By Jim Hightower
Author, Commentator, America’s Number One Populist
Welcome to North Carolina, where the Republican-controlled Legislature and their governor have gone after the state’s hard-hit unemployed people like howling mad dogs. In a state with the fifth highest unemployment rate – now at 9.2 percent – these “tar-heads” have slashed the lifeline of half-a-million people struggling to hang onto their middle class possibilities.
It’s not like North Carolina’s benefits were at all luxurious before this assault on them. Benefits were only $535 a week, but now they’ve been whacked to $350. Try to cover even life’s basics – rent, utilities, food and clothing, and gas for job hunting – on $1,400 a month. And please don’t get sick. Plus, in their wisdom, the right-wing solons slashed the weeks of eligibility for jobless aid from 26 to as few as 12. After that? “Adios chump,” says the GOP (trying out its new Spanish-language appeal to Latino voters).
By cutting the weeks so low, the GOP geniuses tripped over their own extremism, for that disqualifies 170,000 North Carolinians from the federal program of extended benefits, needed by those suffering from long term unemployment. This stumble will cost the state’s economy about $780 million.
That’s interesting, because the Republican rationale for going after so many vulnerable families was (1) that the deep cuts would pay down the state debt, and (2) that they need to shrink government to make North Carolina’s economic climate more attractive to business interests.
Stupidity aside, how can an entire party have strayed so far from common, Sunday school morality and plain human decency, as to cater to corporate interests on the backs of the jobless?
“North Carolina Approves Steep Benefits Cuts for Jobless in Bid to Reduce Debt,” New York Times, February 14, 2013.
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National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks. Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower believes that the true political spectrum is not right to left but top to bottom, and he has become a leading national voice for the 80 percent of the public who no longer find themselves within shouting distance of the Washington and Wall Street powers at the top. He publishes a populist political newsletter, “The Hightower Lowdown.” He is a New York Times best-selling author, and has written seven books including, Thieves In High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country And It’s Time To Take It Back; If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates; and There’s Nothing In the Middle Of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos. His newspaper column is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate.
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This piece was first published on Jim Hightower’s website.
Posted February 23, 2013 at 8:00 am, in Allied Approaches, From Jim Hightower
