The Head of Goldman Sachs Wants to Raise Your Retirement Age

Nov 20 2012, 1:15 PM ET
 
Lloyd Blankfein, the 57-year-old CEO of Goldman Sachs, who was paid more than $16 million dollars last year, appeared on CBS last night to talk about the Fiscal Cliff and lay some truth on the American people: You all need to work longer.

You can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn't devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career. ... So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised. But in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.

As Ezra Klein and others before me have noted, it is very easy for people like Blankfein who are paid outrageous sums of money to sit in offices, think, and talk to tell Americans they should delay retirement.

Senate bill rewrite lets feds read your e-mail without warrants

By Declan McCullagh | CNET.com – Tue, Nov 20, 2012

A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans' e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law.

CNET has learned that Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law enforcement concerns. A vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans' e-mail, is scheduled for next week.

Leahy's rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies -- including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission -- to access Americans' e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge. (CNET obtained the revised draft from a source involved in the negotiations with Leahy.) 

Wall Street Group Behind Poll Supporting Social Security Cuts

By Richard Eskow | November 20, 2012


The anti-Social Security propagandists should’ve thought this one through a little more carefully: On the same day that Goldman Sach’s CEO issued his “balanced” demand for Social Security and Medicare cuts, the Wall Street-funded group called “Third Way” published the results of a poll which precisely reflected the wishes of Goldman Sach’s CEO.

Coincidence? We report, you decide.
 

Why Cell Phones Went Dead After Hurricane Sandy

By Susan Crawford - Nov 15, 2012

After Hurricane Sandy, survivors needed, in addition to safety and power, the ability to communicate. Yet in parts of New York City, mobile communications services were knocked out for days.

The problem? The companies that provide them had successfully resisted Federal Communications Commission calls to make emergency preparations, leaving New Yorkers to rely on the carriers’ voluntary efforts.

We have so far heard few details about why the companies made the particular business choices they did on backup power and what the consequences of those choices were, because the FCC has been blocked from asking -- even though about a third of people rely on mobile service as their only voice-communications connection.

An Inconvenient Truth About Lincoln (That You Won't Hear from Hollywood)

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

November 20, 2012  |  Over this Thanksgiving week, you may find yourself in a movie theater watching Steven Spielberg’s treatment of Abraham Lincoln and the battle to pass the 13th Amerndment, which abolished slavery once and for all. There’s much to be said for Lincoln [3]: marvelous acting, less mythologizing than usual, and a fascinating window into raucous realpolitik. Spielberg’s film stands several cuts above any movie depiction of the Lincoln presidency you’re likely to see.

Lincoln himself stands several cuts above the vast majority of U.S. presidents. After some equivocating, he freed the slaves, a monumental undertaking that was a service to the country and to humanity in general. He was also friendlier to workers than most presidents, an affinity noted by Karl Marx, who exchanged letters with Lincoln leading up to and during the Civil War. (You won’t see the GOP acknowledging that!)

But there’s a side of Lincoln that no Hollywood film shows clearly: He was extremely close to the railway barons, the most powerful corporate titans of the era.

A Grim Status Report

David Kurtz November 20, 2012, 10:47 AM


The World Bank has released a new report (.pdf) on climate change that is ostensibly focused on the dire consequences of a rise in average global temperatures by 4 degrees Celsius. That in itself is significant insofar as the Copenhagen Accord of 2009 agreed that it was crucial to cap the worldwide temperature increase at 2 degrees Celsius.

To be clear, no one then — and certainly no one in the three years since — thought we would be able to avoid blowing through the Copenhagen ceiling (although the World Bank report still holds out such hope). That has become seen as inevitable since no substantial or meaningful agreement has been reached on reducing carbon emissions. If you’re interested, Bill McKibben wrote about these numbers in Rolling Stone over the summer.
 

The Giant Lie Trotted Out by Fiscal Conservatives Trying to Shred Social Security

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

November 19, 2012  |  Trying to convince the public to cut America’s best-loved and most successful program requires a lot of creativity and persistence. Social Security is fiscally fit, prudently managed and does not add to the deficit because by law it must be completely detached from the federal operating budget. Obviously, it is needed more than ever in a time of increasing job insecurity and disappearing pensions. It helps our economy thrive and boosts the productivity of working Americans. And yet the sharks are in a frenzy to shred it in the upcoming “fiscal cliff” discussions.

The most popular red herring Social Security hustlers have unleashed into the waters of public discourse has grown into such a massive whale of a lie that liberals frequently subscribe to it. The idea goes like this: We need to somehow “fix” Social Security because people are living longer – “fix” in this context being code for “cut.” Two groups stand to benefit in the short-term from such a scheme: the greedy rich, who do not want to pay their share in taxes, and financiers, who want to move towards privatizing retirement accounts so they can collect fees. As for the masses of hard-working people who have rightfully earned their retirement, the only “fix” is the fix they will be in if already modest benefits are further reduced.

Who Will Obama Be Bargaining With In The 113 House?

By Matthew Yglesias | Posted Friday, Nov. 16, 2012, at 9:51 AM ET

An underrated issue looking at the legislative agenda in the new year is the question of who's actually decisive in the House of Representatives.

This is perhaps best explained by analogy with the United States Senate. Over there it's clear that what you need is a coalition of 60 Senators to pass bills under the normal process. That means the 55 Democrats plus 5 moderate Republicans, or else the 45 Republicans plus 15 moderate Democrats. Sometimes big leader-to-leader agreements happen, but legislation often occurs on the basis of minimum winning coalitions. The Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, for example, was overwhelmingly opposed by the GOP but Scott Brown, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snowe made a separate peace with the Democrats and it passed.

Dear Mr. Obama, the “Grand Bargain” is neither Grand…nor a Bargain

By Michael Hoexter

Dear Barack,

Congratulations on your recent electoral victory and the hard work that you and your team put into that effort.  You defeated an opponent, formidable not so much from the point of view of his political skills but more in the masses of “dark money” that were thrown against you and other Democratic candidates. You and your advisors ran a sophisticated tactical campaign that will be emulated by many in the years to come.  Still, from my point of view, these tactical skills will only get the American people so far in our pursuit of happiness.


You very much deserve the title of “President of the United States” after this decisive election but I am addressing you as “Barack” and “Mr. Obama” because I want this communication to reach you, if it ever would, with some immediacy and not filtered through the insulating layers of bureaucracy and advisors with which you are surrounded as President.

Ten Numbers the Rich Would Like Fudged

The numbers reveal the deadening effects of inequality in our country, and confirm that tax avoidance, rather than a lack of middle-class initiative, is the cause.

by Paul Buchheit

 

1. Only THREE PERCENT of the very rich are entrepreneurs.

According to both Marketwatch and economist Edward Wolff, over 90 percent of the assets owned by millionaires are held in a combination of low-risk investments (bonds and cash), personal business accounts, the stock market, and real estate. Only 3.6 percent of taxpayers in the top .1% were classified as entrepreneurs based on 2004 tax returns. A 2009 Kauffman Foundation study found that the great majority of entrepreneurs come from middle-class backgrounds, with less than 1 percent of all entrepreneurs coming from very rich or very poor backgrounds.

Wall Street Finds a ‘Third Way’ to Plunder Our Wealth

By Richard Eskow | November 19, 2012


Gotta hand it to ‘em: Those Wall Street guys are smart. They’ve already found two ways to plunder the nation’s wealth for their own enrichment, and now they’re working on a third.

The first way? Identify and finance a wave of Democratic politicians who would join with Republicans in deregulating Wall Street. The second? Employ the same so-called ‘centrist’ Democrats, along with their Republican cohorts, to bail them out after they crashed the economy. That bailout continues, and the assurance of protection from being prosecuted for their criminal misdeeds.
 

25% of Credit Information Is Flat-Out Wrong? How Consumers Are Getting Screwed

By Odysseas Papadimitriou

November 16, 2012  |  Monopoly.  We all know the game – one of the Parker Brothers’ best – as a quintessential American pastime with the potential to bring generations together (or spark heated arguments among those of us with a bit of a competitive streak).  But when that term is applied not to board games, but instead to board rooms, it has a decidedly negative connotation.  Everyone knows how important competition is to a free market economy, after all.

That’s what makes the ineptitude and pervasive conflicts of interest that mark the credit reporting and scoring industry due to a lack of competition so hard to fathom.  It’s also what underscores the drastic need for reform.

Paul Krugman: The Twinkie Manifesto

The Twinkie, it turns out, was introduced way back in 1930. In our memories, however, the iconic snack will forever be identified with the 1950s, when Hostess popularized the brand by sponsoring “The Howdy Doody Show.” And the demise of Hostess has unleashed a wave of baby boomer nostalgia for a seemingly more innocent time.

Needless to say, it wasn’t really innocent. But the ’50s — the Twinkie Era — do offer lessons that remain relevant in the 21st century. Above all, the success of the postwar American economy demonstrates that, contrary to today’s conservative orthodoxy, you can have prosperity without demeaning workers and coddling the rich.