Stop corporatist Democrats from cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits!

Surprise, surprise! Corporatist Dems are once again joining with their Tea Party brethren to sabotage the self-funded Social Security program, as well as Medicare, and Medicaid, which they and the corporate-owned media refer to condescendingly as “entitlements.” 

Never will they admit that it’s the one percent in America who are truly the “entitled.”

I signed the petition below, and I’m hoping Katalusis readers will take this opportunity to protest yet another brutal attempt to destroy the safety net of the elderly and the poor.

Tell Steny Hoyer: Don't sell out Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

 

Dear Virginia,

The corporatist wing of the Democratic Party once again has its sights set on cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits under the guise of deficit reduction. And our friends on Capitol Hill tell us House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer is leading the charge.

Last November CREDO activists helped stop Senate Democrats from agreeing to a terrible Super Committee deal, which would have resulted in deep cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits in exchange for promised but unspecified tax increases that may have never materialized.

But now House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, a prominent member of Democratic Leadership in Congress, is once again pushing a similar legislative proposal that would sell out our social safety net. He is working on a potential backroom deal to put the cuts we defeated last year back on the table.

Tell Steny Hoyer: Don't sell out Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. Click here to automatically sign the petition.

According to recent reports, Rep. Hoyer is "looking to shake legislative politics"¹ by forcing a vote on what the Washington Post called "a so-called grand bargain to raise taxes and restrain entitlement spending."²

Hoyer declined to provide any specifics to this proposal but he gave his remarks at an event hosted by an organization called Third Way, which is a Washington-based, so-called "moderate" Democratic think tank that shills for corporate interests and has previously advanced debunked arguments promoting cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits.³

Hoyer's move — which appears to be in coordination with Third Way — poses a danger to our social safety net. We cannot remain quiet while such a prominent member of Democratic Leadership appears to be working on a proposal which likely includes brutal cuts to Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security benefits.

Medicare and Social Security are wildly popular programs, and the clear majority of Americans want to protect these benefits. If we push back hard and make sure that conservative Democrats like Hoyer don't cut a back room deal on benefit cuts with Republicans, we can hold the line and protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

House Democrats will be particularly sensitive to this kind of pressure in an election year — if we can expose this potential sell out, we can quash the momentum Hoyer and conservative Democrats need to move forward with a "grand bargain" at the expense of benefit programs pivotal to millions of Americans.

Tell Steny Hoyer: Don't sell out Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. Click here to automatically sign the petition.

To be clear, we are not against sensible reforms to these programs. But we shouldn't be cutting benefits for our seniors and other vulnerable Americans in order to spend more on our bloated military or keep taxes low for the ultra-wealthy.

If Democratic Leaders such as Hoyer are serious about addressing our nation's debt and deficit, they should work to address the biggest drivers of our debt — the Bush tax cuts, foreign wars and our economic downturn.⁴

Sign our petition today and let House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer know that we are watching and we will not stand for any back room deal that puts cuts to Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security benefits on the table. Click below to automatically sign the petition:

http://act.credoaction.com/r/?r=5537665&id=35909-4150669-55ueczx&t=10

Thank you for speaking out.

Murshed Zaheed, Deputy Political Director
CREDO Action from Working Assets

Washington declares war on the poor

Poor mother and children during the Great Depression, photo courtesy of progressiveperspective.newsvine.com

 

The Right likes to claim that America is a Christian nation, a convenient way to bolster its prejudices against Muslims and other faith traditions. However, this segment of the electorate conveniently forgets the teachings of Jesus, e.g., “love your neighbor as yourself,” when it comes to setting policy for funding programs to assist the elderly, the disabled, and the poor.

When I graduated from a progressive seminary in 1990, a friend gave me a year’s subscription to Sojourner’s Magazine. That’s when I first learned of Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourner’s who valiantly leads evangelical Christians down the path of social justice.

Speaking of which, Wallis and many pastors with whom he communicates, are now protesting the so-called deficit reduction debate that’s headed toward a war on the poor. Wallis points out that sadly both the Left and the Right are collaborating today in their attacks on the safety net for those in need while seeking to preserve the privileged status of the wealthy.

Wallis writes:

The way you think and feel about the world is shaped by what you see when you get out of bed in the morning. I remember hearing this from civil rights activists. It simply means that perspective is hugely determined by place, context, and vantage point. This is profoundly true for me and most of the people I've ever met. You see the world from the place you live.

Part of the problem in the current budget impasse in Washington, D.C. is the perspectives of the politicians in the debate. Every morning they see and hear each other; the gladiator ring of national politics; the Washington media; their donors; their ideological base; and their latest poll ratings. Sure enough, the perspective that dominates politicians of both parties on the budget is who's up and who's down; whose power is growing or diminishing; whose constituents and donors are better organized and get their interests in front of the lawmakers; what the pollsters say; and how the end result of the debate will impact electoral gains. This perspective also dominates the news coverage.

So we at Sojourners thought there needed to be another perspective in this debate, and that the nation needed other voices. We need to hear from people who see and hear something different from politicians when they get up in the morning -- real people who are struggling, some of whom are poor, families, children, and the elderly, and maybe people whose job forces them to have to read the Bible.

Read more:

Breaking: Budget deficit caused by Bush-era tax cuts, not self-funded Social Security and Medicare

James Fallows, national correspondent for the Atlantic, has the scoop on the real source of the deficit Washington is facing -  what an embarrassment this revelation must be to Paul Ryan, et al,  along with assorted media reps, including David Brooks of the NY Times and the staff of the publicly funded PBS NewsHour who apparently prefer dismantling programs for the elderly and the poor over taxing the rich.

Fallows cites the chart on the left provided by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities that analyzes the sources of the federal budget deficit:

The original explanation and source notes are on the CBPP's site. In brief: the parts in shades of blue are stimulus-related outlays and depressed revenues for economic slowdown. The big dark-golden colored central swath is the revenue forgone by extending the Bush-era tax cuts.*

Fallows quotes Chad Stone of the CBPP:

"simply letting the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule (or paying for any portions that policymakers decide to extend) would stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio for the next decade.   While we'd have to do much more to keep the debt stable over the longer run, that would be a huge accomplishment."  

Fallows reminds us that President Obama extended the Bush tax cuts:

* As many readers have pointed out, although these cuts were enacted at the start of the George W. Bush Administration and supposed to expire last year, they need to be called "Bush-era cuts" rather than strictly "Bush tax cuts" since they were of course extended under President Obama.

For more details, go here:

Obama’s twists and turns on the dance floor as he bows first to the left and then to the right

In Saturday’s column, Washington Post columnist Dan Balz offers a somewhat thoughtful analysis of Obama’s leadership on economic issues since his inauguration and raises a few questions for both parties and the public to consider.

I stayed with Balz for the most part throughout the piece, but he lost me toward the end when he joined most of  the punditry, whether liberal or conservative, by taking the intellectually lazy route and lumping Social Security and Medicare with all other government domestic programs under the derogatory term “entitlements.”

To add insult to injury, he actually credited Paul Ryan for his budgetary assault on the nation’s elderly and the poor.

(One would hope that Balz will eventually glance at the deductions on his payroll check stub and become aware that he’s been paying into the Social Security trust fund over the years. He might want to ask what the government has been doing with that money.)

 In any case, Balz begins by noting Obama’s twists and turns on the dance floor in Washington as he bows first to the left and then to the right:

In his first two years, President Obama pursued an agenda that dramatically increased government spending and ushered in the biggest change in social welfare policy since the Great Society. When he spoke to the country late Friday night, he sounded like a born-again budget cutter.

Americans may ask which is the real Obama, the politician who embraced the biggest stimulus package in the nation’s history, a bailout of the banks and a takeover of the automobile industry, or the one who on Friday hailed the new budget deal as including “the largest annual spending cut in our history.” 

Nervous Democrats fear that Obama gave away too much in the last-minute agreement that averted a government shutdown. They worry even more about the coming fights over raising the debt ceiling and particularly Obama’s response to the budgetary blueprint outlined last week by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).

Read more:

It’s morning at the NY Times: the budget crisis “is all obfuscating nonsense”

Morning in NYC, photo public domain

A surprising editorial in the NY Times appears this morning titled “The Hollow Cry of Broke,” which suggests that John Boehner, Scott Walker, and company are exaggerating the nation’s so-called financial crisis in order “to break unions and kill programs they never liked in the first place.”

Keep in mind that in recent weeks, NY Times op-ed writers have railed time and again at those “entitlements” as the source of the nation’s scary budget deficit and more specifically, said pundits have blamed Social Security, a self-funding program, and Medicare for our current economic woes.

I’ve yet to see David Brooks or any of his colleagues at the Times mention that the government has violated federal law in raiding the Social Security Trust fund to pay for its two wars of choice and avoid taxing the wealthy or closing tax loopholes for major corporations. And they’ve certainly not mentioned that the nation’s seniors paid into the Social Security Trust Fund throughout their working lives with high payroll taxes.

So what’s with this Times editorial that begins:

“We’re broke! We’re broke!” Speaker John Boehner said on Sunday. “We’re broke in this state,” Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin said a few days ago. “New Jersey’s broke,” Gov. Chris Christie has said repeatedly. The United States faces a “looming bankruptcy,” Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialist, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

It’s all obfuscating nonsense, of course, a scare tactic employed for political ends. A country with a deficit is not necessarily any more “broke” than a family with a mortgage or a college loan. And states have to balance their budgets. Though it may disappoint many conservatives, there will be no federal or state bankruptcies. 

The federal deficit is too large for comfort, and most states are struggling to balance their books. Some of that is because of excessive spending, and much is because the recession has driven down tax revenues. But a substantial part was caused by deliberate decisions by state and federal lawmakers to drain government of resources by handing out huge tax cuts, mostly to the rich. As governments begin to stagger from the self-induced hemorrhaging, Republican politicians like Mr. Boehner and Mr. Walker cry poverty and use it as an excuse to break unions and kill programs they never liked in flush years.

Those programs "they never liked in flush years" included Social Security and Medicare. Anyway, it’s good to see the Times editorial board is waking up. I’m resisting the temptation to say, “Good morning, fellas.”

Read the rest of this on target editorial here.

 

House targets budget cuts for domestic programs, but supports the Defense Department’s sponsorship of Nascar racers

Photo courtesy of mmo4free

Well, we all knew that PBS was feeling at risk to lose its federal funding; otherwise, why would the NewsHour have suddenly gone into attack mode against those “entitlements,” an insulting euphemism (see today’s Sally Forth comic strip) that gives NewsHour correspondents and a slew of other media reps cover in supporting funding cuts targeting programs for the elderly, veterans, and the poor. You get the picture.

But Gail Collins has a point this morning in her NY Times column on Sacred Cows, Angry Birds. Collins is commenting on the support in the House of Representatives recently for cuts in funding for domestic programs while fighting to preserve the Defense Department’s budget to sponsor Nascar racers.

Collins writes:

The House of Representatives has been cutting like crazy! Down with Planned Parenthood and PBS! We can’t afford to worry about mercury contamination! Safety nets are too expensive!

But keep your hands off the Defense Department’s budget to sponsor Nascar racers.

“It’s a great public/private partnership,” said Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen, a New Jersey Republican. 

The Defense Department claims racecar sponsorships are an important recruiting tool for the Army. The House agreed — although this might be news to the Navy and Marines, which decided a while back that a Nascar presence wasn’t worth the money. 

“What makes U.S. Army’s motorsports initiatives successful?” Ryan Newman, driver of No. 39 U.S. Army Chevrolet asked his Facebook readers as he urged a show of support for the program. “In a 2009 study among fans nationwide, 37% feel more positive about the Army due to its involvement in motorsports.” 

Read more:

PBS will keep its federal subsidy even if benefits for veterans, the poor, and the elderly are cut

 

Mark Shields

David Brooks

Okay, while watching the PBS NewsHour this evening, including the Analysis of Shields and Brooks, I finally got it. By zealously going after gutting those “entitlements” that refer to benefits received by veterans, the poor, and the elderly, the NewsHour allies itself with conservatives and can therefore better defend itself against long-time charges by the Republican Party that it is has a liberal bias. The NewsHour crew will thereby increase the odds that Federal funding of PBS will not be cut in order to reduce the Federal deficit.

Never mind that Social Security beneficiaries paid into the system throughout their working lives or that Washington has raided the trust fund to pay for its two wars and avoid taxing the rich and closing tax loopholes for large corporations – ever notice how many of those corporations underwrite the NewsHour?

And why should veterans of the US Armed Forces consider themselves more worthy of benefits than the NewsHour crew?

Still, I must say it was especially disheartening that last Friday night, Mark Shields stood up to David Brooks in his attacks on “those entitlements,” but in tonight’s so-called analysis, he had evidently been silenced by his superiors.