Sunday, December 19, 2004
Social Security: Significant Congressional Opposition?
Republican congressional leaders have indicated they will support Bush's plan for private accounts, yet deficit concerns have sparked resistance. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa and Representative Jim Kolbe of Arizona are among Republicans who say higher taxes may be needed to win bipartisan support for private accounts.
Democratic Representatives Robert Matsui of California and John Spratt of South Carolina said the administration's first priority should be reducing the federal budget deficit and only then can it deal with Social Security. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=af_7nCvb9Rm4&refer=top_world_news
The Media and Social Security: Commentary
A "NewsNight with Aaron Brown," report recently misleadingly entitled "Social Security is in Trouble," CNN's Bruce Morton quoted Republican Senator Lindsey Graham together with pro-privatization activists from the Concord Coalition and the Cato Institute. Notably, no anti-privatization voices were aired during his report. Graham was also trotted out as the voice of privatization (or "reform" in the language of its supporters and a compliant press) by CNN anchor, Lou Dobbs, during which he claimed—unchallenged— "Social Security is going bankrupt, it's coming apart at the seams…We're short of money to pay the benefits. If we do nothing, the cost will be trillions, if we do something progressive, the cost can be managed. But to do nothing is a death blow to Social Security."
Instead of questioning the truth of Graham's statements, which are wholly unsupported by either CBO or Social Security's own data, Republican political contributor, Dobbs simply walked Graham right into his next talking point, saying "Let's talk about the idea of private accounts…"
As with the Iraq war, proponents of the Bush plan seek to tar their better-informed opposition as irresponsible and not to be trusted. New York Times' conservative columnist, David Brooks complained that "The people setting the tone for the opposition to the Bush Social Security effort depict the financial markets as huge, organized scams where the rich prey upon the weak. Their phrases are already familiar: a risky scheme, Enron accounting, a gift to the securities industry, greedy speculators preying upon Grandma's pension." Once again, we are expected to take the Bush administration's intentions, competence and veracity on faith; once again, reporters are assisting in the creation of a fictional universe in which "reality" only rears its head after the damage done to those least able to bear it is permanent and irreversible. Perhaps then some of them will learn to say they're sorry. In the meantime, the media has a ways to go to redeem themselves. Let's hope they begin sometime soon. http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=272724
AARP, AFL-CIO and ?
A number of groups opposed to restructuring Social Security, including advocates for the disabled, senior citizen groups and AFL-CIO unions, announced on Thursday they are forming a coalition to counter what is expected to be a major White House's push to promote private investment accounts.
Roger Hickey, co-director of the liberal Campaign for America's Future, called it a "broad coalition of organizations, many of them representing millions and millions of people who are going to fight the president and defeat him on Social Security privatization. We think it is a bad idea and even shocking to many Republican legislators." http://www.reuters.com/printerFriendlyPopup.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=7116094
Fighting Dems: Hardly. The Pelosi-Reid statement:
The President's economic summit should have been an opportunity to begin an honest discussion about strengthening and improving Social Security, and we have been encouraged to hear that the President would like to work on a bipartisan basis.
Oy vey. They must term it a phony crisis, the latest con.... Or else, they’ll sell us down the river…again.
New Intelligence Agency Few of us have apparently been caught up in this ‘most profound change in our intelligence network since World War II.’ Understandable. Yet, we should note some of the ramifications. For example:
The creation of the NID is an appalling idea. It puts all 14 intelligence agencies UNDER A POLITICAL APPOINTEE, which is an invitation for disaster. We all know how corrupted information was before the Iraq war; imagine what it will look like after it travels through the executive sausage-making unit. It's unlikely that anything remotely resembling the truth will ever emerge from the Bush White House. The new bill creates a new national ID card ("Let me see your papers") by federalizing driver's licenses. The plan is to establish federal guidelines in the design of licenses that can be used as a means for tracking people. These standards are unnecessary unless the government is developing a social strategy that is so heinous that it's bound to generate more enemies. The increased repression and the greater disparity in personal wealth suggest that this is the case. Democracy Now elaborates on the new national ID: "There's all sorts of new technologies that could be incorporated into the driver's license to link it to all sorts of public and private-sector databases. And you could also imagine putting an RFID chip in the license that would allow it to be tracked remotely. So, this is something the 9/11 commission had actually recommended be done, that the driver's license should be something like an internal passport of the sort that we've seen in the Soviet Union in the past, and although the Congress wasn't willing to explicitly go that far, they have laid the groundwork for that kind of checkpoint society in the future." Did you hear any complaints from Congress over this hallmark of fascist's regimes? http://www.progressivetrail.org/articles/041216Whitney.shtml
What’s Happening, Iraq: Saturday it was announced that “hundreds” of “insurgents” remained in Fallujah; now, up north…
Gunmen raked a car with machine-gun fire in the northern city of Mosul yesterday, killing three foreigners and their driver. They then cut off the head of one of their victims.
The killings show that at the same time as the US was recapturing Fallujah in a heavily publicised assault it largely lost control of Mosul, Iraq's northern capital… http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=594312
And, elsewhere:
Car bombs tore through a Najaf funeral procession and Karbala's main bus station Sunday, killing at least 60 people and wounding more than 120 in the two Shiite holy cities. In Baghdad, gunmen launched a bold ambush, executing three election officials, in their campaign to disrupt next month's parliamentary ballot. http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041219/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_041219182930
Torture and Rumseld: His fingerprints…
Renewed exposure of prisoner abuse, torture and even murder by American military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan is widening already deep divisions between the Pentagon and the intelligence community -- and creating an untenable situation for Donald Rumsfeld, the beleaguered secretary of defense. A recently disclosed FBI memo indicates that "marching orders" to abandon traditional interrogation methods came from the defense secretary himself. http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2004/12/17/memo/index_np.html
TIME magazine honors Bush. No surprise; grimace and read…
President Bush's bold, uncompromising leadership and his clear-cut election victory made him Time magazine's ``Person of the Year'' for 2004, its managing editor said on Sunday.
Time chose Bush ``for sticking to his guns (literally and figuratively), for reshaping the rules of politics to fit his 10-gallon-hat leadership style and for persuading a majority of voters this time around that he deserved to be in the White House for another four years,'' Jim Kelly wrote in the magazine. http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-media-time-person.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=
The Liberal Public:
Nearly half of all Americans believe the U.S. government should restrict the civil liberties of Muslim Americans, according to a nationwide poll. The survey conducted by Cornell University also found that Republicans and people who described themselves as highly religious were more apt to support curtailing Muslims' civil liberties than Democrats or people who are less religious. http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&u=/ap/20041218/ap_on_re_us/muslims_civil_liberties&printer=1
What’s Happening, Venezuela: Chavez Rules. Will Cheney et al respond?
Record world oil prices have filled Venezuela's treasury and helped President Hugo Chávez and his "Bolivarian Revolution for the poor" win two elections in recent months. Now, freed from worries about domestic political opposition, Mr. Chávez is using his new wealth to extend his influence beyond his nation's borders - and perhaps escalate his long-running confrontation with Washington, say observers.
In recent months, Chávez has expanded Venezuela's policy of supplying oil at below-market prices to poor neighbors. He has also made a major arms purchase from Russia and pushed for the creation of a regional petroleum corporation. A firebrand populist and admirer of Cuba's Fidel Castro, Chávez has often spoken of spreading his leftist vision across this continent, in contrast to the conservative economic policies that swept South America in the 1990s.http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1220/p06s01-woam.html
Latest Environmental Travesty:
Two weeks of negotiations at a United Nations conference here on climate change ended early Saturday with a weak pledge to start limited, informal talks on ways to slow down global warming, after the United States blocked efforts to begin more substantive discussions.
The main focus was to discuss the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which goes into force on Feb. 16 and will require industrial nations to make substantial cuts in their emissions of so-called greenhouse gases. But another goal had been to draw the United States, which withdrew from the accord in 2001, back into discussions about ways to mitigate climate change after 2012, when the Kyoto agreement expires…
"This is a new low for the United States, not just to pull out, but to block other countries from moving ahead on their own path," said Jeff Fiedler, an observer representing the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council. "It's almost spiteful to say, 'You can't move ahead without us.' If you're not going to lead, then get out of the way." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/science/19climate.html?pagewanted=all
-R
Republican congressional leaders have indicated they will support Bush's plan for private accounts, yet deficit concerns have sparked resistance. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa and Representative Jim Kolbe of Arizona are among Republicans who say higher taxes may be needed to win bipartisan support for private accounts.
Democratic Representatives Robert Matsui of California and John Spratt of South Carolina said the administration's first priority should be reducing the federal budget deficit and only then can it deal with Social Security. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=af_7nCvb9Rm4&refer=top_world_news
The Media and Social Security: Commentary
A "NewsNight with Aaron Brown," report recently misleadingly entitled "Social Security is in Trouble," CNN's Bruce Morton quoted Republican Senator Lindsey Graham together with pro-privatization activists from the Concord Coalition and the Cato Institute. Notably, no anti-privatization voices were aired during his report. Graham was also trotted out as the voice of privatization (or "reform" in the language of its supporters and a compliant press) by CNN anchor, Lou Dobbs, during which he claimed—unchallenged— "Social Security is going bankrupt, it's coming apart at the seams…We're short of money to pay the benefits. If we do nothing, the cost will be trillions, if we do something progressive, the cost can be managed. But to do nothing is a death blow to Social Security."
Instead of questioning the truth of Graham's statements, which are wholly unsupported by either CBO or Social Security's own data, Republican political contributor, Dobbs simply walked Graham right into his next talking point, saying "Let's talk about the idea of private accounts…"
As with the Iraq war, proponents of the Bush plan seek to tar their better-informed opposition as irresponsible and not to be trusted. New York Times' conservative columnist, David Brooks complained that "The people setting the tone for the opposition to the Bush Social Security effort depict the financial markets as huge, organized scams where the rich prey upon the weak. Their phrases are already familiar: a risky scheme, Enron accounting, a gift to the securities industry, greedy speculators preying upon Grandma's pension." Once again, we are expected to take the Bush administration's intentions, competence and veracity on faith; once again, reporters are assisting in the creation of a fictional universe in which "reality" only rears its head after the damage done to those least able to bear it is permanent and irreversible. Perhaps then some of them will learn to say they're sorry. In the meantime, the media has a ways to go to redeem themselves. Let's hope they begin sometime soon. http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=272724
AARP, AFL-CIO and ?
A number of groups opposed to restructuring Social Security, including advocates for the disabled, senior citizen groups and AFL-CIO unions, announced on Thursday they are forming a coalition to counter what is expected to be a major White House's push to promote private investment accounts.
Roger Hickey, co-director of the liberal Campaign for America's Future, called it a "broad coalition of organizations, many of them representing millions and millions of people who are going to fight the president and defeat him on Social Security privatization. We think it is a bad idea and even shocking to many Republican legislators." http://www.reuters.com/printerFriendlyPopup.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=7116094
Fighting Dems: Hardly. The Pelosi-Reid statement:
The President's economic summit should have been an opportunity to begin an honest discussion about strengthening and improving Social Security, and we have been encouraged to hear that the President would like to work on a bipartisan basis.
Oy vey. They must term it a phony crisis, the latest con.... Or else, they’ll sell us down the river…again.
New Intelligence Agency Few of us have apparently been caught up in this ‘most profound change in our intelligence network since World War II.’ Understandable. Yet, we should note some of the ramifications. For example:
The creation of the NID is an appalling idea. It puts all 14 intelligence agencies UNDER A POLITICAL APPOINTEE, which is an invitation for disaster. We all know how corrupted information was before the Iraq war; imagine what it will look like after it travels through the executive sausage-making unit. It's unlikely that anything remotely resembling the truth will ever emerge from the Bush White House. The new bill creates a new national ID card ("Let me see your papers") by federalizing driver's licenses. The plan is to establish federal guidelines in the design of licenses that can be used as a means for tracking people. These standards are unnecessary unless the government is developing a social strategy that is so heinous that it's bound to generate more enemies. The increased repression and the greater disparity in personal wealth suggest that this is the case. Democracy Now elaborates on the new national ID: "There's all sorts of new technologies that could be incorporated into the driver's license to link it to all sorts of public and private-sector databases. And you could also imagine putting an RFID chip in the license that would allow it to be tracked remotely. So, this is something the 9/11 commission had actually recommended be done, that the driver's license should be something like an internal passport of the sort that we've seen in the Soviet Union in the past, and although the Congress wasn't willing to explicitly go that far, they have laid the groundwork for that kind of checkpoint society in the future." Did you hear any complaints from Congress over this hallmark of fascist's regimes? http://www.progressivetrail.org/articles/041216Whitney.shtml
What’s Happening, Iraq: Saturday it was announced that “hundreds” of “insurgents” remained in Fallujah; now, up north…
Gunmen raked a car with machine-gun fire in the northern city of Mosul yesterday, killing three foreigners and their driver. They then cut off the head of one of their victims.
The killings show that at the same time as the US was recapturing Fallujah in a heavily publicised assault it largely lost control of Mosul, Iraq's northern capital… http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=594312
And, elsewhere:
Car bombs tore through a Najaf funeral procession and Karbala's main bus station Sunday, killing at least 60 people and wounding more than 120 in the two Shiite holy cities. In Baghdad, gunmen launched a bold ambush, executing three election officials, in their campaign to disrupt next month's parliamentary ballot. http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041219/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_041219182930
Torture and Rumseld: His fingerprints…
Renewed exposure of prisoner abuse, torture and even murder by American military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan is widening already deep divisions between the Pentagon and the intelligence community -- and creating an untenable situation for Donald Rumsfeld, the beleaguered secretary of defense. A recently disclosed FBI memo indicates that "marching orders" to abandon traditional interrogation methods came from the defense secretary himself. http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2004/12/17/memo/index_np.html
TIME magazine honors Bush. No surprise; grimace and read…
President Bush's bold, uncompromising leadership and his clear-cut election victory made him Time magazine's ``Person of the Year'' for 2004, its managing editor said on Sunday.
Time chose Bush ``for sticking to his guns (literally and figuratively), for reshaping the rules of politics to fit his 10-gallon-hat leadership style and for persuading a majority of voters this time around that he deserved to be in the White House for another four years,'' Jim Kelly wrote in the magazine. http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-media-time-person.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=
The Liberal Public:
Nearly half of all Americans believe the U.S. government should restrict the civil liberties of Muslim Americans, according to a nationwide poll. The survey conducted by Cornell University also found that Republicans and people who described themselves as highly religious were more apt to support curtailing Muslims' civil liberties than Democrats or people who are less religious. http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&u=/ap/20041218/ap_on_re_us/muslims_civil_liberties&printer=1
What’s Happening, Venezuela: Chavez Rules. Will Cheney et al respond?
Record world oil prices have filled Venezuela's treasury and helped President Hugo Chávez and his "Bolivarian Revolution for the poor" win two elections in recent months. Now, freed from worries about domestic political opposition, Mr. Chávez is using his new wealth to extend his influence beyond his nation's borders - and perhaps escalate his long-running confrontation with Washington, say observers.
In recent months, Chávez has expanded Venezuela's policy of supplying oil at below-market prices to poor neighbors. He has also made a major arms purchase from Russia and pushed for the creation of a regional petroleum corporation. A firebrand populist and admirer of Cuba's Fidel Castro, Chávez has often spoken of spreading his leftist vision across this continent, in contrast to the conservative economic policies that swept South America in the 1990s.http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1220/p06s01-woam.html
Latest Environmental Travesty:
Two weeks of negotiations at a United Nations conference here on climate change ended early Saturday with a weak pledge to start limited, informal talks on ways to slow down global warming, after the United States blocked efforts to begin more substantive discussions.
The main focus was to discuss the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which goes into force on Feb. 16 and will require industrial nations to make substantial cuts in their emissions of so-called greenhouse gases. But another goal had been to draw the United States, which withdrew from the accord in 2001, back into discussions about ways to mitigate climate change after 2012, when the Kyoto agreement expires…
"This is a new low for the United States, not just to pull out, but to block other countries from moving ahead on their own path," said Jeff Fiedler, an observer representing the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council. "It's almost spiteful to say, 'You can't move ahead without us.' If you're not going to lead, then get out of the way." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/science/19climate.html?pagewanted=all
-R
