Progressive Media Advocates
Social Security is a program that includes provisions for retirement, disability insurance and survivor benefits. It can be self sustaining if structured to do so. The articles below discuss both its challenges and opportunities.
Brent Budowsky: The Senate becomes a farce: Democrats propose, Republicans filibuster. Democrats retreat, Congress recesses. Tiny victories are hailed as great achievements. The Democratic legacy is dumbed down by the day. The voice of a generation is silenced.
Carl Bloice: The Congressional Progressive Caucus budget that is far more sensible and humane than anything the White House is proposing. But since the “serious” people in Washington don’t cotton to it, the serious mainstream media won’t give it the time of day.
Norman Solomon: Whether or not Obama’s vicious assault on Social Security is successful, it has already jolted an unprecedented number of longtime supporters. It should be the last straw, suffused with illumination.
Steven Hill: An expansion of the Social Security retirement system — one of the most successful and popular social programs in American history — that converts it into a more robust retirement system would build upon the most stable component of the current system.
Richard “RJ” Eskow: Our nation was gripped by so many fallacies and delusions in 2012, the whole Mayan calendar end-of-the-world thing didn’t even make the list.
Richard RJ Eskow: The “chained CPI” is an attempt to camouflage deep cuts to Social Security and other benefits, along with tax hikes on middle class wages (but not for high incomes), in a forest of numbers and terminology.
Steve Hochstadt: So we end up with the same racial profiling that conservatives have been using to win votes since Richard Nixon’s southern strategy. The euphemisms change, but the intent is the same.
Tina Dupuy: We’re fatter, sicker, further in debt and using the most illegal drugs in the world—all signs Americans have become overspent from bad economic policies.
Michele Waslin: As the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals initiative begins accepting applications this week, many are wondering whether beneficiaries of the program will be eligible to obtain a state driver’s license. At this point the answer is: it depends.
Eric Laumen: Amidst the controversy of the Starr commission’s Monica Lewinsky investigation, President Clinton, a centrist through and through, was forced to fall back on the support of his party’s left-progressive wing and abandon bipartisanship.
Steve Hochstadt: Dodd-Frank was passed by Democrats when they controlled Congress. Nearly every Democrat voted for Dodd-Frank, and nearly every Republican voted against it.
Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer: The 99% Spring is the latest effort by those close to the Democrats to take advantage of Occupy, but the results were less than spectacular.
Carl Bloice: If the country were really impoverished, there would be some legitimacy to the idea that we really couldn’t afford to properly meet the needs the elderly, people with disabilities and the poor.
Shamus Cooke: Most Occupiers have learned that raw enthusiasm alone cannot bring victory to a social movement; ideas matter too. Action divorced from strategy equals wasted energy, divisiveness, diversions and unnecessary mistakes. Not all tactics push the movement forward.
Wednesday night’s packed Town Hall at the Robert A. Millikan Middle School auditorium in Sherman Oaks (January 4, 2012) to meet Congressman Howard Berman (D), the San Fernando Valley’s longest serving representative, was an informative and low-key affair about a good number of hot-button issues, punctuated by occasional but persistent outbursts from . . . [...]
Robert Reich: Not a day goes by without Republicans decrying the budget deficit. But the biggest single reason for the yawning deficit is big money’s corruption of Washington.
Joseph Palermo: Despite the redeployment of U.S. troops out of Iraq, during this dismal period of “austerity” the public isn’t likely to see any discernible difference in the government’s misplaced priorities.
Shamus Cooke: For Occupy to grow into a democratic revolutionary movement, the working majority of the population must join in, requiring that Occupy broadcast a message based on concrete working-class demands.
Steve Hochstadt: The calls to flatten the income tax, to eliminate welfare payments, and to repeal regulation of industry are about going back to an earlier America, where the rich and powerful could use their advantages without hindrance.
Vivian Rothstein: According to the American Association of Retired People (AARP), a frightening 35 percent of Americans over 65 currently rely only on Social Security (an average person gets benefits of $14,000/year) to survive.
Randy Shaw: I expect many Occupy supporters to spend time from Labor Day to Election Day in 2012 on statewide initiatives seeking to raise taxes on the 1% in order to fund schools and other vital needs.
Friday Feedback: This week, John comments on “Real Social Security: A Just Distribution of Wealth” by Charles Hayes.
Carl Bloice: Several Democrats said during the day that the presentation had the support of a majority of the six Democrats on the panel, leaving the impression that at least one, and possibly two, of the party’s lawmakers had not signed on — possibly Becerra and Clyburn.
Charles Hayes: When I hear senate candidate Elizabeth Warren explain to an audience that no one makes a fortune in America all on their own, I can’t help but wonder why it has taken so long for this argument to surface.
Robert Reich: Occupiers and others have had enough.
Yet paradoxically the presidential race that officially begins a few months from now is likely to be as passionless as they come.
Randy Shaw: If President Obama and fellow Democrats agree to a deficit reduction deal that cuts Medicare, Social Security, and other programs serving the 99%, expect an electoral calamity for Democrats in 2012.
Alan Grayson, the former congressional representative whose speech on the House Floor went viral on YouTube, because he spoke truth, needs your help. After telling the raw truth about healthcare reform, Grayson lost his seat. But Saturday, 12 November, 2 p.m. we can help change that.Grayson famously said that Wall Street controls our economic policy, Big Oil controls our energy policy, and the military-industrial complex controls our foreign policy.
Carl Bloice: Greed is rampant, poverty and economic inequality are growing relentlessly in our country and our political system is ever increasingly corrupted by money. The system is in trouble.
Shamus Cooke: The Occupy Movement has more than room for an umbrella of demands from diverse sections of working class people, but now we must focus on what unites the vast majority, since the corporations have focused on dividing us for decades.
Robert Reich: Without bold alternatives, Americans desperate for big solutions are attracted to bold crackpot ideas like Herman Cain’s “9-9-9” proposal, which would raise taxes on the poor and cut them for the rich.
Carole Bartolotto: The good news is that you can easily replace cow’s milk with almond, soy, rice, hemp or coconut milk instead. I love Trader Joe’s Vanilla Almond Milk.
Robert Reich: The fact is, global corporations have no allegiance to any country; their only objective is to make as much money as possible — and play off one country against another to keep their taxes down and subsidies up.
James Rhodes: Perhaps it is her wildly colorful style or the exaggerated use of glowing women and hidden cats or maybe it has something to do with the tranquility of her work that connects with the “common man” — certainly an artist of the people.
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