Racist NC Republicans

This vile disgusting excuse for a human being represents the racist mindset of a LOT of North Carolina’s republicans. Once you understand who they are and how they think, everything the republican led legislature has done and is doing, begins to make a lot more sense. After republicans won control of North Carolina’s legislature and the state’s executive office in 2012 they began implementing a new wave of radical policies. First they cut unemployment benefits, then they made big cuts in food stamps, they passed extremely harsh new voting restrictions targeting African American, and then they refused the medicaid expansion from the federal government that would have covered 500,000 uninsured low income and out of work families. Cutting programs that help the poor disabled and elderly became their number one priority at a time when North Carolina had the 5th largest unemployment percentage in the country. For every low wage job opening there were hundreds of applicants applying. When governor McCrory and the republican legislature announced the cuts to unemployment benefits they said it would help job growth in the state and give the unemployed more motivation to find employment. Seriously, that is what they said, that was their stated, on the record position. In their weird warped minds the state had plenty of jobs open and waiting for people to fill them. But instead of finding gainful employment the unemployed were just living it up with their huge government unemployment checks making it rain while eating lobster and caviar with food stamps. When you elect uneducated radical ideologues who know nothing about governing, who don’t understand that pragmatism and compromise are requirements for effective governance, who put ideology above the best interest of their constituents time and time again, when you vote for these guys this is the type of government you get. You get elected officials like the racist asshole in the video clip. People like him would rather scorch the earth before admitting that their ideology isn’t practical and although it may sound good at town hall meetings, or on Fox News, or on talk radio, but in the real fact based world it’s a bunch of nonsense.

The racist misguided trash in this video exposes the real reason why North Carolina republican lawmakers are making all of these cuts to social programs. In my home state of North Carolina there are ugly racist stereotypes that are ingrained and cemented in people’s minds. Especially white republicians. Not all of them but a large portion of them. When you start talking about welfare, food stamps, government housing assistance, or any social programs for the poor, most people picture African Americans as the only recipients of these programs. The gentleman in the video clip said exactly what him and his collogues think. Lazy Blacks always taking something from the government. Whites work hard while the lazy blacks get all their tax dollars. They use words like “government dependents” and “makers and takers”. What they fail to realize is there are more white americans who receive food stamps than African Americans. And neither white or black americans become lifetime dependent on federal aid. The average recipient of food stamps only recieve them for one year. Yes one year. That fact alone disproves the “lifetime dependent” fallacy. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 90% of government entitlement recipients are elderly, disabled, and full time working poor. You can lie to yourself and keep picturing lazy minorities who won’t get a job as the people who are taking advantage of government handouts, but the facts do not support it. Here’s the ugly truth about the poor in my home state of North Carolina. The minimum wage for NC is $7.25 an hour. According to the US Department of Labor the lowest hourly wage that a single parent with one child has to make to live above the poverty line with no government assistance is $18.00 an hour. The living wage for a two parent home with one child is $16.00 an hour. So it is absolutely impossible to work a full time job making minimum wage and support yourself and a child. Without food stamps a lot of these children with “working poor” parents would go to bed hungry. What’s even more insulting is the hourly wages for waitresses and servers. In NC it’s $2.13 an hour. If Governor McCrory and his republican legislature really gave a damn about hard working North Carolinians they would raise the states minimum wage and tell the business community that the government and the state are tired of subsidising their low wage workers. Cutting food stamps and unemployment benefits isn’t going to solve anything or make our state stronger. It’s time to stop buying into asinine pre-civil rights era stereotypes and stop using them to rationalize bigoted racist views.

Since republicans won majority control in North Carolina their policies, rhetoric, and actions have alienated women, minorities, lesbian and gays, the poor, moderate republicans, the elderly, veterans, the disabled, senior citizens, college students, legal and illegal immigrants, and the list goes on and on. Governor McCrory has made it known that he wants to privatize the states Medicaid program. But North Carolina’s Medicaid program is one of the best in the country. The state has received a number of awards for it, other states have studied our state program to learn how to make theirs better. So McCrory and the legislature cut Medicaid’s budget so low that the program could hardly function. Then they use a problem that they created as a pretext to reform. Raleigh News and Observer found proof that McCrory and his staff falsified records and research to make the state run Medicaid program appear grossly over budget, inefficient, and wasteful. A woman named Carol Steckel was hired by the governor to fill the Medicaid Director position and spearheaded the effort to privatize NC’s Medicaid program. After only 8 months on the job she left to work for one of the managed care companies being considered to take over Medicaid after privatization. There are a hundred different stories just like this one that are indefensible and unethical. The stories show a distinct pattern of behavior that gets more and more brazen and even more extreme than the previous.

The callous uncaring ethics lacking brazen lying racist extremism exhibited by NC republican lawmakers are an embarrassment to all law abiding hard working North Carolinians both democrats as well as moderate conservatives. The good thing is North Carolina will make sure that democrats are elected as governors for the next 2 or 3 decades.