Larry Summers wanted a flagging economy so he could torpedo Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid

this goes back to a point i've made countless times here... there is nothing whatsoever incompetent about how our super-rich elites are running the show... the constant carping about incompetence under george bush made me crazy... those bush administration bastards knew exactly what they were doing and so do the bastards running the obama administration... they're carrying on with the same agenda that's been vigorously pursued since ronald reagan - shredding of the social contract and making sure that those who have the money and the power not only keep it but add to it significantly... and, guess what...? it's working splendidly...!

mike whitney in counterpunch...

What [Obama’s chief economics advisor, Lawrence Summers] wanted was exactly what he got, a slow, underperforming economy with high unemployment and huge deficits. Does anyone really think that an economist with Summers’ impressive education and experience could be $1 trillion off in his calculations? (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was eventually whittled down to $787 billion) It’s ridiculous. Summers wanted a flagging economy so he could torpedo Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. These were the targets from the very beginning.

As for Obama, well, he probably figured that the $800 billion fiscal package would be enough to carry him over the finish-line in the 2012 elections, but not so big that it would subvert the goals of his chief economics advisor who was beholden to Wall Street and big business. In truth, Obama wanted the same thing as Summers, a justification for attacking the meager programs that keep the elderly and vulnerable from destitution.


[...]


Obama could allocate $300 billion per year to rehire the 650,000 teachers and other state and local workers who’ve been laid off since the crash. That would be the easiest thing to do. Skip all the red-tape connected to infrastructure and gov job’s programs and just rehire the people who got their pink slip after the crash. The money spent on jobs would more than pay for itself by raising state revenues and boosting economic activity by many orders of magnitude.


Have you seen a graph of how many (state and local) jobs have been lost under Obama? It’s shocking! Take a look: http://streetlightblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/government-job-destruction.html

We need to get these people back to work so they can feed their families and pay the bills. If we can afford $11 trillion to bail out crooked bankers, we can certainly afford a measly $300 mil for hard-working middle class families. It’s just a matter of priorities.


[...]

Obama is just as committed to gutting Social Security as Romney. The only difference is that he’s a better pitchman. Much better.

and where do you suppose all that money will go after social security and medicare lie in ruins...? hmmmm...? that's right... the social darwin .0001% are closing ranks, raising the drawbridge, flooding the moat and heating up the barrels of oil... when the peasants finally storm the castle, they want to make sure their fortress is impenetrable...

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Robert Scheer: Love the fetus and shun the child

to me, it's the height of bald-faced hypocrisy to rail and fulminate over abortions and then to leave vulnerable children poor and hungry while sending our young adults desperate for work to fight and die in wars that only benefit the super-rich elites... and that's not even to mention the enormous death toll of citizens of other countries the is the grim legacy of our pursuit of endless war...

from truthdig via common dreams...

The death of American liberalism as a significant moral force can be traced to the point in 1996 when President Bill Clinton signed legislation that effectively ended the main federal anti-poverty program and turned the fate of welfare recipients, 70 percent of whom were children, over to the tender mercies of the states. With a stroke of the pen, Clinton eliminated what remained of New Deal-era compassion for the poor and codified into law the “tough love” callousness that his Republican allies in the Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, had long embraced.

The ensuing wave of state-imposed eligibility restrictions was designed to replace the war on poverty with a war on welfare recipients, with the result that in this time of economic crisis the poor have nowhere to turn. It also allowed states to play in a meanness derby, cutting the welfare rolls and forcing many of the desperate to cross state lines to locales where they might survive. “My take on it was the states would push people off [the assistance lists] and not let them back on, and that’s just what they did,” said Peter B. Edelman, who resigned from the Clinton administration over this issue and who told the Times for the recent article, “It’s been even worse than I thought it would be."

Edelman, now a law professor at Georgetown University, was a close friend of the Clintons. His principled resignation was a rare exception to the cheerleading by Democrats who celebrated President Clinton’s betrayal of the poor as shrewd triangulation.

[...]

Calling the shots on spending for the most vulnerable since the Clinton revisions went into effect, the states have diverted funds for the poor to filling other holes in state budgets. Consequently, as the New York Times piece noted last week, “Just one in five poor children now receive cash aid, the lowest level in nearly 50 years.”

The response of the right-to-life Republicans has been typical—indifference to the fate of the fetus once it’s born.

the "i've got mine so screw you" mentality has not only modeled itself on cold indifference, it's morphed into a contest to see who can be more petty and just plain mean...

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The 1% is a social darwinist force bent on destroying the essential social contract

i've said since i started posting on this blog back in 2005 that there is nothing our 1% desires more fervently than to drive a stake through the heart of any explicit or implied social contract... they are truly the champions of the "you're on your own" society, a dystopian, randian, survivalist nightmare that would turn a blind eye to any effort to support the common good...

robert scheer equates the 1% with the republicans, an equivalency i believe is less than accurate, particularly given the lack of any discernible daylight between the repubs and the dems...

It is with chilling certainty that one can predict that a single Romney appointee to the Supreme Court would seal the coup of the 1 percent that already is well on its way toward purchasing the nation’s political soul. Romney is the quintessential Citizens United super PAC candidate, a man who has turned avarice into virtue and comes to us now as a once-moderate politician transformed into the ultimate prophet of imperial hubris, blaming everyone from the Chinese to laid-off American workers for our problems. Everyone, that is, except the Wall Street-dominated GOP, which midwifed the Great Recession under George W. Bush and now seeks to blame Obama for the enormous deficit spawned by the party’s wanton behavior.

[...]

[T]he Republicans refuse to take ownership of the collapse resulting from their longstanding advocacy of radical financial deregulation that led to the derivatives bubble, hundreds of trillions of dollars of toxic junk, now a permanent, nightmarish feature of the world’s economy. Romney, who made his fortune through such financial finagling, even has the effrontery to call for more of the same and blame Obama’s tepid efforts at establishing some sane speed limits for the financial highway as a cause of our ongoing crisis.

scheer's conclusion is that we have no choice but to re-elect obama...

The Republicans are a sick joke, and their narrow ideological stupidity has left rational voters no choice in the coming presidential election but Barack Obama.

it was good to hear obama use the term "social darwinism" in his speech the other day... it's about damn time somebody in our national leadership dared to say it... unfortunately, however, even though i've used the term a million times myself, it's somewhat misapplied... darwinian theory claims that only the fittest survive, but in our current context, the 1% is massively underwritten by national policies designed to benefit them and their interests, the most egregious example being the massive bankster bailout...

predictably, obama's use of the term has spawned controversy...

the huffpo takes issue with obama's use of social darwinism...

For language expert Kathleen Hall Jamieson, social Darwinism seems like a risky term to use for political ammunition.

She says most people are familiar with Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection – survival of the fittest.

But Jamieson, a political communication authority at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Center, explains that social Darwinism is a concept, an extension of Darwinism, that essentially says that those who are innately superior, often biologically superior, are advantaged in the conflict among or between groups.

She doesn't think that is what Obama is suggesting when he uses the term. Instead, what he is probably trying to convey is that he thinks Republicans subscribe to a theory that each person is on his own – no help from others, no government help.

The term is loaded with all sorts of negative historical associations. It has ties in the past to the rationalization of inequality, says Jamieson, as well as to the eugenics movement and the idea that those who are unfit should not be allowed to propagate.

And that's probably not what the president intends to suggest.

jonathan chait has a different take...

I happen to think "social Darwinist" captures the prevailing Republican philosophy pretty well. The point of the label, created by historian Richard Hoftsadter, is that a species of laissez-faire economics treated the market the way Darwinians treat natural selection — as the sole natural and correct mechanism for distributing rewards. You do not have to venture into the Republican fever swamps to find evidence of this belief. Greg Mankiw, an economist, adviser to Mitt Romney, and relative moderate within the party, has written:

People should get what they deserve. A person who contributes more to society deserves a higher income that reflects those greater contributions. Society permits him that higher income not just to incentivize him, as it does according to utilitarian theory, but because that income is rightfully his.

Now, I suspect that right-wingers object to the term "social Darwinist" because it can be understood to imply a more literal application of Darwinism — that the poor should be killed off so they cannot reproduce. Almost none of them would take the theory quite so far. But the more symbolic application of Darwinism to the market, as a morally optimal tool for allocating rewards, seems appropriate. Republicans may prefer a more positive-sounding label, but in politics you don't always get to pick your label.

the biggest piece of work that needs to be done in this country is for all of us to wake up to the fact that we are ALL in this goddam boat together and that it takes ALL of us to make it work... and that realization will never come about as long as the 1% insists they are at the top of the economic ladder as a result of their own inherent self-worth... such a misbegotten notion is at the fetid, rotting core of what we so proudly extol as our "capitalist free market" while completely ignoring the dynamics of a system specifically built to empower the rich...

p.s. it's interesting to see both commentators eschew eugenics... believe me, even though - thankfully - it's not part of the national dialogue, for those who are convinced that they have achieved their lofty status in society as a result of their superior genetic attributes, the concept of eugenics is only a small step away...

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Fuck you, Larry Summers

health, education and social protection need MORE capitalism...?

Lawrence Summers: We need smart reinvention not destruction

Lawrence Summers opens an FT series on the crisis in capitalism, its failings, challenges, weaknesses and the prospects for reform.

It is not so much the most capitalist parts of the contemporary economy but the least – those concerned with health, education and social protection – that are in most need of reinvention, he says.

why does this total disgrace to humanity keep getting a forum...?

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An embarrassment for Congress and a far-reaching blow to Washington’s financial credibility...? HAHAHAHA...!

oh, yeah... like there's any financial credibility left...

what kind of credibility could possibly remain for a country that has thrown trillions of dollars at its super-rich elites and their bankster puppets, has a larger defense budget than the rest of the planet combined, flushes billions and billions of dollars into the twin sinkholes of afghanistan and iraq, smooths the way for the loss of millions of jobs to other countries but works overtime to lighten the tax loads of the very corporations responsible, allows many more millions to be thrown out of their homes with no recourse, and then - THEN - turns around and burns the midnight oil in an attempt to shred the tattered remnants of the social safety net and place the burden for all of this on the very citizens who have already been repeatedly victimized in the decades-long rape and pillage...

from a nyt op-ed...

We are no fans of the supercommittee. It is undemocratic, and the deep, automatic cuts the law would impose if the committee fails to reach agreement are gimmicky and potentially dangerous. But walking away at this point would be an embarrassment for Congress and a far-reaching blow to Washington’s financial credibility.

[...]

Simply dismissing the committee and undoing the sequester would be such a vast admission of Congressional failure that it could push down the nation’s credit rating, lead to chaos in financial markets and severely cripple hopes for an economic recovery. Republicans created the policies that forced up the deficit and then refused to compromise with President Obama. They cannot simply walk away now. Panel members have only a few days to come up with a plan that balances new revenues with spending cuts. That is the only way to wrestle down the deficit without doing huge damage to the economy and the country.

there isn't any credibility... there hasn't been any credibility for quite some time... with the congressional approval rating at a jaw-dropping 9%, talking about congressional credibility is beyond ridiculous... whatever happens - or doesn't happen - isn't going to make the slightest bit of difference to a system that is so profoundly broken, the only sensible thing to do is sit back and wait for the implosion...

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It's the 1 percent that pay for elections, not the 25 million workers suffering from Congressional greed and incompetence

the ability of our super-rich elites to use their bought and paid for elected puppets and media shills to manipulate us and pit us against each other knows no bounds...

dean baker...

It is truly impressive how the Washington elite have managed to make these modest protections for the country's working population (the 99 percent) into the greatest problem facing the country. The obsession with cutting these programs is occurring at a time when we have more than 25 million people unemployed, underemployed or who have given up looking for work altogether. One might think that Congress would convene a supercommittee to get people back to work rather than figuring out a way to undermine programs that people need, but it's the 1 percent that pay for elections, not the 25 million workers suffering from their greed and incompetence.

Since almost no one can be immune to the hysteria that the media have created around the cost of these programs, it is worth putting it in some context. Starting with Social Security, the latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office show that the program can pay all benefits through the year 2038 with no changes whatsoever.

Even if we never did anything, the program would be able to pay more than 80 percent of scheduled benefits well into the next century. Since the value of benefits is projected to rise through time, 80 percent of the projected benefit in 2040 is considerably higher than the average benefit received by retirees today. Therefore, the often repeated comment that there will be nothing there for our children or grandchildren is a telltale sign of ignorance or dishonesty.

[...]

The public should realize that "generational warfare" is an agenda that was deliberately designed by the 1 percent to distract the rest of us from the class war that they have been successfully waging over the last three decades. Rather than have a public debate on the policies that have redistributed so much income upward, the 1 percent want to pit children against their parents and grandparents, forcing them to fight over crumbs.

it's truly astounding to me that, given the state the world is in and the many issues of real substance we have facing us as a human race, that the appointed stooges of our elites can, in what only amounts to unbelievable arrogance and deliberate denial, sit in washington and deliberate how best to destroy the precious little bit that remains of our social contract...

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A call for participative democracy

yesterday, i listened in on a webinar offered by the good folks at firedoglake... the purpose was to educate members and stir up some enthusiasm for the october 6 people's assembly in d.c... the education part, at least for me, was redundant since i follow all the income inequality, bankster and motu stuff very closely... what i did find interesting was the rejection of any focus on electoral politics, a direct acknowledgement that our electoral, two-party system is seriously broken and an emphasis on the need for aligning ourselves behind a demand for a move (return?) to participative democracy...

i'm all one for working to put together critical mass... we've stood by long enough watching our super-rich elites methodically destroy any semblance of a social contract with their ugly devotion to ayn rand and social darwinism... but i confess to being utterly dismayed at the incredible splintering i witness on the so-called liberal, progressive left... everybody's out there chasing their own special set of issues, whether it's polar bears, mountain-top removal, act blue as the vehicle to fund progressive office-seekers, or ridiculing the latest atrocities to issue from the mouth-breathers that are attempting to pass for serious presidential candidates...

i found it refreshing to see the statement of seven principles the webinar presenters shared with the participants... this is something i can get behind...


(click on image for larger version)

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Krugman cheers on Elizabeth Warren

elizabeth warren's definitely got my attention (see previous post), altho' i must admit, i'd rather see her challenging obama in a primary than running for a massachusetts senate seat... she's gotten paul krugman's attention too, evidently...

Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer who is now running for the United States Senate in Massachusetts, recently made some eloquent remarks to this effect that are, rightly, getting a lot of attention. “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody,” she declared, pointing out that the rich can only get rich thanks to the “social contract” that provides a decent, functioning society in which they can prosper.

Which brings us back to those cries of “class warfare.”

Republicans claim to be deeply worried by budget deficits. Indeed, Mr. Ryan [Wisconsin Republican Congressman Paul Ryan] has called the deficit an “existential threat” to America. Yet they are insisting that the wealthy — who presumably have as much of a stake as everyone else in the nation’s future — should not be called upon to play any role in warding off that existential threat.

Well, that amounts to a demand that a small number of very lucky people be exempted from the social contract that applies to everyone else. And that, in case you’re wondering, is what real class warfare looks like.

after musing about the demise of frank rich at the nyt, i've begun wondering just how much longer the super-rich elites will tolerate krugman's voice at the gray lady... i would not be at all surprised by a resignation announcement in the near future...

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Bush’s policy was to capture (and torture) suspects, while Obama simply assassinates them

chomsky at his usual best, writing in al akhbar...

While longstanding US policies remain stable, with tactical adjustments, under Obama there have been some significant changes. Military analyst Yochi Dreazen observes in the Atlantic that Bush’s policy was to capture (and torture) suspects, while Obama simply assassinates them, with a rapid increase in terror weapons (drones) and the use of Special Forces, many of them assassination teams. Special Forces are scheduled to operate in 120 countries. Now as large as Canada’s entire military, these forces are, in effect, a private army of the president, a matter discussed in detail by American investigative journalist Nick Turse on the website Tomdispatch. The team that Obama dispatched to assassinate Osama bin Laden had already carried out perhaps a dozen similar missions in Pakistan.

As these and many other developments illustrate, though America’s hegemony has declined, its ambition has not.

Another common theme, at least among those who are not willfully blind, is that American decline is in no small measure self-inflicted. The comic opera in Washington this summer, which disgusts the country (a large majority think that Congress should just be disbanded) and bewilders the world, has few analogues in the annals of parliamentary democracy. The spectacle is even coming to frighten the sponsors of the charade. Corporate power is now concerned that the extremists they helped put in office in Congress may choose to bring down the edifice on which their own wealth and privilege relies, the powerful nanny state that caters to their interests.

The eminent American philosopher John Dewey once described politics as “the shadow cast on society by big business,” warning that “attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.” Since the 1970s, the shadow has become a dark cloud enveloping society and the political system. Corporate power, by now largely financial capital, has reached the point that both political organizations, which now barely resemble traditional parties, are far to the right of the population on the major issues under debate.

[...]

The deficit crisis is largely manufactured as a weapon to destroy hated social programs on which a large part of the population relies. Economics correspondent Martin Wolf of the London Financial Times writes that “it is not that tackling the US fiscal position is urgent…. The US is able to borrow on easy terms, with yields on 10-year bonds close to 3 percent, as the few non-hysterics predicted. The fiscal challenge is long term, not immediate.” Very significantly, he adds: “The astonishing feature of the federal fiscal position is that revenues are forecast to be a mere 14.4 percent of GDP in 2011, far below their postwar average of close to 18 percent. Individual income tax is forecast to be a mere 6.3 percent of GDP in 2011. This non-American cannot understand what the fuss is about: in 1988, at the end of Ronald Reagan’s term, receipts were 18.2 percent of GDP. Tax revenue has to rise substantially if the deficit is to close.” Astonishing indeed, but it is the demand of the financial institutions and the super-rich, and in a rapidly declining democracy, that’s what counts.

Though the deficit crisis is manufactured for reasons of savage class war, the long-term debt crisis is serious, and has been ever since Ronald Reagan’s fiscal irresponsibility turned the US from the world’s leading creditor to the world’s leading debtor, tripling national debt and raising threats to the economy that were rapidly escalated by George W. Bush. But for now, it is the crisis of unemployment that is the gravest concern.

[...]

In the past 30 years, the “masters of mankind,” as Smith called them, have abandoned any sentimental concern for the welfare of their own society, concentrating instead on short-term gain and huge bonuses, the country be damned – as long as the powerful nanny state remains intact to serve their interests.

yes, we have to turn to foreign media to see, hear and read chomsky...

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Work 'Til We Die

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Manufacturing consent - this is how it's done

ever since i started this blog, i've been saying that the plan was to run government into the ground which would then serve as the pretext for destroying whatever is left of any existing or implied social contract... our super-rich elites can't stand the thought that ALL money, resources and power might not be in their control so they're going to stop at nothing to make sure nothing escapes their grasp...

The Shock Doctrine Push to Gut Social Security and Middle Class

Today's Washington Post was punch two of a one-two punch. Punch one was the Simpson/Bowles "plan" to cut Social Security, cut middle-class tax breaks and programs (and dramatically cut taxes on the rich.) Punch two is pushing this plan hard with headlines claiming this solution is actually popular, while shutting out voices who explain why we shouldn't do this. This is full-on Shock Doctrine: Wait for an emergency like the terrible recession so people are in shock and want solutions, and then change everything so fast they can't respond while telling them how this is good for them.

This is how they do it, folks, demonstrated by this story in today's Washington Post: Consensus is forming on what steps to take in cutting the deficit,

After an election dominated by vague demands for less debt and smaller government, the sacrifices necessary to achieve those goals are coming into sharp focus. ... Smaller Social Security checks and higher Medicare premiums. ... the plan unveiled this month by co-chairmen Erskine B. Bowles ... and Alan K. Simpson ... has been respectfully received with a few exceptions by both parties. Its major elements are also winning support from a striking line-up of commentators. ... The strange bedfellows are a "testament to the moderate nature" of the ideas under discussion.

Consensus? Sharp focus? Here's your "sharp focus": The public hates this!

That headline is the manufactured reality. The real reality is that the public just hates this, and has voted against and will vote against politicians who push it.

Last month you saw campaign ad after ad hitting Democrats who "cut $500 billion from Medicare," and Democrats lost the senior vote and the midterms. The public hates this.

A recent Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research report showed that an overwhelming 69% of voters agreed that "politicians should keep their hands off Social Security and Medicare" when they address the deficit. The public hates this.

Only 6% of the public says the government's priority should be deficits now. The public hates this.

An AARP poll finds that 90% of people aged 18 to 29 say Social Security is important. The public hates this.

An NBC/WSJ poll finds that 57% are against cutting Social Security no matter how bad the deficit is. The public hates this.

A USA Today poll finds that the public by 66/31 says don't cut benefits to fix the deficit. The public hates this.

I can continue citing poll after poll; there are no polls that show the public is in any way behind this.

It's clear: The public hates this and will vote out any politician who does this. If you think the public didn't like the bailouts and the politicians who voted for them, this "Deficit Commission" plan to cut Social Security is the other shoe dropping. Bailouts helped Wall Street and not Main Street and people certainly didn't like that. But this is paying for bailing out Wall Street by hitting Main Street in the gut. And the public understands this.

But here is today's reality: the public hates this, and the corporate media tells you how much you love it. This is how it's done. You have heard the stories of FDR and LBJ saying "make me do it," meaning create the public pressure that forces politicians to do act. This is a story of manufacturing consent where the elites, the Peterson Foundation, the president and the corporate right are setting up an appearance of making them do it.

sit back and watch how it's all coming down...

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The whole point of the Deficit Commission

even though glenn didn't post this with a specific focus on labor day, having in mind instead a snide tribute to the honesty of alan simpson, it's still highly apropos for today's national holiday...

The whole point of the Commission is that the steps which Washington wants to take -- particularly cuts in popular social programs, such as Social Security -- can occur only if they are removed as far as possible from democratic accountability. As the economist James Galbraith put it when testifying before the Commission in July:

• Continue reading

Your proceedings are clouded by illegitimacy. . . . First, most of your meetings are secret, apart from two open sessions before this one, which were plainly for show. There is no justification for secret meetings on deficit reduction. No secrets of any kind are involved. . . .

Second, that some members of the commission are proceeding from fixed, predetermined agendas. Third, that the purpose of the secrecy is to defer public discussion of cuts in Social Security and Medicare until after the 2010 elections. You could easily dispel these suspicions by publishing video transcripts of all of your meetings on the Internet, and by holding all future meetings in public . . .

Conflicts of interest constitute the fourth major problem. The fact that the Commission has accepted support from Peter G. Peterson, a man who has for decades conducted a relentless campaign to cut Social Security and Medicare, raises the most serious questions.

That's why Commission co-chair Alan Simpson -- with his blunt contempt for Social Security and and other benefit programs (such as aid to disabled veterans) and his acknowledged eagerness to slash them -- has done the country a serious favor. His recent outbursts have unmasked this Commission and shed light on its true character. Unlike his fellow Commission members, who imperiously dismiss public inquiries into what they're doing as though they're annoying and inappropriate, Simpson -- to his genuine credit -- has been aggressively engaging critics, making it impossible to ignore what the Commission is really up to.

[...]

One of the most significant developments in the U.S. is the rapidly and severely increasing rich-poor gap. A middle class standard of living is being suffocated and even slowly eliminated, as budget cuts cause an elimination of services that are hallmarks of first-world living. Because the wealthiest Americans continue to consolidate both their monopoly on wealth and, more important, their control of Congress and the government generally, we respond to all of this by enacting even more policies which exacerbate that gap and favor even more the wealthiest factions while taking more from the poorest and most powerless. And now, the very people responsible for the vulnerable financial state of the U.S. want to address that problem by targeting one of the very few guarantors in American life of a humane standard of living: Social Security.

i would ask just exactly when my country became the bought and paid for property of our super-rich elites but that would be seriously disingenuous on my part... it's been going on for the better part of my nearly 63 years... it's just taken me well over 2/3 of that for me to see it for what it is...

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Is it any wonder I'm losing interest in posting...?

with headlines and stories like this to start my day, i'd be much better off just jumping off a cliff...

Senate Approves Nearly $60 Billion for Wars

The Senate on Thursday approved a nearly $60 billion measure to pay for continuing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq as House Democrats struggled to round up votes for a major package of business tax breaks and safety-net programs for the long-term unemployed.

hells fire... it's all fiat currency anyway, printed up or digitally created on a computer, so why can't they whip some up for the unemployed instead of continuing to enable endless death and destruction...? i guess i must be from a different planet, maybe even a different universe...

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Is "the purpose of the corporation to harness private interests in service to the public interest?"

one would think that any organization that requires state approval to operate would also be required to serve the common good...

one would think...

it's pretty evident that, in the united states, in particular for the u.s. health insurer industry, that's not the case...

from business week...

The industry has already accomplished its main goal of at least curbing, and maybe blocking altogether, any new publicly administered insurance program that could grab market share from the corporations that dominate the business.

maybe all of us should start thinking more in terms of the common good...

[S]ix propositions from Allen White, co-founder of Corporation 2020, an organization formed in the United States to “rethink corporate purpose, rights and obligations”.

1. The purpose of the corporation is to harness private interests to serve the public interest.

2. Corporations shall accrue fair returns for shareholders, but not at the expense of the legitimate interests of other stakeholders.

3. Corporations shall operate sustainably, meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

4. Corporations shall distribute their wealth equitably among those who contribute to its creation.

5. Corporations shall be governed in a manner that is participatory, transparent, ethical, and accountable.

6. Corporations shall not infringe on the right of natural persons to govern themselves, nor infringe on other universal human rights.

whaddaya think...? personally, i like 'em... i like 'em a LOT...

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Michael Parenti on global financiers' view of the current U.S. economy: "We've destroyed the social democracy"

i've said all along that the goal of the super-rich elites was to completely gut any semblance of social contract, whether it be in the u.s. or anywhere else in the world, and, for the most part, they've done a damn good job...

In 1978, a number of these financiers came out and said, “This country is just heading for a social democracy, and we don’t want that.” I mean, they used the term “social democracy.” They’re aware of these things. A few months ago in The New Yorker, there was an article about how Republicans had a loss for issues, and one of them said, “Well, the reason we’re at a loss is because we’ve accomplished all we wanted to. We’ve destroyed the social democracy.” And that’s their goal.

And if you listen to them now, I mean, it’s fascinating and outrageous. They’re talking about doing nothing, just putting a cap on all spending, that the market is in a stage of correction. They use terms like “correction” or “adjustment.” They don’t mind recessions. Recessions are fine. It allows them to buy up smaller companies at bargain prices. It disciplines labor. It humiliates and beats back people. And this, I think, is what we’re facing. And I’m infuriated by the Republicans in the Congress and the way they’re going at this. The only passion they show is to protect the tax cuts for the super rich. That seems to be the only interest they have.

[...]

Well, I argue that one of the functions of a capitalist state is to defend capitalism from itself, to defend capitalism from the capitalists. It was Marx—dare we mention him? I hear he’s coming back in style. It was Marx who said one capitalist will kill many other capitalists, that the system begins to consume itself. We see that with Bernard Madoff and the like.

And it’s not merely because of a number of wicked personalities, because these personalities are brought to the fore. Those are the people who get the rewards. Those are the people who—yes, and what we need are drastic sets of regulations, and there hasn’t been enough talk. We just got a vague reference to it here, Geithner referencing and saying, well, it’s going to be a little bit of a different camp, a little more responsible, accountable maybe. But as far as actual regulations, we haven’t seen it.

The free market does not work. It’s not free. It’s not really a market; it’s a plunder. And it has to be done away with.

i completely agree...

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The destruction of the social contract and the rise of Ron Paul

juan cole shares some observations about how and why a traditional conservative like ron paul is emerging as a serious candidate, but he also puzzles over why, given the bush administration's deliberate campaign to destroy every trace of the social contract, his libertarian orientation is not being more strongly called into question...

Government is a set of bargains, a 'moral economy.' We let the government take a certain proportion of our money, and we expect it to organize services for us that would otherwise be difficult to arrange. Anyone who has studied any history and economics knows that the market is going to leave some people destitute, and you need government to correct for that imbalance. It is no accident that government was invented by irrigation-based societies like Egypt and Iraq, where if someone did not organize the peasants to do the irrigation work and keep it up, everybody would starve.

Bush has broken the US government. The US military was there to protect us. Bush has used it to fight a fascist-style aggressive war of choice. FEMA is there for emergency aid. Bush did not deploy it effectively for New Orleans. Social security lifted the elderly out of the poverty that had often been their fate before the 1930s. Bush declined to use Clinton's surplus to fix the system, and has essentially borrowed against the pensions of us all to pay for his wars. Government is there to ensure our security. Bush has used it to spy on us, to prosecute patently innocent persons, to manipulate the media and instill us with lies and propaganda.

[...]

Given how horribly corporations like Walmart treat their employees, denying them the right to unionize and cleverly avoiding paying anything toward their health insurance, I have never understood why Libertarians think corporations would be nicer to us if we could not organize government protections from them. It is the government of the state of Maryland that protected workers from Walmart's exploitation of them. Libertarian faith in the utopia that comes from the withering of the state strikes me as just as impractical as the similar Marxist theory.

But after 7 years of Bush, I don't find it at all astonishing that large numbers of internet contributors would give Ron Paul money to campaign on getting rid of the Frankenstein' s Monster of a government that George W. Bush has been constructing in his macabre basement of a mind.

a cornerstone of the bush administration policy, driven by such movement conservative ideologues as karl rove and grover norquist, is pure social darwinism*... that particular belief system is, in fact, the underpinning of the global elites that are, even as we speak, directing world events to their own ends (see previous post on alex jones' endgame)... the elites believe that they occupy their privileged and powerful positions because they deserve them... they and only they are worthy to decide the fate of the planet, and everyone and everything on it...

* Social Darwinism is the idea that Charles Darwin's theory can be extended and applied to the social realm, i.e. that just as competition between individual organisms drives biological evolutionary change (speciation) through "survival of the fittest" (not a scientific term itself), competition between individuals, groups, nations or ideas drives social evolution in human societies.

The term was popularized in 1944 by the American historian Richard Hofstadter, and has generally been used by critics rather than advocates of what the term is supposed to represent (Bannister, 1979; Hodgson, 2004).

While the term has been applied to the claim that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection can be used to understand the social endurance of a nation or country, social Darwinism commonly refers to ideas that predate Darwin's publication of his theory. Others whose ideas are given the label include the 18th century clergyman Thomas Malthus, and Darwin's cousin Francis Galton who founded eugenics towards the end of the 19th century.

Some claim that it supports racism on the lines set out by Arthur de Gobineau before Darwin published his theories, which directly contradict Darwin's own work. This classification of social Darwinism constitutes part of the reaction against the Nazi regime and the Holocaust.

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More on the National Guard and emergency preparedness

a follow-on to an earlier post about the problems of emergency preparedness following the tornadoes in kansas...

since hurricane katrina, i have been convinced that the bush administration has deliberately disrupted and obstructed our country's capability to respond to natural disasters... the strength of my cynicism leads me to believe it is part of a purposeful strategy to convince us that our government is not either equipped, willing or able to provide anything in the way of comprehensive assistance in time of citizen need... it's all part of the socially-darwinian, on-your-ownership society and the on-going dismemberment of any type of implied or explicit social contract... they are QUITE capable, however, of telling you what you talked about on the phone last night with aunt jane...

According to a recent report by a congressional commission, nearly “90 percent of Army National Guard units in the United States are rated ‘not ready,” largely “as a result of shortfalls in billions of dollars’ worth of equipment.” A January Government Accountability Office analysis found that the Pentagon “does not adequately track National Guard equipment needs for domestic missions” and as a consequence, “state National Guards may be hampered in their ability to plan for responding to large-scale domestic events.”

if that indeed is the strategy, it's working quite nicely...

(thanks to think progress...)

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Letting Mexico show us the way to fight poverty

this is from a story in today's nyt about nyc mayor bloomberg's trip to mexico to see first-hand how mexico is dealing with its huge number of people living in poverty... i could care less about bloomberg, but i did find the details of the mexican program fascinating... particularly since bushco's concerted attack on any form of implied or explicit social contrast and its championing of social darwinism and the bogus "on-your-own(ership)" society, the u.s. has turned a blind eye to poverty...

If the women and their children have kept all their medical appointments, and if their children have stayed in school, the money is theirs to use as they wish. The awards range from 360 to 3,710 pesos (about $36 to $370), enough to buy food or shoes or other necessities. The size of the award depends on how many children they have and what level of school the children are in.

The program is 10 years old, has a budget of more than $3 billion a year and covers almost a quarter of all Mexicans.

[...]

Outside evaluations have found that the program, called Oportunidades, has been successful in raising school attendance and nutrition levels. The percentage of Mexicans living in extreme poverty has fallen by 17 percentage points since 1996, when it reached 37 percent.

Those results have spurred some 30 countries to adopt some version of the program.

meanwhile, back in the richest country in the world...

• In an economy that produces $13 trillion annually, 37 million Americans still live below the official poverty line.

• In 2005, the richest one percent of Americans had the largest share of the nation's income -- 19 percent -- since 1929, while the poorest 20 percent of Americans had only 3.4 percent of the nation's income.

• In 2005, 16 million people -- 5.4 percent of all Americans -- had incomes below half the poverty line. The number of Americans living in such extreme poverty grew by over three million [PDF] between 2000 and 2005, and the share of poor people living in extreme poverty is now greater than at any point in the last 32 years.

• The federal minimum wage has remained static for nearly a decade. At $5.15 an hour, it is at its lowest level in real terms since 1956.

• There are more Americans living in poverty today than there are total people living in the state of California, the most populous state in the nation.

(u.s. poverty statistics courtesy of the center for american progress...)

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It's the "on your own"ership society

i certainly can't claim credit for the title's cutesy phrase, but that's precisely what the bush administration has pursued since day one by attacking and/or dismantling every instance of an implied or explicit social contract...

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama accused the Bush administration on Tuesday of pursuing a policy of "social Darwinism" that leaves every man and woman struggling.

"It's a strategy that we've seen this administration pursue over the last six years, that basically says government has no role to play in making sure that America is prosperous for all people and not just some," Obama said to applause during an appearance before the Communications Workers of America.

truer words were never spoken... if you don't do well in bushworld, it's because you're lazy, stupid, and just plain no goddam good... don't come crying to us... if you're a good citizen, work hard, play by the rules, and do the best you can in bushworld, don't expect anything in return from the government you pay to keep in office... there is no quid pro quo in bushworld... your duty is to your government, period... only the strongest - and most unscrupulous - rise to the top... for the rest of you, tough shit...

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