This Year I'm Thankful For

 As it is Thanksgiving week I’ll tell you what I’m thankful for besides my family and my job. I’m thankful for Medicare which has allowed my wife to have health insurance since she became disabled more than 20 years ago. Without Medicare no private insurer would cover her until the Affordable Care Act was passed and even that would have been so expensive that we would likely be living paycheck to paycheck like so many other Texans. Medicare isn’t perfect and it doesn’t cover most dental or vision care. Medicare did cover her for open heart surgery, cataract surgery, and treatment for sepsis in a leg that nearly killed her.

I’m thankful for the improvements to Medicare Part D that have reduced my wife’s pharmacy bills over the last couple of years. One of the improvements was the limit on the price of insulin which is a life saving change for many as they often had to choose between insulin and paying rent or buying groceries. Considering how many prescriptions drugs, including insulin, my wife takes not having Part D coverage would have broken us years ago. She qualified for Catastrophic Coverage back in October this year so most medications since then have had no co-pay. According to the projection offered when we renewed her Part D coverage for next year, she’ll qualify much earlier in the year reducing out total pharmacy bill to less than half of this year’s amount.

I’m thankful for the Affordable Care Act through which my brother is covered now that his employer laid off the entire staff and closed its doors. His insurance is not cheap and it isn’t as good as what he had through his employer but at 63 with no the best health it’s important to have insurance at all. The Affordable Care Act provides for expanded Medicaid coverage in many other states, though Texas Republicans chose to punish the some hardest working yet poorest workers in the country by choosing not to take the federal money available. Republican have tried in vain to kill the Affordable Care Act dozens of times since it was passed during the first Obama administration, they couldn’t even manage when Trump was president the first time. Now they’ll get another shot at it. Let’s hope they fail again.

I’m thankful that Joe Biden surprised me and made a strong push for clean energy via regulation and policy as well as working to pass legislation to fund more projects even if some of the benefits are still several years away. 

I’m thankful for all the men and women across this country who stood up and ran for elected office as Democrats. Running for office takes guts, it takes hard work, and it takes someone who is at least moderately comfortable talking to people they’ve never met and who may not even be interested in talking to them. It takes a special kind of person to have the fortitude to do those things.

Last but most definitely not least, I’m thankful for the Democratic Party County Chairs, Precinct Chairs, and all the volunteers that blockwalked, phone banked, wrote postcards, and sent text messages in an effort to get people out to vote. I know they worked hard in Texas even though turnout here was less than 61% of registered voters. That’s pretty pathetic as only six states had worse, including Oklahoma with less than 55% turnout. Texas turnout was lower than it has been in years. It doesn’t matter how hard you work or how much time you spend if people just can’t be bothered.

If These Are the Best People

Ever since Trump started his run for the presidency back in 2015 he has claimed that he hires only “the best people”. He showed that to be a lie last time he won and his recently named nominees for various posts show no sign of improvement and may even be worse.

Last week Trump announced that Matt Gaetz, who was elected to represent Florida’s 1st Congressional District located in the panhandle next to Alabama and which encompasses Pensacola Naval Air Station, as his Attorney General nominee, the person who will oversee the entire Department of Justice. Mat Staver, founder and chairman of the Christian legal ministry Liberty Counsel in Orlando, wrote a scathing argument titled “Matt Gaetz is not qualified to be U.S. Attorney General.”

Staver’s letter says, “The nomination of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General is shocking and disappointing to those who have followed this man and the lurid scandals and serious allegations of sex parties and drugs during his tenure in the U.S. Congress. The resignation of Gaetz immediately after his name surfaced for Attorney General is inexplicable except for the fact this resignation now ends the U.S. House Ethics probe.”

Trump’s defense secretary pick, Fox News host Pete Hegseth,  is troubling for a number of reasons. Hegseth paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault in a settlement agreement that included a confidentiality clause, according to Hegseth’s attorney. Sexual mis-conduct seems to be one of the themes of Trump and his new team.

Hegseth has admitted to being one of 12 U.S. National Guard members were removed from Joe Biden's 2021 inauguration security detail as a "possible insider threat" after vetting by the U.S. military and FBI. Hegseth downplays the issue claiming his removal was over a tattoo of the Jerusalem Cross, when in fact the sergeant charged with reviewing the security team wrote that Deux Vult tattoo which has ties to extremist groups was the reason. According to Robert LeBlanc of Villanova University, the Deus Vult symbol is "actively being used by neo-Nazi and extremist hate groups to incite fear and violence toward other cultures and religions."

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Hegseth could make good on Trump's campaign promises to rid the U.S. military of generals he accuses of pursuing progressive policies on diversity in the ranks that conservatives have railed against. This is especially problematic because we already have problems in our armed services with commanding officers demanding their subordinates attend their particular religious services and events even though it is specifically prohibited by regulations. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation run by Mickey Weinstein a former officer exists to ensure that members of the United States Armed Forces are able to practice their religious beliefs without fear of discrimination or coercion, and to promote the separation of church and state within the military.

Finally there is Trump's pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation's most well-known anti-vaccine activist. Doctors all over the United States, especially pediatricians are worried by about this choice as the country is already seeing a drop in vaccination rates leading to more measles outbreaks this year than last year and a five-fold increase in whooping cough cases this year from the year before, according to Centers for Disease Control data.

If these people are the best Trump can do our nation is in for a load of trouble.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - November 20, 2024

Why Did We Lose?

 After the devastating results of last week’s election it is no surprise that various and sundry talking heads and pundits have been offering their “analysis” of the cause. Turnout was down 6% in Texas even as more people were registered to vote then ever before. Nationally turnout was down about 1.5% and lower turnout is invariably bad for Democrats. 

I’ve read and seen a number of those critiques many of which blame Harris for running a bad campaign. Others say and I agree that Harris actually ran a technically great campaign yet those pundits aren’t entirely wrong. I think that Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration, and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have the best answer. Both Reich and Sanders have long promoted the idea that working stiffs like you and I are getting a raw deal from corporate interests, whether you work for one of those big corps or even run your own small business.

Businesses can right off expenses like corporate jets and even yachts if they claim they are for business use but you and I can’t even get a tax deduction for the interest payments on our student loans. Businesses can declare bankruptcy and essentially get all their loans forgiven or pay just pennies on the dollar but if you or I declare bankruptcy we still owe the entire balance of a student loan plus interest.

Reich and Sanders argue that the average American worker has every right to be fed up with neo-liberal Democrats who have passed legislation in favor of corporations while at the same time failed to pass even a long overdue increase in minimum wage. Yes, Joe Biden has been good to labor over the last four years but it hasn’t been near enough and it isn’t just his fault. Too many Democrats in Congress have been captured by the uber-wealthy donors who fund their political campaigns. It’s a lot like Stockholm Syndrome or the phenomenon known as regulatory capture, those legislators spend so much time schmoozing with big money donors that they start seeing the world through the eyes of those donors. Once their worldview aligns with big money they are more easily convinced that voting in the interests of their “friends” is a good idea.

I don’t excuse them for losing sight of the reason they were elected but I do understand how it can happen. That’s brings up another issue that Sen. Sanders points out in his analysis and has been campaigning against for a long time; which is the problem of money in politics. Campaign finance has always been problematic but ever since the Supreme Court decision known as Citizens United which overturned many of the limits on campaign donations at the federal level the amount of money donated and therefore the amount of money any campaign needs to win an election is 5 times what it was in 2000 and that’s after adjusting for inflation.

None of this is to say that Republicans have a better track record on labor issues just that Trump at least recognized it as a significant campaign issue. His “solution” was to blame immigrants just like he did in his to previous campaigns regardless of the fact that immigrants aren’t the problem. He certainly isn’t about to blame big business as those campaign donors favored him. While Trump isn’t actually going to do anything helpful many of the 60% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck voted for him because they felt he at least was listening to them and Democratic candidates weren’t.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - November 13, 2024