This Can't Be Happening!

So Pope Francis, the new pope who has conservative American Catholics, particularly those in politics and the media, freaked out because he is criticizing capitalist greed, knows Marxists who are “good people,” and isn’t upset to be labeled one of them, even though he says “Marxist ideology is wrong.”.

That’s quite a lot for many Americans to swallow. For someone like Rush Limbaugh or Fox commentator Andrew Napolitano, it must feel like the world is collapsing. A “Marxist” pope! How could God allow such a thing!

Part of the problem is that Americans don’t even know what Marxism is. The pope made his remarks on the subject in Italy, to the newspaper La Stampa. Italians, who are busy organizing increasingly massive “pitchfork” demonstrations in cities across their country, and are calling on police and soldiers to take off their helmets and join them in bringing down their country’s corrupt government, have greeted his remarks with a collective yawn.

After all, many of Italy’s largest urban areas have been governed on and off, and sometimes for generations, by Marxists of one stripe or another — even by the dreaded Communist Party itself, which, of course, in Italy has long been something quite different from the Stalinist party that Americans have been trained to imagine when they hear the word. Such “red” municipal governments have been elected over and over by the Italian public because they tend to do a better job, are less corrupt, and try to do what New York City’s new left-leaning Mayor Bill de Blasio says he wants to do: reduce the wealth gap in his city, and do more to help its poorest residents.

Americans, thanks to decades of overt, blatant propaganda in our schools and our media, don’t know that Marxism is a philosophy, a school of thought, an economic and social theory, not a political party. Even the pope got that partially wrong. There is an ideology of Marxism too, but that’s something else again. Marxism, as developed by the man who lent the theory its name, Karl Marx, and his colleague and friend Friedrich Engels, is really a way of thinking, a form of analysis. It posits a few important things. One is that economic relations are a key driver of history. The other is the concept that each new development in history or in social or economic relations contains within itself the seeds of resistance or, ultimately, its own destruction.

Model for the US?: In Italy, a growing mass Pitchfork Movement is seeking to overthrow the Italian government.

When Barack Obama, the first black president of America, delivered remarks Tuesday during a South African memorial service for that country’s first black president, he muffed a historic opportunity to right a grave wrong done by the American government – one that helped send Nelson Mandela to prison for nearly 30-years.

Obama, during his remarks at a Johannesburg, SA memorial service for Mandela, who died on December 5 at age 95, recalled how that world-revered leader had endured “brutal imprisonment.”

But the U.S. president conveniently excluded the fact that America’s CIA had helped South African agents capture Mandela, leading to the very imprisonment that Obama and other world leaders were decrying during that service.

A few miles from the soccer stadium where that memorial service for Mandela was held is the house in Soweto where Mandela lived before he went underground in the early 1960s to ramp up the fight in his homeland against apartheid – that racist system modeled on U.S. segregation laws.

That small four-room house on Vilakazi Street in Soweto’s Orlando West section is now a museum commemorating the life and sacrifices of the man credited universally hailed as the ‘Father’ of modern South Africa.

Schoolchildren visit Mandela House Museum in Soweto, where the South African leader lived before going underground (Linn Washington photo)

The White House, and most headline writers around the country, are crowing that the November jobless rate of 7.0%, reported Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is the lowest since 2009 when President Obama took office, when it was 7.3% and rising.

But is this number really something worth cheering?

Not if you look behind it.

That 7.0% number is the BLS’s so-called U3 figure, which is the percentage of the labor force currently unemployed, and it is significantly lower than the figure for November 2012, which was 7.8%. But U3, known as the “official unemployment rate,” doesn’t really count everyone who is unemployed. It doesn’t include, for example, anyone who has even one hour a week of work, or who has not had a job for more than six months, or who in despair has given up looking.

A better number to look at, in terms of getting a true picture of the health of society and the economy, is the BLS’s U6 number, which also counts as unemployed those who are “marginally attached to the labor force,” meaning discouraged people who are not working and have given up looking for work, but who told BLS interviewers that they have looked within the past year and would take a job if one were available. U6 also counts as unemployed those who are currently working part-time for “economic reasons,” meaning that they want full-time work but cannot find it.

The U6 measure of unemployment for November is 13.2%, and while that too is down from 14.4% in November 2012, it is historically very high. Furthermore, as the analytical website ShadowStats points out, even U6 doesn’t tell the whole story. The BLS U6 figure, as ShadowStats’ John Williams notes, doesn’t count long-term discouraged workers — people who have given up trying to find work because they cannot find a job. This group was “defined out of existence” by the BLS during the Clinton presidency in 1994. You can understand why that was done: adding these people to the total gives a current unemployment rate of a whopping 23% — a number that, unlike the U3 and even U6, has been continuing to rise since the start of the so-called Great Recession in late 2008, even through the last four years of “economic recovery.”

As this ShadowStats graph demonstrates, the crucial labor participation rate has been falling since at least 2003 (click on image to go to ShadowStats.com)

Talk about a no-brainer!

The $2.5-trillion Social Security Trust Fund, which current workers, including the much-maligned Baby Boom generation, have been bulking up with our 6.2% payroll tax and the 6.2% that our employers have to pay, is slated to be exhausted by 2036-8. Unless more money is injected into the system to cover the tsunami of retirees born between 1946 and 1964, the program, if it were just running on current payroll taxes, would only be able to cover 75% of promised benefits to current retirees.

At the same time, the rich are getting richer every year, and the rest of us poorer.
Income tax rates for the rich are far lower now than they were in the 1990s, ‘80s or in any prior decade. Meanwhile loopholes and deductions and exemptions for the wealthy keep getting added to the tax code to help make them richer. (Those rich enough to be able to use the Schedule A tax form get to claim all mortgage interest, including for vacation homes. They get to deduct the cost of fancy insurance plans and pricy medical care, they get to deduct their state and local taxes, and they get taxed much less than even a low-income wage-earner on income they earn from investments.)

Everyone, except the rich themselves of course, agrees that the widening wealth gap in the US (now about the same as in Jamaica and Argentina) is a terrible thing, and everyone agrees that something needs to be done to keep Social Security well-funded.

What isn’t being said is that the two problems are linked and can be at least partially solved simultaneously.

Think about it: As things stand, only the first $113,400 of wage income is subject to the Social Security tax — the so-called FICA tax. Even if you earn $2 million or $200 million a year, you still only pay that 6.2% FICA tax on the first $113,400 of it–a maximum tax of $7,030.80 per person or $14,061.60 for employee and employer.

If the cap were eliminated, as was done long ago for the Medicare tax, so that the rich and their employers — or rich people themselves if they are self-employed — had to pay the full 12.4% tax on their income, almost all of the shortfall in the Social Security Trust Fund’s ability to pay for the retirement benefits of the Baby Boomers and subsequent retirees would be eliminated. If, beyond that, investment income was also made subject to the Social Security tax, either as a straight percentage of profits, or as a small 0.25% to 0.5% tax on stock and bond transactions, not only would the entire shortfall be gone, but there would be money to do what an increasing number of Americans are saying must be done: increase retirement benefits.

The chained CPI 'reform' proposed by Obama to "fix" Social Security would rob retirees of tens of thousands of dollars each

This has been an important year in the struggle for peace, freedom and democracy, and for the revival of real journalism as it was at least imagined by the founders of the nation.

We had the courageous act of NSA contract worker Edward Snowden, who blew a nuke-sized hole in the National Security Administration’s secret spying program that is still smoking, even as he has been forced to hole up as a refugee from repression in, of all places, Russia. We have had too, the courageous act of Jeremy Hammond, an activist and, yes, a journalist, who did what reporters at our so-called corporate “news” organizations should have done, and exposed the links between private intelligence operators, notably Stratfor, and the government spooks like the CIA and NSA, for which act Hammond was maliciously sentenced to 10 years in jail.

We have Chelsea Bradley Manning, the courageous soldier who alerted the world to the crimes of American power in Iraq and Afghanistan, who unapologetically admitted his actions, and who is now facing a long, hard prison sentence in a military brig at Leavenworth.

Most of the information about these people and what they have revealed, you have to learn by turning to the alternative media. The corporate media — print and electronic — hide it or filter it or sanitize it. Hell, they won’t even tell us the name of the CIA station chief in Pakistan, just outed there by an opposition party. The rest of the world’s media are reporting his name — Craig Osth, a long-time CIA dirty trickster who was also once station chief for the Agency in Brazil, but our toothless media are keeping it secret from us here in the Land of the Free.

Florida U.S. Congressman Trey Radel, recently convicted of possessing cocaine, rightly wears the label of Drug War hypocrite. But assigning that title to just that one prominent felon helps hide the long-standing stench of Drug War hypocrisy that extends from Capitol Hill to the White House and state capitals nationwide, including members of both parties.

Yes, Tea Party-backed Radel (R-Fla.), busted recently in a federal sting operation in the act of purchasing cocaine, deserves his hypocrisy dunce cap for antics like siding this year with a Republican seeking to require food stamp recipients to first receive mandatory drug testing.

Philadelphia Democratic Congressman Bob Brady notes what many of his Capitol Hill colleagues (hypocritically) refuse to acknowledge publicly. “An elected official who calls for drug testing for poor people trying to feed their families with the support of food stamps while knowing that he is himself a drug user is an absolute violation of the public trust,” Brady stated.

The mean-spirited initiative from Radel and his GOP confederates for pee-tests from persons impoverished enough to need government food assistance has, it should be noted, proved a costly failure in the Sunshine State.

Rank hypocrisy, thy name is Radel…

I’m going to engage here in a thought experiment which may make some readers a little queasy, but bear with me.

It’s been half a century since the wrenching experience of having a charismatic young president cut down by bullets in what most Americans apparently still believe was a dark conspiracy by elements of the US government unhappy with the direction he was taking the country in international affairs.

Certainly powerful people like ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles and some of the nation’s top generals, not to mention executives of what prior President Dwight D. Eisenhower had labeled the military industrial complex were outraged that in his third year in office Kennedy was trying to dial back the Cold War, to reduce or even end the threat of actual nuclear war, and that he was even thinking of pulling US troops out of Vietnam and of reaching some accommodation with Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

Today we can read analyses like this that compellingly argue that the assassination of President Kennedy was orchestrated by those in the ruling elite who opposed such moves towards peace by a president who had campaigned for office as a hard-line cold warrior.

What then are we to make of recent actions by President Obama, who since his election has been a supporter of aggressive, even criminally aggressive militarism in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, but who, in recent months has been taking steps that appear, at least on their face, to be aimed at tamping down American belligerence?
Take his surprising back-down from a threatened attack on Syria. That prospective war at one point was only two days from being launched, with US ships and planes in place surrounding Syria, all fueled, armed and awaiting orders from the commander in chief.

Is a war-weary Obama suddenly starting to channel the '63 JFK?

I once did know a President
A way down South, in Texas.
And, always, everywhere he went,
He saw the Eyes of Texas.

The Eyes of Texas are upon you, all the livelong day.
The Eyes of Texas are upon you, you cannot get away.
Do not think you can escape them
At night or early in the morn
The Eyes of Texas are upon you ’til Gabriel blows his horn.

Sing me a song of Prexy, of days long since gone by.
Again I seek to greet him, and hear his kind reply.
Smiles of gracious welcome
Before my memory rise,
Again I hear him say to me, “Remember Texas’ Eyes.”

“The Eyes of Texas” by John Sinclair, 1903

(This was the last song JFK ever heard. President Kennedy was serenaded by the Texas Boys Choir in Ft. Worth on the final morning of his life.)

Nov 22 1963: CBS evening news anchor Harry Reasoner displays the grisly headline.

A tectonic shift is occurring in the US body politic. Ignore the media-driven sideshow about the 2014 contest for control of the House or about the screwed-up Obamacare insurance-market website. The real political battle is over Social Security and Medicare, and there the story is a historic turn from fighting against Washington efforts to cut those programs to demanding that both be expanded.

A coalition of progressive groups organizations, including of groups like the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, NOW, Paralyzed Veterans of America, Generations United, NARFE and SocialSecurity Works, last week protested outside the White House against a proposal, still included in the proposed Obama 2014 budget, to cut back on the inflation adjustment to Social Security, effectively assuring a gradual, but significant reduction in benefits in future years for elderly retirees and the disabled.

Meanwhile, a small but growing group of US senators and representatives, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent socialist from Vermont, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) and Sen. Bryan Shatz (D-HI), is calling for eliminating the cap on income subject to Social Security taxation, so that all Americans, including millionaires and billionaires, pay the full FICA tax on their income, a move which would effectively end any talk of the Social Security program “running out of money.”

It’s about time.

As Sen. Warren put it in a recent statement on the Senate floor, “We should be talking about expanding Social Security benefits – not cutting them…. Social Security is incredibly effective, it is incredibly popular, and the calls for strengthening it are growing louder every day.”

While Democratic party leaders, like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and President Obama, in thrall to Wall Street lobbyists, have offered to cut Social Security benefits by, for example, adopting a new stingier means of calculating inflation called the “Chained CPI), polls show that Americans consistently and resoundingly support not just protecting Social Security but expanding its currently meager benefits.

Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) want expanded Social Security, not just no benefit cuts

(This article first appeared in WhoWhatWhy News)
 

“I regret to inform you…”
 

Late last May, Reniya Manukyan, the widow of IbragimTodashev, publicly disputed a claim by the FBI that her dead husband was a murderer. Two months later, Manukyan received a letter from her bank informing her that her personal account was being cancelled. She had a month to withdraw her money.

Her “offense”?  Neither the bank nor the FBI will say.

Manukyan was widowed May 22 by seven bullets fired into Todashev under suspicious circumstances by an FBI agent while he was being held and interrogated in his Florida apartment by several agents and Massachusetts State Police troopers.

The FBI subsequently claimed Todashev, along with alleged Boston Marathon bomber TamerlanTsarnaev, had slain three drug dealers in a grisly 2011 murder in Waltham, Mass.

But Manukyan provided an alibi for her dead spouse: bank records of purchases he had made in Atlanta on Sept. 11, 2011, the day of the killing.

After she revealed publicly that she had those records, Manukyan received a bizarre communication from her Atlanta bank. The message, mailed on August 28, 2013, informed her bluntly that her account was being cancelled. No reason was given.

Reniya Manukyan's bank account was closed after she said account records proved her husband, Ibragim Todashev, killed by the FBI during an interrogation, was in Atlanta at the time of a 2011 Massachusetts murder the FBI is trying to pin on him