"The Bell Curve" - A Bogus (Pseudo-scientific) Brief For Racism & Inequality

Protesters at Middlebury College in July, 2017, and  social pseudo-scientist Charles Murray, who marched his way into eugenics infamy with his (co-authored) academic farce, 'The Bell Curve'.


Let us concede we live in treacherous times with bastardized memes and subtle mind viruses regularly unleashed on an unsuspecting populace.  In this deformed mental and intellectual atmosphere, Donnie Dotard and his lame tweets is only the most obnoxious example.  More generally,  climate denial propaganda, economic misinformation and irrational conspiracy  ideations  - such as spawned by Q Anon - are a dime a dozen.  And sadly,  relatively few Americans possess the critical thinking skills to parse BS from fact and distinguish fake news from the genuine article..

Into this moral and intellectual vacuum any kind of poseur, dilettante, or crank can seemingly make an impression, especially if he or she can generate some facsimile of genuine academic work,  i.e. a veneer of actual scholarship.  No one has performed better in this ersatz scholarship category than Charles Murray co-author of 'The Bell Curve'.  Indeed that co-authored parody of scholarship  paved the way for his later work, 'Coming Apart'  wherein we learned that all those poor whites -  displaced from their jobs -  could have landed on their feet had their IQs only been high enough.  But sadly, they weren't, so they are left to pound sand and cry for government help - like those displaced, forlorn coal miners now scratching for aid in Kentucky.

So both books have merely served to advance Murray's pet general narrative that a certain segment of Americans are destined to be in the underclass-  by virtue of lower IQ, genetically traced--   and we ought to get used to it. Even writing (with his co-author Herrnstein) at the end of The Bell Curve.:

"It is time once again for America to try living with inequality, as life is lived..."

As "life is lived"?  Such a reprehensible statement smacks of Social Darwinism as promulgated by Herbert Spencer, the British philosopher who had no patience for such niceties as government assistance.  He deemed the poor and infirm “unfit” if they couldn’t compete for resources without state assistance and it was their lot to be eliminated if they couldn’t manage. As Spencer put it (Social Darwinism in American Thought, American Historical Association, 1955):

"The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better.."

Author Richard Hofstadter points out (pp. 41-42) Spencer absolutely repudiated all state assistance to the poor, the needy, physically feeble, or infirm. In terms of the role of natural selection in “social evolution” such aid amounted to unwanted artificial interference in nature. Not to mention, meddling in the “natural development” of a superior society.  As Spencer put it (ibid.):

"If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well that they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best that they should die. "


Again, this could have been lifted right out of a Nazi Eugenics tract.  Just as Herrnstein and Murray's Bell Curve bilge.


So in perspective, taking  Messrs. Herrnstein and Murray's conclusion at face value, the Democratic candidates ought to just abandon their proposals to create a "wealth tax", i.e. to tax accumulated wealth instead of income. (WSJ, yesterday, p. A1).   As noted in the article:

"Liberals see extreme inequality as morally wrong  and socially divisive and regard the current system which taxes income generated by wealth more lightly than wages  as especially objectionable and  a contributor to wealth gaps such as between blacks and whites."

Whereas in Murray and Herrnstein's Bell Curve, one can simply lay the blame at a "genetic" disparity in IQ between blacks and whites.  Hence, how can a wealth tax or even a highly progressive income tax correct what nature has already pre-ordained?    That then leads to the authors' chapter on dysgenesis.

What is that all about?  Basically they use suspect research and citations, which they either mischaracterize or inflate, to attempt to make the case that blacks are intellectually inferior genetically to whites.  At the core of this dysgensis effort one beholds this skewed Bell curve:



How did they arrive at such a skewed graphic?  Well, they began by asking: "How do African-Americans compare with blacks in Africa on cognitive tests?"

Sounds simple enough, no?  But the devil as always is in the details.  The pair thus started with the null hypothesis that 'there should be no significant difference between the IQs of black Africans and African-Americans'.   This was based on testing the effects of discrimination (as African-Americans experience every day) and genes. Hence, black Africans - say in Cameroon - ought to have higher IQ scores  than African- Americans IF low IQ scores for the latter are a result of discrimination rather than genes.

To try to get to an answer the pair cite as their authority Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster.  So they cite a Lynn paper from 1991 in which he "estimated the median black African IQ to be 75... about 10 points lower than for American blacks."

Murray and Herrnstein then conclude that the difference cannot be accounted for by the "special circumstance" of African-Americans (i.e. discrimination), hence genetics must explain the difference. To try to bolster this view  (that African -Americans have higher IQs than black Africans) the pair then cite a Ken Owen paper from 1992. writing: "The IQ of coloured students in South Africa - of mixed racial background- has been found to be similar to that of American blacks."

Now note where this is going. All of a sudden we have the white genetic component entering via the "mixed" background of the South African students.   The implication almost doesn't have to be outright stated: The addition of Caucasian genes to African genes - in both S Africa and the U.S. - results in a 10 point higher IQ score over native Africans.  What accounts for the difference? Well, obviously the whities' higher IQ  genes have entered the picture!

But here's the bugbear:  In a footnote the pair cite the Owen 1992 paper as seeming to "prove" the IQ increment peculiar to both S. African mixed race students and American blacks. (Interestingly, the actual reference doesn't appear in The Bell Curve's bibliography. GO figure.)  Maybe the reason for non-inclusion is that Owen's work is not properly characterized.  For one thing, he used the nonverbal Ravens' Progressive Matrices (thought to be less culturally biased than standard IQ test)

Owen found that out of a possible maximum raw score of 60, whites scored 45, Indians scored 42, mixed race (coloreds) scored 37 and blacks scored 27.  Seems straightforward, no?   Not quite. The second bugbear was that the test's developer, John Raven, repeatedly insisted there could be no translation of his test into IQ scores. Hence, Herrnstein and Murray were confabulating IQs out of thin air.

Worse, the source for another  Lynn citation (accepted as valid by the Bell Curve pair)  that "Zambians had a lamentably low average IQ of 75" was given as Pons [1974]; Crawford -Nutt, 1978."

But in an astounding research misfire of stupendous proportions - one more likely for a green 1st year social science student- Herrnstein and Murray failed to note that Lynn had taken the Pons' data from Crawford-Nutt's paper and converted it into a bogus IQ average of 75.   At the same time the pair failed to recognize that Lynn chose to outright ignore the substance of Crawford-Nutt's paper which reported that 228 Soweto black HS students scored an average of 45 on the matrices test, or higher than the 44 scored by same age whites.   Most appalling 5 of 6 studies were omitted from Lynn's 1991 summary - by which time the average African IQ had gone down to 69.  Selection bias on steroids, anyone?

As described by one book review of  The  Bell Curve in Scientific American  (Feb., 1995) from which the preceding graphic was obtained:

"Lynn's distortions and misrepresentations of the data constitute a truly venomous racism, combined with scandalous disregard for scientific objectivity."

Adding pointedly:

"Lynn is widely known among academics to be an associate editor of the racist journal Mankind Quarterly and a major recipient of support from the nativist, eugenically oriented Pioneer Fund. It is a matter of shame and disgrace that two eminent social scientists- fully aware of the sensitivity of the issues they address - take Lynn as their scientific tutor and uncritically accept his surveys of research."

But, of course, given Murray and Herrnstein's conclusions, it is impossible to decouple their work from a clear and intentional agenda:  to attack affirmative action, .e.g.

"Affirmative action, in education and the workplace alike, is leaking a poison into the American soul."

And argue for accepting inequality (see earlier quote) as a natural norm.

Indeed, the revealing quotes of this dysfunctional pair of academics  tells me they damned well knew the unsavory nature and pseudoscience underpinning Lynn's work, but used it anyway. They used it because it advanced their own deformed elitist agenda based on their pet prejudices and presumptions, i.e. that genetics  really does separate the human family by IQ, and we ought to accept inequality instead of fighting it.  Should we then be charitable to Murray and Herrnstein for possibly being over confident in giving so much sway to Lynn's research? Hell no! Examining this book as a scientific researcher it is clearly so full of blatant holes, slipshod methodology  and  questionable sourcing that if it was submitted to physics referees - in terms of a physics context (using similar regression analyses) - it would be rejected outright.  Much like the daft papers of climate deniers are by reputable climate journals.

For example, one of the first things the budding researcher learns in any science - when applying statistics - is  not to conflate or confuse correlation with causation. And yet the Bell Curve duo commit this fundamental transgression  in spades.  We see this in the ridiculously (and excessively) long section of their book featuring analyses of data from the National Longitudinal Survey Of Labor Market Experience of Youth (NLSY for short).  The data, even without doing a single regression analysis do show a correlation between IQ and socio-economic status.

But to besiege  the reader with a blizzard of charts, graphs, tables etc. to extrapolate to a conclusion that IQ (inherited of course) translates into better paying jobs and higher socioeconomic status is simply twaddle.  It posits that the correlations obtained are actually causative.  As the SciAm reviewer of the book put it (ibid.):

"The core of Herrnstein-Murray's message is phrased with a beguiling simplicity: 'Putting it all together, success and failure in the American economy, and all that goes with it, are increasingly a matter of the genes that people inherit."


So if you are a sanitation worker, or wait staff person, instead of say a high end investment banker or stock broker, then you have to blame your low IQ genes.  Interestingly, members of Mensa - to provide an example of an inversion of the above- are often asked: "If you're so smart why aren't you rich?"

Well, for a lot of reasons!  Kudos here must go to Dr. Steven Mason in his article 'Let's Get Dumb' in one issue of Intertel's  Integra (October, p. 26, 2014). Mason, in about 5 pages,  shows that very often being smart isn't the asset so many believe, but an actual liability.  Especially in terms of 'making it in our money obsessed capitalist culture

 As Mason points out, in conjunction with this 'why aren't you rich' theme (p. 27):

"There are several reasons for this being the case. One is that employers don't especially like employees who are smarter than themselves. The result is that many of my friends belonging to high IQ societies wind up underemployed, working at jobs far below their potential."

Hey, Herrnstein and Murray, how do you process that?

Mason also notes that "kids hate those geeks who screw up the grading curve".  These kids, who aren't afraid to show their smarts are also the most victimized and bullied. No surprise then how back in 1978 my niece Vanessa expressed fear and shame at repeatedly outshining her classmates at St. Joseph Convent school in Trinidad, and asked advice. She was leaning to "dumbing down" her profile and being less conspicuous. I advised against it and told her to do it only if she felt it was critical to her ongoing emotional balance.

Perhaps the most provocative insight rendered by Dr. Mason concerns the communication gap between people of significantly different IQ. He writes (ibid.):

"It's been demonstrated, though not widely publicized in this PC culture, that complete and effective communication between those separated by more than fifteen IQ points is unlikely. It means there is no way, repeat NO WAY, that people with IQs of 115 are ever going to explain to people with IQs of 85 why it's important to graduate high school."

By the same token, it likely means a communication gap will exist between those of IQ 110-115 and those of Mensa or Intertel  IQ level (130-135) on matters of politics, including deep politics  (and I warrant most 115'ers don't even know what it means), science, philosophy, history and economics. The gap is simply too vast to be bridged.  Now carry this gap into the typical American work scenario and what do you see?  Likely enmity breaking out especially if the Mensan or Intertel member doesn't play sufficiently dumb over time. (Again explaining why  - if outed- they will not get that promotion and hence, well, remain at a lower socioeconomic station.  But this is not because of low IQ as the Bell Curve Bozos claim, but rather being enmeshed in an anti-intellectual culture .)

Taken at a more fundamental level, Mason's thesis indicates that the upper two or so IQ percentile of Americans will never be able to communicate effectively and completely with most of the rest of the population.  This gets most glaringly exposed in the political domain. Again, the need of so many voters to base their choices on atmospherics and optics ("Is he a guy I can have a beer with?") is downright disheartening. It makes me want to scream, "No you dummy! Don't worry about the damned beer but what he can do in office!"

And this  emotional tendency (often of swing voters) surely explains many of the puzzling election results over the years, from electing Gee Dumbya Bush in 2000, to the deranged semi-imbecile, criminal and grifter Donald Trump in 2016.  The takeaway?  The practical intelligence that helped put such losers into office has to be exceedingly low. So even if one is a top flight investment banker  or history professor and had voted Bush in 2000,  2004, and Trump in 2016, his working intellect can't be all that great irrespective of what Herrnstein-Murray claim.  Even Harvard Prof Harvey Mansfield attributed Trump's  election to the "lower half of the IQ curve."  And that includes all those business CEOs, market quants, and other "upper socioeconomic class" hotshots.  Oh sure, they got their tax cuts - but look what Trump's trade war has cost them, and we haven't gone beyond a technical recession yet.

Speaking of that:  the Southern Poverty Law Center has noted many criticisms of The Bell Curve, most notably Charles Lane’s thorough takedown in The New York Review of Books, have pointed out that Murray’s attempts to link social inequality to genes are based on the work of explicitly racist scientists. In an afterward to the book, Murray rejects criticisms that rest on the fact that “we cite thirteen scholars who have received funding from the Pioneer Fund, founded and run by men who were "Nazi sympathizers, eugenicists, and advocates of white racial superiority.” Murray contends that the racist pseudo-scientists he cites “are some of the most respected psychologists of our time” and that “the relationship between the founder of the Pioneer Fund and today’s Pioneer Fund is roughly analogous to that between Henry Ford and today’s Ford Foundation."

To me, such woeful blindness and shoddy work is deliberate and totally disqualifies Murray (and Herrnstein)  from claiming any objective insight into socioeconomic status and its relation to IQ.   At  the same time it shows me that those students who protested his effort to spout racist, eugenic -based rubbish at Middlebury College  2 years ago were totally justified. Indeed, as critical thinking citizens it was incumbent on them to block the dissemination of toxic racist propaganda disguised as scholarly research.

Indeed, not to do so allows the proliferation of racist memes and the sort of degenerate codswallop recently put out in a WSJ op-ed by  Heather MacDonald ('Trump Isn't The One Dividing Us By Race',  August 19, p. A19)  Let us note this hack is the author of 'The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture'.    One can only imagine here that Ms. MacDonald is a firm acolyte of the Charles Murray Bell Curve cult. Especially when she argues (WSJ, ibid.) the racial divisiveness is the product of diversity acknowledgement and "its main propagation by the academic left and mass media".   To see her spouting her balderdash live on you tube (at Hillsdale College) check out this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE-_weLRLK4
  
Getting back to the authors of The Bell Curve, truth be told what these two have produced  is no more scholarly than Gerald Posner's 'Case Closed' which tried to finalize the specious Warren Report as the last word on the Kennedy assassination.  JFK Assassination experts document twelve of the most serious “Posnerisms” here:

http://assassinationweb.com/twpos.htm

See also:

"Coming Apart?" - Charles Murray's Arguments After..

Why Democrats May Soon Have To Embrace Political Warfare To Stop Trump And the GOP.

How our Founding Fathers settled political disputes - the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton - with the latter shot dead for his effrontery.(From The New Republic, March, 2018)


"The way democracy is conducted today may have hit a new low in the lifetime of most Americans—but not in the life of the republic. The United States has been here before. For almost the entirety of the country’s first century of existence, politics was a zero-sum game—and often a blood sport. All fights were to the death, and those parties that lost were eliminated. The Federalists ceased to exist. So did the old Whigs, after losing their battle to the death with the Democrats. " -   Kevin Baker, 'The Myth Of Normal America', The New Republic, March 2018, p. 14.

"At their heart, appeals to moderation willfully ignore an obvious and indisputable aspect of our presidential system: the ahistoric procedural tactics marshaled by the Republican Party to accomplish their objectives are adopted because they usually work. And despite brief episodes of political blowback when the party reaches too far, Republicans have done incredibly well for themselves by pushing the limits of acceptable political behavior to their advantage." - Tim Donovan, 'Dems Fighting Words',  The American Prospect, Aug. 26, 2006

"Unpleasant as it may be for Right wingers to think about, their articles of faith are essentially spinoffs of wrong ideas about baboons. ...The baboon model, of course, fits hand in glove with the idea that humans are killer apes who have always hunted and eaten flesh. Wrong or not this theme works well in the dog-eat-dog culture of industrial capitalism...Put together in a package they make up a political outlook known as Social Darwinism." - Jim Mason, 'An Unnatural Order: Uncovering The Roots Of Our Domination Of Nature And Each Other, p. 79.

Let's get real here: the hope of many Democrats - like my wife,  Janice- that Trump and the gangster GOP will be stopped by Robert Mueller or elections in November ( and two years hence), may be no more than a pipedream. This is because the tacit assumption made is the Ds' political opponents will act as rational and responsible actors - as opposed to rats using Russian hacking, voter suppression, rigged electronic voting machines  or other vicious tactics -  i.e. to stay in charge of the current rolling national disaster.  The point? It may be necessary for the Dems - to survive as a viable party, far less win elections - to go "nuclear" in terms of political warfare at multiple levels. 

 As long ago as April, 2010, I wrote about the message in Michael Tomasky's American Prospect piece,  'Dems' Fightin' Words', in which he observed the extent to which Democrats had devolved to become political Caspar Milquetoasts. That is, deliberately eschewing hard nosed, no -holds barred  partisanship for a debate style emphasis on "reason and temperance",  based on invoking policy points.

Little wonder from that point the Dems have been thumped time after time (especially in governorships)  until now they have almost been gerrymandered out of existence by the Repukes. Oh, even as the lower federal courts are being stacked with right wing nuts.  Without the will to fight, and by that I mean bringing a metaphorical "Uzi" or anti- aircraft gun to the proverbial "gunfight", they likely will go the way of the Dodo ….or the Whigs.

This is also the theme of Kevin Baker's New Republic article from March, 2018,  'The Myth Of Normal America'.    E.g.
https://newrepublic.com/article/146915/american-politics-has-never-been-normal

A myth, sadly, that the Democrats largely appear to be operating under.  But for context let me provide a few quotes from Baker's article, starting with the genesis of what I will call the political war state:

"Republicans’ pursuit of the “Southern strategy” to scoop up Wallace voters, followed by the Clintons’ largely disastrous effort to reshape the Democrats from a culturally diverse party with shared liberal economics into a center-right economic party with shared cultural values, have pushed our politics back to the winner-take-all past. Can we expect the results to be any different after Trump than they were the last time around, if we find ourselves back in the old-school, antebellum political system? Well, what’s the popular definition of insanity again?"

The point about the Dems' "center right economic party" - leading to the DLC  or "Democratic Leadership Council" - is a solid one because it was suggested by Tomasky (ibid.) that this is what turned the Dems away from partisan fights to Milquetoasts- and losing.  This also led to "a diminution and loss of an overarching and motivating vision".  Not surprisingly, the Dems moved toward corporate elitism (and Neoliberalism) - effectively becoming "Republican lite".

The problem is that this pose simply emboldened the GOP  - which went on a tear to destroy the Dems totally - using propaganda of whatever form, as well as bare knuckle tactics such as gerrymandering on steroids, voter suppression (including in the 2000 general election in FLA) and  reaching their apex (nadir?) with the blocking of any Senate hearings for Merrrick Garland. Oh,  and the more recent total capitulation to the traitor Trump - thereby becoming his de facto henchmen.  To  fix ideas, just look at the recent mouthings of the trio of Reepo quislings:   Lindsey Graham, John Kennedy (Louisiana backwoods inbred - no relation to JFK) and Orrin Hatch - denouncing John Brennan after Trump stripped his security clearance.

Another timely, excellent Baker point to ponder:

"Democracy is a system designed for human beings to exist in and prosper under, together and indefinitely. As in any successful means of living, it depends to some degree on mutually agreed-upon forgiveness (if not forgetting). War, on the other hand, is meant to achieve a set objective, for as long or as short a time as that takes. Its aim is to break the will of an opponent to resist, and it builds momentum—and often morale—by dwelling more and more on the perfidy of the enemy. Atrocity builds upon atrocity, propaganda replaces truth and objective analysis, “winning” surpasses any other objective, and all rules that exist are the more likely to be discarded the longer the war continues, with each blow that follows the next falling harder and more heavily. 

The politics-as-war we live under now escalates steadily, with each transgression inviting another. The Democrats who finally unseat Trump, or merely succeed him, will have to respond in kind to him and his ilk, no matter how superior they may feel in ethics and motivation. It’s the logic of war rather than the logic of democracy."

 

 
The last point is a critical one to process which is likely to blow away many Dem centrists, moderates  or "powderpuffs". I.e. those who cling to the use of "civility" or civil tactics and strategies to oust the human pustule in the White House and his retinue of lesser pustule enablers.  Hence, the theme needs to transform to the "logic of war"  rather than the "logic of democracy". Why? Because for all intents the Repukes have demonstrated by their actions they've no interest in democratic institutions or processes. Hell, they will not even provide a constitutional check on the powers of the pretender occupying the White House.   So hence Baker's admonition for the Dems to "respond to Trump in kind". In other words, become just as vicious and unforgiving, striking back as he has. Oh, and even go beyond that to altering the system itself. How ?


Again, we go to Baker for specifics:

"Democrats will have to become more partisan and more ruthless just to survive. Let’s say Republicans do add another 60, or 250, or 300-plus seats to the federal judiciary. Democrats will have no choice but to add even more, if they hope ever to pass a program that will not be struck down by the rabid new partisans filling our courts. 

 

For that matter, the best way for Democrats to make certain that Republicans never duplicate what they just did with Merrick Garland and Neil Gorsuch—refusing even to consider the Supreme Court nominee of a sitting president for months on end and then installing their own party’s ideologue instead, as soon as they won an election—would be to expand the Supreme Court by appointing two new justices, as soon as they have the opportunity.... It would be easy to say that this way madness lies, but this is the way America used to do business. 

As Richard Primus points out, before most of our modern federal judiciary existed, it was much easier for the party in power to manipulate the law by simply changing the number of seats on the Supreme Court, up or down. Why not? There is nothing in the Constitution that says they can’t—any more than there’s anything saying that Mitch McConnell can’t have the Senate wait until “the people have spoken” in a distant presidential election"

Will the Dems have the cojones to add more Supreme Court seats? How about more federal judiciary seats?  My take is most of the current Dems in power - namely Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi  - will not go that route because they will regard it as "extreme".  In this case, we can only expect more Dem losses because the two dem leaders regard our politics like a college debate society as opposed to political war. This is also precisely the criticism leveled at the last generation of D leaders by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber in their book, Banana Republicans | PR Watch

Baker has this further warning for any Dem leaders, including Schumer and Pelosi, prepared to tolerate more GOOpr ruthlessness as opposed to taking the bastards to the mat.

"Lawlessness, long tolerated, has a way of coming back on one’s own party. Democrats, ruminating upon what meat doth our Caesar feed, may be dumb, but they’re not stupid. They understand that the Gorsuch coup was another escalation, another coarsening of democracy. They get that McConnell’s silence and McCain’s pledge about not approving a Hillary nominee, period, was a clear suggestion that any Democratic president would be considered illegitimate—and that should one be elected, we can expect a four-to-eight-year Republican blockade of any Supreme Court nominees, and nominees to other vital government posts as well. "

So, in other words, Trump and the GOP have already declared a state of war- against the Dems. The latter perforce will now have to muster the will to fight like rabid Tasmanian Devils to stop the further destruction of our Republic and its devolution into a One Party state that Rampton and Stauber have warned about.

But again, is there the will?  My bet is the Dem party will need to tilt far more leftward in Antifa-style to mount the will to fight on the scale and intensity needed.

Baker again:

"Judging by the events of the last year—and the last 30—that crisis may soon be in the offing. The tactics formulated by the right, and eagerly adopted by Trump, have proved so successful that their opponents would be foolish to forswear them. And if Democrats still don’t happen to possess more than a knife to bring to this gunfight, they seem at least to recognize that it is a gunfight."

Fine. But I still want them to not only recognize the "gunfight" but to bring an Uzi and an anti-aircraft cannon or two.

Finally:

"Just three days after this column appeared, Trump sandbagged a meeting with Republican and Democratic senators to devise a bipartisan immigration bill, by bringing in some of the worst anti-immigration bigots in the Congress and announcing before them all that he was for more immigrants from nice countries like Norway, and not from some “shithole countries.” In short order, all the president’s men were insisting that they had heard nothing, nothing at all; other Republicans were denying he had said anything bad or claiming that he had actually said “shithouse countries” (a befuddling distinction); and Trump himself was insisting, once again, that Democrats wanted to let murderers and drug dealers into the country to kill us all in our beds.In one fell swoop, the president had inflicted on Americans a vulgarity that we had never before seen in our daily newspapers or heard on our newscasts and followed it up with his usual tsunami of lies, coerced perjury, and lethal smears. The sad truth of the matter is that it was years ago that one political movement in this country obliterated the “rules”...…. What the United States is immersed in now is not politics as usual but something much worse, with as venal, as vicious, and as openly racist a group of individuals as have ever controlled its government."

 In other words, we are in the midst of a political upheaval, a war for all intents, and every manjack who wants to see the end of Trumpism and the GOP quisling enablers - needs to act like it's a war - not a college debate.

The Cruel And Unusual Punishment Of Making The Sick Work For Their Health Care

The GOP and Trump recently reached a new low when a number of Trumpie-dominated states began to pass laws in Medicaid expansion states to make recipients work for their health care. Never mind that 95% of the 70 million Medicaid recipients are either children or adults so severely physically or mentally ill that no one would hire them even if they wanted to work.

Take the case of Thomas J. Penister of Milwaukee, recently examined in The Denver Post (January 14, p. 14A, 'Debate Over Work Requirements Begins').  Penister suffers from such severe social anxiety disorder that he's been unemployed the past five years, unable to even stuff a letter in an envelope in the presence of coworkers without flying into a panic. Fortunately, with Medicaid, he's received help and has been able to see a behavioral health specialist to deal with his anxiety.

Penister also acknowledges that while he's made progress it simply hasn't been enough to enable him to satisfactorily return to the workforce. At the same time, he's "unnerved by the prospect of losing his Medicaid".  He doesn't believe, as millions like him, that one beset by physical or mental issues should have to go out and work for his health care. (His state, Wisconsin, is one of ten and counting, that applied for a waiver seeking to implement work requirements for single adults.)

But this is what our nation has come to, as evidenced by the farce of a state of the union address tens of millions were duped into watching - and believing the swine in chief could be a uniter not a divider.  In more specific terms, the GOP are quite okay with giving away enough huge tax cuts for the CEOs and corporate parasites to be able to afford luxuries like that shown below:



















But are averse to enabling a guy like Penister to receive Medicaid to take care of his mental health. Let us note here that - as reported in a Washington Post column  - the Republican tax bill  nominally delivers $3.7 trillion in tax breaks over the next decade.  However, nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts are needed to support those tax breaks in case they don't deliver any growth or revenue. In other words, the GOOPs are hoping enough  sick Medicaid people put to work will croak and so cut down the rolls.

The claim made by the Repukes is that their plan isn't draconian or Scrooge like at all, but merely an attempt to "return Medicaid to its original intent".  That is, to act as a temporary stopgap until people can find work. The GOOPs appear to be oblivious to the fact that too many cheapo companies - like Walmart - instead of providing health care for workers, steer them into Medicaid!

But what the Reeps are most incensed about, and why they are driven to take cruel action, is that they were outsmarted by Obama - who implemented a significant expansion of the ACA by expanding Medicaid. SO that 70 million are now covered under the ACA- Medicaid umbrella, where things like preexisting conditions have no warrant. 

The clueless Reeps also miss the boat regarding the fact many people on Medicaid are working, but their health care and its ancillary costs can't be met by their incomes. Take the case of  Matthew Fischer and his wife highlighted in the Denver Post's extended look at Medicaid recipients in Colorado  back in July. As the Post noted, "both have health insurance and work full time".  It "covers major medical issues picks up substantial costs for their child's medical care" - though they inevitably hit their maximums in January each year.   But there is much it doesn't provide and that's where Medicaid comes in. That includes: the wheelchair ($25,000), the formula their 11 -year old (Cecilia) which needs to be ingested through a feeding tube. ($500 a month), and the nurse who accompanies their daughter to school and attends to her needs.  As the Post explains:

"All of that is covered through a Medicaid waiver, making Cecilia among the 45 percent of the state's Medicaid recipients who are age 20 or younger."

But that's the key characteristic of these Philistines on the Right:  they don't care that people are already working.  If they're not earning enough money it's all on them,  not the inequitable system,  which is geared more to Wall Street than Main Street.

I'll go one further: This GOP plan to make those on Medicaid work for their care is merely a cruel effort to punish the poor and infirm.  This attitude can mostly be traced to the Repukes' fondness for Social Darwinism. While they reject scientific Darwinism and evolution, they have a boner for Herbert Spencer's specious form.  Indeed, Richard Hofstadter, in his Social Darwinism in American Thought, (American Historical Association, 1955) observes that Spencer rejected all services for the poor and disabled as encouraging a fundamental weakness in society which induces corruption, sloth and all the other vices. It was also Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the phrase "the survival of the fittest". 

Oh, another choice saying of Spencer's was the following:

"If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well that they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best that they should die."

Hmmmm.... they "should die".   The basic GOP health care plan exposed, the death solution plan!

But this degeneracy of making sick people work is only the beginning of erosion of the general welfare as embodied in the Preamble of the Constitution. The Pukes ultimately want to cut Medicaid to the bone so even if the  chronically infirm want to work they can't get health care.  This is the goal of these barbarians:  to savagely slice all social services in line with Spencerian Social Darwinism so the poor and sick mostly die off. Then the country will be made safe for the rich parasites to do whatever they're doing now - including  screwing the poor fools still tying their wealth to phantom assets in the bubbling stock market. But then when it crashes and all those who couldn't afford to lose their saving are penniless,, no amount of caterwauling or imploring- say by their new employer Wal-Mart (to its low paid workers) will get them the gov't help they need. They will truly be on their own, to starve or at least be malnourished (for lack of food stamps) or perish in a nasty H5 N1 Bird flu pandemic because Medicaid lacked the federal matching funds to survive in their state.