The Downtrodden Middle Class

I keep seeing ads for Lou Dobbs' show on CNN. He seems to have got a bee in his bonnet about the plight of the middle-class family.

Why, he asks, does it take two incomes to keep a middle-class family afloat? Why oh why, he muses, do Americans work longer hours than their European counterparts? It's time, he feels, to put the middle class first.

Why should the middle class be put first? Are working-class families second rate? One wonders if Dobbs has considered that if it is difficult for middle-class families to support themselves, what does that suggest about the typically lower-paid working-class families? Apparently their plight is not on his radar.

How many times do we hear a middle- or upper-middle-class, white male gripe about the plight of his social group...poor darlings, they do suffer so.

The question seems even more inane when one considers that the answer is fairly obvious.

The short-sighted hostility to labor unions that many middle-class professionals have acquiesed to over the decades is surely a likely culprit for why workers of all social classes have it worse here than in Europe. It is unions that campaigned for and won the higher wages, shorter hours and better benefits enjoyed across the Atlantic.

Universal healthcare was not a benevolent gift of the upper class. It was brought in by political parties that had strong union backing. The same can be said for all the statutory advantages enjoyed by the European worker.

Those in the American middle-class who have refused to speak out against anti-union legislation, or who have even applauded it, clearly fail to see that the benefits that unions win 'trickle up'. As the minimum wage goes up, so do the wages of those higher on the pay scale; universal health care benefits everyone (duh, it's in the name!); legislation mandating 20 holiday days a year applies to lawyers and middle-management as much as it does to those on the shop floor or in McDonalds.

So if the poor down-trodden middle class wonder why their life is so tragically hard, perhaps they should examine their own values and voting history. This situation didn't come about by accident!

Jesus is a liberal!

While thinking some more about Ann Coulter's hateful attack on liberalism as a Godless religion, I have come to the conclusion that there is some truth to what she says.

Liberalism tends to emphasize caring for one's brothers and sisters in society, looking after the weak and vulnerable, tolerance of other people, life as a collective rather than an individualistic pursuit, love rather than hate, peace rather than war, inclusion rather than exclusion.

And unless I'm mistaken, the Christian faith (as well as many other faiths) teaches all these things too?

So maybe liberalism does have a religious bent to it after all.

A Just War

(I'm plagiarising this from a friend - cheers LJ!)

Given the innumerable deaths every year from disease one would think that conservatives, with their "culture of life", might welcome the advance of stem-cell research as a tough but necessary way to protect human life in the long term. If diseases such as cancer and AIDS could be eradicated the way that polio and scarlett fever have been, then millions of "God's Creatures" would be saved.

Evangelical conservatives instead decry the 'attack' on a fertilized egg due to the harm done to an 'innocent'.

I suggest , therefore, that we declare war on disease. Apparently once one places a society in a state of war (even if one's enemy is an abstraction - terror or drugs, for example) then killing becomes a justifiable act.

If stem-cell research is thus characterized, then the 'deaths' of embryos in order to furnish the DNA for research is comparable to the deaths of innocent men, women and children in Baghdad and Fallujah: collateral damage if you will.

These embryos are not the targets of the attack, just as innocents in Iraq are not the targets of American bombs - to target innocents in war would make it unjust. But if the target is a malevolent force that threatens one's own life, then causing the deaths of innocents in order to fight this force is a justifiable act.

War is a fact of life, and the sooner you lily-livered conservatives accept it the better!

Freedom isn't free?

I have lost count of the times that a supporter of Bush's adventurism has spouted this little dictum or a variant thereof. This kind of bumper-sticker politics is deceiving in that on the surface it appears to make sense -- fighting for liberty does usually require a sacrifice.

I would ask who exactly is paying for it right now?

The biggest cost is being borne by the Iraqi people, both in terms of lives lost (Bush himself estimated last year that it is at least 30,000) and in financal hardship. Surely the decision to sacrifice their lives and/or livelihood for their freedom should have been their own, rather than that of the British and American leaders?

It is true that many Americans have paid the ultimate price, but I suspect that they are probably not the children of the wealthy Republicans who started this war. In fact they are more typically the people who grow up faced with the choice of a McDonalds uniform or an Army uniform.

Finally there is the financial cost to America. Huge, no doubt, but again we must ask, paid for by whom? Certainly not adventuristic, wealthy Republicans. Their desire for a tax cut evidently outweighed any sense that the potential outlays for the war might make such a cut unwise. Instead of biting the bullet and providing the government with much-needed funds, this elite subset of society cut the money available to the government by giving themselves a hefty tax cut. Then, when faced with the inevitible deficit they spoke of fiscal responsibility and cut the services that the least fortunate in society rely on.

So next time a wealthy suburban white Republican tells you that freedom isn't free, ask them exactly what it has cost them. The answer will likely be 'nothing at all'.

Ann Coulter, Demon or Demonizer?

It appears that Ann Coulter has a new book out in which she suggests that Liberalaism is just another religion; a Godless one.

Additionally she implies on her website that us pesky Liberals have contrived to gag her by hiding her books in the back of the shops. While I would love for this to be true, her paranoia is disingenuous. It may occasionally work to adopt the wounded martyr position, but not when you are selling millions of books! The truth is that her work is widely promoted in most bookshops, ( know because I have seen it!).

As for the book's proposition, it seems somewhat asinine. Liberal politics does have certain central tenets, as does any section of the political spectrum, this doesn't make it a religion.

Ultimately, of course, it doesn't matter if what she says really makes sense or not. That's not the point of the book.

Coulter's stock in trade is the practice of demonizing those who disagree with her while being unabashedly intolerant and insensitive. Rather than being a strength this actually ends up looking more like a weakness. Name-calling is generally a juvenile practice and is typically reserved for those who have exhausted (or failed to develop) rational arguments.

Her vitriolic attacks on Liberals and Liberalism possess an air of petulance, and ultimately add nothing to reasonable political discourse where, it's worthwhile remembering, it is generally accepted that people may disagree. Adults respect the rights of others to hold contradictory opinions. Ann Coulter despises and villifies anyone who does not share her beliefs.

CNN's American Morning

Interesting juxtaposition on CNN's American Morning today.

Soledad O'Brien first noted that the Senate was expected to vote shortly on the anti-gay-marriage amendment.

Shortly after this she interviewed a Mr. Snyder who is suing the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka for defamation. The church runs the website http://www.godhatesfags.com/ and its members regulary demonstrate at military funerals. They protest, not because they object to the war, but simply to remind mourners that the death is God's punishment to the nation for tolerating homosexuality. They suggest that the dead soldier is in Hell for attempting to defend a country and constitution that do not prohibit this, as they see it, abomination.

I wonder if it was an intentional juxtaposition. Clearly the Senate Majority Leaders don't share the ultra-extreme views of the WBC, but there is no doubt they are fanning the same fire. Both are attempting to deny that diversity in sexual orientation should be tolerated and, moreover, trying to prevent those outside of the traditional pairing being granted the same rights as those within it.

It would be nice to think that the scheduling of the WBC story on the same day as the Senate vote was deliberate. A reminder to us that while the methods of the two groups are different, they are uncomfortably similar.