HOW THE "MAINSTREAM" MEDIA MAKES LIBERALS LOOK UNHINGED ...AND PATENTLY DUMB RIGHT-WINGNUTS LOOK POPULAR

Thom Hartmann: I'll bet you didn't see this Palin on "Face the Nation" 

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NPR NOW REDUCED TO JUST ANOTHER SOURCE OF RIGHT-WING PROPAGANDA?

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Home > Publications > Blogs > Beat the Press > NPR Joins Drive to Cut Social Security

NPR Joins Drive to Cut Social Security

Tuesday, 15 March 2011 19:48

NPR ran a piece that largely accepted untrue or misleading Republican assertions about Social Security. The piece told readers that:

"Republicans also believe [emphasis added] the very best time to fix Social Security is now, during a time of divided government when both Democrats and Republicans can share ownership of any changes."

Actually, NPR's reporters/editors have no clue what Republicans "believe." They are just making this up. The Republicans in question (like Democrats) are politicians. They say things that advance their political agenda whether or not they actually believe them. Competent reporters know this and don't try to tell their audience that these politicians actually believe their assertions; competent reporters just report the assertions and let their audience make up their own mind as to whether the politicians believe what they are saying.

It is also not a fact that Social Security needs to be fixed in any meaningful sense of the term. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the program can pay all benefits for the next 28 years with no changes whatsoever and can pay nearly 80 percent of projected benefits indefinitely into the future, even if nothing is ever done to change the program.

The article includes a statement from Alabama Senator Richard Shelby noting that Social Security paid out more in benefits than it took in taxes last year: "

"Social Security is now at the tipping point, the first step of a long, slow march to insolvency if we don't do something about it."

It would have been worth noting that this actually was part of the design of the program. The reason that payroll taxes were raised to a point where they exceeded benefits was to cover the cost of the baby boomers' retirement, which meant that there would be points like the present where benefits exceeded taxes. Otherwise, the increase in the payroll taxes in the 1980s made no sense. It would have been appropriate to point out to listeners that Mr. Shelby either does not understand the program or is deliberately trying to mislead the public.

Similarly, the segment included an assertion from Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn that money was stolen from Social Security:

"The fact is ... $2.8 trillion was stolen from Social Security .., The money was spent. It's broke. And we're going to have to fund $2.8 trillion over the next 20 years just to make the payments that we've got. I would think most people would think we ought to fix that."

Actually, not a penny was stolen from Social Security. Social Security lent money to the federal government by buying bonds, just as individuals, private corporations and banks do all the time. When an individual or company buys a bond from the government, it doesn't matter to them at all (except as citizens) whether or how the government spends the money. The government owes the exact same money regardless.

When the government pays back the bonds held by the Social Security trust fund it will effectively be replacing the bonds held by the trust fund with other bonds. The borrowing took place when the government sold bonds to the Social Security trust fund in the first place. It is not new borrowing when the government repays the bonds held by the Social Security trust fund.

About Beat the Press

Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He is the author of several books, including False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy. Read more about Dean.

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LIES, BIG LIES, AND DAMN LIES - ABOUT THE AMERICAN WORKER BY THE SO-CALLED "LIBERAL" MEDIA

Public Employee Unions Don't Get One Penny from Taxpayers and Can't Require Membership, But the Big Lie That They Do Is Everywhere

Nobody has to belong to a union or support its political activities, but you'd never know that from reading the news.

AlterNet / by Joshua Holland

March 5, 2011 | Let us begin with this simple, indisputable truth: public employees' unions don't get a single red cent from taxpayers. And they aren't a mechanism to “force” working people to support Democrats – that's completely illegal.

Photo Credit: vaxomatic

Public sector workers are employed by the government, but they are private citizens. Once a private citizen earns a dollar from the sweat of his or her brow, it no longer belongs to his or her employer. In the case of public workers, it is no longer a “taxpayer dollar”; it is a dollar held privately by an American citizen. Public sector unions are financed through the dues paid by these private citizens, who elected to be part of a union – not a single taxpayer dollar is involved, and no worker is forced to join a union against his or her wishes. No worker in the United States is required to give one red cent to support a political cause he or she doesn't agree with.

There is no distinction between the role public- and private-sector unions play: both represent their members in negotiations with their employers. At the federal level, both are prohibited from using their members' dues for political purposes. They donate to political campaigns – to elect lawmakers who will stand up for the interests of working people – but only out of voluntary contributions their members choose to make to their PACs.

“Unions cannot, from their general funds, contribute a dime to any federal candidate or national political party,” says Laurence Gold, an attorney with the AFL-CIO. “They can only do it through their separate political PAC and only according to strict limits.”

The states have a patchwork of different laws, and many do allow unions to donate to campaigns. But membership is entirely voluntary – when a group of workers elect to form a union, it doesn't mean that everyone must sign up. The union negotiates on behalf of all the workers in the group – and all of the workers get the job security and other benefits that come with collective bargaining -- but by law it can't compel them to pay union dues. “It is a right-wing canard that anyone needs to join a union,” Gold told AlterNet. “If a union member doesn't like what his or her union is doing, he or she is ultimately free to walk, without any diminution in their employment rights. They still get all the benefits and the union still has to represent them – just like it did the day before.”

In states that haven't passed so-called Right-To-Work laws, the union can charge all workers in a “negotiating unit” for the direct cost of representing them, but cannot, by law, force them to pay for the union's political activities. “They can only be required to pay for their share of bargaining costs and representation costs – not politics, not legislative stuff, not anything else,” Gold said. “Compulsory union dues are a canard, everywhere, and without exception. Anybody who says, oh you can compel somebody to support the union's electoral activities – well, that's simply false.”

Now that we have established a baseline of factual reality, let's take a look at what much of the media – even the ostensibly “liberal” media – are telling the American people.

In a widely cited opinion piece in the Washington Post, former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson claimed that "public employee unions have the unique power to help pick pliant negotiating partners -- by using compulsory dues to elect friendly politicians." Again, a blatant falsehood, and one that prompted economist Dean Baker to point out that “if Mr. Gerson knows of any violations of the law, I'm sure that there are many ambitious prosecutors who would be happy to hear his evidence.”

The irony here is that while unions can't compel workers to fork over a penny for political campaigns, corporations can donate unlimited amounts of their shareholders' equity to do so – they are, in fact, in the “unique position” to elect pliant lawmakers. “What the right-wing and the business community always try to portray is that you have these union bosses that are forcing helpless employees to give them money,” says Gold, “when the reality is that these are their members who chose to be in a union and then elected their officers democratically, in sharp contrast to corporations, none of whose officers are elected democratically unless you count shareholders voting at an annual meeting as a real democratic system.”

And conservatives have long held that voluntary donations to political campaigns are a high form of free speech. The double standard is clear-- “money equals speech” unless it's money freely donated by working people to advance their own economic interests.

The corporate-backed Heritage Foundation – which has waged a longstanding propaganda war against the American labor movement -- notes that “state and local employees in 28 states are required to pay full union dues” – patently untrue -- and, “using this government coercion, government unions have amassed tremendous financial resources that they use to campaign for higher taxes and higher pay for government workers.”

There are no “government unions,” just unions of private workers. And they have no interest in campaigning for higher taxes – they are unions of taxpaying citizens. They do push for better pay, benefits and working conditions, like private sector unions, but officials elected by American voters determine the number and size of public programs and therefore the ultimate cost of government.

Heritage also makes much of the fact that public unions lobby for various policies that conservatives don't like, and claims, yet again, that they do so with “taxpayer dollars.” That's false, as we know, but it is true of another group: private contractors. They routinely include a line-item billing the government for part of the money they spend on lobbying – they, rather than the unions, actually use taxpayer dollars to lobby for, as Heritage puts it, “legislation and ballot measures that raise taxes and spending.”

Writing for Newsweek, Mark McKinnon writes that “it is the abuse by public unions and their bosses that pushes centrists like me to the GOP.” (McKinnon was a political adviser to both George W. Bush and John McCain.) His enthusiasm to spin public unions as something to be feared is so great, he ends up making this confused – and confusing – argument:

Unlike private-sector jobs, which are more than fully funded through revenues created in a voluntary exchange of money for goods or services, public-sector jobs are funded by taxpayer dollars, forcibly collected by the government (union dues are often deducted from public employees’ paychecks).

I don't pretend to know what he means when he says private sector jobs are more than fully funded – we do have an underemployment rate of about 17 percent – but the rest is an incomprehensible mish-mash of “public sector jobs,” which are obviously paid for out of tax revenues, and public sector unions, which, as he notes, are funded out of the paychecks of private citizens working for the government – workers who choose to belong to a union.

He then advances the Big Lie, essentially turning reality on its head:

Big money from public unions, collected through mandatory dues, and funded entirely by the taxpayer, is then redistributed as campaign cash to help elect the politicians who are then supposed to represent taxpayers in negotiations with those same unions.

This falsehood pitting public employees against taxpayers is ubiquitous. The Washington Post ran a story headlined, “Ohio, Wisconsin shine spotlight on new union battle: Government workers vs. taxpayers”; Rush Limbaugh called public sector unions, "money launderers" for "Democrat politicians"; Mark Steyn called them, "rapacious, public sector-shakedown kleptocrats," and self-proclaimed liberal Joe Klein wondered if they “are organized against the might and greed...of the public?” 

All of this is meant to serve another, Bigger Lie – even more ubiquitous -- that the cost of public workers is killing state budgets. As Bill O'Reilly put it with typical understatement, state "governments can't afford to operate" because of "union wages and benefits."

Here's another factual baseline: those “cadillac” pensions we always hear about public workers getting actually average $22,000 per year and amount to just 6 percent of state budgets. Some states' pension funds have problems because they've been raided to pay for tax cuts, but in aggregate, pensions aren't eating up state budgets. Andrew Leonard, writing in Salon about what he calls  “the imaginary public sector pension fund crisis,” notes that because the stock market has recovered to a great degree, “those horrible 'shortfalls' everyone has been making such a big deal of are already in retreat.”

As economist Dean Baker notes, it was Wall Street, not a bunch of teachers and firefighters, which is to blame for the gaps that do exist. “Most of the pension shortfall,” he wrote, “is attributable to the plunge in the stock market in the years 2007-2009. If pension funds had earned returns just equal to the interest rate on 30-year Treasury bonds in the three years since 2007, their assets would be more than $850 billion greater than they are today.”

Public workers' salaries are another 28 percent of state budgets. They get paid less than comparable workers in the private sector, even including benefits. The problem, as far as an honest debate goes, comes from the word “comparable.” Last week, USA Today (mis)informed its readers that workers in the public sector make more than in the private, a claim it backed up with misleading averages. The article only quoted in passing an economist who pointed out that their “analysis is misleading because it doesn't reflect factors such as education that result in higher pay for public employees.” It's actually meaningless, as public workers are twice as likely to have a college degree and have, on average, more years on the job than workers in the private sector.

State and local employees' wages and salaries have virtually nothing to do with the budget gaps which many states are grappling with – that too is a result of the recession caused by Wall Street, not Main Street. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, “State tax collections, adjusted for inflation, are now 12 percent below pre-recession levels, while the need for state-funded services has not declined. As a result, even after making very deep spending cuts over the last several years, states continue to face large budget gaps.” According to Census data, states' social welfare payments to struggling individuals and families increased by around 25 percent between the first quarter of 2007 and the last quarter of 2010.

Most of the media lazily accepts that collective bargaining by state workers is a fiscal matter – a typical headline on AOL news asked, “Can collective bargaining bills stem state deficits?” as if there is some correlation between those two things. But the evidence doesn't suggest as much: There are already 13 states that restrict public workers' bargaining rights and it hasn't helped their bottom lines. As Ed Kilgore noted, "eight non-collective-bargaining states face larger budget shortfalls than either Wisconsin or Ohio," and " three of the 13 non-collective bargaining states are among the eleven states facing budget shortfalls at or above 20%."

Tragically, the corporate media, rather than shedding light on these facts –which are necessary for a healthy debate -- is helping to obscure them under a cloud of anti-union spin.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

WILL NEW YORK CITY BE THE NEXT CAIRO?

Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign rally, New York City, Aug. 2004.

Policemen guard the Fox News building during the Shut-Up-A-Thon, NYC, Aug. 2004.

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http://fubarandgrill.org/node/919




February 2, 2011

The New York Times and “living within our means”

- by Bill Van Auken

On the eve of New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo’s budget announcement, the New York Times published a lengthy editorial headlined “Within Our Means,” demanding that all New Yorkers tighten their belts in order to close the state budget gap.

The budget presented by Cuomo on Tuesday includes drastic across-the-board austerity measures, cutting billions of dollars in local school funding and Medicaid appropriations, while proposing to lay off some 10,000 state workers.

This is all to the good, as far as the Times is concerned, but only as a first installment. Cuomo and the state legislature, the editorial declares, “will have to make very difficult decisions about how to close a $10 billion budget deficit—which state offices to shutter, which services and aid to cut, which employees to lay off and which taxes to raise. There are no easy fixes left.”

Noting that half of the state’s operating budget goes to education and health care—the areas hardest hit by Cuomo’s budget ax—the Times affirms indifferently, “So, the state’s most vulnerable citizens—the poor, the sick, the elderly and schoolchildren—will inevitably bear the largest burden.”

The newspaper assures its readers, however, that there is plenty of “room to cut,” arguing that the deficit is largely a function of the state government’s “profligacy and its eagerness to reward unions and other special interests.” To illustrate its point, it cites the provision of “optional benefits” such as dental coverage to such “special interest” groups as the children of families subsisting on less than $15,000 a year.

There is no room for sentimentality about such things, the Times makes clear. “We need to live within our means,” the editorial states, while expressing the hope that ways can be found “to cut spending equitably.”

To demonstrate its commitment to equity, the newspaper makes a few concrete proposals. “The best place to look for savings is in programs for the elderly and the disabled,” it writes. It suggests that the state “restrict allowed home visits,” leaving those unable to leave their apartments to die on their own.

It adds proposals to carry out mass layoffs of teachers and state employees, while freezing their salaries, cutting their pensions and increasing their health care contributions. “Freezes are a painful fact of life across the private sector these days,” the newspaper notes.

Cautioning against taking the idea of equity too far, the Times warns, “With the economy still struggling this is not the time to impose major new taxes.”

This editorial gives voice to the firmly held views of a ruling elite in New York City which, in terms of its corruption, defense of social inequality and political reaction, is a match for Hosni Mubarak and his cronies in Cairo. Only outright sociopaths could make the case that in New York, of all places, the prime area to look for money to close the deficit gap is the meager assistance provided to the disabled and the homebound elderly.

This city’s mayor is Michael Bloomberg, a man whose personal fortune exceeds $18 billion. He and his fellow billionaire New Yorkers—men like David Koch, John Paulson, Ronald Perelman, Carl Icahn, Stephen Schwarzman, Rupert Murdoch—could personally cover the state deficit ten times over and still rank among the super-rich.

They bestride a city that is the most unequal in the country and among the most unequal in the world. According to one recent study, if New York City were a country it would rank 15th from the bottom in terms of income equality among 134 nations, roughly on a par with Honduras. To talk about “cutting spending equitably” in this environment is not just farcical, it is criminal. [emphasis added]

The state’s budget crisis is not the result of “profligacy”—no one who has been inside a New York City public high school, a public housing development or a state-run medical facility could utter the word with a straight face. Rather, like the yawning chasm between wealth and poverty, it is the product of the systematic plundering of society by a layer of social parasites and financial swindlers, many of whom should be the subject of criminal investigation and prosecution.

This layer, which is now braying for the fiscal crisis to be taken out of the hides of school kids, the poor and the disabled, monopolizes the wealth of society on a scale unheard of in modern history.

New York City’s top 1 percent consists of those making $645,000 or more in annual income. (The Times’ executive editor, Bill Keller, fits comfortably in this category). According to a recent study by the Fiscal Policy Institute (FPI), this layer has seen its share of total income in the city rise from 12 percent in 1980 to 44 percent in 2007, the last year for which data is available.

This top 1 percent consists of about 34,500 households, comprised of 90,000 of New York City’s richest. Their average household income amounts to $3.7 million a year. As the FPI study points out, ten times as many city residents—900,000—are living in deep poverty, defined as half of the absurdly low federal poverty line for a family of four, which translates into $10,500. This annual income, upon which more than 10 percent of New York’s population subsists, is roughly the equivalent of the $10,137 which the average household in the top one percent rakes in every single day of the year.

The average income of the top one percent has more than doubled since 2002 alone, rising by 119 percent. Meanwhile, over the past two decades, the median hourly wage in New York City has fallen by nearly 9 percent, while the share of total income earned by those on the bottom half of the economic ladder—50 percent of the population—has been cut in half, from 15.8 percent in 1990 to 7.9 percent today.

The top one percent runs the city, with Bloomberg, one of their own, at the helm. This elite rests on a wider layer of millionaires, which, according to a survey produced last summer, consists of some 667,000 people. No doubt they include not a few of the higher-paid columnists and editorial writers at the Times. According to the FPI study, the number of millionaires in New York City rose by 18 percent in 2009 over the previous year, a staggering rise that can be explained only by the massive amount of money poured into Wall Street in the wake of the September 2008 financial meltdown.

It is worth recalling that at the time of the bank bailout, the Times editorial board wasn’t talking about living “within our means.” Instead, it was demanding that the government make available hundreds of billions of dollars to cover the bad bets of the major financial institutions and protect the fortunes of their biggest investors.

“It is painfully clear that the financial system will not rebound on its own from the excessive lending and borrowing of the Bush years and the credit collapse in their wake,” the Times editorialized at the time. “The one-bailout-at-a-time approach hasn’t worked. And modest steps are no longer an option.”

Thus, the same newspaper that proclaimed there could be no “modest steps” in bailing out the banks now insists there can be “no easy fixes,” i.e., that the working people must pay the cost.

The Times editorial sums up the outlook of the liberal Democratic Party establishment, including the Obama administration, and reflects the wealth-besotted social layer for which it speaks—a layer that looks on the working class with contempt and hatred.

The drastic cutbacks now being introduced, coming on top of the sharp decline in living standards for the majority of the population, near-record unemployment and historic levels of social inequality, will inevitably ignite a social firestorm.

New York City will see social struggles on a scale now being witnessed in Egypt. Millions of workers will fight to defend their jobs, their living standards, their children’s education and their basic social rights against the rapacity of New York’s billionaire pharaohs. [emphasis added]

This struggle must be prepared through the creation of popular action committees in the neighborhoods and in the workplaces to resist school closures, mass layoffs and social cutbacks. Genuine resistance can be organized only if it is independent of the trade union apparatus, which is an integral part of the entire corrupt political setup, assisting in the implementation of the policies of Bloomberg, Cuomo and Obama.

The answer to the cynical demand that we live “within our means” by driving millions more into poverty lies in the fight to recover the “means” that have been robbed from society by the Wall Street plunderers.

What is needed is a socialist program, including the expropriation of the major banks, finance houses and corporations and the placing of their resources under public ownership and the democratic control of the working class. Together with a policy of taxation that places the burden of the economic crisis upon the wealthy parasites who created it, such measures will free up resources to provide jobs for the unemployed, raise living standards, and provide the funding needed to assure decent health care, quality education and a secure retirement for all.

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Copyright © 2011 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved. Reposted to Fubar with permission.

Link to source: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/feb2011/mean-f02.shtml

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