Whom Does the Tea Party Like?

Tea Party politicians don’t like people who are out of work. In Congress and in campaigns they consistently oppose paying unemployment insurance to the most distressed citizens, those who have been out of work for the longest time. A poll earlier this year found that 70% of Tea Party Republicans oppose extending unemployment benefits and 65% oppose raising the minimum wage, even though most other Republicans favor these policies.

They don’t like people who have suffered from catastrophic events beyond their control. Chris McDaniel, the Tea Party favorite who challenged Republican Senator Thad Cochran in a Mississippi primary, said he didn’t know if he would have voted for federal aid to those people in his own state who were devastated by Hurricane Katrina, legislation that passed the Senate unanimously.

They don’t like poor people in general. Their arguments for reducing food stamps are that poor people are not motivated enough to find work, that poor people prefer living off welfare, that poor people are undeserving of public assistance. 84% of Tea Party Republicans believe that government aid to the poor does more harm than good.

They don’t like immigrants. Most of those who identify with the Tea Party want to deport all undocumented immigrants. But Tea Party supporters don’t like immigrants in general: over half think that “immigrants” take away jobs from “Americans”.

They certainly don’t like Muslims. A Brookings/PRRI survey of American attitudes in 2011 found that most Tea Party followers believe that American (not foreign) Muslims are trying to impose Sharia law in the US.

They don’t like people who are not like them. Pew Research has found that the most conservative Americans are the most likely to want to live where everybody shares their political views. They want to live where everybody shares their religious faith, which is overwhelmingly evangelical Christian. Only 20% of the most conservative want to live among a mixture of people from different ethnic and racial backgrounds. About one-third of the most conservative would be unhappy if a family member married a Democrat and one-quarter don’t want a family member to marry a non-white. That fits with most Tea Party supporters’ generally negative beliefs about African-Americans: a 2010 study found that among whites who approve of the Tea Party movement, “only 35% believe Blacks to be hardworking, only 45% believe Blacks are intelligent, and only 41% think that Blacks are trustworthy.” A Public Policy Poll in 2011 found that 46% of Mississippi Republicans thought interracial marriage should be illegal.

It’s obvious that Tea Party politicians don’t like Democratic voters, who have been the majority of Americans in 5 of the past 6 Presidential elections, and by far the majority in both the Presidential and Congressional elections of 2012. But this goes beyond dislike: two-thirds of the most conservative Republicans see the Democratic Party as a “threat to the nation’s well-being”.

Tea Party politicians don’t even like their fellow Republicans. They taunt other Republicans with the nickname RINO, Republicans In Name Only. They challenge established Republican politicians in primaries as insufficiently conservative. And as the Mississippi election last month demonstrates, they don’t accept losing. McDaniel, who was beaten in a narrow primary by Senator Cochran, won’t say he will vote for him in November.

Tea Party politicians don’t really believe in democracy. Not only does McDaniel argue that some people should not have been allowed to vote against him. He, like other Tea Party politicians, does not want to govern democratically. They want to impose their minority ideology on the rest of us. They believe that any compromise with the majority is evidence of evil. Dave Brat, who defeated Eric Cantor in Virginia, had a photo of Cantor speaking with President Obama prominently displayed on his website.

The most conservative are the least likely among Americans to favor politicians who make compromises. They don’t care that their core beliefs are not shared by most Americans. They are not willing to acknowledge their minority status. An early poll showed that nearly all Tea Party supporters believed their ideas reflected the views of most Americans, although every poll shows that they don’t.

The Tea Party is nothing like their namesakes. They do not believe that all men have inalienable rights. Only they have the right to say what is right. They don’t want to govern, they want to dictate. They don’t like most Americans, who don’t agree with their ideas. They probably don’t like you.

They are intolerant and dangerous. They applaud when radicals like Cliven Bundy take up arms against the state. Imagine what Tea Party politicians would do if they had power, if they could command the police, the armed forces, the FBI. Imagine their reaction to criticism, to dissent, to Americans exercising our rights say “no”.

Recognize the danger that Tea Party politicians pose to our way of life. Don’t vote for them.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, July 8, 2014

What Makes a Perfect Politician?

What do we want in a politician?

We want broad knowledge of the American economy and how it affects average Americans. Not partisan slogans or talking points, but real knowledge from years of thoughtful work with economic issues.

We want courage to stand up to powerful interests. The wealthy can make big political contributions; giant corporations hire armies of lobbyists. But average Americans, who put politicians into office with their votes, can only hope that these representatives actually represent them, rather than the rich people who buy them meals, take them on private jets, and fill their campaign coffers.

We want independence from all the forces which demand that politicians toe a certain line. The biggest forces are the two parties, which don’t like their members to break ranks. Lobbying groups, like the NRA or labor unions or banks, try to buy or threaten politicians who don’t do their bidding.

We want people who use politics as a means to improve American life, not their own lives. We want politicians who will leave office with a record of accomplishment, not with swollen bank accounts and cushy corporate jobs, that they have gotten by promoting their own interests.

Not many of our current politicians fit these criteria. One who does is Senator Elizabeth Warren. Lately I have been listening to her autobiography on tape, which she narrates herself. Like all political memoirs, one purpose is to advertise and proselytize, but Warren mostly tells revealing stories from her life.

Although she represents Massachusetts, she was raised in Oklahoma. Her understanding of economics comes from her own family’s financial hardships: she worked as a waitress, went to college on a scholarship, but quit after two years to get married and raise children. She completed college in Houston and taught law in Texas for nine years, before moving to the University of Pennsylvania and then Harvard.

Warren’s deep and detailed understanding of how our economy has caused so much distress for middle-class families over the past 30 years came out of her work as a lawyer specializing in bankruptcy and personal finance. As advisor to the National Bankruptcy Review Commission after 1995, she traveled the country listening to families going through bankruptcy. She learned that Americans in economic crisis were not the deadbeats or spendthrifts of ideological fantasies, but typical families who endured unexpected setbacks, like illness or loss of a job. They were caught in a financial system designed to protect banks, not citizens.

Warren has been fighting for American families for decades, lately as the most public advocate for protecting us from the clever tactics of money lenders trying to squeeze a few more dollars from average families. She created the ideas behind the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), as a means to give families with credit cards and mortgages a fighting chance (her book’s title) against giant corporations selling tricky credit products, raising interest rates, and hiding fees.

Elizabeth Warren meets all the criteria I set out above. Her work exemplifies both sides of the partisan debate about “big government”. Conservatives who say they oppose big government really oppose limitations on what big corporations can do to us, their customers. Republicans in Congress tried every possible tactic to prevent the CFPB from coming into existence, exactly what the big banks and credit card companies wanted. If the language of your credit card statements is now clearer, the opportunities the credit card issuers have to raise your rates are now more limited, and the fees they can charge for lateness are spelled out, thank the new rules of the CFPB.

On the liberal side, the CFPB represents what regulation really means. Nobody is prevented from making an honest dollar, but dishonest tactics are now being policed by those with power to make corporations stop. Ally Financial had to pay an $80 million court judgment for racial discrimination in auto lending. Ocwen Financial Corp., the nation’s fourth largest mortgage servicer, has to provide $2 billion in principal reduction to underwater borrowers. That latter victory represented a collaboration of the CFPB and the attorneys general from all the states. Richard Cordray, head of CFPB, estimated that Ocwen illegally foreclosed on 185,000 people; some estimate that this number should be much higher.

Although Warren is considered to be very liberal, in fact she stands outside of partisan politics more than most politicians. She was a Republican for most of her life, and remains an advocate for markets, as long as they are fair for consumers. Her book is critical of the Obama administration for funneling hundreds of billions to the biggest banks, but little to underwater homeowners. Her criticism of the power of big corporations is echoed by the most conservative voters.

Isn’t that what we want our politicians and our government to do? Who else could possibly protect us from cheats like Ally or Ocwen? Who else could protect us from serial swindlers, like Barclay’s Bank, already proven to have manipulated interest rates and gold prices, and now accused of repeatedly lying to its best investors about how they traded stocks. This is not the “nanny state” of the ideological right wing. This is a government acting as sheriff, what every community needs for protection against those who would take advantage of the weakest members.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, July 1, 2014

Blindness and Science

I almost went blind. Vision in my left eye started clouding about two months ago. After waiting too long, I went to my eye doctor. Dr. David Sutton diagnosed a partially detached retina, and the next day Dr. Lanny Odin in Springfield operated. Now I’m almost back to normal vision.

The retina coats the back of the eye, changing light into electrical signals sent by the optic nerve to our brain, which forms pictures of reality. With age and chronic near-sightedness, the liquid that fills the eye can begin to dry up, peeling the retina away from the eyeball. It looks like a dark curtain covers the field of vision. When it all peels off, the eye is blind.

Until the 1960s we could do nothing about that. As more people lived beyond age 65, millions went blind in one eye, some in two. By the 1970s doctors had developed a remarkable procedure that fixes the retina and saves vision. Here is what WebMD says about the vitrectomy: “the surgeon inserts small instruments into the eye, cuts the vitreous gel, and suctions it out. After removing the vitreous gel, the surgeon may treat the retina with a laser (photocoagulation), cut or remove fibrous or scar tissue from the retina, flatten areas where the retina has become detached, or repair tears or holes in the retina.”

Poking around in my eye for an hour, Dr. Odin reattached my retina with lasers. He also injected a bubble of gas. I had to look down all day for 10 days, keeping the bubble floating at the back of the eye, so it would properly press the retina in place. Now the bubble has been absorbed and I can see again.

The day before, when he first examined my eye, Dr. Odin offered me a choice. I could let him perform a vitrectomy as described above. Or I could go blind in that eye. He offered no guarantees. His diagnostic belief that he could fix it might be wrong. Although operations are very safe, they still are not completely predictable.

I didn’t understand half of what Dr. Odin proposed. I remembered the models of the eye in my optometrist’s office, incredibly complex organs depending on a series of biological, electrical and physical processes to allow me to see the world. How could someone poke around in there and restore my vision?

In our daily lives, we often must rely on the advice of experts. From doctors to electricians, insurance agents to plumbers, we need help to understand our complex bodies and a complex world. The experts, Drs. Odin and Sutton, were in agreement about my eye – I had a detached retina and it needed to be fixed right away, or it might peel right off. Their consensus would cost me money and cause me inconvenience, a lot of both. I would have been a fool to ignore these scientific opinions.

Yet that is exactly what millions of American voters are doing when they vote for Republicans who ignore the expertise of the world’s climate scientists. You can get a second, third, or hundredth opinion about whether we need to do something now to prevent future environmental disasters, and they would all agree.

Our National Climactic Data Center offers a variety of evidence about air temperature, ocean temperature, rising sea levels and glacier shrinkage. The warming of the Alaskan Arctic threatens a way of life dependent on fishing, hunting, and ice. Our National Academy of Science and the British Royal Society have produced a booklet which answers basic questions about climate change. In May, Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine said, “We are past the point of debating climate change.”

But we’re not. Why do people in responsible political positions assert that the experts are all wrong? Why do so many Americans say the same thing, more than in other industrialized countries? Why are those voters and politicians who don’t believe in the need to deal with climate change so overwhemingly Republican? I think the answer is fear.

I was afraid when my doctors talked about cutting into my eye. I once fainted when an eye doctor described how a cataract operation was done. If I had given in to the fear, I could have created lots of rational-sounding explanations for why I was ignoring the experts. I might have searched until I found someone who might be labeled an expert who would say I didn’t need an operation. But I would have been a fool.

Conservatives are afraid that if they admit that global warming is happening and that we can do something about it, that would mean more public spending, more public regulations, the American public operating through our government to save the future of our society. That is correct, unless they can develop workable non-governmental methods to accomplish the same goals. They don’t think they can, so they close their eyes and repeat “la-la-la-la” as loud as they can.

I’m happy I didn’t go blind. Why are they embracing blindness?

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, June 24, 2014