Sam Brownback Likes Some Government Handouts And Hates Others

Don't you just adore governor Brownback?  He's such an extreme believer in his own little right-wing religious fundamentalist reality.  Even though it's Christianist, it's not very charitable.  Or rather, the charity goes to the haves and is removed from the have-nots.  I wonder what Jesus would say about that, hmh?

A few years ago Brownback cut taxes in Kansas something fierce.  Indeed, certain kinds of firms don't pay any tax on their profits!  That's giving the owners of those firms government handouts, in my divine and correct opinion.

But other types of handouts Brownback doesn't like.  His most recent move consists of making absolutely sure that welfare recipients don't spend that grudgingly-offered money on strippers or tattoos but on useful things such as baby diapers:

The measure bars spending relief funds on movies, at swimming pools, or on "cruise ships," as well as at any "jewelry store, tattoo parlor, massage parlor, body piercing parlor ... psychic or fortune telling business, bail bond company, video arcade ... or any retail establishment which provides adult-oriented entertainment in which performers disrobe or perform in an unclothed state."


It also places a $25 daily limit on ATM withdrawals using the debit cards issued to recipients under the state/federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, which is what's left of America's welfare program. That renders the cards useless for major spending, such as paying the rent, but it does mean that users will pile up ATM fees at $1 per withdrawal, plus bank fees.

Note that there is no evidence Kansas welfare recipients are desperately trying to use their welfare checks in the manner described here.  I'd be pretty surprised if such misuse is at all common, given that most recipients are single mothers with young children.

The point of this bill, Brownback tells us, is to get people to go to work!  I haven't checked if Kansas funds daycare for single mothers on welfare so that they can go to work in one of the minimum wage jobs many of them would end up with.  But whatever.  At least they can't get tattoos and massages while taking cruises.

Emily Badger in Washington Post writes about all this with great lucidity.  She points out that the treatment of one group of handout recipients differs from the treatment of all other groups of handout recipients:  They are held to higher moral and ethical standards:

The second issue with these laws is a moral one: We rarely make similar demands of other recipients of government aid. We don't drug-test farmers who receive agriculture subsidies (lest they think about plowing while high!). We don't require Pell Grant recipients to prove that they're pursuing a degree that will get them a real job one day (sorry, no poetry!). We don't require wealthy families who cash in on the home mortgage interest deduction to prove that they don't use their homes as brothels (because surely someone out there does this). The strings that we attach to government aid are attached uniquely for the poor.

And that is because we don't view other forms of government transfers as undeserved handouts.

It's not necessarily bad to limit what welfare payments can be used for.  But when you combine this particular move with Brownback's earlier handouts to much wealthier groups of taxpayers you wonder what type of Jesus his reality has.  If this man is supposedly following in his footsteps.

Terry Pratchett Thoughts. On the Role of the Media and On Citizens as Consumers.

I've been re-reading many of Terry Pratchett's books, in his memory.  I often come across little jewels (or chocolate truffles) of ideas.  For example:

"the public is not interested in public interest."

Which is true.  The reasons for that are many and varied, but it's almost impossible to try to write about topics of public interest on a commercial basis (so send money).

My most recent re-read is The Truth, about the first newspapers in Ankh-Morpork.  Mr. William de Worde starts the very first one, with actual news in it (though also stories about funny-shaped vegetables).  A competitor soon catches on with scandalous stories such as "a woman gives birth to a cobra."

de Worde gets a statement from the king of the area where this miracle-birth was supposed to have happened, at some cost for himself.  The king denied any cobra-human births to have happened.

The response of the readers was that of course the king would deny everything, of course.  In any case, stories about women giving birth to cobras are a lot more fun than stories about politics, say.

All that reminds me of American politics, in a gently ridiculous sense. Weird people writing or nattering about Hillary Clinton's cankles (a term for fat ankles) as if it matters what size ankles a president has and as if we ever otherwise measure the ankles of presidential contenders.  Presidents being judged on the basis of whether we'd like to have a beer with them.

Imagine using that way of judging for picking your neurosurgeon.

All this links in a vague way to a Finnish article I recently came across, on the new approach to citizens as consumers.  This is the part I wish to translate:

Kun on riittävän monta vuotta toisteltu, että kansa tietää parhaiten kaiken, ovat sivistysinstituutiot alkaneet nöyrtyä.
Korkeakoulujen oletetaan palvelevan paitsi liike-elämää ja politiikkaa, myös oppilaitaan, joista on tullut asiakkaita.
Lehdet ovat luopuneet vanhanaikaisesta valistajan roolista ja kyselevät yleisöltä, mikä on tärkeää. Nettiäänestyksissä media tenttaa lukijan mielipidettä asioihin, jotka eivät ole mielipiteestä kiinni: tuliko lama, lämpeneekö ilmasto, tappavatko rokotteet, mitä mieltä jengi.
Asiakkaan rooli voi imarrella meitä hetken, mutta demokratian ja sivistyksen osalta se on tylsä loukku: olemme aina oikeassa, ja siksi meidän ei tarvitse omaksua uutta.

My approximate translation:

When we have repeated for many years that the people (here meant as the audience) know best all the cultural institutions have begun to agree.  Universities are assumed to serve both business and politics but also the students who are now customers.  Newspapers have given up their old-fashioned role as educators and enlighteners.  Instead, they ask the public what is important.  In online polls the media wants the reader's opinions on matters which are not based on opinions:  did we have an economic recession, is the climate warming, do vaccinations kill.  What do you guys think?

The role of a customer can momentarily flatter, but it's a boring trap from the point of view of democracy and culture:  we are always right and that's why we don't have to learn anything new.

What To Read Today on Gender, 4/16/15

1.  This article about feminist foreign policy is worthwhile.  A quote:

Last month, Saudi Arabia abruptly cut ties with Sweden, recalling its ambassador and announcing that it would issue no new visas to Swedish business travelers. The cause, according to Saudi Arabia, was some remarks made by Margot Wallström, the foreign minister of Sweden.

...

On February 11th, Wallström, speaking before the Swedish parliament, stated what may appear to be a few facts about Saudi Arabia: she said that women are not allowed to drive, that their human rights are violated, and that the country is a dictatorship in which the royal family has absolute power. Like representatives of several other European countries, she also criticized the public flogging of the blogger Raif Badawi and later called it “medieval.”
Wallström, whose government recognized the State of Palestine last year, had been asked to deliver a speech at an Arab League summit in Cairo in late March, but Saudi Arabia intervened, and Wallström was disinvited. On March 9th, Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador to Sweden, saying that Wallström had “unacceptably interfered” in the country’s internal affairs. The United Arab Emirates followed suit a week later. Due to Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic wrangling, Wallström was also condemned by the Gulf Cooperation Council (which consists of Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the U.A.E.), The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which includes fifty-seven countries, and the Arab League itself. Finally, Saudi Arabia leveled a more serious charge against Wallström: that by commenting on the punishment of public flogging, the Swedish foreign minister had criticized Sharia law and Islam.

There are similar pressures in writing.  How does one criticize beliefs and not people?  And are other people allowed to tell us not to criticize their beliefs?  Should Western feminists be silent about ISIS, because criticizing ISIS so easily is viewed as criticizing Islam, given the discrimination and labeling of Muslims, especially in the West? 

But if Western feminists are silent about ISIS,  what remains of feminism?  How can a feminist write about the forced-birth policies of US conservatives and not write about this?

I'm on Wallström's side in this, and that's why I worry about the argument that her comments are somehow the same as criticizing Sharia law (which is deemed to have a divine origin).

2.  Female chimpanzees are more likely than male chimpanzees to fashion weapons and use them in hunting, according to one study.  I have not read the study, but note the framing, especially in the last paragraph.  Then check how often this particular study is disseminated, compared to the earlier study about how female chimpanzees appeared to shape branches into dolls.  That one was widely disseminated and discussed, along the lines that "we all know the gender roles in humans are innate.  Just look at the chimps!"

I bet this one won't get the same amount of publicity, because it doesn't serve to prop up human gender roles.  As Terry Pratchett states in one of his books, people don't want news, they want "olds:" reinforcement for what they already believe to be true.

In any case, I've written about the gender politics in this field earlier.

3.  Martha MacCallum really really dislikes the idea of a woman's head on US paper money.  There's a movement to get a woman on the twenty-dollar bill, and Bill O'Reilly and Martha MacCallum ruminated on that at Fox News.  O'Reilly asked why everything must be so damn politically correct*, and MacCallum disliked the idea that this movement is all about women.  It would be more interesting, I guess, if it was about melons or papayas. 

Sigh.  The movement wouldn't have to be all about women if the US had had the same number of male and female presidents and if the Founding Fathers had been joined with some Founding Mothers, dear Martha.  Context matters.

MacCallum stated that for her the heads on money are US presidents and a few Founding Fathers, and that statement creates an infinite loop with my previous paragraph.  Or put Abigail Adams on the money.

4.  As many people say on Twitter:  "I can't even..."  That's the term describing utter exhaustion with the silliness that goes on in American politics.  Now that Hillary Clinton has stepped into the ring we are going to have several years hilarious sexism.  And I have this feeling I should write about it. 

Perhaps I will, perhaps I won't, but I can't help lifting up the skirt on the particular commentary of a Texas marketing CEO Cheryl Rios, who believes that women are too hormonal to run a country (even though apparently not too hormonal to run a marketing firm) and that this is why we shouldn't have a female president.  Imagine her hand on the switch which rules nuclear weapons!  She might start a poorly thought-out war!  Gasp!  And gasp!

Enough exclamation marks for you?  In any case, Hillary Clinton probably has calmer hormones, given her post-menopausal stage, than any of the younger guys joining the race.  And quite possibly calmer hormones than the older guys, at least based on what I've observed of her in the public eye over the years.

But if that isn't enough to convince you not to vote for Hitlery** (a conservative pet-name for Clinton), there's also the Biblical argument which is very very logical Rios tells us.  (I've read the Bible and can't recall where the logic in the statements are.  They just tell us that men should rule over women and that women should shut up.)  And if even that won't make you face the facts, well, what will all those sexist countries think of the US if it is run by a woman?  How can we possibly invade them or start reckless wars against them if they won't even respect us because of our gender equality policies?

OK.  That last bit was me pretending to be inside the head of Cheryl Rios.  I got all dizzy and hormonal.

----
*  That term is a euphemism for "let's ignore large classes of people" in politics and in business.  It's also shorthand for "here comes the bit where we dis women and/or minorities."  It's a marvelous term!  And a boring one, because it doesn't say WHY the utterer finds something politically correct but in reality completely false and unnecessary and trivial.  It's right-wing code-speak.

**  This post is not about Hillary Clinton as a candidate.  Voters have their own reasons for voting or not voting for a particular candidate.  My focus here (and in the future) is in the kind of statements which are not about Clinton at all but about all women or all women of a particular age etc..  In other words, about sexism and misogyny and the use of extreme stereotypes based on gender.

The Chibok Schoolgirls. One Year Later.

It's a year since Boko Haram, an extremist Wahhabist terrorist group, captured a group of schoolgirls in northern Nigeria.  More than two hundred girls still remain disappeared.  Nobody knows their fate.  Nigeria's president-elect Mr. Buhari:

“Currently their whereabouts remain unknown,” he said. “We do not know the state of their health or welfare, or whether they are even still together or alive.”
The girls were taken late on the night of April 14, 2014, from their state school in the heartland of the Boko Haram insurgency, igniting fears among local officials that the girls would be used as slaves by the group if they were not rescued immediately.
Perhaps as many as 50 of the girls subsequently escaped. The majority remain missing, forced into “marriage” by their captors, forced to cook and do chores for them, or killed by them.

Boko Haram has since butchered and kidnapped an unknown (but large) number of people. From that angle the fate of the Chibok schoolgirls is no more awful than Boko Haram's general policies.  But this particular kidnapping is noteworthy not only for the human lives it destroyed (which is quite possible without killing someone outright).  It's also an example of Boko Haram's political views:  Western education should be banned and girls and women, in particular, should not be educated.  

To kidnap schoolgirls is to make those views into reality.  To turn those schoolgirls into domestic slaves or to force them into marriage clarifies the Boko Haram political stance even more.

Profits As A Reward For Risk Carrying?

Economists often argue that this is the ultimate function of corporate profits:  They reward those who bear the risks, and the losses punish those who made the wrong guesses in the corporate games.  So it's all ethical, right?

Given this, I find the new focus on transferring risks to employees an interesting one.  Logically every step towards workers-as-the-real-entrepreneurs should make it harder to justify high profits, correct?  But I'm not seeing that trend to follow the other new trend, this one, say:

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is probing chain clothing retailers for their practice of on-call scheduling, which forces workers into a purgatory of not knowing from day to day whether they'll have to report for duty, making something as simple as planning childcare or attending college extremely difficult—if the boss doesn't force you to quit school altogether.

This is not the only example of the new trend.  Corporations are now demanding no risks from what governments might do in the future, for example, as is visible in the trade agreements.