Good Morning!
Philadelphia. February, 2013. Photo by joanneleon.
Philadelphia. February, 2013. Photo by joanneleon.
Philadelphia. February, 2013. Photo by joanneleon.
Philadelphia. February, 2013. Photo by joanneleon.
Vincent Lopez & his orchestra - Singing a vagabond song
News and Opinion
The Social Security Defenders blogathon continues today. Thanks so much for your support yesterday. joe shikspack and I are up today at 1pm and 11am, and priceman has decided to contribute a diary for today too, so we're checking with Roger to decide on a time slot, and it should be a great day with Arshad Hasan from DFA and Roger Fox wrapping it up at 5pm. And of course the blogathon continues all week. Your shares, likes and tweets on social media are really appreciated to spread the word.
Update: Okay, the blogathon diaries for today are off and running. Here is the first one for the day, which happens to be mine :)
Dick Durbin's new Social Security reform commission (Social Security Defenders blogathon)
Gaius Publius at Americablog. Gaius zeroes in on the real divide between the 1% and the 99%. The team gunning for Social Security is bipartisan, there's no left/right divide. And seriously, Ed Rendell needs to stop calling himself a Democrat. He needs to start calling himself the spokesman for the 1%. He's not the only one. We need to name names, loudly and often. Read the article to find out some more about Fix the Debt, et al. This is not news to us, we've been reading and talking about this for two years, but maybe it is news to others on the left. Glad it's garnering some more attention.
The Democratic turncoats behind the "Fix the Debt" attack on Medicare and Social Security
Most left-side commenters paint “Fix the Debt” — the well-funded campaign to scare Americans into believing the debt is not only going to destroy us all, but that massive cuts to Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid are the only way to “fix” the “problem” — as a billionaire-led, CEO-led operation to kill (or at least seriously maim) the social programs by delivering one blow after another. But Fix the Debt is also a bipartisan operation.
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Keep that horizontal division in mind as you look at what follows. The left-right divide among the elites, the 1%, is usually represented as Democratic vs. Republican. But that’s only true among the electorate, and then only on some issues. As the following shows very clearly, the leadership of both parties is deeply in bed with the Billionaire push — fronted by Pete Peterson — to kill off the social programs.
There’s a true bipartisan consensus among billionaire-backed Democrats and billionaire-backed Republicans — “All your money are belong to us.”
Gutting Social Security: It Isn't Just an Issue for Old Folks
or most teens and twentysomethings, the raging debate in Washington over Social Security reform probably seems as relevant and engaging as PBS’s Friday night lineup of Antiques Roadshow and Jerry Lewis: Live from Las Vegas.
But the proposals on the table could be seriously bad news for young people planning to enter the workforce in coming years.
President Obama has offered to break the sequester gridlock by recalculating inflation in a way that would reduce Social Security benefits. The Business Roundtable, a club of hundreds of large company CEOs, likes Obama’s idea but wants to go even more draconian by also increasing the Social Security retirement age from 67 to 70.
What does any of this have to do with the youngsters? Both of these moves will keep seniors working longer. That means fewer job opportunities for younger workers coming behind.
Americans already work longer than those in other advanced economies. Nearly 30 percent of those in the 65-69 age group in this country continue to work (versus the OECD average of 18.5 percent), up from 24 percent a decade ago. That percentage will likely rise if Social Security is cut further.
Americans Value Protecting Social Security More Than Deficit Reduction
While you might not think it from watching cable news the reality is that the American people overwhelmingly believe protecting Medicare and Social Security benefits is more important than deficit reduction. According to Pew Research, 55 percent think keeping Medicare and Social Security is more important than reducing the deficit. Only 34 percent of Americans think reducing the deficit should be a higher priority.
Really, someone should put these beltway elites out to pasture.
REPORT: The Washington Post Overwhelmingly Favors Cutting Social Security Benefits Over Increasing Revenue
The Washington Post wrote editorials mentioning policies that would cut Social Security benefits more than editorials mentioning Social Security revenue increases by nearly six to one, according to a Nexis search of Post editorials since late 2010. This analysis was performed as Social Security becomes a major topic in the upcoming budget negotiations.
Matt Taibbi, a really good article.
Wikileaks Was Just a Preview: We're Headed for an Even Bigger Showdown Over Secrets
I'll do a full review in a few months, when We Steal Secrets comes out, but I bring it up now because the whole issue of secrets and how we keep them is increasingly in the news, to the point where I think we're headed for a major confrontation between the government and the public over the issue, one bigger in scale than even the Wikileaks episode.
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A common thread runs through all of these cases. On the one hand, the motivations for these information-stealers seem extremely diverse: You have people who appear to be primarily motivated by traditional whistleblower concerns (Manning, who never sought money and was obviously initially moved by the moral horror aroused by the material he was seeing, falls into that category for me), you have the merely mischievous (the Keys case seems to fall in this area), there are those who either claim to be or actually are free-information ideologues (Assange and Swartz seem more in this realm), and then there are other cases where the motive might have been money (Aleynikov, who was allegedly leaving Goldman to join a rival trading startup, might be among those).
But in all of these cases, the government pursued maximum punishments and generally took zero-tolerance approaches to plea negotiations. These prosecutions reflected an obvious institutional terror of letting the public see the sausage-factory locked behind the closed doors not only of the state, but of banks and universities and other such institutional pillars of society. As Gibney pointed out in his movie, this is a Wizard of Oz moment, where we are being warned not to look behind the curtain.
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Now, this "white paper" of Obama's is already of dubious legality at best. The idea that the President can simply write a paper expanding presidential power into extralegal assassination without asking the explicit permission of, well, somebody, anyway, is absurd from the start. Now you add to that the complication of the paper being based in part on some half-assed, hastily-cobbled-together, factually lacking precedent, and the Obama drone-attack rationale becomes like all rationales of blunt-force, repressive power ever written – plainly ridiculous, the stuff of bad comedy, like the Russian military superpower invading tiny South Ossetia cloaked in hysterical claims of self-defense.
Blogathon!
"HandsOffMySS" Blogathon: March 25th thru March 29th, 2013
Diary Schedule - All Times Eastern Standard
IT IS TIME TO TAKE A STAND
Social security is a concept enshrined in Article 22 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security.
A limited form of the Social Security program began, during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term, as a measure to implement "social insurance" during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when poverty rates among senior citizens exceeded 50 percent.
Let your voice be heard.
Members of the Daily Kos group Social Security Defenders have organized this bogathon to promote the truth about the financial condition of the Social Security trust fund, and the impacts of various so called reforms and fixes.
Understanding how benefits are calculated, the History of Social Security, where the Wisconsin Idea came from, and how over the years changes have been made to Social Security, all increase awareness and hopefully improve the discussion.
11:00am:Roger Fox
1:00 pm: Joan McCarter
3:00 pm: Roger Fox
5:00 pm: KitsapRiver
11:00am: joanneleon
1:00 pm: joe shikspack
3:00 pm: Arshad Hasan DFA
5:00 pm: Roger Fox
11:00am: poopdogcomedy
1:00 pm: teacherken
3:00 pm: Jamess
5:00 pm: Bruce Webb
11:00am: Jim Dean DFA
1:00 pm:
3:00 pm: One Pissed Off Liberal
5:00 pm: floridagal
11:00 am: Economist Dean Baker
1:00 pm: VCLib
3:00 pm: Armando
5:00 pm: Liberal Thinking
Please remember to republish these diaries to your Daily Kos Groups. You can also follow all postings by clicking this link for the Social Security Defenders Blogathon Group. Then, click 'Follow' and that will make all postings show up in 'My Stream' of your Daily Kos page.
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Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
Evening Blues
Everything You Need to Know About the "Work-'til-You're-Dead" Meme In One Chart
Chained CPI - A Primer from the Center for Economic Policy and Research
Why do we have Social Security anyways? (Blogathon diary, by jamess)
Economics Daily Digest: Banks learned their lesson, right?
Social Security grew from the Wisconsin Idea (Blogathon diary, by Roger Fox)
Okiciyap - We Help
The new economics of the power sector
The 'greatest retirement crisis' in history looms large (Blogathon diary, by Joan McCarter)
Welcome to the Daily Kos Social Security Defenders Blogatho (Blogathon diary, by Roger Fox)
Roger Wolfe Kahn and his Orchestra - Cheer Up, Good Times Are Coming (1930)