This Can't Be Happening!

With Republicans now in control of both houses of Congress, the current president already on record as having supported cuts in Social Security and Medicare, and all signs pointing to the likelihood that the 2016 election could bring us either a neo-liberal or a neo-conservative president, and an increasingly Republican-dominated Congress, it’s time for an aggressive mass movement built around defending and expanding both those critical public funding programs.

The first step is getting out the truth that Social Security is not broke or doomed, but simply needs to be better funded by ending the free pass given to the wealthy. Simply eliminating the cap on income subject to the FICA tax, currently set at the first $118,500 of earned income, would make the system fully able to pay all promised benefits for the next century or more. Extending the tax to cover unearned income — basically capital gains (a tax that only impacts the wealthy) would allow for an expansion of benefits.

There is today $2.8 trillion in the Social Security Trust Fund, a fund that was created by a compromise reform reached by President Ronald Reagan and a Democratic Congress led by House Speaker Tip O’Neill back in 1983. The idea at the time was to have Baby Boomers and their employers pay more into the system ahead of the time they would be retiring, when their numbers would place a burden on current workers (the Boomers’ kids and grandkids), since the system has always since its inception financed current retirees’ benefits through current workers’ FICA payroll tax payments. (The reform also raised the full retirement gradually from 65 to 66 and later to 67 for people born after 1964.)

That advance funding of Boomer retiree benefits is now starting to be tapped but that is what was supposed to happen to it, a point the doom-sayers and political scare-mongers fail to mention. It turns out, though, that the advance funding was not large enough for several reasons. One, very positive, is that people are living longer than projected because of improved nutrition and medical advances. Another is that a series of recessions and market collapses, especially during the “lost decade” of 2000-2010, caused in large part by corrupt investment banks in 2001 and by Wall Street’s mega-banks turned casinos in 2007-9, cut severely into FICA contributions, as well as into workers’ personal savings and net worth.

Right-wing and corporate propaganda to the effect that the Trust Fund is smoke and mirrors or just “IOU” scrips, is absurd. It’s true that Washington politicians promptly borrowed FICA tax revenues as soon as they came in the door to allow them to fund things like endless wars and Pentagon war-profiteers without raising taxes, but that debt is every bit as real as the federal debt held by investors in the form of treasury bills and notes. It will be covered, whether by rolling it over into new debt or by raising taxes.
Boomers have the political power to remake Social Security and to expand Medicare to all! We just have to use it!
 

In any event, as has been often pointed out, even were the fund to be exhausted in 2033 or 2034 because of inaction by Congress to boost revenue for Social Security, the system would, at the current FICA tax rate of 6.2% for employee and employer, still be able to fund 77-78% of promised benefits out into the distant future beyond the time when the last Baby Boomer has moved off to some Woodstock in the sky.

More importantly, there is no way that will happen. Why? Because the Baby Boom generation, in retirement, will constitute not just the largest block of elderly voters in the nation’s history (almost 78 million people!), but also will represent the largest elderly bloc proportionately, in history, fully 1.5 times as large a segment of the electorate as the already powerful current senior vote.

The report released in early March by a panel President Obama appointed to examine serious shortcomings in police practices across America, including the shooting of unarmed people, mostly non-white, listed problems and proposed solutions that are hauntingly similar to those found in a report on police abuses released 47 years ago by another presidential panel.

The March 1968 report of the presidential panel popularly known as the Kerner Commission noted with dismay that many minorities nationwide regarded police as “an occupying force” – a presence that generated fear not feelings of security.

The March 2015 report from President Obama’s panel made a similar finding, noting that perceptions of police as an “occupying force coming in from the outside to rule and control the community” had sabotaged the ability of law enforcement to build trust in many communities.

Reactions to police brutality, particularly fatal encounters, triggered protests and riots that sparked both President Barack Obama and President Lyndon Johnson almost two generations earlier to appoint these two panels.

Sadly, the recommendations from President Obama’s panel could sink under the weight of the same forces that sank full implementation of the Kerner Commission proposals: systemic recalcitrance from all sectors of American society to reforms devised to remediate festering race-based inequities.

Watts uprising in 1965, Ferguson in 2014: 50 years and still the same police violence and racism
 

For many people reading this, there are at least two concepts that will offend.

One is surveillance, about which we’ve written often on this site. The other is the Barbie doll: the ubiquitous toy that has for decades molded girls’ (and boys’) concept of “the perfect female” as having an impossible-to-achieve figure derived from sexist fantasy and has taught them that their lives should be about dressing up and attracting the attention of a boring male named “Ken.”

There are, of course, many other offensive things going on in the world but these two catch the writer’s attention because, in a new version of this product toy-maker Mattel Inc. is introducing to the market this Fall they are combined. Barbie, the girl you can never be (and shouldn’t ever want to be), is now a spy.

Hello Barbie: Reporting for Duty
 

The company introduced its new doll, called “Hello Barbie,” at a February trade fair in New York and…well, you can’t make this stuff up.

This doll can converse with you (or with your child unless you play with dolls) and record the answers. It then transmits these answers to a data-bank at the company’s headquarters and stores them under the child’s name and other personal information, then analyzes this data and responds to it…immediately or months later. Given a little time, it will have profiled your child and turned her into an information gathering source.

In an interview Wednesday on the Progressive Radio Network’s program “This Can’t Be Happening!”, TCBH! colleagues Dave Lindorff and Alfredo Lopez talk about the recent coup plot broken up by Venezuelan police, consider President Obama’s outlandish and absurd claim that Venezuela, one of the leading suppliers or oil to the US, poses a “unique and extraordinary threat” to US national security, and also discuss Alfredo’s contention that the telecom industry has become a counterattack on the Federal Communications Commission’s recent decision in favor of net neutrality.

Lopez, a long-time Latino activist and founder of the progressive web hosting service MayFirst/PeopleLInk, reports on how for years, Venezuela has been essentially under attack by US funded right-wingers and oligarchs trying to oust the popular elected government, first of Hugo Chavez, and now his successor Nicolás Maduro. This has included a coup, recently broken up by Venezuelan police, which allegedly had the backing of the US, like the nearly successful one in 2002, when Chavez was actually captured and held hostage by coup leaders until freed by a mass mobilization of the country’s poor and its military enlisted ranks.

Lopez notes that the Bolivarian socialist experiment launched by the late President Chavez has been essentially working in a constant state of “impending coup,” a US funds and advice have poured into the country from outfits like USAID and the Congressionally funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) — subversive organizations that have funded violent protests and riots aimed at destabilizing the existing government, as was successfully done in Ukraine last year.

Lindorff and Lopez talk about what lies behind the absurd claim, made in an executive order Tuesday by President Obama, that Venezuela, a functioning Latin American democracy, poses a threat to US national security. Is this a prelude to military action, as feared by Venezuelan government officials, or just part of a longer-term plan to destabilize and ultimately unseat Venezuela’s socialist-minded central government.

Listen too, to the second half of the PRN program as Lopez explains how the telecom industry is organizing a counter-attack against the successful progressive campaign that lead to the last month’s surprise announcement by the FCC that it was endorsing reclassifying the Internet as a public utility, subject to equity rules that require it to provide equal services at equal costs to subscribers of all income levels.

“The pushback by the big media corporations against this FCC ruling has already begun,” warns Lopez, suggesting that this is a battle that the left can win — if people are paying attention.

Dave Lindorff and Alfredo Lopez discuss Venezuela's coup, US imperialism and the Internet on the Progressive Radio Network

Seriously? Venezuela is a “national security threat”?

That is what President Obama has reportedly declared today in a new executive order. Actually, he went further, calling Venezuela “an unusual and extraordinary threat to national security.”

And how exactly is poor Venezuela, a nation of 29 million, with a small military upon which it spends just 1% of GDP, one of the lowest rates in the world (the US spends 4.5% of GDP on its own bloated military), so incredibly dangerous a threat to the United States?

Well, according to the new executive order, some of Venezuela’s leading officials have “criminalized political dissent” and are corrupt. That’s about it. There’s nothing in there about Venezuela threatening military action against the US, or trying to subvert our government, or promoting terrorism, or even of threatening Americans.

But hold on. I remember reading in documents obtained through Freedom of Information petitions by the Partnership for Civil Justice from the FBI, Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security, that back in the fall of 2011, during the Occupy movement that swept the nation, the US national security apparatus, including the NSA and the 72 so-called Fusion Centers that had been set up to link federal, state and local intelligence organizations in all major US cities devoted most of its domestic intelligence and police resources to spying on, infiltrating, and ultimately crushing a purely peaceful wave of political protest against the rampant corruption of the political class and the banking industry.

Guess: Is this photo of Venezuela or the United States?
 
 

And what about the National Security Agency, which Edward Snowden and others have exposed as being focused, in its unprecedented monitoring of all possible forms of communication among the American people, not as claimed on preventing terrorism but on simply gathering dossiers on millions of law-abiding citizens?

What about the FBI and other national intelligence agencies, which have been labeling anti-war activists, environmental activists and even animal rights activists (and this news site!) as “terrorists” in their files?

Looked at objectively, isn’t it the US that is a national security threat to Venezuela?

There are some famous film clips of the US Congress that stand the test of time. One is of attorney Joseph Welch as s subpoenaed witness denouncing the redbaiting charlatan Sen. Joseph McCarthy during his hearings into alleged Communist infiltration of the military and the government. “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Welsh says angrily, as the senator from Wisconsin uses lies and innuendo to assassinate the character of a junior member of Welch’s law firm who had shown the temerity to join the “commie front” National Lawyers Guild as a Harvard Law student.

Another such famous clip was the 1973 testimony of White House lawyer John Dean admitting to his knowledge of the criminal acts of President Nixon and his key advisors in the so-called Watergate scandal that led to Nixon’s impeachment and resignation from office.

A third unforgettable clip shows when Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska), in a packed Senate hearing room, read out the text of the Pentagon Papers, which the Nixon administration was trying to get a federal court block the New York Times from publishing.

Now to that venerable list we must add the appalling video of a foreign leader, invited as a speaker by the Republican leadership of the House, denouncing the current negotiations of the State Department aimed at preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, and in effect telling the US it should prepare instead to launch a catastrophic war against Iran. Whatever one may think of President Obama, the image of a packed House chamber, filled with slathering, mindlessly applauding Republicans and a majority of the feckless Democrats of the House and Senate (only 40 Democrats chose to boycott this treasonous address by Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu), leaping up and down and clapping to Netanyahu’s verbal garbage, is shocking. It also exposes the extent to which a tiny apartheid nation based upon a tribal ethic and a long history of genocide, has hijacked the foreign policy of the world’s most powerful country.

As Uri Avnery, an Israeli peace advocate and former Knesset member, writes in his article titled “The Speech,” the unseemly image of Republican members of Congress leaping up as one and hooting rabidly at almost every line uttered by Netanyahu reminded him of nothing so much as the Reichstag members in the 1930s leaping up to cheer and salute each applause line of Chancellor Adolph Hitler.

Years or decades from now, if the US still exists as even a nominal democracy, this video will surely shock any citizens who view it every bit as much as do the above listed iconic videos.

Two images, two legislatures, two speeches, same ugly reality
 

We used to have picnics on a bayside beach.
My grandmother was too frail to walk on the sand,
So we used to carry her from the car
Which made her grumble,
Which was just grandma.
We never knew how much she hated being carried
Because we were so busy feeling manly,
My brother and I.
And once we got her settled out of the breeze
She would say
“There, this is nice. . .” or something like that
And smile.
And when you are young you never question a smile.
So that was our permission to run off
Leaving our half-eaten sandwiches
While she sat there under her hat
Facing outward to the bay.
 

  –Gary Lindorff

When Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma was arrested last week, charged with organizing and leading a coup, the U.S. State Department’s spokeswoman Jen Psaki said: “The allegations made by the Venezuelan government that the United States is involved in coup plotting and destabilization are baseless and false. The United States does not support political transitions by non-constitutional means.”

That remarkable quote — denying what has been a well-known and fully documented pillar of U.S. foreign policy for the last 30 years — tells us more truth than the lie Psaki was trying to spread. Why, at this point, would Washington make such a definitive and laughably false statement?

Legacy and Challenge: Maduro salutes Chavez at rally
 

The evidence is overwhelming that the rich and powerful of Venezuela have followed a continuous, constantly morphing plan to de-stabilize the country and take over the government by any means necessary and that the United States government knows about that plan, supports it and, as much as it can, is assisting in it.

“There’s been an ongoing effort to destabilize the government,” said author Miguel Tinker Salas, a top authority on the Venezuela’s situation, “to represent the government as a crisis in crisis mode, and to depict the country as if it’s on the brink of a precipice.”

Everything about Venezuela — including its progress and successes, its growing status as a leader in its continent and its difficulties, stumbles and failures — is driven by two realities. One is its government’s commitment to a genuine program of fundamental political and economic change and the other is an equally committed effort to sabotage that program and overthrow this government.

Is there a coup planned in Venezuela? All the time.

The Republican-dominated Congress, with the help of a cadre of sell-out conservative Democrats in both chambers, are gearing up to attack Social Security again, under the guise of “saving” the program.

The attack will be brutal, because the program’s assassins understand that this is probably their last chance to undermine Social Security. With the Baby Boom generation born after 1946 now seriously starting to file for retirement benefits, it will soon become such a mainstay for so many people that it will be impregnable, unless already undermined.

A person born in 1946 could have retired at age 62 as early as 2008, and next year could retire at 70 and receive maximum benefits. There are already seven years’ worth of Baby Boomers who are at least eligible to start collecting benefits. By the time the last Baby Boomer born in 1964 is eligible to retire in 2026, the “senior lobby” of Social Security-eligible voters will be more double what it is today, and more importantly, will represent a bloc 50% larger as a proportion of the voting population than it is in today’s elderly population. Social Security’s enemies in Congress and in the business world know that as powerful as the elderly vote is today it will be 50% more powerful in years to come. And don’t forget, it’s not just retirees who ardently support Social Security. It’s people in their 50s and early 60s, who are looking ahead at the program as their salvation in retirement.

Polls show that even among the young, there is strong and abiding support for this flawed but critical program founded in 1936, which today provides 100% of income for one-seventh of all America’s elderly, and 90% or more of income for one-third of the elderly. Another one-third depend upon those benefits for more than half their income. Most of the rest too depend on their Social Security benefits for basic expenses like food and rent. It’s the rare American who just uses their benefit checks for vacations, luxury purchases or investment purposes.

But for all that Americans remain incredibly ignorant about the program, and are losing out on many of its benefits because of that ignorance. If this information were more readily available and understandable, it would be far harder for the program’s enemies to successfully attack it. I will attempt to do that here.

The Social Security program is under attack by both Republicans and many Democrats
 

 
We have to address the political grievances terrorists exploit.
                 – Barack Obama
 
All week, the bully-in-chief of cable news, Bill O’Reilly, has been passionately recruiting American clergy of all ethnic and supernatural inclinations to preach from their pulpits this weekend for US troops to lead what he sees as a holy war declared by ISIS. “The problem is Islamic fanatics who want to kill Christians and Jews.” The goat that gives him his vein-popping urgency is President Barack Obama who is determined to never make a reference to religion in his call for international propaganda war against the ISIS phenomenon — to accompany his current bombing campaign and any other military action he may lead.

While Mr. Obama is guilty of a host of national security state sins and is not without blood on his hands, the president’s rhetoric is smart when he emphasizes that ISIS is a “death cult” with incredible influence that should be engaged by the forces of civilization. The problem is the fine rhetoric seldom translates into action. Policy always falls back on our runaway national security state and its deep terror of losing some aspect of its power and self-image of exceptionalism.

Bill O'Reilly takes up holy war with ISIS
 

The question that needs to be asked — and answered forthrightly and courageously for the American people — is why ISIS is so successful all of a sudden in the geographic arc made up of the Middle East, Southwest Asia and North Africa. Ordinary Americans should realize this is a serious question that has less to do with messiahs and theological beliefs about the afterlife than it has to do with frustrated human aspirations and the power of a death cult. It’s true that comforting afterlife fantasies certainly constitute fuel for a death cult; in fact, it’s the religious component that makes them that much more deadly and frightening.

What we’re talking about is ideas that coalesce as mobilizing thought in the mass human mind. Think of a school of fish or a swarm of birds moving as one. In this sense, then, what exactly is a death cult? My dictionary defines cult as “a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing.” As for the adjective in this case, death, in line with his long 1930 essay Civilization And Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud might have defined a death cult as a group focused on a mythic and psychological obsession with Thanatos, the Greek mythic personification of death, or what he called the death instinct — versus its counterpart, Eros, or the life instinct. The latter drive overcomes difference and pulls things together, while the former accentuates difference and tears things apart. This is how Freud put it: