Sequestering Morality

Emergency responders like the ones who are here today — their ability to help communities respond to and recover from disasters will be degraded.  Border Patrol agents will see their hours reduced.  FBI agents will be furloughed.  Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go. 

~  Remarks by President Obama on Sequestration, February, 19th 2013

"A culture that victimizes it's weakest members is a culture in decline."  ~  John Barry of The Southern Tier AIDS Program.

We’ve been sequestered!  Or is it sequestrated?  I don’t know; either way it comes out to the same thing.  We’ve been screwed.  By our government.  Again.  Actually I couldn’t say whether or not I’m actually part of the “we” that’s being screwed.  I’m in the comfortable middle class and I imagine I’ll come through this without really noticing much.  If I decide I want to take a flight somewhere I might have to show up at the airport a little earlier; so I lose a little sleep.

No, the ones who will notice it will be the ones who ALWAYS notice it; the ones who ALWAYS bear the brunt of the indolence in the halls of government; the poor, the elderly and the little children.  From a pragmatic point of view it makes perfect sense; just adopt the philosophy that it’s safest to pick on someone smaller than your own size, the one with the frailest of voices; the one who carries the least threat.  And so what follows is a sampling of what sequestration has in store for the least among us:

* About 3.8 million long-term unemployed will see an 11 percent cut in weekly benefits.

* The WIC nutrition program for low-income pregnant women, infants and young children may be forced to deny services to up to three quarters of a million women and children.

* An estimated 100,000 low income families will lose housing vouchers.

* An estimated $4 million will be cut from the Safe Motherhood Initiative; an organization that helps prevent pregnancy related deaths.

* $8 million will be cut from the Breast and Cervical Cancer Screening Program.

* $24 million will be eliminated from Title X family planning services.

* The Title V Block Grant which provides prenatal care for low-income, at risk pregnant women will lose $50 million. 

New York State is expecting $80 million in cuts to general education funding keeping 70,000 children from receiving services such as special needs assistance; $26 million will be cut from Head Start Programs; $3 million in cuts to HIV testing and vaccinations affecting 70,000 adults and children; and cuts to senior nutrition and food pantry programs. 

California stands to lose 10,000 college work-study jobs and spots for 8200 children in Head Start.  Nearly 130,000 unemployed will be denied job search assistance and referral and placement services.  As many as 2,000 disadvantaged children will lose child care services meaning many parents will have to take time off from their jobs.  Nearly 16,000 children will be denied needed vaccinations.  Also affected will be the STOP Violence Against Women Program and nutrition assistance for seniors.

Another pragmatic rule of thumb is, “don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”  And so to that end some programs in the sequestration battle that are in a safe and protected no fire zone include:

* $10 billion in tax deductions for vacation homes and yachts.

* $168 billion dollars in tax breaks to corporations that outsource jobs overseas.

* A $3 billion dollar corporate jet loophole.

* $25 billion dollars in tax breaks to oil companies.

It’s a popular sport to criticize the President and Congress as a bunch of idiots; boobs and bunglers.  Nothing can really be further from the truth.  By and large, regardless of their party affiliations or ideologies, these are well educated, hardworking and highly capable individuals.  Clearly the problem with these individuals who have been elected to serve and represent the American people is not their capabilities but their morality.  To put it succinctly these individuals are immoral.

Webster defines immoral as, not moral; not conforming to the patterns of conduct usually accepted or established as consistent with principles of personal and social ethics.

Imagine that you’re walking along your local city sidewalk and feeling a bit generous.  You decide that you’re going to give a perfect stranger a ten dollar bill.  You come to a bus stop and on one end of the bench is a homeless man, unwashed and dressed in tattered clothes; and on the other end of the bench is a well groomed man in a Brooks Brothers suit and Gucci loafers.  You have to choose which individual to give the ten dollar bill to.  The obvious moral decision is to give the ten dollars to the homeless man.  And yet on a consistent basis, our legislators at both the Federal and State levels consistently lavish advantage after advantage on the Brooks Brothers crowd while kicking the poor and the disadvantaged when they’re down.  And while my example might be an oversimplification, where is it stated that moral behavior is governed by a ceiling of expediency?  Morality doesn't sit on a pragmatic middle ground; there is either moral behavior or immoral behavior.

The Washington crowd consistently likes to invoke, “the American People,” when they promote their respective positions on various issues.  In fact, they don’t give a tinker’s damn about the American People.  Who they do care about are their various benefactors who pay the big dollar that allows these politicians to buy their re-elections so that they can continue to feather their own nests and push their personal ideologies.  And I’m not under any illusion that a second term President is above that behavior.  He’s concerned with midterm elections and the success of his own party in the next Presidential election.  Is it moral behavior when well-heeled individuals climb up on their sanctimonious pulpits and claim to have the good of their country in mind while acting in ways that are clearly motivated by selfishness and narrow ideologies? 

What is particularly galling about this sequestration is that it’s very invention was predicated on the notion that it would never be implemented because the cuts and consequences would be too onerous.  The sword of sequestration dangling over the heads of the President and Congress would force them into agreement.  Of course that didn’t happen.  Both sides dug in their heels, anchored by the cement of their ideologies and rooted to the needs not of “the American People” but the goals of their respective parties.  And as sequestration drew nearer and nearer everyone in authority, that is Congress and the President, seemed to grow comfortable with the notion that we could all live with it (To them, “we” means everyone but them.).  Consider that a week ago President Obama declared that the “sequester is not apocalypse.”  This after he spent weeks and scads of taxpayer dollars doing the prophet of doom whistle stop tour and predicting every calamity short of a plague of locusts (see epigraph at the beginning of this post).  Well, what is it Mr. President?  It’s only been a week and sequestration is fading into nostalgia and I’ve little doubt that Obama and Congress are all hoping that in a couple of weeks we’ll all settle comfortably in a sequestrated world and those that matter the most (those who aren’t poor or children or disadvantaged) won’t even notice the difference.  They’ll have faith that by the time the cuts get deep enough to splinter bone the news outlets will have completely dropped this story to focus on some other news du jour; a natural disaster, a sports scandal, another mass shooting or maybe a Kardasian getting knocked up

This whole economic doomsday scenario brings me back to my childhood and the “good old days” of the Cold War.  It was a time when the Soviet Union and the United States had massive arsenals of nuclear weapons pointed at each other; enough, so the saying went, to blow up the Earth many times over.  We lived with the nervous faith that neither side would launch.  This was because the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) held that neither side would be crazy enough to launch and bring about an exchange that would destroy life on Earth.  I’m certainly glad that the current Washington crowd wasn’t in power then.  I could just imagine them handling a military escalation by getting comfortable with the notion that we could all get used to living in a nuclear winter.