Wednesday, the Santa Clarita Valley Chamber of Commerce hosted a debate between the candidates running to replace Buck McKeon as congressman from the 25th CD. The two Republicans in the race, Tony Strickland and Steve Knight, have basically one idea: repeal Obamacare. Meanwhile, Lee Rogers, the progressive Democrat in the race, unveiled a well-thought-out, detailed 10-point comprehensive jobs plan, meant to attract industry and jobs to the district. Immediately after the Chamber of Commerce forum, Rogers took the plan on the road "visiting," he said, "small business owners who need a Congressman who will fight for them in Washington.” His first stop on the Rogers Job Plan, Making the Economy Work for Everyone business tour was at Plum Cleaners on Bouquet Canyon Road, a family-owned small business dedicated to providing an environmentally-friendly alternative to traditional dry cleaning.Sacramento politicians like Knight and Strickland couldn't be bothered. They're too busy fighting each other for the right to claim the mantle of right-wing extremism. Instead of telling hard-pressed voters in Santa Clarita, Simi Valley and the Antelope Valley what he plans to do to help them, Tony Strickland is running around the district crowing about an endorsement from… Paul Ryan, the Big Business shill whose twin central goals are to privatize Social Security and ease out Medicare for future generations. Ryan calls that "making hard choices to balance the budget." For corrupt conservatives like Ryan and Strickland-- whose cushy political careers are underwritten by Big Business-- hard choices always fall on the backs of working families. "As our national debt continues to skyrocket it’s going to take hard choices and smart budgeting to get it in line," said Strickland. "No matter how difficult it might be, it’s vital that we start to seriously addresses our debt with meaningful spending cuts. Paul Ryan has been an incredible leader in the fight to reduce the national debt and get our country on track towards fiscal sanity. I’m thankful for all of his hard work as well as his support of my candidacy. The President and Nancy Pelosi’s continued insistence on more spending and debt is totally irresponsible. Our debt not only hurts our economy and costs us jobs, but also passes off responsibility to our children and grandchildren. That’s not leadership. In Congress, I will proudly stand with Paul Ryan in the fight to return fiscal responsibility to Washington."HuffPo co-founder Arthur Delaney authored a substantial essay this week about what exactly Tony Strickland is vowing to proudly stand with: Paul Ryan's Approach To Poverty Is Straight Out Of the 19th Century. Ironically, Ryan-- an admitted (sometimes) Ayn Rand acolyte-- has been preparing to run for president by positioning himself as "the Republican Party's foremost authority on the issue of poverty." Unfortunately, Ryan's ideas, writes Delaney, "echo conservative views about welfare going all the way back to the English Poor Laws of the 17th century, which categorized poor people according to their deservingness of help. These ideas have gained popularity at different times since then in response to different crises, like when 'tramps' terrorized American towns in the 1870s, when 'welfare queens' birthed crack babies in the 1990s, and when the so-called "food stamp surfer" delighted the Fox News crowd by refusing to get a job in 2013."
n March, Ryan stepped in it when he spoke on a conservative radio show about what he saw as "this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work."Ryan apparently didn't realize "inner city" is a common euphemism for "black." Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, called his remarks "deeply offensive." Ryan quickly backtracked, saying he'd been "inarticulate," and he attempted to repair the damage by meeting with the caucus at the end of April.As he emphasized during the dustup, however, Ryan had been attempting to make a point about class, not race. His office cited a 2012 Harvard study which found that young people from lower-class backgrounds tended to be more isolated from society and civil institutions-- a problem Ryan felt needed to be corrected."If you're driving from the suburb to the sports arena downtown by these blighted neighborhoods, you can't just say, 'I'm paying my taxes, government's got to fix that.' You need to get involved," Ryan said on the radio show. "You need to get involved yourself, whether through a good mentor program, or some religious charity, whatever it is to make a difference. And that's how we help resuscitate our culture."Ryan's comment could have come straight from the late 1800s, an era of rapid industrialization, robber barons and unrest known as the Gilded Age.The financial panic of 1873 triggered a worldwide depression. Bank failures led to widespread layoffs, and welfare historians have documented increasing demands for private and public poor relief at the local level. Concern rose about tramps roaming from city to city to soak up whatever charity they could find. Welfare reformers at the time fought to stop the handouts, which they said only exacerbated tramping."Next to alcohol, and perhaps alongside it, the most pernicious fluid is indiscriminate soup," one reformer said in the late 1870s, according to historian Walter I. Trattner's 1974 book, From Poor Law to Welfare State. Another said, "It is not bread the poor need, it is soul; it is not soup, it is spirit." Ryan channeled the spirit and the language of these reformers when he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in March, "What the Left is offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul."In the 19th century, local governments worked alongside private charities to provide an ad-hoc patchwork of poor relief. Poorhouses, or "indoor relief," served as the main alternative to handouts. The institutions varied greatly over time, but in general poorhouse inmates received food and shelter in exchange for control of their lives.As tramp fears escalated, a "scientific charity" movement arose to coordinate and stifle "outdoor relief," the nickname for assistance not given within poorhouse walls. Hundreds of charity organizing societies sprang up across the country, and government-funded relief ended in more than a dozen cities.Instead of handing out cash, members of these societies, calling themselves "friendly visitors," would go into poor people's houses and investigate their claims of destitution. Often the wives of wealthy businessmen, they sought to help fill the souls of the poor."The best means of doing the poor good is found in friendly intercourse and personal influence," the Rev. R.E. Thompson explained in his 1879 Manual for Visitors Among the Poor. "The want of money is not the worst evil with which the poor have to contend; it is in most cases itself but a symptom of other more important wants." Indiscriminate almsgiving, explained charity reformer William Slocum in 1892, "destroys the best element of true society. It destroys citizenship and those active powers of the human soul that put it in sympathy with the divine ideal."Welfare reformers wanted to control the poor, but they also sought to inspire them to lift themselves up by dint of their own example-- much as Woodson sought to inspire the those at House of Help to embrace a better way of life, and as Ryan encouraged suburbanites to volunteer as mentors."The best way to turn from a vicious cycle of despair and learned hopelessness to a virtuous cycle of hope and flourishing is by embracing the attributes of friendship, accountability and love," Ryan said this week at an event in New York."That's how you fight poverty."…"In 1996, Congress began to require people on welfare to work," Ryan said in a January speech. "And welfare rolls dropped dramatically. Child poverty fell by double digits. The problem is, we haven’t applied this principle far enough."Child poverty indeed fell, but Ryan omits the fact that it went back up. At 21.8 percent, the rate is now higher now than it was in 1996.Ryan was working as a congressional staffer that year when President Bill Clinton fulfilled his campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it." The law nudged working-age single moms into the workforce, but experts debate whether welfare reform, expanded tax credits or the longest economic expansion of the postwar era deserve credit for declining poverty rates in the five years after the law's passage.Since 2001, the poverty rate has gone up and eligibility for welfare benefits has increased, but the welfare rolls have barely budged and spending has stayed the same. Food stamp enrollment has surged, however. Ryan wants to take the lessons of welfare reform and apply them to nutrition assistance, the biggest anti-poverty program besides Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid."We haven’t applied the welfare-reform mindset with equal vigor across the spectrum of anti-poverty programs," Ryan said in 2012. "In most cases, we’re still trying to measure compassion by how much we spend-- not by how many people we help."Still, Ryan would prefer less spending and fewer people receiving help, at least according to his annual budget blueprints. He would cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by 18 percent and turn it into a "block grant," as Gingrich and Clinton did with Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Block grants are fixed sums that don't rise in response to economic conditions, as food stamps have done, and which give states more leeway to trim enrollment.Food stamp spending more than doubled since 2007 as the bad economy made almost 50 million Americans eligible for the program. Congressional Republicans have focused on one: Jason Greenslate, a San Diego resident conservatives have dubbed the "food stamp surfer," who refused to apologize for playing rock music instead of getting a normal job. As an able-bodied adult without dependents, he is the welfare queen of today and the tramp of yesteryear. His story and others like it feed Republican animus to food stamps and the undeserving poor."The arguments Ryan is making are recycled arguments from the 1980s, which are themselves recycled from the 1880s," historian Stephen Pimpare said in an interview. Pimpare's 2004 book The New Victorians compared conservative think tanks of the late 1900s to the charity organizers of the Gilded Age.
Tony Strickland has no jobs plan and no plans to help make CA-25 more prosperous the way Rogers does. Instead he has this: "I will proudly stand with Paul Ryan in the fight to return fiscal responsibility to Washington." You can proudly stand with Lee Rogers to make sure Strickland's and Ryan's reactionary failed Austerity agenda is never enacted in this country. One way to do that is by contributing to Roger's campaign here at the Blue America ActBlue page.
