You know how Obama and the kind of Democratic lackeys who follow him blindly are always saying how they don't want to "hurt" social programs like Medicare and Social Security-- just "strengthen" them? Somehow when I hear that from Obama-- if Henry Clay was the "Great Compromiser," Obama is the "Dismal Compromiser"-- alarm bells go off... loud. That isn't to say that Social Security and Medicare can't be strengthened. They can-- and should be. Just not by the mortal enemies of the programs-- conservatives and reactionaries-- and not by a patsy like Obama. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, is someone I would-- and do-- trust to strengthen Social Security. And yesterday he announced plans to do just that-- and fast... before the reconstituted Boehner/Obama Catfood Commission or SuperCommittee or whatever this incarnation of the Four Horsemen of the Austerity Apocalypse are being called. It's not a coincidence that Bernie is the only incumbent senator who has been endorsed by Blue America this year and it's not a coincidence that when we question prospective nominees we try to gage how Bernie-like they would likely to be if they get into Congress. In a post of his own blog yesterday, the Independent senator from Vermont explained why he's introducing Social Security legislation when the Senate gets back from their long, undeserved summer vacation.
Since it was signed into law 76 years ago this month, Social Security has kept millions of senior citizens, widows, orphans, and the disabled out of poverty. To keep Social Security strong for another 75 years, Sanders' legislation would apply the same payroll tax already paid by more than nine out of 10 Americans to those with incomes over $250,000 a year.
Joined at a press conference by leaders of Vermont seniors organizations, Sanders also cautioned that Social Security may be in jeopardy as a powerful new congressional "super committee" looks for ways to cut deficits by $1.5 trillion over the next decade.
"We are here today to send a loud and clear message to this super committee: do not cut Social Security," Sanders said at the news conference with Janet Dermody, deputy director of the Vermont Center for Independent Living; Jim Coutts, director of the Franklin County Senior Center; and Jane Osgatharp, a retired state worker who sits on the Alliance of Retired Americans board of directors.
Before Social Security, about half of our senior citizens lived in poverty. Today, less than 10 percent live in poverty. More than 53 million Americans, including more than 120,000 Vermonters, receive Social Security benefits.
Social Security is the most successful government program in our nation's history. It has not contributed one dime to the federal deficit. It has a $2.5 trillion surplus, and it can pay out every nickel owed to every eligible American for at least the next 25 years, according to the Social Security Administration. A recent report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that Social Security is in even better financial shape and can pay all promised benefits until 2038.
One way benefits could be cut would be to lower cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients. Even under today's formula that underestimates senior living costs, there has been no COLA in the last two years. Proposed changes in the way inflation is calculated would cost a retiree living on $16,000 a year about $560 a year when they turn 75 and pay $1,000 less at age 85.
Under Sanders' legislation, Social Security benefits would be untouched. The system would be fully funded by making the wealthiest Americans pay the same payroll tax already assessed on those with incomes up to $106,800 a year. The idea follows through on a proposal that President Obama made when he was running for office in 2008.
Remember that Obama? I didn't trust him entirely but I went for the Hope and Change thing and I voted for him. That seems like a long time ago. Right-wing frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, Rick Perry, says he's changed his mind (maybe) on Social Security. In a recent book he claims to have written (and even read) he called Social Security a "ponzi scheme" and asserted that it is "unconstitutional" and should be abolished. They like that kind of talk in Texas. Now that he has to appeal to sane voters, he says he didn't really mean his book to be a statement of factual policy. We'll let him and Obama hash that out between them. You can donate to Bernie's reelection campaign on the Blue America Senate page. Right now it's just him-- and one other proven friend of working families.
This was from a few months ago. Bernie knew exactly what was coming:
The president, by God, he's got resolve on one thing: he's going to Martha's Vineyard whether you like it or not!
Nine days! He "wants to be with his children."
Really? Aren't they in the White House? Listen to these idiotic arguments.
No, he wants to be on Martha's Vineyard with the beautiful people; the millionaires and the billionaires. And the private jets and the yachts! This is what kills me: the hypocrisy of how this man lives!
He lives a life of luxury, which you and I subsidize... while he attacks a life of luxury by people who pay for themselves!
He takes the biggest corporate jet in the world -- in terms of its cost, operation and construction -- Air Force One, there's gonna be yachts, millionaires, billionaires. They're going to be eating all kinds of food with salt, fat and all the rest of it, wonderful desserts, cheesecake, chocolate, mousse -- you and I, were supposed to act like we're living in hovels.
The children on the Left enjoy screeching about corporations, "the wealthy" and the high-achievers who have made something of themselves.
What they fail to understand is that the biggest, most powerful, most corrupt and lawless "corporations" in the world are governments.
Case in point: Democrats have constructed the most gigantic Ponzi schemes in world history: Social Security and Medicare, to name but two. Had they done this in the private sector, they'd be serving life sentences in a cell, sharing a bunk with Jethro.
But somehow it's noble if they're in government and they're bankrupting your children and grandchildren with lawless, unconstitutional and mathematically impossible schemes!
No, they're not noble. They're all hypocrites. Every last Democrat.
Frank Guinta is a dangerous kook; the other guy is dressed up as a Revolutionary War general
If you've been following Bernie Sanders' heroic efforts to refocus Congress on what the American people are actually interested in their representatives in Washington getting accomplished-- as opposed to the Austerity Torture that has taken over both parties-- it will have come as no surprise to you that the Alliance for American Manufacturing released a non-partisan poll this week that shows, conclusively (and once again), that by an overwhelming 67% to 29% margin voters prefer that Washington focus on job creation rather than deficit reduction. Confirming what Sanders has been telling everyone who will listen,
• Voters want Washington to act on jobs, especially in manufacturing.
• At the same time, voters give the President and Congress even worse marks than last year for taking any action at all on jobs and manufacturing.
• Voters across the spectrum see manufacturing as central to the nation’s economic success.
• Less than a third of Americans see the U.S. as the strongest economy in the world, but overwhelming majorities feel it is possible and important for the nation to regain that position.
• Though it may surprise pundits and media talking heads, Republican voters favor pro-manufacturing job solutions just as much as Democratic voters.
• When given an “either/or” choice, just 29% want Washington to focus on deficit reduction while 67% favor job creation.
I like the way independent-minded Democrat Nick Ruiz looked at the problem yesterday. (There's a reason he was the first candidate for Congress Blue America endorsed this cycle)
The mediastream is awash in debt talk. Such is the pop currency in circulation. It's not a train that is bound for glory, saddled as it is with the misinformation of the corporate coup d’état. The conductor in chief could easily change tracks, but he has not.
The trick of the ideological center people are talking about today, the "centrist cop-out" as it is being called -- is that there is no center. That is the trick of the tale. People once believed the Earth was at the center of the universe. I'm sure some of the radicalized Right still do. But as for the political axis, we should recognize that there are only interests, factions, alliances, allegiances and competition -- but no center. The center is what they call it when someone has won. New centers are created every political cycle.
That is why there is always talk of the pendulum swinging this way and that, each election cycle, with winners and losers. And we all know who has been winning lately. The center is the myth that the media sphere sells on CCTV, where everything is solicitation. But you don’t have to buy it.
Debt is in circulation, tradable, like any other instrument of financial imagination.
Will someone throw the people a line? Save them from being cut adrift, as Wall Street pouts and sulks; about as convincing to us as a teen-aged tantrum? Not this time.
Merck will cut 13,000 more jobs, hording cash. BHO says again today, he is willing to sever the New Deal legacy. McDonald’s continues to open a restaurant every other day, soon to be every day -- in China. All while the U.S. economy grinds essentially to a halt.
I'm sure Republican Sandy Adams (FL-24) would love to take your call, fax or email on all of this, and seriously consider your concerns about the Wall Street debt crisis, the destruction of the New Deal, the corporate miseducation of our children and the wholesale destruction of our natural environment; and candidly admit how wrong she is to follow the fake Republican simulation of prosperity. Perhaps you'd rather not waste your time.
But there is something you can do about all of this for the next phase of austerity that is sure to come -- help me to replace these kinds of Republicans with progressive Democrats, and give yourself the voice you deserve on Capitol Hill.
Carol Shea-Porter was one of the few progressives who got caught up in the big Tea Party mess last year. By a 121,655- 95,503 vote she lost her New Hampshire congressional seat to hackish on-again, off-again teabagger Frank Guinta. He got to Congress and promptly started voting to end Medicare and attacking Social Security. Carol has decided to seek a rematch now that New Hampshire voters are having a serious case of buyers' remorse all across the board. This week she approached this whole Beltway mess from another perspective in a guest column she did for New Hampshire media.
Social Security had its 75th Birthday last year. While Americans celebrated this vital program that has provided economic support and dignity to seniors, disabled people, and children of deceased workers, there were members of Congress and a political party who were laying plans to change and jeopardize the program. The Republican Party leaders, who previously tried to privatize Social Security in 2005, decided to "save" Social Security from the very people who have spent a lifetime paying into the program. Their Chairman of the Budget Committee introduced "The Path to Prosperity," which included raising the qualifying age and, yes, privatizing it. It is particularly grating to read the language from Budget Chairman Paul Ryan's plan-- "Further, even if the current system could be sustained, it is no longer a good deal for American workers"-- because he, more than most, knows better. His father died young, and Paul Ryan rightfully became eligible for help from the federal government. He collected Social Security benefits as a minor. He saved those federal government checks to pay for college. This shows why we need to protect Social Security from the now educated and financially secure Paul Ryan and his party-- because Social Security provides economic support and, for the young, economic and educational opportunity.
Here are some facts about Social Security. First, more than 90% of Americans 65 and over receive Social Security. More than 6 million children receive benefits due to a parent's death or disability, and a deceased worker's spouse collects if there are children under the age of 18. Millions rely on it to survive. While almost half of all seniors would be poor without it, women would be hurt even more than men, because women earn lower wages and generally live longer than men. More than half of all elderly women would live in poverty.
This would have an enormous economic impact on middle class families with aging parents. Already struggling adult children would have to care for themselves, their kids, and their parents. Without Social Security, families would have to make devastating decisions about living arrangements, health care, education, transportation, etc, as they tried to divide resources between the young and the old. Also, reducing future benefits or privatizing Social Security would not be a "shared sacrifice.” As former White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers recently wrote in Vanity Fair, "The top 1% of Americans now take home nearly a quarter of all income and control more than 40% of the country's wealth-- roughly the same as the bottom 90%." Not exactly shared sacrifice. Therefore, we must stop Paul Ryan and New Hampshire's Republican Representatives from dismantling this program.
Both of our Republican Representatives have attacked Social Security. One supported the Bush plan. The other said, at a May 2009 rally with Glen Beck's 9/12 group, "…future generations should seek different private sector solutions and have personal responsibility start to lead the way."
Why are Republicans doing this? Is there really a problem with Social Security? Right now, there is actually a surplus. As Jacob Lew, director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in USA Today on 22/21/11, "...the problem is not with Social Security, but with the rest of the budget. In 2001 and 2003, Washington cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and later expanded Medicare without paying for it. Blaming Social Security for our fiscal woes is like blaming you for not saving enough in your checking account because the bank lost all depositors' money."
Social Security will have problems paying at today's rate in 26 years, but it can be fixed if the Congress would do what Reagan did in 1983-- fix it. First, raise the cap. Right now, people who earn under $106,800 pay tax on every single dollar they earn. People who earn over that do not pay on every dollar, just the first $106,800. This amounts to a hidden tax cut as their income rises. This is not fair. We also need to stop the Social Security tax “holiday” that was enacted last year, which reduced workers' payments 2%. This denies the fund essential resources.
As President Roosevelt said about Social Security in 1941, “We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.” We need to tell our leaders again-- don't scrap our social security program!
Stimulating the economy to put American victims of the Bush/Wall Street/GOP Recession back to work, while protecting the lives and well-being of our most vulnerable citizens, is clearly what Americans expect from our government. Someday we may figure out what President Obama is thinking. It's not difficult to know just how progressives like Bernie Sanders, Alan Grayson, Raúl Grijalva and Carol Shea-Porter feel about it-- and how strongly they'll stand up against the right-wing onslaught. In the end, of course, it's up to the voters to chose. And in New Hampshire, voters are more than a little shocked to see how the Republicans they have empowered have chosen to proceed, after being-- excuse the phrase-- given the keys to the car.
Yesterday Robert Reich warned his readers to not fall for the Republican lies that have totally infused the corporate media. His point: there's a job crisis and a growth crisis, not a budget crisis.
[T]he best way to get jobs and growth back is for the federal government to spend more right now, not less-- for example, by exempting the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes this year and next, recreating a WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps, creating an infrastructure bank, providing tax incentives for small businesses to hire, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, and so on.
...Repeat after me: The federal deficit is not the nation’s biggest problem. The anemic recovery, huge unemployment, falling wages, and declining home prices are bigger problems. We don’t have a budget crisis. We have a jobs and growth crisis.
The GOP has manufactured a budget crisis out of the Republicans’ extortionate demands over raising the debt limit. They have succeeded in hoodwinking the public...
I like the ad below that's running in Iowa this weekend. It could have just as easily run in either of New Hampshire's congressional districts-- or against Sandy Adams in central Florida.
Historian Victor Davis Hanson is far more optimistic than I regarding the aftereffects of the impending debt implosion here in the U.S. We are approaching $15 trillion in national debt, which does not even take into account the $60+ trillion entitlement programs that will soon overtake our ability to pay. In that light, Hanson asks:
• "Should those on welfare who have more than three children still qualify for increased assistance for each additional offspring?"
• "Does the affluent class deserve mortgage-interest deductions on second and third homes?"
• "Should U.S. troops subsidize the defense of an allied and rich Germany or Japan 66 years after World War II?"
Hanson observes that the aberration of deficit spending will soon result in a return to rationality:
...the dogma that a teenager with dyslexia or a mature man with a bum knee will receive years of Social Security disability benefits will be assessed as an historical aberration of the last twenty years. A decision by an insurance company or government agency that a 62-year old must settle for arthroscopic surgery on a chronically torn meniscus rather than a complete knee replacement will not be interpreted as social cruelty.
Almost everything that can be said has been said about illegal immigration — and about the sustainability and morality of millions of Mexican and Latin American nationals crossing the U.S. border unlawfully and plugging into the American entitlement system. But an insolvent state like California, despite the liberal protestations, cannot continue to house 50,000 Mexican nationals in its penal system at a per capita cost of nearly $35,000 a year, or to extend free tuition in its broke university system to those without legal residence, or to provide social services to illegal aliens that may well cost the state nearly $10 billion a year. Even to suggest such limits was once considered illiberal. Now, not to state the obvious — that those without education, English, and legality have been expecting far more than what they could contribute in return — will be considered derelict.
Do the almost 50 million people now on "food stamps" all truly need them? Are they all starving to death? Is the program fraud-free and used only to buy bare necessities?
Is 99 weeks of unemployment (or more) reasonable?
Can someone who owns an iPhone, a big-screen television, a laptop computer, and a comfy leather couch really be called "poor"?
We can no longer afford the liberal philosophy of redistribution. Hanson concludes that there "...is a certain brutal honesty about this debt crisis. It is slowly beginning to force us to see the world in the tragic way it is, rather than in the therapeutic way we dream it must be."
But as Greece showed us -- and the public sector battle in Wisconsin hinted at -- civil unrest could be on the horizon rather than a becalmed expiation of liberals' sins.
I have no idea if wine drinkers or beer drinkers-- or non-drinkers-- are more or less likely to favor marriage equality. But the new issue of Out has a cute survey by the World Wine Guys Mike DeSimone and Jeff Jenssen, "The Ethical Wine List," about which wine-producing countries' products should be served at same-sex weddings. They base their findings on which wine-producing countries legalized same-sex unions. Alas, Napa wine is still out-- although, gloriously, the fantastic wines from NY's Finger Lakes area and Suffolk County are now fine. Turns out France legalized the pacte civil de solidarité in 1999. Other wine-producing countries which legalized same-sex unions while President Obama was evolving include Canada, New Zealand and Spain, all in 2005, South Africa in 2006, and Argentina last year. (I might add that non-wine-producing countries that have recognized marriage equality include Belgium, Holland, Iceland, Sweden, Portugal, Norway, Mexico, Israel, Brazil, Ecuador, Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, Uruguay, England, Germany, Finland and... Nepal.)
I'm sad to say that my mistrust for our president has grown so rapidly that Tuesday, when he announced he would be supporting Dianne Feinstein's and Jerry Nadler's legislation to repeal DOMA, my first reaction was to look for shady motives. I mean, did he suddenly evolve in one leap and bound? The White House blog:
President Obama is proud to support the Respect for Marriage Act, which has been introduced by Senator Dianne Feinstein and Congressman Jerrold Nadler. This legislation would uphold the principle that the federal government should not deny gay and lesbian couples the same rights and legal protections as straight couples.
The President has long called for a legislative repeal of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which continues to have a real impact on the lives of real people-- our families, friends and neighbors.
Why the caution? Well, it just happened to be the day that the media reported that Obama was supporting the efforts of the Gang of Six's conservative consensus plan to redefine "shared sacrifice" as meaning more sacrifice from working families and more tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires.
With the deadline for raising the nation’s debt ceiling just 14 days away, Mr. Warner and the other five senators-- three Republicans and three Democrats in all-- appear to have given new life to a grand bargain with President Obama that could reduce the nation’s deficit by about $4 trillion over the next decade.
In an early afternoon news briefing, Mr. Obama called the proposals unveiled by the senators on Tuesday morning “good news” and a “very significant step.”
Senators from both parties appeared optimistic as well. Forty-nine of them, from both parties, attended a briefing by Mr. Warner and his group’s members on Tuesday morning. Mr. Warner said the reaction had been positive.
“You could almost feel a sigh of relief as people said, ‘Oh my gosh, here’s something that we could be for,’” Mr. Warner said.
...Republicans in the House, who have stated their opposition to any tax increases, could continue to balk at the proposals, which raise nearly $1 trillion in new revenue by lowering rates while closing tax loopholes.
Republican members of the “gang” are trying to persuade House members to support the plan, he said. “There are a number of our Republican colleagues who are working hard on this,” Mr. Warner said.
Democrats, too, will need to be brought along to support the idea that entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security can be modified without sacrificing their basic nature. A deal could be scuttled if Democratic opposition to some of those proposals develops.
My worry was that Obama would toss the idiotic same-sex marriage bone to hysterical and obsessed gays clamoring for the right to imitate unhappy heterosexuals while slipping in the long-cherished conservative dream to open the doors to the dismantling of Social Security and Medicare. Opposing marriage equality is horrifyingly reactionary and unreasonable. No one opposing marriage equality is fit for public office. But using it as a trade-off to wreck Social Security and Medicare is far worse... far, far, far worse.
Bernie Sanders, addressing Vermont wine growers (and others in the nation's most forward-thinking state) on Ed Schultz's show Tuesday night:
Can we trust Obama on the cuts? I'm not sure. Everyone I know says "no." A usually reliable source of mine in the administration asked me to hold my fire and swore that the president will never do anything to harm Social Security. We should know soon enough. Meanwhile, DeSimone and Jenssen have recommended Ruca Malen Kinien cabernet sauvignon 2007 (an Argentine red) that they describe as "Raspberry and dried-fig flavors with just a hint of spice." For a white, he suggests a South Africa Raats Family Wines Cabernet Franc, 2008, which they describe as "black cherry, plum, and earth tones... super with red meat or game." And for bubbly they're in France: Taittinger Brut La Française champagne-- "granny smith apple and brioche flavors," which they say is "ideal on its own or with caviar." If My White House source is correct and Bernie Sanders and Donna Edwards (and Ed Schultz) are wrong, we're all going to need something a lot stronger than the wines. Bernie-- if you need to read it and not just hear it:
In my view, this Gang of Six proposal is a disaster. iI lowers the tax rate very substantially for the wealthy, and it will make devastating-- this is not modification-- devastating cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, nutrition... you name the program that are struggling, working class in this country desperately needs, it is going to be cut. I would estimate if the Gang of Six proposal were ever to pass-- I will do my best to see that doesn't happen-- it would be absolutely devastating to working families. We have to do everything we can to rally the American people to prevent it. You're giving the Republicans about 90% of what they ever dreamed of.
90%. Is that hyperbole? Exaggeration? Bernie doesn't think so. Speaking about reactionary gang members Tom Coburn (R-OK), Mike Crapo (R-ID) and Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), he maintained that “while I am sure that they did not get everything that they wanted, I think it’s fair to say they won about 80 percent to 90 percent of what they fought for. Despite President Obama’s campaign promise not to cut Social Security benefits, the Gang of Six plan, which he apparently embraced, calls for massive cuts in that vitally important program... Under the Social Security proposal, a new formula for calculating cost-of-living adjustments would cut a typical 75-year-old’s yearly benefits in 10 years by $560. The average 85-year-old would see a $1,000 a year cut in 20 years. Furthermore, the proposal demands that Social Security be solvent for a 75-year period, which could include additional cuts. The proposal also cuts Medicare by $298 billion over 10 years and makes massive cuts to Medicaid."
Sanders said that the president "apparently embraced" this. My source denies it-- 38-dimensional chess, I'm guessing-- and we'll be finding out pretty soon. I'm guessing Obama's reelection bid depends on it. If he doesn't stand up for working families this time, and takes the part of Wall Street and Big Business again, he's toast... one-termer, no matter what kind of walking freak show the GOP puts up against him.
Lawrence O'Donnell doesn't agree. It looks like my friend in the White House has been talking to him too. And he seems pretty sure it's for real. Listen carefully:
It's getting very scary out there. First there has been an unsubstantiated rumor that Spanish PM has resigned based on an El Pais editorial, and then we have the fact that Greek 2 year bonds have just collapsed by another 2% to an all time record 35.19%. The cherry on top are reports that Intesa Sanpaolo and some other volatile bank shares are suspended after continuing their last week plunge. One day soon the entire European stock market will just shut down and not reopen (which will naturally simply be an excuse for the US HFT lobby, which now feels unfairly attacked for being a malicious parasite, to levitate the Russell 2000 to unseen levels).
As usual, this is worth a thousand words:
In short, the market believes that Greece's promises to pay its immense debts are worth roughly the value of the Zimbabwean trillion-dollar note.
Kind of like Social Security's promises to pay. Which reminds me:
How is it that Bernie Madoff is in prison for life, but the enablers of a Ponzi scheme three orders of magnitude larger -- Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer among them -- are not only free as birds, but still grasping onto the reins of power with white-knuckled death grips?
• President Obama abruptly walks out of talks: "President Barack Obama abruptly walked out of a stormy debt-limit meeting with congressional leaders Wednesday, a dramatic setback to the already shaky negotiations, according to GOP sources... 'He shoved back and said ‘I’ll see you tomorrow’ and walked out,' House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told reporters... On a day when the Moody’s rating agency warned that American debt could be downgraded, the White House talks blew up amid a new round of sniping between Obama and Cantor, who are fast becoming bitter enemies."
• Much Needed Straight Talk from Rep. Walsh: Quit Lying, Mr. President: "Congressman Joe Walsh (R-IL)... reminds Obama and fellow Republicans why people like himself were elected to Congress. While everyone is focused on the fight over tax increases, many Republicans are forgetting that the $2, $3, or even $4 trillion in supposed spending cuts are nothing but unverifiable accounting gimmicks that are based upon some contrived baseline. Even if they would represent real cuts, the $4 trillion in deficit reduction would only extirpate $400 billion annually from a $1.4-1.6 trillion yearly deficit."
• DNC chairwoman: Republicans acting almost like 'spoiled children' on debt ceiling: "The chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee said Republicans have been acting like 'spoiled children' in negotiations to raise the debt ceiling... 'We demonstrated that we're willing to put all our sacred cows on the table and the Republicans are simply not willing to do anything but sit on their hands and cross their arms like spoiled children almost. That's just not responsible,' Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said Wednesday on MSNBC... [she] also rejected the idea that some Democrats were 'rebelling' against President Obama for wanting to include cuts to Social Security and Medicare as part of a possible debt ceiling increase deal."
• Obama warns Cantor: 'Don't call my bluff' in debt-limit talks: "Republicans said tense negotiations over raising the $14.3 trillion debt limit at the White House ended when President Obama stormed out of the meeting with a stern warning to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.): 'Don’t call my bluff.'"
Monday night Alan Grayson was on The Ed Show, not just to announce his candidacy for one of the Orlando congressional seats (the boundaries aren't drawn yet) but to lay out an alternative vision to what we've been seeing from the weenies in the Democratic Party. All I can say is, please watch the clip and, if you're so moved, drop in on the Blue America page and give Alan a hand with his race.
Yesterday James Galbraith posted an exhaustive and perceptive guide to the catastrophic debt ceiling debate and I want to contrast some of his conclusions with what Grayson has had to say about that debate. "News reports," Galbraith reminds us, "hold that President Obama scored a political victory by agreeing to put Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block to achieve a 'go-big' $4 trillion deficit reduction. Speaker Boehner had to concede that Republicans won’t vote for any package that includes tax increases-- and the deal died. So the gambit worked and the President emerged with a solid image as the alpha deficit hawk." Grayson referred, politely even fondly, to Obama as "my president" and "the leader of my party," but he was clearly uncomfortable with his approach. When asked by Ed Schultz, "How would you handle this," he answered unhesitatingly, "I would not vote for any cuts in Medicare. I would not vote for any cuts in Social Security and I'd be grabbing anybody else by the collar and telling them they should do the same... I know a way to cut two trillion dollars out of the deficit in the next ten years: you could end the wars. You could end the war in Afghanistan. You could end the war in Iraq and Libya. Those wars cost us $157 billion last year and the cost is going up, not down. If you want to save two trillion dollars, how about peace? Why don't we give that a try!"
When Schultz pressed him on Obama's willingness to cut Social Security, Grayson was very clear:
Washington is now divided between the Meanies and the Weenies; that's the real two party system today... The Meanies want to take Social Security and Medicare away from grandma and grandpa and the Weenies are quite willing to go along with it and "compromise." Well, people need Social Security and Medicare to live and there's no compromise between life and death; there's no middle ground. The average person who retires in America today has less than $50,000 in savings. That's good for one, maybe two years. And those people live for twenty. There's no way [these people] can live without Social Security and Medicare and that's what the right-wing in America wants to take away. I say NO-- no compromise. We need to strengthen Social Security and Medicare. I want to see Medicare cover dental work. I want to see Medicare cover hearing aids. I want to see Medicare cover actual medical leaves.
Galbraith points out that the debt ceiling, dating back to 1917 and the U.S. entry into WWI, was "an exercise in bad faith" right from the git-go-- and still is.
Today this bad-faith law is pressed to its absurd extreme, to force massive cuts in public programs as the price of not-reneging on the public debts of the United States. Never mind that to force default on the public obligations of the United States is plainly unconstitutional. Section 4 of the 14th amendment says in simple language that public debts, once duly authorized by law and including pensions, by the way, “shall not be questioned.” The purpose of this language was to foreclose, to put beyond politics, any possibility that the Union would renege on debts and pensions and bounties incurred to win the Civil War. But the application is very general and the courts have ruled that the principle extends to the present day.
What is going on in Congress at this moment already violates that mandate. It is an effort to subvert the authority of the government to meet and therefore to incur obligations of every possible stripe. It is an attack on the concept of government itself-- as the “Tea Party” by its very name would no doubt agree. It therefore paints those deficit hawks who are using the debt ceiling to take budget hostages as enemies of the United States Constitution.
The President, though supposedly a constitutional expert and though sworn to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution, will not say this. Instead he appears to treat the Constitution as an optional matter, to which he will not resort, in the hope that by negotiating with the hostage- takers he can reach some reasonable outcome that will preserve everyone’s good name. (The great Harvard legal scholar Laurence Tribe recently argued that the President cannot defy the debt ceiling on his own. That’s a debatable point.) It is as though Lincoln in 1861 faced with the siege of Sumter had sat down with Confederate commissioners to see what could be worked out.
In Washington it appears that this assault on government has a large measure of elite and media support, if not on the crass details or vulgar personalities but because it could conceivably force the parties to do “what they should do anyway”-- namely come to a long-term deficit and debt agreement. Such an agreement would cut spending, raise some taxes, put the projected debt-to-GDP ratio on a declining track, and solve the “government’s fiscal crisis.”
What fiscal crisis? The great unasked question in this summer of sound-and-fury is “why?” The United States has many problems at the moment: a high-and-stubborn unemployment rate, a foreclosure catastrophe, a slowing economy that has not recovered and will not recover from the Great Crisis, and the ongoing challenges of infrastructure, energy and climate change. Fiscal crisis? The entire thing is a figment, made up of wise-men’s warnings repeated endlessly and linked to the projections of technicians at the Congressional Budget Office and elsewhere.
...There are many people who believe fervently in the resilience of the private sector and for whom government is just a burden. Some of those people are pure predators: resource magnates, media magnates, banking magnates. Others have blinded themselves to the role government actually plays in sustaining the advanced networks, human protections and social systems that make up our lives, and imagine that one can go back to the world of subsistence farming, church charity and credit from the corner store. But there were many fewer people in that world, they didn’t do what we do, and they didn’t live nearly so long.
In broad terms, today’s government does four major things:
– it provides for the national defense.
– it purchases goods and services from the private economy for a wide range of public purposes, most of them individually quite small-scale in relation to GDP.
– it regulates a wide range of private-sector activity, for safety, health, environmental and other purposes, including financial stability-- or so one should hope.
– it administers Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as well as other pension and health benefit programs.
On what grounds are any of these functions too large? As an economist concerned with peace and security issues, I do believe we would be better off ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan quickly, that we could dispense with the real resource costs of many foreign bases, aircraft carrier groups, fighter aircraft and submarines and nuclear weapons left over from the Cold War. But these are security judgments, not broad economic ones. In other words, I would not cut a single dime of Pentagon spending that was actually necessary to defend the United States, in order supposedly to lower the interest rate on federal debt.
By the same reasoning, why should we cut transportation, or public health, or environmental protection, or scientific research, or bank inspectors or funds that support the public schools? One can argue these matters program by program-- and one should. (I would happily cut ethanol subsidies and oil company tax breaks, for starters.) But there is no economic case for placing an overall limit, and it is obvious that the 500,000 public sector workers-- including many teachers, police, fire and park rangers and librarians-- who have lost their jobs since 2009 were doing good and useful things that are now missed. If sacking them had been good for the economy, we would be having a stronger recovery than we are.
Finally there are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Unlike the military or the transportation program, Social Security is not a government purchasing program. It therefore takes nothing directly from the private sector. What it does, is provide insurance: it protects workers from poverty in old age, whether or not their families would otherwise be willing and able to support them. And it taxes all workers, whether or not they would otherwise be burdened with elderly parents, or survivors, or the disabled, to support. Along with Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security is a powerful protector of the entire working population-- young and old. It redistributes purchasing power, in loose relation to past earnings, in a way that meets the basic needs of a large number of Americans who would otherwise, in many millions of cases, be destitute or medically bankrupt.
What economic purpose would cutting such programs serve? To do so would again redistribute incomes. Many of the future elderly would be much worse off, and of course many would die younger than they otherwise would. Survivors and the disabled would suffer as well. In return, what would the federal government and the country gain? A release of real resources to the private sector? Social Security does not take real resources from the private sector! Lower interest rates? The idea is absurd, and not just because interest rates are low today. The notion that cutting Social Security would help keep interest rates down is absurd because interest rates are set in a way that has no relationship at all to the scale of Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.
This argument has nothing to do with the trope, oft-repeated and perfectly true, that the Social Security system does not contribute to the deficit. It would not matter if it did. The important question is: are benefits too high? Obviously not. How about payroll taxes-- are they too low? There is no case for that either. One of the very few bright spots in recent policy was the decision to reduce payroll taxes on employees, temporarily, while leaving Social Security benefits alone.
If you wanted to build on that, the right steps would be to lower-- not raise-- the Social Security early retirement age, permitting for a few years older workers to exit the labor force permanently on better terms than are available to them today. This together with a lower age of access to Medicare would work quickly to rebalance the labor force, reducing unemployment and futile job search among older workers while increasing job openings for the young. It is the application of plain common sense. And unlike all the pressures to enact long-term cuts in these programs, it would help solve one of today’s important problems right away.
Instead of this, what do we have, from a President who claims to be a member of the Democratic Party? First, there is the claim that we face a fiscal crisis, which is a big untruth. Second, a concession in principle that we should deal with that crisis by enacting massive cuts in public services on one hand and in vital social insurance programs on the other. This is an arbitrary cruelty. Third, a refusal to stand on the strong ground of the Constitution, against those whose open and declared purpose is tear that document and the public credit to shreds.
There's a real danger in American politics-- and that danger is that independent voices for working families, will be replaced by corporate handmaidens. What would our system be like if all we had were the Boehners and Cantors and Obamas and Liebermen and Ryans without someone to speak up for ordinary working people the way Bernie Sanders, Raul Grijalva and Alan Grayson always do. When the DNC asks you for money to support Obama's reelection, they're telling you two things: the Republicans are worse (true) and Obama's solutions are noble (false). When the DSCC and the DCCC ask you for contributions they're asking for money to help elect or reelect corporate whores like Ben Nelson, Jim Matheson and Joe Donnelly, Democrats who consistently vote against the interests of American families and who reflexively support right-wing Republican positions on issue after issue. But they wear blue t-shirts... for whatever reasons.
You can find Alan Grayson and other independent progressive candidates here. Check them out. Let's make sure regular folks even have a voice. And check out this note from Nick Ruiz to his donors. "Republicrats," he warns, "continued to raise $millions this second fundraising quarter, in order to ensure the New Deal legacy goes down in flames. This is what they want. It’s what their paymasters want. It’s what they have been working toward since FDR. We are outgunned, but never outnumbered-– make those numbers count by volunteering your time and money to people that will work for you, and work to further human progress, rather than increase America’s suffering with their indifference to our shared human struggle... Will you help to put this progressive Democrat in Congress, so I can join Sanders et al. in order to stop them?"
UPDATE: “Look at our campaign. This is what People Power looks like,” said Grayson.
The Grayson for Congress campaign is off to a great start: in less than 48 hours, more than 2,000 contributors have made contributions at the campaign website and through Blue America. That, plus contributions and pledges from other channels, has raised more than $75,000 already for the campaign.
The Grayson for Congress campaign raised more than $5 million for the 2010 campaign. In fact, he raised more money than any other Democratic Member of the House.
“And it’s all clean money,” says Grayson. “I won’t beg for money from the special interests, the lobbyists and the PACs. I won’t put the law up for sale. I can’t be bought or sold. I owe nothing to anyone but the voters.”
The 2,000 individual contributors yesterday and today are the first “down payment” toward the record number that Grayson attracted to his 2010 campaign. More than 80,000 people made more than 100,000 individual contributions to Grayson’s campaign. By comparison, his 2010 opponent’s Federal Election Commission reports show contributions from 1,336 people.
Blue Dog Mike Thompson vs progressive Norman Solomon?
Not every Blue Dog is as bad as Dan Boren, Mike Ross, John Barrow, Jim Costa, Jason Altmire, Collin Peterson and Jim Matheson, the 7 bums who have voted with the GOP more than 65% of the time on crucial roll calls this year. Boren, whose district gave McCain a 66% landslide, has only voted with the Democrats 17% on these crucial roll calls. Normally he just sticks with Boehner and Cantor. California Blue Dog Mike Thompson isn't nearly as bad as Boren or the other 6. He's with the Democrats around 80% of the time. Interestingly, his northern California district was the mirror image of Boren's. Voters there have Obama a 66% landslide against McCain. And under the new redistricting, it looks like Thompson will be running in a district that is made up of the most Democratic parts of his old district plus most of Lynn Woolsey's even more Democratic district in Marin and Sonoma counties. (Woolsey's district gave Obama 76%, one of his best performances anywhere.)
This isn't a district that should be represented by a Blue Dog, even if he's a relatively house-broken one. Mike Thompson's agenda is not even nearly in sync with the progressive voters of the district. He's a middle-of-the-road, corporate-oriented Democrat who has chosen to join and participate in the decidedly anti-working family Blue Dog caucus. And one of the country's most promising progressive leaders, Norman Solomon, is running on a platform to continue and expand the work of retiring Representative Lynn Woolsey, who was often at odds with Thompson on important issues.
Last week, for example, Woolsey co-wrote a letter to Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi bolstering her stand against trading away Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to prevent the GOP from driving the U.S. Treasury into default. Norman Solomon told me he would have signed that letter. Mike Thompson, of course, didn't. Nor would he ever be involved in any progressive initiatives. He's a party hack who, at best, goes along to get along. His career is that of a backbencher serving his time before transitioning to K Street. This is as good a time as any for that transition. Here's the letter:
Leader Pelosi,
We write in strong agreement with your unwavering defense of the Democratic programs that form the bedrock of America’s middle and working classes, and which are overwhelmingly popular.
On July 7, you made very clear that “We are not going to balance the budget on the backs of America’s seniors, women and people with disabilities” and that “we do not support cuts in benefits” for vital safety-net programs. We agree completely.
Especially in these tough economic times, we should not be cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits that millions of our constituents paid into and depend on. Such benefit cuts should be off the table in current debt discussions.
Our Republican colleagues should be embarrassed by their insistence that unless Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits are cut, the nation will default on its debts. Middle-class families have sacrificed enough, and a deal that pushes the American Dream further out of reach, in order to pay for extending tax breaks for the rich and corporations, is simply unacceptable.
We are united as Democrats in saying that it’s time to stand up to the Republican hostage-taking. We will not be forced to vote for a “final agreement” that we do not agree to -- and that the American people do not agree to.
We stand united with you in insisting that benefit cuts for working families, our seniors, children, and people with disabilities must be off the table, and we stand united with you in fighting for millions of Americans who need Democrats to be firmly on their side.
I think most Democrats and independents in Marin, Sonoma and Napa counties would agree with that-- and they deserve a congressman who will stand up and fight for those ideas. Clearly, that is not Mike Thompson. It is, however, Norman Solomon. Norman is committed to joining the Progressive Caucus once he's in Congress, a caucus Lynn Woolsey chaired for many years. He'll be working on legislation there with people like Raul Grijalva, Jerry Nadler, Donna Edwards, Barbara Lee, Keith Ellison and Barney Frank. Thompson has chosen to spend his legislative career with Boren and Matheson and Barrow and working with them on the toxic Blue Dog legislative agenda. The work of progressive fighters like Bernie Sanders is anathema to that crowd. Norman applauded Sander's approach to keeping Social Security safe-- a far different perspective from how the Blue Dog Caucus views it. Bernie:
Social Security cuts under consideration by the White House in deficit-reduction talks would drive 245,000 people into poverty and lower widows’ benefits $1,200 a year by 2050, according to Social Security Administration calculations provided to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Changing the way inflation is measured to determine Social Security benefits is one option on the table in high-stakes budget negotiations that resume Sunday at the White House. The so-called Chained Consumer Price Index on average results in a lower inflation levels than the more common formula used to adjust benefits.
“The result would be devastating cuts for millions of American seniors and people with disabilities,” said Sanders. As chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging, Sanders asked the Social Security Administration’s Office of Retirement Policy to calculate the impact on poverty rates and benefits if the revised inflation gauge were to be adopted.
In 2030, according to the report prepared for Sanders, there would be 173,400 more people living in poverty in the United States. The revised formula also would dramatically lower benefits for retirees. Widows would receive almost $70 a month less in benefits, a reduction of $840 a year. People who are 70-79 would receive $49 a month less, a drop of $588 a year. Benefits for those who are 80-89 would drop by $80/month or $960 a year. Benefits for women would fall by 3.5 percent overall while men’s benefits would drop by 2.9 percent.
By 2050, the impact would be much worse. There would be 245,000 more people living in poverty at mid-century. Widows’ benefits would be $1,200 a year less. Those 70-79 would lose $720 a year, and seniors in the 80-89 age bracket would see benefits fall by $1,200 a year. Overall, women would see a 4 percent reduction in benefits while benefits for men would drop 3.4 percent.
As the deficit negotiations were set to resume on Sunday, Sanders emphasized that Social Security has not contributed a dime to the deficit or the national debt. Funded by the payroll tax on workers and employers, Socials Security has a $2.6 trillion surplus and will be able to provide full benefits for every eligible American for the next 25 years.
Sanders called on President Barack Obama to publicly renounce the idea of cutting Social Security as part of any deal to lower deficits. "I am especially disturbed that the president is considering cuts in Social Security after he campaigned against cuts in 2008," Sanders said. "The American people expect the president to keep his word."
And if Norman has to face Thompson, it means he's going to be up against an extremely well-financed Blue Dog, with lots of support from all the worst places. Norman is going to need our help. There is a difference between Democrats who join the Progressive Caucus and Democrats who join the Blue Dog Caucus. It's life and death... for the most vulnerable segments of the population, quite literally. Today Norman put out a press release calling for an all out defense of Social Security:
A day after President Obama urged fellow Democrats to go along with “trimming benefits” for Social Security and other safety-net programs, North Bay congressional candidate Norman Solomon called for “an all-out defense of Social Security.”
Solomon, a progressive Democrat who was elected as an Obama delegate to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, said Tuesday [July 12] that Social Security cuts would be “a tragic mistake, undermining our nation’s best values as well as its future.”
“Our leaders should be fighting to protect seniors, children, the jobless, the disabled and other vulnerable Americans, not throwing Social Security on the table and pulling out knives,” he said.
“I support the efforts by many Democrats in Congress to resist this looming assault on seniors and others who depend on Social Security and Medicare,” Solomon added.
“The idea of cutting Social Security and Medicare is not only a moral outrage-- it is a disastrous approach that would end up costing us dearly in the long run, severely damaging people’s quality of life and escalating healthcare costs,” Solomon said. “This is not how a civilized society solves its budgetary problems.”
Responding to the president’s statement Monday that “I’m prepared to take on significant heat from my party to get something done,” Solomon said: “We need to turn up the heat to protect Social Security.”
“Social Security does not add a penny to the deficit,” he said. “As it is now, the program will be solvent for more than two decades-- and adjustments such as raising the cap on Social Security taxes for well-to-do recipients can easily render it solvent through mid-century and beyond.”
Senate Democrats reacted angrily Thursday to a report that President Obama has proposed significant cuts to Medicare and Social Security in closed-door talks with GOP leaders.
Democratic lawmakers said they were dismayed to read about Obama’s offer in the press rather than hearing it from the president himself. Their frustration is exacerbated by Obama’s snub of their invitation to speak to the Senate Democratic caucus Wednesday...
...“We would have preferred to hear it from the president instead of from the press,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski (Md.), a senior member of the Senate Democratic conference. “We first have to go after tax earmarks.” [Ed: WTF?]...
The debt-ceiling talks seem to be occurring in “a parallel universe,” Mikulski said. “The base is quite cheerless right now,” she added.
The White House appears to be gambling that Democrats, even if they gripe, will ultimately rally around the deal the president cuts, as they did last year on a tax package and this year on a continuing resolution funding the government through October... But any deal will still need votes from Senate Democrats and likely some House Democrats. And Democrats worked Thursday to suggest limits to what they will accept.
...But Democrats signaled they may not accept a deal that pairs immediate entitlement cuts with the prospect of future revenue increases.
In a statement, David Krone, Reid’s chief of staff, said spending and revenue should be balanced “in terms of timing, specificity and dollars.”
Balanced. Kind of like how the Democrats crammed Obamacare down the throats of the American people. And the Frank-Dodd "financial reform" bill. And the "Stimulus", which was -- of course -- "shovel-ready".
Republicans: hold the line. No hiking the debt ceiling without a balanced budget amendment.
Sign the pledge -- and tell your representatives to sign it too
As an aside, that Barbara Mikulski is quite the hottie.
Like many people I know, I held my nose in 2008 and voted for Barack Obama, a junior senator with a voting record I kept warning people meant we were electing an untrustworthy conservative. No, not a reactionary and not as untrustworthy or even as conservative as John McCain, but, to be charitable, nothing to write home about. Other than the symbolism of electing an African-American and an intellectual. But, like almost everyone I knew, I was aware we would be getting-- at best-- another spineless, status quo drone like Bill Clinton. As you may have been able to discern from my comments Monday on Frank Rich's New York piece, I have no intention of holding my nose and voting for Obama again. If he can't win in California without my vote, he has no shot whatsoever.
Last year it was strongly suggested Blue America endorse Obama and raise money for him. I laughed-- and then made some changes to the PAC in response. If there was no chance of Blue America asking our contributors for money for Obama in 2008, there's even less of a chance that we'd consider anything like that for 2012 now that he's proven all of our worst fears to be completely founded. In 2007 I explained my reluctance over and over again, like here, discussing environmental reform. Obama, I insisted at the time, was certainly no better than Hillary Clinton.
A consistent and craven compromiser on almost every progressive value or principle he's had to confront since being elected to the Senate (from Republican "tort reform" to legalizing credit card usury), Obama's environmental record has clearly been "one of accommodation to big corporate interests" and "his 'new kind of politics'" is nothing more than a charismatically delivered sham: "the old kind of influence peddling, caution, and smallness that most Democrats [at the grassroots level] reject." His environmental record is nothing Bush Republicans need to fear.
He is the Senate's leading Democratic supporter of "coal to liquid," a technology that can make gasoline out of coal. Only problem: it produces double the global warming pollution that regular old dirty oil does. As if that wasn't bad enough, Obama actually voted for George Bush's energy bill despite more than $27 billion in subsidies for the oil, nuclear and coal industries, its weakening of clean air and water laws, and the fact that it gave electric companies the power to charge consumers high rates while doing almost nothing to tackle global warming or increase consumer protections.
Why is Obama so willing to "trim his sails" so often-- despite the consequences to working and middle class Americans and the environment? It's not just that he apparently believes accommodation-- even of right-wing extremists-- can be both right and politically useful. It's something deeper. In his autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, Obama admits he has a hard time feeling a truly pressing sense of urgency about the great issues of the day.
He's not the leader America so desperately needs to clean up after the worst presidential regime in history, no more than Hillary Clinton is. It's not enough to drive Republicans out of government, even if that is a well-deserved and worthwhile first step. It's just as important to find BETTER Democrats.
That's still what Blue America is dedicated to and what we ask our supporters to help with. And, on top of Obama's all too predictable colossal cave-in-- or worse-- to the Republicans this week, that work takes on an even greater urgency.
President Obama is pressing congressional leaders to consider a far-reaching debt-reduction plan that would force Democrats to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for fresh tax revenue.
At a meeting with top House and Senate leaders set for Thursday morning, Obama plans to argue that a rare consensus has emerged about the size and scope of the nation’s budget problems and that policymakers should seize the moment to take dramatic action.
As part of his pitch, Obama is proposing significant reductions in Medicare spending and for the first time is offering to tackle the rising cost of Social Security, according to people in both parties with knowledge of the proposal. The move marks a major shift for the White House and could present a direct challenge to Democratic lawmakers who have vowed to protect health and retirement benefits from the assault on government spending.
“Obviously, there will be some Democrats who don’t believe we need to do entitlement reform. But there seems to be some hunger to do something of some significance,” said a Democratic official familiar with the administration’s thinking. “These moments come along at most once a decade. And it would be a real mistake if we let it pass us by.”
Rather than roughly $2 trillion in savings, the White House is now seeking a plan that would slash more than $4 trillion from annual budget deficits over the next decade, stabilize borrowing, and defuse the biggest budgetary time bombs that are set to explode as the cost of health care rises and the nation’s population ages.
As a liberal, I believe that if Obama comes in and implements a bunch of muddled centrist policies, proposing tax cuts to deal with poverty and an expanded military and entitlement reform along with a weird convoluted health care reform, he will fail because basic liberal ideas like accountability, oversight, and integrity in leadership will not be embedded into our institutions. The rich have left us with a massive bill in the form of an intractable trade deficit, national debt, and oil addiction, and someone's going to pay it. If it's the public instead of the people who ran up the country's credit cards (take a look at the nation's billionaires), it's going to make a lot of people much angrier than they are right now.
This anger will go somewhere; right now anger is going against Bush, but he's out of the picture come 2009, though we can kick his corpse for a few years or so if Democrats act smartly (which they won't). If Obama's centrist policies fail, and he is considered a big government liberal or progressive, the public will reject liberalism and progressivism, as it has for the last forty years. But this will not be a result of disliking progressive ideas, but as a result of believing that bad centrist ideas are progressive ideas.
So, as liberals who believe in a different vision for America than Obama, it's important that Obama's centrist policy sympathies are blamed for what goes wrong when he takes over and screws up the country worse than it is right now, which we'll notice after our honeymoon of hoorays some time after the transition.
Dave Johnson was also quick to realize the danger we were putting Social Security-- and wjat's left of the New Deal-- in by electing a weak, vacillating and basically conservative Barack Obama.
Barack Obama is echoing the right's destructive narrative about Social Security being in crisis. The crisis is that Reagan and then Bush took all the money from the Social Security Trust Fund to use for tax cuts for the rich. (Clinton's surpluses were paying it back, Bush reversed that.) And now the Trust Fund is going to need some of that money back.
The right's line is that this means Social Security is in crisis, is "not going to be there" for the next generation, and "tough choices" are required. The audacity-- they took the money, and now they say this is Social Security's problem, and that we have to fix Social Security! They say this to distract the public from asking for the money back, and to get them to support efforts to privatize the program.
And Barack Obama has joined them in this! Recently an Obama ad reinforced the right's bamboozlement that Social Security is running out of money. speaking on Meet the Press:
Now, we've got 78 million baby boomers that are going to be retiring, and every expert that looks at this problem says "There's going to be a gap, and we're going to have more money going out than we have coming in unless we make some adjustments now." ... I want to make sure that it's there not just for this generation, but for next generations. So that means that we're going to have to make some decisions...
Paul Krugman pleads with him to stop. A few years ago the right tried to go after Social Security and there was:
... a determined defense by progressives in the media, on the blogs, and in Congress beat back one spurious argument after another, while the American people made it clear that they really want a program that guarantees a basic retirement income that doesn't depend on the Dow. And Social Security survived.
All of which makes it just incredible that Barack Obama would make obeisance to fashionable but misguided Social Security crisis-mongering a centerpiece of his campaign.
The American people don't want to see cuts to Medicare and Social Security. They want the rich to pay their fair share and they want tax loopholes for Big Oil and other corporate monsters to be closed. But Obama is playing it like his hand is being forced. It isn't. This is just what he wants. He'll have the Republicans backing him, of course, but which Democrats have the courage to stand up to him? Watch this space.
UPDATE: Can Chris Van Hollen Be Trusted... A Little?
Van Hollen was just on CNN with Ali Velshi claiming Democrats won't vote to balance the budget on the backs of Social Security recipients. Van Hollen is a sneaky, untrustworthy character and if he's what's standing between the New Deal and fascism, we're sunk. Here's most of the transcript:
VELSHI: Do you know anything about the reports the President is prepared to talk about Medicare and Social Security with the Republicans in exchange for their support to raise the debt ceiling?
REP. VAN HOLLEN: Ali, I do not know the details on this. I saw the reports and will hear a lot more from the President around eleven o’clock when he meets with bipartisan group at the White House. I do know that the President has been looking for a comprehensive deal that gets about $4 trillion in deficit reduction. That was along the lines of the proposal from the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles Commission. But with respect to the story that appeared this morning on Social Security I do not know what exactly the President is referring to. And I should be clear that Congressional Democrats are not going to support something that seeks to balance the budget on the backs of Social Security beneficiaries. What we have said is that if the President wants to adopt a separate track, just as Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s, to strengthen Social Security, that’s one thing. But to try and balance the budget on the backs of Social Security beneficiaries would be unacceptable and I’m pretty confident that is not what the President is referring to.
VELSHI: Let's set the stage what here with what kinds of things could you, and Congressional Democrats, with respect to Social Security might support. If we support an increase in the age when you get Social Security for people who are younger at this point so it phases in over some time. Is that the kind of thing we could be talking about?
REP. VAN HOLLEN: I think that would meet with a lot of resistance for this reason. It's easy for people who make a living like you and I do; talking, to retire a little bit later. It’s a lot harder for someone who has been doing back-breaking work. What we could do-- this is something part of the design of the existing system-- you don't take away the option to retire early but if you do retire early you do get a lower benefit over a period of time. That is part of the design in the current system. You could build on that. There are other options that we have discussed, for example, lifting the cap on the payroll tax. That would bring in more revenue, so there are ways to strength Social Security. Obviously, an important issue-- but don’t do that as way to balance the rest of the budget.
VELSHI: Part of the reports coming out that the President would agree to or push for $3 to $4 trillion in cuts over the next ten years. Where do Congressional Democrats stand on that?
REP. VAN HOLLEN: Well, the President's proposal that he laid out just a short time ago at George Washington University called for about a $4 trillion in cuts over 12 years. And while I think you'd find people disagreeing with some of the details, the overall architecture of that proposal is something that certainly I could support because it was a balanced approach. It said we got to close a lot of these corporate tax loopholes. We have to ask the folks at the very top to go back to paying what they did under-- during the Clinton administration. But it also called for significant cuts which we are going to have to do on domestic discretionary spending. But the President was clear that while we make cuts on the domestic side of the ledger we have to look at Pentagon spending and some the bipartisan commission also recommends.
VELSHI: Congressman, you're a leader in the Democratic Party. So, at some point, we know that Republicans have dug in about nothing that looks, smells, or walks like a tax increase or an elimination of a credit. You do have to compromise and you will probably tell me that you and Congressional Democrats have, but the bottom line is what can you do to bring hard line fiscal conservatives over who will not get off of that mantra?
REP. VAN HOLLEN: That is exactly the question I think all of us need to ask and I, frankly, do not have a good answer for you. Because what you've got right now is a dynamic in the Republican Party, especially with the Tea Party movement, that says that we're not going to support closing corporate tax loopholes even for the purpose of deficit reduction. And until the Republican Party is more worried about the deficit than they are about Grover Norquist, and that whole part of their coalition, then we’re going to have a real problem. Now maybe the ice is beginning to break a little bit there. I haven't-- you know, there were some signs yesterday although you have to see it to believe it. I need to see an actual proposal.
Keith Ellison, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, may not have the institutional clout Van Hollen does, but he's far more trustworthy and far more a champion of working families. This morning on Morning Joe he defended Social Security in no uncertain terms-- from both sides. He tried to refocus the debate on the central problem that seniors and the poor are being asked to sacrifice greatly while the richest Americans are being protected by congressional Republicans: "Social Security actually is not contributing to the deficit. Social Security loans us money. So at the end of the day, all this discussion about how we’re going to cut Social Security is very distressing to me because Social Security isn’t the problem… This is inequitable and regressive… We’re asking the poorest Americans to sacrifice. When are the wealthiest Americans going to step up and do the patriotic thing, which is to contribute to deal with this budget deficit."
And Elison's co-chairman, Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), was among over a dozen progressive leaders vowing to oppose cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid listed as part of any deficit reduction package combined with a proposal to raise the $14.3 trillion debt limit. They signed a letter to Obama that makes the case that “job creation is the most important issue facing the country-- not deficit reduction... [A]ny cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid should be taken off the table,” the letter said. “Second, revenue increases must be a meaningful part of any agreement.”
Grijalva: “I think we are allowing the conversation to be skewed by the Republican leadership. The demand on these three programs [Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid] is more political than it is fiscal. It’s a political statement they are making. For the president or for the Congress to allow them to make that statement, when there’s no fiscal rationale for it, is something that we can’t support.”
And, over on the Senate side, there's a champion for working families as well, Bernie Sanders: “Let us be clear,” Sanders said. “Social Security has not contributed one nickel to our deficit or our national debt. Social Security is funded by the payroll tax, not the U.S. treasury... I am especially disturbed that the president is considering cuts in Social Security after he campaigned against cuts in 2008." [Obama made his position clear on Sept. 6, 2008, when he said: “John McCain's campaign has suggested that the best answer for the growing pressures on Social Security might be to cut cost of living adjustments or raise the retirement age. Let me be clear: I will not do either,” Obama said.] “The American people expect the president to keep his word,” Sanders said.
Obama isn't the only Democrat supporting Wall Street's dream to end Social Security and privatize Medicare. Predictably, corporate whores Third Way is backing Obama.
STOP THE PRESSES: 9th Circuit panel lifts injunction that permitted DoD to continue enforcing DADT (see below)
Our Davy Brooks:Does the fact that he has a career prove that there truly aren't any disadvantages to being a functional moron?
I know I sometimes try to argue that, contrary to what you might think from observing who gets respect in our society, there actually are disadvantages to being a functional moron. That, however, would still leave the career of Our Davy Brooks -- and I mean the fact that he has a career -- unexplained. Beyond that, I don't think anything more needs to be said about this post from Jonathan Schwarz on his blog "A Tiny Revolution." -- Ken
July 06, 2011
David Brooks Reveals He Literally Worships Money
David Brooks just acknowledged that the Republican party is insane, which has caused great excitement among liberals. But no one seems to have noticed the most important thing Brooks said, which is that he actually worships money:
The members of this [GOP] movement [to default on the national debt] have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money.
Obviously there's no religious or moral tradition which considers repaying loans to be "sacred." It's almost 180 degrees the opposite: the Old Testament, New Testament and Qur'an all condemn charging interest on loans. And of course the Bible requires Jubilee years in which all debts are completely canceled.
That doesn't mean that defaulting on the U.S. national debt would be a great idea. It just means that Brooks is, ethically-speaking, a gigantic pervert.
On the other hand, it turns out there's a particular kind of U.S. debt that David Brooks feels is completely unsacred:
BROOKS: There is no Social Security trust fund there.
BROOKS: ... the trust fund is an accounting fiction.
What's the difference between these two kinds of debt? Well, David Brooks himself undoubtably owns a lot of standard government bonds. Paying him back is sacred. But the Social Security debt is mostly owed to peons. So paying them back is profane.
-- Jonathan Schwarz
POSTSCRIPT: DOES OUR DAVY HAVE A POINT?
An exceptionally erudite colleague points out that "many religious traditions do, in fact, involve themselves with borrowing and lending, dating back as far as written records," which he says often actually document temple loans in barley and silver, with gods listed as creditors and wars fought over collection of such debts. Even my learned colleague acknowledges, though, though, that officially at least this is not the case in the monotheistic religions, possibly in response to the abuses noted in such cultures as the Sumerian. (And I'm guessing that when Our Davy invokes the "sacred," he has a pretty limited version of same in mind.)
He suggests that, while "maybe Brooks is right," the point to stress is that "the US is not a theocracy, legally at any rate." He points out too that it's worth stressing who it is threatening to not live up to U.S. debt obligations: the Republicans.
STOP THE PRESSES: IN THE WAKE OF FRIDAY'S DOJ FILING, 9TH CIRCUIT PANEL RESTORES BAN ON DADT ENFORCEMENT
This statement comes from Jon W. Davidson, legal director of Lambda Legal in Los Angeles:
The injunction issued by the district court in the Log Cabin Republicans' challenge to Don't Ask, Don't Tell is back in effect. The government is enjoined from enforcing DADT anywhere in the world -- that means, not only no more discharges, but also no more processing for discharge of those who might violate DADT.
This, of course, was the situation that existed for 8 days, before a different set of Ninth Circuit judges issued the stay of the injunction in the Log Cabin Republicans case. Nonetheless, this is a quite stunning development. It shows just how important it is that the Department of Justice now recognizes that sexual orientation discrimination should be presumed to be unconstitutional and that courts should examine such discrimination carefully, as the Department of Justice forcefully argued in its brief filed last Friday in our Golinski case, which today's Ninth Circuit order expressly referenced.
But, how safe it is to come out depends on what happens next. The government could ask the Ninth Circuit judges who just lifted the stay to reimpose it while they ask a larger group of Ninth Circuit judges to again issue a stay or while they ask the Supreme Court to reimpose the stay. Even if the 3 Ninth Circuit judges who just lifted the stay refuse to do that, the government could ask the larger group of Ninth Circuit judges or the Supreme Court to reimpose the stay.
Social Security is the most successful government program in our nation's history. It has not contributed one dime to the federal deficit. It has a $2.5 trillion surplus, and it can pay out every nickel owed to every eligible American for at least the next 25 years, according to the Social Security Administration. A recent report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that Social Security is in even better financial shape and can pay all promised benefits until 2038.
Remember that Obama? I didn't trust him entirely but I went for the Hope and Change thing and I voted for him. That seems like a long time ago. Right-wing frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, Rick Perry, says he's changed his mind (maybe) on Social Security. In a recent book he claims to have written (and even read) he called Social Security a "ponzi scheme" and asserted that it is "unconstitutional" and should be abolished. They like that kind of talk in Texas. Now that he has to appeal to sane voters, he says he didn't really mean his book to be a statement of factual policy. We'll let him and Obama hash that out between them. You can donate to Bernie's reelection campaign on the Blue America Senate page. Right now it's just him-- and one other proven friend of working families.
