Ordc Forum/Blog

The Eastern Sierra Speaks

HAVE NO FEAR! NO SOCIALISM HERE!

By Irwin Heit

A recent issue of Newsweek Magazine featured the headline “We Are All Socialists Now”. A subsequent issue had an article by Jacob Weisberg, “The Staying Power of the S Word”,
intended, I think, to reassure the American electorate that President Obama, in spite of his progressive agenda, is aware of our inherent conservatism and will not turn us into a
European Social Democracy. After all, European nations feature less economic flexibility and social dynamism; they have higher taxes, lower growth rates, more unemployment, and less class mobility. They have powerful trade unions, rigid bureaucracies, and heavy regulation. They are less conducive to entrepreneurship and slower to embrace technological change. Mr. Weisberg believes we Americans are more individualistic, enterprising and protective of our liberties.
We prefer cradle to grave opportunity to cradle to grave security. Mr. Weisberg believes President Obama understands this attitude of our electorate and will not foist foreign ways
upon us. I hope he is wrong!

Here is another view of western European Social Democracies. According to 2005 statistics, Western Europeans live longer than Americans. Their children are less likely to die in infancy; the U.S. ranked twenty-sixth among industrialized nations in infant mortality with a rate double that of Sweden, higher than that of Slovenia. In 2005, it was reported that Sweden spent just 8% of its GDP on health care while the U.S. spent 15% of its GDP and was ranked 37th in
quality of service by the World Health Organization. Western European Social Democracies have universal health care of some kind; the U.S. had about 45 million without health insurance in 2005, and that number has increased.

As to embracing technological change, many believe Europe has the best roads, the fastest trains, and the cheapest plane fares. With regard to entrepreneurship, in 2005 there were more small businesses in the European Union than in the U.S., and they take better care of their employees. Every Western European country provides salary support during parental leave for the birth or adoption of a child, part of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Norway’s minister for children and family is reported to have said, “Americans like to talk about family values. We have decided to do more than talk; we use our tax revenues to pay for family values.” In 2005, productivity per hour of work was similar in the U.S., Italy, Austria, and Denmark, and it was higher in Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg,Germany, and France. The ratio of earnings of the top tier of American CEOs to those of the average manufacturing employee was about 475:1, while in Britain it was 24:1, in France 15:1, in Sweden 13:1. In the U.S. the richest 1% held 38% of the wealth and one American adult in five was in poverty, compared to one in fifteen in Italy.

The point of all this ---- nobody in the current American administration is really advocating socialism, but the current American electorate should be aware that there may be
something worthwhile to learn from Western European Social Democracies.

I'm posting some excerpted thoughts of Robert Scheer on AIG. It has been observed and I agree that the furor over the AIG bonuses is somewhat of a smokescreen. However outrageous these are, they are less than .01% of the total we have given them. The entire interview may be found by clicking on the title.

...
ROBERT SCHEER: Hi, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Perp walks?

ROBERT SCHEER: Yes. I mean, first of all, let me say, the bonuses—I think it’s an important glimpse into the cesspool that is Wall Street, but it’s a side show, you know, and I know it’s confusing—millions, billions, trillions. But the real scandal is—the money—AIG is basically a shell game at this point, and they’re passing the money through AIG to the big banks, the former stockbrokers and so forth. Goldman Sachs got the biggest amount, $12.5 billion. The head of AIG was on the board of directors and the head of the audit committee for Goldman Sachs for five years. The Treasury Secretary that put this deal together, Paulson, under Bush was the head, was the CEO of Goldman Sachs. The guy who administered the TARP fund was a vice president at Goldman Sachs. The Democrat who made all of this deregulation possible, Robert Rubin, when he was Secretary of Treasury, and then Lawrence Summers who followed him, Rubin had been the head of Goldman Sachs. And they pushed through the basic deregulation that allowed these banks to become too big to allow to fail.

I am reposting this for those who may be new to our forum

Every post should be assigned a Main and as many secondary categories as seem applicable. If a category is omitted, the first one (alphabetically) on the list, Blog Issues, is assigned.

If one clicks a category (these are listed on the right) all posts assigned to that category will appear.

One can do this retroactively if they forget, but only for their own posts. Click the "Posts" tab which is just right of the "Write" tab.

Palestinian gynecologist and peace advocate Dr. Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish speaks to Democracy Now! producer Anjali Kamat and Jacquie Soohen of Big Noise Films in his home in Jabaliya, Gaza, where Israeli shells killed three of his daughters and a niece two months ago.

(Video)

Transcript below:

The Granny Bashers: Different Facts, Same Policy
Monday 16 March 2009

by: Dean Baker, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Many seniors rely on dependably funded Medicare benefits to cover their health care costs. The granny basher crew constitutes one of the largest and most determined lobbies in Washington. The top priority for this lobby is to cut Social Security and Medicare.
The lobby includes the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, with an endowment of more than $1 billion from the private equity tycoon himself. It also includes The Washington Post, which liberally sprinkles assertions about the need to cut Social Security and Medicare in both its news and editorial pages. Many prominent members of Congress also belong to the club, along with much of the punditry who make their living pronouncing on public policy.
The granny bashers' theme is that Social Security and Medicare constitute an enormous generational injustice because the young, and those yet to be born, will be forced to pay for the cost of these programs for retirees and current workers. Of course, the reality is that the vast majority of the granny bashers' horror stories about generational inequity stems from the cost of sustaining a broken health care system not from programs for retirees.
If the United States fixed its health care system, then the granny bashers' horror story disappears. In fact, even if we don't fix the health care system, we can make most of the horror story disappear by just allowing seniors to buy into the health care systems of countries that have more efficient systems than the United States .
But the granny bashers are not interested in fixing the health care system; that would involve confronting powerful interest groups like the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and the doctors' lobby. In fact, the granny bashers are not really even particularly interested in generational equity. This is just an excuse for their real agenda: cutting Social Security and Medicare.
This point is demonstrated by the fact that their policy recommendations never change even when the evidence changes in very big ways. The granny bashers have treated us to three very dramatic examples of this "different facts, same policy" approach in the last 15 years.
The first example is slightly technical. It has to do with the claim that the consumer price index (CPI) overstates inflation.
The CPI is our yardstick for measuring how much better off people are getting through time. If wages grow 4.0 percent and the CPI tells us that inflation is 3.0 percent, then real wages have grown by 1.0 percent. However, if the true rate of inflation is just 2.0 percent because the CPI overstates inflation by 1.0 percentage point a year, then real wages have grown by 2.0 percent (4.0 percent wage growth, minus 2.0 percent inflation).
Fifteen years ago, many economists and pundits (including much of the granny basher lobby) embraced the claim that the CPI overstated the true rate of inflation by at least 1.0 percent a year. If this claim was true, then it undermined the core of the granny bashers' story. It would mean that our children and grandchildren would be far richer than we ever imagined possible and that many older workers and elderly grew up in poverty.
If annual wage growth was 2.0 percent rather than 1.0 percent, then in 40 years, wages will be more than 220 percent of the current level, instead of just 50 percent higher. The granny bashers embraced the claim of the overstated CPI in order to justify cutting Social Security (retiree benefits are indexed to the CPI), but they never followed through the logic of this claim for their generational equity story.
This would be comparable to Al Gore maintaining a drive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions even after new evidence showed that the planet was actually cooling. Honest people don't ignore such evidence.
The exact same issue arises with the speed up in productivity growth in the mid-90s. The granny basher crusade against Social Security and Medicare dates from the mid-80s when productivity growth was just 1.5 percent a year.
Productivity growth determines the rate at which society can, on average, get richer. In the mid-90s, the rate of annual productivity growth increased by a full percentage point - in effect bringing about the more rapid gains in real income that would have been implied by an overstated CPI. However, none of the granny bashers noted how the productivity growth speedup had enormously improved the prospects of future generations. They just maintained their insistence on cutting Social Security and Medicare.
Finally, the recent collapse of the housing bubble and the resulting stock market plunge have reduced the wealth of older workers and retirees by close to $15 trillion. This is a transfer to the young, since they will be able to buy the housing stock and the corporate capital stock for a far lower price than they would have expected to pay just two years ago.
Remarkably, the granny basher crew has somehow failed to notice this enormous transfer of wealth from the old to the young. They just continue their crusade to cut Social Security and Medicare as though nothing has happened.
It should be evident that the granny bashers don't care at all about generational equity. They care about dismantling Social Security and Medicare, the country's most important social programs. It is important that the public recognize the granny bashers' real agenda so that they can give them the respect they deserve.
________________________________________
Dean Baker is the Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. CEPR's Jobs Byte is published each month upon release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' employment report.

Dear MoveOn member,
This is ridiculous. The media has been obsessing about President Obama's plan to roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans—from 35% to 39.6%—even asking if that makes him a socialist.1

But do you know what tax rate the wealthiest Americans paid on the top portion of their earnings at the end of Ronald Reagan's first term? 50%.

Under Richard Nixon? 70%. Under Dwight Eisenhower? 91%!

Shocking, right?

And for all the whining about rolling back Bush's irresponsible tax cuts, the truth is that Obama's plan cuts taxes for 95% of working Americans. Further, it closes huge tax loopholes for oil companies, hedge funds and corporations that ship jobs overseas so that we can invest in the priorities that will get our economy back on track.2

We saw a great chart in The Washington Monthly3 that shows just how absurd Republican complaints about Obama's budget are. Check it out and pass it on:

Thanks for all you do.

–Daniel, Eli, Laura, Matt and the rest of the team

Sources:

1. "A socialist? Obama calls back to insist no," The International Herald Tribune, March 8, 2009
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/08/america/barack.php

2. "Tax Cuts," The New York Times, February 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/washington/27web-tax.html

3. "Soaking the Rich (Redux)," The Washington Monthly, March 8, 2009
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51234&id=15734-1332774-HqisQXx&t=2

Want to support our work? We're entirely funded by our 5 million members—no corporate contributions, no big checks from CEOs. And our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. Chip in here.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PAID FOR BY MOVEON.ORG POLITICAL ACTION, http://pol.moveon.org/. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. This email was sent to IRWIN M HEIT on March 13, 2009. To change your email address

WHO YOU CALLING SOCIALIST?
Wednesday 04 March 2009
by: Harold Meyerson , The Washington Post

“We are all socialists now,” proclaims Newsweek. We are creating “socialist republics” in the United States, says Mike Huckabee, adding, on reflection, that “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.” We are witnessing the Obama-era phenomenon of “European socialism transplanted to Washington,” says Newt Gingrich.
Well! Even as we all turn red, I’ve still encountered just two avowed democratic socialists in my daily rounds through the nation’s capital: Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders . . . and the guy I see in the mirror when I shave. Bernie is quite capable of speaking for himself, so what follows is a report on the state of actual existing socialism from the other half of the D.C. Senators and Columnists Soviet.

Obama Skews Battle Lines in “Class War”
Wednesday 04 March 2009
By Michael Hilzik, Los Angeles Times

“Class warfare” comes in many flavors. There’s the variety practiced by feudal overlords upon their serfs, and the variety waged by the Jacobins of the French Revolution against the monarchists.
Then there’s the variety that Republicans claim to find in President Obama’s proposed budget—a taking from the rich to reward the undeserving poor. The rhetoric has spread quickly, moving from the libertarian Heritage Foundation to the ranks of GOP presidential hopefuls like flames leaping from tree to tree in the Angeles National Forest.
“Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff,” says former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics may be dead, but a Union of American Socialist Republics is being born.”
Yet the true class war of recent American history is the one that has pitted the upper 1% of income earners against almost everybody else. Over the last three decades, a period that spans Republican and Democratic administrations alike, average family income has scarcely budged an inch, while the wealthy have grown measurably wealthier.
In 1979, the top 1% of U.S. households earned eight times as much as the middle 20% and 23 times as much as the bottom fifth; by 2005, the Congressional Budget Office found, the upper crust touched 21 times as much as the middle class and 70 times as much as the bottom. Adjusting for inflation, the average American worker made 16% less in 2004 than in the 1970s, according to economist Benjamin M. Friedman.

Click the title to see video of Gaza after the Israeli bombardment. Click the link above to read about the efforts of the charity American Near East Refugee Aid.

A Beit Hanoun preschooler shows the destruction in one of her school's classrooms.

By Scott Horton

Juan Cole is one of the nation’s leading historians focusing on the Middle East. Over the past decade he has emerged as a commentator on Middle East policy and a reliable source for new ideas that may enable the United States to pursue its foreign policy objectives more effectively in the region. For millions, his frequent posts at the Informed Comment blog provide a daily update on press accounts from the Islamic world, often including translations from Arabic- and Farsi-language sources in close-to-real time. His new book, Engaging the Muslim World, will be published on March 17.

1. What are the three biggest misperceptions Americans have about the global Islamic community?

Prof. Juan Cole

One: If you watch American television, you see the most extreme charges against Muslims set forth by pundits. Some allege that Muslims are inherently violent and commanded by scripture to attack infidels. In fact, the Quran forbids murder and commands Muslims to make peace with people who seek peace with them. The “infidels” whom the Quran urges the faithful to combat were the militant pagans of ancient Mecca, who had aggressively attacked the Muslims and were trying to kill them all. The Quran praises the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels as full of “guidance and light,” celebrates the children of Israel, and says that Christians are closest in love to Muslims. Of course, some Muslims are bigoted and manage to ignore those parts of their scripture, but it is not the case that the religion is essentially militant. I’ve gone with Americans to the Middle East, and after a few days they typically come and confess to me that they are amazed at how nice the people are, how kind and generous to foreigners, and how little they resemble U.S. media stereotypes.

I read a study by one of the major humanitarian organizations working in Gaza that showed that over 50% of children in Gaza, and this was BEFORE the terrible 22 day assault of the Israeli military of December of '08, have hearing loss due to the constant exposure to the sonic booms of the F-16 terror bombers that constantly fly over Gaza, even when they are not dropping bombs. And that over 50% of the children of Gaza do not have the will to go on living because of the terrible conditions under the Israeli siege that has been blocking import of necessities for years. I will try and bring a copy of the study to our next ORDC meeting later this month. PF

Published on Sunday, March 8, 2009 by CTV Canada

Israeli Airstrikes Continue to Haunt Gaza Children

by Parminder Parmar

Steve Matthews, an aid worker with World Vision Canada, has been to some of the world's most violent and troubled regions, including Darfur, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

But even after years in the field, Matthews still has difficulty comprehending the devastating affects of war on children. In February, he returned from Gaza, where he had spent a month listening to Palestinian children describe in graphic detail what they saw, heard and felt during this winter's Israeli airstrikes.

Ameer, a 9-year-old in northern Gaza whose father was killed from aerial fire as he tried to save his brother who had also been hit with bullets, in this undated photo. (Courtesy Steve Matthews of World Vision)

David Brooks penned a column for The New York Times today that is destined to become a classic of its type. His editors seem to think so as well, titling his essay: "A Moderate Manifesto."
Its main thrust is to agree with conservative arguments that the Obama administration's budget proposal is a radical big-government, class-warfare, tax-and-spend package that would remake the country in a horrifying fashion.

Saturday, March 07, 2009
Walt: In Defense of Chas Freeman
Why we Need Clear-Eyed NIEs

Harvard political scientist Stephen Walt, who blogs for Foreign Policy takes on the critics of Chas Freeman's possible appointment as chair of the National Intelligence Council, and critics of Walt for defending him.

Freeman is a man of enormous diplomatic experience, both a China expert and a Middle East hand, and is the former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He is also a clear-sighted analyst who is not afraid to say that the US mission in Afghanistan has become quixotic, and that Israel's expansionist policies are bad for all concerned, including the US. As soon as his appointment was bruited, the well-connected coterie of right-Zionist pundits went after him, and it is pretty obvious that he was being smeared and punished for having dared publicly criticize Israel, which the Revisionists have tried for years to make a hanging offense.

How do I enter an article into a Post?

Ordc Forum/Blog

Archives for: March 2009

03/27/09

07:47:59 am

03/24/09

01:23:26 pm HAVE NO FEAR! NO SOCIALISM HERE!

03/22/09

10:15:09 am Robert Scheer on AIG

03/21/09

12:20:55 pm Using Categories

03/20/09

06:55:23 pm Doctor from Gaza Talks about the Deaths of Three of his Daughters and a Niece in the Israeli Agression

11:05:46 am NO SOCIAL SECURITY OR MEDICARE; WHO WILL LOOK AFTER GRANNY?

10:05:08 am SOCIALIST TAX POLICY?

03/14/09

03:36:21 pm WHO YOU CALLING SOCIALIST?

03:04:21 pm OBAMA SKEWS BATTLE LINES IN CLASS WAR

03/12/09

08:20:04 am American Near East Refugee Aid

03/11/09

06:00:25 am Six Questions for Juan Cole, Author of Engaging the Muslim World

03/09/09

06:37:02 pm Israeli Airstrikes Continue to Haunt Gaza Children

03/08/09

07:20:16 pm THE ULTIMATE DAVID BROOKS COLUMN

03/07/09

03:00:09 pm In Defense of Chas Freeman Why we Need Clear-Eyed National Intelligence Estimates

03/06/09

03:45:14 pm Trial Post