Taxes

How do we fix Social Security/Medicare and the lack of Health Care for the general public?

jtbutler — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:35:52 -0400

September 12th, 2009

Everyone wants to fix the Social Security system, the Medicare system and provide Health Care for the general public. Hello, everyone is going at these issues from the wrong angle. What needs to be introduces is:

1. A law that stops the Senate and House of Reps from drawing such large salaries from the taxes us common folk pay. Yes they should be paid, but come one everyone, Social Security folk will not be getting their normal Cost of Living Increase for the next 2 or so years because the system is failing. But yet members of the Senate and House of Reps will still draw their huge salaries.

2. A law that says that once a Senator or House of Rep retires, the gravy train is done. Right now these people collect their pay for the rest of their lives with not exception. This is not right when we have millions of people that are living in poverty because there are no jobs. This is an issue of no money because the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer.

3. A law that says Senators and House of Reps has to pay into the Social Security System and collect the same amount as the rest of us common folk. After all right now they draw their full salary after leaving the job and never were made to pay into the system... How freaking backwards is this?

Well gee wiz, if Senators and House of Reps were forced to pay into the Social Security System and collect from it after they leave their jobs I would think that the Social Security System would be fixed in no time.

As far as Health Care for the General Public goes. I think the major issue is that when you pay for insurance you are covered for your health care. The insurance companies only pay a portion of the bill that is incurred. If you are an uninsured person you pay 100% of the cost of your health care. So dollar for dollar the poor person is getting hit with a full bill. I think that people that are paying cash/from their pocket should be getting the same deal that insurance companies make with Health Care Providers and Doctors. Then at least the poorer folk that are paying 100% would me more able to pay for their health care because they do not have to pay 100% of the bill.

My opinion is that if Elected Officials had to pay into the Social Security System like everyone else (and not be allowed to vote themselves a raise whenever they feel like it) and collect from it for their retirement instead of getting their full salary without ever paying into the system, the Social Security System would be fixed really quickly. Also, if uninsured people were given the same break that Insurance Companies get they would be able to afford Medical Care.

One other point I would like to make. We have lent millions upon millions of dollars to many countries that have never even attempted to pay us back. Why are we still helping these countries and giving to them when they already owe us? If I over borrow from the bank they will not allow me to borrow anymore until I pay it off... So why are we giving money to people whom on the most part do not even like the American People???

Thank you for reading my statements, it would be nice if the American people woke up and started telling the Government what to do instead of them doing whatever they feel like and totally ignoring the issues that face the general population of our great country.

Sincerely,

Joseph Butler

San Antonio, Tx

'My Fellow Americans...': The Speech President Obama Should Give to Congress Next Week

dlindorff — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:20:48 -0400

As imagined by Dave Lindorff

My Fellow Americans.

I stand before you a chastened president. I made a mistake. Two mistakes really. (wild applause from Republican side)

I thought that Congress could do its job and through the
deliberative process, produce a health care reform plan that would win
broad support across the aisle and among all of you. But I’m afraid
that I was wrong. Health care is an enormous industry—maybe the biggest
and most powerful industry in the country—and it has far too much power
in Washington. Literally thousands of lobbyists, carrying tens of
billions of dollars in campaign contributions—have invaded these halls (and my house!) (relieved laughter)
and distorted the process, and in the end have stymied reform. (some hissing)

Meanwhile, I have realized that the answer has been staring us in the face all along.

And that was my second mistake. I told the American Medical
Association that while single-payer medical plans, where the government
is the insurer, might work well in other countries, the idea of
government running health care was not part of our American tradition.
In fact, it is, and has been since 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson
signed into law the Medicare program. Medicare is a single-payer
program, and polls and surveys show it is enormously popular with older
and disabled Americans. Medicare has relieved our parents and
grandparents from the fear that they will not get medical care when
they stop working, and it has lifted the enormous burden and worry off
of younger Americans over how to pay for the care of their elders, and
it has done this with enormous efficiency, all while allowing
recipients to choose their own doctors and hospitals. (applause)

So we really don’t need to re-invent the wheel here. There is no
point in members of Congress having to hold endless hearings, and to
sit and listen to the pitches of lobbyists from the medical
establishment. We can just expand Medicare to cover everyone. (applause)

How much would that cost? Well, we know that 10% of the elderly—the
oldest and sickest among us--account for 50% of total Medicare costs,
so that means the other 90% only cost some $200 billion a year. Even if
we assumed that the rest of the population’s medical bills were as high
as those 90% or older Americans, it would mean that expanding Medicare
to cover them would cost less than $1 trillion a year, and probably
closer to $750 billion. So roughly speaking, we’re talking about adding
$750 billion a year to the cost of Medicare.

Now that’s a big number, and I know that some of you—a lot of
you—worry about higher taxes. But let me assure you, expanding Medicare
to cover everyone is going to save you money—virtually
everyone. Let’s look at why that is, and why you cannot just look at
the federal tax when you consider those savings.

Today, the United States spends nearly 20 percent of GDP on health
care. That is more than double what any other country in the world
spends on health care. And you know what? We don’t get our moneys’
worth for all that dough. Canadians, who spend half that percentage of
their GDP on health care, and who have what amounts to Medicare for all
with their single-payer system (they call it Medicare too), have longer
lifespans and better infant mortality statistics than we do. In fact,
Cuba and Mexico have better child health statistics than we do!

By the way, I want to introduce, in the gallery, Shirley Jean
Douglass, whose father, Tommy Douglass, was the founder of Canada’s
Medicare program. We will be consulting closely with experts and
administrators of Canada’s Medicare program as we move forward with our
own reform. (applause)

Now I've been accused of lecturing (laughs and applause),
and I don’t want to sound like a college professor here, but let me
just highlight a few reasons why simply expanding Medicare to cover all
of us makes not just moral, but also economic sense. If we were to make
that change, we could immediately eliminate the Medicaid program, which
as you know is funded by the states, and costs them (and you) about
$400 billion a year, mostly to cover low-income families and
individuals. Now that money would not be totally eliminated, because
Medicare currently doesn’t cover all health care costs—just 80%. And
Medicaid covers the remaining 20% for those elderly and disabled people
who cannot afford to pay for Medi-Gap private plans--something the government would continue to do with an expanded plan. Even so,
eliminating Medicaid for the poor, who would be switched to Medicare,
would save at least $300 billion. We could also eliminate the Veterans
Administration—which incidentally is an excellent example of true
government healthcare, with publicly owned hospitals and doctors on
salary, and it runs very well and very efficiently.

Something those folks at last month’s town meetings who were saying government can’t do anything right should think about. (wild applause from Democratic side)

Sorry. I just had to say that. (more applause)

Anyhow, eliminating the VA would save another $100 billion so we’ve
already saved more than half the amount that was added to the cost of
Medicare in order to cover everyone. (applause)

But there are far more savings.

One of the biggest would be the elimination of about $300 billion
that is spent each year by hospitals and doctors to provide care to
people with no insurance who end up in hospital emergency rooms. The
cost of this “charity care” is factored into higher hospital and
physician bills, and ultimately into higher insurance premiums paid by
the rest of us. Since all those people would now be covered by
Medicare, that expense would vanish.

American companies currently pay about $25 billion a year in workers
compensation insurance—money that ultimately comes out of workers’
paychecks. That would no longer be necessary, because people injured on
the job would be covered by Medicare. (smattering of applause, mostly from Republican side)

Car insurance rates would be dramatically lower, because car
insurance would no longer have to pay for medical costs following an
accident. The same is true for homeowners insurance, which would no
longer have to cover the costs of someone being injured on your
property. (applause from Pennsylvania delegation, with among highest car insurance rates in the nation)

And of course, the biggest savings of all—about $3000 per person or
$12,000 per family every year—namely the cost of private insurance
premiums paid by you and/or your employer, would be gone. Think about
that a minute: no more co-pays, no more annual deductibles, no more
employee share of insurance premiums for yourself or your family. And
for businesses that provide health care coverage, a huge savings that
will make them more competitive in the global marketplace, and that
will also allow them to pay higher wages to their employees. (prolonged applause)

Oh, and there is one other huge, if unquantifiable savings to
consider. If everyone has Medicare, the total cost of health care will
go down dramatically, because everyone will be getting timely
treatment, instead of having to put of exams and early treatment of
illness or injury. And no one will suffer the terrible anxiety or
worrying about whether they can pay for health care for themselves and
their families.

So yes, your Medicare withholding will be perhaps 25% higher if we
expand Medicare to cover everyone. That tax is currently set at 2.9%
for you and 2.9% for your employer, so it would go up to about 0.75% of
your paycheck. For someone earning $600 a week, that would represent an
increased deduction of about $4.50 a week. For someone earning $1200 a
week, it would be an increased deduction of $9. That is a pretty good
deal for not having to pay for insurance coverage any more, wouldn’t
you agree? (applause, plus some boos from largely silent Republican side)

Now for you folks already receiving Medicare, there have been a lot
of scare stories out there, some of them being promoted by some
irresponsible people right in this chamber (pause for applause and nervous laughter), suggesting that if we expand health care coverage, it will come off of your benefits. Don’t you believe it! (applause)

We live in a democracy, and when a lot of people want something, or
benefit from something, they collectively defend that particular thing.
In the case of Medicare, if everyone is receiving it, and receiving it
in the same manner as everyone else, that creates a huge voting bloc in
favor of defending that benefit, so by expanding Medicare to all, we
would be creating a powerful political force that will defend Medicare
from attack, just as the universality of Social Security has made that
program bullet-proof (something my predecessor learned when he tried to
promote the idea of privatizing it). (wild applause from Democratic side)

So here’s the deal.

I’m admitting it was the wrong move to try to lay it on your poor
folks in Congress come up with some completely new, complicated reform
our existing health care system—if you can even call it that. My good
friend and former colleague in this building, Chairman John Conyers,
had it right all along: We have a great system that we just need to
expand to cover everyone.

So to get it started, I’m going to send Congress a couple of bills.
One would immediately shift everyone eligible for Medicaid over to
Medicare. I’m calling this the States' Medical Cost Relief and Medicare
Expansion Act. It will not only begin the process of expanding
Medicare, but will provide badly needed financial relief to states that
are suffering from declining tax revenues and rising health care costs
because of the recession. (applause)

I will also send Congress a bill that will expand Medicare coverage to all Americans and to legal residents. (applause, some boos from Republicans)

I am sure that as financially sound as this change is, there will
be opposition from the medical industry, so let me add that this is,
for me, a moral imperative too. For too long, this great country has
allowed health care to be a matter of whether or not you had a job with
health benefits, or enough money to pay for insurance yourself. That is
unacceptable. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, and just as we
believe that every child needs an education, we believe that everyone
deserves to have access to quality medical care. (loud applause)

So let me add this: If Congress does not pass these two bills by
the end of the current session, in time for the holiday recess in
December, I will declare a national emergency because of the recession
and the huge rise in the uninsured that it has caused, and will issue
executive orders implementing both these measures. It’s not the way I
would prefer to see things done, but if Congress cannot act, I promise
you and the American people, I will. (applause and boos)

Let me also say that this program is a priority for me and for all
Americans, and anyone—Republican or Democrat—who gets in the way can
expect to hear from me, and from the American people, in this coming
election year. (applause)

Thank you and good night. (applause)
_______________
DAVE LINDORFF is not a speechwriter for the president. He is,
however, the author of “Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the
For-Profit Hospital Chains” (Bantam Books, 1992). His work is available
at www.thiscantbehappening.net

It's April 15: Time to Pay for War, Killing and Oppression Once Again

dlindorff — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:29:00 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

As you’re mailing out that tax return again this year, it’s time to
remember once again how much of your hard-earned bucks are being devoted to destruction, imperialist domination, slaughter and
war, to funding ridiculous programs like the failed anti-missile
system, and also to supporting a massively bureaucratic and overstaffed
military.

Even with the current US budget predicted to hit a record $3.5
trillion, thanks to a whopping $800 billion, two-year economic stimulus
package, and with several hundred billion being poured into a group of
banks and the bottomless pit called AIG, the $800 billion budgeted for the military to date
(a figure that includes an $85 billion “supplemental” request for the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) represents 22% of total US spending.

That means that more than one in every five of the dollars you are paying to the IRS will be going to the Pentagon.

For a typical family of four with taxable income of $60,000 and a
tax bill of $8201.00, that would mean a “war tax” of $1804.00. For a
wealthier two-income family of four with a taxable income of
$100,000.00, with a tax bill of $17681.00, that would mean a “war tax”
of $3890.00.

Of course, it’s never that simple. Actually, the government’s tax
collections this year, because of the deepening recession which has
been with us since December 2007, means that tax collections will be
way down, not to mention the cuts that were part of the above-mentioned
stimulus package. That is to say, tax revenues this year could be below
$2.4 trillion, meaning the government will have to borrow at least $1
trillion to pay its bills.

At least a fifth of that debt, or $200 billion, will be for war and
general military spending, and it will have to be paid off at interest
rates that mean by the time that debt is retired, it will have cost us
perhaps triple that amount, or $600 billion.

In fiscal 2008, the government spent $408 billion just on interest
on the national debt. At least one quarter of that amount, or $102
billion, was for military-related debt. While this might be a little
low, since our military budgets and military debt are rising year after
year, what that tells us is that we’re also spending perhaps an extra
$40-50 billion a year of our collective tax bill on interest on war
debt. That works out to another 15% of your taxes for war.

So make that $60,000-income family’s war tax $2075.00, while the $100,000-income family’s war tax goes to $4474.00.

The reporting on America’s military budget in the mainstream
corporate media (some of which is actually owned, like NBC, by
conglomerates that are themselves beneficiaries of military spending,
and all of which are beneficiaries of considerable ad revenue from
military contractors and from the Pentagon itself), has been atrocious,
with a lot of talk about “cuts” in pointless hugely expensive weapons
systems like the F-22 Raptor, a fighter jet designed to combat an
advanced enemy that simply doesn’t exist. The truth is that the
proposed 2009 military budget put out by the Obama administration is
the largest in history in actual dollars, continuing the trend of the
last 11 years in which each year’s military budget has been larger than
the prior year’s. It is also the largest military budget, after
adjusting for inflation, since WWII.

If that disgusts you, consider what just 25% of that budget, or
about $175 billion—the amount that House Finance Committee Chair Barney
Frank (D-MA) has proposed cutting—could do, if spent on things this
country needs, instead of on killing and preparing to kill. Total
federal spending on education for 2009: $46 billion. Total spending on
welfare for families with dependent children for 2009: $60 billion.
Total federal spending on unemployment compensation for 2009: $43
billion. Total federal transportation spending in 2009: $84 billion.
Looked at another way, cutting the military budget by 25% (which is
really a modest amount, considering that the US is spending as much on
its military machine as the rest of the entire world combined!), would
allow the government to increase all those other budgets by 50% and
still have $58 billion left over for other useful spending goals like
the environment, energy and medical research, etc.

Just a thought for tax day.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The late folksinger/songwriter Tim Hardin had it right long ago.

___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

3.5 Trillion budget has now passed BOTH houses of congres!!!

seawolf1957 — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 01:29:33 -0400

HOUSE and SENATE have now BOTH passed the BUDGET...

FLASH

WASHINGTON POST

just off the press

NBC Lies About Small Business Taxes

Bob Fertik — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:32:54 -0500

On MSNBC's Morning Joe, CNBC's Maria Bartiromo lied about tax increases for small business, and MediaMatters busted her:

small businesses, you know, are putting $250,000 in revenue out there, and they're going to get impacted -- and this is the single largest creator of jobs.

So Bartiromo says small business taxes will be raised if the business grosses over $250,000 in revenue. But that's a lie.

First, a small business that is not a personal business is taxed at corporate tax rates, which will not change under Obama's plan.

Second, a small business that is a personal business will only see higher taxes on the profit (i.e. personal income) that exceeds $250,000, not the gross revenue.

So how many small businesses would be affected? Just 1.5% (481,000) of all small businesses, according to the Tax Policy Center. In other words, 98.5% of small businesses will get a tax cut!

Even for the unlucky 1.5%, the tax increase is tiny: the value of tax deductions for families earning over $250,000 would drop from 35% to 28%. So $10,000 in deductions would save a wealthy taxpayer $2,800 in taxes instead of $3,500 - a small net tax increase of $700. Amazingly enough, that's how deductions worked in the 1986 tax bill signed by Saint Ronald Reagan.

The core rightwing argument is that this tiny tax hike will cause small businesses to cut back or even shut down. This is a Big Lie - obviously it will have no impact on small businesses whatsoever.

So where is this Big Lie coming from? House Republican Leader John Boehner and the stenographers at the Pentagon Post

If the tax-deduction cap is enacted, it is likely to hit many small businesses, said House Republican Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio).

"Everyone agrees that all Americans deserve access to affordable health care," he said, "but is increasing taxes during an economic recession, especially on small businesses, the right way to accomplish that goal?"

and the Telmex Times:

"Everyone agrees that all Americans deserve access to affordable health care," Mr. Boehner said in a statement, "but is increasing taxes during an economic recession, especially on small businesses, the right way to accomplish that goal?"

Update 1: Joe later echoed Maria's lie on Twitter:

$250k also drags in small businesses, who generate 75% of US jobs. Bad news for economy.

Update 2: Sean Quinn reports on the incredible attack on Robert Gibbs by White House "reporters" who mostly make over $250K themselves

Gibbs: I think the President was pretty clear on Tuesday. We are talking about people who earn in excess of a quarter of a million dollars a year.

Reid: And a huge percentage of those people are small business owners.

Gibbs: Some of them are, sure. Some of them are big business owners. Some of them are home run hitters in Major League Baseball. Some of them run kickoffs back for a living. Some of them are the President of the United States.

Q (off mike): -- create jobs?

Gibbs: Certainly some of them, that's what their job is. But I would reject this overall premise that when we're asking for tax fairness from the American people, that this is going to kill jobs. I guess if I follow the logic of the Republicans on Capitol Hill, how do you explain last month's unemployment figures? (Pause.) Under current tax rates? 550,000 jobs.

Reid: (Long pause) It's a unique moment.

Gibbs: (Laughs heartily) Apparently, it always is.... The president ran specifically on the promises that are contained in what he believes is a blueprint and a vision for our future. And that's what the the American people, that's the result they rendered in November.

Beyond Boondoggles

dlindorff — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:23:21 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Critics of government get all worked up when Washington spends money
stupidly, or does something manifestly stupid. There was a even senator
from Wisconsin, William Proxmire, who used to hand out "Golden Fleece"
awards for such things.

The Pentagon's notorious $600 payments for toilet seats that were
$12 in local discount stores, or $434 paments for hammers that were $10
in the local hardware store were good examples of this.

But nobody seems to be screaming about the incredibly wasteful
rescue of AIG, on which the government has spent first $85 billion and
now another $37.5 billion.

Bad enough that the Treasury Department is pumping an astonishing
$123.5 billion into a private company to prop it up, but what no one
has mentioned is that at the time of the initial announcement of an
$85-billion bailout, the insurance giant's stock had crashed so far
that it could have been bought outright by the government for a scant
$7 billion! That's small change by today's standards.

For $123.5 billion, the taxpayers have gotten warrants that could,
if exercised, end up giving "us" 80 percent of the company, but if the
government had just gone ahead and bought 100 percent of AIG right
away, it would have only cost about five percent of that amount.

Talk about a "Golden Fleece" award!

The money is now flying so thick and fast--$700 billion here, $37.5
billion there, $25 billion to the auto industry, $900 billion to buy up
short term corporate debt, hundreds of billions of dollars more to buy
stakes in failing banks--that we've simply lost sight of what we the
taxpayers are getting for our money, or whether the government is even
bargaiining for good deals.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson reportedly came up with the initial
$700 billiion figure for the Wall Street bailout off the top of his
head, with the only consideration being that the number be large enough
to "shock" investors into feeling confident.

Before another dollar of borrowed cash is spent on this binge,
Congress should call urgent hearings to look into what's being paid and
what the taxpayers are getting for their money. Any deals--like the AIG
boondoggle--that were clearly bad should be halted and reconsidered.

My suspicion is that with AIG, ideology intruded. The Bush
administration doesn't want to be seen as simply nationalizing banks
and insurance companies--the kind of thing they condemn Venezuela's
Hugo Chavez or Cuba's Castro for doing. But they are doing that anyhow,
and on a much bigger scale than Chavez or Castro ever dreamed of--just
not overtly. And to avoid overt takeovers, they are spending many
multiples of hundreds of billions of dollars just taking over the
liabilities of companies that they could have taken over lock, stock
and barrel for a fraction of the cost.

Left out of consideration is the incredible carnage this is certain
to cause down the road. Every penny that is being spent on this rolling
bailout is borrowed money. As an NPR reporter quite accurately noted in
a report yesterday on Britain's colossal $900-billion bailout of UK
banks, that borrowed money will have to be repaid by taxpayers over
time, and will come at the expense of other things that the public
wants, like Britain's vaunted National Health Plan, education, etc.

We don't hear much about that on the reporting, even on NPR, about
the US bailout, but it is equally true here. The bailout is doing to
the nation's public funding in a few short weeks what Ronald Reagan and
his budget director David Stockman tried to do over the course of two
presidential terms off office: bankrupt the government to kill off
social spending.

As of this point, if all these allocated funds being thrown at
financial institutiions are spent, there will be no money left for
health care, education, infrastructure, environmental protection,
national parks, Social Security, welfare assistance, or critical things
like consumer protection and worker safety. Truth to tell, there won't
be any money left for the military either--probably the only good thing
you can say about this mess.

It's enough to make one think that this is all some final disastrous
plot by the Bush/Cheney administration to bring on a collapse of what
remnants were left of the old New Deal and Great Society programs
before leaving Washington. And that's not such a wild notion. The whole
eight years of Republican rule in Washington has been a giant wrecking
game.

If some KGB mastermind, back in the late 1960s (perhaps young Vlad
Putin?), had dreamed up a scheme to capture the child of a leading
American political family, and re-program him to become a kind of
"Manchurian Candidate" who would return and work his way into the
presidency, from which high office he would destroy the country, he
could not have accomplished more than President Bush has done.

The financial fiasco and the subsequent bailout boondoggle is the final blow--one from which the nation may well never recover.
____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\n\r\nCritics of government get all worked up when Washington spends money stupidly, or does something manifestly stupid. There was a even senator from Wisconsin, William Proxmire, who used to hand out \"Golden Fleece\" awards for such things.\r\n\r\nThe Pentagon\'s notorious $600 payments for toilet seats that were $12 in local discount stores, or $434 paments for hammers that were $10 in the local hardware store were good examples of this.\r\n\r\nBut nobody seems to be screaming about the incredibly wasteful rescue of AIG, on which the government has spent first $85 billion and now another $37.5 billion.\r\n\r";
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Hang On to Your Wallet! The Government is About to Rescue Us

dlindorff — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:55:19 -0400

by Dave Lindorff

When the financial markets started coming undone earlier this week,
the Treasury Secretary and the Federal Reserve stepped in, and with $85
billion of our money (actually our children's money,
since they borrowed it from China and Saudi Arabia), bought foundering
AIG, the world's largest insurance company, and assumed its colossal
pile of crap debt.

That didn't help, and the stock market crashed further, falling to
levels not seen in three years. Banks, meanwhile, stopped lending,
figuring to just hold onto their money and try to weather the crash.
The US Treasury and the Fed stepped in again, this time pumping nearly
$300 billion more of our money into foreign money markets, and getting
European and other governments to do the same in an effort to get the
credit markets open again and to stop the stock market swoon. That was
on top of some $700 billion already spent on bailouts.

It didn't work. Thursday, the markets continued to fall, well into
the afternoon, and it looked like another seriously down day. But then
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson came up with a new idea. He said he
and the Bush administration were considering setting up a new agency to
assume all the bad debt of the banking sector--meaning all those bad
loans they made, and that they lured unsuspecting consumers into taking
out, by way of deceptive marketing techniques and outright fraud.

Note that we're talking about perhaps half a trillion dollars
here--of our money again. And remember, much or even most of this money
will never get repaid, and we're talking about money that could have
funded reduced class sizes in every school in America, a national
healthcare system, a crash R&D program into non-carbon energy and (not or) a strengthened Social Security and Medicare program.

The drones in the Democratic Party leadership in Congress
immediately jumped on the bandwagon, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
(D-CA) urging her charges to act quickly to get some kind of a bill out
there to facilitate the bail-out, which could cost anywhere from $600
billion to $1 trillion, but most estimates.

The thing to remember here is that this is not a rescue of the
little guy (though the Democrats say their rescue plan, when it
appears, will include some kind of relief for people unable to pay
their mortgages). Don't hold your breath. Odds are those people facing
foreclosure will still be unable to pay their mortgages, and besides,
there's no way there will be relief for the majority of homeowners who aren't missing their mortgage payments, but who are struggling mightily to meet them each month.

Primarily, who gets helped by this enforced taxpayer largesse are
the fat cats who own all the stock in these financial institutions, all
the executives who pay themselves outsize salaries each year for their
lousy management records, all these hotshot traders who make the deals
that later turn sour, long after they've run off to another job taking
their bonuses with them.

We ordinary people, who live from check to check, will feel the
pain of this "rescue" in the form of higher taxes in coming years, and
in a devalued dollar--because you can bet that all that money they're
printing, and all that added debt they're piling on to the mountain of
debt already out there is going to make the rest of the world pretty
queasy about holding onto dollar-denominated debt, or about buying any
more of it.

When you hear a banker say he's going to help you, it pays to hang
onto your wallet. When you hear a politician say he's going to help
you, hang onto your wallet. If they're both saying the same thing, and
especially if one of them is the head of the Federal Reserve Bank, then
you better really hang on tight.

Not that that will do any good.

The real answer to this crisis is, firstly, a massive dose of
trust-busting, so that no bank or investment bank or insurance company
is so big that its failure becomes a threat to the financial system,
and thus the government has to rescue it with taxpayer money, and
secondly, a return to the era of Glass-Steagall, when it was illegal
for banks to also be in the investment banking busiiness.

All the talk of "efficiencies" and of "better service to the
customer" that has been endlessly parroted to justify mergers like
Citicorp and Travelers, or JP Morgan and Chase Bank, or now Bank of
America and Merrill Lynch is fraudulent. Just to give an example, my
bank, once known as Willow Grove Bank, a small family-owned
institution, was bought by another bank and became Willow Financial.
Almost immediately the staffing levels went down. Recently, the
combined entity, which ran into trouble, was bought by another
institution, Harleyville Bank. Now there are half as many tellers most
of the time. As one teller confided, "Every time we get bought, they
lay people off."

Of course they do. That's what mergers always do. To recoup the
costs of the merger, management cuts back on service and employment.

The truth is, for all the talk about the efficiencies of bigness,
getting a mortgage today isn't any cheaper than it was in the 1950s,
when there wasn't even any such thing as a national bank that would be
"too big to fail."

The real reason we have mega financial institutions is that mega
financial institutions pay mega bucks to managers and make mega
donations to the campaign coffers of politicians. They also get to put
some of those mega-buck managers into key advisory positions in each
administration, Republican and Democrat, to ensure that government
polices allow them to get even bigger and even richer--and to ensure
that when they screw it up, they get rescued at the taxpayers' expense.
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Finding Voters 'Bitter and Frustrated,' Obama is Sounding Like Nader

dlindorff — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 10:55:21 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I haven’t lived in rural Pennsylvania or in rural Indiana, but I have lived in rural upstate New York, in towns where there are so few Democrats that on some local election ballots, not a single position, from town council to justice of the peace, has a contest. As in China, your option is to vote for the Republican candidate, or to leave that line blank.

And many of the people in these towns, uniformly white, when they talk politics, spend a lot of their time complaining about black people, immigrants (neither of whom can even be found in the vicinity) and the threat to their guns.

Barack Obama is exactly right.

In Hancock, NY and Spencer, NY, there are no factory jobs. There used to be in Hancock, but the companies where hundreds of people used to work have long since folded or moved south of the border, courtesy of the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) aggressively promoted and pushed through Congress by Bill and Hillary Clinton during the 1990s. In Spencer, there are no jobs because in the free-for-all bidding by companies for tax giveaways between communities, Spencer had nothing much to offer. The town is so dirt poor that when the library board, of which I was briefly president, got a measure on the ballot to have one extra dollar per taxpayer of school district taxes allocated to support the local little library, which was at that time totally supported by donations, the measure went down to resounding defeat (I was labeled a communist by some for promoting the idea!).

In 1992, neighbors in Spencer told me they were voting for George H. W. Bush—a patrician blue blood if ever there was one—because Bill Clinton, if elected “would take away our guns.”

Of course, he didn’t, and had no intention of doing so, but that didn’t matter.

Don’t get me wrong—the people in Hancock and Spencer are good folks. I'm pretty sure many of them probably give a higher proportion of their meager incomes to charity than do millionaires John McCain and Hillary Clinton. But Obama is right that in their angst and frustration at seeing the good economic times pass them by, at seeing themselves abandoned by the federal government in hard times, and at seeing candidates promise them everything during campaigns, only to ignore them after winning, they are bitter and frustrated.

And they have a right to be, and they should be.

One response to that bitterness and frustration is that they are open to the charlatans in both parties, and especially the Republican Party, who have played on their basest fears. It’s Republicans who have whispered the poison in their ears that their high taxes are because “the Blacks” are getting all that welfare money and are getting all the jobs through “quotas.” It's the Republicans who have warned them about "hoards" of Mexicans coming across the border to steal their jobs. It’s the Republicans who have been warning them that Democrats are going to take their hunting rifles and shotguns away. It’s the Republicans and their Christian fundamentalist front men who have been saying that the Democrats have been causing the nation’s decline by supporting licentiousness and a “gay” agenda. And it's Republicans and Democrats who have been hyping the bogus issue of national defense to keep people from focusing on the deliberate dismantling of the US economy that is underway. (Over years of Republican and Democratic administrations, the tax contribution of US corporations to the national budget has fallen from 50% in 1940 to just 14% today. Between 1996 and 2000, 61% of all corporations and 39% of large corporations paid no taxes at all, and that situation has only gotten worse in the Bush years.)

Anything but the real issue, which is how to provide funds so that the children in places like Spencer and Hancock can get a decent education without bankrupting the local taxpayers, how those communities can get jobs again, so that their children won’t have to move out, how to ensure that everyone in town can have health insurance and access to medical care.

Barack Obama is right. I've seen it in person. The people in rural America are bitter and frustrated, and after years of being played by politicians, they fall victim to the charlatans who tell them it’s all because of “the Blacks,” or the immigrants, or who tell them that their guns are in danger. Or they turn to religions that preach division or apocalypse—a concept that offers the chance of a final, delicious revenge against the rich and the powerful oppressors on Wall Street and in Washington.

Now I don’t know what Obama has in mind to try and turn things around for these good people, but it’s a start that he’s at least talking to them, not down, but honestly.
His talk in response to attacks on his statement about rural residents being “bitter and frustrated” is as good as anything Ralph Nader has said about the power and mendacity of the ruling political elite in America.

As he put it, to wild applause at a rally in Terra Haute, Indiana, explaining the difficulty of appealing to the rural working class voters in Pennsylvania:

“For the last 25 years they’ve seen jobs shift overseas, they’ve seen their economies collapse, they have lost their jobs, they’ve lost their pensions, they’ve lost their health care. And for 25-30 years, Democrats and Republicans have come before then and said we’re gonna make your community better. We’re gonna make it right.
“And nothing ever happens. And of course they’re bitter, and of course they’re frustrated. You would be too, in fact many of you are. Because the same thing has happened here in Indiana. The same thing has happened across the border in Decatur. (Wild applause) The same thing has happened across the country. Nobody’s looking out for you. Nobody is thinking about you.

“And so people end up, they don’t vote on economic issues, because they don’t expect anybody’s gonna help them. So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns—you know are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. You know, they, they take refuge in their faith, and their communities, their families—things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington.

“So here’s what’s rich. Sen. Clinton says, `Well I don’t think people are bitter in Pennsylvania. You know I think Barack’s being condescending.’ And John McCain says, `Oh how can he say that? How can he say that people are bitter? You know he obviously is out of touch with the…’”
“Out of touch? Out of touch! I mean, John McCain, it took him three tries to finally figure out that the home foreclosure crisis was a problem and to come up with a plan for it, and he’s saying I’m out of touch?”

“Sen. Clinton voted for a credit card-sponsored bankruptcy bill that made it harder for people to get out of debt, after taking money from the financial services companies and she says I’m out of touch?

“No, I’m in touch. I know exactly what’s going on. I know what’s going on in Pennsylvania, I know what’s going on in Indiana. I know what’s going on in Illinois. (Standing ovation) People are fed up! They’re angry, and they’re frustrated and they’re bitter and they want to see a change in Washington, and that’s why I’m running for president of the United States of America!”

Now who knows whether this is all talk too. Maybe Obama is just one more political charlatan.

What is clear though is that this was a speech that we have not heard from a Democratic politician for decades, and it sure sounded good to hear it.

If Obama sticks to this rhetorical approach in the coming weeks, he will nail this nomination in spite of a concerted attack on him by the corporate media and by the combined forces of the Clintons and McCain.

And if he does win the nomination, and resists the siren calls of the Democratic Party leadership to “move to the middle,” and instead hones this populist message, he will go on to win the presidency.

That’s when the real challenge will come, for an aroused citizenry, in those rural communities and in the larger cities across that nation, to make a President Obama and a Democratic Congress deliver on these words.

For now, they’re pretty powerful words, and just hearing them coming from a Democratic Party frontrunner is an exciting change.
____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. He lived with his family in Spencer, NY from 1986-1992 and has had a home in Hancock, NY since 1984. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

A Manchurian Candidate in the White House?

dlindorff — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:34:28 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

With a viral campaign underway via email, right-wing radio, and on the street suggesting that Barack Obama is a black “Manchurian Candidate,” secretly trained as a Muslim fanatic who will insinuate himself into the White House, thence to undermine all that we hold dear, perhaps it is time to look at the Manchurian Candidate we already have in the White House, who, together with his handler over in Blair House, has pretty much done all the damage already.

George Bush came to office in 2001 promising a new era of integrity, civility and “compassionate conservatism,” an era of humble American foreign policy, and a bi-partisan approach to government.

What did we actually get?

Once in office, this chameleon president almost immediately set out to embroil the country in a major war in the Middle East against the nation of Iraq. The game plan was laid out at the president’s first National Security Council meeting, attended by Vice President Dick Cheney (the man holding Bush’s controller), Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neal (who later spilled the beans about the session).

Bush also famously ignored all warnings about the imminent attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. How much he and the rest of the administration knew about that attack in advance, or whether elements within the administration may have even helped it along, remains the subject of considerable interest and investigation and may never be answered, but it is clear that there were ample warnings about it, and he did nothing—even rudely blowing off a briefer who tried to alert him to the danger. Moreover, it is known that Israeli Mossad agents (who we know have close ties to both the US intelligence apparatus and to the Neocons who infest the Bush White House) did indeed have advance knowledge, and were set up across New York Harbor with a video camera to tape the attack on the Twin Towers (they were subsequently arrested by New Jersey police, only to be later released and sent back to Israel, through intercession by the US government). As well, we know that unidentified people made a killing by placing negative bets, called “puts,” on the stocks, several days before 9-11, of the two airlines that were hijacked, American and United, and of two investment banks that would be seriously hurt by the building collapses, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. (The puts were placed through an investment bank, Alex Brown, which until a year earlier had been headed by a man who moved over to become the number three person in the CIA.) It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Bush/Cheney administration, at a minimum, wanted an attack on American soil, and a national disaster that would put the country on a war footing.

Certainly instead of rallying the public and defending the nation’s democratic traditions and its Constitution, Bush and his handlers after 9-11 immediately set in motion a concerted scare campaign to undermine both. While urging the public to buy sheets of plastic and duct tape to construct “safe rooms” in their homes, they rammed through Congress a deceitfully named measure, the so-called Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA PATRIOT Act), which effectively undermined most of the articles of the Bill of Rights (and which appeared, suspiciously, fully drawn up in bill form, only days after the attacks).

At the same time, the president, only one week after the attacks, obtained an Authorization for Use of Military Force for a military attack on the Taliban government in Afghanistan and on Al Qaeda forces in that country, which he subsequently interpreted broadly as an authorization for a global “war” on terror which he then claimed made him effectively a dictator with absolute power both at home and abroad (the so-called “unitary executive” theory). Under this claim of absolute power as commander in chief in time of war, Bush went on to order the use of torture against captives, foreign and domestic, including US citizens, to strip even US citizens of the right of habeas corpus—that is, the right to have their arrest and detention brought before a federal court—and to establish secret torture centers around the globe and on military installations in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba.

As well, even before the 9-11 attacks, the president began a sweeping program of electronic spying, run through the super-secret National Security Agency, on Americans’ telephone and internet activities. It was and remains a program that deliberately avoids seeking warrants and court approval even by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court—a body that has only rejected some five requests for warrants out of hundreds of thousands sought since its establishment in 1978.

Finally, in a perhaps fatal undermining of the Constitution, the president after 9-11 began a practice of simply refusing to enact or obey laws passed by the Congress, effectively rendering the legislative branch an impotent debating club.

Not content to simply explode or dismantle the legal foundations of the American government and rule of law, Bush and his handlers also went about systematically destroying the country’s basic institutions and even its economy.

The education system was fatally ensnared in a test-driven system called “No Child Left Behind,” which has in short order dumbed down public education to an extent shocking even to this already anti-intellectual society, with many schools simply giving up the teaching of art, literature or history, in order to focus desperately on math and reading in order that their students would do well enough on standardized tests to keep the schools from losing their funding.

The dollar has been cast adrift to become the new Lira as the government has gone on an unprecedented borrowing spree to fund endless war and ever-larger military budgets, while erasing the taxes on the wealthy, the super-rich, and corporations. Banks were given free rein to enter into all manner of risky ventures, leading to the current collapse in credit. Corporations were encouraged to ship their production and jobs overseas. Homeowners were encouraged to spend, spend, spend and to mortgage their homes to the hilt and then some. Towns, cities and pension funds were encouraged to invest in fantastic “structured” products that were actually towering card houses. Domestic car manufacturers were encouraged to build every larger, ever more voraciously gas-guzzling vehicles, pumping out ever larger quantities of carbon into the already overstressed atmosphere.

The nation’s infrastructure—its roads, dams, bridges, levies, airports, veterans hospitals etc.--were left to decay, with predictable results, the most dramatic of which was the loss of an entire city, New Orleans, to a routine Category 3 hurricane (after which, the president did nothing to rescue the survivors or fund a recovery).

Surveying at the appalling wreckage left after eight years of the Bush administration, it is hard to recognize the country that he started out with in 2001. A once proud nation—one that only a few years ago was admired around the world and that now is viewed as a pariah and a rogue state—today trembles before a handful of turbaned fanatics holed up in caves in the Hindu Kush, its trillion-dollar high-tech military colossus fought to a standstill in Iraq and Afghanistan by a few thousand brave men and women armed with RPGs, antique AK-47s and home-made roadside bombs. A nation that once was the envy of the world for its free society now has scientists afraid to report their findings, university professors afraid to support outspoken colleagues, members of Congress afraid to defend their Constitution, citizens afraid of their neighbors, journalists afraid of government criticism, lawyers afraid to defend clients...

Hey, this place starts to look and feel an awful lot like the China I lived in back in 1991!

Forget all the nonsense about Barack Obama being a closet Muslim. We already have our Manchurian Candidate in the White House, and he has largely accomplished what he was programmed to do: destroy the country.

The truth is this: If at the end of their second term, Bush and Cheney were to hop on a plane and fly off to a hideout in the mountains on the Afghan-Pakistan border, leaving a "Nya-nya!" note on the White House dining room table, few people would really be very surprised.
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and columnist. His most recent book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006, and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

No Tax Rebate's Going to Fix This Mess

dlindorff — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:34:44 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

When you hear a number like $100 billion (the amount Bush is proposing to give back to people in the form of tax rebates, at about $800 per adult family member) or $145 billion (that $100 billion, plus another $45 billion in business tax breaks—mostly accelerated deductions for capital investment) bounced around, it sounds like a lot of dough, and you might think it would be a good shot in the arm for an economy that is falling into a dead faint.

But let’s think about it on a micro level.

What would my wife and I do with an extra $1600?

Well, to be honest, that’s not quite one month’s mortgage payment.

If we were smart, we’d probably use it to pay down some principle on our credit line, which would over time get us out from under on that dreaded monthly bill a lot sooner. But if we did what most people are likely to do--pay off some bills with it, or one month's mortgage, chances are, given how hard we're all working just to keep going, that we'd then slack off somewhere else just to catch a little break--maybe turn down one assignment, or if we're on an hourly job, turn down some overtime and catch a little more shuteye--and in the end, we wouldn't be adding anything to the economy at all.

But then there are the cars. They both need servicing. The Volvo, a 1993, is suffering from a case of electronic lock collapse syndrome: the right rear door can no longer be opened. It’s frozen in the locked position. The lock button on the driver’s door came unconnected from the latch mechanism inside the door too, so that door has to be locked and unlocked from the outside with the key. And I figure it’s only a matter of time before some of the other doors get frozen in locked position, which could get really ugly when I need to drive with more than one passenger. So I could use probably $1000 of that rebate to get that mess fixed. That would leave $600 for two alignments, two tune-ups and some new tires.

If I were to do all that, I suppose that would be a little boost to the economy, but not much. It certainly would be nice for the auto electric shop guy, but it’s not going to do much for Detroit. Trust me—that extra $1600 is not enough to tempt me to go out and buy a new car. Heck, it’s only about a down payment and two monthly payments on some piece of junk from the bottom of the Chevy or Ford line-up, and after that I’m stuck with payments for four more years. No, I’ll be staying with my old Volvo and the 2001 Honda Civic.

I suspect most Americans are in the same boat. If you have to worry about the future of your job—in my case a continued flow of assignments from various magazines that keep me afloat—you’re not going to go out and buy some big-ticket consumer item just because you got an unexpected $1600 check from Uncle George in Washington.

Economic theory, regarding the "velocity of money" and all that, says that if I do get the Volvo door problem fixed, and if I do buy those new tires and get the cars tuned up and aligned, that money I spend will flow through the economy, making everything hum a little better (not the tires though, since they're probably made overseas so the extra dollars just get lost to the US economy). That’s probably true to a point. The auto electric guy is likely to get a little pick-up in business—mine and other people with door and light problems they’ve been living with for a while. But will it be enough to convince him to go out and hire another employee? I doubt it. Will he invest in new equipment? Nah. I doubt he’d do that, and even if he did, it most likely would be imported too, meaning an end to the stimulus chain. More likely, he’d take his extra dough and go get his pick-up repaired. It’s belching a bit of smoke these days, and looks like it could use some engine work. But again, I doubt that he’ll be ordering a new F-150. And any parts he buys for his vehicle are likely to be imported too, thanks to globalization. That’ll be good for Mexico’s or China’s economy, but not for ours.

Besides, the thing is, we all know that those IRS rebates are a one-off thing. It’s not like they’re going to make this a regular yearly surprise. So you’d have to be an idiot to take the money and pump up your life-style.

And then there’s another problem. By adding another $145 billion to the budget deficit, the government is contributing significantly to inflationary pressures, and when those gnomes in Zurich, London, Tokyo and Hong Kong see that, they’ll bid down the value of the dollar even more. Our once mighty currency, now worth only half a pound Sterling in Britain, or just over 100 Yen in Japan, is shrinking faster than the polar icecap. And that means that all the products we depend on—our tools, our dishware, our clothes, much of the food we eat, and of course our oil—will get more expensive.

I don’t know about you, but my wife and I spend basically every penny we earn each year, in order to make ends meet. Now some of that is for stuff like mortgage payments, tuition payments, etc., but I’d guess that, counting oil and energy bills, probably half our income goes to buy things that are imported, and that’s probably roughly true for most American families. After all, almost nothing is actually made in the US anymore, and we even buy a lot of raw materials—iron, oil, etc.—from overseas. So if for sake of argument and easy math, we’re making $100,000, that’s $50,000 being spent on imported stuff. Now here’s where things get a little speculative. But suppose that having the government add another $145 billion in red ink to the federal budget leads to an extra 3 percent decline in the value of the dollar against foreign currencies—a not unreasonable scenario. Why, that would mean that the $50,000 I spend on foreign goods in a year would cost me an extra $1500—just about the same amount as that $1600 Bush is proposing to lay on me.

But…that weakened dollar will continue into next year and beyond, while the $1600 rebate is a one-time thing.

So what do we get out of this rebate thing?

Worse than nothing.

There is, unfortunately, no free lunch.
]
In fact, it’s worse than that. To the extent that the extra decline in the dollar puts pressure on the Federal Reserve to take some action to prop the Greenback up, we will see interest rates rise. Now at the moment, we’re in hock to the tune of about $25,000 on a home equity credit line—a result of living beyond our means that is the typical American family’s response to incomes that have failed to keep pace with inflation. While my mortgage is fixed-rate, my credit line is not. So if the fed raises interest rates by .25 percent to prop up the dollar from the effects of that one-off tax rebate, I’m going to be paying an extra $650 annually in interest on my credit line balance.

In other words, this rebate is putting me into the hole right from the get-go!

Thanks a lot George!

So how about we just forget this whole stinking rebate idea. It ain’t gonna work, folks. It might sound good in an election year, but if you look at it closely, you can see it’s really just smoke and mirrors.

There is a solution, though. How about if they end the war in Iraq and bring all the troops home. The government will save several hundred billion dollars a year that’s being spent overseas blowing things up—and that is helping to depress the dollar and raise our tax bills. Some of that saved money can help reduce the deficit. Other chunks of it could be invested in America’s badly decaying infrastructure—repairing bridges, building new schools, etc., maybe building some major levees to protect our coastal cities from the next Katrina or from the global warming flood that we know is coming. And all that will mean jobs for people who need them.

We might also try to do something about reducing that massive outflow of dollars that’s making our currency do a disappearing act. An easy way to do that would be to slap higher taxes on gasoline and to tax cars based on how bad their gas mileage is. Before long, most Americans would be driving less and buying smaller, fuel-efficient cars, and we could significantly reduce the single biggest item on our import bill: oil.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll be happy to get that $1600 check George Bush is calling for. I’m certainly not going to return it to the Treasury! But let’s not be pretending that it’s going to jump-start the sick economy.

It might even end up making things worse.

_________________________________________
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is "The Cast for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net