THE REAL POLITIK EDITION: ISSUE 61, VOLUME 91
Obama Administration and Wall Street Predators Target “Entitlement Reform”
by Bruce Dixon, The Black Agenda Report
When the corporate media, Wall Street predators and their favorite politicians talk of "entitlement reform," they are not referring to their bonuses, or tax breaks, golden parachutes or consulting fees. They mean to "reform" your Social Security, your Medicaid, your Medicare, all of which they view as "fiscally irresponsible." When President Obama endorses a bipartisan summit on "fiscal responsibility" it's time to look out.
Not satisfied with its multi-trillion dollar raids on the US Treasury, predatory bankers and the Wall Street investor class have in sight their next target of opportunity. It's what their bipartisan pundits and politicians call "entitlement reform." It's what the rest of us call Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, and their "reform" is our ruin.
Wall Street is nothing if not bipartisan on this issue. The 2008 election marked a decisive shift in campaign contributions away from Republican presidential candidates and toward Democrats. Obama's economic A-Team is composed of former execs of firms like Goldman-Sachs that benefited most from the housing and dot com bubbles, and faces like those of Paul Volcker and Robert Rubin, who helped create it. But now that thieves have cleaned out the Treasury, they are ready to lecture us on "fiscal responsibility." The bailouts have blown a gaping hole in the federal budget, a hole that has to be made up for somewhere else.
Ominously, President Obama is talking about Medicare and Social Security in their language, as places where sacrifices will have to be made, and budgets will have to be cut for the sake of trimming the nation's multi-trillion dollar deficit. Words, in the worlds of politics and public policy mean everything, especially when they don't mean exactly what they say. Forty years ago public figures who opposed school desegregation would define themselves as being "against forced busing." Today's economic reactionaries, whose aim is the repeal the last remnants of the Great Society and the New Deal, claim to stand for "entitlement reform."
Among the nation's top "entitlement reformers", and therefore leading contenders for the post of Health and Human Services secretary in the Obama administration is Tennessee's Phil Bredesen, who as governor authored some of the most savage Medicaid cuts anywhere, depriving 170,000 adults and tens of thousands of children of access to medical care, condemning thousands to needless disabilities and early deaths, and their families to unnecessary impoverishment.
Since taking a chainsaw to Medicaid in Tennessee, Harvard alum Phil Bredesen has been hailed as a national model by the bipartisan champions of "entitlement reform." As President Obama's HHS Secretary he will have the power to unilaterally change rules and requirements for patients and providers across the board, and will be the presidential point-man for whatever the administration chooses to call "health care reform."
What kind of guy is Team Obama considering for HHS Secretary? While governor of Tennessee, Bredesen accepted $150,000 from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee to redecorate the governor's mansion. He has since told the Wall Street Journal that the voices of insurance companies and health care providers ought to be more important in the process of crafting a national health care plan than those of ordinary people. Only the willfully blind and foolish can suppose Team Obama are ignorant of Bredesen's record and views, or that they mean nothing because the president makes the policy. The fact that the White House has not ruled out Bredesen, even though late reports indicate that Kansas governor Kathleen Sibelus is also a strong contender, are serious warnings to all who would hear.
In the same vein, the Wall Street Journal reported Feb. 14 that President Obama has given his blessing to a group of congressional Blue Dogs who will convene a bipartisan February 23 "fiscal responsibility summit" that will produce non-amendable and filibuster-proof legislation to "fix" Medicaid, and possibly Social Security.
"The president met with 44 fiscally conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats this week and gave a nod to legislation that would set up commissions to deal with long-term deficit strains. The commissions would then present plans to Congress for an up-or-down vote.
"The president met with 44 fiscally conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats this week and gave a nod to legislation that would set up commissions to deal with long-term deficit strains. The commissions would then present plans to Congress for an up-or-down vote.
"We feel like we've found a partner in the White House," said Rep. Charlie Melancon (D., La.), a Blue Dog co-chairman."
Rolling back Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare have been longstanding goals of America's bipartisan elite investor class, and these goals have always found supporters among "liberal" corporate Democrats. President Clinton too, convened a bipartisan commission headed by Democratic senator Daniel Monyhan to "fix" social security, but the fight to impeach him took all the air out of the room and left him unable, fortuantely, to pursue this agenda. Just as "only Nixon could go to China", only a popular Democrat, the political calculus goes, has a chance of putting through as enormous betrayal to his or her base as completing the repeals of the New Deal and the Great Society.
The Brookings Institution is a Democrat-leaning think tank every bit as loyal to the corporate agenda as the right wing Heritage Foundation, but a resting place for Democratic policymakers temporarily out of government. The definitive "liberal" plan for "fixing" Social Security is a Brookings Institution document from 2003 titled "Saving Social Security: The Diamond-Orzag Plan. The good people at FireDogLake.com have offered the following excerpt therefrom, along with a link to the original.
"Since Painful Choices Must Be Made, a Key Question Is, Which Ones?
"The Social Security deficit can be eliminated only through different combinations of politically painful choices: tax increases and benefit reductions. Unfortunately, too many analysts and politicians have ignored this reality, responding to the painful alternatives by embracing "free lunch" approaches.
"Our plan makes the painful choices that are necessary—selecting a combination of benefit and revenue changes to restore long-term balance. In doing so, it focuses on three areas which contribute to the actuarial imbalance: improvements in life expectancy, increases in earnings inequality, and the burden of the legacy debt from Social Security’s early history.
"Workers who are 55 or older will experience no change in their benefits from those scheduled under current law. For younger workers with average earnings, our proposal involves a gradual reduction in benefits from those scheduled under current law. For example, the reduction in benefits for a 45-year old average earner is less than 1 percent; for a 35-year-old, less than 5 percent; and for a 25-year-old, less than 9 percent. Reductions are smaller for lower earners, and larger for higher ones."
In keeping with the need to present this initiative, when it becomes public, as a howling emergency requiring immediate passage, details are impossible to come by yet. But one thing is for sure - all the economists on this "summit," all the politicians and other talking heads agree that "long term deficit strains" mean your entitlements, not those of the investor class --- Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. The economists who will be consulted by the "fiscal responsibility summit" will be all those who confused the debt creation of the housing bubble with "wealth creation," who predicted it would last forever, and who solemnly assured us that handing over a trillion or three, no strings attached, to Wall Street predators for their yearly bonuses would "rescue" and restart the economy.
Economists who predicted the bubble and the bailout, like Michael Hudson, Dean Baker, Paul Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and John Galbraith will not be invited, consulted or even quoted in the rooms where the Obama-endorsed bipartisan fiscal responsibility summit convenes. Those kind of economists have been effectively banned from the corporate media, exiled to spaces where their voices are not heard by most of the public, and blacklisted by the Obama administration, which prefers to get its economic advice from the same crew that gave us the bubble and its aftermath, and profited massively from both.
There are also whispers that the discredited former congressman Harold Ford may be in line for an administration appointment, perhaps for Secretary of Commerce or some lesser position. Since leaving Congress, Ford has a cushy job as a VP at Merrill Lynch. Within weeks of receiving billions in federal bailout money via a Bank of America buyout, Merrill Lynch paid out $800 million in bonuses, $696 million of it to its top 100 employees. Ford was doubtless one of those instant millionaires.
The idea that the man who once claimed his black grandmother was white to get a few extra votes, and who offered himself to Bush as a swing vote to privatize Social Security has anything to offer an Obama administration ought to be laughed out of any unpadded room. But after appointing a bloodstained Reaganite war criminal to head the Pentagon, with defense lobbyist William Lynn as his assistant, after Obama's CIA chief affirmed the administration's intention to continue cross-border kidnappings (called "extraordinary renditions") to hand victims over to torturers, and its lawyers blocked the attempts of torture and kidnap victims to seek redress in the courts because of state secrecy, the same grounds cited by the Bush Justice Department -- after all these things, and after the administration's defiance of the majority of US public opinion on investigating the crimes of the Bush era, nobody is laughing.
The newly confirmed deputy chief at the Pentagon was that agency's chief financial officer for most of the 1990s, when an estimated two or three trillion simply vanished without a trace. So don't expect the "fiscal responsibility" summit to even look in that direction. As the Obama administration and its rapacious economic advisers turn their attention from Wall Street giveaways to lecturing the nation on "fiscal responsibility," it's time to beware.
Obama Administration and Wall Street Predators Target “Entitlement Reform”
by Bruce Dixon, The Black Agenda Report
When the corporate media, Wall Street predators and their favorite politicians talk of "entitlement reform," they are not referring to their bonuses, or tax breaks, golden parachutes or consulting fees. They mean to "reform" your Social Security, your Medicaid, your Medicare, all of which they view as "fiscally irresponsible." When President Obama endorses a bipartisan summit on "fiscal responsibility" it's time to look out.
Not satisfied with its multi-trillion dollar raids on the US Treasury, predatory bankers and the Wall Street investor class have in sight their next target of opportunity. It's what their bipartisan pundits and politicians call "entitlement reform." It's what the rest of us call Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, and their "reform" is our ruin.
Wall Street is nothing if not bipartisan on this issue. The 2008 election marked a decisive shift in campaign contributions away from Republican presidential candidates and toward Democrats. Obama's economic A-Team is composed of former execs of firms like Goldman-Sachs that benefited most from the housing and dot com bubbles, and faces like those of Paul Volcker and Robert Rubin, who helped create it. But now that thieves have cleaned out the Treasury, they are ready to lecture us on "fiscal responsibility." The bailouts have blown a gaping hole in the federal budget, a hole that has to be made up for somewhere else.
Ominously, President Obama is talking about Medicare and Social Security in their language, as places where sacrifices will have to be made, and budgets will have to be cut for the sake of trimming the nation's multi-trillion dollar deficit. Words, in the worlds of politics and public policy mean everything, especially when they don't mean exactly what they say. Forty years ago public figures who opposed school desegregation would define themselves as being "against forced busing." Today's economic reactionaries, whose aim is the repeal the last remnants of the Great Society and the New Deal, claim to stand for "entitlement reform."
Among the nation's top "entitlement reformers", and therefore leading contenders for the post of Health and Human Services secretary in the Obama administration is Tennessee's Phil Bredesen, who as governor authored some of the most savage Medicaid cuts anywhere, depriving 170,000 adults and tens of thousands of children of access to medical care, condemning thousands to needless disabilities and early deaths, and their families to unnecessary impoverishment.
Since taking a chainsaw to Medicaid in Tennessee, Harvard alum Phil Bredesen has been hailed as a national model by the bipartisan champions of "entitlement reform." As President Obama's HHS Secretary he will have the power to unilaterally change rules and requirements for patients and providers across the board, and will be the presidential point-man for whatever the administration chooses to call "health care reform."
What kind of guy is Team Obama considering for HHS Secretary? While governor of Tennessee, Bredesen accepted $150,000 from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee to redecorate the governor's mansion. He has since told the Wall Street Journal that the voices of insurance companies and health care providers ought to be more important in the process of crafting a national health care plan than those of ordinary people. Only the willfully blind and foolish can suppose Team Obama are ignorant of Bredesen's record and views, or that they mean nothing because the president makes the policy. The fact that the White House has not ruled out Bredesen, even though late reports indicate that Kansas governor Kathleen Sibelus is also a strong contender, are serious warnings to all who would hear.
In the same vein, the Wall Street Journal reported Feb. 14 that President Obama has given his blessing to a group of congressional Blue Dogs who will convene a bipartisan February 23 "fiscal responsibility summit" that will produce non-amendable and filibuster-proof legislation to "fix" Medicaid, and possibly Social Security.
"The president met with 44 fiscally conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats this week and gave a nod to legislation that would set up commissions to deal with long-term deficit strains. The commissions would then present plans to Congress for an up-or-down vote.
"We feel like we've found a partner in the White House," said Rep. Charlie Melancon (D., La.), a Blue Dog co-chairman."
Rolling back Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare have been longstanding goals of America's bipartisan elite investor class, and these goals have always found supporters among "liberal" corporate Democrats. President Clinton too, convened a bipartisan commission headed by Democratic senator Daniel Monyhan to "fix" social security, but the fight to impeach him took all the air out of the room and left him unable, fortuantely, to pursue this agenda. Just as "only Nixon could go to China", only a popular Democrat, the political calculus goes, has a chance of putting through as enormous betrayal to his or her base as completing the repeals of the New Deal and the Great Society.
The Brookings Institution is a Democrat-leaning think tank every bit as loyal to the corporate agenda as the right wing Heritage Foundation, but a resting place for Democratic policymakers temporarily out of government. The definitive "liberal" plan for "fixing" Social Security is a Brookings Institution document from 2003 titled "Saving Social Security: The Diamond-Orzag Plan. The good people at FireDogLake.com have offered the following excerpt therefrom, along with a link to the original.
"The Social Security deficit can be eliminated only through different combinations of politically painful choices: tax increases and benefit reductions. Unfortunately, too many analysts and politicians have ignored this reality, responding to the painful alternatives by embracing "free lunch" approaches.
"Our plan makes the painful choices that are necessary—selecting a combination of benefit and revenue changes to restore long-term balance. In doing so, it focuses on three areas which contribute to the actuarial imbalance: improvements in life expectancy, increases in earnings inequality, and the burden of the legacy debt from Social Security’s early history.
"Workers who are 55 or older will experience no change in their benefits from those scheduled under current law. For younger workers with average earnings, our proposal involves a gradual reduction in benefits from those scheduled under current law. For example, the reduction in benefits for a 45-year old average earner is less than 1 percent; for a 35-year-old, less than 5 percent; and for a 25-year-old, less than 9 percent. Reductions are smaller for lower earners, and larger for higher ones."
In keeping with the need to present this initiative, when it becomes public, as a howling emergency requiring immediate passage, details are impossible to come by yet. But one thing is for sure - all the economists on this "summit," all the politicians and other talking heads agree that "long term deficit strains" mean your entitlements, not those of the investor class --- Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. The economists who will be consulted by the "fiscal responsibility summit" will be all those who confused the debt creation of the housing bubble with "wealth creation," who predicted it would last forever, and who solemnly assured us that handing over a trillion or three, no strings attached, to Wall Street predators for their yearly bonuses would "rescue" and restart the economy.
Economists who predicted the bubble and the bailout, like Michael Hudson, Dean Baker, Paul Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and John Galbraith will not be invited, consulted or even quoted in the rooms where the Obama-endorsed bipartisan fiscal responsibility summit convenes. Those kind of economists have been effectively banned from the corporate media, exiled to spaces where their voices are not heard by most of the public, and blacklisted by the Obama administration, which prefers to get its economic advice from the same crew that gave us the bubble and its aftermath, and profited massively from both.
There are also whispers that the discredited former congressman Harold Ford may be in line for an administration appointment, perhaps for Secretary of Commerce or some lesser position. Since leaving Congress, Ford has a cushy job as a VP at Merrill Lynch. Within weeks of receiving billions in federal bailout money via a Bank of America buyout, Merrill Lynch paid out $800 million in bonuses, $696 million of it to its top 100 employees. Ford was doubtless one of those instant millionaires.
The idea that the man who once claimed his black grandmother was white to get a few extra votes, and who offered himself to Bush as a swing vote to privatize Social Security has anything to offer an Obama administration ought to be laughed out of any unpadded room. But after appointing a bloodstained Reaganite war criminal to head the Pentagon, with defense lobbyist William Lynn as his assistant, after Obama's CIA chief affirmed the administration's intention to continue cross-border kidnappings (called "extraordinary renditions") to hand victims over to torturers, and its lawyers blocked the attempts of torture and kidnap victims to seek redress in the courts because of state secrecy, the same grounds cited by the Bush Justice Department -- after all these things, and after the administration's defiance of the majority of US public opinion on investigating the crimes of the Bush era, nobody is laughing.
The newly confirmed deputy chief at the Pentagon was that agency's chief financial officer for most of the 1990s, when an estimated two or three trillion simply vanished without a trace. So don't expect the "fiscal responsibility" summit to even look in that direction. As the Obama administration and its rapacious economic advisers turn their attention from Wall Street giveaways to lecturing the nation on "fiscal responsibility," it's time to beware.
posted by Malik Isasis at
12:07 AM
1 Comments:
Thats a very good blog and raises the key questions of how the Democratic controlled government can continue to spit in the face of its base supporters and a majority of people feel as if the Democrats really are that "different" or polar opposites to Republicans. They are only different in their approaches to come to common biparitsan coroporate goals...
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