This Can't Be Happening!

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FOR BOOMERS “OF A CERTAIN AGE”
 

We don’t usually write about money on this site, but this is important.

Last November, as has become standard Washington politics, the Republican party held the federal budget submitted by President Obama and the Democrats hostage, demanding all sorts of non-budgetary concessions and cuts in social spending. Ultimately, the president and the Democrats caved in to get the budget passed. One of the things they did was agree to some cuts in Social Security benefits.

One of those cuts was to eliminate a measure that for years has allowed married couples who both reach 66 (or someone who had divorced a spouse of more than 10 years, but more on that later) to collect some money as a “spousal benefit” without either spouse actually starting to collect their own benefits. The advantage of this arrangement was that if both spouses could continue to hold off on collecting benefits on their own accounts, waiting four more years until reaching 70, their ultimate benefit checks would be 32% greater for life in real dollars than if they started collecting benefits at age 66.

The process was called “file-and-suspend,” and here’s how it works. The higher-earning spouse on reaching 66, goes into a local Social Security office and asks to make a “restricted application” for Social Security benefits, filing for those benefits but then immediately at the same time saying he or she doesn’t want to receive any checks until age 70 (this cannot be done on line — only in person). The lower-earning spouse, also 66, then files for spousal benefits on the first spouse’s account, and immediately starts receiving monthly checks equal to one-half of the benefit the first spouse would have received had that spouse not suspended benefits. Such spousal benefits can range from a low of around $6000/year to $14,500/year, or a total of $24,000 – $58,000 over four years!

The urgent news is that although this benefit was eliminated in the November budget deal, it is still available until the end of federal office hours at the Social Security office on April 30.

So if you and a spouse will be 66 by that date, you should immediately make that appointment (it can take as long as a month to get one because of cuts in Social Security office staffing, so don’t wait!), and go in to make that file-and-suspend and that spousal benefit request.

My wife and I were lucky enough to be able to take advantage of this option, getting in under the wire of the April deadline and I as the lower earner started receiving my spousal benefit check of $983.00 beginning this January. It will amount to a total of almost $40,000 for us by the time I reach 70 and switch over to receiving maximum benefits on my own account.

If you didn’t know about this option, you’re not alone. The Social Security Administration has long been barred by Congress from advertising and promoting its benefits and staff are not supposed to offer beneficiaries any advice or recommendations. They will answer whatever question you ask them (usually accurately), but they won’t offer advice or tell you if you’re making a bad decision. For example, if you turn 62 and immediately file for your Social Security benefits (as most Americans still do), nobody will say, “Um, you know, for each year you hold off on filing until you reach age 66, you’ll get a 7.5% higher benefit check for the rest of your life, and for each year you hold off between age 66 and 70, you’ll get an 8% higher benefit check.” And they won’t inform you about the availability of spousal benefits either.

Republicans & Democrats cut some Social Security benefits in a budget deal last fall — but if you’re 66+ you can still get one major benefit if you act before April 30
 

 Sen. Elizabeth Warren just had a chance to turn the tide in this rigged Democratic primary season last Tuesday, and she ran away from it.

As most people know, the Democratic Party leadership, decades ago following the primary victory of Sen. George McGovern that gave him the party’s 1972 nomination for president despite the opposition of the whole ruling party elite, tried to make such an upstart left candidate impossible in the future by front-running primaries and caucuses in a bunch of deeply conservative Southern states. The idea was to crush any liberal candidate in those states (where no Democrat would stand a chance in the general election), so their funding would dry up and their campaigns would die early in the primary season.

This ugly strategy worked like a charm for decades and it even worked this year to the extent that the Establishment’s candidate, Hillary Clinton, was able to win big in those Southern states. But her upstart opponent Bernie Sanders to some extent blunted the effort this year by winning handily in Colorado, Oklahoma, Minnesota and in his home state of Vermont — four of the five non-Southern states also holding primaries or caucuses on Super Tuesday. Sanders really would have actually defeated the DNC’s sabotage efforts though, had he won Massachusetts, a significantly larger state in terms of delegates, instead of just managing to come within 1.5% of doing so — and without any major endorsers backing him.

Imagine if Warren, the wildly popular senior senator from Massachusetts, in the days or weeks ahead of the primary, had endorsed Sanders, who after all is attacking the same corrupt big banks that Warren built her whole political career by denouncing. There’s no way having a popular anti-bankster, feminist senator endorsing Sanders wouldn’t have won him at least another 10% of the primary vote in Massachusetts — enough to have really damaged Clinton. Instead, Clinton was allowed to eke out a narrow victory there by picking up the support of identity-voting women who didn’t bother to examine her bogus feminism.

The Sanders campaign can still push forward in future primaries, because unlike prior liberal insurgents who were relying on big donors, his campaign is funded entirely by small donors, and those doners are proving to be resilient and energized, not easily demoralized, by evidence that the game is rigged (in February, the Sanders campaign took in a record $42 million in new small donations, and continues to build its campaign war-chest despite Clinton’s wins in the South on Tuesday). But how much better it would have been had he won Massachusetts.

A Warren endorsement would have made all the difference.

Now she stands exposed as a fraud posing as a radical reformer.

Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton share a joke. Is it on progressives?
 

 
The conviction of Peter Liang is the best thing that has happened to Asian Americans since the Immigration and Nationality Act of the 1960s. It’s also an embarrassing example of how bewildered the minds of some Asian Americans are when it comes to race.

The conviction is a much-needed wake up call to those who have been brainwashed to believe the model minority myth. It’s clear evidence that white America still views Asian Americans as “other.” The “Blue wall of silence” does not cover yellow.

Peter Liang’s conviction makes painfully obvious three crucial facts that are necessary to understand the racial circumstances of Asian Americans. (1) American racism includes Asian Americans. (2) Through intentional legislation and campaigning, the white majority has utilized the educational and financial privilege of a portion of Asian Americans to convince society that racism is no longer an issue. (3) Asian Americans themselves have fallen prey to this message, driving a wedge between the Asian American community and other communities of color and weakening our collective power to change the status quo.

The model minority myth has led much of America to believe that through hard work and an unwavering dedication to academic achievement, Asian Americans have achieved the true American dream, supposedly showing that it is not systemic racism but lack of adherence to American work ethic that holds back other communities of color.

While the falsehoods that make up the model minority stereotype and its toxic impacts are too complex and numerous to unpack in their entirety here, exploring a few the issues is necessary. A key misunderstanding is the origin of stereotypes. While most of us recognize that stereotypes are generalizations that cannot be applied to any one individual, we also believe that they spring from a small grain of truth. They represent a generalization of a true trend in behavior or characteristic that is common amongst a group of people.
  
This is nonsense on so many levels. If you have a gun, you are held to a higher standard. There are no mistakes, just tragedies.

Just as the media, in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s landslide win in South Carolina’s Democratic primary Saturday, are predictably writing the obituary for Bernie Sanders’ upstart and uphill campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) has handed him an opportunity to jolt the American people awake.

Announcing on “Meet the Press” that Americans need a real choice of commander-in-chief — one “who has foresight, who exercises good judgment,” she announced today her resignation as vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee — an organization that has been actively working to promote Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

In a clear dig at Clinton, a neoliberal who has been at the forefront not just in backing President George W. Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, but in pushing for both the illegal and disastrous overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi and the current intervention to oust Syrian President Basher Al-Assad, Gabbard said, “There is a clear contrast between our two candidates with regard to my strong belief that we must end the interventionist, regime change policies that have cost us so much.” She added, “This is not just another ‘issue.’ This is the issue, and it’s deeply personal to me. This is why I’ve decided to resign as Vice Chair of the DNC so that I can support Bernie Sanders in his efforts to earn the Democratic nomination in the 2016 presidential race.”

Gabbard, while only a second-term member of the House, is no lightweight when it comes to US foreign and military policy. A major in the Hawaii National Guard who volunteered for two tours of duty in Iraq, she is one of only two female members of Congress to have served in a war zone. (While I couldn’t find a stat for how many male members of Congress have served in a war zone, given that only 25 were even in uniform in the period since 2001, and given that few of those 25 were in active war zones, and finally given that older vets like John McCain are few and far between, it’s a fair bet that there are not many.) She had the courage to introduce a bill in a Congress filled with war-besotted “chicken-hawks” to require the US to end its illegal intervention aimed at “regime change” in Syria.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) has resigned as DNC vice-chair and is endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders' run for the party's nomination, while denouncing Hillary Clinton’s militarism
 

Wow. I had a dream that went on all night.
 
There was a pink bear sighting in Alaska.
 
Then there were pink bear sightings
In South Dakota and Colorado,
All thought to be hoaxes but then
The New York Times published a photo, front page;
It looked real enough.
 
The article interviewed a hiker
Who reported talking to the Pink Bear.
He said it was standing up.
When asked what the bear said
The hiker said he couldn’t repeat it;
The bear was talking trash.
The hiker said the bear was heading for Washington.
 
What happened next is hard to believe.
(I mean in my dream it was hard to believe.)
There were signs that great changes are coming:
Mount Shasta was waking up, sending out a plume of ash.
Native Americans warning, This is it.
There was a black-out in Washington
And when the lights returned
Someone had painted the Abraham Lincoln monument
Blackface, black hands.
And CODEPINK managed to cloak
Half the Washington Monument in pink.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m no pollster or even political scientist, but when I read that Bernie Sanders is going to be crushed by Hillary Clinton in Saturday’s primary in South Carolina, the state that fired the opening shots in the Civil War and that only last year took down a Confederate battle flag in front of the capitol building, I have to shake my head at the absurdity of it.

Yo! Pollsters! The reason Sanders is predicted to lose badly is because African Americans in that benighted state are telling your people that they favor Hillary Clinton by a margin variously calculated at 30-50%. Then you all put those numbers together with the fact that historically, 55% of the Democratic vote in South Carolina (where blacks represent 28 percent of the state population), are African American, and you say Bernie doesn’t have a chance. Then you go on to say that is going to hurt Sanders in next week’s Super Tuesday contests, which are all over the place, and on into the rest of the primaries.

But wait a minute. Why should Saturday’s primary results matter? South Carolina is, along with Mississippi and Alabama, one of the most solidly Republican states in the country. It’s not going to vote Democratic in November whoever wins the Democratic presidential primary.

Now if the black share of the vote in tomorrow’s primary were representative of the sentiments of black voters all across the country — urban, rural, southern, northern, eastern and western — I could see why maybe there’d be some reason to pay attention, but that is not the case. Hardley.

What we have in South Carolina is a population of black people who have been exiled or marginalized from the state’s political system since Reconstruction, or really since their ancestors were brought over in chains from Africa — a population that despite constituting more than a quarter of the state’s citizens has been living in what is effectively still an oppressive, crushing apartheid socio-political-econoomic system. That’s a far cry from in the north or the far west, where concentrated African-American populations — descendants of the great migration from the agrarian south — have achieved plurality or even majority status in many cities, and have been able to take on, ameliorate or even overcome some of the oppressive conditions under which they and their forebears have lived. They’ve elected black mayors and black councilmembers, integrated police departments, and opened up hiring in municipal jobs, for example. They’ve even elected blacks to Congress, and in significant numbers. In places like that, who wins the presidency becomes less important an issue. But in a backward racist place like South Carolina, where it isn’t even socially unacceptable for a white guy to admit he’s in the Klan in some communities, it can seem crucial — even a matter of survival.

In ’63, Bernie Sanders was busted for leading a protest against Chicago U's segregated housing, in ’64 Hillary Rodham Clinton was a ‘Goldwater Girl’ (while Clinton admits to this, there are no extant photos of her dressed as one, so we composed one here)
 

Hollywood honchos told a big lie 74-years ago.

That lie told in 1942 is a link in the sordid chain of perceptions and practices that have produced the present brouhaha surrounding the 2016 Oscar awards featuring an all-white bevy of acting category nominations.

That lie is part of a legacy the stretches to the very founding of the United States of America. That legacy is the persistent refusal to forthrightly tackle racism, particularly insidious institutional racism.

The fact that so few have no clue about this Hollywood lie evidences the need for better understandings about facets of American history that are purposely forgotten yet have a pronounced impact on the contours of current society.

Highlighting forgotten facets is a prime reason for the existence of Black History Month, an annual recognition of the contributions and achievements of African-Americans held every February. However, each year, many across America castigate Black History Month as unnecessary and divisive.
The Birth of a Nation – One of Hollywood's most racist movies
It’s not surprising that many of those who find Black History Month unacceptable are comfortable with accepting a movie industry that continues to present an illusion of inclusion while fanning the race prejudice that pollutes the very core of democracy in America.

Interestingly, assailing Black History Month is an interracial exercise in America. Critics of Black History Month include blacks, most recently FOX News commentator Stacy Dash, a person who gained her stature through starring in the 1995 Hollywood movie “Clueless” and its network television spinoff.

Truth can be stranger than fiction…or at least more surprising. Apple Computer is the current champion of privacy against U.S. government attempts to expand its spying on us. The company, a frequent NSA and FBI collaborator in the past, finds itself in the strange position of confronting a federal court order to dislodge its iPhone security system, an action Apple insists will cripple encryption as a privacy-protection measure.

Last week, federal judge Sheri Pym ordered Apple to help the government de-crypt data on the iPhone of Syed Farook. Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, shot up a government employees’ Christmas Party last year in San Bernardino, California killing 14 people and injuring many more. The couple are suspected Islamist terrorists and the government wants to know about Farook’s calls and text messages.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook says that complying with the order would deeply damage all encryption on the iPhone and Apple has appealed it. The government counters that it’s doing no such thing: the order it insists is for one phone and Apple can easily help de-crypt the phone without affecting everyone else’s.

Apple CEO Tim Cook: Taking the Right Stand
 

The case has drawn enormous attention. Apple is…well…Apple and what it does is big news even before it does it. Encryption has become a major issue after whistle-blower revelations about how the government, particularly the National Security Agency, vacuums massive information from people in this and other countries every second of the day. There has been a predictable flurry of speculation about how the government might get that info without Apple’s help and the analysis about the potential impact has been voluminous, ranging from accepting Apple’s argument to calling it absurd.

In the roar, however, some truth is being drowned out. On the one hand, with ever increasing consciousness about privacy and security, Apple may be acting not out of commitment to privacy but because taking the stand may be good for business. It’s not clear how long it will resist. On the other hand, the government’s “only one case” argument is an outrageous and cynical lie. If Apple complies with the court order, the use of encryption on cell-phones will suffer profound and lasting damage.

That, many believe, is the real reason why the government wants Apple’s cooperation. “The government’s goal in this case has little to do with unlocking a single iPhone,” wrote surveillance expert Joshua Kopstein, “and everything to do with establishing a legal precedent that guarantees them the ability to achieve this access on any device.”

To put it mildly, there is a lot at stake.

As Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination continues to strengthen, so do the attacks on him by the establishment corporate media, which are reflexively backing the status quo corporatocracy.

The latest smear comes from the New York Times, in the form of an almost laughable piece by Jackie Calmes run on Feb. 15 and headlined “Left-Leaning Economists Question Cost of Bernie Sanders’s Plans.”

The so-called “left-leaning” economists quoted by her, however, included not one genuine left or even left-leaning economist. Rather, they were a bunch of mainstream economists who, while “not working for Hillary Clinton,” as Calmes notes, have in fact worked for either the administration of Barack Obama or of Bill Clinton (a point she largely fails to note). As media critic Doug Henwood of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) pointed out in a blistering critique of the Times article, referring to the economists quoted in the piece, “So slight is their leftward lean that it would require very sensitive equipment to measure.”

Take source one, Austan Goolsbee, former chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, who obligingly tells Calmes that Sander’s “numbers just don’t add up,” and claims that Sanders’ proposed measures on health care and job creation would add “$2 to $3 trillion” to the current $4-trillion federal budget. Just the vagueness of his estimate, which had a range of uncertainty of $1 trillion, should alert people to a certain, shall we say lack of rigor on Goolsbee’s part, rather unbecoming of a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. Goolslbee, in fact, was the economist with the Obama campaign who famously rushed off to Ottawa to privately reassure that country’s right-wing Prime Minister Stephen Harper that candidate Obama wasn’t serious in his campaign rhetoric condemning the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

The second supposedly “left-leaning” economist critic of Sanders cited by Calmes in her article was Jared Bernstein, former economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, who is now at what Calmes terms the “liberal” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — actually a haven for Clinton-era mainstream economic hacks pedaling the usual trickle-down theories. Bernstein is quoted criticizing UMass economist Gerald Friedman, who wrote an analysis backing Sander’s call for replacing Obamacare with a Medicare for All program. Friedman, in his analysis, demonstrates that such a switch to a single-payer system would save Americans an average of about $5000 per family, even after raising the Medicare tax by about $500 per family, because it would eliminate virtually all private insurance premiums and co-pays.

Bernstein argued that “several assumptions” in Friedman’s analysis were “wishful thinking.” In fact though, it’s Bernstein whose assumptions are flawed. For example he argues that Sanders and Friedman are “mistakenly” assuming that there would be minimum health care inflation under Sanders’ plan. Actually, it’s no mistake. With the government in a position as sole customer under a national single-payer plan to negotiate pricing with all segments of the delivery system — hospitals, doctors, drug companies, equipment makers, etc. — health inflation could be virtually halted in its tracks, and in many cases, costs would likely go down significantly.

Hillary Clinton at a campaign event in New Hampshire, with the supposedly “independent” and “left-leaning” economist Jared Bernstein (carrying young girl on shoulders) Note: this photo ran in the Times and so editors should have been aware of Bernstein’s close link to the Clinton campaign in editing Calmes’ article.
 

London, UK -– Often lost amidst the damning evidence of injustice in the enforcement of Britain’s notorious legal doctrine of joint enterprise are real people like Susan Williams –- persons whose lives have been shredded by the JE doctrine that Britain’s Supreme Court just gutted in a dramatic ruling today.

Williams’ grandson is serving a life sentence under joint enterprise which permits convictions carrying long sentences even of persons who did not commit a crime or even know a crime would occur. Williams said her grandson was trying to break up a fight in 2010 that ended in a fatal shooting by others, yet led to his conviction under JE.

The nightmare for Williams following the joint enterprise arrest and conviction of her grandson, Trevelle Williams, got much darker last November when her youngest daughter, the mother of Trevelle, committed suicide.

Williams’ daughter, Tara Le, was distraught over her inability to free her son Trevelle, nicknamed Bluey, from what the Williams family and others saw as a wrongful conviction.

“The last thing she said to me was ‘Mom, no one is listening.’ Tara said lawyers, the courts and human rights people would not respond to her or the evidence she had uncovered,” Williams said during an interview the day before Britain’s Supreme Court announced its historic ruling on JE.

That unanimous decision by Britain’s highest court, rendered on February 18, 2016, sets new legal standards for joint enterprise saying older standards had been applied too loosely by police, prosecutors and courts for over 30-years.

The President of Britain’s Supreme Court, Lord Neuberger, before reading the decision before a courtroom packed with persons, most opposed to JE, said, “We consider that the proper course for this court is to re-state as nearly and clearly as we may, the principles which had been established over many years before the law took a wrong turn.”

Deb Madden (far right) holds ruling outside British Supreme Court building. LBW Photo
 

The Court’s unanimous ruling stated that an error had been made in the mid-1980s when law enforcers, from police through judges and legislators, began equating intent to commit a crime and/or intent to participate in a crime with the contention advanced by enforcers that persons arrested for a crime should have exercised “foresight” in knowing a crime could occur. This led to people being charged and convicted and sentenced simply for having the “bad judgement” or “lack of foresight” to show up at the scene of a crime, even if they weren’t personally involved.