Politics above people. What else is new?

From my favorite cartoonist, Matt Davies.

From my favorite cartoonist, Matt Davies.

I don’t want to write about the sequester; I was hoping I wouldn’t have to.

But here we are as the two sides in Washington bicker like toddlers. Well, one side is bickering like toddlers, but they can hold things up all by themselves, which is what they intend to do.

They’re protecting their rich and powerful friends and ignoring their constituents.

So, what will the sequester do? Well, it will hold up your tax return for a few months or more for one thing. I hope you weren’t depending on that money for anything, like to help pay off a maxed-out credit card or supplementing your unemployment check.

It will send less money to things like public health, so we’ll all be more vulnerable to outbreaks of various illnesses that can kill us. Fewer people will be able to get vaccinations to keep them from getting sick and response to outbreaks will be slower.

It will cause the layoffs of 30,000 teachers and teacher assistants.

Defense contractors will face layoffs.

Unemployment benefits will be cut.

And on and on …

This is exactly what the Republicans want to happen. In fact, they’re trying to force the cuts to last a year, even if a compromise is reached.

Their rich friends won’t be hurt because those people can afford whatever they need. But what about hungry children? What about people who depend on government-funded clinics or adult day care for elderly parents who have dementia and can’t be left alone?

They like to claim it’s all about choices, but I don’t know any children who chose to have parents whose living-wage jobs were shipped overseas and who now have to work at Walmart, where 70 percent of workers are paid so little they have to rely on government assistance.

That’s right, you and I subsidize the disgustingly rich Walton family with our tax dollars so they can keep getting richer while their workers go hungry.

The Republicans don’t care about us; they don’t care if we lose our homes, go hungry or die. If they can get rid of birth control, the poor will keep pushing out babies — cogs for the money-making and war machines. We live in poverty and they get fatter.

We MUST get rid of these clowns in 2014, both at the national and state levels. They’ve done enough damage. In fact, it will take generations to fix their damage.

We need to start organizing NOW.

 

 

 

One last plea against Amendment One

Tomorrow is Primary Day here in North Carolina, and the most important item on the agenda is Amendment One, or The Amendment.

Its supporters tout it as a ban on same-sex marriage, but what it really does is attack families, gay and straight, young and old, adults and children. It takes family benefits away from people who rely on them, including survivor benefits, and worst of all, health care benefits.

Take, for example, my friends Mike and Elizabeth, who have a young daughter. They’re a strong family; they adore each other and their child. Like any other couple, they struggle to make ends meet. But because Elizabeth has a chronic illness that absolutely requires medical care, she and Mike can’t get married; if they do, she loses her health care and likely will die from complications. She wants to work and contribute to the family, but if she does, she loses Medicaid and likely will die from complications of her illness.

Now, to add to the indignities they endure, Mike could lose all rights to his daughter because of the amendment. Mike will have to choose between the life of the woman he loves and the rights to the child he adores.

What kind of society is this that calls itself Christian and pro-family and then proceeds to demolish families?

In another twist, the amendment will take away domestic violence protections for people who are not legally married. A woman wouldn’t be able to get an order of protection against her boyfriend. I guess that’s punishment for not being legally married.

Ohio passed an anti-marriage law that’s less restrictive than North Carolina’s, and it has helped batterers get out of jail because they weren’t legally married when the abuse took place. It has made orders of protection unenforceable.

Because this is an amendment to the state constitution, courts can not overturn it, and they can’t change it. North Carolina courts won’t be able to choose whether to apply the anti-gay constitutional amendment to domestic violence cases.  A constitution, whether federal or state, is supreme law. If a court thinks that there is a conflict, the Constitution controls and the court will limit the reach of laws accordingly.

In other words the amendment would rewrite the Constitution, which would nullify all the state laws protecting victims domestic violence unless they are married legally, potentially undoing all the work that the General Assembly have done to protect domestic violence victims.

Perhaps some who want to vote for the law want to punish people who aren’t married legally because they want their so-called Christian values enforces no matter who gets hurt.

But overall, I think most people just don’t know how many families will be damaged or destroyed by this amendment.

Let’s not kid ourselves, people will die because of this. Some will die because they lose access to health care, some because they lose the protection of domestic violence laws. Do we really want to be responsible for those deaths?

Please, no matter what your views on gay marriage, vote NO on Amendment One. Gay marriage is already illegal in North Carolina; we don’t have to institutionalize it.

What does it look like to you?

My team's vision of a community where people help each other and there's enough for everyone.

I was at an anti-poverty summit today, sponsored by Children First/Communities in Schools of Buncombe County.

The activities centered around how we could eliminate poverty in a county where nearly one in four children lives below the national poverty level, an income of $22,050 for a family of four. In reality, it takes double that to be able to make ends meet here.

Parents struggle with unsafe housing, low wages, few good food choices, little or no health care for themselves, inadequate child care and a social services system that’s confusing, seemingly uncaring and traps them in poverty.

We told each other stories of families we knew — or our own families, and talked about what we might be able to do to change those stories.

We started with ideas: a home visit by a nurse to every new parent, plus a guide to parenting resources; community centers where people could go for help and rise to become volunteers and community leaders themselves; child-care cooperatives at the community college and in the community that would offer parents training in child care and age-appropriate toys and materials to promote optimal early brain development; community gardens, or trucks that sell fresh fruits and vegetables that travel to neighborhood that have no grocery stores or farm stands; access to safe recreation; help navigating the social services system; programs with rules that are flexible enough to accommodate different families and cultures, and of course, access to quality health care for children and their parents.

There were a couple hundred ideas posted on the walls before we were done.

We talked about the “benefits cliff” that removes assistance before people are ready. For example, someone who works overtime and makes a few extra dollars just winds up having to pay it in housing because the rent is tied to income, or taking away child care subsidies as soon as a mother finds work. People can’t get ahead; they feel trapped.

We were asked to illustrate our vision of what the county could look like in five years if our solutions were implemented — but we also had to talk about how they might be implemented. Who would work together to get a visiting nurse into the home of every new parent? Who would be responsible for putting together a parenting resource guide? Who would operate the community resource centers in our dream community?

At the end of the day, we were asked to write a statement of our vision. This is my group’s statement:

“We share the value of strong families and recognize the interdependence of our community. We choose to be bold and build innovative and efficient resource networks that nurture a holistic, healthy, sustainable and abundant life for all.”

It will take bold action to fix our communities and clean up the mess left by corporate greed, but we can do it, one community at a time.

Tomorrow, summit participants will talk about how we do it here.