Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Minimum Rage

Our Republican National Congress has done it again. In less time than it takes to say "morosely ironic" Congress has both voted to give themselves a raise (those are the only votes that always pass) and NOT to raise the minimum wage. I mean really, at $5.15 an hour, haven't those greedy working poor gotten enough out of our struggling corporate empires? They're lucky their jobs haven't gone to 5 year old Indonesian kids by now (for those of you who only recognize sarcasm in the tone of one's voice, I invite you to apply that tone to your inner narrator right about now).

Conservatives place too much faith in the capitalist system. The simple fact is that laissez faire capitalism proved itself a failure years ago. Need I remind us that the Great Depression really did earn the title, "great" for a reason. But laissez faire is no longer an issue. Congress has expanded its power under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution by exponential proportions. Our conservative forbears have been forced to admit that there is no longer such a thing as intrastate commerce, at least for the most part. Now we must once again force reality down the throats of the conservatives.

The basic, driving principle of our economy boils down to greed, pure and simple. Proponents of the system will call it self-interest, but that's just a candy coating on the harsh reality of our economic existence. The story goes that capitalism works because each individual is motivated to accumulate as much wealth as possible, thereby encouraging both production and consumption, while the free, unimpeded market is guided by the "invisible hand" (I'm not making this stuff up, read "The Wealth of Nations") that works to fairly dispense commodities to those who work hard enough to deserve them. The problem is that with accumulated wealth comes great power and, when accompanied by a largely unregulated inheritance system, that wealth and power stays in the hands of a few individuals until we end up with the picture we all now see (or at least ought to see): the overwhelming majority of the world's resources concentrated under the control of the overwhelming minority of people. Karl Marx thought this phenomenon would lead to the inevitable uprising of the working class and subsequent mass redistribution of wealth. Marx, however, was wrong because he underestimated the stranglehold of power associated with great wealth and the phenomenon we Americans like to call our "dream," but what rightly ought to be called what it is- greed.

Now for those of you with just enough sense to know that Marx founded his own economic system, one that became a very dirty word in this country, let me clarify my own stance. I am not promoting a communist revolution. Communism has its own set of very dire problems that I will not address here, but suffice it to say that's not what I want. I simply have to add this caveat because the very mention of Marx's name tends to invalidate most arguments in this country, particularly those arguments with the ill informed.

My purpose here is to give a Stephen Colbert-esque "wag of the finger" to Congress for not increasing the minimum wage. $5.15 an hour is a joke, albeit a very unfunny joke to those who have to live with it. What I am saying to my conservative friends is this: don't whine about our welfare system, state-supported healthcare, or those dirty poor people who so inconvenience your lives and rob you of your hard-earned money through taxes when YOUR Congress, full of those people YOU keep voting for, won't even raise their wage to a paltry 7 bucks an hour. YOU asked for it, YOU got it, now deal with it.

Saturday, June 10, 2006

A Strategy of Denial

Under the guise of some lofty notion about freedom of choice, many of our state republicans, including our embattled governor, are pushing for government subsidies to send children to private schools. For those of you who read my previous post about the racist roots of the republican stranglehold on South Carolina politics it might benefit you to know that the overwhelming majority of these private schools were founded in the mid-50's and early 60's...hmmm right around the time our national government was forcing an end to segregation. Why is it that today, in 2006, we are still debating incentives to segregate our schools?

But the racist roots of the republican push to privatize education is not my main concern here. The fact is that our public school system is suffering in many ways and that providing a tax incentive for upper-middle class white kids to flee our public schools is simply the wrong answer to the plight of our school system. School vouchers are a band-aid fix to our educational problem. Meanwhile, those poorer students who really don't have a choice even if the government offered tax breaks, would be sent back into a separate and unequal school system that perpetuates the cycle of poverty in our state that can only be broken with quality education for all.

And yet one of the firmest foundations of GOP dominance in our state comes from poor, rural whites who are continually preyed upon to vote against their own interests by saavy politicians who appeal to their sense of freedom. Sure, you'll be free...free to watch as the priveledged remain priveledged and the good jobs go to the only kids whose parent could afford to send them to a school that provided a decent education. State money for private schools is simply wrong. The money spent by the government (and yes, tax incentives are de facto government spending) rightly belongs to all the people, not just those who can afford to pay the balance of private school tuition, the cost of transportation to and from school, as well as the hidden costs that come along with poor kids trying to fit in with the rich.

Sanford and his republican colleagues are espousing a policy that is devisive and insidious and our state will continue to suffer for it. South Carolina is a relatively poor state and one of the key ways to break that trend is to provide a quality education to all of the state's students, rich and poor, black and white. We have to understand that our state cannot progress, cannot attract meaningful jobs, unless we provide business owners with a pool of well-educated, goal-driven, hopeful employees. So conservatives, if you really want to keep things as they are, if you really want to remain at the bottom, then vote republican and your wish will come true.

Friday, June 02, 2006

Onward into the Great Morass

The single biggest issue of late in South Carolina politics has been what its supporters have termed "Property Tax Relief." It was recently pointed out to me by someone intimately involved in the debate that when politicians include the term "relief" in any sentence about taxes, the public tends to support it without question. Of course, no one likes to pay taxes and tax "relief" seems like a good deal for everybody. But let us examine exactly what this property tax "relief" is, who it benefits, and who it does not.

First, the gentleman who I have personally witnessed in the lobby of the Statehouse and in the gallery for every Senate debate on property taxes, the man who is arguably one of civil society's greatest proponents of the tax bill, lives in an old house in Charleston overlooking the Battery. For those of you unfamiliar with Charleston real estate, his house is on one of the most valuable pieces of land in the state. This is that man who is championing property tax "relief." It seems to me, a man of relatively meager assets, that any tax legislation supported so vigorously by someone holding such valuable assets is dubious in nature and deserves close scrutiny by those of us who find ourselves out of the highest tax brackets.

Also, because our local property taxes provide for the vast majority of the money spent on education, eliminating such taxes opens a Pandora's box of issues for those of us concerned with South Carolina's public schools. The Senate Democrats saw this opportunity to push for an equitable school funding program to be attached to the property tax "relief" bill. Under this bill, monies from the richer counties would be filtered through statewide programs into the school systems giving a roughly equal amount of money, per student, to each school in this state. I have personally attended public schools in both poor, rural counties and richer, more urban counties and I can vouch for the vast difference between the two. We must ask ourselves, is it fair to those kids who have the misfortune of being born in a rural area that their schools are underfunded and void of any of the newer technology and innovation that has made a few of the schools in this state great?

Paul Harrison wrote a famous book in the 1970's on the subject of worldwide poverty and, according to him, one of the root causes of poverty is geographic location. The logic goes that those peoples living in places that are naturally disadvantaged by climate and topography make up the vast majority of the systematically impoverished peoples of the world. Seems to make sense: if you live in the desert, it's probably thought to grow crops. Along the same lines, those students who were born in rural areas, where property values are low, attend underfunded schools. By allowing such a system to persist, we are dooming these kids to a life of poverty because we refuse to sacrifice a few of the creature comforts of our rich schools in order to promote equality of opportunity.

You should have seem the look on the President Pro Tempore's face when the issue of equitable school funding came up in Senate debates. I was a look of shock, horror, and disdain. The problem with our state's schools is that we allow a small percentage of them to prosper at the expense of the vast majority. But hey, we need people to shine our shoes, pump our gas, and bring us our filet mignon...right?

A Quick Note...

I have gathered from some of the comments posted that I was not as explicit as I should have been about my wishes not to discuss religion in this blog. Politics is a contentious enough issue without involving religion which is why I don't wish to continue any more theological dialogue. I'll never be able to change anyone's mind about religion, that is a matter of faith and something I have no desire to do anyway. But I'm not going to reply to any religiously charged comments here because I don't want this forum to turn in that direction. If you desire to debate politics that is fine, I'll debate you until I'm blue in the face, but I don't think its my place to comment on anyone's religious views, so I'm not going to.