Thank you George Bush: Food banks cannot keep up with the surge in requests for assistance, and are turning people away. Working people are going hungry. Food prices keep rising, and landlords and gas stations now take so massive a percentage of the paycheck that employed people have little left over.
A correspondent from Australia told me that a family member recently toured California and was appalled by the poverty.
Ohio: I heartily recommend Brad Friedman's interview with Ohio's new Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner. review of electronic voting systems, a review which had the catchy title of "Evaluation & Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards & Testing," or EVEREST. The Republican reaction was of interest:
BB: ...But then there was immediately an attack from the Republican Party of Ohio's website saying that your study was put together with "left-wing activist academics" and claiming that you "cooked up" the report. So I wanted to give you a chance, if you wanted, to respond to that pretty startling criticism.Why would they fight so hard against scientific, independent testing?
JB: Well, unfortunately, the tenor of the Republican Party on issues dealing with a Democratic state office holder such as myself, is not very objective. And they tend to find any small little thing to blow out of proportion and turn into criticism. And I'm surprised that they have any credibility within their own ranks, because if I were a member of the Republican Party and trying to read the blogs or what was on my state Party website, I would get very tired of all that negativity.
Social Security and health care: The finest pages of Al Franken's The Truth (With Jokes) concern Bush's attempt to bamboozle the American public over Social Security. All those frightening numbers W bandied about came from rotten data cooked up by the libertarian Cato Institute. Well, the Republicans have renewed attempts to go after our elderly, and the numbers are still concocted.
The amount of bullcrap the privatizers have slung over the years is amazing. Apparently their new trick is to conflate Medicare (which is in trouble -- that's why the privatizers want nothing to do with it) with Social Security (which is not).As for Medicare:
Why is Social Security safe? Because the sky-is-falling projections used by the Trustees are based on unrealistically gloomy economic forecasts (less than 2% per year forever), as if we were going into a permanent recession or depression. The reality is that even with growth that averages below-par -- 2.7% -- Social Security never runs out of money. Ever.
But get this: In order to convince Americans to destroy Social Security and hand their pensions over to the brokerage firms, the privatizers tout phenomenal rates of return on stock-market-based accounts of as much as 7% per year. These rates are possible only if the economy is growing at 1998-peak-boom-year levels every single year to the end of time. So the privatizers aren't just arguing Permanent Recession -- they're also arguing Permanent Boom. At the same time!
Funny thing: Health care costs, which are out of control in the US (to the point where they're rising twice as fast as wages), aren't out of control in places with socialized medicine. You know, like Canada, where car makers like Toyota are building new plants instead of in America, because in the US health care costs make up around $1500 of the cost of each car that rolls off the assembly line. But the privatizers don't want you to know about that.This is why I became so infuriated listening last night to the Ed Schultz show, where the stand-in host referred to Ron Paul as one of two candidates not beholden to "the corporations." Paul is a Libertarian, and Libertarians abetted Bush in his scheme to turn Social Security into a far more costly, far less effective profit-making scheme for select business cronies.
But why are the Republicans making a big deal out of this issue now? This is an election year. Is Social Security no longer considered the third rail?
3 comments:
You may have noticed that for some reason, probably to play to the Tim Russert pundit class, Saint Obama has decided to push much of the Republican catechism on Social Security.
SS reform is going to turn out to be like getting the Federal Reserve. The Republicans try and cannot get it done (the Aldrich plan, in the case of SS). The Democrats oppose the entire idea in their election platform. And then Wilson gets elected, foregoes the promises against doing so, and pushes through a plan nearly identical to the already defeated Aldrich plan.
Stealing MORE from Social Security recipients: an idea whose time has come?
....sofla
I'm a Paul man, not a Romney guy,but the media hypocrisy is
glaring. Bill Clinton as president claimed he became a civil rights
liberal as a result of witnessing church burnings and bombings in Arkansas as a youth. There were none. And no national media called him on it.
Well, if CNN is a national media outlet, they DID carry a correction of the Clinton statement about the church burnings. That's just the one I found, and there may have been others. (Had Clinton skated on that one entirely, it wouldn't have made up for the press making up the airport delay for a haircut story, or the fact that none of them mentioned when the RTC investigation cleared the Clintons of any civil liability in the Madison Guarantee failure (a lower standard than a criminal one)).
As it turns out (thanks to TPM coverage), it is STILL the case that Romney didn't march with King. The Grosse Point march took place with King provably elsewhere.
...sofla
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