BETTER BRAIN DEVELOPMENT

 

The pandemic has taught us all one thing: child poverty in America could be eliminated easily.  The cash payments of $300 per child that were sent out by the Joe Biden administration as part of last year's stimulus bill, has, according to researchers at Columbia University, kept around 3.8 million children out of poverty, a nearly 30 percent reduction in the child poverty rate. (It also helped the economy). Sadly, the payments recently  ran out and Biden's Bill Back Better Bill, which would have reinstated them, is dead for now in congress.

Despite the money helping so many families in a time of need, most Republicans and some conservative Democrats opposed it  by implying (in a typically classist and racist attitude) that it would discourage work, or even worse, parents might  spend the money  on illegal drugs.   (Personally, I wish that every time the Republicans pass a huge tax cut for the rich, they would consider that a lot of that money is going to wealthy stock brokers, who's passion for snorting cocaine is legendary!).

But, putting the behavior of adults aside, what about the children themselves?  Does giving money to parents really benefit their  children?  A recent study that compared poor babies who's families  received $330 a month to ones that didn't found a definite increase in cognitive development for the babies in the families that got the money.  

Is this really so surprising?  As someone who has taken classes in childhood development, I can attest that the single most important thing for a baby's brain development is that it have parents and caregivers that bond with it, interact with it, respond to its needs and play with it.  So it makes sense that parents having a little more money will have less stress and more time to positively build an emotional relationship with their babies.  

Anyone who has ever interacted with a healthy, normal baby can understand this; when you look at a baby and smile and coo at it, the baby will usually smile back, encouraging you to continue.  You feel good for making the baby smile, and the baby also feels good from getting your attention.  These kind of simple interactions are crucial to a baby's development.  I once had a teacher in a child development class who told us about an orphanage in England during World War II where babies were cared for by nuns, who were too overworked to do anything with the babies other than feeding them and changing them.  Every baby from that orphanage grew up to have mental deficiencies, a sad example of how important affectionate interactions are for babies.

I think that this can be extended beyond the years of infancy; it's no secret that children in the US have lower test scores in math and science on average than children in most other industrialized nations.  While there are a number of reasons for this, one factor may be that the US is also the only industrialized nation to not have mandatory paid parental leave, robbing millions of babies of that crucial early developmental period with their parents that can, as this study clearly seems to show, give them a extra brain boost in  later life.  

And, and I always like to point out when discussing social spending programs, reducing child poverty benefits not only poor families but also society as a whole.  Children who grow up without the negative effects of poverty are going to be better educated and get better jobs, improving the economy for everyone, and they're less likely to wind up in prison, which we all pay for with our taxes.

Hopefully, the money for parents will be written into a new form of the Build Back Better bill sometime soon, and really I think it's just the tip of the iceberg of the changes that should be made to improve the lives of poor children in this country (How about national daycare?  Paid parental leave?  Increased per pupil spending in low income neighborhood public schools?).   Although these programs may seem expensive, they are just a drop in the bucket compared to other spending this country does (the cash for the parents program cost 80 billion dollars in one year, around a tenth of what we spend on defense), and they improve the country as a whole.  Put simply, the richest country in the world shouldn't punish children for being born into poverty.

BIDEN SUFFERS ANOTHER BLOW

President Joe Biden recently gave a fiery speech pushing for the voting rights bill that just passed the house to be also be passed by the Senate, which would require changing the rules on the filibuster.  His speech was strong, he invoked the civil rights movement and compared conservative resistance to the bill to the segregationists of old.  But some civil rights leaders refused to attend the speech, thinking that Biden had ignored their concerns for too long, or that the bill didn't go far enough.  Meanwhile, moderates and political pundits wondered why he bothered to give the speech at all, given that both Senator Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have said that they oppose changing the filibuster rule, dooming the bill.  Yes, for all its powerful rhetoric,  Biden's speech feels in many ways like the first year of his presidency: nice ideas, but impossible to get done in the current political climate.

 Biden has been president for almost exactly one year, and right now he seems mired in inability and incompetence.   It's a shame, because he started off well: he pushed for vaccinations, passed a stimulus bill, and stood ready to reap the political rewards of a recovering economy.  Instead, he has run into a number of problems: two different variants of the virus and a  stubbornly vaccine resistant populace (America currently stands at 63% vaccinated, the lowest of any industrialized nation according to the New York Times), inflation caused by a supply chain slowdown, and Manchin and Sinema's willingness to stab him in the back and kill his agenda in the Senate.  And while he has been able to appoint numerous judges and pass an infrastructure bill recently, Manchin's killing of the  Build Back Better Bill and his and Sinema's killing of the voting rights bill have left Biden, who ran as a former Senator who knew how to get things passed, look weak.

Things have looked so bad for Biden that a recent polling memo release attacked a poll that showed his approval rating at 33%, saying that it was really more like 43%.  Hardly something to brag about!

The depressing reality of this is that the Republican party has been swarming election boards in swing states with Trump loyalists who believe his lie that the 2020 election was stolen.  Once in power, these board members very well may find ways to reject vote counts in future elections.  Meaning that if Trump were to run again in 2024, state election boards may be able to swing votes in his direction through creative counting and discounting of the votes.  In other words, they've moved beyond voter repression into throwing out votes after they have been cast.  This kind of despicable, undemocratic election rigging is a horrifying possibility, and so far the Democratic party has done little to stop it.

Things get even worse when you consider the now very likely possibility of the Republican party retaking both the house and the senate next year.  Believe me, if Manchin and Sinema have been driving you crazy, wait until people like Margery Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz are on investigative committees in the house.

Which brings us back to Biden's voting rights speech; while it may seem to be an empty gesture, one thing it may help do is fire up the base, and let African American voters know that Biden has their back, even if congress  doesn't.  This could lead to more donations and volunteering for the party in the upcoming midterm elections.  Will this be enough to hold a Republican takeover in congress?  Sadly, I doubt it.  The only thing that could help the Democrats this year is if the Supreme Court overturns Roe Vs Wade, which could result in the Republican party losing the all important white suburban women vote that they've had for years.  While I certainly don't want Roe Vs Wade overturned, that could be the one thing that saves both the Democrats and democracy itself.  We'll see.

THE BUSTED HELICOPTERS THAT DOOMED THE PLANET

 I can remember as a child in 1978 reading an article in my Jr. Science magazine that said that solar power was on the way.  The magazine heralded this amazing new technology as a cheaper, cleaner way to get energy.  A year later, the president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, had solar panels put on the roof of the White House to heat water with.  Yes, it looked like solar power was going to be a big thing.  So what happened?  Well, seven years after Carter had those panels put up, his replacement, Ronald Reagan, the man who once said that trees cause pollution, had them taken down.  

When one looks at the devastation caused by the effects of global warming, the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, and his singlehanded pulling of the entire Republican party away from caring about any environmental issues has to seen as one of the defining moments.  Before Reagan, the Republican party at least pretended to care about the environment (it was President Nixon, after all, who created the Environmental Protection Agency), but after his election the party has always sided with big corporations and fossil fuels over environmental protections every time.  From George Bush and son both leading invasions into Iraq in which American oil interests were part of the reason for invading, to Donald Trump tearing up the Paris Climate Accord, coddling fossil fuels and Republicanism have gone hand and hand.  Now I'm not saying that the Democrats have been perfect on this issue, far from it, but at the end of the day at least they admit that climate change is real.  The Republicans still deny it, despite worldwide record temperatures, flooding and droughts and other indicators of climate change.

One of the most depressing things is that the world would be much better off right now if  some helicopters hadn't malfunctioned 41 years ago.  What am I referring to?  Well, in April of 1980  President Carter ordered operation Eagle Claw, a military attempt to rescue the 52 hostages that  had been  held in Iran since November of 1979. The operation planned to use helicopters to airlift the hostages out under military cover.  Up to that point, Carter's inability to negotiate a release of the hostages was seen as proof of his ineffectiveness as a leader.  Obviously, this kind of bold action was intended to end that perception.  It's hard now to not look back and wonder at what would have almost certainly have happened if the operation had succeeded.  Positive coverage of Carter greeting the freed hostages at the White House and a national swell of pride would have easily won him a second term, and the more moderate wing of the Republican party would have turned away from Reagan's brand of extremism. 

Sadly, it wasn't meant to be.  Of the 8 helicopters that were deployed for Eagle Claw, only 5 managed to arrive ready to the first staging area; one was lost in a sand storm, another had a cracked rotor blade, and the third had hydraulic problems.  The military recommended the mission be scrubbed, so Carter did so.  Even worse, on the return trip one of the helicopters crashed, killing 8 servicemen.  So, what could have been a triumph for the Carter administration was a failure, one that he openly admitted to when he addressed the nation about it afterwards, sowing the seeds for his eventual defeat.   

History is, of course, full of small moments that lead to huge consequences, (just look up  Gavrilo Princip!) and who knows, maybe climate change would be just as bad now if Carter had won.  There's no way of knowing.  Still, it's hard for me not to look back and wonder how much better things would be today if those damn helicopters hadn't cracked up.