Silence can be much more revealing than what a person actually says.

Let’s consider Hartzler’s latest newsletter.

Of course, she want to repeals the ACA, but has not clear recommendations on what to replace it with:

As we begin the new year, I remain committed to working with my colleagues in Congress to end this disastrous law and to replace it with health care options that offer all Americans access to quality, affordable health coverage they want.

I want to consider two other examples.

She takes no bow for how much money will be saved from the budget by extending long term unemployment benefits.  We can all wonder why.

One of the reasons Hartzler cites to replace Obamacare is the following problem.

There’s a chance many people who thought they had enrolled in various health care plans are not actually enrolled, after all. Many Americans who signed up through the government exchanges have been incorrectly informed they enrolled in plans. If you’re in this category you might be in for a big shock early in the new year when you learn that while you were informed you had enrolled, the insurance company you thought you had signed up with might know nothing about you. Bottom line – you might not have coverage!

[I won’t note that these government exchanges are actually coverage by PRIVATE companies.}

This is serious: some of her constituents who thought they have insurance might not. However, she offers NO advice on how to find out whether one is enrolled or not.  Nice non-service for something that is important.

There is this “good” news:

I am pleased to share that even though Congress was not in session, negotiators from the House and Senate Agriculture Committees were at work hammering out the final details of what I hope will be a comprehensive five-year Farm Bill. There are still differences between the House and Senate versions of the Farm Bill, but the principle negotiators are making significant progress and the conferees plan to vote the first full week back in January. As a member of the House Agriculture Committee, I am committed to serving the interests of both consumers and farmers – approving a Farm Bill that provides the United States with a safe, plentiful, and affordable supply of food for many years to come.

We don’t need to note that a significant portion of the Farm Bill will be GOVERNMENT supported crop insurance.  

What is missing in this good news is any mention of providing Americans who are food insecure with help.  (Missouri has the highest percentage of people who are food insecure in the country.) There was a time when the Farm Bill had such support.

What Hartzler doesn’t say is much more important than what she says.

Silence can be much more revealing than what a person actually says.

Let’s consider Hartzler’s latest newsletter.

Of course, she want to repeals the ACA, but has not clear recommendations on what to replace it with:

As we begin the new year, I remain committed to working with my colleagues in Congress to end this disastrous law and to replace it with health care options that offer all Americans access to quality, affordable health coverage they want.

I want to consider two other examples.

She takes no bow for how much money will be saved from the budget by extending long term unemployment benefits.  We can all wonder why.

One of the reasons Hartzler cites to replace Obamacare is the following problem.

There’s a chance many people who thought they had enrolled in various health care plans are not actually enrolled, after all. Many Americans who signed up through the government exchanges have been incorrectly informed they enrolled in plans. If you’re in this category you might be in for a big shock early in the new year when you learn that while you were informed you had enrolled, the insurance company you thought you had signed up with might know nothing about you. Bottom line – you might not have coverage!

[I won’t note that these government exchanges are actually coverage by PRIVATE companies.}

This is serious: some of her constituents who thought they have insurance might not. However, she offers NO advice on how to find out whether one is enrolled or not.  Nice non-service for something that is important.

There is this “good” news:

I am pleased to share that even though Congress was not in session, negotiators from the House and Senate Agriculture Committees were at work hammering out the final details of what I hope will be a comprehensive five-year Farm Bill. There are still differences between the House and Senate versions of the Farm Bill, but the principle negotiators are making significant progress and the conferees plan to vote the first full week back in January. As a member of the House Agriculture Committee, I am committed to serving the interests of both consumers and farmers – approving a Farm Bill that provides the United States with a safe, plentiful, and affordable supply of food for many years to come.

We don’t need to note that a significant portion of the Farm Bill will be GOVERNMENT supported crop insurance.  

What is missing in this good news is any mention of providing Americans who are food insecure with help.  (Missouri has the highest percentage of people who are food insecure in the country.) There was a time when the Farm Bill had such support.

What Hartzler doesn’t say is much more important than what she says.

Today the House of Representatives voted 217-210 to cut $39 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). All the House Democrats and 15 Republicans voted against the cuts. None of the 15 Republicans were from Missouri.

As House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) noted, “Every person who votes for this Republican measure is voting to hurt his or her own constituents.” For a Missouri perspective on Pelosi’s comment consider that 15% of Missouri’s population – about 933,000 people – are expected to receive SNAP benefits in 2014. SNAP funding in Missouri in 2014 is already due to be diminished by $96 million when temporary funding from the  2009 Recovery Act expires on November 1. The bill our Missouri GOPers voted for today will take an additional $40 billion from the entire program over the next 10 years – pushing 4 and 6 million people across the U.S. out of the program. Be assured the new cuts will hit Missouri hard. The U.S. Department of Agriculture ranks Missouri second in the nation in percentage of households with “very low food security.”

SNAP aid is usually included in the farm bill. It was separated out this year so that a bill with hefty agricultural subsidies could be passed without wrangling with the Senate about the SNAP cuts that killed an earlier effort at a Farm Bill. Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-4), a Missouri farmer who manages to pull in plenty of those agricultural handouts, indicated that she was going to vote to cut food aid because:

“This bill helps people get back to work,” Hartzler said. “It also cuts down on the waste, fraud and abuse in the SNAP program.”

You read it right. According to Hartzler – and other GOP bozos who are attempting to put a good face on their votes today – starvation creates jobs.

Sorry, Vicky, no matter what you try to make us believe, we don’t have 7.1% unemployment in Missouri because folks are lazy. There aren’t enough jobs to go around – thanks to the Bush recession that GOP ideologues like Hartzler helped engineer. Actually, given the fact that the minimum wage hovers around $7, there are plenty of working folks whose families won’t eat without SNAP aid.  KOMU in Columbia quoted a man named Jack Bhutod whose situation is all too common:

I’m supporting a family of three on a low wage job and we can’t afford the food we need without food stamps, … “Hunger is not a game for us. We need to eat.

As for fraud, if it were really a problem, then Hartzler’s GOP fellow-traveler, Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), wouldn’t have had to tell overt lies in order to try to make that case. Food stamp fraud rates are among the lowest of any federal program.

So fraud and lazy lay-abouts aren’t don’t pose real problems.  But no matter – we should give our Missouri GOPers some leeway . Most of them probably don’t really understand too much about hunger since almost all of them have an average net worth well above a million dollars (see also here). Nor do they really have to be too concerned about constituents who are in a daily struggle with hunger. Poor people, after all,  aren’t the folks who pay the campaign bills.  

Rep. George Miller (D-CA) today issued a report identifying fourteen Republican representatives who voted – are you ready – to cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits from the farm bill while retaining massive agricultural subsidies they themselves receive. Collectively, the fourteen GOP piggies:

Have a total net worth of up to $124.5million;

Have received a total of at least $7.2 million in farm subsidies;

Each previously voted to gut the SNAP program by giving states large financial incentives to kick families off SNAP.

A charter member of the GOP’s pork swilling fourteen: Missouri’s Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-4). Her federally-financed take: $516,000; her total worth: somewhere between $2,218,026 and $13,854,995; the number of constituents in her home county, Cass County, who receive SNAP benefits: 8,664 or 9%. According to Rep. Hartzler, the House approved farm bill:

… secures a safe, affordable, and plentiful food supply by improving agricultural programs to be cost-effective and market-oriented.

“This Farm Bill saves taxpayer dollars by eliminating direct subsidies and payments to those who don’t farm,” said Hartzler. “In place of direct payments, farmers will have access to a low-lying safety net that offers assistance only after significant losses are suffered as a result of extreme droughts, floods, or adverse market conditions. This ensures American consumers won’t have to be dependent on foreign countries for our food. A safe, affordable food supply is vital to the national security of this great nation.”

However, as usual, Hartzler’s not telling us the whole story:

Republicans tried to claim that the passage of the farm provisions was done to help family farms, but this Farm Bill is loaded with pork and handouts for the wealthy and corporations. Farmers with incomes over $250,000 will receive one third of the crop insurance money. This Republican House passed windfall for millionaires and corporations comes at a time when net farm income is projected to reach it highest level since 1973.

Hartzler does try to weasel out of taking responsibility for redistributing wealth upwards, claiming that cutting direct subsidies to farmers who take land out of production while providing federally funded insurance subsidies to big agricultural interests constitutes a significant fiscal “reform.” As Lisa Ritland of the Denver Post put it, “While ending one egregious subsidy program, direct payments, a new potentially larger taxpayer giveaway was created.”

It’s clear who benefits here, but who gets hurt?:

… the typical household receiving aid under the farm bill through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), has a gross monthly income of only $744, and their average monthly SNAP benefit-which every member detailed in this report voted against extending- is just $281.

Nor are the recipients the worthless “takers” that make the GOP and their supporters go rabid with self-righteous, tax-payer rage:

House Republicans aren’t starving able bodied poor people. Forty five percent of food stamp recipients are children. Twenty percent of recipients are disabled, and 8.5% are elderly. These aren’t healthy working age adults mooching off the system. They are the most vulnerable members of our society.

So, to recap, Children will go without food while millionaire Vicky Hartzler continues to lives the good life, pulling in the funds that should be supporting our much-vaunted safety net. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired to death of subsidizing the likes of the self-serving Rep. Hartzler.  

The 2013 agriculture bill that was passed in the Senate, and which must now be reconciled with the bill passed by the House, proposes a few modest but welcome cuts to programs subsidizing big agriculture, but it also insures that millions of the poorest Americans will once again struggle with hunger. The Senate bill cuts $4.1 billion dollars from Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) – a.k.a. food stamps – over 10 years; the House is proposing cuts of $20.5 billion over the same period. This means that the actual cuts will be somewhere between these two numbers and anywhere from 500,000 to 2 million people will lose essential food support.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) attempted to restore the cuts in the Senate. If nothing else, doing so would have created more bargaining room for Democrats in the deliberations that will determine the final configuration for SNAP. Her amendment was, however, defeated 76-20, and among the 28 Democrats voting against it was our own Senator Claire McCaskill.

I haven’t found any statement from McCaskill about why she decided to go this route. Undoubtedly, there are lots of times when politicians swallow hard and vote for bills that have bad aspects in order to obtain important benefits for their main constituents, and Agriculture, big and small (but mostly big) is important for Missouri politicians. However, Sherod Brown of Ohio, surely an agricultural state, saw fit to support Gillibrand’s amendment.  Nor would this amendment have endangered the bill; it would have simply given Senate negotiators more room to get a better final bill relative to SNAP out of the reconciliation process.

Any cuts to SNAP will hurt. The New York Times notes that “some 50 million Americans live in households that cannot consistently afford enough food, even with the food-stamps program.” Benefits should arguably be increased, not cut. The Senate was wrong to cut benefits for those who are most helpless while proposing to cut generous agricultural subsidies only for those farmers making more that $750,000 annually – I guess our rich Senators think you’re a hardship case if you only manage to pull in a measly $600,000 a year.

Surely, McCaskill, who was calling herself a  Democrat last I heard, doesn’t buy into the reactionary Republican meme of the “culture of dependency,” which eschews a safety net for ideological reasons:

… There is a supposed moral impetus driving these cuts, a pathological desire to see to it that the “culture of dependency” is snuffed out, as the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” clause remains embedded within dominant political ideology. Republican Rep. Stephen Fincher out of Tennessee recently summed up these exact sentiments when he informed a gathering in Memphis that food stamps essentially “steal from those in the country and give to others in the country.” The culture of dependency is destroying America, so the story goes.

This message, of course, has always been reserved for the poor. This is in fact the scandal and hypocrisy of such a message. It could never be leveled at the wealthy and powerful. If it were, there would be more talk in congressional circles about prosecuting Wall Street. If it were, there would be considerably more action taken in combating tax evasion. If it were, then maybe Rep. Fincher would stop taking millions of dollars in farm subsidies and call for an end to such subsidies.

Perhaps McCaskill is just burnishing her simple-minded, deficit cutting, bipartisan-queen schtick. A “bipartisan” amendment sponsored by McCaskill and Jeff Flake of Arizona proposed to allow “taxpayers to save money via renegotiated rates with insurance companies who are making billions of dollars selling crop insurance.” It essentially mandates that such savings be used to pay down the deficit (a deficit that is shrinking just fine without such intervention, thank you). So it’s clear that McCaskill is sill playing that worn-out tune, although whether or not it figures into her justification for anti-SNAP vote is only conjecture.

If McCaskill does try to justify this vote on economic grounds, she should be reminded that there is actually a solid economic reason to support food stamps. Although Republicans have managed to paint stimulus as a dirty word, the underlying fact is that economic growth is the result of demand, that is, stimulus, and food stamp spending provides just that:

Food stamps also help stimulate the economy more than other forms of government spending … since their recipients are so poor that they tend to spend them immediately. When Moody’s Analytics assessed different forms of stimulus, it found that food stamps were the most effective, increasing economic activity by $1.73 for every dollar spent. Unemployment insurance came in second, at $1.62, whereas most tax cuts yielded a dollar or less.

I look forward to learning just why Claire McCaskill thinks it’s okay to balance the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable. In the meantime, I would like to remind her of the words of Richard Nixon, of all people, quoted in the opening of a New York Times editorial about congress’ shameful efforts to cut nutritional support to poor Americans: “That hunger and malnutrition should persist in a land such as ours is embarrassing and intolerable.” What’s even worse is when our politicians disable governmental mechanisms used to hold the line against hunger and malnutrition.

If you take a listen at the video of “Women for Akin” rally (h/t the Turner Report), the most notable thing you’ll hear is that lots of women really were making their voicees heard – only the ones speaking up weren’t actually rallying for Akin. If you can’t manage to make it out, about 40 protesters are regaling the 100 or so attendees with the chant, “rape is rape”:

Otherwise, what you’ll hear if you take the time to listen to Akin’s remarks is his standard, rightwing Christian take on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For example, he unhesitatingly declared that if “you take a look at the Declaration of Independence, it is built on the brilliant idea that God intended you to have life, liberty and to pursuit happiness.” I’m sure that this would have come as a surprise to it’s author, the deist Thomas Jefferson, as well as to the other signatories, many of whom were not bible-believing Christians despite what Todd Akin and his revisionist Christian Nationalist pals would like us to believe. Of course, when you consider that when Akin talks about life, his biggest concern is abortion – he doesn’t approve – and, similarly, when he talks about liberty, he seems mainly concerned about taxes and government regulations – you know, the things that keep your food safe, and keep the banks from robbing us blind –  you begin to realize that it isn’t only history that he finds confusing.

Were his audience inclined to actually think about what he had to say, though, they might have been puzzled by the images he used to express his sense of American exceptionalism:

Let me just ask you a question. Do you like America? Let’s take a look about America and kinda see what it is we like about it. You remember we won two World Wars. We didn’t annex any territory, we didn’t crown any king or emperors, but what we did do is vote to tax ourselves to rebuild our enemies. How often has that happened in World history? We have the oldest written constitution, and the world over is blessed with the innovations and technology that have come from America and if you really think about, if you think about the times there’s a tsunami or earthquake or something like that and what do you remember? A gray hole with the Red, White and Blue behind it full of medical supplies and food to help people all over the world. And you know what? That’s who we are. That’s what America is – we give back; we help other people. …

This could almost be a bleeding heart liberal extolling Americans who taxed themselves to rebuild Europe and Japan, deliver disaster relief, and just generally help people. But this generous soul is also the same fool who says he would have refused to vote for the Farm Bill that would deliver disaster relief to American farmers devastated by this summer’s drought. The reason why? It also offers food aid to poor and working families who have been flattened by jobs lost during the Bush recession.

The contradictions are almost too painful: The women rallying for Akin were only concerned about doing away with reproductive choice for other women. At the same time the Todd Akin who stood on the Missouri Capitol steps and extolled the governmental decisions that resulted in the Marshall plan is the same fool who thinks that the only safety net Americans need is what they can beg from religious and private charities. It would be laughable if it weren’t so sad.

P.S. Akin’s also wrong about what country has the oldest written constitution. This guy can’t even get the easy stuff right.

Beard: The American slang term originally referred to anyone who acted on behalf of another, in any transaction, to conceal a person’s true identity. (Wikipedia)

In this case, the beard is, as the title states, Vicky Hartzler, and the identity she’s trying to conceal is that of the political party responsible for the failure to pass a farm bill filled with much needed disaster assistance for drought-devastated farmers. Miss Vicky was chosen to give the weekly Republican address (video at The Turner Report). Since her family runs a big farm in Missouri, the GOPers were probably sure that she would be a natural choice to help them wipe the egg that was the farm bill fail off their collective faces. Here’s what Miss Vicky had to say about the hard time ahead for our farmers:

Like you, I was relieved earlier this month when the House passed a bipartisan measure helping farmers devastated by the ongoing drought.  A lot was riding on this bill, but the Senate, a body controlled by the president’s party, left Washington for the month of August without even bringing it to a vote.   The president has seen fit to politicize this issue, but the fact is he didn’t urge the Senate to act.

That is a true shame.  Drought conditions continue to worsen, and the shaky state of the economy only amplifies our anxiety.

Well no, Vicky, your feelings about the House Farm Bill are demonstrably not at all like mine – or like most Americans who don’t grudge food to the hungry. Nor are your facts exactly correct.

The fact is the Senate acted. It passed a bill that House members refused to vote on because it gives too much in the way of food subsidies to poor Americans. The House, instead, attempted, in the last few hours of their session to pass a paltry stop-gap disaster-relief bill that many legislators, both Republican and Democratic, considered next to worthless, and jam it through the Senate without allowing for time to consider its provisions. The jokers that make up the House majority didn’t need to create this mess, but they have shown time after time that they will always put ideology above the welfare of Americans.

In this case, House leaders (John Boehner and GOP VP pick, Paul Ryan) were more than willing to bankrupt American farmers just to insure that people who are feeling the Bush recession the hardest don’t get any government-sponsored relief. Because, dontcha  know, government doesn’t know how to do it; if government does know how to do it, we shouldn’t let it because that’s  socialism and we’ll not be free anymore; the tiny fraction of our budget spent providing food aid to our poor will explode the deficit (although we love to explode it when it comes to unnecessary arms spending, unprovoked wars, oil subsidies and tax cuts for millionaires), and, finally, golly-gee, when it comes down to it, feeding our poor probably just isn’t in the Tea Party version of the constitution.

Believe it or not, there’re fools who buy this claptrap. And lots of them live in Missouri. At least some of them will be cheering Miss Vicky on. (For those who are, instead, embarrassed, and who live in her district, there’s an alternative – her name is Teresa Hensley, the Democratic Party candidate in the 4th Congressional District House race.)

Michael Tomasky wrote a piece last week abut why Republicans lie. The conclusion was pretty straightforward: they lie because the truth about their policies is so ugly. If they were to tell the truth about what their policies will do – and this pertains to the farm bill, jobs, and every other talking point Miss Vicky dredged up in her pedestrian effort to ring the various GOP-rigged Pavlovian bells – it would boil down to something like what Tomasky expresses in the following summary:

What we’re going to do here is make sure society’s very richest people have a lot more money. Our theory is they will spend it and that will help the whole economy. History hasn’t been kind to this idea, but it’s our theory and we’re sticking to it. These are the people who pay us to run, after all. Besides which, we really don’t like poor people; we think at bottom that it’s their fault they’re poor, so it doesn’t really matter to us whether anything trickles down to them.

As Tomasky adds: “That’s the truth. How would that sell?”