Obama’s “Jobs Plan” Endangers Social Security and Medicare

Posted: September 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , , | 17 Comments

Via Naked Capitalism, The Real News Network interviewed an actual economist, Robert Pollen of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, about Obama’s “Jobs Plan” as describe in last night’s speech. It’s well worth a listen.

According to Zach Carter at HuffPo, next week Obama plans to propose a deficit reduction package that will include increasing the eligibility age of both Social Security and Medicare.

Jon Walker at FDL also has a couple of posts about the Villagers’ plans for Medicare:

Political Forces Lining up to Raise Medicare Retirement Age

The threat to Medicare is very real and pressing. Over the past several months more and more political forces in Washington have being slowly lining up behind a campaign to raise the Medicare eligibility age. This most recent effort really got started when Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) put forward a bill to raise the Medicare retirement age in late May.

It got a major push in July when Obama privately offered it up as part of a “grand bargain” on the debt ceiling with Speaker John Boehner. It probably got another push in Obama’s jobs speech last night when the president suggested he still wants to change Medicare in a way “some in his party” won’t like.

The campaign also got a behind-the-scenes boost this week. First, the Democratic members of the House Ways and Means committee included raising the Medicare retirement age in a memo to the Super Committee outlining possible deficit reduction options. But more importantly, the powerful Obama is coming to cut Medicare Walker points out the part of Obama’s speech in which he suggested that Democrats are rigid and unreasonable in opposing changes to Medicare. Walker counters:

Progressives support ways to reduce Medicare spending by methods such as allowing Medicare to directly negotiate for drug prices. Progressives just do not support shifting costs onto old people. Obama saying he supports Medicare changes “some in his party” won’t like is code for saying he will support cutting benefits.

Most of the jobs parts of the speech are unlikely to pass, so on the policy front they won’t really matter much. On the other hand, there is a Super Committee currently empowered to make large deficit reductions, so this part of the speech about cutting Medicare benefits could be the only policy from the speech that is enacted.

I fear all that may result from this speech is that Obama gets a campaign message about how the Republicans don’t care about jobs, and Obama helps the Super Committee raise the Medicare retirement age.

Obama Must Go!!

Why Obama and his Banker Bosses Want a Depression

Posted: April 12, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Catfood Commission, income inequality, just because, poverty, Psychopaths in charge, Surreality, Team Obama, The Bonus Class, The Great Recession, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, We are so F'd, worker rights | Tags: , , , , , | 49 Comments

Via Susie Madrak at Suburban Guerilla, Economist and historian Michael Hudson explains why U.S. elites are trying to bring about a full-fledged depression (December 16, 2010).

From the transcript:

JAY: So President Obama’s deficit commission has reported. The press, the media, and most of the political punditry all seem far more worried about government debt than depression. Why?

HUDSON: Because they’re essentially appointed by the banking interest. When the government runs into debt, it has to borrow from the banks. They want to scale down government debt in order to scale down government taxes. So it’s part of a one-to punch against the economy, basically. To the deficit commission, a depression is the solution to the problem, not a problem. That’s what they’re trying to bring about, because you need a depression if you’re going to lower wages by 20 percent.

JAY: And why do they want to do that?

HUDSON: Because they have the illusion that if you pay labor less, somehow you’re going to make the economy more competitive, and the economy can earn its way out of debts–meaning their employers, the banks and the companies–and make more profits and pay more bonuses and stock options, and somehow their constituency, Wall Street and the corporate economy, will become richer if they can only impoverish the economy.

So essentially you can think of it as between a parasite and the host economy. A smart parasite in nature actually is in a symbiosis with the host and tries to steer to new food. It wants the host to find new food, doesn’t want it to get bigger; the parasite wants itself to get bigger. But to do that, it has to take over the host’s brain and make the brain think that the parasite, in this case the host, is the industrial economy, the real economy, production and consumption.

The parasite is basically the financial sector. That’s the deficit commission. That’s the largest financier of the Obama administration. Obama appointed Wall Street lobbyists for the deficit commission, and basically their mind is a one-track mind: reduce labor’s wages. So what we have here is a dumb parasite, not a parasite. That’s the problem that’s facing the American economy today. The problem is that the parasite’s not only taken over the brain of the economy, which was supposed to be the government, but it’s taken over its own brain in the process. And it actually imagines that corporations can make larger profits and the industrial–the financial system can survive if they just bring on a depression. In fact, it’ll be the exact opposite.

Hudson predicted the housing crash in a cover story in Harpers’ Magazine in 2006: The New Road to Serfdom.

Another article he wrote for Harpers’ in 2005 was influential in killing Bush’s push for privatization of Social Security: The $4.7 Trillion Pyramid: Why Social Security won’t be enough to save Wall Street

It looks like the elites are already succeeding in turning the U.S. into a third world country. According to the LA Times, Swedish giant Ikea opened a plant in Virginia in order to take advantage of the U.S.’s slave wages and hostile atmosphere for union organizing.
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Steve Benen says that isn’t supposed to happen here in the “land of opportunity,” but according to Professor Hudson, that’s exactly what our government and the top 1% want.