GDP growth will contract by two percentage points.

Essentially, the point being made by the author is that the Federal Reserve’s efforts to lower interest rates is inadequate to address the fundamental problem - the value of the assets that underly much of the existing debt is in a period of contraction…largely as a result of the collapsing housing industry.

As such, the ability of lenders to lend is limited. They lack the capital needed to make loans; let alone the capital required to support declining equity positions and the increasing default risks that are associated with these loans. Hence, the Fed’s efforts to infuse the economy with the capital needed to spur growth isn’t going to be sufficient. Even worse, should this contraction lead to lender insolvency, the likelihood of the need for a huge government bail out advances. If this happens, I believe it will be far larger than the one witnessed during the S & L scandal.

From The New York Times:

The Fed’s economic power rests on the fact that it’s the only institution with the right to add to the “monetary base”: pieces of green paper bearing portraits of dead presidents, plus deposits that private banks hold at the Fed and can convert into green paper at will.

When the Fed is worried about the state of the economy, it basically responds by printing more of that green paper, and using it to buy bonds from banks. The banks then use the green paper to make more loans, which causes businesses and households to spend more, and the economy expands.

This process can be almost magical in its effects: a committee in Washington gives some technical instructions to a trading desk in New York, and just like that, the economy creates millions of jobs.

But sometimes the magic doesn’t work. And this is one of those times.

Instead of following its usual practice of buying only safe U.S. government debt, the Fed announced this week that it would put $400 billion — almost half its available funds — into other stuff, including bonds backed by, yes, home mortgages. The hope is that this will stabilize markets and end the panic.

Officially, the Fed won’t be buying mortgage-backed securities outright: it’s only accepting them as collateral in return for loans. But it’s definitely taking on some mortgage risk. Is this, to some extent, a bailout for banks? Yes.

Still, that’s not what has me worried. I’m more concerned that despite the extraordinary scale of Mr. Bernanke’s action — to my knowledge, no advanced-country’s central bank has ever exposed itself to this much market risk — the Fed still won’t manage to get a grip on the economy. You see, $400 billion sounds like a lot, but it’s still small compared with the problem.

Krugman offers a look into the risks being taken by the Federal Reserve to avert the looming collapse of financial institutions. The fact that the government is taking unprecedented risk signals the seriousness of the situation. The fact that the government has committed half of its available funds to this risk intensive effort suggests that the ultimate solution will require the government to appropriate additional funds…hence the bailout begins. The price tag of the S & L scandal would likely pale in comparison.

The impact to the overall economy could be mind-boggling since it would be apt to affect consumer spending. Falling home values would strip millions of Americans of the bulk of their accumulated wealth which would no doubt restrict their ability and willingness to spend money. The direct correlation of this intertwined cause and effect spiral could have disastrous consequences.

We haven’t even factored in the disproportionate numbers of baby boomers moving towards retirement. A worst case scenario could place the financial stability of many of these individuals in jeopardy at a time when the safety net of Social Security is also approaching insolvency.

From CNBC:

The United States has entered a recession that could be “substantially more severe” than recent ones, former National Bureau of Economic Research President Martin Feldstein said Friday.

“The situation is very bad, the situation is getting worse, and the risks are that it could get very bad,” Feldstein said in a speech at the Futures Industry Association meeting in Boca Raton, Florida.

“There isn’t much traction in monetary policy these days, I’m afraid, because of a lack of liquidity in the credit markets,” he said.

The Fed’s new credit facility, announced on Tuesday, “can help in a rather small way … but the underlying risks will remain with the institutions that borrow from the Fed, and this does nothing to change their capital,” Feldstein noted.

I simply don’t see the mechanism by which this strained liquidity can be alleviated in the near term. Pumping more cash into the system could have short term benefits but the risk to the already tenuous value of the dollar would likely outweigh them. Relying upon the standard bearers…the consumer…to spend us out of this mess seems unlikely. Rarely have prior recessionary periods been accompanied by such significant declines in home values.

Were we to see the emergence of sustained inflation, the picture becomes even more disconcerting. Many of the measures designed to address the liquidity crunch have the potential to do just that. Toss in our trade imbalance, the amount of debt held by the Chinese, and an international shift away from the dollar as the preferred reserve currency and one begins to see the growing alignment of negatives.

The fact that the American image has been tarnished during the current administration makes it difficult to imagine the kind of international cooperation we might have otherwise received during such a slowdown. In fact, don’t be surprised if a number of nations stand idly by as the perceived bully endures its comeuppance.

Returning to the Bush legacy, I recall the deteriorating situation faced by his father prior to the 1992 election. When the senior Bush expressed his amazement with the scanning technology found in grocery stores, his appeal and his connection with the average American is thought to have suffered. When the Clinton campaign added, “It’s the economy, stupid”, the stain became permanent.

The fact that the current president expressed surprise when a member of the press mentioned the prospects of $4.00 per gallon gas seems eerily similar to the last days of his father’s presidency…and it may also assist in cementing the economy as his legacy’s leading albatross.

George W. Bush’s seeming shortage of empathy for the plight of the average American shone through in his mishandling of Katrina, his passage of tax cuts for the wealthiest, his inept energy policy, and his willingness to sink trillions of dollars into the execution of a virtual vendetta in Iraq. These events will forever be tethered to his tenure and his successors are apt to spend years trying to repair the damage done.

They say the writing of one’s legacy is rarely finished since the past undoubtedly shapes the future. In the case of George Bush, I suspect he’d be best to hope that his influence on the future be less indelible than his unabashed attempts to color the present.

Gertrude Stein stated that a “rose is a rose is a rose”. Ernest Hemmingway responded with “a rose is a rose is an onion”. In thinking of the Bush legacy, I’m inclined to argue that a silver spoon may beget rose colored rhetoric…but a silver spoon full of rose petals rarely helps us swallow the thorns. When the bow breaks, the Bush legacy will fall.

Cross-posted at Thought Theater

I’m old enough to remember when the nuclear family was really the American dream: 2.2 kids, a house with a modest mortgage, mom met the kids at the school bus stop in the afternoon because she didn’t work outside the home, dad came rolling in later in the afternoon, dinner was served, homework was done, then maybe some TV (3 VHF channels and a couple of UHF “independents”). Rinse, spit, repeat.

The promise of technology and automation was never that Americans would lose their jobs to machines, but that the machines would make the jobs more efficient and lead to a better quality of life for everyone. LBJ’s “Great Society” was a product of progressive thinking - that yes, indeed, it was possible for the previous generation to leave the next generation just a little bit better off, and so on and so on.

In the past, I’ve ranted about how there was a palpable shift in the overall demeanor of big business back in the early days of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Perhaps I was a bit closer to it (”the shift”) at the time because of the point that I was at in my career - I’d been with the same employer for a couple of years, making a pretty good wage, and I was the sole breadwinner in the family. That was my role; that was the real role in life I thought I was supposed to play. But I could sense, even back then, that something was terribly amiss. I just couldn’t put my finger on it at the time. Something strange was happening in the work place that augured an uncertain future.

Allow me to use a personal story as a segue into a larger discussion on why I’m a progressive Democrat.

The company I worked for during the Reagan years made a very rapid transformation from a truly “family oriented” employer, to a “bottom line” company. Harvard Business School was just starting to churn out Michael Hammer-cloned MBA graduates using the “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap model of business education. The heady days of merger and acquisition really got cranking around the time of Reagan’s second inauguration. The atmosphere in the workplace shifted dramatically in the space of what felt like just a few short months. In fact, the change was so dramatic that, even in the quasi-professional / technical role that I filled, it was becoming obvious that the only way to survive was for those in my technical specialization to organize with a local labor union. And so we tried - I tried. I was very active in the effort.

I was active in the effort for several reasons, but the most important was that the HBS graduates were starting to fling around the specter of competition and deregulation and corporate survival as if to generate a self fulfilling prophecy. And, to a degree, the HBS’ers did just that. What a union offered, even a professional / technical union, were rules that the company and employees had to live by. I reasoned that, without a legally binding employment contract, non-represented, non-management employees were flying by the seat of their pants and without a net.

In the long run, I was right.

The company used a couple of really shady tactics, aided and abetted by a Reagan-reconstituted National Labor Relations Board ruling, to defeat the organizing effort, and the union local was not prepared well enough to respond. The threat of layoffs never emerged for the rank and file union members in the company, but the professional and technical specialties started to be purged in the late 1980’s, as folks like me began to simply make too much money.

As my salary and 401K grew, I clearly recall sitting at my kitchen table one night and amortizing the value of my salary and benefits 20 years into the future. I somberly recognized that evening that the company couldn’t sustain me and hundreds of my coworkers into the future. At some point, even a modest three or four percent increase per year in a fairly decent salary becomes like compounding interest to the bean counters in a company - and it was clear that something had to give. So the professional ranks started taking hits in terms of layoffs, “performance-based” firings, and early retirement package offerings to those in the organization who held the corporate institutional memory.

Here’s an example of how quickly the changes occurred, and why I worked so hard in the union organizing effort.

At one time, the technical and professional folks made time and a half for overtime (because the company would never compensate their professional people less than their union workers, don’tcha know…). Out of the blue, the non-represented technical workers were required to put in at least 45 hours a week to qualify for time and a half. The uncompensated five hours per week was euphemistically dubbed “professional time”. And then one day, word came down from the executive suite that overtime was completely gone for the professionals. You worked what you had to in order to get your job done, no matter how long it took or how much additional responsibility you had to assume because the guy’s desk next to you was suddenly vacated late on a Friday afternoon (the favorite time to issue pink slips), and there was no replacement for him or her.

But you know who didn’t go? The company never touched the union rank and file, because of the contract. There are still guys working for the company in union positions who were there when the great middle management purge of 1990 took place.

I was fortunate enough to see the handwriting on the wall, and started doing some serious programming work on the side back then, and that led to my ability to leave the company on my own terms in the mid-90’s. After all, computers were where the big money was, Tim Berners-Lee was rolling out the HTTP protocol, and the dot com boom was just getting underway. My services were in pretty high demand, and I brought not only my computer experience to a booming market, but my mature business acumen. It was a great combination that worked for awhile, and I made a pretty good living. And then the dot com bust hit.

By the time I was forced back into the job market in the early part of this century, even though my skills were at their peak, my earning power was not. The conservative mantra was, “well, you work whatever you have to work at. McDonalds, whatever. There’s no shame in working hard.” Indeed. It got to the point where I took one of the first jobs that I was offered that was even remotely reasonable in terms of compensation. And then that job was “mergered and acquisitioned”, even though it was in the non-profit sector. The last several years have been a struggle, having come down from positions of both authority and responsibility. In the business climate that I was unfortunate enough to experience, at a certain age, it’s impossible to regain career traction, and you settle for the best job that’s available in order to make ends meet.

I know I’m not alone in my tale, and that there are many out there like me. My real income has declined significantly since the mid-90’s. In fact, I was 1040′ing more per year in 1995 than I am today. And I’m working harder today than I ever did in my life, for a relatively thankless employer whose executive battle cry at the end of every quarter is: “We’re not making the numbers!! Panic! Panic!!” So, the sales force forward-sells our product line to make this quarter’s numbers at the expense of bookings at the beginning of next quarter. It’s an endless cycle of stupid business decisions that leads to bargain basement deals for our customers, less revenue for the company, and a repeating of the cycle again at the end of next quarter.

The company that I work for in 2008 is by no means exceptional in the modern corporate world. There is no “quality of life”, so to speak. I’m tethered to a cell phone and a computer 24 hour a day, 365 days a year, and I spend my time reacting to business crises rather than getting a break from the bonds. I am literally doing the same work that three people did 20 years ago. But my employer thinks this is ok. (The customers don’t, but that’s another story for another day.)

This is the life that the Republican Party brought to me, and why I’m such a strong progressive, even if I’m getting a bit long in the tooth. I’m angry. I’m angry with the business climate that has upended my life and that of millions of others like me. I’m angry that I’m good enough at what I do that I’m the “go-to” guy when there’s a steaming pile of business shit that someone else has left for me to clean up, but there’s no one to back me up when I have a less than stellar day at the office. I’m angry that at this point in my life I’m locked into a fairly dead-end position because of the paycheck, but more importantly, benefits that I can’t (again, at this point of my life) afford to be without.

In the past year, I’ve seen one of my closest business associates hang it up because it just wasn’t worth it anymore - he bailed out early when he had the opportunity, even as he was somewhat unsure of his financial future. Another (15 years younger than me) had a heart attack just before Christmas. He was back at his desk last week. He’ll never make it to retirement. Another is opting for early retirement in March rather than spend another minute with her nose stuck to the grind stone.

The nuclear family is a dream of the past. There are so many among us (thankfully, I’m not yet one of them) who have to work two and three jobs just to pay the mortgage, electric bill, and put food on the table because real wages have declined so precipitously in years recently passed. But the GOP thinks that’s all right, in fact, they’re proud of it. They think it’s just peachy that mom and dad have to work themselves to the point of exhaustion, and then on the other hand they wonder why the nuclear family has disintegrated.

There is more than just a mortgage crisis at hand, and I don’t think anyone in a position to say so really wants to admit it in polite company. There is a very real family financial liquidity crunch that is underway, and sooner than later, the crunch is going to affect all of us. The unprecedented wealth transfer from poor and middle income families to the uber rich is nearly complete. The folks at the bottom of the GOP-led financial pyramid scheme are nearly bled dry, and the pyramid is about to collapse. To sustain itself a little longer, the folks at the top of the pyramid will have to start an Amway-style ritual of financial cannibalism amongst themselves. I think that (to an extent) this is exactly what we’re seeing in the stock markets and big financial houses as the true meltdown begins. Is this is how it starts?

An executive of a collapsed subprime mortgage lender jumped to his death from a bridge Friday, shortly after his wife’s body was found inside their New Jersey home, authorities said.

The deaths of Walter Buczynski, 59, and his wife, Marci, 37 — the parents of two boys — were being investigated as a murder-suicide, according to the Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office…

[He] was a vice president of Columbia, Md.-based Fieldstone Mortgage Co., a high-flying subprime mortgage lender that made $5.5 billion in mortgage loans and employed about 1,000 people as late as 2006.

However, it has since filed for bankruptcy and now has fewer than 20 employees. The company had recently filed court papers seeking approval to pay about $1.1 million in bonuses that would be divided among Buczynski and other staffers so the company could wind down its lending operations and go out of business…

Even in the last throes of corporate failure, the bosses reward themselves.

It’s only speculation, but perhaps this tragedy happened in part because the Buczynski’s were embroiled in some intractable sort of financial difficulty. Still, for each VP of a failed company that can’t take the personal pressure any longer and leaps from a bridge, how many more bodies and destroyed lives from the lower rungs of the economic pyramid have they left in their wake as they pursued the Republican holy grail of financial success and “A-list” cocktail parties?

When consumers stop spending, the economy is going to crash hard. Signs already point to a significant contraction in consumer spending, which is why George Bush today offered up a $140 billion economic stimulus package. The plan tosses a meager bone to those who chose to forgo a new winter coat this year in order to pay the gas or heating oil bill. The theory is that people will see $800 or $1000 from the government as “found money” and go out and buy a new refrigerator or big screen TV, thereby stimulating the economy.

Here’s a news flash for George Bush and his fiscal policy wonks: a lot of people aren’t going to use the cash from his proposed “economic stimulus package” to buy a new big screen TV. They’re going to use the money to catch up on a late car payment. Or pay the electric bill for a month or two without having to figure out which Peter to rob in order to pay Paul.

This is the GOP price of living. And it isn’t cheap or indexed for inflation.

This is why I’m a progressive Democrat.

Update, 1/19: From the Moderate Voice, on the eve of the GOP primary in South Carolina, Shaun Mullen remembers the late GOP henchman Lee Atwater’s “death bed” soliloquy:

“My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The ’80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don’t know who will lead us through the ’90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.”

Ed. Note: Former RNC Chairman (and Karl Rove mentor) Lee Atwater currently resides in a special circle of hell, and a séance to obtain his comment on this article was not immediately productive.

I’m of the age when retirement is no longer a distant event on my biological calendar. It might be a distant dream, but from a chronological perspective, retirement age isn’t that far off for me.

After George Bush’s razor thin election victory in 2004, the battle cry of the GOP was, “Privatize Social Security!” Well, we all know that the effort to further enrich Wall Street financiers by gambling with the retirement money of Americans kind of flopped. In fact, the GOP’s scheme to privatize Social Security was so floppy that it was one of the key factors to the seismic shift in politics after the 2006 election returned control of congress to the Democratic Party.

Even still, it really doesn’t matter to someone like me who hasn’t had a great retirement plan (at least up until a year ago), and who burned through most of my life’s savings during layoffs and periods of unemployment in the first part of this century. That’s why I guard my current job so closely - I’m working for one of the few companies in America that still offers a fully company funded pension to its non-represented workers. And listen, I’m not bragging about that, because with only a dozen or so years left until retirement, whatever pension I’m able to accumulate is going to be rather paltry in terms of meeting my financial needs going forward. I’m just using my own personal situation as a segue to the Sensenbrenner Retirement Plan.

The SRP, also known as the MegaMillions / PowerBall Act of 2007, goes something like this:

MILWAUKEE - U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wi), already a millionaire and heir to the Kimberly-Clark fortune, is on a lucky streak. The Republican hit it big in 1997 with a $250,000 jackpot in the District of Columbia lottery. Then, last spring, he won $1,000 prize in the Wisconsin lottery, and he won another $1,000 in that lottery last week.

“I got lucky,” Sensenbrenner said.

Sensenbrenner, 64, was born into a family that helped build Kimberly-Clark Corp., maker of Kleenex tissue and Scott paper towels, and he recently reported a net worth of about $11.6 million. He said he spends about $10 a week on lottery tickets…

Interestingly enough, Sensenbrenner’s faith-based retirement plan is very similar of that of many working class Americans: Pick 4 and Pick 6.

Fred Barnes, in an editorial at the Wall Street Journal, offers his manifesto for Republican resurgence. Unfortunately, from my perspective, the piece is a textbook demonstration of the degree to which GOP insiders haven’t a clue with regards to the concerns of ordinary Americans as well as the existing political realities. Even worse, much of the piece is an exercise in the “if only” mentality one might expect to find in the Harry Potter world of fantasy and magic. The following excerpt is wholly illustrative.

Clearly the war hurt, more than a little. Just as clearly, a turnaround in Iraq would help enormously.

But even if the “surge” is as successful as it appears it might be, there’s a problem. While public support has increased recently, the war still faces deep-seated opposition. There’s a widespread view that its cost in lives, money and national prestige has been too high. This won’t change overnight. Public opinion isn’t quite that fickle.

It’s not immutable, however. What if military success by Gen. David Petraeus, the American commander, is matched by a political breakthrough engineered by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki? Or matched by the acceleration of political reconciliation at the provincial rather than the national level in Iraq? Either scenario is possible.

I’m willing to concede that anything is possible in this world of uncertainty…but to assume that all of the above will transpire seems akin to Mr. Barnes believing that he holds the winning Power Ball ticket. Yes, it could happen…but it is hardly a reasoned piece of journalistic conjecture.

While Barnes is imagining a political breakthrough, Senator Levin and others are suggesting that the Maliki government is not only an obstacle to progress; it may need to be removed for any hope of political reconciliation to emerge. Shouldn’t a Wall Street Journal piece offer more than the fanciful thought one might find on a slip of paper removed from a fortune cookie?

For the sake of those within the GOP who are actually seeking a blueprint for a return to relevance, may I suggest that the content of this editorial may not be the horse upon which to hitch their hopes?

Mr. Bush can’t erase the memory of his inept handling of Hurricane Katrina. But if another disaster occurred and the president responded effectively, that would counteract the memory of his Katrina performance.

OK, if this is part of the Barnes plan, why not be bold and ask Pat Robertson and the 700 Club to pray that god’s wrath be brought upon another sinful city so that the President can redeem his poor performance. Never mind that this sounds like Barnes is wishing America experience a natural disaster in order to achieve political gain.

As I recall, each time a Democrat has mentioned the possibility of a terrorist attack and that we are no safer as a result of the invasion of Iraq, the GOP has pounced upon such statements as vile, unpatriotic demonstrations of blatant partisanship…going so far as to argue that the Democrats hate America and calling such statements a willingness to sacrifice American lives for political capital. Conversely, is hoping for a natural disaster a noble cause if it helps the GOP?

On fiscal issues, Democrats foolishly dismissed the president’s insistence on cutting $22 billion from overall discretionary spending, claiming it was a puny amount. To them, it is. To the public, it’s not. A veto war on spending bills is likely to work in Mr. Bush’s favor, though not if weak-willed congressional Republicans cut and run. Should it lead to a government shutdown–call it the shutdown trap–that would be all the more harmful to Democrats.

On taxes, Democrats appear confident there’s no trap at all, so long as they don’t raise taxes on the middle class. Thus congressional Democrats have felt free to pass tax hikes this year on energy companies, foreign corporations and cigarettes, and they’re poised to repeal the Bush tax cuts for those earning more than $200,000 a year.

Republicans believe Democrats have misread their mandate on taxes. We’ll see.

Fred, where have you been while this President has nearly doubled the national debt from 5 trillion to 9 trillion? Have you forgotten that this is the President who enacted the largest entitlement program in recent history with the passage of his prescription drug benefit? When the Democrats fail to get excited about 22 billion dollars, they do so while pointing to the borrow and spend backdrop that has typified the Bush administration.

As to the tax hikes which Barnes feels will hurt the Democrats, clearly the number of Americans impacted by such increases is miniscule…but then again, I doubt Barnes spends much time with ordinary citizens. Frankly, Barnes might want to consider the possibility that voters have grown weary of tax cut promises from the GOP. Putting a few dollars into a voters pocket…while at the same time taking it out through inflation, wage stagnation, a suspect economy, declining home prices and sales, tightening credit, and the expenditure of 10 to 12 billion dollars each month on an endless war effort…doesn’t seem like much of a winning strategy.

They practically invited Democrats to trump them on ethics and lobbying reform. And they’ve allowed their obsession with illegal immigrants to get out of hand. This drives away Hispanic voters and leaves the impression that Republicans are small-minded, ungenerous and nasty. The worst offenders are the presidential candidates, who would be wise to tone down their rhetoric on immigration.

Yes, nothing like embracing a strategy premised upon the notion that a leopard can suddenly lose its spots. The glaring omission in this suggestion is any understanding of where the GOP actually stands with regards to immigration…other than where Barnes posits may be most politically advantageous. Perhaps the fact that the Republican Party seems to treat this and so many other issues as nothing more than political calculations is what is troubling voters?

From my vantage point, Republican candidates have spent years using the immigration issue to pander to competing constituents such that the majority of the wells have been poisoned and the kool-aid is no longer potable. Weaving a workable message at this point would be akin to pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

As Karl Rove has noted, Republicans need a big idea. The best available is the one Mr. Bush abandoned: ownership. Allowing private investment of payroll taxes for Social Security would only be a start. An Ownership Society would allow individual Americans, rather than government, to control how and where their health care, public education, 401(k) and IRA funds are spent.

I’ll give Barnes credit…if you’re in the last act of a show that is undoubtedly destined to go dark…you might as well pull out all of the stops. Sadly, like most men who become enamored with their own self-interest, Barnes’ Ownership Society finale is little more than the wish list of a man and a Party that has not only sought to raid the cookie jar…but has also decided that it is entitled to devour all of the delicacies on the dish.

In the ultimate miscalculation, Barnes’ final words ring hollow to the many voters who can’t afford this months rent, who work jobs that do not provide health insurance, who couldn’t put money in a 401K even if the company offered one, and who haven’t the time or the energy to invest social security funds for a future they can’t begin to imagine as they try to scrape together the means to put enough food on tonight’s dinner table.

I hate to be the one to break this to Fred…but after reading his manifesto, the final thought that crossed my mind was that it would be far easier for voters to simply vote for the Democrats than for them to hope that the Republicans can shed their sullied skin and suddenly become the compassionate conservatives they so masterfully marketed as none other than George Bush.

In the end, the Barnes piece has served one valuable purpose…it has made it abundantly clear why voters will likely relegate the GOP to the sidelines for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, maybe Mr. Barnes and his fellow Republicans can craft the next iteration of an ill-conceived illusion. One thing is certain, they would be well advised to choose a better wizard…one that isn’t quite so visibly unable to manipulate the machinery as the drapes of deception are dismantled.

Cross-posted at Thought Theater

Sometimes comparison proves to be the best means to understand the intentions of those who have been elected to public office…especially since the spoken word is often the tool by which politicians manipulate voters. When it comes to understanding President Bush, comparison is necessary…and the results offer a string of contradictions that defy the rhetoric of compassionate conservatism.

In a New York Times article, Paul Krugman provides readers a look into the position of the President with regard to the expansion of programs to cover uninsured children…programs that the President supported in the past…but programs that the President is opposed to expanding despite their success.

When a child is enrolled in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (Schip), the positive results can be dramatic. For example, after asthmatic children are enrolled in Schip, the frequency of their attacks declines on average by 60 percent, and their likelihood of being hospitalized for the condition declines more than 70 percent.

Regular care, in other words, makes a big difference. That’s why Congressional Democrats, with support from many Republicans, are trying to expand Schip, which already provides essential medical care to millions of children, to cover millions of additional children who would otherwise lack health insurance.

But President Bush says that access to care is no problem — “After all, you just go to an emergency room” — and, with the support of the Republican Congressional leadership, he’s declared that he’ll veto any Schip expansion on “philosophical” grounds.

The House plan, which would cover more children, is more expensive, but it offsets Schip costs by reducing subsidies to Medicare Advantage — a privatization scheme that pays insurance companies to provide coverage, and costs taxpayers 12 percent more per beneficiary than traditional Medicare.

Strange to say, however, the administration, although determined to prevent any expansion of children’s health care, is also dead set against any cut in Medicare Advantage payments.

Well, here’s what Mr. Bush said after explaining that emergency rooms provide all the health care you need: “They’re going to increase the number of folks eligible through Schip; some want to lower the age for Medicare. And then all of a sudden, you begin to see a — I wouldn’t call it a plot, just a strategy — to get more people to be a part of a federalization of health care.”

Looking at this particular situation offers ample opportunities for relevant and informative comparisons. First, let me suggest that the President’s position is neither conservative nor compassionate. There has been little disagreement that George Bush’s Medicare prescription drug program was the largest expansion of entitlements in recent memory and most analysts believe it will cost far more than the original estimates.

On its surface, one might argue that adding a prescription drug benefit was an act of compassion…and to a degree that conclusion has some merit. However, this is where comparison becomes an enlightening tool.

It is well known that the President is in favor of privatizing entitlement programs and one could argue that the prescription drug benefit was a logical step in that direction and likely the only means by which he could initiate such a plan…given that is has the appearance of compassion. One can look at the high costs of the program as the essential seed money for turning the corner towards privatization.

As we know, the program has been viewed to have achieved mixed results but there is no doubt that it provided insurance companies with a subsidized entrée into the living rooms of millions of Americans. Let me attempt to explain. The prescription drug benefit allows those on Medicare to purchase the benefit from an array of private providers…a move that begins to put in place a ready made structure for further privatization.

Such a plan achieves two important goals for a President in favor of privatization. One, it begins to give insurance companies an expanding role in providing care for the millions of seniors on Medicare…a move that is good for large corporations in the business of health care…including drug manufacturers. Two, it is an important incremental step in taking the government out of the health care business and entitlement programs.

Coming back to the Schip program, one can begin to use comparisons to uncover actual motivations. The number of uninsured Americans is well documented as a politically charged issue. In approving a plan to cover a number of uninsured children, the President achieved points for compassion just as he did with the prescription drug benefit. These programs also helped to hold off calls for universal government health care…a direction which this President opposes.

When one looks at the Bush administration position on the relative costs for the Schip plan and Medicare Advantage, we see that compassion and conservatism are secondary to the ideology of privatization. Granted, one could argue that the ultimate goals of the measures endorsed by the President have conservatism at their core…meaning less government and more market determined programs and costs.

In that regard, perhaps these spending measures…which are seemingly incongruent with conservatism…and which have raised the ire of traditional conservatives…have been shrewd considerations and calculations on the part of the President intended to push the country towards more privatization.

Now, why should Mr. Bush fear that insuring uninsured children would lead to a further “federalization” of health care, even though nothing like that is actually in either the Senate plan or the House plan? It’s not because he thinks the plans wouldn’t work. It’s because he’s afraid that they would. That is, he fears that voters, having seen how the government can help children, would ask why it can’t do the same for adults.

And there you have the core of Mr. Bush’s philosophy. He wants the public to believe that government is always the problem, never the solution. But it’s hard to convince people that government is always bad when they see it doing good things. So his philosophy says that the government must be prevented from solving problems, even if it can. In fact, the more good a proposed government program would do, the more fiercely it must be opposed.

This sounds like a caricature, but it isn’t. The truth is that this good-is-bad philosophy has always been at the core of Republican opposition to health care reform. Thus back in 1994, William Kristol warned against passage of the Clinton health care plan “in any form,” because “its success would signal the rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment that such policy is being perceived as a failure in other areas.”

But it has taken the fight over children’s health insurance to bring the perversity of this philosophy fully into view.

Krugman’s analysis is valid but perhaps it stops short of identifying the ultimate misconceptions that underlie such a philosophy. George Bush is no doubt a product of privilege and in that reality his ability to comprehend the struggles of those at the opposite end of the spectrum is undoubtedly insufficient.

There is an inherent risk for those who “have” to infer that those who “have not”…deserve not…that what they lack results from their lack of effort and that if they are coddled by the government, they will never demonstrate the necessary initiative to alter their situation absent the assistance of the government.

Clearly, there have been situations that have given such arguments credibility…particularly the welfare reform seen in the 1990’s (though one could argue that the strong economy played a larger role in that success than the simple act of refusing to toss people a government subsidized lifeline).

Regardless, refusing to provide care to needy children seems to be punishing the innocent amongst us for all of the wrong reasons. Ideology aside, children lack the ability or the autonomy to effect their status. Allowing them to be political pawns seems wrong by whatever comparative means one may choose to employ.

Sadly, I view this situation as one of many examples whereby George Bush has demonstrated his predisposition to implement and impose his absolute ideological views despite the detrimental impact they may inflict upon those who do not serve to advance his narrow objectives.

Cross-posted at Thought Theater

We often hear the expression, “That’s just the tip of the iceberg”. The good news is that our familiarity with that terminology has probably prevented a few maritime collisions. The bad news is that the principal holds true for numerous other life situations…situations that go unnoticed or ignored because we really don’t want to understand the depth and breadth of the issues we encounter and exactly what they might tell us about our choices, our beliefs, and our identities.

Let me ease into the topic with a story my dad has told for a number of years. My dad and my uncle were business partners for all of their working lives. At different points along the way, they entered into partnerships with other individuals. This particular story is about one of those partners…I’ll call him John.

John was married when the partnership began but there were lingering questions about John’s propensity to have outside interests. Eventually, John and his wife divorced and over the next few years he dated a number of different women…enough to catch my dad’s attention. My dad, my uncle, and John spent a lot of time together discussing the business…which as we all know allows one an opportunity to see how people behave…to learn about their idiosyncrasies.

As the three of them were out and about, my dad and my uncle were always comfortable noticing and pointing out an attractive woman. As my dad says, “What’s wrong with acknowledging what you see and what you think?” In other words, a pretty woman is a pretty woman…and noticing that reality is normal. John, on the other hand, never noticed or acknowledged an attractive woman. It was as if they didn’t exist…never saw them, never gonna see them.

So I recall many nights when my dad would joke about the fact that John seemed to always have a new woman sitting next to him in his car…and my dad would ask, “If he never sees or acknowledges an attractive woman, how is that he always has a new girlfriend?” Of course he always answered his own rhetorical question…John had learned to lead two lives…the one he wanted everyone to see and the one he actually preferred…and he lived those two lives while he was married and while he wasn’t. Somewhere in John’s identity, he needed others to see him as a good family man…even if he couldn’t actually live that life.

In the end, my dad’s conclusion was that it is unhealthy to deny human nature…people are sexual beings that notice what they find attractive. If you accept that reality and make your choices mindful of that aspect of your human nature, you’ll be able to make good choices…because you will better understand yourself. If you deny that reality, you will always be in the throes of a deceitful internal battle and your choices will lack clarity and your actions will betray the outward persona you present. Thus, you end up fooling yourself…perhaps the worst transgression one can commit.

I was reminded of icebergs and John’s story while surfing the internet this morning. I came across an article discussing an organization called XXXChurch.com, a religious based group intended to help Christian men come to grips with their obsession with pornography.

Brian McGinness had an insatiable appetite for porn. Day after day, for more than eight years, he spent countless hours surfing the Web for it, usually on a computer that he used after business hours at his old job.

Because of his compulsion to view pornography, McGinness spent more time away from home, so he lied to his wife about having to work overtime in the evenings. He felt guilty about what he was doing, believing that it was morally wrong and knowing that it was keeping him from his spouse and their two young children. But he also felt unable to control himself.

All that started to change one Saturday morning in December after he attended a breakfast of “Porn and Pancakes” organized by XXXChurch.com, an online ministry created to get Christians talking about their X-rated addictions.

The December event attracted more than 500 men to Ada Bible Church, which McGinness attends. They ate pancakes and sausage while discussing how pornography had harmed their lives, including their relationships with God and their families.

Craig Gross, a pastor with XXXChurch.com, refers to the widespread use of porn as “the elephant in the pew” that many churches ignored for years because they didn’t know how to deal with it.

First, I commend Gross and his organization for having the ability and the integrity to expose and address the issue. At the same time, I’m not surprised that the problem exists. One need only recall the many high profile ministers that have fallen from grace as a result of sexual indiscretions…the type of indiscretions that were often the subject of their sermons and that I would suggest result from this concept of dual identity.

Here’s the equation. Religious beliefs often focus on sin and sex…virtually portraying sex as sin and creating an environment whereby one’s proximity to god is premised on one’s denial of sexual reality. Good men are family oriented, have sexual desires for only one woman…desires that are believed to exist in order to create Christian families…which are to become testaments to the established doctrine. Sex is packaged into a tidy formula and acting outside that formula is viewed as a betrayal of one’s faith…a formula I believe to be both unrealistic and unhealthy.

Freud described the concept of identity as a tube of toothpaste. If one allows one’s identity to flow from the tube naturally by removing the cap, then the identity functions as it should. If one puts a cap on the tube and applies pressure, toothpaste will find weak points from which to escape…toothpaste being the dark corners of our unhealthy and unexplored identity that become pathology (bad behavior). I think the model explains the issue of porn addiction or obsession in these Christian men. Doctrine becomes the cap that places an inordinate amount of pressure on the capped identity…and in due time it escapes in unhealthy ways.

Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that pornography is sinful or evil (Isn’t it actually just visual images of our sexuality?). The state of mind one brings to the viewing of pornography is the issue. We watch people act out other elements of human nature in movies and on television all the time and we’re still able to use good judgment about our behaviors. Watching pornography needn’t be any different so long as one hasn’t given it far more power than it actually possesses.

I think it’s akin to the way alcohol consumption is addressed in the United States as opposed to Europe. In our Italian family, having a glass of wine wasn’t just reserved for those over the age of 21…we were allowed to drink wine as children (in moderation) and it never became an obsession brought about by an archaic notion of denial.

We don’t give children the keys to the car the minute they turn 16…we spend time teaching them how to drive and giving them an opportunity to gain some experience. Does it make sense to forbid a child to taste alcohol before they turn 21 and then turn them loose to drink all they can consume? Is sex any different? Does it make sense to tell children not to partake of this great thing…until we tell you its time…and then Katie bar the door?

I’m not suggesting parents ought to encourage their children to have sex…but I am suggesting that the model of denial is nothing more than the predecessor of an unhealthy perspective that is likely to haunt the individual well into adulthood if not indefinitely. Connecting sex with loving relationships ought to be a parent’s focus because it will provide the proper motivation and avoid instilling a cookie jar binge mentality. We should rethink the current construct and I would suggest that an unhealthy obsession with pornography supports that argument.

“We’re not going to shut down the porn industry,” Gross said. “So, why even try? It’s a $13 billion-dollar-a-year industry in the United States.

“The right-wingers say, ‘Let’s boycott this, let’s all stop doing this.’ Well, if the Christians would just stop consuming it, that would put a dent in it. To me, they (in the porn industry) have a right to do what they do.”

McGinness, who has been married for more than 10 years and has children ages 8 and 3, said he is not ashamed of talking publicly about his former problem because he hopes to help others by doing so.

“I want other people out there to know there is a way to get away from this.”

Look, sexuality is not extinguishable…but having healthy thoughts about sexuality is achievable. I agree with McGinness that banning porn isn’t the answer. Unfortunately, the goal of XXXChurch is to extinguish the interest in pornography amongst Christians by reasserting the importance of religious doctrine and family values. I don’t begrudge his efforts though I doubt it provides a lasting solution. It may, in the short term, diminish the obsession…but until the underlying realities of sexuality are addressed in a proactive and positive manner without the attachment of sin and judgment, there will no doubt be more Ted Haggard’s and more money spent on pornography.

An iceberg is not only what is visible, but it is also what exists beneath the surface. Life is no different. We can elect to only address that which is visible and on the surface or we can accept and embrace that which exists just beyond our view. When we choose to ignore the whole of our human identity, we run the risk of being torn apart by that which lurks below. We need not steer clear of who we are…the whole of our essence must be acknowledged and accepted.

If we turn and run, then the weight of what lies beneath will become an albatross around our necks and pull what little remains of our authenticity and awareness into the dark abyss of self-deceit. If we embrace our totality, it will be the ballast that allows us to endure the rough waters that lie ahead…but most importantly, it will be the anchor that firmly fastens us to the whole of our wondrous human identity.

Cross-posted at Thought Theater

According to Zell there’s not a recruitment problem because young men and women don’t want to serve in a war started for stupid and false reasons. Nope, we’ve got a shortage of servicemen and women because of abortion. If only we had the grown fetuses that have been aborted over the years, Zell would have plenty of young people to throw into stupid wars fought for false reasons. Additionally, if Zell had those grown fetuses we wouldn’t have an immigration problem, as there would be tons of people ready to do the jobs Americans don’t want to, and wouldn’t have a Social Security problem, because the grown fetuses would be paying more taxes.

Zell is so smart! I suggest he advocate a government program to breed soldiers. That might solve some of the problems he sees. RawStory is on the Zell story as well.

By the way, there’s evidence that the Republicans in Georgia are just as stupid as is Zell. The Republicans in the Georgia House have approved a statue in Zell Miller’s honor, and it is going to be situated outside the Georgia Capitol. Each of them knows such a statue would do far more good scaring crows in a farmer’s field, but these Republicans wish Zell to be a pigeon target instead.

The House of Representatives approved a resolution today calling for a statue to former U.S. Sen. Zell Miller on the State Capitol grounds.

Backed by several House Republican leaders, HR16 urges the Capitol Arts Standards Commission to move forward with the project, calling the Democrat “one of Georgia’s most distinguished native sons.”

“The time is right,” state Rep. Ben Bridges Sr. (R-Cleveland), who sponsored the resolution, told the House this morning. “I know of no one who has done more for the people of this state than Zell Miller.”

Man, they’re going to honor a (technically) living man with a statue? That’s tacky.