Iowans Talk about SJR2001 and the Traditional Family

by Paul Deaton

"This discussion is not about traditional marriage, it is about the decimation of the middle class brought on by the policies of President Ronald Reagan."

Last summer, at the lineup for a parade during our town festival, the local Catholic priest walked up to our state representative and asked for his position on “protecting the traditional family.” It was a confusing question, and behind it was the question whether or not the elected official would support a change in the Iowa constitution to define “marriage” as “between a man and a woman.” When the representative said he would not support such a change, the priest said in a loud voice, “Then I will do everything I can to defeat you in the next election.”

A few minutes later, the priest brought over a member of the Knights of Columbus to say that he felt he did not have a say in the Iowa Supreme Court decision to overturn the 1998 law with this definition of marriage. He explained that enabling the schools to recognize the validity of what he called “non-traditional marriage” was undue pressure on him as a working person trying to raise a traditional family.

The irony is that many of the members of the Knights of Columbus in our town register their party preference as Republican and it was a Republican president who initiated the social change that puts pressure on working families of every political party. This discussion is not about traditional marriage, it is about the decimation of the middle class brought on by the policies of President Ronald Reagan.

Many of us are familiar with the film Roger and Me, by the Flint, Michigan native and film maker Michael Moore. The film depicts the human impact of auto plant closures on Flint natives during the late 1980s. The closing of Buick City and other automobile manufacturing plants in Flint was just a small slice of what the Reagan presidency did for working class people. I experienced Flint, Michigan during the Reagan years first hand.

After the auto plants closed in Flint, I made a trip there to recruit truck drivers from some of the 25% of the community that was unemployed. While we paid less than what the auto workers had made, we found many takers for our non-union jobs.

In that union town, people did not like non-union companies replacing the UAW jobs. Protesters showed up when any company recruiting non-union workers came to offer employment. I ran into these protesters more than once. One night the four tires on my vehicle were slashed while I gave a presentation to a group of about 25 people. I fixed the tires, went home and came back the next month because I felt that eventually the bitterness would subside and economic needs would drive people to take a job with a US company. I was wrong about that. The way of life for many of the people I met was just plain gone.

We don’t often hear this part of the story of the Reagan Revolution. It is a story about the internationalization of the auto industry specifically and corporate America in general. It is a story about moving production of goods to foreign lands where the cost of raw materials, labor and government regulation favored making our automobiles, washers and clothing. It is a story about when Mexico became too expensive, the jobs moved to China and Southeast Asia, leaving behind a push that brings Mexican immigrants to the United States to take jobs our citizens don’t want to support their families. The Reagan years were harsh on families and created the roots of the world in which we live today.

This week, Iowa SJR 2001, “A Joint Resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the State of Iowa specifying marriage between one man and one woman as the only legal union that is valid or recognized in the state,” failed to get the support needed to pass in the Iowa legislature. I suspect we have not seen the last of this debate in our communities.

The sooner we recognize that the debate is not about the definition of marriage, but about the policies of our government and the pressure these policies put on the middle class, the sooner we will stop pointing blame at each other and work together to fix the society that started breaking, partly as a result of the Ronald Reagan presidency.

If Washington is broken, then this work belongs to each of us.

~Paul Deaton is a native Iowan living in rural Johnson County.  Check out his blog, Big Grove Garden.    E-mail Paul Deaton

The Authoritarian Political Brain

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by Propagandee

September 3, 2007

Drew Westen's The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation helps explain the neuro-cognitive mechanisms involved in rationalizing away inconvenient truths, something we all do regardless of political affiliation. From the Introduction:

The neural circuits charged with regulation of emotional states seemed to recruit beliefs that eliminated the distress and conflict partisans had experienced when they confronted unpleasant realities. And all this seemed to happen with little involvement of the neural circuits normally involved in reasoning.

The results show that when partisans face threatening information, not only are they likely to "reason" to emotionally biased conclusions, but we can trace their neural footprints when they do.

When confronted with potentially troubling political information, a network of neurons become active that produces distress. Whether this distress is conscious, or unconscious, or some combination of the two, we don't know.

The brain registers the conflict between data and desire and begins to search for ways to turn off the spigot of unpleasant emotion.

Nothing earth shattering there. But here's where it gets interesting (italics in the original):

But the political brain did something we didn't predict. Once partisans found a way to reason to false conclusions, not only did neural circuits involved in negative emotions shut off, but circuits involved in positive emotions turned on. The partisan brain didn't seem satisfied in just feeling better. It worked overtime to feel good, activating rewards circuits that give partisans a jolt of positive reinforcement for their biased reasoning. These reward circuits overlap significantly with those activated when drug addicts get their "fix", giving new meaning to the term political junkie.

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People Party vs. Money Party: Who's Who Among the Democrats

Many people ask me who? Who are the leading members of both sides of the actual divide? The answer is that there is no official list because no one is forced to formally declare their allegiance to the People Party or the Money Party. But it is fairly obvious which lawmakers in the new majority have specifically defined themselves on economic justice issues.

Though this is by no means a comprehensive list, here are the ones to watch in the coming Congress:

People Party Leaders

Freshman Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Jon Tester (D-MT) and Jim Webb (D-VA): This is the core group of economic populists who defined the larger populist trend in the 2006 election. Brown has a long record in the House as an economic justice champion, as has Sanders (who I worked for years ago). Tester (pictured above from an event he did here in Helena last night) made his campaign about cleaning up K Street corruption, and Webb has declared that his top issue is going to be addressing the taboo issue of economic inequality.

Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Russ Feingold (D-WI), Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Dick Durbin (D-IL): Dorgan has been one of the strongest voices against profiteering by the energy and pharmaceutical companies, and has recently written a book called "Take This Job and Ship It," which is one of the strongest declarations against lobbyist-written trade deals from any sitting Senator in recent memory. Similarly, Feingold has voted against every major lobbyist-written trade deal that has come through the Senate, even airing campaign ads on the issue well before that kind of message became more popular. Kennedy, as the incoming chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee is expected to continue his rabid support for the People Party on nearly every economic issue. And Durbin, now the number two Democrat in the Senate, has also had a solid record on trade, and is additionally talking about pushing public financing of elections -- the most effective way to cut off K Street's ability to manipulate Congress.

House Chairpeople George Miller (D-CA), David Obey (D-WI), John Conyers (D-MI), Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and Henry Waxman (D-CA): Miller will now head the Education and Workforce Committee where he is expected to turn his longtime leadership on pension security, wage protection and union organizing rights into legislative action. Obey, who will head the Appropriations Committee (and who I worked for a few years back), will make sure that any budget submitted by the White House that slashes health care, education and labor law enforcement will be dead on arrival, and replaced with a real spending plan that protects people (Obey was the guy who famously authored amendments to slash tax cuts for millionaires in order to better fund these priorities). Conyers will head the Judiciary Committee, which oversees all sorts of regulatory affairs where his pro-consumer record will finally have a chance to shine. Slaughter will chair the powerful Rules Committee -- the panel that governs how the entire chamber operates. She has been an outspoken leader against media consolidation -- one of the toughest issues to champion because the broadcasting industry is so powerful. And finally Waxman will head the Government Reform Committee, where we will now have a chairman who is serious about rooting out the waste, fraud and corruption that has plagued the no-bid Iraq contracts given to President Bush's cronies.

Reps. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), Tim Ryan (D-OH), Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) Nancy Boyda (D-KS), and Bruce Braley (D-IA): Ohio's trio of Kaptur, Ryan and Kucinich have been among the staunchest critics of lobbyist-written trade pacts and advocates for the middle-class agenda in the House. Freshmen Boyda and Braley both ran their campaigns almost exclusively on the trade issue. In Braley's case, the Wall Street Journal noted that he made opposition to the Bush administration's free-trade agenda a centerpiece of his campaign" urging "more focus on labor rights in national trade policy and talked of using economic sanctions to keep America competitive."

Money Party Leaders

Sen. Chuck Schumer and Reps. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) and Steny Hoyer (D-MD): All three of these men, now in leadership positions, have made very little effort to conceal that they answer to Big Money interests. Schumer, for instance, recently trumpeted a new report calling for post-Enron corporate reforms to be gutted. Emanuel was the architect of NAFTA who used the prospect of his being in the majority on the Ways and Means Committee to suck corporate cash out of Wall Street. Hoyer bragged on his website about starting his own K Street Project, and, as I documented in Hostile Takeover, one of his top legislative staffers serves simultaneously as an official for his corporate fundraising operation -- 'nuff said.

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