I was so busy actively blogging for not-profit yesterday morning that I missed the Presider's post-traumatic stressor of a presser, and had to settle for reruns later in the day. And then this morning I read the transcript. Big mistake. The pabulum totally cancelled out the caffeine in my coffee. So I have to warn you that I am striving mightily to even remain conscious as I type out yet another unprofitable blog-post from the extreme hinterland.
In case you missed it, here's the part of his preachy little lecture that I'm referencing:
And now that the government has reopened and this threat to our economy is removed, all of us need to stop focusing on the lobbyists, and the bloggers, and the talking heads on radio and the professional activists who profit from conflict, and focus on what the majority of Americans sent us here to do, and that's grow this economy, create good jobs, strengthen the middle class, educate our kids, lay the foundation for broad-based prosperity and get our fiscal house in order for the long haul. That's why we're here. That should be our focus.
Now, that won't be easy. We all know that we have divided government right now. There's a lot of noise out there, and the pressure from the extremes affect how lot of members of Congress see the day-to-day work that's supposed to be done here.
I assume that who the Presider meant by professional activists and extremes (sic) who profit from conflict were the likes of the Koch Brothers and Newt Gingrich, and not outfits like Organizing for Action, which did offer to put my name on the virtual Obama Wall if I'd just chip in $5 to help him make money off the shutdown. I'm sure he wasn't talking about his own little band of money-grubbing activist plutocrats in the Fix the Debt lobby, whose talking points he appeared to read verbatim during his class lecture to the Nation. I am not so self-important that I actually think he meant the likes of me and the hordes of other fringe-dwellers of the Internet. But still, it's fun to pretend that he actually reads the non-profits, and that we're getting under his skin.
The rest of the speech was typical self-contradicting Obama. Some examples:
These last few weeks have inflicted completely unnecessary damage on our economy. We don't know yet the full scope of the damage, but every analyst out there believes it's slowed our growth..... But probably nothing has done more damage to America's credibility in the world, our standing with other countries, than the spectacle that we've seen these past several weeks. It's encouraged our enemies, it's emboldened our competitors, and it's depressed our friends, who look to us for steady leadership. (On the Other Hand), Now the good news is, we'll bounce back from this. We always do. America's the bedrock of the global economy for a reason. We are the indispensable nation that the rest of the world looks to as the safest and most reliable place to invest, something that's made it easier for generations of Americans to invest in their own futures.
And here's the part where he still thinks cutting somehow magically leads to growth:
And we shouldn't approach this process of creating a budget as an ideological exercise, just cutting for the sake of cutting. The issue's not growth versus fiscal responsibility. We need both. We need a budget that deals with the issues that most Americans are focused on, creating more good jobs that pay better wages.
And remember, the deficit is getting smaller, not bigger. It's going down faster than it has in the last 50 years. (On the Other Hand), The challenge that we have right now are not short-term deficits; it's the long-term obligations that we have around things like Medicare and Social Security.
In case you missed it, the Presider just announced that cutting the great social insurance programs of the 20th century is his Numero Uno priority. Number Two is immigration reform with its defense industry, private-prison enriching border patrols to catch and jail undesirables fleeing one kind of misery for another, and on the other hand supply imported cheap labor to our tax-evading job creators. Number Three is passing the Farm Bill. He only vaguely mentions the endangered food stamp program, and puts the emphasis on the millionaire compromisers rather than their struggling victims.
The Presider closed thusly, giving due deference to the Invisible Guy in the Sky as he ushers in a reprise of the Era of Good Feeling among the battling plutocratic factions of the Beltway, urging the R's and the D's to come together as one for the sole purpose of placating the restive herds in the hinterland as the wealth grows ever more concentrated among the Ruling Class:
The American people's hopes and dreams are what matters, not ours. Our obligations are to them. Our regard for them compels us all, Democrats and Republicans, to cooperate and compromise and act in the best interests of our nation, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
And speaking of those hopes and dreams, here's my response to Paul Krugman's column today:
The pain caucus lives despite the debunking of austerity. The Big Lie that the country is broke and so people must suffer spreads like a virus from the six media giants feeding us 90% of everything we read and hear.
The plutocrats continue to hoard nearly half the wealth in "the one indispensable nation." The stock market soars while the hopes and dreams of ordinary people plummet. CEOs kvetch about uncertainty for failing to hire, even as they rake in an obscene 350 times the salary of the average worker. And both right wings of the Money Party agree that the answer to record income inequality, wage stagnation and the jobs crisis is to cut our earned benefit programs and "reform" the tax code, all the while jingoistically pouring money down the drain of the war machine and the surveillance state.
Nobody's talking about jobs and a living wage. Nobody's talking about stimulus. Nobody's talking about our lost generation of student debt slaves. The D's and the R's of One Percent Nation are starting current budget negotiations born in the Randian brain of Paul Ryan -- $1 trillion in cuts over the next eight years.
Even President Obama, fresh as he is from his own partisan victory over the Cult of the Cruzians, persists in his allegiance to the billionaire cult of Fix the Debt. As he blasted "bloggers" and "extremes" at his presser on Thursday, I swore I could see Simpson & Bowles hovering just behind the curtain, whispering their toxic catfood nothings in his ear.
While we're enjoying our brief intermission between acts of Fake Fiscal Crisis Theater, we can finally give some belated attention to that other sideshow called The Obamacare Rollout. It would be a comedy of errors if not for the fact that so many people's lives are literally on the line for their inability to even get online to sign up.
And now that the Republicans and Democrats have agreed to reinstate that "minor tweak" of enhanced income verification to the digital hot mess, look for even more roiling in the roll-out. There was a reason the Obama administration initially decided to delay income verification, and it wasn't to allow hordes of fraudsters to sign up for junk health insurance on the public dime. It's because income verification is, by its very nature, fraught.
When so many low-wage or unemployed people have no way to show their assets because they lack bank accounts and jobs and tax returns, it seems cruelly designed to shut even more people out of health care. The most vulnerable people will be asked to prove a negative. The most vulnerable people will be victimized all over again. Ten million American households are now deprived of the basic economic right of a bank account. I'm willing to wager that most of these households also lack basic medical insurance.
Then again, maybe I'm worrying about nothing. According to the deal signed last night, HHS will not have to report to Congress on the "effectiveness" of income verification requirements until next July. It's really quite cynically meaningless and Orwellian -- the truth of verification is pending verification of the truth.
But still, is it just me, or does being forced to show how much money you have or don't have before getting health care smack of discrimination? Isn't this "meaningless" requirement every bit as draconian as being forced to provide a photo ID in order to vote? Maybe I'm just not sufficiently attuned to the symphony of the free market, and the exceptionalism of the United States being the only advanced country in the world without universal health care. Maybe I'm not sufficiently suspicious of my fellow human beings.
And maybe it's even more of a moot point, given that so few people have actually been able to sign up for insurance on the federal exchange in the first place, even without having to prove their income. Out of an estimated 50 million uninsured Americans, only 20 to 40 new applications on the federal site a day are being reported by the insurance industry. One health care policy wonk calls the Affordable Care sign-up process "like an astronaut on the tip of a rocket." Ouch. This brings up visions of oxygen deprivation, and Ground Control desperately trying to raise a comatose Major Tom floating somewhere in space. (You actually get a clue about their desperation when the first thing you see upon visiting the Enroll America gateway site for purchasing insurance is a request for donations to help facilitators sign more people up. They have neither competence nor shame.)
Robert Lasziewski of Health Policy and Strategy Associates tells the Washington Post that the HealthCare.Gov site is so messed up that "what I’m worried about is that when people go to their doctor in January they may walk in, and the doctor and hospital won’t find them in the insurer’s computer system or their bank account won’t be appropriately debited or they’ll be signed up for the wrong plan. I’m worried about all these things. Now, we have a few weeks to get this straightened out. But only a few weeks."
He said one insurance company got a message enrolling and dis-enrolling the same person over ten times in a row. Multiply that one little glitch a hundred thousand-fold and it becomes uncontrollable. Affordable Care morphs quickly into Unmanaged Care. A real Tragedy of Errors:
This project is one of the single biggest IT projects in American history. When Amazon.com and Facebook started they came up as a small company and came up slowly. This had to become prime time on day one. And this business about building it for 50,000 people? You have 50 million people uninsured and 19 million in the individual market and a few hundred million who aren’t eligible for Obamacare but have been hearing about it for years! Did they not think a few of those would go take a look? I think it gets back to oversight. It was a lack of oversight on the part of the Obama administration. They needed to bring in the same kind of heavyweights in IT that the Obama administration brought in to sell this from the campaign.
Laszieweski recommends that people just refrain from signing up on the federal exchanges for the time being. That's how messed up it is. The problem with the Obamacare website, he says, is that it was designed as a public relations gimmick rather than a functional enrollment vehicle.
For even wonkier and headache-inducing ways that the ACA is a fraud wrapped in obfuscation surrounded by free market profiteering, read this run-down by economist Paul Craig Roberts. In order to understand what securing health care in the Age of Obama is all about, you really do have to be a certified public accountant or a tax lawyer.
The Affordable Care Act is 2,000 pages long for a reason. The Canadian law that enacted single payer health care, on the other hand, comprises a mere 13 concise pages. In humane societies, people are patients. In inhumane societies, people are "consumers."
The Republicans shut down the government for no good reason. They wanted to destroy Obamacare by defunding it. They needn't have worried. Obamacare is well on the way to destroying itself without their help. It's being debunked, in real time.
An upstate New York physician named Dr. Andrew D. Coates succinctly notes that the current D vs. R. debate over health care in Washington is actually a debate between the D One-Percenters and the R One-Percenters. Regular people are simply not part of the equation:
Because the debate in Washington is among, on the one side, a right wing that believes there should be no government intervention in health care whatsoever. This side believes that some individuals deserve to be sick, even deserve to die – that they deserve to go without health care because of the choices they may have made in their lives.
Meanwhile, on the other side – among the “left” of the 1 percent – there’s an idea that any government intervention could be a good thing, even if it’s government intervention to manipulate a profit-driven health insurance marketplace in a way that recruits more customers for private health insurance companies.
(snip)
Underneath it all, health care is becoming an industry. It’s becoming a business. And there are myriad new forces within the system, each trying to extract their tiny profit, and this drives all of us crazy. But it also drives prices and costs ever upward.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and everybody knows that. So when the discussion takes place in Washington, the disconnect kicks in. The 99 percent of us continue to have those undignified experiences. The consequences, of course, are grave in the short run. But in the long run, I believe that we will together build the kind of health system worthy of us as a people.
Enroll America? More like Get Rolled, America.
How about we start our own exchange, and call it Get Roiled, Citizens! Because the lives you save may be your own. And your lives are worth it.
Don't forget to hang up your stockings by the chimney with care tonight, kiddies, because the Default Elf will be making his rounds.* It's the Nightmare Before Halloween! The whole world is watching, waiting and scared. So you might want to leave him a pot of hot water and some tea bags as a sacrificial offering. Or maybe you don't believe in default Armageddon any more, because your own personal catastrophe has already struck. Maybe you're so broke you can't see the dentist and your teeth have started falling out. If so, you might try putting them under your pillow in hopes that the Trickle Down Fairy will pay you a visit and slip you a few nickels. Of course, any tax is your responsibility, not theirs.
In any case, you do begin to suspect that this whole crisis is just a bigger than usual headfake when you read Thomas Friedman's New York Times column today. He already sees the day (tomorrow) when the fear abates, the crisis temporarily ends, and the real business of destruction can get underway with a vengeance before the next crisis hits in six weeks.
His personal Santa and his close personal friend is one Stan Druckenmiller, Forbes billionaire and self-promoting philanthropist whose claim to fame is urging debt-enslaved college kids to blame Grandma for their world of economic woe instead of.... well, him and his band of plutocratic predators. You get the awful rancid taste of Bowles-Simpson Catfood in your mouth the minute you start reading:
Wait! Who is that speaking to crowds of students at Berkeley, Stanford, Brown, U.S.C., Bowdoin, Notre Dame and N.Y.U. — urging these “future seniors” to start a movement to protect their interests? That’s Stan Druckenmiller, the legendary investor who made a fortune predicting the subprime bust, often accompanied by Geoffrey Canada, the president of the Harlem Children’s Zone, of which Druckenmiller is the biggest funder. What are they doing on a Mick Jagger-like college tour where they don’t sing, don’t dance, and just go through a set of charts showing young people how badly they’ll be hammered if our current taxes, growth rates, defense spending and entitlements stay where they are?
As I pointed out in my published response,
Thomas Friedman doesn't tell you that the mass movement of young people against the greedy geezers is, in reality, an astroturf scam funded by billionaire Pete Peterson. It's called "The Can Kicks Back," and it comes to life every time there's a new manufactured crisis.
With another episode of Disaster Capitalism upon us, Druckenmiller, himself a multibillionaire hedge fund mogul, is joining fellow plutocrats Al Simpson and Erskine Bowles in their zombie propaganda campaign aimed at slashing the safety net. They just can't get enough of the wealth of a nation. More and more seniors are falling into poverty, and the Fix the Debt scare-mongers have shamelessly used young people as human shields in their pathological quest for more, more and more.
Under their “chained CPI” proposal, over the next 25 years the average retired federal employee would lose $48,000. The average Social Security recipient would lose $23,000; the average military retiree would lose $42,000, according to Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Why not suggest to your greedy plutocratic pals, Mr. Friedman, that they do away with their carried interest deductions and pay their fair share in taxes if they're so interested in saving the kids? How about scrapping the cap on their own FICA contributions to protect Social Security?
Because, make no mistake -- this is not generational warfare. It's class warfare, of the pathological rich versus the rest of us. And we plan on fighting back, every step of the way.
To get all fired up and ready to fight, be sure to watch the latest Simpson and Bowles comedy routine here, followed by an excellent takedown of their geriatric antics by cartoonist Mark Fiore.
We've grown a little leaner, colder, sadder, older, so haul out the holly, and say bah humbug to catfood. We need a little Christmas, right this very minute.
Update* -- thanks to some Congressional can-kicking tonight, the government will soon be open for business and default has once again been averted. So it looks like the next opportunity for the Grinch to shoot us up with another bolus of shock doctrine will be 'round about Valentine's Day. But until then, the anticipatory drama and fear-mongering will continue.
Let's see.... we now live in a representative democracy where about 95 out of every hundred citizens have lost faith in Congress and just want them gone. But they won't leave! They are some of the most loathed people in America, yet there they still are, being treated with all due deference and respect by the six corporate media conglomerates bringing you 90% of all the news you're fit to hear. Any subliminal messages that may be coming through your TVs and newspapers are your problem.
In other news, the New York Times has a retrospective of Dolly the Sheep. Dolly, you may remember, was a clone. A long time ago in the 20th century she made people very, very afraid that they too might be turned into clones. She made people so fearful, in fact, that her creator didn't even win the Nobel Prize that year. It went instead to the guy who cloned frogs. Apparently they are much safer than sheep, and don't bleat when they are boiled very, very slowly.
Oh, and I hate to keep taking back everything I write in these blog-posts, but you can go ahead and disregard my entry on Paul Ryan now too. He lost his official centrist status as Wunderkind phoenix rising from the ashes over the weekend because, after he was apparently dissed by the big kids in Congress, he went back to playing Tea Party.
The latest official word on the Shutdown is that it was never about Obamacare at all! Now they tell us.
As a matter of fact, the whole script has been thrown out the window and they're all ad-libbing. The latest episode includes the attack of the weird hybrid clone of Weimar Germany and Civil War secession. Stage sets for the Sunday matinee included confederate flags and militarized police in riot gear.
Bah, bah, bah. Ribbit.
Okay, scratch that last post about the two sides of the Money Party probably not being able to make a deal to save the world and screw the people before Default Apocalypse. I spoke/wrote in haste and despair. Paul Ryan has emerged from the ashes of defeat as the New Democrats' (a/k/a Wall Street/centrist branch of the party) wet dream, a knight in shining armor to help forge the grand bargain with Barack the Feckless. Ryan, almost universally lambasted in the past few years for his fraudulent Budget to Nowhere, is now being hailed by "moderates" as the latest hot new pragmatic star.
You know you're in trouble when Paul Ryan emerges from anywhere. But even without his august presence now suddenly eclipsing that of Ted Cruz, the Democrats had already started their current negotiations with the Ryan budget. Austerians are now going to deal with austerians.
Ryan is beginning to sound like Obama. In a Wall Street Journal (paywalled) editorial, he wrote of the need for "modest reforms to entitlements" and was careful to deny that this equates with any Grand Bargain. Both sides of the Money Party now realize that the phrase "Grand Bargain" has a negative connotation for those they are trying to screw.
From what I can glean from the corporate media, talks are back on to kick the debt ceiling can for another six weeks or so -- right up until the usual hectic holiday time, when nobody is paying much attention and all the political players will be anxious to do anything and sign anything in their haste to blow town for their Christmas vacations on the slopes or the beaches.
The good news, of course, is that the almighty Koch machine might be losing some of its steam and a few of its well-oiled parts are crumbling and falling by the wayside. These polluting plutocrats are finally being forced to distance themselves from their own decades-long crusade to destroy the government. The bad news is that the almighty Pete Peterson plutocrats of Fix the Debt are taking up the slack, still slithering around like giant boa constrictors, ready to put the Wall Street squeeze on the squeezed Republicans. The bad news is that the now-weakened Tea Party was the only thing standing in the way of the last Grand Bargain attempt by Boehner and Barack in 2011. As I responded to Paul Krugman's column today,
All it will take to destroy the Tea Party movement is that magic moment when the co-opted astroturfers suddenly connect the dots between their misery and their libertarian heroes' sedition. Grandma's Social Security check is M.I.A. Junior breaks a bone, and the local E.R. has closed for lack of government reimbursements. Uncle Joe's heart medication kills him because FDA inspectors were furloughed, and Big Pharma just can't seem to resist cutting corners with quality control.
Of course, the ultimate irony is happening right now. People are getting sick from eating salmonella-tainted chicken -- all because of the dangerous game of chicken the GOP is playing. Even before the shutdown, the government cut back on poultry plant inspectors, leading the Southern Poverty Law Center to issue a dire warning. You know that our democracy is in deep trouble when a group known for exposing domestic terrorism and hate groups warns that even our sustenance is an imminent threat.
And you know that when even "liberal" pundits start viewing Paul Ryan as reasonable, willing to help the president out with "entitlement reforms", the real progressives need to start coming out of the closet, pronto. It's not enough to "just say no" to the extremists.
How about an end to the carried interest deduction and a tax on high speed trades to fund education and infrastructure? How about scrapping the cap on FICA contributions to protect retirement into perpetuity?
We have to fight fire with fire.
Although Obama is pretending to adhere to his pledge not to be extorted with the threat of default, he is perfectly willing to be extorted with the government still shut down. Putting furloughed federal employees back to work is not a condition for slashing the safety net. At least, not according to the latest leaks. Stayed tuned, but don't stay too riveted. It's bad for your health, and it makes you feel like a yo-yo that keeps getting played.
Somewhere in America, a claque of merry pollsters stuck in preadolescent boy mode is getting paid to think up the most disgusting objects in the universe with which to compare Congress. Last time around, they made annoying dinnertime phone calls to unsuspecting people to find out whether they preferred a root canal or a Congress Critter. Guess who won? At least with a root canal, you get anesthetized.
It's getting harder and harder to come up with new lists of horribles, but the PeePeePee outfit really outdid itself this year. With an unbelievably high approval rating of 8 percent, Congress was unfavorably compared with toenail fungus, cockroaches, dog poop and hemorrhoids.
But there is faint hope for the critters. Americans still like Congress better than they like Honey Boo Boo and Charles Manson.
Meanwhile, over at the New York Times, Tom Friedman still thinks there's such a thing as mainstream Republicans. And that they really need to get their act together to reform their party, the same way Clinton reformed the Democrats and gave us mainstream Republicans. My response:
So-called mainstream Republicans have lost the right to call themselves mainstream. Their flow of ideas and policies for the common good dried up long ago. And John Boehner looks like he just needs to dry out.
A party only deserves to call itself mainstream when it has the capacity to either swamp, or cut off completely, those occasional renegade rivulets that branch off into crazy directions every now and again. The mighty GOP has spawned a cascade of toxic tea, and its so-called leaders have neither the will nor the way to dam (or damn) it.
And you can't call them conservatives, either, when they are so complicit in wanton destruction.
I'm happy that the president seems to be standing firm against what amounts to an internal coup d'état by a small group of reactionary usurpers. I'm unhappy that he still feels it necessary to hold out to the economic terrorists in our midst the carrot of deficit reduction and "entitlement reform" at a time where income disparity is at record levels and more and more people are sliding into poverty. I'm happy that he's giving more interviews and press conferences. I'm unhappy that he's ruled out invoking the 14th Amendment, minting a platinum coin, or even going so far as to call for the abolishment of the debt limit itself. After all, it doesn't actually exist.
The only limit we have to fear is the limited morality of the usurpers. So let's just go with the flow, and flush them out in 2014 (if they don't resign in disgrace first.)
Although a Grand Bargain of austerity for the masses and prosperity for the rentiers was the obvious endgame for both sides of the Money Party, I'm not as confident as I was even a couple of days ago that they will be able to accomplish their sleight of hand before default actually occurs. It is looking more and more like the imaginary ceiling will be breached after all, and that we're in for a whole heap of dog poop. Faced with the reality of a politically-manufactured Great Depression, I suppose the plan is that we'll feel abjectly grateful when the political donor class of the Charitable Industrial Complex provides a soup kitchen in every city to make up for the lack of jobs and the cutting of Social Security, food stamps and Medicare. This time around, there is nothing even close to a socialist left flank to protect us from incipient Hooverism.
Congressman Alan Grayson of Florida tried, though. And he got gaveled into silence when he cited the dog poop poll to illustrate how the "dignity of the House" has been called into question during the debate for a clean debt ceiling vote. Clip here.
The continuing immiseration of common people caused by a cabal of fringe right wingers and complicit deficit hawk Democrats and the fun poll questions answered by disgusted populace reminds me of the ending of an Anton Chekhov story called "Small Fry."
A depressed wage slave, stuck in his bleak surroundings while the rich people gambol about town, ponders the hopelessness of his life as his kerosene runs out and a lone cockroach scurries around on his desk:
Ah... running about here, you devil!" With the palm of his hand, he spitefully swatted the cockroach, which had had the misfortune of catching his eye. "What vileness!"
The cockroach fell on its back and desperately waved its legs... Nevyrazimov took it by one leg and threw it into the lamp. The lamp flared and crackled...
And Nevyrazimov felt better.
In an unsurprising move pretending to catch all the movers and shakers by complete surprise, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered all 350,000 furloughed civilian employees of the military back to work. This decision, according to the Washington Post, will "significantly" lessen the impact of Shutdown USA: The Movie.
When a shutdown's impact is "significantly lessened" simply because the workforce in one single department is now back on the job, it suddenly dawns on you just what the United States government is all about. (As if you really needed any more sudden realizations. But they keep slapping you in the face anyway.)
It certainly isn't about helping its own citizens apply for Social Security, or ensuring that teams of scientists are working at the CDC to track this year's flu outbreaks and other epidemics, or staffing WIC offices, so that poor women and children can get the proper nutrition and education. Those workers are all still at home. You see, they are not "essential" personnel tasked with maintaining American military bases or building predator drones and bombs for the lucrative defense industry.
Oh, eventually the non-essential workers will get paid. But only retroactively. Let them eat on credit.
And naturally and also unsurprisingly, the shutdown has certainly not stopped the hemorrhaging of $10 million an hour for the war in Afghanistan, now entering its 13th year.
Nor will it prevent Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) from holding a hearing today to demonize disabled Americans. Ronald Reagan had his welfare queens in their Cadillacs before Bill Clinton and the Newtster destroyed "welfare as we know it." Then the right wing pivoted to food stamp recipients dining on lobster tails. Not to be outdone, Coburn has his hordes of trailer trash malingerers buying electronics and meth with their $1100-a-month disability checks.
The ever right-leaning 60 Minutes, rather than showcasing the suffering of ordinary people sinking in the quagmire of gratuitous government austerity, devoted its very first segment last night to unquestioningly letting Coburn deliver his propaganda. The program highlighted a disability fraud ring operating out of Appalachia -- where, we are led to believe, an entire community has conspired to bilk the government out of its dwindling Social Security disability funds. (Even though Coburn says he has evidence, none of the culprits has been prosecuted thus far.)
Not once does 60 Minutes interview real people with real disabilities, struggling to get by on their paltry benefits. Reporter Steve Kroft never challenges Coburn on his specious claim that at least a quarter of all SSA cases are fraudulent, or on his even more ridiculous claim that the average disabled person stands to suck up $300,000 in lifetime benefits. It doesn't tell you the inconvenient truth that the vast majority of disability applications in this country are denied by the government.
CBS, of course, is not alone in demonizing people too sick or impaired to work. When NPR came out with its own hit piece on disability beneficiaries last spring, a group of former Social Security commissioners were incensed enough wrote an open letter refuting the claims:
Approximately 1 in 5 of our fellow Americans live with disabilities, but only those with the most significant disabilities qualify for disability benefits under Title II and Title XVI of the Social Security Act.
Title II Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (DI) benefits and Title XVI Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits provide critical support to millions of Americans with the most severe disabilities, as well as their dependents and survivors. Disabled beneficiaries often report multiple impairments, and many have such poor health that they are terminally ill: about 1 in 5 male DI beneficiaries and 1 in 7 female DI beneficiaries die within 5 years of receiving benefits. Despite their impairments, many beneficiaries attempt work using the work incentives under the Social Security Act, and some do work part-time. For example, research by Mathematica and SSA finds that about 17 percent of beneficiaries worked in 2007. However, their earnings are generally very low (two-thirds of those who worked in 2007 earned less than $5,000 for the whole year), and only a small share are able to earn enough to be self-sufficient and leave the DI and SSI programs each year. Without Social Security or SSI, the alternatives for many beneficiaries are simply unthinkable.
And as if to hammer home its subliminal message of Makers vs. Takers, honest folks vs grifters, workers vs. couch potatoes, the 60 Minutes segment immediately following Coburn last night was a hagiographic puff piece on the veterans of the Blackhawk Down debacle of the Clinton Administration. This second piece dovetailed nicely and coincidentally with the two weekend military strikes (Somalia and Libya) against terrorists, which went on as scheduled despite the Shutdown, as if to back up Sec. of State John Kerry's soothing remarks to the world that America the All-Powerful is still Number One.
Militarism and hegemony are essential. People, not so much. Especially those malingerers. The corporate media-political complex sends you this message:
 |
| Bad American |
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| Good American |
Do you see how the messages of the media and politicians always seem to mesh so very nicely? It's almost as though it was planned, or something.
