Tennessee: Ayn Rand's Vision of Paradise

By Les Leopold, AlterNet

12 April 13

Tennessee lawmakers have elevated hatred for government and disgust for poor people to an art form.

f you're worried about where America is heading, look no further than Tennessee. Its lush mountains and verdant rolling countryside belie a mean-spirited public policy that only makes sense if you believe deeply in the anti-collectivist, anti-altruist philosophy of Ayn Rand. It's what you get when you combine hatred for government with disgust for poor people.

Tennessee starves what little government it has, ranking dead last in per capita tax revenue. To fund its minimalist public sector, it makes sure that low-income residents pay as much as possible through heavily regressive sales taxes, which rank 10th highest among all states as a percent of total tax revenues. (For more detailed data see here.)

As you would expect, this translates into hard times for its public school systems, which rank 48th in school revenues per student and 45th in teacher salaries. The failure to invest in education also corresponds with poverty: the state has the 40th worst poverty rate (15%) and the 13th highest state percentage of poor children (26%).

Employment opportunities also are extremely poor for the poor. Only 25% have full-time jobs, 45% are employed part-time, and a whopping 30% have no jobs at all.

So what do you do with all those low-income folks who don't have decent jobs? You put a good number of them in jail. In fact, only Louisiana, Georgia and New Mexico have higher jail incarceration rates.

From the perspective of Tennessee legislators, it's all about providing the proper incentives to motivate the poor. For starters, you make sure that no one could possible live on welfare payments (TANF: Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). Although President Clinton's welfare reform program curtailed how long a family can receive welfare (60 months) and dramatically increased the work requirements, Tennessee set the maximum family welfare payment at only $185 per month. (That's how much a top hedge fund manager makes in under one second.) As a result, the Volunteer State ranks 49th in TANF, just above Mississippi ($170).

Kick 'em when they're down or tough love?

In the Randian universe, it's not enough to starve public education and the poor. You also must blame the poor both for their poverty and for the crumbling educational system. If a poor child is failing it must be the fault of low-income parents. So how do you drive the point home? You take away their welfare checks if their kids don't do well in school, which is precisely what the Tennessee House and Senate are about to do. The KnoxvilleNews.com reports:

The bill is sponsored by Sen. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, and Rep. Vance Dennis, R-Savannah. It calls for a 30 percent reduction in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits to parents whose children are not making satisfactory progress in school.

More amazing still, the bill originally applied to all children of TANF parents, even if they were severely disabled. Realizing that they had gone too far, the bill was amended so that, "it would not apply when a child has a handicap or learning disability or when the parent takes steps to try improving the youngster’s school performance - such as signing up for a parenting class, arranging a tutoring program or attending a parent-teacher conference." (Imagine the uproar if those provision were applied to upper-income parents, assuming any still use the public school system.)

Dennis told the House Health Subcommittee the measure now only applies to “parents who do nothing.” He described the measure as “a carrot and stick approach.”

Obviously, this is insane, right? Not if you've already started down the road of whipping the poor into shape. The proposed draconian cuts are just an extension of previous policies that already made welfare contingent on school attendance. As Travis Waldron reports in ThinkProgress:

When Campfield introduced the legislation in January, he said parents have “gotten away with doing absolutely nothing to help their children” in school. “That’s child abuse to me,” he added. Tennessee already ties welfare to education by mandating a 20 percent cut in benefits if students do not meet attendance standards, but this change would place the burden of maintaining benefits squarely on children, who would face costing their family much-needed assistance if they don’t keep up in school.

By the way, the Tennessee legislature is lily-white: One percent is Latino, 6% AfricanAmerican and 91% Caucasian. But the complexion of poverty is darker. Nearly 80 percent of Tennessee's poor children are black and brown.

Attacking the poor as the answer to the Wall Street crash?

These attacks on the poor, rather than on poverty, are not peculiar to Tennessee. In fact, similar concepts circulate among political and policy elites in Washington. For Ayn Rand acolytes, Wall Street's reckless, greedy casinos couldn't possibly be the real reason the economy crashed. After all, the rich get rich because they are terrific at what they do. We should reward these creators, not blame them for their foresight, their ingenuity and their obvious success. The blame instead should fall on the poor -- the takers -- and on the collectivist government liberals who cater to them. Didn't the government force banks to put unqualified poor people in homes they couldn't afford? (It doesn't matter that the data shows that low-income buyers who gained loans through the Community Readjustment Act didn't default in higher numbers than anyone else. The idea of blaming the poor has power.)

Blaming low-income people for chronic unemployment is the next move. As the rate stays stubbornly high (precisely because all Republicans and even a few Democrats don't want the government in the business of job creation) we hear talk of "structural" unemployment. That's code for the jobs would be there if only the workers were qualified. But you know, those lower-income workers just don't have the skills and work habits to compete in our globalized economy. Even older middle-class workers are hopelessly out of date. So there's really nothing government can do about it.

The final twist is to claim that the richest country in human history doesn't have the means to eradicate poverty. Instead, we are told, rising debt is forcing us to tighten our belts -- rather, we need to tighten the belts of the poor by taking away a few more dollars from Medicaid and Social Security.

How to justify meanness?

It's not easy to be cruel to someone who is down and out. After all, most of us feel ashamed when walking by a homeless person or watching kids crammed into over-crowded classrooms. It requires several psychological twists and turns to make life even harder for low-income Americans.

• You have to blame low-income parents for their own economic problems. Even if the unemployment rate is sky-high it must be the poor person's fault.


• You need to feel superior - that somehow you got to where you are today not by an accident of birth but rather by your own hard labors. Anyone not as successful as you, by definition, is inferior.


• You have to believe that meanness really is tough love - that by taking benefits away from the poor you are actually helping them on the road to self sufficiency.


• It's helpful to have access to the broader Randian/libertarian philosophy that argues all forms of collective government action are an attack on freedom. In this view, altruism is seen as a curse that justifies collective government programs which essentially steal money from the makers and to waste on the takers. All collective caring by the state, therefore, is evil, so that all support for the poor via government is evil as well.


• It's psychologically crucial to have your prejudices confirmed by charismatic alchemists like Ayn Rand, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan who peddle selfishness as the highest form of morality (although only Ayn Rand had the guts to say it so bluntly)

Is Washington locked into increasing inequality?

While the Republicans in Congress are committed to supporting the rich and crushing the poor, smug Democrats can too easily look down upon the bumbling Tennessee legislators. Tie welfare to school success? How crude. But many of these same Democrats also are totally in sync with the Wall Street hucksters who have, for a generation, siphoned off America's wealth into their bottomless pockets. In fact, both parties again are in competition for Wall Street campaign cash as if nothing much has happened. And both parties clearly are unwilling to break up the big banks, cap obscene financial incomes, or create public banks to serve the public interest.

Washington politicians and pundits from Obama on down (with very few exceptions) are enthralled by Wall Street wizardry. Making a million dollars an hour no longer seems strange or repugnant. Too big to fail, jail and regulate are just the natural order of things. In fact, more than a few public servants can't wait to race through that revolving door to get in on the big casino games.

This should tell us that the path to social justice requires a new political movement that operates outside the two great corporate parties.

Is it too late?

I ran into a young woman who is very concerned by the enormous gap she sees between life on campus and the hardships of the low-income people. She wants to know what she can do with her life to really change things.

What can we say? I look back over a lifetime in the cause of social justice and I don't have much to show for it - more war, more poverty, more inequality, more disinvestment in critical human infrastructure. Yes, we've made great strides on gender, sexual preference and overt racial discrimination compared to a generation ago. But how can we explain why America has the world's highest incarceration rates? Why couldn't we prevent a criminal justice system from sending 40% of young black males to prison? How, on our watch, did our relatively egalitarian country develop the most obscene wealth gap in the world? How is it possible that so many of our cities are in worse shape than a generation ago? It's almost to impossible to comprehend, and even harder to change.

But that young woman already senses that we have no choice but to try. And that requires building a movement that targets the core of the problem - the systems that allow the economic royalists and their political minions to hijack our country.

It's a long-term project. After all, it required almost two generations of painstaking work for the Ayn Rand right to take over the national debate. It may take just as long to recapture it. Let's hope there are enough caring young women and men who still have a sense of the common good. Altruism may have died in Galt's Gulch, but it's still alive and well in the hearts of those who share a passion for justice, even in Tennessee.

Three Lessons From the Drone Lies

By Glenn Greenwald, Guardian UK

12 April 13

The axiom that political officials abuse their power and lie to the public when operating in the dark is proven yet again

or years, senior Obama officials, including the president himself, have been making public claims about their drone program that have just been proven to be categorically false. The evidence of this falsity is so conclusive that even establishment sources are using unusually harsh language - including "lies" - to describe Obama's statements. McClatchy's national security reporter, Jonathan Landay, obtained top-secret intelligence documents showing that "contrary to assurances it has deployed US drones only against known senior leaders of al-Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified 'other' militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan's rugged tribal area." That article quotes drone expert Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations as saying that "McClatchy's findings indicate that the administration is 'misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted.'"

In his own must-read article at Foreign Policy about these disclosures, Zenko writes - under the headline: "Finally, proof that the United States has lied in the drone wars" - that "it turns out that the Obama administration has not been honest about who the CIA has been targeting with drones in Pakistan" and that the McClatchy article "plainly demonstrates that the claim repeatedly made by President Obama and his senior aides - that targeted killings are limited only to officials, members, and affiliates of al-Qaida who pose an imminent threat of attack on the US homeland - is false." Beyond the obvious harms of having the president and his administration continuously lie to the public about such a crucial matter, Zenko explains that these now-disproven claims may very well make the drone strikes illegal since assertions about who is being targeted were "essential to the legal foundations on which the strikes are ultimately based: the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force and the UN Charter's right to self-defense." Marcy Wheeler uses the documents to show how claims about drones from other key officials, including Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, are also unquestionably false.

Both Landay's article and Zenko's analysis should be read for the details, but I want to highlight the three key points from this:

(1) The Obama administration often has no idea who they are killing.

This has long been the most amazing aspect of the drone debate to me. Not even the CIA, let alone ordinary citizens, has any idea of the identity of many of the people they are targeting for death. Despite this central ignorance, huge numbers of people walk around in some sort of zombie-like state repeatedly spouting the mantra that "Drones are Good because We are Killing the Terrorists" - even though the CIA itself, let alone citizens defending its killings, have no clue who is even being targeted. It has long been known that Obama (like Bush before him) approved the use of so-called "signature strikes", where the identity of the target is not known but they are targeted for death anyway "based on a 'pattern of life' analysis - intelligence on their behavior suggesting that an individual is a militant" (the New York Times reported that "the joke [at the State Department] was that when the CIA sees 'three guys doing jumping jacks', the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp" and that "men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers - but they might also be farmers").

But these McClatchy documents make clear just how extreme this ignorance often is, even after the fact:

The documents also show that drone operators weren't always certain who they were killing despite the administration's guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA's targeting intelligence and its assertions that civilian casualties have been 'exceedingly rare.'"

Zenko adds: "even the US intelligence community does not necessarily know who it has killed; it is forced to use fuzzy categories like 'other militants' and 'foreign fighters'." Targeting people without knowing their identity is as dubious morally as it is legally, which is why, Zenko explains, "No US government official has ever openly acknowledged the practice of such 'signature strikes' because it is so clearly at odds with the bedrock principle of distinction required for using force within the laws of armed conflict." How can any minimally rational person continue to walk around defending Obama's drone kills on the ground that they are killing The Terrorists or that civilian deaths are rare when even the government, let alone these defenders, often have no clue who is being targeted and then killed?

(2) Whisteblowers are vital for transparency and accountability, which is precisely why the Obama administration is waging a war on them.

Here is yet another example where we obtained proof of the falsity of the government's claims, and possibly illegal actions, for only one reason: a whistleblower leaked top secret documents to a journalist, who then published them. When you combine an impotent Congress, a supine media, and a subservient federal judiciary - the institutions ostensibly designed to check excessive executive branch secrecy - government leakers have really have become the only reliable means for learning about the lies and bad acts of political officials. And that's precisely why the Obama administration is waging an unprecedented war against them. Yesterday on Democracy Now, New York Times national security reporter Mark Mazzetti explained to Amy Goodman how this whistleblower war - by design - is impeding basic investigative journalism:

"AMY GOODMAN: And you, as a reporter, Mark - we see the greatest crackdown on whistleblowers that we have ever seen under any president: President Obama's administration is going after more whistleblowers than all presidential administrations combined in the past. And the role of journalists, how do you feel, as you try to cover these issues? Do you feel the crackdown?

"MARK MAZZETTI: It's harder. There's no question. It's harder and harder. People are - this crackdown has perhaps had its intended effect, which was maybe not to go prosecute the cases that have been brought, but also to scare others into not talking. And so, I find that in the last couple years covering national security issues, you just find people who were perhaps once more eager to talk or willing to talk, for reasons that- not just because they were whistleblowers, but because they thought it was important for reporters to have context and information about some of these operations -those people are increasingly less likely to talk.

"AMY GOODMAN: And you, yourself, being prosecuted or put under a kind of spotlight from the administration?

"MARK MAZZETTI: I mean, it's certainly worrisome for us and is worrisome that, you know, they go after - they go after sources, and it brings the reporters into it, as well. I think we're at a critical time here to - you know, hopefully this ends. But, you know, once there is a momentum in some of these cases, the Justice Department works in its own ways, and so people, once they make cases, they tend to try to make other cases. And so, that's what some -that's what's concerning for us."

There is no doubt that this is not only the primary effect, but also the primary purpose, of Obama's vindictive though highly selective attacks on leakers: to create a climate of fear to deter whistleblowers and journalists who think about exposing the bad acts and lies of the government (leaking to glorify the President remains permissible and encouraged). As Mazzetti suggests, the traditional sources for national security investigative reporters have dried up and the journalists themselves are frightened about reporting on these matters. All of this from a President who vowed to have the Most Transparent Administration Ever and from a political movement that once professed such horror at the secrecy abuses of Nixon and Bush.

(3) Secrecy ensures both government lies and abuses of power.

That the Obama administrations' claims about its drone program have proven to be false should be viewed as anything but surprising. Aside from the potent impulse for governments to lie to their citizenry about what they do, secrecy in particular renders inevitable - not possible, not probable, but inevitable - both abuses of power and systematic lying. And secrecy has been the hallmark of the Obama administration generally and its drone killings in particular. A recent Washington Post article - headlined: "Drone use remains cloaked despite Obama's pledge for more transparency" - discussed Obama's repeatedly unfulfilled promises for more openness and explained:

"But there is no indication that moves have been made in that direction, and the White House has not taken a public position on any legislative initiatives [for greater transparency]. The administration has continued to contest legal challenges to the program's secrecy. It has argued that national security concerns and the sensitivity of foreign partners who allow strikes on their territory preclude public explanations of how targets are selected and follow-up reports on who is killed."

So extreme is this secrecy and the abuses that it is spawning that even former Obama officials, such as former Clinton State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter, are vehemently objecting. Slaughter told the Post:

"The idea that this president would leave office having dramatically expanded the use of drones - including [against] American citizens - without any public standards and no checks and balances ... that there are no checks, and there is no international agreement; I would find that to be both terrible and ultimately will undermine a great deal of what this president will have done for good . . . .I cannot believe this is what he wants to be his legacy."

Just to get a sense for how inevitable government lies are when political officials can operate in secret, consider the McClatchy revelation that "the [secret CIA] reports estimated there was a single civilian casualty, an individual killed in an April 22, 2011, strike in North Waziristan". Aside from the fact that, as Zenko noted, this proves Brennan's public claim of no civilian casualties during this period to be a lie, and independently is a claim that can be made only by virtue of Obama's warped re-definition of "militant" to mean any military-age male in a strike zone, the demonstrated truth is that this exact drone strike killed "five women and four children". So here you have Brennan lying to the public about civilian deaths, and the CIA lying in its own documents - all enabled by the radical wall of secrecy behind which this all functions.

That secrecy is the linchpin of abuses of government power is as central a political principle as exists. This week, WikiLeaks released a serachable catalog of millions of once-secret but now-declassified documents and highlighted an incredibly revealing transcript of a 1975 meeting between then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Turkish officials. The US Congress had just enacted an arms embargo on Turkey in response to its aggressive actions in Cyprus, and Kissinger, at this meeting, made clear that the Ford administration opposed the embargo and was committed to finding a way to get arms and other aid to Turkey. When a Turkish official suggested that Kissinger enter into a secret agreement for European countries to provide the arms, this is what was said:

People who exercise power inevitably abuse it when they can wield it in secret. They inevitably lie about what they do when they can act in the dark. This is just basic human nature, and applies even to the most kind-hearted leaders, even ones who are charming and wonderful family men. This is what makes pervasive secrecy and a lack of oversight and accountability so dangerous. It's what makes it particularly dangerous when the powers in question are ones highly susceptible to abuse, such as the power to target people for execution.

For that reason, it's entirely unsurprising that the Obama administration got caught making plainly false statements about its killing program. But for the same reason, it's very significant that it has been caught. In light of this evidence, any journalists that continue to rely on US government statements about its killing program are revealing themselves to be eager propagandists, willing to be lied to and help amplify those lies (the same was true of journalists who continued to rely on government statements about "militants" being killed even after they knew how Obama officials had broadened that term to the point of meaninglessness). How many times do we have to learn these same lessons before recognizing their universality?