Elizabeth Warren’s Foreclosure Settlement Bombshell: Banks Determined the Number of Victims of Their Own Foreclosure Frauds

By Pam Martens: April 12, 2013

There is only one thing more Kafkaesque than the ongoing Wall Street frauds and that is watching a live United States Senate investigation of a diabolical settlement the banks themselves concocted to repay the victims of their own fraud. Such was the case yesterday when Senators Sherrod Brown, Jack Reed, and Elizabeth Warren grilled regulators from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Federal Reserve along with outside consultants over allowing banks to hand pick the consultants to do their foreclosure reviews, negotiate confidentiality agreements with them and pay them directly.

Republicans Try To Nullify NLRB And Labor Law

By Dave Johnson | April 11, 2013

The corporate/conservative effort to gut the country’s labor-law enforcement continues at full steam. Senate Republicans are blocking NLRB Board confirmations. Republican judges blocked the the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from operating until the Senate confirms Board members. Today House Republicans are moving on a bill to just shut the NLRB down.  

There Is a Battle Raging Over What America Will Look Like in 21st Century

By Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez

April 11, 2013  |  As tens of thousands rallied on Capitol Hill for humane reform Wednesday, more details emerged on the bipartisan immigration plan being drafted in the Senate. The deal will reportedly require greatly increased surveillance and policing near the U.S.-Mexico border. According to The Wall Street Journal, U.S. immigration officials would have to certify complete monitoring of the southern U.S. border and a 90 percent success rate in blocking unlawful entry in certain areas. Only then could the nation’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants apply for permanent residency. The process is expected to take at least 10 years. Juan González, Democracy Now! co-host and New York Daily News columnist, calls the looming congressional debate on immigration "a battle over what will America look like in the 21st century."

AMY GOODMAN: Juan González, co-host on Democracy Now!and columnist with the New York Daily News on Wednesday wrote a piece [3] called "With Much at Stake, Gang of Eight Senators’ Immigration Bill, Due to Be Unveiled Soon, Awaits Uphill Climb." Juan, talk about what is happening here. You’ve been covering this very closely.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I think the first thing that people have to understand is that what’s at stake here, what this battle—which is going to go on for all the spring and summer and probably into the fall, is really a battle over what will America look like in the 21st century, what will be the—who is legitimately in the country, and who will be legitimately allowed to come into the country over the next several decades.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: 9 'Chained CPI' Facts They Don't Want You to Know

Posted: 04/11/2013 12:58 pm

The "chained CPI" proposal in President Obama's budget continues to draw much-deserved fire, which is only likely to increase as more information about it becomes known.
Here are nine embarrassing facts about the chained CPI which the White House and its defenders would prefer to see overlooked:
1. Of course it's a benefit cut.
Chained-CPI defenders say it's not a benefit cut. It's just a slowdown in the rate of the benefit's planned increases. That's a silly semantic game unworthy of serious leaders or analysts. The Social Security benefit, as laid out on the Social Security Administration's website, includes adjustments designed to keep pace with the rising cost of living.
Those adjustments aren't a benefit increase. They're designed to prevent the benefit from being decreased as a result of inflation. If you lower that adjustment, you're cutting benefits. Period.

Paul Krugman: Lust for Gold

News flash: Recent declines in the price of gold, which is off about 17 percent from its peak, show
that this price can go down as well as up. You may consider this an obvious point, but, as an article
in The Times on Thursday reports, it has come as a rude shock to many small gold investors, who
imagined that they were buying the safest of all assets.

And thereby hangs a tale. One of the central facts about modern America is that everything is
political; on the right, in particular, people choose their views about everything, from
environmental science to gun safety, to suit their political prejudices. And the remarkable recent
rise of “goldbuggism,” in the teeth of all the evidence, shows that this politicization can influence
investments as well as voting.

10 Tax Dodges That Help the Rich Get Richer

By Alexander Arapoglou, Jerri-Lynn Scofield

April 11, 2013  |  Have you read about the billionaire who pays a lower income tax rate than his secretary [4] and gives advice for how much income tax other people ought to pay? You might want to ask: “How does he do it? ”

We don’t know the complete answer to that question. No doubt, only his army of tax advisers does. What we’d instead like to share are 10 ways the current tax code allows the rich to accumulate vast fortunes, subject to little or no tax. And, unlike the offshore account tax fraud that gets so much press and regulatory attention, many of the most egregious tax avoidance scams are perfectly legal.   

Will Voters Forgive Obama for Cutting Social Security?

William Greider on April 10, 2013 - 3:33 PM ET

President Obama has riled loyal Democrats by tossing Social Security onto the table in his poker game with Republicans. Not to worry. I think I know how this story ends. A year from now, when the 2014 congressional campaigns are hot underway, Republicans will be running against Obama-the-slasher and promising to protect Social Security from the bloodthirsty Democrats.

By then, having lost on his too-cute strategy, the president will be reduced to lamely reassuring old folks. Really, he didn’t actually intend to cut their benefits, really he didn’t. It was just a ploy to get tightwad conservatives to give in a little on tax increases. Republicans can pull out the videotapes in which Obama and team explain their high-minded purpose—sacrificing the Democratic party’s sacred honor in order to get Republicans to play nice.

Can We Kiss Internet Privacy Goodbye?

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act is moving swiftly again–and this time, Obama’s veto is less certain.

BY Ian Becker

When the House introduced the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) in 2011, purportedly to help prevent cyber threats to national security, the measure was criticized heavily by Internet policy watchdogs and civil liberties groups, who argued that the bill would likely encroach on internet users’ Fourth amendment rights. The bill passed the House in the spring of 2012 but died in the Senate under threat of a White House veto.

Now CISPA is back, reintroduced in the House by its original author, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.). By all accounts, the “new” version poses the same threats to privacy rights that alarmed the White House a year ago. In an unusual secret session on Wednesday, the House Intelligence committee passed the bill without additional privacy protections proposed by Jan Schakowsky (D.-Ill.). The measure could be up for a full House vote as soon as next week.

New Research Confirms Gun Rampages Are Rising—and Armed Civilians Don't Stop Them

And the data further debunks the NRA claim that "good guys with guns" stop mass shooters.

By Mark Follman | Thu Apr. 11, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

By the time the nation confronted the unthinkable school massacre in Connecticut last December, Mother Jones' groundbreaking [1] investigation of mass shootings [2], launched the prior summer, had shown that mass gun violence in America was on the rise. The trend appeared to be no coincidence in light of the proliferation of guns and looser gun laws [3] nationwide. One leading criminologist took issue with our criteria [4], arguing that mass shootings had not become more common. But now, research from an expert on criminal justice at Texas State University further shows that gun rampages in the United States have escalated.

The research [5], to be published in a book in July, confirms that:

• Public shooting rampages have spiked in particular over the last few years
• Many of the attackers were heavily armed
• None of the shootings was stopped by an ordinary citizen using a gun

Debate: After Activists Covertly Expose Animal Cruelty, Should They Be Targeted With "Ag-Gag" Laws?

Wednesday, 10 April 2013 11:43  
By Amy Goodman and Aaron Mate, Democracy Now!

So-called "ag-gag" bills that criminalize undercover filming on farms and at slaughterhouses to document criminal animal abuse are sweeping the country. Five states, including Missouri, Utah and Iowa, already have such laws in place. North Carolina has just become the latest state to consider such a law, joining a list that includes Arkansas, California, Indiana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Vermont. Many of these bills have been introduced with the backing of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a mechanism for corporate lobbyists to help write state laws. We host a debate on the ag-gag laws with two guests: independent journalist Will Potter, and Emily Meredith, communications director for the Animal Agriculture Alliance.

Paul Krugman: Poland's Risky Euro Gamble

Poland is not yet lost. But its leaders remain determined to give disaster a chance.

Poland is one of Europe's relative success stories. It avoided the severe slump that afflicted much of the European periphery, then had a fairly strong recovery.

Solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities

By David Roberts

Solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies could lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century, to the ground.

That is not wild-eyed hippie talk. It is the assessment of the utilities themselves.

Back in January, the Edison Electric Institute — the (typically stodgy and backward-looking) trade group of U.S. investor-owned utilities — released a report [PDF] that, as far as I can tell, went almost entirely without notice in the press. That’s a shame. It is one of the most prescient and brutally frank things I’ve ever read about the power sector. It is a rare thing to hear an industry tell the tale of its own incipient obsolescence.

Before Next Crash, Create Finance System That Serves Public, Part I: Shrink, Regulate Banks, and Enforce Law 

Wednesday, 10 April 2013 00:00  
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers , Truthout | News Analysis 

Big finance - the too-big-to-jail banks that dominate the economy and government - is designed for financiers and does not benefit most people. That is why many are in rebellion against the looting class of Wall Street. But if we don't like Wall Street finance, what would we replace it with? What would a finance system that served and protected the people look like?

 It is time to put together a new kind of financial system. Since the crash of 2008, not only do fraud and high-risk investments continue with little regulation and lax enforcement, but policies that protect people have weakened. Experts predict that another collapse of the big banks is very possible. In our fragile economy, another crash could have devastating consequences. 

Secret Tape: McConnell and Aides Weighed Using Judd's Mental Health and Religion As Political Ammo

A recording of a private meeting between the Senate GOP leader and campaign aides reveals how far they were willing to go to defeat the actor/activist.

—By David Corn | Tue Apr. 9, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

On February 2, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the US Senate, opened up his 2014 reelection campaign headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, and in front of several dozen supporters vowed to "point out" the weaknesses of any opponent fielded by the Democrats. "They want to fight? We're ready," he declared. McConnell was serious: Later that day, he was huddling with aides in a private meeting to discuss how to attack his possible Democratic foes, including actor/activist Ashley Judd, who was then contemplating challenging the minority leader. During this strategy session—a recording of which was obtained by Mother Jones—McConnell and his aides considered assaulting Judd for her past struggles with depression and for her religious views.

Solidarity NOT Forever: How the Supreme Court Kicked Retirees Into the Gutter

Thursday, 11 April 2013 10:16  
By Ann Hodges and Ellen Dannin, Truthout | News Analysis 

The Supreme Court's decision in Allied Chemical Workers v. Pittsburgh Plate Glass to give employers complete control of retiree benefits undercuts the purpose of the National Labor Relations Act and leaves vulnerable, retired employees powerless to protect themselves from costly changes in benefits.

Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act to balance the power of employers - who could operate as corporations or partnerships - by giving employees the right to band together and deal with their employer as a group. A second way Congress gave employees power was by giving them the legal right to support any employee, whether or not they were employed by the same employer. In other words, the NLRA gave employees the right to make common cause with other workers, just as employers had the right to form industry groups to support one another.

Why do people hate deficits?

Posted by Dylan Matthews on April 8, 2013 at 2:48 pm

People really don’t like deficits. Polls measuring national priorities tend to find that the deficit/debt is the second most important issue to voters, after “the economy” generally and ahead of health care, guns, foreign policy and immigration.

Politicians don’t like deficits either. Both President Obama and the Republican leadership in the House pay lip service to wanting to reduce the national debt burden, and almost all their fights to date have centered on how best to do that.

But hold on a second. Why do we hate deficits? “Balancing the budget” sounds really nice, but what reason do we have to believe it’s actually valuable? There are a number of reasons to think it might be good for the debt load to be smaller rather than larger, but almost all of them are controversial among economists, and some more so than others. Here are the common reasons for balancing the budget you hear, and what the evidence says about each.

How Did Margaret Thatcher Do It? 

Gary Younge

April 9, 2013

On the day Margaret Thatcher resigned my brother was stuck in the London Underground. The dispatcher informed them over the intercom that there train would hopefully be moving in another few minutes. The carriage groaned. Then he informed them of the prime minister’s resignation. Two thirds of them started cheering and clapping.
 
With the exception of the immediate aftermath of the Falklands war, Thatcher was never a massively popular politician. She never won more than 44 percent of the vote, though in Britain’s winner-takes-all parliamentary system that was enough to secure massive majorities. Her reign over the country was partial. She left her party decimated in Scotland, the North of England and most urban centers, relying on her electoral fiefdom in the South, the Midlands and rural areas. She was divisive, apparently revelling in the acrimony engendered by massive strikes, riots, hunger strikes and economic upheaval for which she was in no small part responsible. She was authoritarian, abolishing the city’s elected authorities because they opposed her agenda and banning Sinn Fein representatives’ voices from the television because they advocated armed resistance to the British occupation of Northern Ireland. (For six tedious years they would be shown with the lips moving, the sound of their voice turned down and their words read by actors). She was a crude majoritarian who never had the support of the majority and became a liability even to her allies. Her political career perished when she was shot by her own troops who tired of her leading them into reckless battle.

Tomgram: Barbara Garson, Going Underwater in the Long Recession

By Barbara Garson
Posted on April 9, 2013, Printed on April 13, 2013
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175685/

They call it the “spring swoon.” For the third straight year, the American economy bounded out of the starting blocks, adding hundreds of thousands of jobs in January and February. And for the third year in a row, that momentum melted away in the spring like the last traces of winter snow. Employers added only 88,000 jobs this March, the Labor Department announced on Friday, the worst monthly jobs report since June. Economists predicted gains of at least twice as much, and the news fed fears that the economy's modest recovery might be faltering. And this before we’ve even felt the real effect of the "sequester," those $85 billion across-the-board budget cuts recently approved by Congress and President Obama.

The biggest cause for concern, however, isn't actually that anemic monthly job-gain figure. Measuring the job market is, at best, an inexact science, and the number crunchers at the Labor Department could yet revise that number upward (or, god forbid, downward) in time for next month's report. Here's the real news, as U.S. corporations rake in record profits (and shift record amounts of money into offshore tax havens): nearly half a million workers "disappeared" last month. Yes, disappeared. The Labor Department tracks what it calls the "labor force participation rate" -- wonk-speak for the percentage of people working or actively hunting for a job. In March, that number slumped to 63.3%, the lowest point since 1979. That means there are millions of people out there who have lost their jobs, stopped interviewing or even applying, who have packed it in, given up. The government excludes them when it calculates the main unemployment rate.  They have entered the invisible workforce.

The Wall Street Ticking Time Bomb That Could Blow Up Your Bank Account

By Ellen Brown

April 9, 2013  |  Cyprus-style confiscation of depositor funds has been called the “new normal.”  Bail-in policies are appearing in multiple countries directing failing TBTF banks to convert the funds of “unsecured creditors” into capital; and those creditors, it turns out, include ordinary depositors. Even “secured” creditors, including state and local governments, may be at risk.  Derivatives have “super-priority” status in bankruptcy, and Dodd Frank precludes further taxpayer bailouts. In a big derivatives bust, there may be no collateral left for the creditors who are next in line.  

Shock waves went around the world when the IMF, the EU, and the ECB not only approved but mandated the confiscation of depositor funds to “bail in” two bankrupt banks in Cyprus. A “bail in” is a quantum leap beyond a “bail out.” When governments are no longer willing to use taxpayer money to bail out banks that have gambled away their capital, the banks are now being instructed to “recapitalize” themselves by confiscating the funds of their creditors, turning debt into equity, or stock; and the “creditors” include the depositors [3] who put their money in the bank thinking it was a secure place to store their savings.

The Cyprus bail-in was not a one-off emergency measure but was consistent with similar policies already in the works for the US, UK, EU, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, as detailed in my earlier articles here [4] and here [5].  “Too big to fail” now trumps all.  Rather than banks being put into bankruptcy to salvage the deposits of their customers, the customers will be put into bankruptcy to save the banks.

French agency: Pregnant women’s exposure to certain plastics can lead to breast cancer for children

By Agence France-Presse
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 10:05 EDT

France’s food safety agency raised the alarm anew Tuesday over the use of bisphenol A, a chemical found in certain plastics, saying it said may expose unborn children to breast cancer later in life.

Bisphenol A, or BPA, is a common component of plastic bottles and canned food and drink linings, but some studies have linked it to brain and nervous system problems, reproductive disorders and obesity.

White House Approves Radical Radiation Cleanup Rollback

Civilian Cancer Deaths Expected to Skyrocket Following Radiological Incidents

 

Posted on Apr 08, 2013

---

Washington, DC — The White House has given final approval for dramatically raising permissible radioactive levels in drinking water and soil following “radiological incidents,” such as nuclear power-plant accidents and dirty bombs. The final version, slated for Federal Register publication as soon as today, is a win for the nuclear industry which seeks what its proponents call a “new normal” for radiation exposure among the U.S population, according Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

Issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, the radiation guides (called Protective Action Guides or PAGs) allow cleanup many times more lax than anything EPA has ever before accepted. These guides govern evacuations, shelter-in-place orders, food restrictions and other actions following a wide range of “radiological emergencies.” The Obama administration blocked a version of these PAGs from going into effect during its first days in office.

Rick Perlstein: Why Conservatives Think the Ends Justify the Means

Let's continue my series on the continuities on the American right: the stockpiling of guns for the coming apocalypse; the panic over textbooks and the passion for reckless spending cuts; the horror at the government sponsoring pre-school education—and, for today, the comfort the right harbors for minoritarianism: the conviction that conservatives are fit to rule even if they don't actually win elections. We've been reading about that and again these days in the way the Republican Party does business: the "Hastert rule" which doesn't let a measure get to the House floor if it can't win a majority of Republicans even if the majority of all House members want it; the Republican embrace of gerrymandering that guarantees Republican congressional majorities in states Obama won decidedly like Pennylvania; the Republican comfort with the disenfranchisement of Democratic constituencies that the Nation's Ari Berman has been covering so effectively these days. This comes from somewhere—from the nature of conservatism itself. It is an old, old story.

Let's start, though, with a question of first principles, one absolutely crucial to understanding the difference between liberalism and conservatism, one that goes very deep at the cognitive level. We'll be returning to it when I arrive at the crucial question of how that which liberals consider hypocrisy functions on the right.

How America's Imperial Class Has Hijacked Human Rights to Further Its Interests

By Chris Hedges

April 8, 2013  |  The appointment of Suzanne Nossel, a former State Department official and longtime government apparatchik, as executive director of PEN American Center [3] is part of a campaign to turn U.S. human rights organizations into propagandists for pre-emptive war and apologists for empire. Nossel’s appointment led me to resign from PEN as well as withdraw from speaking at the PEN World Voices Festival [4] in May. But Nossel is only symptomatic of the widespread hijacking of human rights organizations to demonize those—especially Muslims—branded by the state as the enemy, in order to cloak pre-emptive war and empire with a fictional virtue and to effectively divert attention from our own mounting human rights abuses, including torture, warrantless wiretapping and monitoring, the denial of due process and extrajudicial assassinations.

Nossel, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs under Hillary Clinton in a State Department that was little more than a subsidiary of the Pentagon, is part of the new wave of “humanitarian interventionists,” such as Samantha Power [5], Michael Ignatieff [6] and Susan Rice [7], who naively see in the U.S. military a vehicle to create a better world. They know little of the reality of war or the actual inner workings of empire. They harbor a childish belief in the innate goodness and ultimate beneficence of American power. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, the horrendous suffering and violent terror inflicted in the name of their utopian goals in Iraq and Afghanistan, barely register on their moral calculus. This makes them at once oblivious and dangerous. “Innocence is a kind of insanity,” Graham Greene wrote in his novel “The Quiet American,” and those who destroy to build are “impregnably armored by … good intentions and … ignorance.”

Michael Hudson: Thatcher’s Legacy of Failed Privatizations

Yves here. Be warned this piece is long but very much worth your time, since it demolishes the myth of the attractiveness of privatizations by looking at its record in England, where it was first undertaken on a widespread basis.

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is “The Bubble and Beyond.” 

As in Chile, privatization in Britain was a victory for Chicago monetarism. This time it was implemented democratically. In fact, voters endorsed Margaret Thatcher’s selloff of public industries so strongly that by 1991, when she was replaced as prime minister by her own party’s John Major, only 35 percent of Britain’s voters supported the Labour Party – half the proportion registered in 1945. The Conservatives sold off public monopolies, used the proceeds to cut taxes, and put the privatized firms on a profit-making basis. Their stock prices rose sharply, making capital gains for investors whose ranks included millions of Britons who had been employees and/or customers of these enterprises.

Yet by 1997 the Conservatives were voted out of office by one of the largest margins in their history. What concerned voters were the results of privatization that Mrs. Thatcher had not warned them about. Prices did not decline proportionally to cost cuts and productivity gains. Many services were cut back, especially on the least utilized transport routes. The largest privatized bus company was charged with cut-throat monopoly practices. The water system broke down, while consumer charges leapt. Electricity prices were shifted against residential consumers in favor of large industrial users. Economic inequality widened as the industrial labor force shrunk by two million from 1979 to 1997, while wages stagnated in the face of soaring profits for the privatized companies. The tax cuts financed by their selloff turned out to benefit mainly the rich.

Paul Krugman: Insurance and Freedom

President Obama will soon release a new budget, and the commentary is already flowing fast and
furious. Progressives are angry (with good reason) over proposed cuts to Social Security;
conservatives are denouncing the call for more revenues. But it’s all Kabuki. Since House
Republicans will block anything Mr. Obama proposes, his budget is best seen not as policy but as
positioning, an attempt to gain praise from “centrist” pundits.

No, the real policy action at this point is in the states, where the question is, How many Americans
will be denied essential health care in the name of freedom?

Obama’s Social Security Cuts Are Our Wake-Up Call

By Richard Eskow | April 7, 2013


No jobs. No growth. Falling income. Unaffordable colleges. A dying middle class. Young people without hope.  The greatest economic inequality in modern history.

And yet, in the midst of the Long Depression, we’re told that President Obama intends to cuts Social Security.
 

How to Close Public Schools: A Guide

By dianerav

Just in case you have been wondering what is the best way to shut down your local public schools, the Broad Foundation has thoughtfully provided a guide to help you.

 [...]

Read it and be forewarned. Your own public school may be next.

The Real Problem with Education Today? Kids Hate School -- and Here's Why

By Alyssa Figueroa

April 8, 2013  |  The following is a Q&A with Peter Gray about his new book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life [3], which argues that students learn better when they are free to play, explore and teach themselves.

1. Can you explain briefly why you were motivated to write this book? You wrote about your son, who had trouble learning in a traditional school?
I wouldn’t say that my son had trouble learning in a traditional school, certainly not any more so than anyone else.  I would say, rather, that he found that he was not free in school to follow his own interests, ask his own questions, solve problems in his own way, and present his own ideas honestly.  He found it to infringe on his rights as a human being.  Once he finally convinced his mother and me of this, we found a very different school—a school that is really a setting for self-directed learning.  Ultimately, this experience led me to change the direction of my research.  I began to focus on how children educate themselves—largely through free play and exploration—when they are free to do so and are provided with a setting that optimizes their ability to do so.  I wrote the book because I came to believe that we, as a society, are stunting children’s social, emotional, an intellectual development by depriving them of the freedom they need to play and explore.
2. You write in your book that not only is the decline in children’s freedom hindering learning, but also it’s actually increasing psychological, emotional and social disorders in children. Are people seeing this? Are parents seeing this? Why is there not more outrage?
The decline in children’s freedom to play and explore, undirected by adults, has been gradual over the past 50 or 60 years.  This gradual decline has been accompanied by a gradual increase in anxiety, depression, and other mental disorders in children.  Because the change is gradual, people don’t necessarily see it. Yet, over time, the change has been dramatic.  Today, by unchanged measures, the rates of anxiety disorders and major depression in children and adolescents are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s.  When people see that their own children are depressed or anxious, they tend to blame themselves, as parents, rather than the social conditions that have deprived children of freedom.  Or they assume that this is just a normal part of childhood or adolescence, because it is so common.

7 Chilling Facts About Retirement in America That Should Make Obama Tremble Before Cutting Social Security and Medicare

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

April 7, 2013  |  We are headed for a catastrophic retirement train wreck. A Wall Street-driven financial crisis has stripped millions of people of things like jobs, pensions and home equity that were supposed to deliver a dignified retirement after a lifetime of hard work. The crisis has also provided certain interests the opportunity to make false claims about the “unaffordability” of vital social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare that help the 99% make it. These opportunistic “Raiders of Your Lost Retirement [3]” do not give a hoot if you starve in your golden years – this is about money to them. American financiers hate Social Security, for example, because they want to push us toward private retirement accounts on which they can charge fees. A large swath of the wealthy does not like Social Security and Medicare because they do not like to pay taxes.

You might think Obama would be on the side of the citizens on this one. But it seems that the President will officially propose this week to cut Social Security and Medicare as part of his annual budget, despite the fact that this move would be economically irresponsible, socially disruptive and morally repugnant. Here are seven things that should make Obama tremble before he dares to announce such a betrayal of the American people.

Destroying the Economy and the Democrats

Robert Kuttner

April 5, 2013

Amid disappointing jobs numbers, the president's budget proposal gives away his party's crown jewels: their defense of Social Security and Medicare.

Job creation slowed to just 88,000 in March, signaling a sluggish economy. And President Obama, with unerring timing, picked this moment to put out an authorized leak that he is willing to put Social Security and Medicare on the block as part of a grand budget bargain that will only slow the economy further.

The deterioration in economic performance was all too predictable, given the combined lead weights of the March 1 $85 billion of budget cuts in the sequester and the January deal to raise payroll taxes by about $120 billion. (The tax hike on working people was almost double the much-hyped tax increase on the top one percent, which totaled a little over $60 billion.)