Progressive Opinion

truth-out.org — As we approach budget time we can look forward to another burst of handwringing by the Washington elites, who will once again tell us about the need to cut Social Security and Medicare. News stories and opinion columns will be filled with solemn pronouncements about how these programs must be curtailed before they drive the nation to bankruptcy. We can look forward to that famously deceptive graph showing how the cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are projected to soar as a share of the economy over the next two or three decades. Those with good eyes will notice that it is the cost of Medicare and Medicaid that are soaring, not Social Security. But this is old hat. We know that the elites tell stories to advance their agenda. What is worth noting — and celebrating — is that thus far they have failed.

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slate.com — Today’s the day when Washington officially comes to terms with the fact that the “Supercommittee”— a bipartisan, bicameral group charged with reducing America’s long-term fiscal deficit — won’t agree on anything. This is being termed a “failure,” and by the standards of D.C.’s fetishization of bipartisanship, it is one. But in terms of deficit reduction, failure is actually better than success. By failing, in other words, not only did the Supercommittee preserve a larger set of spending cuts than would have been enacted if they succeeded, they preserved the current-law baseline. That means that if the White House follows through on its threat to veto any full extension of the Bush tax cuts, we’ll get both more tax increases and more spending cuts than we would have if they’d succeeded.

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progressive.org — Thank God the Congressional Super Committee failed to reach an agreement. It was a bad idea in the first place, and Obama and the Democrats should never have pushed it. It focused too much attention on deficits, which aren’t the biggest problem we’re facing right now. High unemployment is the real crisis, and the more obsessed we all are with deficits, the less room there is to address unemployment. The Super Committee also was a bad idea procedurally as it bypassed the usual way Congress makes laws. In this sense, it was an end around democracy.

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alternet.org — The bipartisan super committee will probably fail to meet the self-imposed November 23rd deadline to enact $1.2trillion of cuts over the next ten years. That failure, as Paul Krugman notes in the New York Times, is a good thing: “Any deal reached now would almost surely end up worsening the economic slump. Slashing spending while the economy is depressed destroys jobs, and it’s probably even counterproductive in terms of deficit reduction, since it leads to lower revenue both now and in the future.” The economics of the super committee, indeed that of virtually all of the mainstream Washington policy establishment, is still predicated on the economic equivalent of Medieval blood-letting. Continuing to “draw blood” from the US economy via ongoing cuts in government expenditure at a time of high unemployment and underused resources will ensure the patient’s death, not recovery.

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blog.aflcio.org — In a packed hearing room at the U.S. Senate, participants in a “Jobs, Not Cuts!” rally keynoted by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), erupted into the chant that has come to identify the Occupy movement: “We are the 99 percent!”  Most of the chanters bore little resemblance to the stereotyped image of an Occupy protester–many were senior citizens, and the young people in the audience bore a distinctly clean-cut look. It all served to prove Sanders’ point that mainsteram American wants the wealthiest Americans to pay more taxes, and they want Congress not to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicate.

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otherwords.org — Between 1979 and 2007, the after-tax household income of America's most affluent 1 percent ballooned by 275 percent, while the bottom 20 percent's income inched up just 18 percent. The top 1 percent now owns more than an entire third of the nation's wealth, which is more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent. From these sad facts you might correctly deduce that America's "Class War" is nearly over. The rich are now just mopping up. They recently tied up a few loose ends when Congress finally passed those long-stalled, job-killing "free trade" agreements with Colombia, South Korea, and Panama. Now if they can just privatize Social Security and Medicare, the whole conflict will be over.

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truth-out.org — The austerity gang seeking cuts to Social Security and Medicare have been vigorously promoting the myth that the elderly are an especially affluent and privileged group. Their argument is that because of their relative affluence, cuts to the programs upon which they depend is a simple matter of fairness. There were two reports released last week that call this view into question. The first was a report from the Census Bureau that used a new experimental poverty index. While these new measures showed a slightly higher overall poverty rate, the most striking difference between the new measure and the official measure was the rise in the poverty rate among the elderly.

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rollingstone.com — David Brooks, the [gratuitous insult deleted], wrote this this morning entitled "Mitt Romney, the Serious One." In it, he explained how Romney’s recent decision to unveil a plan for reforming the entitlement system "demonstrates his awareness of the issues that need to define the 2012 presidential election." So we had a giant financial crash in 2008 that necessitated a bailout costing a minimum of nearly $5 trillion and perhaps ultimately costing $10 trillion more, we have foreclosure crisis with more than million people a year losing their homes, and we have a burgeoning European debt disaster that threatens to devastate the global financial system — and the chief issue facing the country, according to Brooks and the Times, is reforming the entitlement system? Romney’s ideas are not as draconian as Paul Ryan's, but they do pave the way for Wall Street’s ultimate goal — full privatization of Social Security and Medicare.

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politics.salon.com — Anybody who discerns a relationship between a decade of keeping the “have-mores’” yachts and Lear jets running smoothly and a manufactured crisis supposedly threatening grandma’s monthly Social Security check must be some kind of radical leftist. That, or somebody skeptical of the decades-long propaganda war against America’s most efficient, successful and popular social insurance program. It’s an effort that’s falsely persuaded millions of younger Americans that Social Security is in its last days and made crying wolf a test of “seriousness” among Beltway courtier-pundits like the Post’s Lori Montgomery, who concocted an imaginary front page emergency out of a relatively meaningless actuarial event. All in service, alas, of a single unstated premise: The “have-mores” have made off with grandma’s money fair and square. They have no intention of paying it back.

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thenation.com — There’s right-wing hypocrisy, and then there’s this: Charles Koch, billionaire patron of free-market libertarianism, privately championed the benefits of Social Security to Friedrich Hayek, the leading laissez-faire economist of the twentieth century. Koch even sent Hayek a government pamphlet to help him take advantage of America’s federal retirement insurance and healthcare programs. The private correspondence between two of the most important figures shaping the Republican Party’s economic policies — billionaire libertarian Charles Koch and Nobel Prize–winning economist Friedrich Hayek, godfather of today’s free-market movement — offer a rare glimpse into how these two major free-market apostles privately felt about government assistance programs — revealing a shocking degree of cynicism and an unimaginable betrayal of the ideas they sold to the American public and the rest of the world.

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