HEY, HUMPTY DUMPTY – GET IT TOGETHER, STUPID!

By Edwin Cooney

Last week, I asserted that poverty did exist in America 50 years ago and that Lyndon Johnson (or if you prefer, Daddy Bird!) was right to go to war on it.

Surprise! Surprise! Not all of my readers agreed with me! (What a shock!)  What’s rather interesting is that both the right and the left blame the problem on the very people they expect to solve it.  My righteous rightist reader blames immoral and lazy people while my lion from the left blames faint-hearted politicians – that is, the government.

The righteous reader from the right who responded to last week’s column, insists that if everyone simply graduated from school, got a job, got married, and raised socially and morally responsible children, things would be pretty good in America.  The poor are poor largely due to their immorality, he insists!

My lion from the left observes that my analysis is right on, but he scolds me for not being either radical or courageous enough to offer a credible solution to poverty.  My leftist lion, who identifies himself as a social liberal and an economic conservative, insists that poverty would disappear if we’d take certain factors off the commodity market – in other words, if everyone were entitled to them free of charge or at minimum cost.  He asserts that clothing, food, housing, health care, education and public transportation ought to be practically free.  Payment ought to be for luxuries. Supposedly, you could even tax luxuries to pay for the “non-commodities” and America would soon be up and running like LBJ’s once powerful political juggernaut!

Beyond that he suggests the following:

Privatize NASA; cut the military and subject it to market forces; close the White House;
amend the Social Security Act and require everyone to pay into the system based on their earnings; require the House and Senate to meet in virtual meetings online thus eliminating the Capital complex; do away with cash money; end all federal holidays; and amend the Constitution to reduce congressional salaries.  Finally, he establishes the following tax schedule:  those earning $30,000 or less a year should be tax exempt, $30,000 to $60,000 should be taxed at 15%, $60,000 to $80,000 -- 25%, $80,000 to $100,000 -- 35 %, and $100,000 to $400,000 -- 45%.  People making between $400,000 and $2 million should be taxed at 60% and those making above $2 million should be taxed at 80%.  My socially liberal friend asserts that the very wealthy would make a minimum of $400,000 a year.  Presumably, $400,000 is enough money for anyone    to feel prosperous. (Now, I wonder if you Milton Friedman fans recognize my leftist lion’s economic conservatism! Somehow, I’ve got my doubts.)

Even with all the huge holes in it, I like my leftist lion’s solutions better than my righteous rightist’s political, social, and spiritual smugness!  Solutions offer promise while observations merely offer a degree of rather static clarity.

My problem is how to adequately assess the damage that poverty has had on America.  My righteous rightist keeps asserting that there are too many Americans on food stamps – 47 million of them to be exact.  That’s approximately, as I calculate it, 15% of the population, which means that 85% of Americans aren’t on food stamps.  Of course, the problem my righteous rightist never mentions is “the working poor,” those who are hired part-time and paid the minimum wage which is not a living wage while their bosses also avoid paying medical benefits.  The fact that fulltime workers for Walmart and MacDonald’s annually receive 2.66 billion dollars in aid from the federal government hasn’t been brought to him as a conservative talking point.  By the way, that includes a billion dollars a year in health care benefits.  In other words, the federal government is subsidizing both Walmart and MacDonald’s.  Additionally, most people don’t realize that we write laws that keep people poor.  We zone people into areas where the education is poor.  We allow homeowners to write off their costs of home ownership, but we don’t allow renters to write off the cost of their rents.  We allow a banker and a builder to write off the cost of their martini lunch whether most of their conversation concerns business or the upcoming Super Bowl. However, a grocery market food checker and a grocery market shelf stocker having lunch together don’t get to write off the cost of their hotdog and coke even if they are discussing nothing but business!

The point here is that there’s more, much more that ought to confound people at all points on the political spectrum.  Poverty is a problem for absolutely everyone and until we face it, it will continue to evolve into a force greater than any international political or ideological foe.  FDR stayed the hand of poverty in the 1930s not because he was a liberal, but because he was willing to use government, the people’s greatest political social and economic weapon, to combat it.  He put it this way in a 1938 Fireside Chat:

“...Therefore, the only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over its government.”

FDR largely, if imperfectly, put “Humpty Dumpty” together again between 1933 and 1945. Now, it’s our turn!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

POVERTY -- NEXT TO LIBERTY, AMERICA'S MOST LEGITIMATE CAUSE!

By Edwin Cooney

I know, you thought that January 8^th was only significant as the late great Elvis Presley’s birthday.  However, that date in January 1964 was -- in addition to the day Elvis turned 29 -- the day 55-year-old President Lyndon Baines Johnson declared war on poverty in America.

As Americans listened to LBJ’s first State of the Union Address after less than two months in office, a considerable portion of them dismissed his “war on poverty” objective as a mere extension of what they derisively called the Democratic Party’s cynical strategy to “tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.”  After all, 1964 was an election year!

Men of sufficient intellectual, educational, social, and political means named Nixon, Goldwater, Dirksen, Ford, Reagan, and Thurmond (all of whom were born with adequate resources to escape any deprivation they may have individually been born into) openly predicted that LBJ’s war on poverty was all politics and therefore was bound to fail.  Even more, they were determined that it should fail. I know that’s what they felt and hoped for because back then I was one of them.  In countless meetings and especially in private conversations, they made it plain that if people were poor in America, it was absolutely their fault.  The poor, they insisted, were largely socially, intellectually and spiritually inferior people, otherwise they would have “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps” long ago. Sympathy for the plight of the less fortunate was the way of the “bleeding heart liberals” like Hubert Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson, and Martin Luther King, Jr. who owed their allegiance to alien social doctrines which were distinctly Marxist and therefore both immoral and un-American.

The primary reason this wasn’t the overwhelmingly prevailing public reaction in January1964 was due to two realities.  First, there was the struggle for civil rights which was not only LBJ’s fight, but also the unfinished work of our recently martyred president John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

The second and perhaps just as compelling reason was because too many Americans vividly remembered the United States government’s frank indifference to the economic and social plight of the average citizen from the days of George Washington to those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. 

Some Americans vividly recalled how local sheriffs and even state police were routinely at the beck and call of well-to-do industrialists when poorly paid workers sought to form unions to improve their working and living environments.  In other words, the same Americans who professed to hate government were perfectly prepared to use government to protect their interests.  Hubert Humphrey and Adlai Stevenson might be “bleeding hearts” and perhaps Lyndon Baines Johnson was a political power monger but the plight of the poor was real and needed to be addressed even if 1964 was an election year.

During the past couple of weeks, conservative and liberal talk show hosts, commentators and politicians have lined up on both sides of this question: how truly effective was Johnson’s war on poverty?  As you can be sure, there are plenty of statistics supporting its failure and its success.  The reality is that the idea that government should be the primary force to overcome poverty has men and women of good intentions on both sides. 

Still, there’s a deeper and, I believe, essentially moral question that neither conservatism nor liberalism is capable of adequately addressing. Is poverty in America our individual responsibility?  Are we all, to the extent that we can be, our brother’s and sister’s keeper?  Should we marshal every resource at our command to conquer it?  Of course we should!

Reasonable people debate whether Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal, Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom, FDR’s New Deal, Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, JFK’s New Frontier or LBJ’s Great Society were the best paths to follow.  However, the belittling of that goal, especially since 1981, has been paramount to scuttling the “American dream” which, as I see it, is un-American.

Here’s where we’re stuck.  We’ve substituted constructive strategies to conquer poverty for the sake of slick ideological bromides sufficient to ease our moral sense of responsibility for the economic and socially deprived among us.  We complain on the one hand that God has been taken from our schools, our courts and our public priorities and yet we insist that our selfishness is nobody’s business.  Charity may be a priority for Jesus Christ, but any government that deigns to require charity on the part of its people becomes, in Ronald Reagan’s words, “the problem.”  If it is immoral for a single mother to abort a child she can’t afford to feed, what is moral about the political priority to deny food stamps to poor children?

Let’s stop putting fake values on political ideologies that serve merely to justify our insistence on the right to maximize our personal profit. We have the resources here in America to do so much more for those who could do more for themselves if they were energized by our love rather than being stultified by our own self-righteous arrogance!

Here’s a piece of advice I’ve just discovered that might energize the well-off who feel oppressed by taxes and regulations designed to assist the rest of us: “Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps!”

Now, how much did that just inspire you?

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

AH NUTS, I DID IT AGAIN!!!

By Edwin Cooney

This should be column number 367 and you should have received it last week.  However, the truth of the matter is that I’m late with it.

Lateness has been a bugaboo of mine since I was in the fifth grade back in the spring of 1957.  One day in late March or early April, I’ve forgotten exactly which, I walked into Mrs. Hilken’s class as the last tinkles of the school bell rang. Down to the principal’s office I was sent for being late.  Of course, Mr. Brayer, our principal, asked me why I’d been sent down and when I told him, he told me to come back after school and he’d talk to me.  He apparently forgot, because as I was reporting to his office he was leaving for home.  He asked me to come back the following week, which would have been exactly the following Tuesday.  I guess he knew he was going to be away – thus the seven-day wait for my scolding or for maybe even the fictional (but still infamous) rubber hose.  As it turned out, I escaped both the scolding and rubber hose as Mr. Brayer died before the following Tuesday could arrive.

Now, I told you all of that to tell you this.  Two weeks ago I sent out my 366^th column.  That means this week’s topic should have been last week’s.  That means I’m late again -- thus the above story.

In addition to lateness, I also suffer from sentimentality, which means that I’m a sucker for such things as clean slates and milestones whether significant or trivial!  There are, of course, 365 days in most years and 366 days in every fourth year according to the 500 year old Gregorian calendar, which means that you could read one of my columns, were you so inclined, every day for a solid year.  Were you to do that and it took you, say, two minutes to read each column, you’d spend a total of 732 minutes with me, which is a total of twelve hours and twelve minutes reading all those columns. Wow!  Isn’t that impressive?

While I’m patting myself on the back (I’ve got to be careful not to break my arm!), I should tell you that after writing 100 columns, Edwin Cooney was interviewed by his alter ego Ed Cooney for column number 101.  That was back on June 30^th, 2008.  For some odd reason, I forgot about column number 200 or 201 and by column number 250 (not waiting for column 251, mind you), Little Eddie, the little kid of my alter ego, interviewed me.  That was back on August 22^nd, 2011.  I forgot number 300, but here I am celebrating number 366 a week late – thus the self-reprimand as the title of this column.

The origin of all this is self-examination.  Late last week I was suffering a bit of writer’s block so I asked myself why I even do this.  Of course, the three goals I give – to inform, to stimulate thought and to entertain – came to mind, but I then probed even deeper into my own psyche.  One of my best friends and most careful readers insists that I write primarily to show off.  He insists that I like to show how much I know about history or baseball or current events.  We joke about it and he says he “forgives me” because he loves me –- as I do him – and anyway, he insists, why else would I write, since I’m not being paid?  (My friend prides himself on being a realist while I insist he’s merely being cynical!)

I think I write for deeper reasons than what might be termed male or even intellectual “show and tell” -- or even worse, chauvinism.  I believe I write for the same reason I enjoy engaging others in conversation or even debate.  In order to be really valuable, knowledge or perspective has to be shared.  Even one’s thoughts aren’t fully alive unless they are shared with others.

Here is a brief list of thoughts I have shared with many of you since June 2005 when I wrote my first column.

First, near the beginning, I shared the late CBS commentator Eric Severeid’s observation about “the special strength of the shameless” in international relations.

Soon thereafter, I shared with you my conclusion that there’s no such thing as “common sense” (meaning a sense common to all). I insisted, and still do, that there is such a thing as “good sense.”  (I also insisted then as I still do that the phrase “common sense” is merely an emotional and intellectual control mechanism.)

A little later, I expounded on the mere vengefulness rather than the justice or morality of capital punishment.

Shortly thereafter, I shared with you preacher Roy Ratcliff’s encounter and experience with the serial killer and even cannibalistic Jeffrey Dahmer as described in Ratcliff’s book entitled “Dark Journey Deep Grace.”

Topics such as history, biography, and significant aspects of current events have been subjects on which I’ve offered my perspective and position.  I’m incapable of keeping either concerns or satisfactions strictly to myself; otherwise they would be too empty to be of much use or gratification. Whether the topic is Clement Moore’s “Twas the night before Christmas” or the story of the late Jerry Ford’s luncheon meeting with his real father, the fact is that I’m incapable of keeping my appreciation of significant historic or human events strictly to myself.

Here’s the unvarnished truth.  Although I’ve yet to make my first penny as a writer, nevertheless I’ll keep writing, because it alleviates a feeling of isolation that comes over me in the absence of the thoughts, feelings and ideas of you who so generously respond to these almost weekly musings.

Next Monday, January 20^th, 2014 looms just ahead on the calendar.  The sun will rise and there in your inbox will be another Cooney’s Corner column.

I wonder if it’ll be late!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

ROOTING FOR AMERICA’S MOST SERIOUS UNDERDOG!

By Edwin Cooney

I know it’s almost a scandal to feel this way, but I’m rooting for a comeback on the part of America’s lowliest underdog: the Congress of the United States.  It may shock you to know, although it shouldn’t, that the halls of Congress have reverberated with the foresight, creativity and wisdom of some of the most remarkable men and women in history.

In fact, today, January 6^th, 2014, marks the 132^nd anniversary of the birth of one of the most outstanding members ever to sit in Congress, Samuel Taliaferro Rayburn of Texas.  Sam Rayburn served in Congress from January 4^th, 1913 to November 16^th, 1961 –- the day he died.  Elected the forty-eighth Speaker of the House of Representatives on Monday, September 16^th, 1940, “Mr. Sam,” as he was to become known, would serve as Speaker for seventeen out of the next twenty-one years. (Note: Rayburn succeeded William B. Bankhead of Alabama -- the father of actress Tallulah Bankhead -- on the occasion of Bankhead’s sudden death the previous day.)

Born and baptized in Kingston, Roane County, Tennessee into the Primitive Baptist Church (also known as the Old Line or Hard Shell Baptist Church), Rayburn and his family moved to Bonham, Texas in 1887.  A 1903 graduate of Texas A&M, Rayburn was admitted to the Texas Bar in 1908 and joined the law firm of Steger, Thurmond and Rayburn that same year.  In 1907 at age 25, he entered the Texas State Legislature and, just four years later at the tender age of 29, he served as Speaker of the State Assembly until his election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1912 at age 30.

Integrity was of such importance to Rayburn that from the moment he took his seat in the Texas Legislature he refused to accept fees from corporations although it was common practice and he was legally entitled to receive them through his law firm from such clients as the Santa Fe Railroad.  Sam Rayburn would avoid any possible conflict of interest throughout his public service.

An even more interesting aspect of “Mr. Sam’s” social outlook is the fact that although he was invariably close both politically and socially to men who were dedicated segregationists, he refused to sign the “Southern Manifesto.” (Other Southerners who refused to sign included Senators Al Gore Sr., Estes Kefauver and Lyndon Johnson.)

Written in January and February of 1956, the Southern Manifesto pledged to lawfully do whatever it might take to overturn the 1954 Supreme Court decision ending segregation in the public schools.  A protégé of FDR’s first vice president, former House Speaker and fellow Texan John Nance Garner, “Mr. Sam,” chose to work quietly and effectively behind the scenes to accomplish his and the Democratic party’s agenda rather than posturing before the public as a champion of ideological principles.  To that end he established a private club he called “The Board of Education,” which met after hours to drink bourbon and discuss various aspects of pending legislation.  Speaker Rayburn’s “Board of Education” was available only to those who received invitations to attend its sessions.  In fact, Vice President Harry Truman had just arrived at a session of Mr. Sam’s Board around 5 p.m. on the afternoon of Thursday, April 12^th, 1945 when he was called to the White House to assume the presidency on the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It would be both false and naive for me to suggest that either “Mr. Sam” or others of his era were always above politics or statesmanlike in all that they did. After all, political power or, if you prefer, control of public affairs and issues was precisely their agenda.  However, men such as Sam Rayburn realized that political principles were guidelines for the practice of good government rather than ends in themselves.  Thus, in “Mr. Sam’s” day, a sitting president, whether his name was Calvin Coolidge or Franklin Roosevelt, was entitled to the benefit of all doubts by virtue of his election to his high office by a free people.  Privately, Sam Rayburn had little regard for either John or Robert Kennedy because of their less than gallant treatment of his friend Lyndon Johnson, but once Jack Kennedy became President Kennedy, “Mr. Sam” considered it his patriotic duty to play whatever part he needed to play for JFK to succeed in office.

Now, as Speaker Boehner’s gavel opens the second session of the 113^th Congress, that historic and essential body’s reputation has never been so low.  Even worse, by its almost total lack of cooperation with President Obama, it has earned that reputation.  The most discouraging part of that conclusion is that Congress generally reflects the mood of its constituency.

This was true during the early Nineteenth Century when Congressman John Randolph of Roanoke, an exceedingly eccentric Virginia planter, often brought his pistols, his whip and his hounds onto the floor of the House of Representatives – after all, rich Virginia planters were the social and economic backbone of the South and were presumably entitled to behave as they pleased and attain what they desired.

The pre-Civil War mood was reflected in May 1856 when Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina severely beat nearly to death Massachusetts’ abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner at his desk on the floor of the Senate.

Congress reflected the desperation of the American people during the Depression in 1933 when it passed FDR’s New Deal legislation with little resistance within the first hundred days of his administration.

In May of 1961, “Mr. Sam’s” last spring as Speaker, Congress reflected the determination of the American people to beat the Soviet Union in the space race when it agreed to appropriate the necessary financial and other resources necessary to land a man on the moon by 1970.  As Harry Truman once observed: “Any jackass can kick a barn down. It takes a carpenter to build a barn.”

Since Congress must be political by design, the best politicians find a way to feed the hopes and needs of the broadest possible constituency.  Politics is ultimately the art of blending natural, economic and spiritual resources to accomplish the greatest possible good for the greatest possible number of people.

Yes indeed!  I’m rooting for Congress, America’s lowly underdog.  Let’s see now – how should the necessary cheer go for urging Congress forward? Let’s see now, hmmmm!

Go Congress, go Congress, go Congress, go! Pass resolutions, pass those bills! Go Congress go!

Go Congress, go Congress, go Congress, go! Hoist the flag! Appropriate the money till the voters are happy and the talk show hosts go daffy and the chickens come home to roost!

Go Congress, go Congress, go Congress, go! Be as crazy as Randolph, as principled as Sumner!  Always remember that the voters never slumber! 

Never mind, I better shut up.  “Mr. Sam” just turned over in his grave!

SORROWFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY