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Listen: MP3
This broadcast was recorded in one, 60-minute segment
Introduction: In FTR #829, we noted that the GOP-dominated 114th Congress wasted no time in attacking Social Security, firing their opening salvo on its first day in office. In that same program, we opined that the Snowden “op” was a significant factor in alienating the young, idealistic voters who had propelled the Obama candidacy in 2008.
The Peach Fuzz Fascist himself (Snowden) marches to the same drummer as the GOP, the Koch brothers, Rand Paul et al. He went on the public record in 2009 against Social Security and for the restoration of the gold standard (this when that career spy was posted to Geneva, Switzerland as an officer of the CIA.)
The obscene quote in the title recaps Snowden’s thinking verbatim.
This program continues analysis of the assault by the GOP on the New Deal and Social Security, concluding with review of the 1934 coup attempt by powerful U.S. financial and industrial interests.
Like Snowden and the GOP-controlled 114th Congress, the 1934 plotters wanted to restore the gold standard and repudiate Roosevelt’s social agenda.
Rand Paul–part of “The Paulistinian Libertarian Organization” and an ardent defender of Snowden–is at the forefront of the attack on Social Security, characteristically manifesting blatant falsehoods and distortions to justify his position. (Rand Paul is being touted by Ralph Nader.)
A significant part of the program consists of an analytical timeline of the GOP’s attack on Social Security, dating back to the period of the 1934 coup plotters.
What we are seeing with the Snowden/GOP “get rid of Social Security/bring back the gold standard” political catechism is a manifestation of “Clausewitzian economics.”
Program Highlights Include: The GOP’s plans to “privatize” Social Security; an irresponsible “60-Minutes” piece featuring Tom Coburn (R‑Oklahoma) spuriously attacking Social Security; review of Snowden’s advocacy of returning to the gold standard; a blueprint of the GOP’s game plan for attacking Social Security; review of eugenics philosophy and the need to eliminate “useless bread gobblers.”
1a. Excerpting some of Snowden’s 2009 online musings–crafted during the same time period in which he decided to leak NSA documents–gives us insight into his true nature. We’ve mentioned Snowden’s embrace of the gold standard, belief that we should eliminate Social Security and deep affinity for Ron Paul. Perhaps examining his actual pronouncements will prove educational.
EXAMPLE: . . . Snowden wrote that the elderly ‘wouldn’t be fucking helpless if you weren’t sending them fucking checks to sit on their ass and lay in hospitals all day.’ Yeah, if ONLY those 75 and 80-year-olds lying in hospital beds would get up and find jobs like everybody else, right Eddie? Snowden is a nasty little fascist and people should carefully consider the rest of his behavior in the context of his ideological pronouncements.
[Snowden is posting under the moniker “The TrueHOOHA”] At the time the stimulus bill was being debated, Snowden also condemned Obama’s economic policies as part of a deliberate scheme “to devalue the currency absolutely as fast as theoretically possible.” (He favored Ron Paul’s call for the United States to return to the gold standard.) The social dislocations of the financial collapse bothered him not at all. “Almost everyone was self-employed prior to 1900,” he asserted. “Why is 12% employment [sic] so terrifying?”In another chat-room exchange, Snowden debated the merits of Social Security:
<TheTrueHOOHA> save money? cut this social security bullshit
<User 11> hahahayes
<User 18> Yeah! Fuck old people!
<User 11> social security is bullshit
<User 11> let’s just toss old people out in the street
<User 18> Old people could move in with [User11].
<User 11> NOOO
<User 11> they smell funny
<TheTrueHOOHA> Somehow, our society managed to make it hundreds of years without social security just fine . . . .
<TheTrueHOOHA> Magically the world changed after the New Deal, and old people became made of glass.
Later in the same session, Snowden wrote that the elderly “wouldn’t be fucking helpless if you weren’t sending them fucking checks to sit on their ass and lay in hospitals all day.”
1b. More about Snowden’s ultra-right wing views, at one with those of the GOP-controlled 114th Congress, whose election appears to have been greatly aided by the Snowden/WikiLeaks “op.” (The 42% turnout was small, even by off-year election standards.)
. . . . Hired by the CIA and granted a diplomatic cover, he was a regular old IT guy whose life was elevated by a hint of international intrigue. . . .
. . . . But as his first spring dawned in Switzerland, it must have felt cold, foreign, and expensive. Two days after his arrival in Switzerland, Snowden logged onto #arsificial, a channel on Ars Technica’s public Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server. He’d been frequenting this space for a few months, chatting with whomever happened to be hanging out. . . .
. . . . Snowden logged on to the public IRC chat room with the same username he used across the Web: TheTrueHOOHA. The chat room was a place he would return to on dozens of occasions over his years in Switzerland, and his writings fill in details about the man who may go down as the most famous leaker in US history. Over the years that he hung out in #arsificial, Snowden went from being a fairly insulated American to being a man of the world. He would wax philosophical about money, politics, and in one notable exchange, about his uncompromising views about government leakers.
Four years later, Snowden took a job with a government contractor for the specific purpose of gathering secret information on domestic spying being done by the National Security Agency (NSA). In May, he hopped a plane to Hong Kong before the NSA knew where he was going. Once there, Snowden began a process of leaking top-secret documents to journalists. Snowden’s first leak confirmed what activists had suspected but couldn’t prove: there was a dragnet government surveillance program collecting information on every American’s phone calls. . . .
. . . . And he could be abrasive. Snowden didn’t short stocks just to make money—he did it because it was the right thing to do. He saw himself as a paladin of the markets, bringing “liquidity” to all. As for those who didn’t agree with him about the rightness of the gold standard or the need to eliminate Social Security, they weren’t just mistaken—they were “retards.” . . .
. . . . A Ron Paul man and a short-seller
If Snowden was getting comfortable in Geneva, he was fully at home in #arsificial. In a departure from his nearly 800 posts in other Ars forums, here he spoke bluntly on matters of state. In the months following the 2008 election, he discussed his embrace of a return to the gold standard and his admiration of its highest-profile champion.
In his more hyperbolic moments, Snowden spoke about the fall of the dollar in near-apocalyptic terms. “It seems like the USD and GBP are both likely to go the way of the zimbabwe dollar,” he suggested in March 2009. “Especially with that cockbag bernanke deciding to magically print 1.2T more dollars.” . . .
. . . . The high unemployment rate that was on the way for the US didn’t phase Snowden; those wringing their hands and seeking conventional Keynesian solutions seemed softheaded to him. Obama was “planning to devalue the currency absolutely as fast as theoretically possible,” he wrote. Rising unemployment was a mere “correction,” a “necessary part of capitalism.” . . .
1c. Edward Snowden is a spy. Those who have been taken in by his superficial persona are victims of a relatively obvious intelligence “op.”
. . . .“I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word, in that I lived and worked undercover overseas — pretending to work in a job that I’m not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine,” Snowden said. . . .
1d. Rand Paul, who introduced Bruce Fein to the Snowden family, has joined the attack on Social Security. He is marching to the same drummer as the Peach Fuzz Fascist (Snowden).
Travel obligations kept me from addressing until now the attack on Social Security disability recipients made last week by Sen. Rand Paul (R‑Ky.), but it was too outstandingly ignorant and cynical to go unanswered.
Long story short: If Paul’s words truly represent the Republican Party’s approach to Social Security, then not just the disabled but everyone else with an interest in the program — taxpayers, retirees and their survivors and dependents — should start panicking now. We reported on the first shot fired at Social Security by the new GOP Congress here. Paul has now raised the stakes.
Here are his words, delivered to an appreciative audience on Wednesday in the key presidential primary state of New Hampshire:
“The thing is that all of these programs, there’s always somebody who’s deserving, everybody in this room knows somebody who’s gaming the system. I tell people that if you look like me and you hop out of your truck, you shouldn’t be getting a disability check. Over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts. Join the club. Who doesn’t get up a little anxious for work every day and their back hurts? Everyone over 40 has a back pain.”
Paul thus associates himself with a slander of disability recipients favored by Republican conservatives abetted by ill-informed journalists, who include the staffs of NPR and “60 Minutes.” (We reported earlier on the latter’s abandonment of journalistic standards in its disability coverage.
Leaving aside Paul’s contempt for people suffering from these conditions (“Join the club”), his numbers are flagrantly wrong. The actual figures can be found in this table from the Social Security Administration. Start with “anxiety”: The Social Security Administration classifies anxiety as a subset of mental disorders and places it in the catch-all category of “other,” which constitute a total of 3.9% of all disability claims — and that’s all otherwise unclassified mental disorders, not just anxiety.
Where Rand Paul goes wrong: Back pain and anxiety account for nowhere near half of all disability claims...
Social Security doesn’t regard anxiety as lightly as Paul. According to its definitions, which can be found here, the category includes post-traumatic stress syndrome and phobias or compulsions that result in “marked difficulties” with working or living in society, or “complete inability to function independently outside the area of one’s home.” Paul wants his audience to think of “anxiety” as the mild sense of dread you might experience when contemplating a bad day at work, or perhaps an unpleasant visit with your family. He’s lying about it.
As for back pain, no one gets disability for the kind of mild stiffness that Bayer aspirin claims to relieve in its TV ads. That’s the condition Paul tries to evoke by saying “everyone over 40 has a back pain.” But he shows no empathy whatsoever for the real sufferers of this condition — those who get it not from laboring in a physician’s office or in Congress, as Paul has, but from years of hard physical toil or workplace injury.
Social Security classifies back pain as a “disease of the musculoskeletal system.” Some 30.5% of disabled workers fell into this category in 2013, according to the latest available figures. But that category covers a lot more than “back pain.” It also comprises amputations, joint failures, leg and arm fractures, spine disorders and burns.
These are the official figures; no one has documented any others. Paul didn’t cite a single source for his assertion that “over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts,” so it’s reasonable to conclude that he has no sources. But that’s all right, because his goal isn’t to offer a considered analysis of the pressures facing Social Security in general or its disability component in particular, but to rationalize an attack on the whole program by ridiculing disability recipients as a step toward legislating their benefits out of the system. Fabricated statistics are more than useful for that purpose.
...but his home state of Kentucky has one of the highest disability rates in the country, for different reasons. (Social Security Administration)
The disability program is facing a fiscal crisis that could force a cutback in disability payments of about 20% starting next year; Paul and other Republicans have signaled that they won’t accept the customary remedy for similar situations, which involves reallocating some payroll tax revenue from the old-age fund to cover disability’s near-term shortfall. Instead, they’re demanding a full-scale fiscal rebalancing of Social Security, which in practice means benefit cuts for everyone — disabled, retirees and their families.A large proportion of Paul’s own constituents would be harmed by his approach. In 2013, his home state of Kentucky had the fourth-highest disability rate in the country — more than 225,000 residents, or 8.2% of the population — fostered in part by low educational attainment and lack of gainful employment opportunities. (What has Paul done to alleviate those conditions?)
The most cynical aspect of this attack is that it comes from some lawmakers who were helped by Social Security in their own lives. The roster includes Rep. Paul Ryan (R‑Wis.), who received Social Security benefits during his college years, after his father’s untimely death, and now thinks that the nation can’t afford to keep paying them as currently scheduled.
Another is Rep. Tom Reed (R‑N.Y.), the sponsor of the House rules change, whose father died when he was 2 and then was raised by a single mother on Social Security and veterans benefits. Now he talks about Social Security going “bankrupt,” which is flatly incorrect, and promotes a measure aimed at cutting benefits for all. This is known as climbing the ladder and pulling it up behind you. If Reed, Ryan and Paul get their way, the only option left to the rest of us will be to hold tight.
1e. It appears to be far more than just the GOP that is attacking Social Security. “60 Minutes” played a willing sounding board to wealthy GOP Senator from Oklahoma Tom Coburn:
Is it possible for a major news organization to produce a story about the Social Security disability program without interviewing a single disabled person or disability advocate?
That’s the experiment “60 Minutes” conducted Sunday. The result was predictably ghastly.
The news program’s theme was that disability recipients are ripping off the taxpayer. Anchor Steve Kroft called the program “a secret welfare system... ravaged by waste and fraud.” His chief source was Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican with a documented hostility to Social Security. Coburn has a report on the disability program’s purported flaws due out Monday. Good of “60 Minutes” to give him some free publicity.
Together Kroft and Coburn displayed a rank ignorance about the disability program: how it works, who the beneficiaries are, why it has grown. This is especially shocking because after a similarly overwrought and inaccurate “investigation” of disability aired on National Public Radio in March, numerous experts came forth to set the record straight. They included eight former Social Security commissioners, experienced analysts of the program, even the Social Security Administration’s chief actuary, Steve Goss.
“60 Minutes” apparently talked to none of them.
At the top of the segment, Kroft observed that disability now serves “nearly 12 million Americans,” up by about 20% in the last six years. Coburn asked, “Where’d all those disabled people come from?”
To begin with, 12 million people aren’t collecting disability payments. The number as of the end of 2012 was 10.9 million, comprising 8.8 million disabled workers and about 2 million of their family members, mostly children.
The rolls have grown consistently since 1980, but even though Coburn professes to be dumbfounded why, there’s no mystery. As Goss laid out the factors, they include a 41% increase in the total population aged 20–64. Then there’s the demographic aging of America, which has increased the prevalence of disability by 38%. (In case Coburn, a physician, hasn’t noticed, the older you get, the more vulnerable you are to injury and illness.) Then there’s the entry of women into the workforce in large numbers, which has brought many of them under Social Security coverage for the first time.
Finally, there’s the economy. When jobs are scarce, more people land on the disability rolls, but that’s not about people treating it as an alternative welfare or unemployment program, as “60 Minutes” would have it.
The relationship between disability and unemployment is much more nuanced. As we explained in April, disabled people always have more difficulty finding jobs than others; when desk jobs disappear and all that’s left are laborers’ positions, the opportunities for the physically and mentally challenged shrink. A good economy allows more disabled persons to find gainful employment and stay off the rolls; in a bad economy that path isn’t open.
The most pernicious lie told about the disability program is that it’s easy to obtain benefits. “60 Minutes” repeated that lie. The truth is that disability standards are stringent, and they’re applied stringently. Two-thirds of all applicants are initially denied, though 10% or so of all applicants win benefits on appeal. All in all, 41% of all applicants end up with checks. Sound easy to you?
“60 Minutes” interviewed two Social Security disability judges, Marilyn Zahm and Randall Frye, who seemed to say that standards are so loose almost anyone can score. That’s curious. When they were interviewed in 2009 by Zahm’s hometown newspaper, The Buffalo News, they said that standards were too tight – “Every month, most judges see a case that should have been paid at the first level,” Frye said then. (It would be interesting to see the “60 Minutes” outtakes.)
Much of the “60 Minutes” piece was devoted to exposing garden variety scams supposedly perpetrated by shyster disability lawyers, which apparently is Coburn’s hobbyhorse. But that’s not the true story of Social Security disability. This is a program that serves needy, aging and injured members of the workforce, paying a princely average of $1,130 a month.
The tragedy is that the disability program is underfunded, facing the exhaustion of its resources as soon as 2016. In the past, Congress has routinely remedied this funding crisis by transferring funds from Social Security’s old-age program. But it has never acted to properly support the disability fund.
2a. In keeping with the views of Eddie the Friendly Spook Snowden, the GOP began attacking Social Security and its disability program.
With a little-noticed proposal, Republicans took aim at Social Security on the very first day of the 114th Congress.
The incoming GOP majority approved late Tuesday a new rule that experts say could provoke an unprecedented crisis that conservatives could use as leverage in upcoming debates over entitlement reform.
The largely overlooked change puts a new restriction on the routine transfer of tax revenues between the traditional Social Security retirement trust fund and the Social Security disability program. The transfers, known as reallocation, had historically been routine; the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities saidTuesday that they had been made 11 times. The CBPP added that the disability insurance program “isn’t broken,” but the program has been strained by demographic trends that the reallocations are intended to address.
The House GOP’s rule change would still allow for a reallocation from the retirement fund to shore up the disability fund — but only if an accompanying proposal “improves the overall financial health of the combined Social Security Trust Funds,” per the rule, expected to be passed on Tuesday. While that language is vague, experts say it would likely mean any reallocation would have to be balanced by new revenues or benefit cuts.
House Democrats are sounding the alarm. In a memo circulated to their allies Tuesday, Democratic staffers said that that would mean “either new revenues or benefit cuts for current or future beneficiaries.” New revenues are highly unlikely to be approved by the deeply tax-averse Republican-led Congress, leaving benefit cuts as the obvious alternative.
The Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees estimated last year that the disability insurance program would run short of money to pay all benefits some time in late 2016. Without a new reallocation, disability insurance beneficiaries could face up to 20 percent cuts in their Social Security payments in late 2016 — a chit that would be of use to Republicans pushing for conservative entitlement reforms.
“The rule change would prohibit a simple reallocation! It will require more significant and complex changes to Social Security,” Social Security Works, an advocacy group, said in a statement Tuesday. “In other words, the Republican rule will allow Social Security to be held hostage.”
Policy wonks who follow Social Security saw the GOP rule change as a play for leverage.
“Everybody’s been talking about entitlement reform. Mr. Boehner and President Obama were pretty close to coming up with some kind of grand bargain, which ultimately fell apart,” Tom Hungerford, senior economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, told TPM. “Maybe this could be used as a hostage to try to get back to something like that.”
For their part, congressional Republicans were fairly transparent about their thinking. Rep. Tom Reed (R‑NY), who has been outspoken on the disability program, co-sponsored the rule amendment. The disability program has been a favored target for the GOP; members were warning last month that the program could be vulnerable to fraud.
“My intention by doing this is to force us to look for a long term solution for SSDI rather than raiding Social Security to bail out a failing federal program,” Reed said in a statement. “Retired taxpayers who have paid into the system for years deserve no less.”
Liberal analysts counter, however, that the retirement fund, which pays out $672.1 billion in benefits per year versus $140.1 billion for the disability fund, is more than healthy enough to allow for a reallocation, as has historically been done. CBPP’s Kathy Ruffing wrote that, if a transfer was made before the 2016 deadline, both funds would be solvent until 2033.
...
2b. More about the GOP’s assault on Social Security, a policy wholeheartedly endorsed by Snowden:
Republicans are seizing a once-every-20-years opportunity to force a crisis in the Social Security disability program and use it as leverage to push through reforms, a long game that they have been quietly laying groundwork for since taking control of the House in 2010.
In less than two years, the Social Social disability insurance program will start being unable to pay its full benefits and House Republicans saidthis week that they aren’t going to simply give it more revenue from the retirement side, as has been done historically. It’s the latest episode in a protracted campaign over the disability program — and it raises the question of what exactly Republicans plan to do now.
The last time this happened was 1994, and liberal analysts say that another simple reallocation between the disability and retirement funds, as has been done 11 times in the past, would keep both funds solvent until 2033. That meant that conservatives had to act now if they wanted to squeeze the crisis for all it’s worth. For the last few years, they’ve been highlighting instances of fraud and other problems with the program, setting the stage for the big move this week.
Democrats are sounding the alarm, warning that Republicans have taken a “hostage” and will leverage it to pursue broad changes to Social Security as a whole. With memories still fresh of their failed effort to privatize Social Security in 2005, conservatives wonks are less sure that the new GOP Congress would have the political will to do that, though they wouldn’t necessarily mind if it did.
“I wasn’t sure that they were going to be willing to take it up. I’m heartened that the rule was put in place. It forces us to start having a debate on this issue today,” said Jason Fichtner, senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center who has been called by House Republicans to testify on Social Security. “What I suspect is this allows for a conversation not just on (disability), but the whole system combined. But the hurdle of disability insurance is high enough. You start adding in trying to retirement reform at the same time, that just makes it a higher hurdle. I’m not sure there’s the political will or the public will to tackle both systems at the same time right now.”
The hostage in this metaphor is the disability insurance program and a late 2016 deadline, at which point it won’t be able to pay its full benefits to its 11 million beneficiaries. The new Republican House has approved a rule that says Congress can’t just transfer tax revenue from the Social Security retirement fund, as it has been done routinely in the past, to cover the looming shortfall. If nothing is done, beneficiaries would face an estimated 20 percent cut.
Most members on both sides presumably wouldn’t want to see that happen, especially during a critical election cycle, giving Republicans powerful leverage to bring Democrats to the negotiating table. One of the co-sponsors of the rule change, Rep. Tom Reed (R‑NY), saidthat his intention was to “force us to look for a long-term solution” to the disability program.
But the rule itself says it will allow a revenue transfer if the “overall health” of Social Security, encompassing both the retirement and disability programs, is improved. That’s what Democrats are warning about, but some conservative analysts who have consulted with House staffers are also hoping that the GOP uses the threat of benefits cuts to go big.
“It’s encouraging that the rule actually says we could do reallocation if it’s accompanied by improvements in overall Social Security solvency. Our preference has always been that the depletion of the DI trust fund become the impetus for comprehensive Social Security reform,” Ed Lorenzen, senior advisor to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told TPM. “For the most part, the problems facing DI are really just a symptom of the larger problems for Social Security as a whole.”
Staff for the House’s big players on Social Security — Ways and Means Chair Paul Ryan (R‑WI) and Social Security Subcommittee Chair Sam Johnson (R‑TX), who co-sponsored the new rule with Reed — weren’t ready to reveal their plans for what comes next. But asked if their proposals would address just the disability insurance fund or Social Security in its entirety, an aide to Reed told TPM: “Just DI for the moment.”
Those on the right weren’t surprised that the new GOP Congress took an aggressive stance on Social Security’s disability program on its very first day. “Over the last year, it started becoming clear that there’d be a lot of resistance to (a clean reallocation) and a desire to have reallocation tied to some reforms,” Lorenzen said. “We were sort of anticipating that this would happen.”
...
The hostage in this metaphor is the disability insurance program and a late 2016 deadline, at which point it won’t be able to pay its full benefits to its 11 million beneficiaries. The new Republican House has approved a rule that says Congress can’t just transfer tax revenue from the Social Security retirement fund, as it has been done routinely in the past, to cover the looming shortfall. If nothing is done, beneficiaries would face an estimated 20 percent cut.
Most members on both sides presumably wouldn’t want to see that happen, especially during a critical election cycle, giving Republicans powerful leverage to bring Democrats to the negotiating table. One of the co-sponsors of the rule change, Rep. Tom Reed (R‑NY), said that his intention was to “force us to look for a long-term solution” to the disability program.
...
3. The chairman of the House Budget Committee also hinted at privatizing Social Security:
The new House Budget Committee chairman hinted Monday that he had big plans for Social Security reform in the next two years, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
A week after the House voted on a rule that critics say could force a manufactured crisis in the disability program in late 2016, a potential leverage point for Republicans aiming for changes, Rep. Tom Price (R‑GA) told a conservative audience that he wanted his committee to tackle Social Security.
“What I’m hopeful is what the Budget Committee will be able do is to is begin to normalize the discussion and debate about Social Security. This is a program that right now on its current course will not be able to provide 75 or 80 percent of the benefits that individuals have paid into in a relatively short period of time,” he said at a Heritage Action for America event in Washington, D.C., according to AJC. “That’s not a responsible position to say, ‘You don’t need to do anything to do it.’”
Price, whose predecessor Rep. Paul Ryan (R‑WI) never put forward major reform proposals in his otherwise ambitious budgets, offered means-testing and increasing the eligibility age as possibilities. He also hinted at privatizing Social Security.
“All those things ought to be on the table and discussed,” he said.
...
4. The GOP spent the last 80 years trying to throw granny off a cliff? When today’s 80 year olds were born, the GOP was already planning for their elderly poverty. Well, that’s our GOP (and Eddie the Friendly Spook): trying to smother the joy out of life, from cradle to grave:
“The 80-Year Conservative War On Social Security Is Back For More” by Dylan Scott; TPM DC; 1/14/2014.
A new battle is brewing over Social Security in 114th Congress. The House passeda rule last week that critics say could hasten a crisis on the disability side of the program in late 2016, allowing Republicans to use the looming threat of benefit cuts as leverage in negotiations. New Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R‑KY) has hinted at his hopes for a grand bargain on entitlements, and House Budget Chair Tom Price (R‑GA) signaled Monday that he too had big ambitions for Social Security reform.
Social Security, in more ways than one the mother of all U.S. entitlement programs, has been the dragon that conservatives have succeeded in slashing, but never slaying, over its 80-year history. Their opposition has morphed from outright ideological grounds as the program was being debated during the New Deal era to a campaign masked in careful rhetoric once Social Security became virtually untouchable as a political animal.
Republicans know they have a new opportunity with the disability trust fund and a leverage point that comes along once every 20 years, and they’re seizing it. Price floated some favorite proposals like means-testing, increasing the eligibility age, and individual accounts (otherwise known as privatization). He described it as the GOP’s effort to “normalize the discussion and debate about Social Security.”
...
INITIAL GOP OPPOSITION (1933–35)
FDR began advocating for an old-age insurance program shortly after taking office in 1933. While the debate among Democrats largely centered on what form the program should take, whom it should cover and how it should be paid for, Republicans warned that the program would “impose a crushing burden on industry and labor” and “establish a bureaucracy in the field of insurance in competition with private business.”
Republicans petitioned for the old-age insurance program — what became Social Security — to be struck from the House’s bill entirely, leaving a much smaller version of welfare for the elderly. “Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers and to prevent any possibility of the employers providing work for the people,” Rep. John Taber (R‑NY) said, arguing against the program.
In the Senate, Sen. Daniel Hastings (R‑DE) also moved to strike the program from the legislation, warning that it would “end the progress of a great country and bring its people to the level of the average European.”
...
TRYING TO STOP ITS GROWTH (1935–1955)
Despite the passage of Social Security, conservatives still believed that they could undo the new program. In the 1936 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Alf Landon, governor of Kansas, described Social Security as “a fraud on the workingman” and “a cruel hoax.”
“The Republican party will have nothing to do with any plan that involves prying into the personal records of 26 million people,” Landon said in one address. The Republican National Committee sent out mailers campaigning against it.
But FDR trounced Landon, and the Roosevelt administration, his successor Truman, and Democrats in Congress started working on ways to expand the program toward its goal of universal coverage. When the disability program was up for debate in 1949, Republicans criticized it. They also petitioned against an increase in benefits, arguing that Social Security was intended to provide only a income floor for older Americans.
Some still pushed for the program to be repealed entirely. “The old-age and survivors insurance program is a grossly unsound and ineffective tool for the social-security purposes it attempts to accomplish,” Rep. Carl Curtis (R‑NE) said when the 1949 amendments were being debated. He lobbied to replace it with a program with much smaller benefits.
But by 1955, with the notable assistance of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, who called those who wanted to abolish Social Security “stupid,” the program as it exists today — with near-universal coverage, better benefits and a disability component — was effectively in place.
THE REAGAN REFORMS (1980s)
As Social Security cemented itself as a fixture of the American safety net, Republicans faced something of a crisis about how to discuss the program. As late as 1962, conservatives like Ronald Reagan were saying that the program had put the United States “down the road in the image of the labor Socialist Party of England.”
The debate largely subsided with the program solvent and other issues dominating the political discourse for the next two decades. But, coincidentally, as Reagan took the White House, demographic trends were putting a squeeze on the program. Reagan appointed Rep. David Stockman (R‑MI), who had once called Social Security “closet socialism,” to oversee his budget office.
Publicly, Reagan warned that the program was “teetering on the edge of bankruptcy,” but Stockman’s private remarks suggest that the administration saw the crisis as an opportunity for cuts. The White House pushed through an elimination of a “frozen” minimum benefit and student benefits without much Democratic support in 1981.
The crisis “will permit the politicians to make it look like they’re doing something for the beneficiary population,” Stockman said, “when they are doing something to it which they normally wouldn’t have the courage to undertake.”
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PREPPING FOR NEXT BATTLE (1980s-2000)
Behind the scenes, though, conservative thinkers were dismayed that the Reagan White House had come nowhere close to dismantling the program as had once been hoped. Wonks at the conservative Heritage Foundation warned that they must work to “prepare the political ground so that the fiasco of the last 18 months is not repeated” and they could achieve the “radical reform of Social Security.”
Privatization — called “individual accounts,” which had people investing their money, eliminating the base benefit that Social Security had been conceived as — was the goal. They considered young people “the most obvious constituency for the private alternative” and pondered ways “to detach, or at least neutralize” the older Americans who were or would soon be benefitting from the program in its current form.
Again, however, Republicans seemed to recognize the political realities that the last few decades had solidified and what that required of their public rhetoric.
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BUSH’S FAILED PRIVATIZATION PLAN (2000–2005)
Conservatives finally made their play for privatizing Social Security during the second Bush administration.
George W. Bush told conservatives in the midst of the 2000 campaign that Republicans “have to find a way to allow people to invest a percentage of their payroll tax in the capital markets” — a new incarnation of the individual accounts or privatization concept.
But the GOP was getting sharper with its rhetoric. The libertarian Cato Institute renamed its existing Project on Social Security Privatization to the Project on Social Security Choice in 2002. The overall effect of the Bush-era proposals was the same, turning a guaranteed benefit into something else entirely, but they had figured out what they thought were better ways to talk about it.
“BANISH PRIVATIZATION FROM YOUR LEXICON,” read a memo that Republican pollster Frank Luntz gave Bush during the 2004 campaign. But while Bush made Social Security a top priority at the onset of his second term and undertook a national tour to discuss the issue, those who support the traditional program rallied against it.
The effort — which TPM covered extensively; long-time readers might recall the Fainthearted Faction — proved to be a debacle for Bush. Formal legislation never even got a full vote in Congress, and in 2006, Democrats took control of both chambers. Republicans appeared to be so scarred by the episode that the notion of major changes to Social Security was rarely broached in the following years.
But now, nearly a decade later, conservatives think they have another shot.
5. The program concludes with review of the 1934 coup attempt by powerful U.S. financial and industrial interests.
Like Snowden and the GOP-controlled 114th Congress, the 1934 plotters wanted to restore the gold standard and repudiate Roosevelt’s social agenda, especially Social Security.
“Magically the world changed after the New Deal, and old people became made of glass.”–Edward Snowden (“the peach fuzz fascist”) in 2009.
WOW! Everyone needs to send ten emails of the above to ten people and each one of these ten people should send ten emails to another ten people, and so on and so on; and each person needs to write letters to publications and public office holders as well as call talk show hosts with the truth about Mr Ed, the talking bull shit artist.
Behold the GOP’s latest trolling targets: The concepts of civil and human rights:
Behold the GOP’s latest trolling targets: The concepts of civil and human rights:
Trolling civil and human rights. It’s an oldie but a goodie! Apparently.
Next up: endless trolling of the concepts of pain and suffering. Endless:
“Even if in the end there is some kind of a reasonable outcome, that will be just a great deal of anxiety that’s created in the minds of the 11 million people who are receiving disability benefits.” And that anxiety makes it all worth it, to the troll.
People get old, but jokes don’t. At least some jokes. Like threatening to throw the elderly under a bus. And then doing it. Never gets old.
Dylan Scott has another piece about how it’s looking more and more like the GOP has made a major strategic choice about it’s going to gut social security: Make the case that society needs a new social contract. A social contract based on a series of choices. Sophie’s Choices. One after another. It’s an appealing strategy because a Sophie’s Choice society is both an ends and a means:
Keep in mind that it’s really only a ‘Sophie’s Choice’ when you’re forced to choose between two options you find personally horrible. So the GOP isn’t really envisioning a ‘Sophie’s Choice’ society for everyone.
As assisted suicide laws spread, cancer survivors, disabled object
Despite a terminal diagnosis, Chasity Phillips perseveres
Physician-assisted suicide supporters reject ‘slippery slope’ argument
Advocates for people with disabilities fear mistakes, coercion
Imani Sippio, and her mother Chasity Phillips in Abita Springs, La., on June 17th, 2015.
In 2002, Phillips was diagnosed with incurable bone cancer in her chest; despite being terminally ill, she has managed to live a rich, full life with pain management.
“There was nothing I wasn’t willing to do to have one more day with my child,” said Phillips of her diagnosis.
Imani Sippio, and her mother Chasity Phillips in Abita Springs, La., on June 17th, 2015.
In 2002, Phillips was diagnosed with incurable bone cancer in her chest; despite being terminally ill, she has managed to live a rich, full life with pain management.
“There was nothing I wasn’t willing to do to have one more day with my child,” said Phillips of her diagnosis. |
Bryan Tarnowski McClatchy
BY DANIELLE OHL
McClatchy Washington Bureau
Doctors told Chasity Phillips in 2002 that she had a 50 percent chance of surviving surgery.
She suffers from chondrosarcoma, a malignant bone cancer. It had begun to affect her heart, ribs and spinal cord. Her choices were certain death, her doctors said, or surgery to remove part of the tumor.
She chose the surgery. Still, the return of her cancer was likely. Doctors told her she would have six months to a year before it grew back, requiring more risky followups.
But 13 years later, Phillips is 38 years old and thriving, despite two very severe medical conditions. She also suffers from lupus. The state of her health has made her somewhat philosophical about her own mortality.
“There’s a certain freedom that comes with dying,” said Phillips, who lives near New Orleans. “You really don’t have to deal with your annoying cousin. You really don’t have to go on that family trip. You can eat ice cream for breakfast.”
Her prognosis was not unlike Brittany Maynard’s. But Maynard chose physician-assisted suicide after doctors diagnosed her with terminal brain cancer on Jan. 1, 2014. Before she died less than a year later – on Nov. 1, 2014 – at age 29, Maynard had become a prominent advocate for the “death with dignity” movement, which has triggered legislation in 25 states.
She was one of 1,327 people who took advantage of Oregon’s 1997 Death with Dignity Act, the oldest and foremost such law in the country, by obtaining the life-ending medicine. Maynard was one of the 859 people who actually chose to use it.
THERE’S A CERTAIN FREEDOM THAT COMES WITH DYING...YOU CAN EAT ICE CREAM FOR BREAKFAST.
Chasity Phillips, terminally diagnosed with cancer
But as citizens from California to Kentucky push for dying rights, advocacy groups for people with disabilities question whether physician-assisted suicide should be legal.
“The risk of mistake and coercion and abuse are really too great,” said Diane Coleman, founder and CEO of Not Dead Yet, an advocacy group that informs and lobbies on behalf of the disabled.
Besides Oregon, whose death with dignity law is a model for similar efforts elsewhere, four other states allow physician-assisted suicide: Washington and Vermont have legislation in place, while Montana and New Mexico established legality through the courts.
Twenty-six states and the District of Columbia are considering or have considered legislation this year, and Kansas and Missouri are among the 12 states weighing death with dignity legislation for the first time.
Earlier this year, Colorado lawmakers rejected a death with dignity bill. In California, meanwhile, the state medical association recently dropped its longstanding opposition to physician-assisted suicide in the case of terminally ill patients. The state Senate last month approved the End of Life Option Act, but it has run into religious opposition in the state Assembly.
“This legislation has evoked strong feelings from both those who support and oppose it,” said California state Sen. Anthony Cannella.
Phillips said the laws discourage people from finding comfort in their condition. Though studies of some patients show that physicians generally offer more optimistic predictions about how long a terminal patient will live, she’s still alive long past expectations.
“I’m able to surround myself with people like me,” said Phillips, who worries that many terminal patients do not know about support groups and advanced palliative care. “These aren’t things that people are told exist. Doctors often don’t know. They value my life as it is.”
Peg Sandeen, executive director of the Death with Dignity National Center, said that those in favor of death with dignity laws support the merits of palliative care.
The center has not found evidence of a “slippery slope” argument, which claims that legalizing physician- assisted suicide would lead to more extreme types of end-of-life care, including euthanasia.
“We want people to be getting good quality end-of-life care at all times,” Sandeen said.
She said that the slippery slope “hasn’t happened. There have not been any reports of coercion, of vulnerable people being pressed into using the laws.”
Coleman established Not Dead Yet in 1996 to counter the efforts of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, dubbed “Dr. Death” for his active support of a terminally ill patient’s right to die.
Not Dead Yet partners with groups like the Disability Rights, Education and Defense Fund and the Massachusetts activist group Second Thoughts to create a nationwide network that opposes the death with dignity movement and the laws it champions as discriminatory and dangerous.
The laws generally stipulate that only a capable adult with a terminal illness, meaning one that will lead to death within six months of diagnosis, may receive a life-ending prescription. The patient must make both a written and oral request in the presence of two witnesses. Another oral request must follow at least 15 days later.
But where the safeguards stop, the danger begins, according to the disability groups. None of the laws or rulings include provisions about when, where or how patients should ingest the life-ending medicine once prescribed.
THERE HAVE NOT BEEN ANY REPORTS OF COERCION, OF VULNERABLE PEOPLE BEING PRESSED INTO USING THE (PHYSICIAN-ASSISTED SUICIDE) LAWS.
Peg Sandeen, executive director of the Death with Dignity National Center
While the Oregon Public Health Division’s 2014 review of the the state law showed 89.5 percent of patients took the medicine at home, only 19 percent of patients took it under a physician’s supervision.
According to Oregon’s review of the law, the foremost reasons for physician-assisted suicide are loss of autonomy, decreasing ability to participate in activities that made life enjoyable, and loss of dignity. Most advocacy groups cite unendurable pain as the main motivation for pursuing legislation.
To Not Dead Yet and the Disability Rights, Education and Defense Fund, this amounts to fear of disability rather than fear of painful death or lessened quality of life.
The laws have a provision that bars physicians from prescribing a life-ending prescription to a person with disabilities simply because they are disabled. But opponents stipulate that the danger does not come from those with disabilities who might feel pressure to end their lives, but those without disabilities who fear becoming disabled or having a poorer quality of life.
Marilyn Golden, a senior policy analyst at the Disability Rights, Education and Defense Fund, who uses a wheelchair as a result of injury, spoke from personal experience about the doubts about her quality of life that she initially encountered.
“At the beginning, I felt that the injury was unbearable,” she said. “A year later, it hit me: There was no change in my quality of life.”
EMMA BACCELLIERI OF THE WASHINGTON BUREAU CONTRIBUTED.
Email: dohl@mcclatchydc.com
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