Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

Payback time.

The election is barely past us and corporate America is already knocking on our door for the rent.

Speaking of timing, former Sen. Alan Simpson and former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, co-chairs of the president’s commission on deficit reduction, have agreed we should gut Social Security, Medicare. Well, there’s a surprise – both have an execrable history of animosity towards these quite successful social programs. (Simpson’s contempt for elderly people is palpable and disgusting, and he never misses an opportunity to toss a rhetorical brick at them.) Of course, their proposal also calls for tax cuts for the rich and for corporations. Again, no surprises there.

This is just the latest chapter in the attack against the poor, working class, elderly, and infirm that has been underway for decades in this country. Time and time again they have sought to undermine Social Security, to loot its trust fund, and to convert it into something it was never intended to be – an instrument for the creation of private wealth. Social Security is a supplemental guaranteed retirement program and, as such, an extremely successful one. It has kept elderly people (at least the ones who did not retire on a mountain of money, like Simpson) out of poverty for seven decades. Likewise, Medicare has not only made the elderly more financially secure, but it has also improved their quality of life in demonstrable ways. Not for nothing that these are the most popular social programs in America.

It may mean little to Simpson, Bowles, and many who share their views that people they don’t know will have to work until 68 or 70 and do without adequate cost of living adjustments in their old age. It sure as hell matters to me, and I imagine to many others as well. Social Security is not on the brink of bankruptcy – far from it. They just want to use its revenues to cover our government’s bad decisions with regard to financial regulation and foreign policy – decisions that have cost trillions of dollars over the last decade alone. Now we are being asked to pay for those criminal actions. There can be only one answer to that.

Don’t know, but we may have to take a page out of France’s book. If it takes standing in the street to protect the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people, it’s goddamned worth it.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Turning Japanese.

Looks like we all drive with Boehner. And perhaps swim with Aqua Buddha.

Okay, so… here’s the irony of this mid-term election. Admittedly Obama isn’t the most “outside of the box” thinker imaginable, but when he came into office two years ago, he had a relatively ambitious agenda that included a major stimulus package. The original version included infrastructure spending that would have put some fuel into this sluggish recovery. The Republicans had decided, of course, to vote no on everything, including cloture for all Senate bills, making the bar for passage of anything more than sixty votes. The stimulus got watered down with tax cuts – 30% or so was tax cuts – to bring along people like Arlen Specter, who was a Republican then.

Of course, that spending package worked by all measures… but only so well, as tax cuts have always been a pretty poor method for stimulating the economy. The G.O.P. then tag the dems with the “failed stimulus”, even though its lack of broader effectiveness was largely due to their stonewalling. Now the voters, in their understandable anger at this failure, have put the Dems out and, by extension, House Republicans back in charge, so any correction of this is extremely unlikely. So… it looks like we’re headed for Japan in the 1990s – a zombie economy, staggering along for the next decade, suffering from our unwillingness to take bold action. The deficit hawks have gained the upper hand for the nonce, and that is not good news for the rest of us.

Not that the G.O.P. House will seriously move to cut the deficit. As of yet, they have been unable to name even a few billion dollars worth of cuts they would be willing to make. Not to mention the fact that they seem determined to continue boring the hole through the treasury that Bush started with his tax cuts for the rich and famous. If they do that and succeed in repealing the health care legislation, we’re effectively talking about another $1.7 trillion in debt added on to what they claim is a staggering total already. Does that sound serious to you? Perhaps they’ll try to resurrect Dubya’s Social Security privatization plan to underwrite such largesse to the wealthy. (Since their successful House campaigns were floated by post-Citizens United corporate cash, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.)

Here’s my suggestion, Mr. President. Take that $700 billion tax cut they want to give to the wealthy and propose adding it to the cuts for the bottom 97%. Let them vote against that one.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

What’s up.

Just a few thoughts prior to the most expensive mid-term elections in U.S. history.

Don’t abstain. You’ve heard this before from wiser people than me. You’ve even heard it from me. In any case, here it is again – don’t stay home on election day. Go out and vote. Vote against the money tide from corporate America. Make their Supreme Court-sanctioned pay-to-play electoral machine useless to them. It only works if we cooperate by failing to oppose their favored candidates – don’t. Get out there and mark those ballots – again, not because that’s the only thing that needs to happen in order to build a better world, but because it’s necessary to keep the media-fueled G.O.P. “tsunami” myth from materializing.

I’m most particularly addressing this message to folks in states like Wisconsin, where you are represented by the finest member of the U.S. Senate. For god’s sake, don’t replace Feingold with some vacuous millionaire CEO. And for those of you in Nevada who, I’m sure, read this column religiously, I encourage you to hold your noses and vote for Harry Reid, rather than allow that bigoted Schlafly clone to become one of the most narrow-minded members of the world’s greatest deliberative body. (Any sane person would vote against her on the basis of her incendiary anti-immigration ads alone.)  

Bloody mess exposed. I’ve sifted through only a tiny corner of the Iraq War documents released by Wikileaks, and I have to say I feel something distantly related to PTSD. Go to the Guardian site and check it out. This trove helps to confirm the oft-criticized claims of the antiwar movement; that the Bush administration was wanton in its disregard for the well-being of Iraqi civilians, that it had an administrative policy of non-intervention when detainees were being tortured, and so on. The torture revelations are not that surprising – this is the kind of approach we traditionally followed with third world allies prior to Bush’s wars: have the CIA guy observe while the El Salvadoran officer applies the thumb screw or the electrodes. In Iraq we had both the new way and the old.

Relax. When the power went off on that nuclear missile base in Wyoming, the major media outlets – including NPR – offered a brief item that amounted to, don’t worry, we never lost the ability to launch them. I slept a whole lot better after hearing that.

luv u,

jp