What's the Matter with Kansas (Redux)?

I read the news and I shudder.

Thanks to the curdled “leadership” of Governor Sam Brownback, Kansas welfare recipients cannot, according to a new bill just signed into law, access their $400 per month benefits in cash except to a limit of $25 per day from an ATM. That would mean making 16 withdrawals each and every month. Or, the Governor suggested, people could pay their bills with money orders. If their creditors would not accept payment by the state’s debit cards.

Hey, Gov, money orders can cost up to $5 each (when’s the last time Sammy boy bought a money order to pay for anything?). Four hundred dollars won’t go far if money order fees consume a chunk of it.

And suppose it’s February, like the February we just survived, and the temperature is below zero and folks really don’t feel like going to the ATM in order to get money for food or other necessities.

A Kansas advocacy group issued a statement pointing out that this new law will prevent many poor families from participating in other support programs, including a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps.

There’s more, a whole lot more.

Welfare recipients who have the misfortune to live in the great state of Kansas, home of some of the craziest of the right-wing loonies, cannot use their benefits to spend money for alcoholic beverages, casino gambling or gaming, jewelry, tattoos, massages, body piercings, spas, nail salons, lingerie (you mean they can’t buy underwear?), tobacco, vapor cigarettes, fortune-tellers, bail bonds, video arcades, movies at theaters, access to swimming pools, cruise ships, theme parks, race tracks or off-track betting, lottery tickets, concert tickets (no Taylor Swift or Eminem for you!), most sporting events, any other entertainment events open to the general public, sex paraphernalia, strip clubs, and places where minors under 18 are not permitted (i.e., bars and sex clubs).

Ah, but there is a saving grace in the Gov’s bill: Kansas recipients of welfare can buy guns with their Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) cards. (Does this mean that our friends and neighbors on welfare might apply for TANF just to acquire money to buy a Ruger, a Glock, or a Smith and Wesson? And then hold up their friendly neighborhood grocery stores? Or even the aforementioned off-limits liquor stores? The possibilities are endless.)

And what is to prevent these needy folks from withdrawing cash and then spending the money on any of the verboten items in Brownback’s miserly legislation? Nothing at all. There appears to be no provision for body cams or electronic tracking devices to be attached to the ankles of the presumed-to-be-guilty-of-spending-money-to-survive recipients of TANF money. (What? No surveillance? But Kansas has implied that people who get welfare are up to no good. Unless you are a gun-owner. Then you are exercising your Constitutional rights.)

We used to label folks who receive welfare (generally, single mothers with young children) “welfare queens” who drove Cadillacs and had a dozen out-of-wedlock kids just to increase the amount of their welfare benefits and live the high life. Until Bill Clinton put an end to that (which really never existed except in the fevered minds of the Wall Street gang and their toadies). That’s right, folks, the Clinton welfare reforms tended to limit the number of years that people could receive welfare benefits and put parents with children of school age to work for a number of hours each week as a condition for being eligible for benefits.

So the era of easy living on welfare (the fantasy of easy living on welfare, because believe me, it isn’t easy at all) came to an end a couple of decades ago, and the American public, a/k/a the filthy rich politicians and their billionaire corporate cronies, got its money’s worth from those lazy folks who just didn’t want to work for a living. (Trust me, taking care of children is full-time work, hard work: no maids, nannies, or play dates for these families.)

Sam Brownback is rumored to be interested in running for President in 2016. In preparation, he has cut $45 million in his state’s public school funding. The Kansas public schools and colleges are struggling to stay open and it’s only April. He cut taxes for the wealthy so much that he may be forced to raise them again. And now he has become an inspiration to the governors and legislators in other states that have set strict limits on what, exactly, welfare recipients may spend the state’s money on, as if such people didn’t need every dime to pay for rent, food, and transportation. No limousine liberals on TANF.

As the LA Times put it, Kansas is breaking new ground in demeaning the poor. And states such as Missouri (where a bill is pending to deny poor people the right to purchase cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood, or steak with food stamps) are emulating Kansas. Some role model.

The New Republic has pointed out that in Brownback’s rush to create a “conservative utopia,” he instead established a “conservative hell.” I need hardly mention that Kansas has rejected the establishment of a state ACA Medicaid program, relinquishing $5.3 billion in federal funding and $2.6 billion in Medicaid reimbursements. Kansas is the only state with a reported increase in the percentage of uninsured individuals between 2013 and 2014, according to Karla Anderson, writing for HealthInsurance.org. This includes a number of disabled recipients who have lost their coverage altogether.

“Navigators” who assist people to sign up for ACA coverage pursuant to the federal exchange, under a Kansas bill that could have authorized them under a proposed state health insurance exchange, would have been subjected to onerous additional eligibility requirements, leading to further increases in the number of Kansas uninsured. Such individuals would have been required to undergo criminal background checks including fingerprinting, provide their credit histories, and pay a $100 annual registration fee. Scrooge is alive and well in Kansas. Cutting off his nose to spite his face, as my mother used to say.

In closing, let’s not forget Brownback’s local booster club: The Wichita-based Koch Brothers, the largest contributors to Brownback’s campaigns. Now there’s a fan club worth cultivating. D’ya think maybe Charlie and Dave Koch had a little chat with Sammy B? You bet your life they did (apologies to Groucho).

For God’s Sake, Open the Door!

In our worst nightmares we speed toward destruction in the dramatic style of film characters Thelma and Louise, whose car is last pictured frozen in time hurtling over the abyss of the Grand Canyon, forever out of reach of law enforcement, plunging hundreds of feet to oblivion. These two icons have, in a hasty but decisive act to avoid capture and imprisonment, elected this catastrophic ending as a last resort.

We the viewers know the car would fall and crash in real time, but we’d rather remember the exuberant women who sought respite from humdrum lives only to become ensnared first by violence and then by their resulting need for survival and escape as they locked hands and sped toward the void.

Unlike Thelma and Louise, most of us wake from our nightmares unscathed, understanding that we were merely dreaming. Perhaps we even speculate about the meaning of such dreams: Do our lives feel like we’re going off a cliff, losing control, heading for disaster? If so, we do our best to exercise restraint if our feelings seem to be accelerating toward calamity. We seek peace, loss of anxiety, and a secure future.

Maintaining status, control, job security—these goals were slipping away from Andreas Lubitz, the young German commercial airline co-pilot who could imagine no life worth living beyond piloting a Lufthansa Germanwings Airbus across Europe, but could not in the end control the demons that caused his “severe subjective burnout” and depression, accompanied by suicidal thoughts. Instead, as he confided to a former girlfriend, he speculated that, “One day I will do something that will change the whole system, and then all will know my name and remember it.”

He was instructed to provide his employer with several medical reports that specified he was not fit to fly. Instead he discarded those reports in the trash. He apparently consulted with up to five different German clinics about both his mental health and troublesome eyesight, possibly a side effect of his anxiety or medications for same. None of the doctors could give him hope (nor did they appear to investigate further or report their findings to Lufthansa, regardless of German medical privacy laws that arguably did not entirely prevent them from doing so under the totality of the circumstances).

Days before the flight Andreas researched online how the Airbus cockpit locking mechanism could be set in play, when and how it could be opened, and how it could be rendered unassailable. The stage was set. He encouraged the pilot in charge to take a bathroom break after the plane reached cruising altitude near the Alps, leaving him alone in the cockpit. He then locked the door to the cockpit, set the cruise mechanism to descend to 100 feet—far below the Alpine terrain—and overrode the efforts of the pilot to regain admission to the controls.

This pygmy of a man who believed his life was over if he could no longer be at the controls of an airliner then sat in silence for an excruciating eight minutes, breathing evenly, even accelerating the plane's speed, while the pilot banged and hammered on the door, ground control was unable to obtain an audible response, and passengers finally started screaming in terror as the inevitable crash loomed.

The resulting impact after a descent from 38,000 feet to the altitude of the French Alps, at about 6,000 feet, occurred at a speed of about 700 kilometers per hour or 435 miles per hour. The plane and its occupants were pulverized when the plane hit the mountains, the debris field covering several adjacent slopes. Rescuers have relied on DNA to identify victims.

There were 149 passengers and crew who died with Andreas Lubitz when he set an Airbus on an automatic course to crash into the French Alps last week. Available audio indicates that the chief pilot was screaming and beating at the impregnable door, perhaps with a fire ax, yelling, “For God’s sake, open the door!” As the plane inexorably descended, the passengers were shouting in fear, their fate determined by a 27-year-old man who could not face his future without aviation but instead sought immortality through a breathtaking act of barbarity.

Thelma and Louise made an improvised pact in their last few conscious seconds to drive off the rim of the Grand Canyon to their deaths rather than spend the rest of their lives in prison, but Andreas Lubitz made no pact with any of the occupants of the plane he piloted into the side of a French mountain. They had no chance to opt out. They had no warning. They were not willing to end their lives. And so the 149 passengers and crew, young and old, seasoned fliers and nervous inexperienced travelers, were carried to their doom by the fears and insecurities of a selfish, dishonest, pitiable excuse for a man.

It is not hard to kill oneself; there are dozens of ways to do this publicly or privately. And in lovers’ quarrels, it is not unusual that a heartsick or revengeful partner kills his wife or girlfriend as well as himself, even other family members such as minor children.

But to methodically pilot a planeload of the innocent to their doom from the clouds to the mountains below is beyond diabolical. It is an act of aggression against the common good that does not suggest doing “something that will change the whole system, [so that] all will know [his] name and remember it.”

It is madness. It is a crime against humanity. It is the ultimate fear that clutches our hearts every time we are in the air and depend upon the skill of a pilot to bring us safely back to earth. If a well-respected airline such as Lufthansa cannot protect us from savagery like the Germanwings suicide crash, then none of us will ever be safe.

We do not wish to remember Andreas Lubitz. His remains should be buried in an unmarked grave. And although his act may never be forgotten, his infamous name should be obliterated from history.