Saturday, December 7, 2019
Trump administration food stamp cuts spell hunger and destitution for millions
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/06/pers-d06.html
6 December 2019
The Trump Administration announced Wednesday a rule change that will deprive nearly 700,000 people of benefits from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, increasing hunger for countless families.
SNAP, formerly known as the food stamp program, currently provides vital federal assistance to over 36 million people.
Beginning in April 2020, the rule will make it much harder for adults, aged 18 to 49, who are without dependents to obtain benefits. It will make it more difficult for states to waive a requirement that these individuals work at least 20 hours a week or lose their benefits by allowing only those states with an official unemployment rate of 6 percent or above to apply for waivers. Currently, some regions with jobless rates as low as 2.5 percent are included in the waived areas.
A supermarket displays stickers indicating they accept food stamps in West New York, N.J. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)The print and broadcast media have largely ignored the move, which will lead untold thousands of households to go hungry. Congressional Democrats have remained virtually silent, focused on their impeachment proceedings against Trump centering on claims that his policies are insufficiently aggressive against Russia.
That is because, in attacking the living conditions of masses of people, Trump is carrying out a bipartisan policy supported by both parties of big business. In 2014, President Obama signed legislation into law that cut $8.7 billion in food stamp benefits over the next decade, causing 850,000 households to lose an average of $90 a month.
According to a study from earlier this year when the change was first proposed, it will affect the poorest and most vulnerable: 97 percent of SNAP participants affected live in poverty; 88 percent have household incomes at or below 50 percent of the poverty level, or less than $600 a month.
The work rule change is tied to two other proposals—one capping deductions for utility allowances and another that would lead to nearly 1 million students losing access to reduced-cost or free lunches. Taken together, the Urban Institute estimates that these three proposals would cut 3.6 million people from SNAP benefits. In the words of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, these measures—which will literally snatch food from the mouths of children, the destitute and the most vulnerable in society—will “restore the dignity of work to a sizable segment of our population, while also respecting the taxpayers who fund the program.”
In reality, Perdue’s dystopian vision has nothing to do with restoring the “dignity of work” and everything to do with plunging millions of Americans further into poverty while increasing the wealth of the already super-wealthy who have been the beneficiaries of Trump’s tax cuts and attacks on social programs. Forbes places Perdue’s current net worth at $5 million, a minor player compared to Education Secretary Betsy Devos, whose net worth is $2 billion, the highest in Trump’s cabinet.
The secretary of agriculture and former Georgia governor built a fortune in agribusiness and real estate. Shortly after joining Trump’s cabinet, he transferred control of investments worth at least $8 million to his adult children. It is a cruel irony that the Trump official leading the assault on food stamps made his fortune profiting from agribusiness, while suicides among financially ruined Midwest family farmers are surging.
The three changes to SNAP rules would reduce the food stamp rolls by at least 15 percent in 13 states, according to an estimate by the Urban Institute. The third of these changes would hit the District of Columbia (24 percent) and Nevada (22 percent). Total benefits would fall by at least 15 percent in nine states.
In California alone, an estimated 200,000 people could lose benefits as a result of the restrictions on waivers to work requirements.
Americans living in cold-weather states like Vermont, New York and South Dakota will bear the biggest brunt from the rule reducing the amount people can deduct for utility costs. Mostly rural Vermont would lose almost 22 percent of its food stamp aid, while New York, South Dakota and Maine would lose about 11 percent each. The US Department of Agriculture estimates the utility cost overhaul will reduce food stamp spending by about $4.5 billion over five years.
Almost 7 in 10 Vermonters would see a cut in SNAP benefits, with the typical benefit reduced by almost 40 percent, dropping from an already paltry $215 a month to about $133, according to Hunger Free Vermont. Ellen Vollinger, legal director at the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center, said the utility cost proposal will force people to “choose whether to eat or heat.”
It is a myth that any of these measures will help people find jobs. Hunger advocates have emphasized that many of those who will be affected are impoverished, live in rural areas and often face mental health issues and disabilities. “The policy targets very poor people struggling to work—some of whom are homeless or living with health conditions,” Stacey Dean, food assistance policy vice president at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told NBC News. “Taking away basic food assistance from these individuals will only increase hardship and hunger, while doing nothing to help them find steady full-time work.”
But as the Trump administration touts a rise in the GDP as an indicator of the country’s economic health, renewed signs of social crisis in America portend an increase—not a lessening—of suffering and despair, which will only be exacerbated by cuts to food assistance.
The US has experienced a decline in life expectancy for the third straight year. More disturbingly, growing numbers of people are dying relatively young, between the ages of 25 and 64, an age group that intersects with those targeted by the rule changes to SNAP.
These are people who in a healthy society would be in the prime of their working lives. Instead, rising numbers of people are dying from “diseases of despair:” suicide, alcohol and drug overdose. Midlife mortality rates have also increased as a result of at least 35 other causes, including diseases and conditions such as diabetes, autoimmune disorders, obesity and high blood pressure.
After a decline in the uninsured rate due to the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that those without health insurance obtain coverage from a private insurer, the uninsured rate is now rising again. The numbers of those who are underinsured and burdened by high out-of-pocket costs are growing, leading to increasing numbers of people filing for personal bankruptcy.
A new report by two non-profit groups reveals the staggering statistic that over 2 million Americans in 2019 do not have access to indoor plumbing or running water. New statistics also show that the Flint water crisis is not an isolated incident, and that the water supply in countless cities and towns across the country are contaminated with dangerous levels of lead.
The defense of the basic human right to adequate nutrition, water and health care cannot be entrusted to either big business party. The Trump administration’s assault on SNAP benefits poses the necessity of the working class adopting its own independent defense of these social rights through the organization of a revolutionary leadership that fights for the socialist organization of society on the basis of human need, not profit.
Kate Randall
Understanding socialism
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/12/06/understanding-socialism/
The New York Times magazine has described Richard Wolff as “probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist”. And that is probably not an exaggeration as a description of this emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and visiting professor at the New School University in New York.
Richard Wolff has been one of a handful of Marxist economists with full tenure at an American university. And he has worked tirelessly to bring home to students and all who would listen in the US, the Marxist alternative explanation of the nature of US capitalism and its current crisis. Wolff has written several important economics books, sometimes with his close collaborator, Stephen A. Resnick. In particular, their recent book, Contending Economic Theories, neoclassical, Keynesian and Marxian is a very useful and clear explanation of the main strands of economics for those who don’t know. Professor Wolff's weekly show, Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff, is syndicated on over 70 radio stations nationwide and available for broadcast on Free Speech TV.
Now Wolff has published two short books designed to explain the ideas of Marxism and socialism in a straightforward way: Understanding Marxism and Understanding Socialism. The first analyses capitalism. He goes through the concepts of how competition develops between the capitalists (p.51); how labour power is commodified (p.41); and how capitalism is prone to crises and instability (p.60). Any individual, he says “exhibiting a personal instability comparable to the economic and social instability of capitalism would long ago have been required to seek professional help and to make basic changes” (p.61). But capitalism limps on and threatens to take us all down with it. Until workers get to decide democratically what to do about replacing it, so it will continue.
As Wolff has said: “If you want to understand an economy, not only from the point of view of people who love it, but also from the point of view of people who are critical and think we can do better, then you need to study Marxian economics as part of any serious attempt to understand what’s going on. Not to do it is to exclude yourself from the critical tradition.”
Wolff concentrates on Marx’s key discovery about capitalism, namely the surplus value, which is what employers appropriate above what they pay for wages. Wolff shows that productive workers are not compensated for the full amount and worth of their labour. And that constitutes exploitation. The expropriators constitute a tiny percentage of the population, and they control what happens with that surplus value. It is this relationship of production, Wolff insists, that has thwarted the democratic promises of the American, French, and other bourgeois revolutions. And this system of minority rule over ownership of assets and people’s labour power is also the cause of the staggering inequality that afflicts the world now.
The weakness in Wolff’s narrative, at least as expressed in his previous books is his explanation of why capitalism has crises in investment, production and employment that damages the lives of billions. Wolff adopts the classic underconsumption argument that capitalists pay “insufficient wages to enable workers to purchase growing capitalist output”. Regular readers of this blog will know that I consider this theory of capitalist crises as wrong. Marx rejected it; it does not stand up theoretically as part of Marx’s law of value or profitability; and empirical evidence is against it.
In the second book, Understanding Socialism, Wolff looks at various socialist experiments throughout history and suggests a new path to socialism based on workplace democracy. Socialism allows the many to control the fruits of their labour. And this would be done in a democratic way, with the workers voting on these concerns, as democracy is extended way beyond voting for politicians and even ballot initiatives, to the factory floor, the office, etc.
Wolff focuses on this democratization of the workplace as the basis of a socialist future. Wolff correctly emphasises that the economic base of socialism is the collective ownership of the means of production. But he is concerned not to adopt the central planning model of the failed Soviet Union, as he sees it. So he wants decentralised democracy through workers cooperatives. For him, the solution to recurrent crises and rising inequality lies in “changing the class structure of capitalist enterprises” and replacing them with “workers-directed enterprises.”
Wolff is concerned, rightly, to correct the view that the socialist alternative to capitalism is simply the public ownership of the major corporations and a national plan. Without democracy and workers control at company level there can be no real socialist development. Otherwise state officials merely replace a capitalist board of directors. This is “insufficient conceptually and strategically”.
But Wolff wants to include and emphasise the role of what he calls Workers Self-Directed Enterprises (WSDEs). To me, this seems to be bending the stick too far the other way, being close the utopian socialist ideas of Fourier and Robert Owen. Workers cooperatives without planning implies that markets will continue to rule between coops, opening the door to the forces of the law of value, rather than directing productive forces in the interest of society as a whole. It is one thing to achieve democracy at the workplace, but is it not jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, by leaving the wider economy to power of the market?
Plato’s Republic and the Dark Triad
Plato’s Republic and the Dark Triad
Kelsey Wood
In psychology, the dark triad refers to the personality traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Thanks to serial killers, most people are aware that psychopathy is characterized by lack of emotional warmth, lack of empathy for others, and deceptive and predatory interactions with others. Psychopathy may also be characterized by criminal behavior (with a wide variety in type of crime). Typically, psychopaths are supremely selfish.
The term "psychopath" is often used interchangeably with the term "malignant narcissist," because there are positive correlations between traits of psychopathy and narcissistic personality disorder. In other words, many of the traits overlap. Everyone knows that narcissists crave attention. But narcissists are also deceitful, manipulative, and—like psychopaths—they lack empathy for other people. A glimpse behind his charming mask reveals that the narcissist is really arrogant, dogmatic, condescending, and self-centered.
What about the last dark triad personality trait, Machiavellianism? A Machiavellian is a person who is so focused on his own profit and/or power that he will manipulate, deceive, and exploit others to achieve his goals. Machiavellians believe that the end of power or profit justifies any means whatsoever, even those means that are inhumane and immoral. Machiavellianism is just the all-too-common art of being deceptive and unscrupulous to get ahead.
For the dark triad personality, other persons are just objects which he uses to gain power or profit or enjoyment of some sort. Dark triad personalities are wolves in sheep’s clothing. They are not inhibited by empathy or conscience. They typically want money, power, sex, fame, and special privileges instead of meaningful long-term friendships, partnerships, or love relationships.
Research indicates that characteristics of pathological narcissism are inherited, and also that environmental factors such as childhood abuse, neglect—or even pampering—contribute to the development of narcissistic personality disorder. And the same is true for psychopathy: there is a biological/genetic aspect as well as an environmental/social aspect.
It is worth noting something about the neurobiological aspect of dark triad behavior and thinking. When dark triad traits are exhibited—such as a lack of empathy—brain functioning is impaired in certain key areas of the brain (like the amygdala). A test called a positron emission tomography scan—or PET scan, for short—clearly shows if these impairments exist in your brain. And these traits exist on a spectrum. In other words, it’s not all or nothing: there are degrees of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism.
But more importantly, the environmental aspect of dark triad traits has political implications. In a social environment that prioritizes individual fulfillment over collective effort, psychopaths or malignant narcissists often rise to the top. An individualistic society becomes a culture of narcissism when pathological narcissism is normalized. In a cultural environment of increasing narcissism, dark triad behaviors are encouraged and rewarded. As a result, even those who lack the genetic predisposition may develop the traits of callousness, manipulativeness, and lack of empathy. In our society today, most people—at some time or another—exhibit dark triad traits, even if we are only imitating bad role models. And even corporate persons exhibit these traits.
Let’s consider corporations as persons. Corporate personhood is the legal notion that a corporation—separately from its associated human beings—has many of the legal rights of a natural person. No nation on earth enshrines in its constitution the right of corporate personhood, including the US. But in spite of this, through a series of legal decisions beginning in the early 1800’s, many corporations in the US have been allowed to gain enormous political influence, and to do enormous harm.
In other countries, there are legal restrictions in the constitutions which rigorously limit how property can be used. In brief, outside the US, capital and property can only be used in a way that is consistent with the public good. But in the US, corporations are bound by law to put profits above all other considerations, including the public good.
And yet the notion that corporations are people is a nineteenth-century lie: a corporation is really just an artificial legal construct. The corporate form is only one of many forms of business ownership, and—given the serious problems facing the world today—it’s safe to say that the corporate form is probably not the best type of business ownership. Consider what happens if we ask what kind of person The Weinstein Company is. What kind of person is Wells Fargo, or Comcast, or Monsanto, or Cigna, or Equifax, or Saudi Aramco?
Joel Bakan is a professor of Constitutional Law, and author of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. Using the Hare psychopathy checklist, Bakan investigates numerous actual case histories of corporate wrongdoing and shows how many corporations behave like psychopaths.
But let’s turn now to Plato. Given all this it’s not hard to see how Republic provides a useful definition of justice and moral rightness (dikaiosunē). Plato’s Republic is considered by many scholars to be the foundational text of the Western philosophical tradition. The whole work is comprised of a number of shorter conversations between Socrates and various interlocutors. These discourses all revolve around the attempt to define dikaiosunē, which means both moral rightness in the individual and justice in society.
First some background. Hesiod’s Works and Days (700 B.C.E.) is the canonical text for Ancient Greek moral and political thought, and it provides a baseline for Socrates’ discussion of dikaiosunē (justice/moral rightness) in Plato’s Republic. Hesiod defines unjust actions as those actions that are motivated by greed. The unjust person is motivated by the desire to have more: more than he has, more than he needs, and more than he is entitled to. But how does Hesiod’s association of injustice with greed relate to Plato’s Republic?
Well, this is where we come to Thrasymachus. Socrates versus Thrasymachus is kind of like Greta Thunberg versus Ayn Rand. Socrates urges that society is interconnected like the various parts of a human being. If the little finger is hurt, the whole person feels the pain. In society, if one minority group suffers, the whole society is unjust. Socrates also argues that if we harm anyone, we make them worse. Since in society we are all interdependent in various ways, if we make other people worse, then we are harming ourselves. So even a supremely selfish person should live without harming anyone.
At this point (336c), Thrasymachus interrupts and aggressively insists that what is called “justice” is actually a system of domination intended to serve the interests of powerful and unscrupulous rulers. The powerful few, the rulers in any society, do not themselves abide by the rules they impose on the gullible majority. Instead, the rulers practice wholesale robbery and violence, and manipulate public opinion so successfully that they are believed to be acting in the public welfare.
One of the ways Socrates refutes Thrasymachus involves the distinction between an art or science and the money-earning skills associated with that discipline: for example, to be a good physician is not the same as simply being a wealthy or successful doctor. One is a good physician if the health of the patient is one's primary concern, rather than becoming rich. Similarly, governing well must be grounded in concern for the welfare of the whole society. The ruler is simply not a ruler in the precise sense unless she or he strives to achieve the greatest good for the public.
Socrates, in effect, defines dikaiosunē as a form of social order and a form of social interaction which is not characterized by the dark triad of narcissism, Machiavellianism, or psychopathy. In brief, justice and moral rightness (diakaiosunē means both) is not behaving like a psychopath or antisocial narcissist. This is a negative definition, like many of Plato’s definitions. In other words, Republic indicates what dikaiosunē is not.
By the way, how do we know that someone does not have dark triad traits? Dr. Jeremy Nicholson has identified the two traits to look for if we want to know whether or not a person can be trusted. To be sure you are not dealing with a wolf in sheep’s clothing, look for the two traits of self-control and conscientiousness. The character of Socrates exhibits these traits throughout the Platonic corpus. At the opposite extreme is Thrasymachus, who—in Plato’s Republic—argues for tyranny. Thrasymachus aggressively promotes greed, callousness, manipulativeness, and lack of empathy: ‘might makes right,’ according to Thrasymachus. Against this, Socrates promotes self-control, conscientiousness, and a society that would have no slavery, no inequality between men and women, would start no wars, and would keep money out of politics.
Socrates argues that a life of injustice makes everyone miserable, including the tyrant who does unjust things. For Socrates, developing an unjust psyche is the worst thing that can happen to a person. If you do wrong, it’s better to be caught, to be punished, and to reform. Getting away with it only makes you worse, and your pathology becomes more and more entrenched. By contrast, a life according to justice leads to moral rightness in the individual and justice in society as the collective of individuals. Socrates shows that personal desires for money, power, and enjoyment are antagonistic to the interpersonal desire for the welfare of the community. The responsibilities of governing are incompatible with a life of excessive enjoyment and luxury. Anyone who lusts for political power is not competent to have it. Only those who are capable of doing without excessive enjoyment in order to make themselves wiser and better should be burdened with political duties, because only such individuals will not abuse power. True education, then, involves the transformation of desire, and the reorientation of one’s psyche toward a shared and public, interpersonal good.
This is why Socrates criticizes the rule of the wealthy. Aristos in Greek means “best,” and the best people, according to Plato, are the morally excellent citizens, not the wealthiest. In Republic Socrates argues that greed causes wars and leads finally to the corruption and degeneration of both the psyche and the society. And if the guardians of the society are corrupted by greed, the culture is in decline, and on the road to tyranny, the worst form of government. Moreover, it is in a plutocracy, ruled by the wealthy, that one encounters the “ultimate evil” of utter poverty and homelessness. In sum, the ungoverned pursuit of wealth, power, and enjoyment paves the way for tyranny and constant war (567a).
Socrates teaches that one becomes a philosophical citizen only to the extent that the desire for personal benefits is transformed into desire for the good of the whole society. Obviously, it would take a specialized system of education to produce such citizens, people who are willing to risk personal fulfillment in order to serve the public good. But we all know that intelligence is more than just the calculation of personal profit. However, in order to actualize this “more,” we have to rein in our culture of narcissism. If we do this, then we might achieve and sustain both social fairness and environmental justice. In the meantime, we can try to get the malignant narcissists and their money out of politics.
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