Lamar W. Hankins : Paul Ryan Makes War Against People, Not Poverty

President Lyndon Johnson marked the start of the War on Poverty with a visit to Tom Fletcher's front porch in Martin County, Kentucky, in April 1964. Photo by Walter Bennett / Time magazine. Image from Daily Yonder.
Paul Ryan’s war:
Not against poverty, but against people

In 1964, long before Paul Ryan was ever swaddled in a diaper, President Lyndon Johnson declared that because America is a great nation, it should not have nearly one quarter of its people living in poverty.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / October 30, 2012

In a hackneyed play on words, Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s extremist vice-presidential running mate, declared, “In this war on poverty, poverty is winning.” His claim created an enticing sound bite for the evening news, but it is factually incorrect.

Ryan’s argument:

With a few exceptions, government’s approach has been to spend lots of money on centralized, bureaucratic, top-down anti-poverty programs. The mindset behind this approach is that a nation should measure compassion by the size of the federal government and how much it spends. The problem is, starting in the 1960s, this top-down approach created and perpetuated a debilitating culture of dependency, wrecking families and communities.

Correspondent John Nichols of The Nation took a look at the census data and found a different reality:

In 1959, 22.1 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line. In 1969, 13.7 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line. The poverty level has varied since 1969. It has gone as high as 15 percent. But it has never again gotten anywhere near where it was in 1959.”

In 1964, long before Paul Ryan was ever swaddled in a diaper, President Lyndon Johnson declared that because America is a great nation, it should not have nearly one quarter of its people living in poverty. I was a junior in college then. Lyndon Johnson’s vision of an America in which all people had adequate food, clothing, shelter, and work moved me to drop out of college for a year to join Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). I was assigned to a migrant labor project developed by a local nonprofit organization in South Florida.

While we helped many migrant farm workers in a modest way, what we did was a drop in the ocean of America’s poverty. But programs and agencies like Medicare, Food Stamps, Job Corps, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and Head Start made a vast difference in the lives of the elderly poor, impoverished families, poor youth in need of job skills, and the young children of America’s poor families.

After graduating from college, I spent seven years working for a local nonprofit agency in Texas that operated Head Start centers, job training programs, summer programs for poor teens, family planning and women’s health programs, and a host of projects developed by VISTA volunteers working for our local nonprofit agency -- housing programs, a credit union, employment services, tutorial programs, recreation programs, buying clubs, food distribution, and more. What was done was limited only by the imagination of the participants and those who wanted to help them, and available funds.

What I experienced in those years was far more than what Paul Ryan blithely describes as “centralized, bureaucratic, top-down anti-poverty programs.” After getting a law degree, I spent over three years working for a local nonprofit legal services program operating in six counties in the Bryan-College Station area. It, too, was created by Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty initiative to provide a modicum of civil justice to poor families.

From my personal experience, I know that what Paul Ryan said is an outright lie. He might not have intentionally lied, but he did intentionally parrot the Republican, right-wing position against making America a better, more prosperous country by correcting many of the deficiencies, injustices, and inequities in our economic, social, and legal systems.

Ryan’s opponent in his other political race (he is running also to keep his seat in Congress), Rob Zerban, had this to say about Ryan’s views on anti-poverty programs:

If poverty’s winning the war, it’s because of policies Paul Ryan supports. By doubling down on his radical plot to gut Medicaid, privatize Social Security, and decimate food assistance programs, Paul Ryan is betting against working families -- all to hand out new tax breaks for millionaires and Big Oil.

As John Nichols points out,

Paul Ryan has taken a side in the war on poverty. He’s against what works. Ryan has a right to take the positions that he does. But no one should confuse those positions with a sincere commitment to fighting, let alone ending, poverty.

And that about sums up Paul Ryan as a politician and a human being.

Like Ryan and so many cut from his mold, I can tell anecdotes from personal experience about people unmotivated to take advantage of available opportunities, but I can tell far more about people who eagerly made the most of opportunities that were available -- about children who received health and dental care as they learned what they needed to prepare for public school; about their parents, who learned how to help their children be more successful in life than they ever imagined was possible; about people with few marketable skills who acquired job skills that lasted a lifetime.

Stories about high school dropouts who obtained their GEDs and went on to colleges or jobs that enriched their lives, not just with money, but with hope made possible by opportunity; about families with renewed pride because they helped to build their own homes; about women whose lives were saved by having access to preventive health care for the first time in their lives; about elderly people who, because of Medicare and Medicaid, avoided the misery their parents experienced in old age.

In the spring of 1969, the local nonprofit agency I worked for received a crudely-written letter addressed only to “Headstart, Washington, D.C.” It had been received at the national offices of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the agency responsible for the Head Start program at that time. The Washington office sent it to the regional OEO office in Dallas, which forwarded it to my agency. It had been sent by a man who lived with his family of four children and his wife in rural Williamson County, Texas, where we provided services.

The man had heard a public service announcement on the radio promoting Head Start, the pre-school OEO program. His letter stated simply that “he needed a headstart.” While he had not correctly understood the announcement, he had heard that there might be an opportunity for him and his family to get some relief from their misery, and he desperately wanted that opportunity. The director of my agency, Rawleigh Elliott, a former mayor of Georgetown and businessman, asked me to find the family and offer help.

After a bit of searching, a friend and I found the family’s house -- a shack with a wood-fired stove, no insulation, and no paint on its weather-worn clapboards. We talked with the family, assessed their needs, and started finding them the help they needed to get their own “headstart.” Such families exist all over this country, even as many politicians dismiss their plight and even their existence.

One such politician is Paul Ryan, who has a deformed and myopic view of life. Ryan has never believed the words of his party’s progenitor Abraham Lincoln, that our government is of, by, and for the people. Many things are wrong in this country, but none of them involve actions by “we, the people” to make everyone’s lives less degrading, less impoverished, and less unjust, with more decency and opportunity for all.

It will be a sad day for America if someone like Ryan is put in charge of our government.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Lamar W. Hankins : Sweet Land of Liberty (for Some)

"The Weight of Liberty." Sculpture by Juliana Murcia Ortiz.
Ah, irony:
Sweet Land of Liberty

When liberty serves the interest mainly of the plutocrats who are largely in control of this country, we no longer have a republic that is of, by, and for the people.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / May 28, 2012

SAN MARCOS, Texas -- Fifty years ago when I graduated from high school and began solidifying my political beliefs, I looked at the world I had grown up in and started deciding what mattered.

The first thing that mattered to me was equal rights for minorities -- those folks who were not allowed by either law or custom to participate fully in American life. They were denied the liberties that I enjoyed. I could not square these circumstances with the values I had been raised to believe in -- the same values that had been dishonored throughout our history while being espoused by everyone from our founders, to my church, to my high school government teachers.

The irony of these contradictions did not escape my notice.

I grew up in a world (the Beaumont-Port Arthur area) where many workers exercised their right to join together with other workers for their mutual betterment. They united together to get better wages, better working conditions, better benefits for themselves and their families, which also made their community better.

Because of their liberty to associate guaranteed by the First Amendment, they were able to form unions to create better lives. When I went away to college, I learned that not everyone thought that having such liberty was a good idea -- not everyone supported the idea of freedom of association even if it was in our Constitution.

The year 1965 was a watershed year for me. I upset my Abnormal Psychology professor by writing my term paper arguing the proposition that homosexuals were not abnormal. That summer, I worked for the Texas prison system. There I learned that the common practice at the Ferguson Unit, 20 miles north of Huntsville, was to beat young prisoners with rough-hewn ax handles for minor transgressions. For reporting this abuse, I was threatened by the warden and assistant warden and kept away from inmates for the rest of the summer.

It should come as no surprise that I began questioning the bona fides of people in positions of authority.

After a weekend at home from my summer prison job, I was driving back to the prison through Huntsville. As I approached the courthouse square, I noticed that it was crowded with people. I stopped to see what had drawn so many people on a Sunday evening to downtown Huntsville. I gathered information from bystanders that a desegregation sit-in was occurring at a local cafe on the square.

As this information was sinking in, a man walked up to a reporter for the local newspaper and knocked him to the ground, shattering his glasses. A policeman was standing a few feet away and saw this incident, but he turned away, unconcerned. It seems that having a reporter there to tell the newspaper’s readers what was happening in their town made the man angry, so he took out his anger on the reporter.

Once again, a person in authority would not take appropriate action to, in this case, protect the freedom of the press.

Before the year was out, I participated in my first demonstration against the Vietnam War. While I had supported Lyndon Johnson’s election as President, largely because of his embrace of civil rights and the implicit promise that he would be less warlike than his opponent Barry Goldwater, I was dismayed that he would send Americans to a small southeast Asian country to forcefully compel the people to follow our views on how they should conduct their political and economic affairs. Our founders had envisioned a foreign policy that did not intrude itself into the affairs of other nations by means of armed force.

Once again, the irony of this situation did not escape my notice.

By the summer of 1965, I had finished my junior year in college and wanted some experience in the nonacademic world. The summer work in a prison had whetted my appetite for doing something positive for others less fortunate than I, and helping to change a system that does not live up to the American values I had learned growing up.

At the end of that summer, I went to Florida to join a group of other mostly young people to spend a year working in a project to help change the lives of migrant farm workers. How naive we all were.

The exploitation of migrant farm workers has been going on in this country since the 1850s, when immigrants from Europe joined African Americans to harvest crops in the eastern part of the country. In the west, people from China, Japan, and Mexico provided the farm labor needed to harvest crops. Later, freed slaves, poor whites, Native Americans, Cubans, Jamaicans, and Puerto Ricans were employed at slave wages to harvest crops, particularly in Florida and along the East Coast.

The project I participated in was part of Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). We were assigned to local social service agencies to help create programs to make the lives of migrant farm workers better. We did touch a few lives in a positive way, but we learned that it would take more than a bunch of idealistic, well-meaning people to change a system that was more akin to slavery than to the work that my father did as a machinist protected from exploitation by a union contract.

The lesson that I drew from this experience is that the system needs to be changed. Making the lives of farm workers slightly more tolerable with preschool programs, nutrition programs, tutorial programs, and programs that provide better access to health services has its place, but it is no substitute for changing a system that denies these people any real chance at liberty.

These experiences that began 50 years ago continue to affect my world view and inform my politics.

When I read that people believe that a health insurance mandate interferes with their liberty, I am appalled. I remember all the migrant workers I met who had incredibly hard lives without the benefit of much health care at all, who developed gangrene in wounds, who were missing half of their teeth, who were often kept in prison-like conditions by growers, who were made sick by pesticides used in the fields where they picked tomatoes and in the groves where they harvested oranges and limes, and who had to live in filthy hovels, larger, but no better than the dog houses many of our pets enjoy.

And I have learned that our founders did not seem to believe that liberty was curtailed by mandating purchases by citizens, which they did at least three times in the early years of this country, including mandating the purchase of health insurance by sailors during the administration of John Adams.

Liberty is an essential part of a free society, but one irony of America’s values is how little liberty there is for a large segment of our society -- a segment in which over 300 million people depend for the food they eat. From this perspective, the liberty interest involved with being required to purchase health insurance pales in comparison to the liberty to have decent jobs at decent pay and decent working conditions.

I continue to hear people argue for their right to to have the liberty to defraud others through the kind of schemes that led to the “great recession” we are still trying to get free of. For many people, it is fine for Wall Street and the big banks to continue to gamble with depositors’ money, knowing that the government, you and I, will bail them out to keep the entire economy from failing.

While the Dodd-Frank law was well-intended, it has been too little, too late. An expanded version of the law that served us well since the Great Depression (Glass-Steagall), but was repealed under Bill Clinton, needs to be adopted, but many Democrats and almost all Republicans will not pass such a law, mainly because they are all beholden to the very entities that created our present economic morass.

The bankers want to have the liberty to do what they want, unimpeded by laws and regulations that will serve the public interest rather than their pecuniary interests.

When liberty serves the interest mainly of the plutocrats who are largely in control of this country, we no longer have a republic that is of, by, and for the people. Under these conditions, most Americans live under the dictates of the few -- what a modern day John Stuart Mill might call the “tyranny of the 1%.” And liberty and justice for all becomes less than a pipe dream.

Mill wrote a fitting ending to this essay, which leads me to question whether we have ceased to be civilized, if we ever were: “[T]he only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

There is much harm overwhelming our society and I see no reason to expect that to change.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Rag Radio : Progressive Texas State Legislator Elliott Naishtat

Texas State. Rep. Elliott Naishtat (D-Austin) on Rag Radio at the KOOP studios in Austin, Friday, Sept. 30, 2011. Photos by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Progressive Texas legislator Elliott Naishtat on Rag Radio
with Thorne Dreyer. Listen to it here:

Progressive Democratic State Rep. Elliott Naishtat of Austin was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, September 30, 2011.

Naishtat, who is Jewish and a native New Yorker, was elected to the District 49 seat in the Texas House of Representatives in 1990 and has been reelected 10 times. Naishtat, who has lived in Texas for 39 years, served as a VISTA volunteer in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty in Queens, New York, and then in Eagle Pass, Texas, before moving to Austin and earning a Masters in Social Work and a law degree from The University of Texas.

Elliott -- who was a protégé of liberal Texas State Representative and Senator Gonzalo Barrientos -- was a founding board member of the House Progressive Caucus and now serves on the House Services Committee and as Vice Chair of the Public Health Committee. Naishtat, who has focused his legislative work in the areas of health and human services, has passed more than 200 bills and has been recognized for his service by numerous citizens groups.

On the program, we discuss Naishtat's unique journey from Queens, New York, to the Texas Legislature. VISTA told Elliott they were sending him to San Francisco, but instead he ended up in Eagle Pass (“You know the government. They lied.”) where he worked as a grassroots community organizer in a Mexican-American barrio, helping to set up a Head Start program.

Later, in Austin, when Naishtat first ran for the Texas legislature, his opponent, a three-time Republican incumbent, ran a television ad that was a takeoff on the famed Pace Picante Sauce commercial. A group of cowboys are sitting around a campfire and a voice asks, “Do you want a liberal social worker from New York City? Get a rope!” Naishtat won by 10 percentage points.

Elliott also shares with us the tale of the Texas House "Killer D's" -- 51 Democrats who in 2003 hid out in Ardmore, Oklahoma, in an attempt to halt the Tom Delay-engineered Republican redistricting putsch -- with the Texas Rangers and Homeland Security trying to track them down (a tactic that was repeated by Wisconsin Democrats in 2011 when they tried to block legislation limiting collective bargaining for public workers).

We also discuss the 82nd Legislature’s slash-and-burn session and the sad state of health and human services in Texas, and Rick Perry (“Governor Goodhair”) and his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. And we learn about the late Molly Ivins’ cherished stuffed armadillo, which now resides on a perch in Elliott’s legislative office, “always looking down at me to make sure that I never forget anything I learned from Molly Ivins.”

From left, Rag Radio's Tracey Schulz and Thorne Dreyer, and Texas State Rep. Elliott Naishtat. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Rag Radio -- hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer -- is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. KOOP is a cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin.

Rag Radio, which has been aired since September 2009, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (Eastern) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

The running time for this interview, with music and underwriting announcements removed, is 54:23.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Lamar W. Hankins : Budget-Gutting Protects the Rich

Rio Grande Farm Workers: The Cortez family at the State Capitol in Austin, Texas, 1979. Photo by Alan Pogue.
We are all in this together:
Republican budget-gutting protects the rich

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / February 22, 2011

In that year in VISTA, I came to value some who are considered the least among us, those we don’t think about or acknowledge. I decided that to be a moral person meant that I could not ignore the needs of others.

Reading some of the Republican plans for cutting -- or gutting -- the budget took me back a few years. On the chopping block is the federal program AmeriCorps. It is the program that currently funds VISTA -- Volunteers In Service To America.

I was a VISTA volunteer in 1965-66. Along with hundreds of other mostly idealistic young people and a smattering of retired folks as well, VISTA volunteers worked in migrant labor camps, on Indian reservations, and in the inner cities to help poor people improve their lives. I even learned to say “soy miembro de un grupo que se llama VISTA Volunteers.” VISTA was a seminal experience that helped me establish what was important in life.

Working with migrant laborers in south Florida taught me about how incredibly hard their lives are. They live typically in squalid camps provided by growers. They don’t have access to much health care -- occasional vaccines provided by county health services and emergency rooms when they are very sick.

It was while taking a migrant worker to the emergency room one evening at a Miami hospital I learned for the first time about gangrene. An injury to his leg, which had been treated earlier, had become so severely infected that gangrene had set in. It took 10 hours to get him help at the emergency room. We returned to his shack in south Dade County as the sun was rising.

Migrant farm workers suffer the effects of prolonged exposure to pesticides, which include neurological damage (especially to children), birth defects, skin diseases, and cancer. Though they work harder than most people, their pay is incredibly low -- the median pay is less than $900 per month for a family of four.

Three-fourths of migrant farm workers earn less than $10,000 per year, and 60% earn below the poverty line. They have no job security and must travel constantly to earn their meager pay. They are abused and financially exploited by the growers and crew leaders, who contract directly with the growers in many areas.

When 20 migrant men from Puerto Rico were killed when the bus in which they were riding was hit by a train at a crossing on their way to a migrant labor camp after working in the fields one day, I learned about the avarice of the insurance industry. Within 24 hours, insurance company representatives were in Puerto Rico getting the families of those killed to take $500 checks as payment in full for the lives of their loved ones.

We notified the Puerto Rican Department of Labor, which took action to immediately expel the insurance company representatives from Puerto Rico. It was an example of a government agency acting on behalf of workers, something that has occurred all too infrequently in my experience.

In that year in VISTA, I came to value some who are considered the least among us, those we don’t think about or acknowledge. I decided that to be a moral person meant that I could not ignore the needs of others. It meant also that there had to be a communal responsibility for the welfare of all in our society.

We are all interrelated. We are all in this together, a sort of union of people doing our part to make this society function as well as possible, recognizing the basic human needs of all. While I have failed personally to always honor my values, I have accepted that this is part of the human condition. All we can do is start each day or week or month or year determined to do better.

I can understand why some believe there is no role for the government to help fulfill a communal responsibility to all. They see the world through different lenses. For them, we are not a community, but individuals living near one another. If someone manages to get the upper hand, it is because that person is superior or more deserving. Expressed in its extreme, it comes out as this Ayn Rand idea: "What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?"

Migrant farm workers, I learned, are easily ground underfoot, both figuratively and literally. These people who pick most of our fruits and vegetables live miserable lives compared to the American ideal. Growers use them to increase profits. After all, the growers own the agricultural businesses, so who are we to question their management? Our society uses them. After all, those fruits and vegetables won’t get on our dining room tables by magic, and we have to have them to live.

Such views ignore the communal reality that there would be no water to nourish the crops, no roads to get the crops to market, no assurance that the crops are safe to eat, without the communal allocation of adequate water, the building of roads, and the development and enforcement of regulations to protect the health of consumers. Just these three concerns lead to disagreements that must be resolved. Those resolutions are what politics is about.

Unfortunately, we have a significant segment of the population that believes there is no role for government. If you care about the well-being of everyone in this communal system we call the United States, such a position is untenable. To not care is counter to the values on which this country was founded.

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are the documents that created a unifying bond among all Americans. Some refer to this bond as the social contract, which most people like when it benefits them. But too many Americans fail to recognize the need to assure that the social contract works for everyone, or ultimately it will fail.

With respect to migrant farm workers, we have abrogated that social contract. Now, all over the nation, governors and legislators are seeking to abrogate it further by denying government workers (and private sector workers, as well) their First Amendment rights of free association through participation in unions to secure their rights to satisfactory working conditions and appropriate compensation and benefits.

As I write, large demonstrations are occurring in Wisconsin. If the government workers in that state, with its long history of support for workers’ rights, fail in their efforts to preserve this basic right, there is little hope for other government workers around the country.

Unions have made a difference in my own life (my father was a union worker) and they have made a difference in scattered instances for farm laborers in the grape fields of California and in the tomato fields of Immokalee, Florida, where the Coalition of Immokalee Workers started the Campaign for Fair Food 10 years ago to improve working conditions and wages for farmworkers, but most such workers remain impoverished, sickened, and abused by their work for growers. Little has changed in the 51 years since Edward R. Murrow’s documentary “Harvest of Shame” revealed the plight of farmworkers in prime time.

Real patriots would be on the side of workers, not their overlords. I learned this lesson 45 years ago as a VISTA Volunteer. That is probably as good a reason as the moneyed interests need to shut down that program. Until workers everywhere start shouting “Viva la huelga!” and Americans support their efforts, there will be no balance in the relations between workers and their exploiters.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...