 |
| Click here to order the book. |
Listen in today and hear Dennis Marker and Dave Lindorff discuss the political terrain today and the change coming, just before the G.O.P. convention starts next week.
Dennis Marker is the author of the outstanding book "Fifteen Steps to Corporate Feudalism: How the Rich Convinced America's Middle Class to Eliminate Themselves" One Standard Press, Santa Fe, NM. He also was the master mind behind the effective and hilarious organizing tool, Money Puppets which a local neighbor is using in North Jefferson County, Ks.
"When giant corporations are called small businesses, the real small businesses like mine get lost in the rhetoric. This book explains how the right wing has partnered with these giant corporations, causing everyone in local communities to lose ground daily." - Juan Bernardez, President/Owner, Computer Medics.
Dave Lindorff, part of the This Can't Be Happening, Project Censored award winning on line news collective recently wrote a proposal for forming a Medicare for All Social Security (MASS) Party. The MASS Party organized around preserving and expanding the two vital government services for the growing number of Americans that will need them into the middle of the 21st century.
Below an excerpt from the original article:
Let’s Start a Medicare and Social Security Action (MASS Action) Party!
By Dave Lindorff
If you want to know how moribund the Democratic Party is, how completely owned by Wall Street the president is, and how sick our national politics have become, just consider Social Security.
The president, earlier in his term, convened a “blue ribbon” panel, supposedly composed of a “broad spectrum” of opinions from liberal to conservative,” to come up with a plan to “reform” the system.
At issue: It is known that because of the huge number of Baby Boomers -- people born between 1946 and 1964 -- just starting to hit retirement age, and the general aging of the population, the Trust Fund composed of revenues paid into the system by working people will be depleted by about 2033. That would leave current worker taxes covering just 78% of the benefits promised to be paid out the same year, unless something is done sooner to increase revenues or decrease the rate of payouts of those benefits.
The commission, which proved to be a bust, was headed by co-chairs named by the president. For the Republicans, who since its inception have wanted to destroy this last vestige of the New Deal, it was former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson, a cadaverous wretch of a man who promptly called the program a “milk cow with 300 million tits.” ‘Nuff said there. Nice pick Barack.
As for his Democratic co-chair, the president named Erskine Bowles. If you wanted to know the views of this former congressman and Clinton advisor on Social Security, you need only learn that a few days back, he publicly praised Mitt Romney’s VP pick, Paul Ryan, who has said he wants to privatize Social Security, and condemned the president’s last budget proposal as a joke. Barack sure knows how to pick ‘em. Bowles was simply Democratic a mole for cutting benefits, raising taxes and raising the retirement age on that commission.
But then, that was the point. In classic Obama fashion, before the debate even began on what to do to fix Social Security’s coming fund shortfall, due in a bit over two decades, he telegraphed to the commission that he wanted “all options” on the table. If that sounds like how he talks about Iran, it’s because he was telling everyone he was ready for the nuclear option -- cutting benefits, and perhaps even partial privatization.
The thing is, though, public support for Social Security is overwhelming. By vast majorities, Americans tell pollsters they want to solve Social Security’s future cash problem by immediately starting to tax all income earned by the wealthy, instead of just the first $110,100 of annual income.
If that one little change was made, the Social Security Administration calculates that 72% of the projected shortfall would be eliminated...
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFFin ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1288
No comments:
Post a Comment