White House Says GOP Is Trying to 'Take Food Out of the Mouths of Hungry Americans'

The GOP act in ways which are undeniably, at their root, evil. The heartlessness, greed, continued obscene redistribution of wealth upwards, and the crushing poverty and suffering openly endorsed and perpetuated by the Republican Party needs to be seen for what it is. And for the Democratic Party to capitulate, to collude, to acquiesce in any of it is to be part of that evil. Full stop. And this infuriates me! And breaks my heart.... Molly

Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) talk to reporters outside of the White House on May 22, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

"The GOP claims doing so is necessary in the interest of $11 billion in deficit reduction. But at the same time, they have doubled down on tax cuts skewed to the rich and special interests."

By JAKE JOHNSON

The Biden White House late Friday accused Republicans of attempting to "take food out of the mouths of hungry Americans" by imposing new work requirements on recipients of federal nutrition assistance, a public rebuke of the GOP that came as negotiators worked to finalize a debt ceiling agreement.

Additional work requirements appear to be among the final sticking points in the time-sensitive talks, with the GOP insisting on their inclusion in any agreement to raise the debt limit.

In a statement Friday night, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said the GOP's proposed work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are "designed to tie the most vulnerable up in bureaucratic paperwork" and "have shown no benefit for bringing more people into the workforce."

"The GOP claims doing so is necessary in the interest of $11 billion in deficit reduction," said Bates. "But at the same time, they have doubled down on tax cuts skewed to the rich and special interests that would add $3.5 trillion to our debt."

House Republicans have demanded new work requirements for recipients of SNAP, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)—many of whom already work.

Asked Friday whether the GOP would be willing to drop its push for work requirements, Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.)—the party's lead negotiator—said, "Hell no."

"Hell no," he repeated. "Not a chance."

The White House has spoken out against new work requirements for SNAP and Medicaid, but it's unclear whether it opposes fresh work mandates for TANF, which replaced the more generous Aid to Families With Dependent Children program under the Clinton welfare reform law that Biden supported as a senator.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, welcomed the White House's statement against SNAP work requirements, which analysts say could strip food aid from millions of people amid a worsening hunger crisis.

"The president is calling out MAGA GOP hypocrisy of refusing to raise the debt ceiling so the economy doesn't crash simply to take food from hungry people," Jayapal tweeted Saturday. "When you count admin[istrative] costs of bureaucratic red tape, this would produce ZERO savings. Isn't and has never been about saving money."

The White House issued its statement amid growing progressive concerns over the concessions the Biden administration has reportedly granted to GOP hostage-takers.

On Friday, watchdogs, Democratic lawmakers, and policy analysts responded with outrage to reports that the Biden White House is leaning toward accepting Republicans' demand for IRS funding cuts—a giveaway to rich tax cheats.

Progressives have also voiced alarm over reports that the emerging debt ceiling deal includes a two-year cap on non-military federal spending, which would result in cuts to key domestic programs.

"Any deal is a disaster since most government departments and agencies are currently severely underfunded," warned Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.commondreams.org/news/white-house-gop-work-requirements#:~:text=The%20Biden%20White%20House%20late,finalize%20a%20debt%20ceiling%20agreement.

DeSantis Accused of ‘Catastrophic’ Climate Approach After Campaign Launch

It cannot be overstated how dangerous this man is — not only to our country, but to all nations, to all of the children of all of the species on Earth, to the possibility of sustaining a habitable planet. Fascism is an existential threat to us all. And this is tragically just one face among many of fascism in America. — Molly

Environmental groups have taken aim at DeSantis over a record on climate they say is no better than Donald Trump’s, his rival for the Republican presidential nomination. Photograph: Wade Vandervort/AFP/Getty Images

Republican ‘trying to out-Trump Trump’ on climate, expert says, as governor says he rejects the ‘politicization of the weather’

By Oliver Milman

Ron DeSantis has been accused of a “catastrophic” approach to the climate crisis after he launched his campaign for US president by saying he rejects the “politicization of the weather” and questioning whether hurricanes hitting his home state of Florida have been worsened by climate change.

DeSantis, the Republican Florida governor who announced his bid for the White House via a glitch-heavy Twitter stream on Wednesday, has previously dismissed concerns about global heating as “leftwing stuff” and he expanded upon this theme during a Fox News interview following his campaign launch.

“People tried to say when we had [Hurricane] Ian that it was because of climate change but if you look at the first 60 years from 1900 to 1960 we had more major hurricanes hit Florida than the 60 years since then,” DeSantis told his interlocutor, the former Republican congressman Trey Gowdy.

“This is something that is a fact of life in the Sunshine state. I’ve always rejected the politicization of the weather.”

Climate scientists have said that while it is true that hurricanes have not become significantly more frequent due to climate change, there is good evidence that the heating of the ocean, now at record levels, as well as the atmosphere is causing storms to rapidly intensify and become more powerful.

A study in the wake of Hurricane Ian, which pulverized roads and buildings in Florida last year, causing $112bn in damages and around 150 deaths in total in the US, found that climate change worsened the storm’s extreme rainfall by around 10%.

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said that DeSantis’s stance towards climate science is “classic projection”.

“It is Ron DeSantis who is engaged in the ‘politicization of the weather’ by denying basic, established science – the intensification of tropical storms with human-caused warming of the oceans.”

Mann added that DeSantis has favored fossil fuel interests over Florida’s, a state acutely vulnerable to sea level rise and more powerful storms that has “been placed directly in harm’s way by the devastating consequences of fossil fuel burning and the resulting warming of our planet”.

Environmental groups have also taken aim at DeSantis over a record on climate they say is no better than Donald Trump’s, his rival for the Republican presidential nomination.

While governor, DeSantis has adopted bills banning Florida’s cities from adopting 100% clean energy goals and barred the state’s pension fund from making investment decisions that consider the climate crisis due to what he called a corporate attempt to “impose an ideological agenda on the American people”. He has also attacked the US military for being “woke” for warning about the national security risks posed by climate impacts.

“The cost of taking his anti-climate record to the national stage as president would be catastrophic,” said Pete Maysmith, senior vice-president of campaigns for the League of Conservation Voters. “DeSantis has already made clear he would unleash his war on climate science, clean energy jobs, and strong pollution safeguards against clean air and clean water.”

During his elections to Congress and to the Florida governor’s mansion, DeSantis has taken more than $1m in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry, with his campaign committee receiving $2m just last year from Club for Growth, a conservative organization that successfully agitated for the US to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement when Trump was president.

“We need fossil fuels,” DeSantis said at an event in March. “You can’t just get rid of them unless you guys want to pay a lot more for energy.”

However, the governor’s supporters argue that he has forged strong environmentalist credentials in Florida, signing bills to beef up the state’s resilience to sea level rise and pledging billions of dollars to restore the ailing Everglades, which has been besieged by agricultural development and, increasingly, climate change.

This record could have been the basis for a pragmatic alternative to Trump and help appeal to voters increasingly alarmed by rising temperatures, according to Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman who now advocates for a conservative response to the climate crisis.

“He’s done some things in Florida designed to address the problem of climate change, he could’ve been the post-Trump successful governor, the solver of problems,” said Inglis.

“But instead he’s choosing to be more of the anti-woke warrior than Trump. He’s slugging it out in the Trump lane which is really a terrible mistake. I’m hearing from Republicans in Florida ‘why is he choosing this path?’

“He could’ve said, ‘Hey, we are dealing with this climate issue in Florida, let’s lead the world on this.’ Instead he’s trying to out-Trump Trump.”

Inglis said that while some senior Republicans fret they will lose out on a younger generation of climate-concerned voters, they still risk being beaten in primary races by candidates that back Trump’s ongoing embrace of climate denialism.

“People like (House of Representatives speaker) Kevin McCarthy know that young conservatives want action on climate change and even if Trump wins he will be a lame duck by 2026 and the party could start moving on by then,” said Inglis.

“The trouble is, the scientists say we don’t have the time to wait for that. That really is the problem.”

Please go here for this post: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/28/ron-desantis-climate-crisis-campaign

Grace Lee Boggs: Replacing Growing the Economy With the Need to Grow Our Souls

Grace Lee Boggs was another great visionary activist and author whose courage and truth-telling, deep wisdom and integrity, and compassion and fierce love over the course of her 100 years here on Earth lives on to inform and inspire us all. — Molly

Love Is About What We Do Today and 

Tomorrow and the Day After and 

Other Wisdom Quotes 

by Grace Lee Boggs

I think people are really looking for some way whereby we can grow our souls rather than our economy. I think that at some level, people recognize that growing our economy is destroying us. It's destroying us as human beings, it's destroying our planet. I think there's a great human desire for solutions, for profound solutions — and that nothing simple will do it. It really requires some very great searching of our souls.

We need to discern who we are and expand on our humanness and sacredness. That's how we change the world, which happens because WE will be the change.

We're in a very, very profound crisis. It's so obvious that no one in the power structure, either the corporate power structure or the political power structure, knows what to do or is willing to do what's necessary in relationship both to global war and global warming. It's so obvious that conditions are getting worse for the great majority of Americans. It's so obvious also that we face a very serious danger from people who feel, see themselves only as victims. And we have to somehow, in a very loving way, help the American people to recover the best that is in our traditions. 

In the middle of catastrophe, in the middle of disaster, people — particularly people who have already suffered — see an opportunity to evolve to another stage of humanity. 

We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of 'critical mass.' It's always about critical connections.

You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.

The main reason why Western civilization lacks Spirituality, or an awareness of our interconnectedness with one another and the universe, according to Gandhi, is that it has given priority to economic and technological development over human and community development.

Being a victim of oppression in the United States is not enough to make you revolutionary, just as dropping out of your mother's womb is not enough to make you human. People who are full of hate and anger against their oppressors or who only see Us versus Them can make a rebellion but not a revolution. The oppressed internalize the values of the oppressor. Therefore, any group that achieves power, no matter how oppressed, is not going to act differently from their oppressors as long as they have not confronted the values that they have internalized and consciously adopted different values.

The image of blacks usually is one of people who are suffering from hunger, unemployment, and poverty. The idea of them as agents and activists — as starting revolutions — does not exist in most people's minds. And I think it's very, very important that folks understand how much this country was founded on the enslavement of blacks, and how the resistance of blacks to that enslavement has been the spark plug for so many important developments.

I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another. 

Nonviolence is based on recognizing that all of us are human beings. And at a certain point we begin to learn that you don't gather very much by making enemies out of people and not recognizing their humanity. Nonviolence is essentially based on recognizing the humanity in every one one of us.

History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories — triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally — has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings. 

You don't choose the times you live in, but you do choose who you want to be.

I think that deep in our hearts we know that our comforts, our conveniences are at the expense of other people.

We need to undergo a very radical revolution in values. And we need to think about what it's like to have become so materialistic that we think having a good job, and consuming like crazy to compensate for the dehumanization of the job, is living like a human being. 

People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values. 

Keep recognizing that reality is changing and that your ideas have to change. Don’t get stuck in old ideas. 

To make a revolution, people must not only struggle against existing institutions. They must make a philosophical/ spiritual leap and become more 'human' human beings. In order to change/ transform the world, they must change/ transform themselves. 

A revolution that is based on the people exercising their creativity in the midst of devastation is one of the great historical contributions of humankind. 

We can begin by doing small things at the local level, like planting community gardens or looking out for our neighbors. That is how change takes place in living systems, not from above but from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously.

Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual.

People in Detroit aren't just urban gardening. They're starting a new mode of education. They're trying to give children the education to be "solutionaries" rather than people who are going to get jobs in the system. And that is a huge change, a cultural revolution.

We urgently need a paradigm shift in our concept of the purposes and practices of education. We need to leave behind the concept of education as a passport to more money and higher status in the future and replace it with a concept of education as an ongoing process that enlists the tremendous energies and creativity of schoolchildren in rebuilding and respiriting our communities and our cities now, in the present. 

The natural tendency of children is to solve problems, but we try to indoctrinate them with facts, which they are supposed to feed back, and then we fail them. And that's child abuse. And you should never raise children that way. You should cultivate and encourage their natural tendencies to create solutions to the problems around them.

Talk and write in a way that encourages the mutual exchange of ideas and acts like a midwife to people birthing their own ideas.

We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other. We urgently need to bring the neighbor back into our hoods, not only in our inner cities but also in our suburbs, our gated communities, on Main Street and Wall Street, and on Ivy League campuses. 

Rebellions tend to be negative, to denounce and expose the enemy without providing a positive vision of a new future... A revolution is not just for the purpose of correcting past injustices, a revolution involves a projection of man/woman into the future... It begins with projecting the notion of a more human human being, i.e. a human being who is more advanced in the specific qualities which only human beings have — creativity, consciousness and self-consciousness, a sense of political and social responsibility. 

Why is nonviolence such an important philosophy? Because it respects the capacity of human beings to grow, and we owe that to each other. 

I think we have to rethink the concept of “leader.” Because “leader” implies “follower.” And, so many — not so many, but I think we need to appropriate, embrace the idea that we are the leaders we've been looking for. 

We need to do what I call visionary organizing. Recognize that in every crisis, people do not respond like a school of fish. Some people become immobilized. Some people become very angry, some commit suicide, and other people begin to find solutions. And visionary organizers look at those people, recognize them and encourage them, and they become leaders of the future.

I think we’re not looking sufficiently at what is happening at the grassroots in the country. We have not emphasized sufficiently the cultural revolution that we have to make among ourselves in order to force the government to do differently. Things do not start with governments. 

The only way to survive is by taking care of one another. 

When you read Marx (or Jesus) this way, you come to see that real wealth is not material wealth and real poverty is not just the lack of food, shelter, and clothing. Real poverty is the belief that the purpose of life is acquiring wealth and owning things. Real wealth is not the possession of property but the recognition that our deepest need, as human beings, is to keep developing our natural and acquired powers to relate to other human beings. 

So many institutions in our society need reinventing. The time has come for a new dream. That's what being a revolutionary is. 

Our challenge, as we enter the new millennium, is to deepen the commonalities and the bonds between these tens of millions, while at the same time continuing to address the issues within our local communities by two-sided struggles that not only say "No" to the existing power structure but also empower our constituencies to embrace the power within each of us to crease the world anew.

Civil and voting rights for blacks didn’t come from the White House or from masses demonstrating in front of the White House. They came after the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–56, the Freedom Rides in 1961, the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham in 1963, the Mississippi Freedom Summer and Freedom Schools in 1964, and the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965. In other words, they came only after hundreds of thousands of black Americans and their white supporters had accepted the challenge and risks of ourselves making or becoming the changes we want to see in the world. Women’s leadership in the public sphere didn’t come from the White House or from CEOs. It came only after millions of women came together in small consciousness-raising groups to share stories of our “second sex” lives. Today’s good news is that Americans in all walks of life have begun to create another America from the ground up in many unforeseen ways. In our bones we sense that this is no ordinary time. It is a time of deep change, not just of social structure and economy but also of ourselves. 

With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of rights. We have entered the epoch of responsibilities, which requires new, more socially-minded human beings and new, more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy.

I am often asked what keeps me going after all these years. I think it is the realization that there is no final struggle. Whether you win or lose, each struggle brings forth new contradictions, new and more challenging questions. As Alice Walker put it in one of my favorite poems: I must love the questions themselves as Rilke said like locked rooms full of treasures to which my blind and groping key does not yet fit.” 

We are beginning to understand that the world is always being made fresh and never finished; that activism can be the journey rather than the arrival; that's struggle doesn't always have to be confrontational but can take the form of reaching out to find common ground with the many others in our society who are also seeking ways out from alienation, isolation, privatization, and dehumanization by corporate globalization.

As Jimmy Boggs used to remind us, revolutions are made out of love for people and for place. He often talked about loving America enough to change it. 'I love this country,' he used to say, 'not only because my ancestors' blood is in the soil but because of what I believe it can become.' Love isn't just something you feel. It's something you do everyday when you go out and pick the paper and bottles scattered the night before on the corner, when you stop and talk to a neighbor, when you argue passionately for what you believe in with whoever will listen, when you call a friend to see how they're doing, when you write a letter to the newspaper, when you give a speech and give 'em hell, when you never stop believing that we can all be more than what we are. In other words, Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after.

Jason Stanley: Tucker Carlson Is Not an Anti-War Populist Rebel. He Is a Fascist

Chilling. And spot on. We Americans, and beyond!, need to understand what fascism is — what it looks and sounds like, how it acts, what its roots and ideology are, and what its devastating and deadly impact is. And, together, we need to rise up against fascism wherever we find it and stand up for that which respects and honors and protects all life rather than destroys it. — Molly

‘Some commentators have taken Carlson to be a rebellious anti-war populist, evading easy political characterization. But is it really so complicated to classify Carlson’s political ideology?’ Photograph: Brynn Anderson/AP

On his show Carlson railed against immigration and LGBTQ+ rights and apologized for Putinist aggression. None of it is new

By Jason Stanley

Fox News has finally broken ties with its most popular star, Tucker Carlson. His ousting has been bemoaned by some commentators, who have taken Carlson to be a rebellious anti-war populist, evading easy political characterization. But is it really so complicated to classify Carlson’s political ideology?

In late February 2022, then Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, began a pro-Russia monologue urging his audience to ask themselves the question: “Why do I hate Putin so much?” The gist of Carlson’s comments about Russia’s leader is that Putin should not be regarded as an enemy. Instead, the real enemies of America are those who call white Americans racist, those who teach so-called critical race theory in schools, business elites who ship jobs abroad, and those who imposed Covid lockdowns on the United States.

In short, Carlson urged, the real enemies of America are internal – racial minorities, doctors and politicians, professors and educators, and large corporations who shift jobs to other countries. Carlson has been resolutely against US support for Ukraine. Insofar as Carlson has since that point gone to war, it has rather been against these supposed internal enemies.

So, is Tucker Carlson hard to classify? On the one hand, he spreads tropes central to neo-Nazi propaganda, such as “white replacement” theory, suggesting that leftist elites seek to replace “legacy Americans” by foreign non-white immigrants. On the other hand, he denounces media, intellectual and political elites, as well as US intervention in Ukraine, platforming those who identify as the “anti-war left”, such as Jimmy Dore. How should we best understand this set of views? If Carlson has fascist sympathies, as do, quite inarguably, many of those who applaud him, how do we understand his firm stance against US military and financial support for Ukraine? Surely, historically speaking, fascism is not compatible with the isolationist position Carlson has urged.

We should look to history as our guide here. But the history that best informs us in this case is not European history, but American history. Before the beginning of the second world war, all of America’s pro-fascist parties opposed US intervention on the side of its allies against Nazi Germany. Often, the opposition to the US supporting Britain against Nazi Germany was represented as “isolationism”.

There were openly fascist organizations during this time, such as the German American Bund. Somewhat more ambiguous was the America First movement. As the historian Bradley Hart recounts, in a packed America First rally in Madison Square Garden in 1941, the Montana senator Burton K Wheeler denounced “jingoistic journalists and saber-rattling bankers” who were pushing the nation into war against Germany.

While the agenda of some members of the America First movement at the time might have genuinely been pacifist, it’s quite clear that the main agenda was in fact support for Hitler. The America First movement had strong support from American fascist movements of various stripes. Its most prominent spokesperson, Charles Lindbergh, published the following words in support of his anti-war position in an essay entitled “Geography, Aviation, and Race” in Reader’s Digest in 1939:

… It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again. This alliance with foreign races means nothing but death to us. It is our turn to guard our heritage from Mongol and Persian and Moor, before we become engulfed in a limitless foreign sea. Our civilization depends on a united strength among ourselves; on strength too great for foreign enemies to challenge; on a Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood; on an English fleet, a German air force, a French army, an American nation, standing together as guardians of our common heritage, sharing strength, dividing influence.

It is simply inarguable fact that American racial fascism has a clear isolationist tradition, especially when the wars in question are against fascist opponents.

But is Putin’s Russia fascist? In Russia, opposition politicians and journalists are regularly imprisoned or murdered. Russia has passed harsh laws against LGBTQ+ communities. Russia’s ideology is based on a militarized Russian nationalism, and its war against Ukraine is quite clearly genocidal in nature. Just as Nazi Germany represented itself as the defender of Christianity and Europe’s classic traditions against an existential threat posed by leftist atheist Jews, Putin represents Russia as the sole defender of the European Christian traditions against similar existential threats, such as “gender ideology”.

Putin’s Russia is the international leader of the global far right, promoting ultra-nationalism, religious traditionalism and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment across the world. If Russia is not fascist, then even Nazi Germany in the 1930s was not fascist. As the historian Timothy Snyder has urged, “we should finally say it”: Russia is fascist.

Just as claims to be isolationists by American inter-war fascists were quite rightly taken to be expressions of support for Nazi ideology, there is good reason to take Carlson’s similar claims not as denunciations of American militarism but as expressions of support for Putinism, which he seems largely to share.

What about Carlson’s scorn for the media, intellectual, financial and political elite, which he lacerates with regularity on his show? Here too there is little ambiguity. Carlson does not scorn all elites – after all, he himself was making as much as $20m a year from Fox news. He only targets certain elites. In the ideology of American fascism, the elites he targets are associated with liberal democracy and Jewish control.

American fascists have always denounced the media, intellectuals and politicians. Carlson is careful to avoid explicitly antisemitic statements. But his show is the home of anti-Soros conspiracy theories. The antisemitism in his programming is clearly dog-whistled, and Jewish organizations have been among the first to cheer his ousting. Indeed, if Carlson did not regularly denounce media, intellectual, financial and political elites, regular targets of Nazi ideology, the case for calling him an American fascist would be much less clear.

Nazi ideology supported strict gender roles – one of the central targets of the first mass Nazi book burning on 10 May 1933 was Magnus Hirschfeld’s collection of LGBTQ+ literature, the largest in the world and the largest documentation of gender fluidity (Hirschfeld coined the term “transsexual”). Carlson has used his platform to denounce transgender Americans as existential threats to Christianity. Fascists target cosmopolitan ways as existential threats to masculinity – a viewpoint Carlson also clearly shares.

Finally, fascism praises violence against democracy, valorizing violent street mobs attacking democratic processes and institutions as martyrs to the nation. Here too Tucker Carlson fits perfectly into the tradition.

It is not difficult at all to classify Tucker Carlson’s political ideology. He is an American fascist, only the latest in a long historical line.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/28/tucker-carlson-politics-fascism