Why the Supreme Court Wants to Kill Universal Health Care

Name the most popular federal program of all time, and you’ll understand why the Republican Supreme Court wants to kill health care reform before it gets going in 2014.

It’s Social Security, of course. Part of FDR’s New Deal, Congress enacted it in 1935 to provide insurance against the vicissitudes of old age, poverty and unemployment, all of which were made more horrific by the Great Depression.

Social Security retirement benefits are based on an individual mandate, just like the new health care law is. Workers and employers are required to pay taxes into the system now, to cover them later. You can’t have a solvent health or retirement insurance program if participation is voluntary, because no one will contribute until they need the benefits – and then they can’t pay for them, as I’ve noted. Social Security, like the health care law, is a universal system - everyone has to be part of it – both getting the benefits and paying for its cost.

Due to a limited grasp of their own history, most Americans don’t realize how similar today's campaign against universal health care is to the one waged against Social Security.

Republican lawmakers bitterly opposed (PDF) FDR’s measure – and still do, though these days they cloak their hostility behind the hysterical and unfounded argument that Social Security is about to go bankrupt. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan claimed in 2004 that retirement benefits had to be cut and the system “privatized” or the nation would face an economic disaster (it did four years later, thanks not to Social Security but to Greenspan’s policies).  The Bush Administration concocted a plan to turn over Social Security proceeds to Wall Street, which it claimed would do a better job of investing people’s retirement savings.  Had it succeeded, most of that money would have been lost in the financial crash of 2008.

But the conservatives’ attempts to demolish Social Security have consistently failed. Why? Because Social Security works. Americans support it by huge margins – even Republicans.

Hence the vehemence of the attack on the health care law now. The anti-government forces realize that once Americans begin to receive the benefits of universal health care – no denials for pre-existing conditions, no medical underwriting, no caps on benefits – they won’t want to give them up.

That’s not all.  Under the law passed by Congress, the insurance industry stands to gain the most from the mandate that all Americans buy health insurance. But the experts understand that the program will end up being too expensive – in most states, private insurance companies are going to be able to raise their rates at will.  If this doesn’t kill universal care, it will eventually lead to a single public system just like Social Security.

Last week’s spectacle at the Supreme Court – three days of “hearings,” with some lawyers appointed by the Court itself to argue positions no party had taken – looked more like a political ambush by a legislative body than the supposedly chaste pursuit of constitutional principles.  It’s important to remember that an unelected majority of the U.S. Supreme Court almost nipped Social Security in the bud 75 years ago. Pro-industry conservatives on the Court consistently rejected FDR’s proposals to provide Americans relief from the New Deal, as I explained recently.  The Social Security law was considered in danger by FDR’s advisors. Criticism of the Supreme Court became widespread, and FDR began to prepare a plan to add more justices to the nine serving on the high court. Unwilling to provoke a constitutional confrontation that would sully the independence of the judicial branch, the Supreme Court backed down, and upheld the law.

It’s difficult to discern any similar hesitation by the current majority of the Supreme Court, with five of its nine members increasingly unabashed ideologues willing to rewrite the Constitution. Think about the Court’s decision to interfere with the Florida vote count and award the 2000 election to George Bush. Consider its 2011 decision in Concepcion v. AT&T, where five Republican appointees determined that “arbitration clauses” inserted in the fine print of virtually every contract between a giant corporation and consumers can rob people of their right to their day in court.  And then there’s the infamous 2010 Citizens United case, in which the five ruled that spending money to influence elections is a form of free speech, protected by the First Amendment. In one fell swoop, the Court disenfranchised the vast majority of Americans who cannot hire their own lobbyist or fund the election of a friendly politician.

On the other hand, yesterday President Obama sent the politicians on the high court a powerfully worded message. Briefly channeling FDR, he said: “I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint — that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example. And I’m pretty confident that this court will recognize that and not take that step.”

Much is at stake here – more than health care reform itself. Public confidence in government is at record lows. As the financial crash of 2008 confirmed, money has corrupted the electoral process; the wealthy and powerful dictate public policy. The judiciary used to be the only branch of government in which a citizen could take on any person or corporation and be accorded equal stature. When Americans loses their confidence in the integrity of the courts, what is left?

Citizens United / Harvey Column / Supreme Court - 04/03/2012

What About The Rest of Us?

In one of the most appalling aspects of our current politics, our elites – elected officials, media lords and corporate chieftains, have swept the opinions and concerns of most Americans off the table to pursue their own agenda.

So we’re stuck with sterile political games focused on the national debt, even while a majority of Americans favor higher taxes on the rich and more aggressive action to reduce unemployment.

We get the highly touted insider trading conviction of a hedge fund billionaire while the Justice Department doesn’t pursue its own FBI’s massive evidence of the too big to fail bank’s fraud at the heart of the financial collapse.

It’s clear that whoever is setting priorities is not us. Take for example President Obama’s deficit commission, which has worked hard to legitimize the austerity agenda embraced by most of both parties. Not only was it stacked with well-known deficit hawks, It was made up of a collection of lifetime politicians, bureaucrats, with a CEO thrown in – because we wouldn’t want the CEOs to feel left out of any big idea brainstorming.

But what about the rest of us? Over at Campaign For America’s Future, Dave Johnson has been asking some intriguing, relevant questions.

For one, what would the deficit commission have looked like if it truly reflected the population of the country, rather than the backroom.

If a 100-person deficit panel truly reflected the country, it would present a stark contrast to the gang the president relied on:

•                19 people on the commission would receive some form of Social Security benefits, 12 of those as retirees. And on this deficit commission they get to talk when the ones making over $250K propose cutting Social Security.

•                43 of the commission members would have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement. 27 of those less than $1,000.

•                98 of the 100 members would make less than $250,000 a year.

•                50 of the members would come from households in which the total income of all wage-earners is less than $52,029.

•                13 would have income below the poverty level.

•                14 members would be receiving food stamps.

•                16.6% of the commission members would be un- or underemployed, and would be wondering why they are on a deficit commission at all instead of a jobs commission.

•                The commission would include the right proportion of factory and construction workers, and people who work in a kitchen, and work waiting tables, and teaching, and nursing, and installing tires, and all the other things that people do except, apparently, those on DC elite commissions. (People who do hard, manual labor get an extra vote each on what the retirement age should be.)

•                74 members would not have college degrees.

•                20 would not have graduated high school.

•                18 would speak a language other than English at home.

Under present circumstances it’s highly unlikely that the president would appoint a commission to consider the deficit or anything else for that matter that wasn’t stacked with wealthy insiders intent on slashing government services for anybody who is not like them. But highlighting the disconnect does point out in a particularly graphic way why those at the top have managed to get left out when its time to divide up the sacrifices.

 

 

 

 

 

Financial Crisis / Martin Column - 05/17/2011

Stand Up Against Fear, Mr. President

Dear Mr. President:

I'm glad to see reports that you don’t intend to call for cuts to Social Security, as your hand-picked so-called deficit commission recommended.

But turning over the Social Security debate to Congress and standing back to see what they come up with is not good enough, Mr. President.

It’s time for you to take on those who want to undermine Social Security protections under the guise of concern over the deficit, rather than enable them, as you have been doing by stacking your deficit commission with members who had previously supported cuts to Social Security.

Now it’s time for you to fight back against the fear-mongering propaganda campaign that’s been trying to whip up a phony crisis around Social Security, not to stand on the sidelines, Mr. President.

Yes, it will be a tough fight. The pundits, Republicans, many in your own party and a gang of Wall Street tycoons are lined up against you.

But the good news for you politically, Mr. President, is that a majority of the people in the country are lined up with you, should you choose to lead them in this fight.

This is a fight we can win, Mr. President. It’s good politics and it’s good sense.

Yes, it means you’ll have to go up against some of the bankers you’ve been trying to get cozy with. You’ll have to stand up and speak out against the fear that the Social Security cutters are peddling. But if you choose to lead this fight, you may remember that’s why we elected you.

Martin Column / President Barack Obama / Social Security - 01/25/2011

`Bloodbath' in Taxbreakistan

Welcome to Taxbreakistan, where the same guys who profited from the financial crisis have launched a treacherous two-fisted propaganda campaign: attacking the benefits of the increasingly fragile middle class while protecting the gains the wealthiest accumulated from the bubble economy and the bailout.

The propaganda war is couched in terms of paternal sobriety and facing up to financial realities, making tough choices and sharing sacrifices.

According to the propaganda, the only thing preventing the anemic economy from taking off is that the wealthiest Americans who have an ever-increasing share of the nation’s wealth don’t have enough money yet. Aside from the wealthy not having their permanent tax cuts, the main impediment to the economic recovery, according to the propaganda, is continuing to pay unemployment checks to those out of work.

What a load of twaddle.

While the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and right-wing think tanks are leading the propaganda campaign, one of the leading bomb throwers in this war is former Wyoming senator Alan Simpson, who President Obama appointed to co-chair a commission to examine options to reduce the federal deficit. A fierce advocate of budget cutting, Simpson, a Republican, said recently that he couldn’t wait for the `bloodbath’ that will ensue when Republicans take a meat cleaver to the federal budget in exchange for raising the federal debt limit.

You may recall Simpson’s earlier colorful quote, in which he compared Social Security to a “milk cow with 310 million teats.”

A couple of weeks ago, Simpson threw down the gauntlet in a draft report he wrote with his co-chair Erskine Bowles, a former Democratic Party honcho and hedge fund partner. They proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare and a host of other sweeteners long sought by big business, such as caps on medical malpractice verdicts, that have little to do with deficit reduction but everything to do with a corporate political agenda. The full commission’s report could be released this week.

Meanwhile, Congress jockeys over how to deliver a sloppy wet kiss to the nation’s wealthiest in the guise of continuing their Bush era tax cuts, supposedly as a means to stimulate the economy, even though the tax cuts themselves add $700 billion to the deficit. While President Obama expresses opposition to extending the tax cuts for those making over $250,000 a year, the president hasn’t been much of a force in the propaganda war over our economic future.

For their part, the Republicans have dug in their heels on behalf of the nation’s gajillionaires.

The whole propaganda campaign is based on the fraudulent notion that tax cuts for the rich help the economy. That’s not how they started out, before the second George Bush was elected president. He intended them as a way to “starve the beast” – giving back the government surplus that had built up during the Clinton era boom as a way to shrink government. His advisers argued that if the government kept that money it was likely to spend it.

Only later, as the economy began to soften, did Bush add the economic stimulus argument. But the evidence that the tax cuts did anything to boost the economy has always been slim at best. Deficit hawks like Simpson and Bowles are trying to jack up the public’s fear about the deficit in a slow-motion version of the fear-mongering that preceded the no-questions asked bank bailout of 2008, and subsequent highly secretive Federal Reserve money giveaway to the nation’s big banks. We shouldn’t fall for it.

A coalition of progressive-leaning nonprofits have offered an alternative, which favors stimulating the economy first, then cutting the deficit. You can check it out here.

Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 11/30/2010

Warming up to the Deficit Commission

Back in 1894, Nobel Prize-winning writer Anatole France made an astute observation:

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

If he was around today, he might update his observation like this:

“In their wisdom, the co-chairs of the deficit reduction commission suggest that the rich and the poor wait until they’re 69 years old to collect their full Social Security pensions and to live with reduced cost-of-living adjustments.”

He might also note that the co-chairs, one a former Republican senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson, and the other former Democratic presidential chief of staff and Morgan Stanley board member Erskine Bowles, think it would be a good idea that both the rich and the poor learned to get with less help Medicare, give up their mortgage interest deduction and pay for admission to the Smithsonian Museum for the good of the country.

This is 21st century America’s contribution to the evolution of shared sacrifice. The rich will have to suffer cuts in their Social Security benefits right along with the poor in order to achieve the greater good of reducing the deficit.

Of course there’s good news: under the co-chairs’ proposal, neither rich nor poor will have tp pay additional taxes on the profits they make speculating on the economy.

Simpson and Bowles’ recommendations are being hailed in the upper reaches of the establishment. David Broder intones from his perch at the Washington Post that the proposals are like “a cold shower after a night of heavy drinking. It’s time to sober up.”

Meanwhile President Obama acknowledged he’s facing “tough choices.”

Translation: he would really, really like to help the middle-class and the less fortunate if only the other bad politicians (and the deficit commission he himself appointed, stacking it with members who have advocated cutting social security) would let him.

The deficit commission chair’s proposals are nothing more than a continuation of the bailout and the financial crisis policies started under the Bush administration and continued under the Obama administration, with the by now familiar cast of winners and losers. These proposals require the middle-class and less affluent to bear the burden of decades of disastrous policies, while those who benefited from those policies continue to avoid paying any costs for the consequences.

Simpson and Bowles are just the latest advocates waging a massive propaganda campaign in an attempt to convince people that Social Security is the main drag on the deficit. While the deficit is a serious problem, it’s not the fault of Social Security. And the deficit is not even the most serious problem facing our economy – it’s high unemployment and the foreclosure crisis. In their proposals, Simpson and Bowles don’t acknowledge that economic reality.

The full deficit commission issues its report in less than 2 weeks. Why not contact them here and let them know what you think? If they don’t want to stop peddling propaganda I know a couple of bridges where their reports could be put to good use, keeping away the cold.

Martin Column - 11/15/2010