THE POWER OF WORDS

On April nineteenth, ninety ninety five, a young white man named Timothy McVeigh exploded a truck outside of a government building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.  The explosion killed one hundred and sixty eight people, making it the worst terrorist attack in American history prior to 9/11.  McVeigh, (who was later given the death penalty) was a former army veteran of the first Iraq war who had been radicalized by the white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries, claimed that his motivation for the attack was to strike back at the overbearing federal government.  He was especially disgusted by the raid that had been carried out by the FBI against a cult in Waco, Texas two years earlier. 

In the aftermath of the attack, then President Bill Clinton began to hint in some speeches that part of McVeigh's hatred of the federal government could had been fed by the right wing media's continual demonization of "big government."  When right wing media figures began to fire back, he quickly moved on to other things.  But was he wrong?  When you have a media system that pumps out hatred everyday, is it wrong for them to at least be held partly responsible when that hatred leads to violence?  While I'm certainly not calling for any kind of censorship, and McVeigh's anger seems to be as much  linked to his bitterness at being single and in debt than any messages from the right wing media, it's not wrong to say that words can matter, and inspire people to commit terrible acts.

Which brings us to the horrific recent shooting of eight innocent people in Atlanta three days ago.  The confessed killer, Robert Aaron Long is, like McVeigh, a deeply confused young man who killed innocent people out of some alleged transgression.   The victims were all people who worked at massage parlors, and Long claimed that he killed them as a way to remove the temptation he had to visit such places because of his sex addiction.  Six of the eight victims were Asian women, although Long claimed that there was no racial motivation to the killings.

Whatever his crazed justification for these killings, this tragedy draws a sharp focus to the terrible rise in anti Asian violence that has been occuring in this country in the past year.  And, like the right wing media's anti government rhetoric that may have fueled McVeigh's hatred, we once again have a right wing media demonizing a certain group of people.  But this time it's even worse,  this time the hateful speech used to come from the President himself.

Ever since the coronavirus first hit our country, Donald Trump has been calling it "the China virus" and the "Kung Flu."  From his point of view, there were two benefits to this: firstly, by constantly reminding people that the virus began in China, he could deflect criticism of his administration's disastrous response to it, shifting the blame to another country.  The second benefit was that this kind of thinly disguised race baiting was extremely popular with his base.  For a chilling example of this, watch any speech he gave in which he used the term "Kung Flu" and just listen to the crowd roar with laughter and excitement at the words.  To be fair, he did tweet out last March twenty third that  "It is very important that we totally protect our Asian American community in the United States, and all around the world."  But that didn't change his tone in his speeches, and he  used the term "China virus" in an interview on Fox News just four days ago.  

And his terrible words have led to terrible actions by some people:  The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism found that anti-Asian American hate crimes reported to police rose 149% between 2019 and 2020.  Overall, over three thousand and eight hundred hateful incidents (some of which were not  crimes) have been reported recently, and the center says that many more go unreported.  They range from screaming epithets to the pushing and shoving of innocent older people.  While nobody in the world has enjoyed all the lockdowns and difficulty that the pandemic has brought, blaming and lashing out at innocent people because of their race is morally despicable and inexcusable in any decent society, displaying the worst aspects of human nature. 

So what do we do?  Sadly, this is no easy answer other than to speak out against such hatred and compel out elected officials and media outlets to do the same.  The fact that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris (who is herself half South East Asian) have given speeches condemning both this shooting and the rise in anti Asian hatred in general is a good start.  Let's hope that as the pandemic begins to draw to an close, the hatred that it inspired will also diminish.

THE STIMULUS

Well, it took a global pandemic, but it happened.  Yesterday the US Senate passed President Joe Biden's stimulus plan. It should be ready for him to sign in a few days. While it doesn't have everything he wanted (most notably an increase in the minimum wage), it's still an openly progressive plan.

At a cost of of just under two trillion dollars, it includes an increase in the child tax credit, an extension in unemployment insurance, and lots of money to help schools and hard hit businesses reopen in the coming  months.  It spends about a trillion dollars more than the stimulus plan that Barack Obama passed back in two thousand and eight, and it may be the most broadly progressive aid given to the poor and the middle class that this country has seen since the days of the New Deal in the nineteen thirties.  Oh sure, Lyndon Johnson passing Medicaid in the sixties and Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act in two thousand and nine were also about aiding the poor and the middle class, but they focused on health care.  This bill broadly provides aid to the millions of Americans who have lost ground not only under the pandemic, but that have had trouble keeping up with the economy for decades now.  (Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy says that it may reduce child poverty in this country by half. ) Whether these gains will be long term remain to be seen, but it's certainly an admirable goal to try and balance the huge gulf that has grown in this country between the well off and the rest of us.  Especially because, even as the pandemic has raged in this country, the super rich have actually increased their wealth in the past year due to an inflated stock market.

Unfortunately, the bill's passage  also shows the deep divide our nation is stuck in politically: not one Republican in congress supported this bill, and their half hearted attempts at negotiation attempted to reduce the spending in the bill to such a low amount that it would have lost Democratic support.  In some ways it compares to the tax cuts that Donald Trump and the Republicans pushed through congress back in twenty seventeen.  It too had a cost of just under two trillion dollars, and it passed without a single vote from the other party.  But there is a huge fundamental difference in which Americans benefit the most: the Trump tax cut's main feature was a reduction in the corporate tax rate, which mostly benefited the wealthy CEOs and stockholders at those corporations.  While the Biden plan, as I've already stated, puts money in the hands of the poor and the middle class.

As a progressive, it should come as no surprise as to which kind of economic plan I prefer, but it's not just because of my bleeding heart.  There's a fundamental reason why spending on poor stokes the economy better than tax cuts for the rich: poor people are more likely to spend that money faster.  You see, whenever conservatives defend tax cuts for the rich, they say that the beneficiaries of those cuts are the captains of industry, the people most likely to invest in new businesses or expand existing ones which leads to an improved economy that benefits everyone.  The problem with this argument is that when you are talking about the wealthiest of Americans, you are talking about people who already have plenty of money to invest and expand.  It's kind of ridiculous to consider that people like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are waiting for their tax cut to kick in  before they start spending!  The poor and the middle class are far more likely to spend that extra money on themselves and their families right away.  Honestly, I think the real reason that Republicans pass tax cuts for the rich has more to do with the huge campaign donations that those rich people make then any notion of economic growth.

It may be that the pandemic, as terrible as it is, may bring about an economic shift in our nation's priorities: if the Biden relief bill brings strong economic growth (as most economists think it will), the public may start believing in the wisdom of government spending as a positive thing, which could lead to things like universal health care and day care.  (And Elizabeth Edwards's wealth tax plan to help pay for them). Perhaps I'm just dreaming, but the Trump tax cut was not popular with the American public and the Biden bill is, so the country's getting there, even if the politicians are taking their time.   A terrible crisis can really change a country, and the end result of the coronavirus could be a push in the right direction.