Midrange Weekly Nov 29
Your Weekly Round Up On What’s Got The Midrange Staff’s Attention
Midrange Staff @midrangeyvr
Hello friends and welcome back to Midrange Weekly. The best thing you can say about the week is that it was slightly less climate apocalypsey than the last one, which is admittedly not a high bar to clear. Beyond our own waterlogged backyard the world has yet again had to unceremoniously learn a new letter letter of the greek alphabet with the omicron variant. While some of us have commented on how it sounds excitingly like a transformer character (As far as we can tell it’s just Tristan), others of a more conspiratorial mindset have commented on how the word is also an acronym for moronic. It’s fun to ponder how the anti vaxers and broader taxonomy of conspiracy theorists insist that the trick to bringing down these secretive and shadowy globalist (read: evil) corporations is to… be good at word games? Sure. Anyways, let’s all get that third dose and see what else happened this week.
A Few Thoughts On The Recently Released BC Child Poverty Report Card
Eradicating poverty shouldn’t be this difficult, yet, we continue to make it so. The only way to solve this problem is to give those in need actual money. That’s it. There’s no other way to it.
And when I say actual money, I don’t mean a little bit, but enough to bring them out of poverty. Giving a single mother a few extra hundred dollars a month will not cut it. Nor will feeding her and her children one meal a day. The food bank does help. Non-profits which feed do as well. But they’re just band-aids to an issue we just can’t seem to fix.
It’s been 32 years since the House of Commons made a unanimous commitment to end child poverty by the year 2000. In 1989, the child poverty rate was 22.0% in Canada and 21.9% in B.C. In 2000, B.C.’s child poverty rate reached a 30-year high at 27.6%. — BC Child Poverty Report Card
Does it look like we’re getting anywhere?
1 in 5 children in this province lives in poverty. That is shameful.
Our Federal and Provincial governments can give out $2000 checks in a matter of weeks when pressed with a pandemic on their hands, yet, we cannot do the same for single mothers who require assistance?
The need is there but our full will is not.
From BC Child Poverty Report Card:
In 2019, the child poverty rate in British Columbia was 18.0% as measured by Statistics Canada’s Census Family Low Income Measure (CFLIM) after income taxes, using taxfiler data. This represents 156,560 children who lived in poor households in 2019.
At 18.0%, BC had a slightly higher child poverty rate than Canada at 17.7%. The 2019 rates were down slightly from 2018 when BC’s child poverty rate was 18.5% and across Canada the rate was 18.2%.
BC’s early years (0–5 years old) child poverty rate, at 17.5% in 2019, was slightly lower than Canada’s early years child poverty rate at 18.5%, while BC’s all ages poverty rate, at 17.9%, was higher than Canada’s all ages poverty rate at 16.5%.
In total 47,830 out of the 866,500 people living in poverty in BC in 2019 were young children (0–5 years old). This a decrease of 11,170 from 2018, where data found 59,000 young children were growing up in poor households.
One of the many highlights all the trillions Joe Biden’s government has doled out this past year was his American Rescue Plan. With expanded child allowances, one estimate predicts child poverty could drop by as much as half. The simple reason for this massive drop? They’re giving more money than they ever have.
From Vox:
The Biden child allowance converts the existing child tax credit into a near-universal benefit of up to $3,600 annually for kids 5 and younger and $3,000 annually for those ages 6 to 17, a portion of which will be paid out monthly from July through December. The expanded credit is not only more generous — it currently maxes out at $2,000 per kid under 17 — but also includes in its scope poor families that don’t qualify for the full $2,000 per year under the current rules. For the first time ever, families with no taxable earnings will be able to claim the full credit.
Here in Canada Justin Trudeau’s government launched the Canada Child Benefit to help give families a fair chance at success. The fund is indexed, which means it grows each year with inflation and it tops out at a high number.
From Canada.ca:
For the 2021–2022 benefit year, the maximum annual benefit will be $6,833 per child under age 6 and $5,765 per child aged 6 through 17. That’s over $350 more per child than when the CCB was first introduced.
This benefit is a great thing but it doesn’t do enough. We need a national child care program to help balance out the disparity many parents struggle with — you have to make a lot of money to justify working if you intend to send your child to daycare.
The BC Child Poverty Report Card goes on to highlight with specifics (unknowingly) a possible answer to this issue.
Poor lone-parent families with one child had a median after-tax income of $19,540 in 2019 in BC, or $12,305 below the $31,845 poverty line for a family of this size. They would have to increase their after-tax income by $1,025 per month to meet this threshold.
Poor couple families with one child had a median after-tax income of $27,070 in 2019 in BC, or $11,932 below the $39,002 poverty line for a family of this size. They would have to increase their after-tax income by $994 per month to meet this threshold.
Poor lone-parent families with two children had a median after-tax income of $24,890 in 2019 in BC, or $14,112 below the $39,002 poverty line for a family of this size. They would have to increase their after-tax income by $1,176 per month to meet this threshold.
Poor couple families with two children had a median after-tax income of $32,950 in 2019 in BC or $12,086 below the $45,036 poverty line for a family of this size. They would have to increase their after-tax income by $1,007 per month to meet this threshold.
With these four examples, getting families up to the poverty line threshold would take an average of about $1,000 per month to achieve. That’s just to get them to the poverty line, which isn’t great at all. Similar to what the government did when the pandemic hit, I believe allocations of $2,000 per month would be the ideal number to really fixing this solution.
Would it be a heavy burden for our government long-term?
Absolutely.
But what’s the alternative?
The status quo isn’t working. Real cash, consistently, is the only way to help those in need. The New Leaf Project is proof that giving poor people money with no strings attached is the best way for them to fix their situation.
Ultimately, what struck a chord with me personally was this quote below.
From The Tyee:
It’s a clear indication that B.C.’s child poverty problem is actually a women’s poverty problem, says Viveca Ellis, provincial organizer for Single Mothers’ Alliance BC.
“The big secret is that the majority of children in poverty in British Columbia are in poverty because their mothers are in poverty,” she said. “It is mothers’ poverty that we need to tackle to shift the dial.”
I’m a child from a single mother who grew up in poverty. It sucked. My mother was mentally ill and she lacked education. She barely scraped by. We moved a lot and struggled with food insecurity all the time. The checks she received from the government got her by (barely), not ahead.
We definitely need to shift the dial. — Jamie
The Lincoln Project Is Not Your Friend
While the group is less ubiquitous across the internet, and generally less loved than they were say a year ago, The Lincoln Project still commands a fair bit of attention from political punditry and those masochistic enough to keep themselves appraised of the various warring factions that operate in D.C. As their primary function since their inception in 2019 was to facilitate the demise of Trump’s political fortunes, at least as far as his re-election went, the group has struggled for relevancy or a guiding mission statement over the last year. In retrospect, quietly slipping into obscurity and obsolescence post Nov 2020 would have been the prudent measure for the group to take, but instead they’ve spent the last year needlessly miring themselves in controversy or awkwardly inserting themselves into political battles where they have proven to be ineffectual at best, and prodigiously counter intuitive at worst. In light of some egregiously foolish political messaging that occurred earlier this month, now is a good time to remind progressive voters, self identified liberals, and the proverbial card carrying members of the insipid #resistancetwitter that no, The Lincoln Project is not your friend. They don’t like Trump and neither do you, but this is not an enemy of your enemy situation. In a lot of respects they are just as bad as him. In a crucial few, they are worse.
First, let’s do a quick little recap of what the Lincoln Project is and how it came to fruition. Founded in early 2019 by a number of formerly prominent republican strategists who were supplanted and discarded by Trump and his brand of much more viciously antagonistic and aggrieved style of electioneering, the Lincoln Project viewed Trump as an apostasy; a cancer on the Republican Party that needed to be excised. They argued, publically and profusely, that Trump and Trumpism as the neoglism would be coined, was an aberration of republican ideology that needed to be addressed. As the founders, which included lawyers and operatives such as Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson, George Conway, John Weaver and several others, had operated within the nexus of the republican ecosystem for over a generation, they felt uniquely equipped to diagnose this so called cancer and mitigate its proliferation.
The Lincoln project, to contrast much of the democratic political machinery that was far too unassertive and weak willed when dealing with Trump, understood how to combat his daily enmity and vitriol that spewed mostly from his Twitter feed. Essentially, fight fire with fire. While the democrats were busy trying to articulate policies and some hypothetical post pandemic world, The Lincoln Project played the role of agitators and saboteurs focusing directly on pissing off Trump. Calling him erratic and unhinged were standardized enough across the liberal spectrum, but The Lincoln Project went a step further by mimicking Trump’s cruel pettiness and redirecting it towards him in their attacks. Deploying the same tactics of weaponized social media and cognizant of Trump’s vanity, they surmised that a fundamentally frail and egotistical person could be easily wounded and distracted. Indeed, the stratagem was largely successful as Trump foolishly spent more time than he should (as in more than zero) spouting acerbic rejoinders to the group when he should have been focusing on Biden.
It’s hard to say to what extent the plan worked beyond the objective notion that Trump did in fact lose. How much influence on the outcome you can attribute to The Lincoln Project’s insurgent attacks is harder to measure. However, they did accrue millions in donations and followers on Twitter, two of the primary battlefields in modern politics, therefore it would be foolish to say their impact was negligible or purely aesthetic.
In the year since Trump was dispatched- at least from the White House if not America’s collective and cultural mindshare- The Lincoln Project’s stalwart image as a noble attack dog and paragon of defending the ideals of American democracy and decency have taken a bit of a hit, to put it mildly. Leading up to the 2020 election, and entangled within the interstitial threads of its hangover were multiple reports and allegations of self-dealing and unethical use of funds. The reports state that a great deal of their fundraising cache was funnelled into a separate consulting firm that would in turn indirectly pay out several of the founders including Weaver and Wilson. More concerning are accusations that Weaver was responsible for cultivating a toxic work environment of sexual harassment, with he himself alleged go have harassed several underage boys. A recent commission concluded no wrong doing on Weaver’s part but as Politico reports, “critics have questioned the independence of that inquiry”. Not a great look for a group that is supposed to be act as an antithetical bludgeon against Trump’s sexual cruelness or malignant greed.
Rick Wilson recently also seemed to needlessly dilute the potency of The Lincoln Project advocating as an anti Trump movement, by… endorsing a Trump 2024 run. While your brain short circuits from this numbing exercise in insanity, let me try to summarize Wilson’s anaemic logic. He alleges that Trumpism, like some kind of metastatic tumour, has grown beyond Trump himself, which is essentially true. His tactical analysis- if you can call it such a thing- is that now a number of politicians who are not as ruinously stupid and infantile as Trump have adopted his cruel and hostile policies. If a person with his malignant agenda, but also with even a simulacrum of actual competency were to be elected, that would be a far more grievous threat to America than Trump ever was. Walker’s calculus is that by advocating for a Trump 2024 run, the big Cheeto will easily trounce any other primary contenders, nullifying the aforementioned threat, leaving only him to be bested by the eventual democratic nominee. The one little flaw in this theoretical is the glaringly obvious point that Trump has actually won this thing in the past. When no one thought he could in 2016, Trump pulled off the biggest upset in the history of American politics, and ya it was pretty upsetting! For Wilson to be somehow ignorant or indifferent to this obvious risk is stunning it its naivety.
Such misguided strategies seem at least partly endemic of The Lincoln project, which was highlighted by their royal screw up earlier this month in Virginia. In hopes of sabotaging the optics of a campaign rally of then republican candidate Glenn Youngkin (he has since gone on to win the governorship), The Lincoln Project recruited a small band of actors to pose as white supremacist protesters from the infamous 2017 Charlottesville Unite The Right Rally. The hope was to artificially tie Youngkin’s brand to the worst of white nationalism that is axiomatic of Trump’s pathology, but it backfired tremendously due to the tastelessness of it all. The incident is instructive of the limits of fighting Trump on Trump’s terms and how such pursuits hurt us just as much as him in the long run. Such antics favour theatricality over substance, which further erodes not only the electorate’s media and political literacy, but deemphasizes the importance of policy differences defining the realm of political discourse- instead it affords primacy to incendiary culture war narratives, the kind that Trump and his supplicants love to deploy and run on. It normalizes and sub-textually advocates that, yes, this is how politics are supposed to work.
How could the top brass at The Lincoln Project make so many unforced errors? Who are these people? We’ve just covered Wilson, who in addition to the questionable bouts of galaxy brain is well known for being a virulent bigot and all around unpleasant person. George Conway was a lawyer who traded notes and teamed up with right wing ideologues of the worst order like Ann Coulter and Matt Drudge during the Jennifer Flowers lawsuit against Bill Clinton in the 90s. Weaver and Schmidt were both advisors for John McCain during his unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid, with Schmidt even running the campaign. While McCain is fondly remembered in some liberal circles erroneously as a balanced, fair minded politician devoted to the lost art of bipartisanship, make no mistake he was a war monger. The level of disastrous foreign adventurism and pre-emptive wars McCain advocated for in the 90s and after 9/11 puts the junior Bush to shame. We should all be thankful he never made it all the way to the White House.
Therein lies the fundamental truth of the Lincoln Project, and what’s so alienating about them- these people aren’t better than Trump. Less crude maybe, but in the grand scheme of things that’s not exactly paramount. They nominally represent a better kind of Republican Party, and of less hyper partisan discourse, but this is a manipulative and propagandistic narrative they are offering. This verisimilitude of a nostalgic republican era obscures several truths about what they were and how we got here. Since the end of the Cold War, and as shown with the Gulf War, and the disastrous post 9/11 conflicts in the middle east, they are all of a caste of Neo Cons who believe America’s manifest destiny is to export its colonial hubris all over the world. Such ideological dogma is responsible for more death and suffering planet wide, as well as a severe battering of America’s image, than Trump was ever able to foster.
Furthermore it puts on stark display the myopia and denial these operatives exhibit in trying to absolve themselves from the conditions that allowed for Trump’s ascendancy. Trump is not an aberration, or a cancerous anomaly of republicanism; he is the logical extension, the obvious conclusion to their tactics and motives. Years of ambient racism and subtly rendered grievances to sway the electorate, or at least the parts of it in hermetically gerrymandered states, were developed by the teams who worked for former republican patriarchs like Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush or John Boehner. Trump simply took their paly book and rendered the subtext as text, said the quiet part loud. Simmering anti Muslim resentment in the early 2000s becomes his Muslim travel ban. Decades of anti science propaganda to ensure shareholder margins for their donors at the energy concerns is antecedent to the anti max/vaccine hysteria that we live with now. Campaign after campaign of tough on borders bravado morphs into draconian immigration polices that are horrifically cruel by design. They were the precursor to the worst of Trump’s excesses and impulses. Restoring the Republican Party to the way things were will just rest the cycle by a decade or so. There can’t be any going back, and if The Lincoln Project can find a place in the future, they can find themselves an exit. -Tristan
Things From The Internet We Liked
Vice Drops An Excellent Video On Canada’s Reconciliation Effort Towards Their Brutal Treatment Of Indigenous Children
We’ve touched on this topic a few times in the past, so bear with us if we do so once more. This video goes into great detail of what the reporters on the ground have seen and heard while investigating this story. Excellent stuff as usual and important viewing for all Canadians.
Don’t Look Up Might Be The Perfect Satire For 2021
With the never-ending shit storm of bad news that we have no choice but to just constantly acclimate to, how would we respond upon learning that a planet killing astroid was barreling towards us? Would it truly even register at this point, or would it be just another thing to be mildly interesting until the next scandalous news cycle? That’s the inquiry that Don’t Look Up is driving at. From Adam McKay who brought us the excellent The Big Short, his new film jokes, with the darkest of humour, about just how cynical, greedy, and numb we can be even in the face of the apocalypse. Check out the trailer; the film releases Dec 24.