October 20, 2007

IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

MEDIA PUSHES RIGHT-WING LIE ON SOCIAL SECURITY

If you listened to some of the major media outlets, you would think Chicken Little was right and the sky was falling when it comes to Social Security. Oh Lord! The system is about to go bankrupt! Young people will be saddled with paying for the baby boomers' retirement! It's nonsense. This is once again a ploy to privatize Social Security so the sharks on Wall Street can get their hands on the money.
This article is at www.fair.org:

This rhetoric is profoundly misleading. Social Security has built up a massive surplus in order to pay for the long-anticipated retirement of the baby boomers. As FAIR reported in 2005 (Extra!, 1-2/05):

The Social Security Administration predicts the program will be able to fully pay all promised benefits through 2042, when most baby boomers will be dead--even using pessimistic assumptions about future economic growth. Annual productivity growth is forecast by SSA at only 1.6 percent through 2078; in the years 1913-1990 (including the Great Depression), it grew by about 2.3 percent, a rate that would more than wipe out any future shortfall (2004 Social Security Trustees' Report; The World Economy, OECD, 2001).

But for most of the media, no such context is allowed. The sole economic expert who appeared on ABC was David John of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, who likened the situation to a "horror movie." Milbank chided a Social Security commissioner for "whistling past the graveyard of entitlement insolvency" because he had the temerity to say, "There's no reason to have any immediate panic." Milbank even suggested that young people are "more likely to believe in UFOs than in receiving their Social Security checks"--a claim based on a misleading poll (Extra!, 3-4/97). Milbank offered the usual prescription--namely, "painful changes everybody knows will be needed."

THE CRIMINAL BILLIONAIRE CLASS

Money has perverted the entire political and governmental process in the United States. The rich have purchased the government and the government acts as a faithful servant to the whims of the very rich. In the meantime, the rest of us get more impoverished. This imbalance is bad not only for democracy, but for the planet as a whole. The very rich are never satisfied and, as a group, they don't much care about the common good. This article talks about David Cay Johnston's new book that details the outright criminal behavior of the very rich. The article by Russell Mokhiber is at www.counterpunch.org:

In the book, Johnston takes shots at the corporate criminal class that would never make it by his editors at the New York Times.

"Unlike the common thief or bandit, these executives have the best and the brightest lawyers to explain away misconduct or to obfuscate.," he writes in the book. "In the rare instances when indictments are handed up, the cheated shareholders sometimes end up paying to defend the thieves who robbed them. Added to this are the legions of publicists who are paid to report what their bosses want us to hear--the antithesis of journalism's call to pursue the facts without fear or favor. The ranks of these image shifters are growing, while across the country a quarter or more of journalists are being fired, reducing further the chances that inconvenient facts will become known."

"The checks and balances provided by oversight, inspection, investigation and in extreme cases, prosecution have all been gutted in the name of deregulation and shrinking the size of government," he writes. "When there is no policeman on the beat the greatest beneficiary is not the taxpayer who is relieved of the cost of maintaining the police officer, but the thief."

Johnston points out that we used to prosecute loan sharks. But then we got rid of usury laws and passed new laws that allow "Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers, MBNA and Citibank to exploit the poor, the unsophisticated and the foolish."