This video is from a protest that was launched at the location of the sign by Broome County Peace Action.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are two of the biggest causes of the federal deficit, yet the Cat Food Commission and other "deficit reduction" groups have left ending the wars off the table. As bad as the financial and physical costs of this war are for Americans, things are much worse than Iraqis, Afghans, and Pakistanis.

Cost of War Sign - Binghamton, NY from bvideo on Vimeo.

Last I heard, the sign was on loan to other cities.

 

Statistics don't lie, do they? (H/T: The Punk Patriot)

Here's an additional reason why rising life expectancies for some don't validate raising the retirement age. Just because people at higher income levels are living longer doesn't mean that the non-lethal health problems facing the elderly have gotten that much better.

Most of the political commentary in the corporate media on the Cat Food Commision has come from men, which is typically sexist but extra bizarre because the CFC's assault on Social Security would disproportionately affect women.

To understand what the Cat Food Commission is about, it is first instructive to understand The Shock Doctrine, a concept developed by Naomi Klein, one of the most important thinkers of our time. Excepts from the documentary film, "The Shock Doctrine" broadcasted on Democracy Now in 2007, provide a good summary of what this is all about.

NAOMI KLEIN: Remaking people, shocking them into obedience. This is a story about that powerful idea. In the 1950s, it caught the attention of the CIA. The agency funded a series of experiments. Out of them was produced a secret handbook on how to break down prisoners. The key was using shock to reduce adults to a childlike state.

TEXT: The following narration is excerpted from the CIA’s 1963 and 1983 interrogation manuals.

NARRATION: It’s a fundamental hypothesis of this handbook that these are techniques are, in essence, methods of inducing regression of the personality. There is an interval, which may be extremely brief, of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis. Experienced interrogators recognize this effect when it appears and know that at this moment the source is far more open to suggestion, far likelier to comply, than he was just before he experienced the shock.

NAOMI KLEIN: But these techniques don’t only work on individuals; they can work on whole societies: a collective trauma, a war, a coup, a natural disaster, a terrorist attack puts us all into a state of shock. And in the aftermath, like the prisoner in the interrogation chamber, we, too, become childlike, more inclined to follow leaders who claim to protect us.

One person who understood this phenomenon early on was the famous economist of our era, Milton Friedman. Friedman believed in a radical vision of society in which profit and the market drive every aspect of life, from schools to healthcare, even the army. He called for abolishing all trade protections, deregulating all prices and eviscerating government services.

These ideas have always been tremendously unpopular, and understandably so. They cause waves of unemployment, send prices soaring, and make life more precarious for millions. Unable to advance their agenda democratically, Friedman and his disciples were drawn to the power of shock.

NARRATION: The subject should be rudely awakened and immediately blindfolded and handcuffed. When arrested at this time, most subjects experience intense feelings of shock, insecurity and psychological stress. The idea is to prevent the subject from relaxing and recovering from shock.

NAOMI KLEIN: Friedman understood that just as prisoners are softened up for interrogation by the shock of their capture, massive disasters could serve to soften us up for his radical free-market crusade. He advised politicians that immediately after a crisis, they should push through all the painful policies at once, before people could regain their footing. He called this method "economic shock treatment." I call it "the shock doctrine."

Take a second look at the iconic events of our era, and behind many you will find its logic at work. This is the secret history of the free market. It wasn’t born in freedom and democracy; it was born in shock.

An obvious example of this being applied to the US was what has been done to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a city with increased homelessness and displaced people, perfectly livable public housing was torn down a couple of years after the hurricane as the coup de grace of exploitation of tragedy to turn the city over to wealthy and corporate interests.

Another example of the Shock Doctrine political economy is the Cat Food Commission in the US. In this case, a real Great Recession is being used in concert with phony hysteria about Social Security to try to push for a massive redistribution of income and wealth to the rich from everyone else.

Cindy Sheehan's recent blog posting, Savage Austerity, puts the issue in concrete, human terms. The entire posting is well worth reading, but I'll excerpt the part most directly related to the Cat Food Commission here.

I have been worried about Obama’s Bowles-Simpson “Cat Food Commission” (CFC) on reducing the deficit since it was announced, and it turns out my worries were well founded.

Besides suggesting raising the retirement age to an ungodly 69, savage cuts to Social Security and Medicare are proposed. Who needs Social Security and Medicare? Not the elite, but they are not forgotten in the CFC plan, the CFC also proposes to REDUCE taxes on the top earners from an already too low 35%, to an absolutely obscene 23%! Obama is following the international sport of the ruling class of forcing the least advantaged in society to pay for the crimes and excess of the One-Percent Club—those who sit at the top of the economic food chain controlling at least 50 percent of the nation’s wealth.

One thing we must understand, especially in the U.S, is that Capitalism creates these crises to be able to “capitalize” on them. The bubbles of the past were generated for gross profit on the expansion, and economic vampirism on the contraction. We who are not in the One-Percent Club may feel some temporary prosperity on the expansion, but each contraction squeezes us tighter and tighter.

In the CFC, there are also modest cuts proposed to defense, but, if any do go through, (very doubtful) it will just be a symbolic gesture meant to prove to us that the parasites really are “in it” with us.

In the commentary, Ms. Sheehan also shows that she gets it in terms of something that is taboo to discuss in corporate media: the parasitism of the rich.

Parasitism is a type of symbiotic relationship between organisms of different species where one organism, the parasite, benefits at the expense of the host. Well, the Capitalists are definitely a species of creature that benefits at the expense of its host—the workers and our prosperity. The intriguing thing about the parasitic behavior of the One Percent Club, though, is in its very name: One Percent. One percent of the economic parasites in the U.S. are benefiting off of the rest of us.

Here though, it’s almost as if we have invited our parasites to suck the life out of us, and we not only give them our comfy beds, we cook them a delicious breakfast, too, and compose a lovely Thank You note to them to add insult to injury.

Corporate propagandists act like we actually owe the rich for everything, not vice versa. In the upside down world of this propagandistic blather, rich people create jobs rather than the rest of us creating the wealth that the rich exploit. Never mind the fact that the rich in the US are shipping jobs out of the country with ruthless glee.

Why are most male commentators, even outside of the corporate media, afraid to acknowledge this parasitism?

Photos: miketually

D.C.Atty

 

Now that President Obama's Cat Food Commission's initial draft of draconian social service cuts has come out, it is getting a lot more attention. The goals of the Cat Food Commission seemed initially to be focused on a jihad against Social Security and Medicare. That crusade is definitely part of the agenda, but the Cat Food Commission has a broader goal.

The Cat Food Commission is a broad based attempt to transfer income and wealth from the elderly, the middle class, and the poor to the rich.

Here are some of the specific recommendations from the Commission's draft report:

From CommonDreams.org 11/10/10 (bolding mine):

• 75% of the solutions in the co-chair mark are spending reductions, 25% are tax increases.

• They want to add co-pays to the Veterans’ Administration and TRICARE, as well as pushing individuals covered by TRICARE into an employer policy. They also want to freeze noncombat military pay for three years. And, they want to end schools for families on military bases, instead reintegrating soldier’s kids into the public school system (because that’s so easy for a military family that moves every other year).

• They would cut the federal workforce by 10%, freeze all salary increases and bonuses for three years, and reduce Congressional and White House budgets by 15%. Surely this is the way to a better and more efficient federal workforce.

• They would eliminate all funding for commercial space flight, as well as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and increase fees at national parks and the Smithsonian museums.

• Increase co-pays in Medicaid and cost sharing in Medicare. In addition, the plan would cap Medicaid/Medicare growth, so that the government would have to either increase premiums and co-pays or raise the Medicare eligibility age if the cost grows above the baseline.

• Massively overhaul the tax code. They have a couple different options on this. In the first, there would only be three brackets: at 8%, 14% and 23% for the top bracket. All tax expenditures – $1.1 trillion, including the Earned Income Tax Credit and the child tax credit, would be eliminated. The corporate tax rate would go down from 35% to 26% as well. Option 2 borrows from the Wyden-Gregg tax reform, establishing rates at 15%, 25% and 35%, increasing the standard deduction, capping the mortgage interest deduction (and eliminating it for second homes), limiting the charitable deduction, eliminating other tax expenditures, and capping the employer deduction for health care. Corporate rates would also go down, with loopholes removed.

• They would increase the gas tax by 15 cents a gallon beginning in 2013, to pay for transportation projects.

• They would pay for the “doctor’s fix” by cutting other reimbursements to hospitals and drug companies, as well as through tort reform (yeah, that’ll do it). They would also speed up a lot of the cost controls in the health care law. They also ask, if health care costs are still rising after the implementation of the exchanges, for Congress to consider a variety of options, including this:

Add a robust public option and/or all-payer system in the exchange

• Reduce farm subsidies by $3 billion per year.

• On Social Security, gradually increase the retirement age to 69 by 2075. They would also institute progressive price indexing to cut scheduled benefits for middle and high-income earners. They would index cost of living increases to inflation and not wages. They would also increase the payroll tax to capture 90% of wages, rather than the current 86%. Social Security savings would stay inside the program to keep it solvent, not be used for deficit reduction.

I've read from multiple sources that they also want to eliminate the home mortgage deduction for all homes.

Here are some things that are not included in the agenda of this alleged "deficit commission."

- Cutting off all funding to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

- Closing the majority of military bases abroad.

- Getting rid of the Bush tax cuts for the rich.

- Getting rid of the Clinton and Reagan tax cuts for the rich.

- Raising corporate taxes.

- Instituting luxury taxes.

- Instituting an SUV tax.

- Repealing all corporate controlled trade agreements and withdrawing from the World Trade Organization, making it possible for our government to expand revenue from tariffs, traditionally one of its major funding sources.

- Initiating a tax on all short term stock, bond, mutual fund, commodities, hedge fund, derivative, and other transactions involving financial instruments. (Call it the Bubble Prevention Tax.)

- Cut back on wasteful and unconstitutional homeland security spending

- An end to covert operations in Iran

- End of all aid to Israel

- End of aid and support for the fascist dictatorship in Colombia

- Legalization of Marijuana

- Sentencing crack like other cocaine

- Legalizing other victimless crimes such as gambling and prostitution.

- Taxing capital gains (other than primary home sales) like income actually earned by working

A "deficit commission" that proposes cutting taxes for the rich and corporations is not a deficit commission. Many have pointed out that wealthy and corporate interests are turning the same Shock Doctrine tactics that were used on non Western countries onto Europe and North America. We need to do more to fight back.

Photo: Sunfox

Now that Barack Bush is setting the groundwork to break his promise to get out of Afghanistan next year, it is becoming clear that Democratic politicians are just as pro war as Republican politicians. The people in the peace movement who trusted Obama and held back on protest made an enormous mistake.

Obama also is dragging out the Iraqtastrophe so corporations can keep making money off of it. Meanwhile, the Iraqis killed by "our" government's greed and corruption continue to add up. Meanwhile, more and more Americans in our military due to the economic draft are adding to the numbers of war veterans, facing the horrible physical and psychological scars of it.

At least the veterans who make it home have VA benefits, as weak as those are. The enormous numbers of mercenaries won't even have that. Considering that Obama has roughly 100,000 mercenaries in Iraq, that's a huge social problem for our country.

More war veterans mean increased competition for services that the GOP as well as Obama's Cat Food commission want to cut so they can cut taxes for the rich even more. Our veterans are treated in an extreme example of the shitty way the politicians treat everyone who isn't rich in this country.

Our veterans deserve better. We all do.

 

Jon Stewart has really turned to the hard right since the inauguration. It's starting to look like he has followed the example of Dennis Miller in terms of grabbing the big bucks by selling himself to rightist corporate bosses and owners. However, Stewart is doing it in a sneakier way, pretending to be reasonable and moderate. I refused to have anything to do with his rally for bigotry and corporate power, and now I realize that decision was even better than I thought it would have been.

When I read a transcript of his speech, this paragraph was particularly disturbing.

There are terrorists, and racists, and Stalinists, and theocrats, but those are titles that must be earned! You must have the resume! Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Party-ers, or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez is an insult--not only to those people, but to the racists themselves, who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate. Just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe, not more.

This is truly disturbing. Of course, Juan Williams comments about Muslims were bigoted. That was the idea. He is spewing the same bigotry against Arabs and Muslims that Faux News overflows with and the other corporate "news outlets" work tirelessly to legitimize. It is the same bigotry that got us into a genocidal war of aggression in Iraq that has killed over 1.4 million people. It is the same bigotry that keeps us in Iraq and Afghanistan today. It is highly profitable bigotry for the corporate masters of cable TV, and Juan Williams was awarded handsomely for it by Rupert Murdoch.



Then, there is the matter of the teabaggers. Let's look at the following facts:

1) The teabaggers are venomously racist.

2) Their opposition to Obama cannot be policy based since Obama supports the same policies they do at least 95% of the time.

3) The teabaggers share the same values, prejudices, and agendas as the Ku Klux Klan.

4) The only difference between the teabaggers and the Klan is that the teabaggers don't wear the white suits and dunce caps....at least not in public.

Stewart knows that none of the criticisms of the teabaggers for being racist are unfair, unreasonable, or "insane." If he were to actually read this blog posting (obviously he doesn't even know that this small blog exists), and if he were honest, he would have to acknowledge all of this. Instead, he chooses to mock and condemn public discussion of any of this.

What about his defense of Rick Sanchez's bigotry? That's called taking one for the team.

What Stewart is doing is hardly original or even new. The corporate media have been marketing racism for years. They constantly portray racism as perfectly reasonable as long as code phrases are used for it, and they censor, ridicule, or demonize anyone who speaks out against it.

This might be familiar to you. Stewart used the technique of ridicule and demonization to shut down Keith Olberman for committing a high crime in corporate media: speaking out against the venomous and uncompromising misogyny and heterosexism of Scott Brown. Stewart wasn't just doing the bidding of his corporate overlords by campaining for the GOP candidate on air. Stewart was trying to make it taboo to speak out against bigotry and oppression against women and queers. Now, Stewart, in a moment of "sincerity," is trying to make fighting blatant racism equally taboo.

Stewart's message to people who are targets of bigotry is the same as that of someone who commits domestic violence to their victim: shut up and take it.

Racism and misogyny have been organizing tools of wealthy interests in this country for centuries. Heterosexism as an organizing tool is relatively recent, but it has proven quite effective. Giving people false senses of superiority and threatening to take those delusions away has been a hugely successful diversionary tactic. The rich are not going to give that up without a fight.

The other disturbing aspect of Stewart's speech involves the vague allusions to "getting things done." Notice how he doesn't mention what those "things" are. Keep in mind that this rally was planned after President Obama set up his Cat Food Commission to slash Social Security and other domestic programs that benefit the middle class and the poor. It also was planned after it had become obvious that the GOP would make big gains in the midterm elections.

When you think about it, doesn't the whole "getting things done" message make you a bit nervous? It certainly doesn't make the CEOs of the cable networks and their advertisers nervous.

During his long winded speech, Stewart expressed pieties about the 24/7 cable media news frenzy that he plays a role in. Stewart plays the role of "good cop" to the "bad cops" like Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly. Now, I have another reason to be delighted that I got rid of my cable TV. It's such crap.

Photo: Bebopsmile

 

Social Security Works has a great video countering lies about Social Security.



I love how they are actually talking about how wealthy and corporate interests are screwing over the rest of this.

The Cat Food Commission is telling some of the very lies being countered in this video. It's important to get the facts out there now, since the timing of the assault on Social Security and Medicare is set to happen during the lame duck congressional session which takes place when people are busy with the holidays and are disconnected from the news.

 

Photo: Muffett

Barack Bush's Cat Food Commission is being marketed as a "deficit commission." The sales strategy is to claim that slashing Social Security and Medicare are necessary to reduce deficits and are the only options.

That is absolute nonsense. Here are some of the far superior options for deficit reduction that are off the table for the Cat Food Commission, proving what a lie the whole thing is.

- Repealing corporate controlled trade agreements like NAFTA, CAFTA, and the GATT agreement that created the WTO which reduce tariff revenues (Tariffs traditionally have been major sources of revenue for governments.)

- Repealing the tax cuts for the rich that passed under Reagan, Carter, and Kennedy

- An immediate and full withdrawal from Iraq

- An immediate and full withdrawal from Afghanistan/Pakistan

- An end to covert operations in Iran

- End of all aid to Israel

- End of aid and support for the fascist dictatorship in Colombia

- Eliminating tax deductions which only rich people can take advantage of

- Closing most military bases abroad

- Legalization of Marijuana

- Sentencing crack like other cocaine

- Repealing cuts in corporate taxes that have passed in recent decades

- Taxing capital gains (other than primary home sales) like income actually earned by working

- Cut back on wasteful military spending

- Cut back on wasteful and unconstitutional homeland security spending

- Instituting a luxury tax

- Legalization of gambling

- Legalization of prostitution

Somehow, these options for deficit reduction never get considered by "deficit hawks" in DC and in the corporate media. Their beloved Cat Food Commission is all about robbing the middle class and poor and giving money to the rich.

 

If it really were a legitimate "deficit commission," it wouldn't be meeting in secret.



This video was put up on YouTube by Strengthen Social Security, Don't Cut it. I'm particularly pleased that the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force is a member organization, which demonstrates their commitment to queer seniors issues. This disproportionately effects queers who are much less likely to have children to help us when we get older.

I has previously blogged about Nancy Pelosi's sneak attack against Social Security. In that post, I describe the Catfood Commission.

You may have been reading about Obama's "deficit commission" in DC. The name is misleading. Some people call it the "catfood commission" because its real goals are raising the Social Security retirement age to 70, cutting benefits in that program, slashing Medicare, and putting 20% of the Social Security trust fund in the stock market. Healthcare Now has been fighting hard to resist this attack on the livelihoods of the elderly and the futures of the young.

The last thing we need as a nation is to have future generations of elderly people reduced to eating catfood when meager incomes fail most of us. Alternet isn't going along with this. They have put up a petition on Change.Org against the Catfood Commission. The background information follows.

Right-Wing "Deficit Hawks" and their enablers are on a march to destroy the social safety net we built for our seniors and retirees. Shockingly, some of the most notorious advocates are actually in charge of the presidential commission that will soon determine the future of Social Security and Medicare. We need to stop them in their tracks! Join us in calling on Congress to Stop the Catfood Commission.

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has been dubbed by progressives the "Catfood Commission" because its goal appears to be cutting benefits so drastically that retirees will only be able to afford to eat pet food. It's hard to tell exactly what the commission is planning because its meetings are closed to the public and the press. Based on past statements and the background of its members the proposals are likely to include raising the retirement age to 70, turning large portions of Social Security over to Wall Street, and cutting Medicare benefits.

The commission's co-chairman Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, has stated he believes the founders of the Social Security program never expected anyone to actually live to 65 and collect. "People just died," he has said. "Social Security was never [for] retirement." Erskine Bowles, the other co-chairman, negotiated a secret but ultimately unsuccessful deal between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich to cut Social Security benefits. Any chances that the commission would make cuts to the US defense budget in its pursuit of fiscal responsibility seem slim owing to the fact that the CEO of Honeywell, a major defense contractor, is a member of the panel.

We can't sit back and count on a Democratic-controlled Congress to protect our social safety net. Just a day before the July 4th holiday weekend, the House of Representatives passed a measure that would guarantee an up-or-down vote on the Catfood Commission's recommendations in the current session of Congress if they pass the Senate. With this measure House Speaker Nancy Pelosi relinquished her power to prevent the vote from coming to the floor.

Your representatives need to hear from you NOW. Let's stop the Catfood Commission from raiding the Social Security trust fund and slashing medical benefits for current and future retirees.

Please Take Action to Stop This Attack on Social Security and Medicare!

Also:

Please Contact the President and Tell Him to Disband the Catfood Commission!

Photo: Sunfox

 

In case you think that Nancy Pelosi has gotten even slightly less execrably rightist since Barack Obama has been in office, think again. Pelosi just isn't satisfied with pushing through a wealthcare bill that takes money and healthcare away from the middle class, the poor, and the elderly and gives money to the HMOs, the health insurers, and the wealthy speculators who own their stocks. Now, she's engineering a sneak attack against Social Security and Medicare.

You may have been reading about Obama's "deficit commission" in DC. The name is misleading. Some people call it the "catfood commission" because its real goals are raising the Social Security retirement age to 70, cutting benefits in that program, slashing Medicare, and putting 20% of the Social Security trust fund in the stock market. Healthcare Now has been fighting hard to resist this attack on the livelihoods of the elderly and the futures of the young.

Pelosi is really good at engineering ways of pushing through rightist legislation while appearing to be liberal to casual observers in her district. We find out from Firedog Lake that she is pulling another fast one. (Hat Tip: I Can't Believe It's Not Democracy)

Embedded in the rule is the requirement that the House will vote on the deficit commission’s recommendations in the lame duck session if they pass the Senate.

The commission, co-chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, is packed with members who favor the raising the retirement age to 70, means testing, and private accounts. Many also support investing 20% of the Social Security trust fund in the stock market.

This is a perfect opportunity. The lame duck session would happen during the holidays when people are really busy and aren't paying close attention to politics. That's the most opportune time to slip something in that is wildly unpopular.

Obviously, this isn't a done deal. However, liberals and progressives better do a better job fighting this than we did on the wealthcare bill. If we keep caving and letting corrupt politicians in both parties fuck us over, the poor will keep getting poorer and there will be no middle class left.

Photo: Speaker Pelosi