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.

THIS GUY AGAIN

 After almost a year of the Joe Biden presidency, it's easy for a progressive to feel a sense of whiplash: on the plus side, the mere exiting of Donald Trump and all the corrupt and incompetent people he surrounded himself with  was a cause for relief and celebration.  Sanity was restored, with Biden cutting an elderly but good natured figure who would bring common decency back to the White House.  And while at first it appeared that the Republican party, other than Trump, did well in the 2016 election (they actually gained seats in the House of Representatives), when the Democrats pulled off a post presidential election upset by winning two senate seats in Georgia, giving them a narrow control of the Senate, things were looking up. Shortly after taking office, Biden passed a stimulus plan that cut child poverty in half.  He also just passed an infrastructure bill, something that Trump tried to do in vain for years.  Plus, even though the Supreme Court appears to be lost to progressives for decades, he's managed to appoint more lower court judges in his first year than Trump did.  

But, on the negative side, Biden's promise to put the pandemic behind us has proven hollow.   While this can be blamed on both the variants of covid and the conservative resistance to vaccines, it still makes him look bad, as a weary country about to face another deadly pandemic winter takes its anger out on him.  Add to that the fallout from inflation (especially in gas prices), the rise of violent crime and the general perception by the public that the economy is doing poorly (it's actually doing quite well) and it's easy to see why his approval ratings are low (although not lower than Trump's were at the same time in his term).

But from a progressive perspective, there has been nothing more frustrating from this presidency as the Build Back Better Bill.  First proposed almost a year ago, this was a bold multi trillion dollar package that would nationalize child care and paid parental leave, while also working to transition this country away from fossil fuels.  In its initial form, it would have been the most progressive bill passed since the new deal, and by raising taxes on the rich to aid the poor, it would have been the first genuine attempt to even this country's shameful class imbalance since Ronald Reagan's massive tax cuts for the rich and gutting of social programs drastically increased that imbalance back in the 1980's.

But then the Democrats discovered that a slim majority in the Senate meant that these welcome changes couldn't pass without serious revisions to the bill.  Not when every Democratic vote would be needed, and one of those Democrats was Joe Manchin of West Virginia.  From the beginning Manchin has demanded cuts to the bill before he would vote for it.  For months those cuts were made with a meat axe, with the cost of the bill sliced by more than half, muting the positive effects of it. Barely a week would go by in the past year without Manchin preening for the press while demanding more and more spending reductions in the bill. For a while, it almost appeared that Manchin had been placated, but just yesterday, in an interview on Fox News, he said he still opposed it, citing national deficit and inflation concerns.  He did this even after Biden had reached out to him personally, and even after every study of the bill found that any impact it would have on inflation would be minimal.  None of that mattered, Manchin shot the bill down.  It's a bit hard to understand just what Manchin's game is here: is he showing off for the Republicans before switching parties?  Is he killing the bill because he's afraid that the climate change provisions might hurt his coal rich state?  His national deficit concerns are really ridiculous, given that the bill's spending would take place over a decade, making its yearly amount a mere fraction of our nation's defense spending. (Congress just passed a $768 billion defense bill for this year, and that number won't be going down in the next ten years!)

So is it all over for the bill?  Hopefully not.  There's still a chance that a reduced version will be introduced that will win him over.  At this point, it would probably be best to let Manchin himself write the bill, which will probably be a hollowed shell of its former self, and sullen progressives in congress will have to support it just to avoid a total loss.  And once again, the concerns of the poor and middle class will be ignored in this country, as they have been for decades.

ANOTHER DESPICABLE ACT

 

Ever since Donald Trump left office there has been a stream of terrible stories about just how corrupt and incompetent our former president was.  Most have dealt with just  hard he was pushing to overturn the twenty twenty election (from verbally pleading with election officials to considering calling a state of emergency), and while those are all upsetting (especially given that Trump will probably run for the presidency again in twenty twenty four),  another kind of recent revelation has really stunned me.

Recently, Trump's former chief of staff Mark Meadows released his book about his time working in the White House.  At first, it appeared to be a standard issue tome that would sell well with conservative readers. Trump himself even gave a positive blurb to the book.  But then Meadows went and mentioned an important, unknown detail: that the former president had tested positive for covid three days before his debate with Joe Biden and that he openly exposed Biden to the virus during the debate without any kind of warning.  This ran counter to the administration assertion that Trump's positive test came after the debate. The host of the debate, Chris Wallace of Fox News, later said Trump was not tested before the debate because he arrived late.  He added that they relied on the honor system (always a mistake when Trump's involved).  And, of course it wasn't just Biden that was exposed, the Washington Post has found that Trump came in contact with five hundred different people without warning any of them of the possibility of infection or taking any precautions.  Perhaps most appalling, the day after that positive test he met with military families, putting all of them and their loved ones in danger.  This from a man who claims to love the military!

Trump has responded to this revelation by doing what he usually does; lying.  He called the reporting on the book "fake news", and Meadows himself now appears to agree with him, contradicting his own book.  But, because the timeline between  when Trump first tested positive and when he publicly admitted it has always been hazy, it stands to reason to assume that our former president avoided telling the public about his positive test.  Former New Jersey Governor Chis Christie, a former Trump supporter who now seems to be the only Republican willing to openly challenge him, has said that he definitely believes that it was Trump himself that gave Christie covid while he was prepping the president for the debate.  And, in classic Trumpian sociopathic style, Christie also says that Trump called him when Christie was near death from the virus to make sure that he didn't tell other people that it was Trump who spread the virus to him.   

Ever since Trump entered the presidential campaign in twenty fifteen, pundits have compared his popularity with the Republican base to a cult, with his passionate supporters attending rallies and cheering his every word.  After his June twentieth rally last year in Tulsa Oklahoma, in which thousands of supporters stood next to each other maskless and screamed at the height of the pandemic, I said that the Trump cult could now be called a death cult in which followers risk their own lives to express their adulation.  To me, it couldn't seem to get any worse.  But now,  once again, he's hit a new low, openly endangering the lives of military families and possibly thousands of others because he didn't want to admit to the world that he himself had contacted the same virus that he had been downplaying since it first arrived.  And, as always with Trump, this new information will do little to shake his popularity with his base, who will shrug off the threat he placed on innocent people by echoing his cry of fake news.  Truly, this man's ability to get away with despicable behavior without consequence is utterly depressing.  And the fact that he very well may run for the presidency again in twenty twenty four despite this latest news shows just how far our country has sunk since he first threw his hat in the ring, in what seems like an eternity ago. 

RESPONSIBILITY

 With the rise of another covid variant, the Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe Vs Wade, and more news coming out about how much Donald Trump tried to steal the last presidential election, it's almost easy to not notice that there was another horrific school shooting in our country which resulted in the death of four teenagers.  Sadly, these kind of shootings  have become so common that news coverage of them end quite quickly.

But this shooting seems different,  oh sure, both sides have already put out their usual talking points, with Democrats pushing for tougher gun laws and Republicans making a few vague comments about the need for better mental healthcare without offering any way to expand such care.  Same as usual.

But this shooting has,  raised the possibility of charges for the shooters parents, and questions about whether or not the school acted responsibly issues that are rarely brought up.  Today, the fifteen year old shooter's parents were booked on four charges of involuntary manslaughter, to which they pleaded not guilty.  The charges were based on the fact that not only did the shooter's parents purchase the gun for him, they were also warned by the school about some disturbing, violent drawings that he had made at school.  (he had also searched on his phone for ammunition at school, which the parents shrugged off.  His mother even seemed to encourage it.) Amazingly, they did nothing about their child's dark thoughts, and, according to the woman prosecuting them, didn't even lock up his gun after hearing about them.

This case raises some interesting questions about responsible gun ownership and parental responsibility.  Now, I do have some sympathy for them in that parenting teenagers can be very difficult.  I remember from my own teen years that I had several male friends (and even a couple of female ones) that were obsessed with violent movies and music, and sometimes they would draw pictures not unlike the ones that this boy drew, and, of course, none of them every actively acted out on those dark obsessions.  Really, embracing a dark view of life is a common thing that many teens go through.  It's not entirely unreasonable to believe that this shooter's parents just thought that he was going through a phase.

But the fact that they never even tried to hide the gun that they had bought for him as a present makes it hard for me to completely exonerate them.  Even though their purchase of the gun was legal, surely the fact that their son was going through a potentially violent stage should have convinced them to at least lock the gun up, if not keep somewhere out of the home.

And what about the school?  A few hours before the shooting, the school requested that his parents take him out of the school and to immediate counseling, but they strongly requested that he be allowed to stay, and so he did, with tragic results.  Really, this seems to be almost as much the school's fault as the parents.  This was a student who was exhibiting violent thoughts and who was potentially armed.  Surely there are times when the safety of all the children in school is more important than the desires of one set of parents.  In other words, I think it's reasonable that a child to be not allowed to remain in  school, even if his parents really want him to stay.  When you hear stories about how other high school students are suspended or expelled for less disturbing behavior than this, it seems tragically absurd that the school didn't do more to prevent this tragedy.  The case will probably come to court sometime soon, and we'll see if a financial settlement to the parents of the children that were killed is possible.  While similar lawsuits in the past have failed, it's possible that this time the school's actions will seem so irresponsible to a judge that the lawsuits may be upheld.

Let's face it , tougher gun laws are not going to be passed anytime in the near future in this country.  That's because, even though a majority of Americans support the passing of such laws, most of them do not feel strongly enough about them to vote for politicians that would pass them.  Gun control just isn't a big issue in most elections, and with Republicans poised to retake the House of Representatives next year, there's no chance of anything changing on that score.  So I'm glad to see at least that the parents in this case are being held responsible, and hopefully there will be some criminal consequence for them.  Even the most pro gun people accept the notion that gun ownership is something to take seriously and responsibly.  Surely, keeping a firearm out of the hands of a potentially dangerous teenage boy is criminally negligent.  

THE REAL SCHOOL CRISIS

             

The Southern Strategy was a conservative political strategy that began in the presidential campaign of Richard Nixon in nineteen sixty eight.  Put simply, it was a way to scare Southern white voters, many of whom were still angry about Democratic President Lyndon Johnson's  signing of the Civil Rights Voting Bill in nineteen sixty five, into voting for Republicans.  This was done by peppering Nixon's speeches with racially coded words like "war on crime", knowing full well who that war would be waged on. In this way, Nixon flipped the Southern states, which had been strongly Democratic for years, into Republican states.  While some Republicans claim that no such strategy was ever used, conservative commentator (and former Richard Nixon staff member) Pat Buchanan defended it in twenty thirteen by writing: "After Richard Nixon cobbled together his New Majority, the GOP carried 49 states in 1972 and 1984, 44 states in 1980 and 40 in 1988."  In other words, the Southern Strategy worked in Nixon's campaign, and versions of it helped Republicans win in later years.

The latest version of this strategy worked again last Tuesday when Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin won the governor's race in the state of Virginia.  While there were a number of factors in his victory (like Biden dipping popularity), one of the big ones was the relatively new issue of Critical Race Theory.  Building on the frustrations of public school parents who are weary of the pandemic and the fights over mask mandates in schools, the Republican party has seized on the issue of Critical Race Theory as a new thing to scare white voters with, to imply that poor little white children are being taught to hate themselves.  The fact that CRT is not being taught in k through twelve schools in Virginia (or any state) and that it was a term first used in law schools is irrelevant, it just sounds scary to white parents and gets them to vote for Republicans, (Youngkin repeated the words over and over in debates and interviews) which is all that matters.  In a way, it's the perfect boogieman for conservatives; Youngkin can say he will ban CRT from schools, and he isn't lying in that it isn't taught there anyway.  Such is the low nature of politics that our country has fallen.

The thing that frustrates me the most is that there is a crisis in our public schools that is not being addressed: wildly uneven funding.  The whole idea of public schooling in this country is based on the common sense notion that every child born here is given the opportunity of a quality education.  But our current public school funding system makes a mockery of that idea.  According to the funding for public schools website, about forty four percent of public school funding  comes from local property taxes, and not surprisingly, the wealthier the neighborhood, the higher the property taxes and the more money that goes to public schools.  Put simply, our current system results in the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

And these differences in spending are often dramatic even within the same state.  In Mississippi for example, a school in Brookhaven spends about six thousand dollars per student a year, while  the neighboring Natchez spends about three thousand dollars more per student.  While this disparity has lasted for years, attempts to address it have been controversial (like school bussing, which lasted a few years in the seventies but is no longer used).  But whatever the remedy, it is a national disgrace that winds up hurting all of us. Poor children who go to schools like jails often wind up in real jails, something for which we all pay.  So, instead of being scared of the words Critical Race Theory, I wish voters were more concerned by another far more real educational problem: the school to prison pipeline.  Although there has been some movement away from our country's desire to fill our jails, America still has the highest prison population in the world.  Fulfilling the promise of our public school system and making them more equal is one way that we can even the playing field for the poor in this country.  Sadly, it will still be a problem long after conservative media has moved on from Critical Race Theory to some other way to scare white voters.