...But We Can't Get By On Nothin'

If one of these people killed a dozen Republican senators and you were on the jury what would you do? Would you take the rightist position and convict him or her? Or the leftist position and give him or her an award for extraordinary service to the country and to humanity? Or would you just sort of take the middle road and call it even and ask everyone to go home and think about the direction our country is taking? I don't think Inside the Beltway politicians, most of whom are millionaires, understand the issue. If some of them passed a few of their colleagues hanging from lamp posts on the way to work, it would come into clearer focus. I'm not advocating that; it's illegal. But the prosecutor wouldn't want me on the jury.

I consulted my pastor, who has just released a new book, Changing The Script, to see if I could get a read on the morality of this kind of action. He's a man of peace and a man of God and you kind of have to read between the lines:

It's been a rough week. Ireland got sold back into serfdom, unemployment benefits expired, and in a bid to bring the spirit of peace and generosity back to Christmas, Republicans threatened to filibuster the START treaty until tax cuts for the upper 2% of wealthy Americans were made permanent. Oh, and like a maraschino cherry high atop a lollapalooza of suck, we find out from Wikileaks that the Obama administration-- with GOP help-- basically has quashed the investigation into torture by slow-marching it to death.

...And where, might you ask, was the religious left (such as it is) during all of this? Begging for scraps, I'm afraid. They were "urging" Congress to pass the DREAM Act and "urging" them to ratify START and "asking"(!) the House to pass the Child Nutrition Act. These are all fine and worthy causes, to be sure. Yet somehow I don't think they're going to be effective. Put it to you this way, it's one thing to go up against a giant with a slingshot. It's quite another to take your rock out and replace it with a crumpled-up piece of paper.

I've been asked a lot over the course of this fall why we don't have a politically effective religious left in America. The short answer is that there's a significant trade-off between being nice (or engaging in "civil discourse," as it's called these days) and being potent. All the commitment to moral suasion, to building consensus, to reconciliation between political opponents, all the commitment in the world to "speaking out" about your values isn't going to accomplish squat.

What will? Identity politics. I'm afraid they’re everything these days. Simply put, the religious left is far less effective than the religious right because it won't turn political questions into us-versus-them. It's too divisive for them, to use one of the president's favorite terms.

Yet, as I seldom tire of pointing out, the God of the Bible is quite partisan and quite divisive. You can't read about camels and the eye of the needle, let alone the Magnificat, without understanding that God is on the side of the poor.

If the religious left (such as it is) wants to be effective on economic issues-- tax cuts, employment, child nutrition-- it's going to have to learn to take sides too. It's going to have to say:

My God is the God of the poor. Someday, that God is going to bring down the powerful and send the rich away hungry, but lift up the lowly and fill the hungry. I know which side I'm on. Which side are you on?

Or better:

My God is the God of the poor. He takes notes, and so do I.

Or:

My God is the God of the poor. A vote against [unemployment benefits, child nutrition] or a vote for tax breaks for the obscenely wealthy is a vote against that God, and it's a vote against those who follow him.

Or simplest and perhaps best:

My God is the God of the poor. You can be for the poor or you can go to hell.

There's nothing nice about that. But then there's nothing nice about the absurd, reactionary, vicious and apparently successful class war the rich and powerful are waging on the rest of the nation, either.

The was the most important part of this post. If you have a hockey game or something you can go now. Otherwise, here's the kinds of facts and figures about unemployment you're never going to find on TV or even in newspapers. It's a report from the Council of Economic Advisors, the entirety of which you can read here after the hockey game. Here's the summary:

Unemployment insurance (UI) provides a safety net for workers who have lost a job through no fault of their own, as long as they continue to search for new employment. During normal economic conditions, firms pay into state insurance systems that replace roughly half of the average individual’s lost earnings, up to 26 weeks. However, the federal government historically funds additional weeks of benefits in response to an economic downturn. The benefits allow recipients to continue to support their families while searching for their next job.

In response to the recession that began in December 2007, Congress expanded UI benefits by creating Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) and 100 percent federal funding of Extended Benefits (EB). These programs provide UI benefits after a worker exhausts state benefits, helping when it takes longer to find a job, such as in this severe downturn. These extensions began to expire on November 30, 2010. In this report, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) examines the effects of the extensions thus far and the potential impact on the economy if Congress fails to act soon to continue these emergency measures.

As a result of these emergency expansions to UI:

• EUC and EB have helped 14 million unemployed workers as of October 2010. As of that date, there were almost 5 million unemployed workers benefiting from these programs each week.

• In total, these programs have benefited about 40 million people who have received, or lived with a recipient of, EUC or EB. This total includes 10.5 million children.

If these measures are not extended, the maximum eligibility for benefits in most states will revert to the pre-recessionary level of 26 weeks. The Department of Labor estimates that, relative to a month-long extension, 2 million unemployed workers will lose coverage in December 2010. And, relative to a year-long extension, nearly 7 million unemployed workers in total will lose coverage by November 2011.

Further, EUC and EB make up a substantial portion of household income. Without EUC and EB, the typical household receiving these benefits will see their income fall by a third. In the 42 percent of households where the EUC or EB recipient is the sole wage-earner, 90 percent of income will be lost.

This important income replacement allows individuals that have suffered from job loss to avoid a dramatic drop in their spending levels. Research studies have documented that UI is an extremely effective form of support for the economy relative to other government programs, both in terms of bang-for-the-buck and timeliness. EUC and EB recipients spend their benefit checks, rather than saving them, and a drop in this income will translate into a sizeable drop in aggregate spending.
Specifically, CEA estimates that:

• Employment was about 800,000 higher, and the level of GDP 0.8 percent higher, in September 2010 than would have been the case without EUC and EB.

• Without an extension, employment would be about 600,000 lower, and GDP 0.6 percent lower, in December 2011 than if a year-long extension were passed.

Previously, Congress continued federal expansions of UI until the economy was much further along the road to recovery. With 10 consecutive months of private sector job growth and half a percentage point drop in the unemployment rate since its peak, the economy is beginning to recover. However, the unemployment rate remains unacceptably high and there are still 5 job seekers for every job opening. For the last half-century, Congress has consistently extended UI benefits when economic circumstances substantially increased the difficulty of finding a job. Given the current labor market conditions, failing to continue UI extensions now would be unprecedented.

I live in California and if the Senate Republicans filibuster unemployment insurance to death 1,013,384 victims of corporate economic policies shoved down the public's throat by the Bush Administration and their GOP congressional allies will lose their unemployment insurance. That's the worst of any state in the Union. But even some of the Confederate states will be big losers. Florida will wind up with 531,029 unemployed people with no means of feeding their families. Texas will have 334,410, Georgia will have 301,688 and North Carolina will have 232,285. I know Republicans go no further than calculating that these people are mostly Democratic voters-- or not voters at all-- anyway. But you think God thinks that way too?

Maine just elected a teabagging imbecile for a governor and capped it off with Republican majorities in both houses of the state legislature. There are 18,485 unemployed Mainers who will lose the meager benefits they have to keep their families from freezing to death this winter. I wonder what they'll tell Mr. LePage about that. People are less likely to wind up with frozen children in Arizona, but one has to wonder how the country's most clueless and unqualified governor-- working together with a heartless and venal state legislature-- will cope with 127,560 unemployed men and women who can't feed their children. Multimillionaires John McCain and Jon Kyl have vowed to filibuster any attempt to extend unemployment benefits. In fact, Kyl thinks unemployment benefits are counterproductive. They just keep people from working and insisting on getting paid at least the minimum wage.





Yeah, prosecutors better hope I'm not on the jury, especially if someone gets Kyl.