The War on Intelligence

Some of the recent actions of our House of Representatives are scaring me a little bit. While our middle and lower class bends under the weight of a national deficit, jobs flee overseas to exploit workers, and our education and healthcare systems perpetuate cyclical poverty and disease, the best they think they can do is take away our intelligence so that we don't notice the actions they aren't taking. 

The recent attack on public broadcasting (170MillionAmericans.org) and Planned Parenthood (ppaction.org/IStandWithPP) are a distraction and a waste of time that hurt, not help, Americans. The attack on public broadcasting not only does not make a dent in the national debt, but it takes away a valuable unbiased news resource from the American people. It is an attack on intelligence that leaves many with no domestic news options besides incredibly biased news stations that avoid the real issues.

Thanks Marz for the image: tellhertruly.tumblr.com

As for the attack on Planned Parenthood, it is a wedge issue and at it's heart is an attack on women's health. The NY Times spells out what the Pence Amendment is really all about:

"The egregious cuts in the House resolution include the elimination of support for Title X, the federal family planning program for low-income women that provides birth control, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and testing for H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases. In the absence of Title X’s preventive care, some women would die. The Guttmacher Institute, a leading authority on reproductive health, says a rise in unintended pregnancies would result in some 400,000 more abortions a year... Their continuing resolution would cut by 10 percent the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, better known as WIC, which serves 9.6 million low-income women, new mothers, and infants each month, and has been linked in studies to higher birth weight and lower infant mortality (The War on Women)."

This is not about abortion. Very little federal money that goes to PP funds abortions, and those dollars that do are for extreme cases like rape and incest. This is about misogyny, about a war on the intelligence of the U.S. public and of women especially. How much more do Republicans have to take from the middle and lower classes before we start taking it personally?

How about the trillions of dollars we have spent killing people in the Middle East? How about the billions of dollars spent on the war on drugs-- the war on drugs being the jailing of thousands of poor non-white men who have committed victimless crimes-- which hasn't stunted drug use in the least? How about the obscene salaries of the men pushing this legislation through? THOSE are the dollars we should be cutting. There's a reason stupid crap gets so much time on the news: it's so we don't think about this stuff. It's so our only political and moral convictions have to do with abortion and gay marriage, instead of the plagues that are killing the minds, hearts, and bodies of our children. This is a war on intelligence. By all means, keep getting angry about the freedom of Muslims to practice their religion, the choices that women make in their personal lives, and the sexual lives of women and men you have never met. But one day you will look down and see the ground has been taken from underneath you by the very men who incited you to such anger, and they will have done it without you even noticing.

http://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/

NY Times: The War on Women

http://www.170millionamericans.org/




Lupe Fiasco- Words I Never Said: