This Can't Be Happening!

This article originally ran as “Social Security: Key Piece of Your Clients’ Retirement Plans,” in the current issue of the magazine Bank Investment Consultant
 

Over the past 77 years since Social Security was passed into law, it has paid out more than $11 trillion in benefits to well over 100 million people— the elderly, the disabled and surviving children of deceased parents. And despite rumors of its demise, it will continue to be a portion of many people’s retirement income. And it’s not just for the 75% of the country that has less than $30,000 in retirement savings. It will be a factor for the middle class as well, as Social Security benefits could represent a retirement benefit of $20,000 to $30,000 a year (or double that for a professional couple).

Still, many financial advisors know precious little about the program and how it operates. Or how to maximize benefits for their clients. Many pay scant attention to Social Security in analyzing clients’ full financial pictures.

For the last four years, Rob Kron has been working to change that. Director of advisor and client education at investment manager BlackRock, Kron has been attending conferences of financial advisors where he offers presentations explaining Social Security’s ins and outs. He points out that there are features like “file and suspend,” that can allow people to improve their benefits at no cost.

Say a married couple, both 66, have a primary earner who doesn’t want to retire. That person has the option of filing for Social Security, but suspending collection of any benefits. If the person continues to work and starts collecting benefits at 70, he or she still gets the maximum benefit amount, just as if he or she had filed at age 70. However, because they filed at 66, the lower-earning spouse became eligible immediately to start collecting one-half of the benefit amount of the spouse who filed.

Part of the problem, for advisors and their clients, is that there is a lot of misinformation circulating about the national retirement program, particularly as many of its critics, including some politicians, have spread false information, say market observers.

Social Security recipients could get 76% more per month by waiting until 70 to collect, instead of taking checks at 62, as three-quarters of retirees currently do.

The news media have failed once again to report a significant story about an example of the racism always so obvious at Republican National Conventions.

That story this time is not about the usual paucity of black delegates participating in the GOP’s quadrennial presidential candidate nominating confab (evident to anyone viewing video of the convention floor) or about Republican leaders lamely decrying Democrats for “falsely” claiming the GOP exploits racial prejudice.

Rather, the story persistently missed by mainstream news media this time concerns the failure of the GOP to include black-owned businesses in the economic opportunities arising from its nominating convention.

This exclusion belies the GOP proclamations that it is a champion of both business opportunity and of even-handedness.

The recently concluded Republican National Convention in Tampa Bay pumped an estimated $153-million into that region’s economy.

However, very few black businesses around Tampa received any revenue from RNC-related expenditures.

The presidents of the Tampa Bay Black Chamber of Commerce and the Sun Coast African American Chamber of Commerce both said economic exclusion ruled at Tampa’s RNC event.

Black faces were hard to spot at the GOP Convention in Tampa, even among concession businesses

Police brutality is in the news, thanks to the widespread availability of amateur video and the omnipresence of security cameras.

We’ve seen scene after scene of police beating the crap out of, and even shooting and killing unarmed or minimally dangrous students, women, old men and crazy people, many of them after they have been handcuffed and checked for weapons.

The police brass, and leading politicians who oversee the departments involved, nearly always have the same answer: This is not the norm, these are isolated incidents, police violence is not on the rise. Rarely is an abusive or murderous officer punished or even administratively disciplined for documented crimes.

The thing is, of course, it is on the rise. Just as the exonerations of supposed murders and rapists are only those where there was DNA available to prove their innocence, while many more are also clearly wrongly facing death or long prison sentences, the scenes of brutality we’re seeing on the videos are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg too. What is different is that we’re seeing these things at all. It used to be that getting videos of police brutality was very rare — like the taping of the notorious police assault on the prone body of Rodney King by Los Angeles cops during a traffic stop. It just happened that someone with a video camera was at the scene when it occurred. Nowadays everyone with a cellphone is a potential videographer, so we’re seeing more of what really goes on when police make their arrests.

Just check out the latest video of LAPD officers body slamming a 5’4″ nurse (two times!) who had the audacity to get out of her car when they stopped her for talking on her cell phone while driving (this particular video was taken by a surveillance camera at a store focussed on the parking lot where police had followed the woman’s car). Note that one of the burly cops slamming this small handcuffed woman to the ground and later fist-bumping to celebrate with his younger partner holds the rank of commander — he’s a 20-year veteran of the LAPD.

Milton Hall, a homeless man killed July 1 by 46 bullets fired by six Saginaw cops, none of whom has been charged with wrongdoing.

 
The patient, by the name of Israel, walks into the room and instantly bursts into a tirade of arguments conclusively proving his credentials, and says that he is better than everyone else.
 

The opening line of Israel On The Couch: The Psychology of the Peace Process
-By Ofer Grosbard, a clinical psychologist born in Israel, who practices in the US
 
 
Americans have an Israel problem.

Recently I responded to an email propaganda piece on Israel sent out by a friend that listed all the magnificent things Israelis have done in technology and agriculture. The clear implication was that Arabs and Palestinians can’t hold a candle to Israelis when it comes to making the desert bloom. Israelis are clearly superior and, thus, deserve to own what was once called Palestine.

I told the list of people (many of them American Jews) that everything on the list was likely true but that it was a case of making an economic and technological argument in response to a moral question. That is, pointing out how smart and savvy in western ways Israelis are does not address the festering military occupation of Palestinian land and the effective imprisonment of Palestinians.

One member of the list went back-and-forth with me — until a handful of others on the list began to cry out “enough!” Naturally, one person pointed out there were many anti-semites in the world, the suggestion being I must be one of them.

Jerusalem

The problem Americans have with Israel is that the region it exists in is in the midst of a major political sea change, while Israel is frozen in time and holding on to its militarist, right-wing policies of extending settlements in the West Bank. It’s a policy that harks back to the ideas of the British-trained militarist Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall, which is based on the idea a live-and-let-live policy between Jews and Arabs is impossible and, thus, Jews must militarily control and repress Palestinians. Here’s Jabotinsky:

“Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.”

This frame of mind is at the root of the current psychology that keeps Israel frozen in time. By extension, it’s a potentially grave problem for Americans.

The perplexing predicament confronting Daryl Brooks could confound writers Albert Camus and Franz Kafka, two authors acclaimed for their works about individuals subjected to surreal forms of injustice.

Brooks, a community activist in Trenton, New Jersey, is facing a Kafkaesque return to prison because some NJ state parole personnel charged him with committing a parole violation that top NJ Parole Board officials contend is not actually a violation.

Top New Jersey State Parole Board officials acknowledge that ‘admission of guilt’ by a person is not a condition for either a person’s release from prison on parole or for a person remaining on parole once released from prison.

Yet, some parole personnel are pushing hard to put Brooks back in prison for his failure to admit guilt, despite top Parole Broad officials having said such an admission is not required for released parolees.

A top Parole Board executive, when responding to a news media inquiry in late June, responded “No” to a question about guilt admission being a condition for parole release or parole continuance. The Board’s executive director recently affirmed that response.

Brooks is not alone in enduring such Kafkaesque predicaments from parole authorities.

Daryl Brooks, railroaded into jail, and then barred from parole for refusing to admit guilt

Sometimes a journalist just has to go with the story, even if it’s going all wrong.

I had set out to stand up for the rights of hitchhikers everywhere, and against abusive policing, when I left the house yesterday afternoon and walked up the road to an intersection where I could stand on the grass and stick out my thumb and try to snag a ride to the supermarket four miles off.

The location and the time — 6 pm — were both important. Three days before, I had tried the same thing at the same spot, same time. Every so often I like to do a local hitchhike, just to test the national zeitgeist and the level of empathy of my fellow Americans. Last winter I tried it, and after over a hundred cars had left me standing in a brutal cold wind, finally got a ride from an immigrant Indian couple and their teenage son. (My fellow Americans didn’t come off so well in that story.)

But three days ago, after nearly 60 cars had passed me — most often one or two men in a car who would look away from me in what appeared to be a kind of embarrassment — a black police SUV from the town of Horsham started pulling towards me through the parking lot of the local bank, on whose lawn I was standing. The cop in the vehicle was shaking his head at me with a stern, disapproving expression. He pulled to a stop, rolled down his window, and as I walked up to his car, said, “You can’t hitchhike. It’s illegal.”

“Illegal?” I said, “Where? I’m not standing on the road.”

The officer said, “It’s illegal in town, in the county, and all over Pennsylvania, on the road or not. If you hitchhike, I’ll have to lock you up.”

“Lock me up? For hitchhiking?” Now I was shocked. I have hitchhiked since I was 15, all over the US, up to Alaska when I was 16, several times across the country and back, and down to Florida, and while I had been ordered off of highway onramps, yelled at, and even taken for rides and dumped far away from the highway by cops who didn’t like long-haired hippie types back in the ‘60s, I had never been arrested. Hitchhiking is not a criminal offense as far as I know.

Hitchhiking, a remnant of freer times, is under attack in some states

There she goes,
Little more than skin and bones
Heading up the drive again.
Twenty years old, kidneys failing. . .
Her body language calls back,
“See you!”
The road is calling.
Crickets are chirping,

 

Dragonflies zigzagging in the field,
The sun is glinting through the tops of the pines
Like a spun-glass bulls-eye
And little vortices of gnats
Are involved in crazy reunions
In patches of sunlight
Over unmown lawn.
Every morning lately, it’s the same:
She heads off into this ecstatic unknown
More than ready to leave everything behind
For that one final act of disappearance
That old country cats are known for.
And I won’t let her go.
But I will watch her make her way
Right up to the bend
Around which I would never see her again.
Only then will I go after her,
Scoop her up,
Keenly aware of the amazing coherence of her bones,
Cooing admonishments. . .
And thus begins our day.
And thus continues my training
For when I try to leave
And the world keeps calling me back.
See if I don’t purr.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, the internationally recognized American political prisoner, thwarted a Philadelphia judge’s secretive court order that could have eliminated his future appeal rights when he filed a last- minute motion on August 23rd challenging that order sentencing him to life-without-parole.

Most supporters and detractors of Abu-Jamal had been expecting the formal conversion of his controversial death sentence to life-without-parole in the wake of a federal appeals court’s second and final rejection of requests from Philadelphia prosecutors to keep Abu-Jamal on death row back in April 2011.

What was unexpected by Abu-Jamal supporters were the procedures surrounding the secretive court order, which appears to have violated a number of Pennsylvania Rules of Criminal Procedure.

Abu-Jamal’s Pro Se Motion for Post Sentence Relief and Reconsideration of Sentence referenced Rule 720 of Pennsylvania’s Criminal Procedure which states in part that defendants shall “have the right” to make post-sentence motion but that motion must be filed “no later than 10 days after imposition of sentence.”

That secretly issued resentencing order occurred on August 13, 2012, exactly ten days before Abu-Jamal filed his motion.

If that ten-day filing period had expired, undiscovered due to secrecy-shrouded issuance of the resentencing order about which no public notice or notice was provided to Abu-Jamal and his legal team, his legal ability to challenge his continued confinement would have been damaged, including his probable loss of future appeal rights.

Mumia, off death row but fighting to escape life in prison, with attorney Rachel Wolkenstein and his wife Wadiya Jamal

GOP presumptive presidential candidate Mitt Romney, as noted in ThisCantBeHappening! yesterday, is probably stonewalling demands that he release his 2009 and earlier IRS filings because they could expose to the public that he availed himself of a 2009 IRS amnesty for those who admitted to earlier felonious hiding of income in Swiss and other foreign tax havens. Some 30,000 wealthy taxpayers did just that after a whistleblower broke the news that thousands of clients of Swiss Bank UBS were illegally hiding income at the bank, and the IRS sued for the names, while also offering the get-out-of-jail amnesty pass option.

But a reader, Phil Birkhahn, points out in his own blog called Romney the Tax Cheat that the slippery Harvard Law grad Romney may also have fraudulently ducked paying taxes in later — and earlier — years. Either that or he has to man-up and accept managerial responsibility for the obnoxious anti-worker and anti-America policies of his Bain Capital company during the 1999-2002 years, and in later years, during times when he asserting that he played none any but a passive investor role in the venture capital firm.

The problem for Romney is that the IRS taxes income significantly differently and allows far fewer deductions, especially for losses, for people who say they were only passive investors in a company than for those who say they were active in management.

Although Romney, whose whole basic argument to voters is that they should elect him because he is a great businessman who will run America “like a business,” also bizarrely at the same time claims that on “Feb. 1999 I left Bain Capital and all management responsibility,” and says “I had no ongoing activity or involvement,” meaning he was a passive investor in the firm, which he still owned 100% from that date until 2002, He is also listed as late as 2002 as one of the two managing members of Bain Capital in its annual report, and the company’s SEC filings list him as CEO, President and managing director as well as sole owner in 2000 and 2001. That would make him an active investor.

Mitt's got to level to Americans: Did he lie to the IRS or to them about whether he was actively running Bain?

If you want to know how moribund the Democratic Party is, how completely owned by Wall Street the president is, and how sick our national politics have become, just consider Social Security.

The president, earlier in his term, convened a “blue ribbon” panel, supposedly composed of a “broad spectrum” of opinions from liberal to conservative,” to come up with a plan to “reform” the system.

At issue: It is known that because of the huge number of Baby Boomers — people born between 1946 and 1964 — just starting to hit retirement age, and the general aging of the population, the Trust Fund composed of revenues paid into the system by working people will be depleted by about 2033. That would leave current worker taxes covering just 78% of the benefits promised to be paid out the same year, unless something is done sooner to increase revenues or decrease the rate of payouts of those benefits.

The commission, which proved to be a bust, was headed by co-chairs named by the president. For the Republicans, who since its inception have wanted to destroy this last vestige of the New Deal, it was former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson, a cadaverous wretch of a man who promptly called the program a “milk cow with 300 million tits.” ‘Nuff said there. Nice pick Barack.

As for his Democratic co-chair, the president named Erskine Bowles. If you wanted to know the views of this former congressman and Clinton advisor on Social Security, you need only learn that in 2011 at a public event, he praised Rep. Paul Ryan, now Mitt Romney’s choice for VP, who has said he wants to privatize Social Security, and condemned the president’s last budget proposal as a joke. Barack sure knows how to pick ‘em. Bowles was clearly a Democratic mole for cutting benefits, raising taxes and raising the retirement age on that commission.

But then, that was the point. In classic Obama fashion, before the debate even began on what to do to fix Social Security’s coming fund shortfall, due in a bit over two decades, he telegraphed to the commission that he wanted “all options” on the table. If that sounds like how he talks about Iran, it’s because he was telling everyone he was ready for the nuclear option — cutting benefits, and perhaps even partial privatization.

President Roosevelt signes the Social Security Act into law in 1935. Republicans are still trying to kill it.