WILLARD “MITT” ROMNEY: CONTINUES TO OPEN MOUTH, INSERT FOOT

Take away Mitt’s script, and he’ll continue to step in it, time after time, again and again.

I had hoped to write about some other issues beside the Republican primaries, but Willard “Mitt” Romney just won’t let me...

Yes, he did it again. We all know that Willard was born into wealth, and due to his corporate wrecking company, Bain Capital, he has grown that wealth to even more hundreds of millions of dollars. No, I am not jealous about his wealth, but as tight as the race in Michigan has become with Rick Santorum, (a race that should have been Mitt’s with little or no effort), he just can’t seem to keep it together without mentioning that he’s a very rich man. (Brings back the time when John McCain couldn’t remember how many homes he had.)

Yep, he blew it again at the Detroit Economic Club as he stated, “I love this country. I actually love this state. This feels good being back in Michigan. Um, you know the trees are the right height. The, uh, the streets are just right. I like the fact that most of the cars I see are Detroit-made automobiles. I drive a Mustang and a Chevy pickup truck. Ann drives a couple of Cadillac’s, actually.”

Really, two Cadillac’s?

And he says this in Detroit, a city which has the highest poverty rate of any big city in America.

This is a city that is so poor that it has lost one-half of its city bus system over the past 5 years.

And to top it all off, the tax plan that Mitt Romney presented at the Detroit Economic club will have the following effect on most of the people living in this big automotive manufacturing city.

Mr. David Cay Johnston of Reuters pointed out last week in his article that Romney’s plan would: “Raise taxes on poor families with children at home and those going to college. Romney does this by reducing benefits from the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit and by ending the American Opportunity tax credit for college education.”

Romney’s tax-cut plan, according to models prepared by the independent Tax Policy Center, would heavily weight the tax benefits toward the top of the income earning spectrum, not to the large groups of average American citizens currently living in Detroit and other Michigan auto manufacturing cities.

And of course, this so called “plan” is being offered to the people of this once great city after Mitt Romney had said in the now-famous New York Times Op-Ed article against the government auto bailouts, saying: “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.”

This amazing Romney faux-pas was totally smacked down by Mr. Steven Rattner, the lead adviser on the current administration’s auto task force in 2009. In a later New York Times Op-Ed article, after GM had once again become the #1 automobile manufacturer, Mr. Rattner nailed Mr. Romney for suggesting that the government “should have stayed on the sidelines” and allowed the companies to go through “ ‘managed bankruptcies’ financed by private capital.” As Rattner put it: “That sounds like a wonderfully sensible approach — except that it’s utter fantasy. In late 2008 and early 2009, when GM and Chrysler had exhausted their liquidity, every scrap of private capital had fled to the sidelines. I know this because the administration’s auto task force, for which I was the lead adviser, spoke diligently to all conceivable providers of funds, and not one had the slightest interest in financing those companies on any terms. If Mr. Romney disagrees, he should come forward with specific names of willing investors in place of empty rhetoric. I predict that he won’t be able to, because there aren’t any.”

Mitt’s “multiple Cadillac moment” also occurred the day after the Pew Research Center found that 63% of all Americans now support the auto bailouts, with 56% saying “the loans the government made to GM and Chrysler were mostly good for the economy.”

To put this all into perspective, even the city’s largest newspaper, The Detroit News, has a problem with the man whose father was a beloved Michigan governor and the state where Mitt was born and raised. “We disagree with Romney on a point vital to Michigan — his opposition to the bailout of the domestic automobile industry. Romney advocated for a more traditional bankruptcy process, while we believe the bridge loans provided by the federal government in the fall of 2008 were absolutely essential to the survival of General Motors Corp. and Chrysler Corp. The issue isn’t a differentiator in the G.O.P. primary, since the entire [candidate] field opposed the rescue effort.”

The Detroit Free Press’s back-handed “endorsement” also complained about Romney’s opposition on the bailouts. They called him “dead wrong” and said that in the past year he has been “...refashioning himself as something other than what his record suggests. He has made gestures toward economic and social radicalism, and eschewed the common sense of cooperative governing that made him a success in Massachusetts.”

But with all this “stepping on his tongue” activity in Michigan, it also appears that he does spread it around in other states that are also having primaries. Here is another goodie of an endorsement from the Arizona Republic newspaper.

“There are better orators in American politics. Indeed, the Democrats appear to have one. And certainly there are Republicans who better project the passion for the office they seek. Steady, unflappable Romney would not a ‘passion president’ make.”

And this head-scratching item was offered as an ”endorsement”of Mr. Romney...?

Copyright G.Ater 2012

Follow me on Twitter: gater01

REPUBLICAN PRIMARY DEBATES: A TOTAL EXERCISES IN BIZARRE POLITICAL RHETORIC

...a self-proclaimed “Mr. Cheerful”, the former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich










The GOP continues to feed piles of comedy political material to the nightly comedy broadcast and cable TV shows.

The latest GOP / CNN primary debate in Arizona has taken the last four Republican candidates to what one media pundit called a “political fantasyland”. I’m sorry, but that’s a real slam at a great place for family entertainment that offers real “fun and fantasy”, not the total removal from the political reality that appeared last week on a debate stage in Arizona.

In Republican primaries, it’s always normal to woo those on the extreme right and then to go to the center in the Fall. But with what’s going on today, many of them have started this year, kind of in the political center, and they are now racing to see who can be more extreme on the right than the other guy.

As an example, in an earlier debate, the former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich had said that “...the US wasn’t the kind of country to uproot millions of immigrants who had lived here peacefully and productively for many years”. In later debates, he had backpedaled somewhat suggesting that he would only ship back the elderly immigrant grandparents to Mexico.

But now in Arizona, Newt is ready to uproot not only thousands of US immigrants, but he also wants half of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to be sent to the southern US border. The DHS would also presumably be armed with pistols and posthole diggers for building a border fence. Gingrich later said he would save $500 billion a year by abolishing the US Civil Service which, would allow him to build the border fence for 10% of its current projected cost...? (Probably using non-union Hispanic laborers.)

On the other hand, Texas Representative Ron Paul said he opposed the building of a border fence because it might be used to keep Americans in, instead of keeping the illegal immigrants out. When it comes to being unreal, early on, Ron Paul was way ahead of the rest of the pack.

When a member of the audience actually tried to get the group back to reality by asking what each would do about the federal debt, they had no real answers.

Mitt Romney answered with a bizarre statement saying, “I’m going to go through every single program and ask if we can afford it”. (What if we can’t?)

And with all the GOP noise last week in DC about birth control and abortion, the CNN moderator, John King, obviously had to raise the issue of contraception. But even these four individuals knew that that subject was a virtual political mine field. Most of them were aware that most Americans think that contraception is a settled subject and they do not understand why any presidential candidates would be debating the morality or legality of birth control.

Of course, even though contraception has been a lively issue with the Republicans in the US Congress, it is also a big issue in many of the Republican state congresses. All of the candidates tried, but failed, to blame the raising of the B.C. issue on the “main-stream and cable media”. They adamantly refused to acknowledge that it’s the Republicans that are the ones that are bringing up all the replays of a sensitive subject that was settled with the American public over 50 years ago.

Of course, former Senator Rick Santorum just had to clarify his personal views on birth control: “I think I was making it clear that, while I have a personal moral objection to it, even though I don’t support it, that I voted for bills that included it. And I made it very clear in subsequent interviews that I don’t — I don’t support that. I’ve never supported it, and — and have — and on an individual basis have voted against it.”

So, he was against it, but voted for programs that included birth control, even though he personally did not agree with using birth control, it was OK if others did. Being a devout Catholic with seven children, I wonder how his Bishop feels about that answer...?

Moving on, one would have thought that since foreign affairs is one of the key issues that is the responsibility of all US presidents, this group would have done their homework on the subject. Well, not really.

After Newt Gingrich had chosen the word “cheerful” to describe himself in the debate’s lightning round, he then delivered this less than cheerful statement: “You live in a world of total warfare. . . . We live in an age when we have to genuinely worry about nuclear weapons going off in our own cities . . . . I believe this is the most dangerous president on national security grounds in American history.” Of course, there was no comment about the Republican president that allowed us to be attacked on 9/11, and there was no explanation as to why the current president is the, “most dangerous president in US history”. This was all Newt had to offer on foreign affairs.

Santorum began his comment on foreign issues this way: “...we have a lot of troubles around the world, as you see, the Middle East is in flames. . . ”, and that was it.

Romney, who not long ago was positioning himself as being the smiling champion of world freedom, declared flatly, “The Arab Spring has become the Arab Winter.”

Ron Paul had nothing to offer.

This was the total extent of their offerings regarding anything that is occurring beyond this country’s borders.

Because Santorum was attacked multiple times by the others on his history of non –conservative votes while in the Senate, his defense was actually very good, but totally against today’s GOP approach.

Santorum kept appealing for understanding that life isn’t all black and white. But it was instead the complexity of political life that troubled him, not the complexity of issues. To be good team players, Republicans sometimes have to support legislation they don’t approve of, he pleaded. Senators sometimes have to vote for big bills they don’t love in their entirety. He was trying to properly say that governing sometimes demands a level of “compromise”. However, he couldn’t bring himself to say the “C” word on national TV. That’s because, as we are all aware, today’s Republicans are not allowed to even consider the “C” word.

Of course, comments like this from Santorum caused the very pious acting Ron Paul to declare that as a real conservative, Rick Santorum was “a fake”.

Yes friends and neighbors, the GOP debate #20 was just one more example of how low the Republican party has sunk and how little they understand about where average Americans stand today.

It was all very, very sad and bewildering to watch.

Copyright G.Ater 2012

Follow me on Twitter: gater01

A RARE LOOK AT PRESIDENT OBAMA VS ROMNEY & SANTORUM

...Mr. "Sweater Vest" himself, Rick Santorum

These are three very different individuals.

I find interesting to look at our current president and compare him to the two current GOP presidential front runners. When this is done, after removing all of the Republican name calling, these are three very different individuals regardless of their political affiliations.

Now first, what do I mean by all the Republican name calling?

Well, let’s look at all the different references that are being aimed at President Obama.

Listed here is a short list of some of the names that early on were assigned to our current president by the GOP.

Obama is:
>>> A Muslim
>>> An Alien
>>> Not “One of us.”
>>> A Secularist
>>> A hater of religion
>>> A Nazi
>>> A Kenyan anti-colonial
>>> An Elitist
>>> A Socialist
>>> A Maoist
>>> A Fascist
>>> A son of Islam
>>> A Hitlerite
>>> And of course the “N” word

What is so amazing is that it would be impossible for any single individual to be all of these at the same time.

And now that the US economy is showing some improvement, all of Obama’s adversaries are reheating all these old names, clichés and slanders.

So, if we put all these disgusting names aside, what kind of man, husband, father and politician really is Barack Hussein Obama?

In reality, the current president is a normal American who loves his wife and children, plays a reasonable game of basketball and some marginal golf. He has a remarkably old-fashioned style family life, and in the manner we regularly recommend to our kids, got ahead by getting himself a good education.

It’s simply astonishing that a man in his fourth year as the US president continues to be the object of the most extraordinary paranoid fantasies. A significant part of his opposition still cannot accept that Obama is a rather moderate politician quite conventional in his tastes and his interests. Many of his adversaries also cannot deal with the fact that he is a black man.

So, what kind of people are these two current front runners in the Republican opposition?

Former US Senator, Rick Santorum is a father of seven children from what is referred to as the gateway of the Midwest, a coal town on the western slopes of the Allegheny Mountains. Santorum’s birthplace of Pittsburgh, PA, is also the birthplace of the Ohio River, the original highway for Americans into the Midwest.

Santorum began this presidential campaign by pushing his “Rust Belt” Pennsylvania, blue-collar roots for reviving US manufacturing and rebuilding the US economy. But instead of pursuing these real concerns of the average working American, Santorum is now focusing on the far-right’s, and his Catholic church social issues of birth control and abortion.

Instead of talking about what is most important to most working Americans, which is jobs and the economy, he’s talking about a statistic that states that more than 50% of all the American babies born to women under age 30 are born to unmarried mothers.

Instead of presenting his positive attitude for improving the education of our American K through 12 children, he’s disdaining Barack Obama’s environmentalism as “phony theology”. As compared to his offering his position on world affairs, Santorum is continuing to reiterate that “abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest”.

Santorum has now made his Catholicism more central and problematic in this nomination contest than even Mitt Romney’s Mormonism.

And what about the other front runner, Willard “Mitt” Romney.

This candidate has been running for president for the past five years and he was also born with a Platinum spoon in his mouth. Yes, he has always lived in wealth and has no clue as to what the average working American has to deal with on a day to day basis. He is considered one of the wealthiest men to ever run for the US presidency.

And Mr. Romney is also taking on the social issues similar to Mr. Santorum

In the latest debate, Romney reiterated that he would repeal the Affordable Health Care Act, (Which a sitting president can’t do.), because it was an affront against religious freedom...? (Huh...?)

The reality with Mitt Romney is that he cannot seem to convince voters that he understands the difference between business and politics. Or between being a CEO and the US president. To bring economic rationality to an underperforming economy requires understanding market segments. To bring confidence to a discouraged nation requires celebrating its history and sketching an inspiring destiny for this nation’s history. Romney is incapable of performing these required functions.

As the ultra conservative columnist, George Will wrote in an article after the latest debate, “Neither Romney nor Santorum looks like a formidable candidate for November.”

Finally, something I can agree with from a conservative pundit.

Copyright G.Ater 2012

Follow me on Twitter: gater01

THOSE RECEIVING GOVERNMENT SUPPORT ARE THE ONES COMPLAINING THE MOST

...1st Social Security Headquarters, 1936

Why are the Americans that receive the most government support, the ones that continue to complain?

Based on a recent research project by the New York Times, they were able to make the statement that when one looks at the map of the voters in the United States, “The people who most despise government support are the ones who benefit from it the most.”

To understand this statement, all that is needed is a close look at the two maps of the United States shown on the link below to see where the red and blue states are and what parts of the country continue to receive the most government help, and those that receive the least government support.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/12/us/entitlement-map.html

If you look at the states that the Republican Senator John McCain won in 2008, you will notice that for the most part, the states won by McCain were the states that show where the most government support is sent. And by government support, I am referring to Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Support, Unemployment Insurance, Social Security and Food Stamps.

As the other example, the blue states of California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, the New England states, Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida were won by President Obama. In these states, the percentage of Americans receiving government support was mostly in the 10% to 25% area. (The exceptions to this are the Obama-won states of New Mexico and Maine where the percentage of Americans receiving government support is closer to 25% to 40%.)

On the other side of the equation, the remaining US states were the red states won by the GOP candidate, John McCain. And of course, this is the party that crusades against virtually anything for Americans that is provided by the US government. With a few exceptions of sparsely populated red states such as Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Kansas and Utah, the remaining mostly southern states were deeply “red”. And according to the distribution map, they are the states receiving the most government support.

I find it interesting that the so called Tea Party is an example of the people that continue to turn against programs such as: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Unemployment Insurance and other basic support systems. But it’s these Tea Party members that are for the most part, the ones that have benefited the most and that use these American safety nets the most...? And I’m not just referring to the poor.

In today’s economy, increasingly it is the middle class that is having to rely on these safety nets. And in today’s economy the middle class numbers are now beginning to dwindle.

The proud American claim of opportunity for all, is today, sorely at risk. Yes, our American support systems need reform. But the point must be to sustain them, not to destroy them. And it’s those Tea Party nut-cases that are out there with their, “Keep your government hands off of my Medicare” signs, that are causing a lot of the problems.

Today, they still keep trying to peddle the conservative myth that “lowering taxes solves everything”. Just starve government and, like magic, all will be well. But lowering taxes during the Reagan and George W. Bush years sent deficits soaring. This is the GOP’s bill that has now come due for all Americans.

We need an honest discussion of what government should do in a civilized society. To blame government for everything going wrong is to blame ourselves. We must hold politicians accountable, but we must be personally accountable as well. Today, much of America is in denial. We can't continue to cut taxes and to collect less money, as the conservatives continue to demand. But you also can't cut off 40% of a community's income, (just look at the map), and expect it to suddenly thrive, or even survive.

Today, Congress spends most of its time in permanent gridlock. The political parties, particularly the GOP, do not want to compromise, no matter how stupid the impasse. The moderate center of political life seems to have disappeared, and many uninformed Americans say it is the fault of government.

But the government is us. We control it. Or we could control it if we would just exercise our political power.

It all up to us.

Copyright G.Ater 2012

Follow me on Twitter: gater01

THE GOP’S “HATE MONGORING” GOES BACK MANY DECADES

As nasty as the conservatives were to Bill Clinton, and now to President Obama, they were just as bad during the years of FDR.

So, why did the GOP also hate FDR back in the 1930’s and 40’s?

>>> They called him vile names because FDR was a “President for the average working American, not one of their wealthy bureaucrats protecting Wall Street”. In a 1932 campaign speech, FDR smilingly said the following about the Republican party, “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

>>> And because FDR’s, “New Deal” was successful at leading the country out of the Great Depression, while their president Hoover had done nothing to help the nation’s economy from1929 to 1933. Just as the GOP has been in today’s politics, they had also expected, “...the nation to cure itself”, which by the way, has never worked.

>>> They hated FDR because he supported regulating the banks and Wall Street.

>>> And because FDR and the Democrats started the Social Security Insurance Fund to prevent the elderly from becoming homeless.

>>> And because FDR led the country to a decisive win in WWII.

>>> And because he supported bills to send vets to college and the FHA for buying new homes.

>>> And because FDR ended prohibition.

>>> And today, FDR has been rated as the “Best US President” by 238 US History scholars.

The conservatives also hated their own, very liberal but popular, President Teddy Roosevelt because he supported the nation’s environment and he saved millions of acres of US land as US National Parks. They also hated TR because he worked closely with the American Labor Unions and he was in support of government health care for all Americans.


So, why do the Republicans now hate President Barack Obama?

>>> Americans always tend to want “instant gratification”. Needless to say, after decades of the GOP driving the nation’s economy into a ditch, when the economy wasn’t immediately fixed by the president in 2009, that has unfortunately caused many of the still unemployed and the anxious low-information Republicans to blame the president.

>>> The other truth is that some bigoted conservatives (such as Rush Limbaugh) hate Barack Obama simply because they cannot accept the fact that the President is a black man. This is in spite of his intelligence, education, and articulateness.

>>> History shows us that generally, during bad economic times, the president in power usually takes all the negative blame and they usually have very low approval ratings. It's true that the president has the power to do things, but the US has 3 branches of government for a reason. People should know (but they don’t seem to) that there are many things the president cannot do without the approval of both houses of Congress. And today’s Congress is run by a “just say no” Republican House and a GOP “Filibuster” ridden Senate. These Republicans have made their #1 goal, not to help all Americans, but instead to focus on making Obama a one term president.

>>> Some conservative Americans hate Obama because they don't believe in what he stands for. His views on the size of government, government job creation, universal healthcare, etc. Plus, based on their “Republican talking points”, many conservatives view Obama to be an anti-American socialist, and that he apologizes for the very country he represents. (This is un-true, but it’s what some conservatives have falsely chosen to believe.)

>>> And some people have been mistakenly led by the FOX cable network to believe that Obama was raised by his dad as a Muslim. The truth is that Obama’s mother raised him as a single mother and she was a Kansas Christian. He didn’t visit his dad’s country until he was an adult. He hadn't even seen his dad since he was 2 years old. He also had, what some people wrongly say, is a questionable birth certificate from Hawaii. Unfortunately, people need to get their facts straight and do some of their own research on Barack and his family background.

>>> Certain Republican politicians and members of the right-wing media have embarked on a campaign to denigrate the president, even to the point of falsely claiming that he is not a native-born American, and is therefore, not eligible to be President.

>>> All of these are mean-spirited, false Republican talking points. Obama is our President, and should be permitted and supported to use his first four-year term to lead America the way that a President is supposed to do. If his policies and leadership do not please Americans, we have the right to vote differently in November.

>>> Unfortunately, the Republicans have derided everything about the president, from the day he was elected and even before he took office. They did the same thing when Bill Clinton was elected. As the greatest nation in history, they should be totally ashamed. And despite our constitutional right of Freedom of Speech, it is completely disgusting, unproductive and unpatriotic.

>>> Democrats usually leave a new Republican president alone at the beginning of their terms, at least until that president does something with which they seriously don’t agree, (such as a useless foreign war). Republicans however, tend to immediately start ripping at a new Democratic president, mainly because they usually don’t have workable politics, nor do they ever represent the average American worker. Therefore, they tend to go after the Democratic presidents on a highly personal basis.

When you are a political party that supports a political process that is not democratic, and that has never proven to actually work, then you only have the option of going after the opposition on a personal or social issue basis. Since you cannot win a debate based on the issues, you must instead go after the opposition on fringe issues such as religion, abortion, the environment, sexual orientation, private versus public, and a host of other social issues. This is where the Republican party is stuck today.

According to the conservatives, we can’t have health care for every American, as it currently is with every other industrialized nation on the globe. “Everyone should be on their own and they must pull themselves up by their boot straps, even if they don’t have any boot straps.” “If you aren’t wealthy, or you don’t have a job, blame yourself.”

This is why they were wrong about FDR, and they are wrong about Obama. They are also wrong for all Americans.

Copyright G.Ater 2012

Follow me on Twitter: gater01

HAVING NO OTHER CHOICE, OBAMA EMBRACES RECEIVING SUPER-PAC MONEY

...The Supreme Court responsible for the 5-4 Citizens-United decision.



Even Obama realized that the election game can’t be played with two sets of rules.

Well, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, has been proven extremely wrong when he mouthed “not true” during the president’s 2010 State of the Union speech. Justice Alito was recorded making this very obvious silent gesture as the president railed against the Supreme Court’s Citizens-United decision The president was warning that it, “opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy.”

Sorry Justice Alito, President Obama -1 / Supreme Court - 0. But being the winner in this case may be just a very moot point.

Unfortunately, to emphasize the extent of Justice Alito’s incorrect statement of “not true”, the Wesleyan Media Project found that Political Action special interest groups, which underwrote only 3% of the campaign ads in the 2008 Republican nomination campaign. These same groups have thus far accounted for 44% of the ads in the 2012 race to date. And the election race has barely begun.

Two former White House aides, Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney, established the Obama-supporting Super PAC, Priorities USA, last year. However, with the president trying to stay away from Super PAC money, the Obama campaign had previously kept its distance, treating Priorities USA as if it had a communicable disease.

Unfortunately, Karl Rove’s Republican American Crossroads Super PAC has already raised $51 million, versus $20 million that has been raised for five Democratic groups combined. In 2011, American Crossroads had raised $19 million versus Priorities USA, $4.4 million.

With this latest financial campaign situation, President Obama has had no choice but to join in and encourage his supporter to throw in their contributions as well. This money, as with the Republicans, is raised by each groups’ nonprofit arms, of which neither group has to disclose their donors.

Therefore, the president’s campaign manager sent out an announcement last week in an e-mail headlined, “We Will Not Play by Two Sets of Rules.” The Obama campaign manager stated, “The Obama campaign has to face the reality of the law as it currently stands.”

As was expected, the Super PAC phenomenon has already, totally dominated the Republican primary campaign.

The Republican Super PAC's are going crazy in their primaries, but they also aren’t leaving out their going after president Obama.

One group, Americans for Prosperity, has aired nearly $6 million in negative ads aimed at President Obama. And Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, has already run another $3 million in negative ads against President Obama. Those and other groups are poised to unleash even more millions against Obama, once the general election campaign gets started.

Even Mitt Romney’s Super PAC raised $30 million in 2011. If he’s the general election nominee, those deep-pocketed donors will simply whip out their checkbooks and write another big one. And if Rick Santorum is able to pull-out the primary win, those Romney donors can just change the name on their checks to Santorum, since the donor’s names are not required to be disclosed.

The Citizens-United decision made this is a whole new election ball game, and with all of this available anonymous money, it is making everyone very nervous.

Based on what’s going on out there, if you were the Obama campaign manager, Jim Messina, you’d be nervous, too.

Copyright G.Ater 2012

Follow me on Twitter: gater01

WHY THE GOP WILL NEVER GIVE UP GOING AFTER OUR, SOCIAL SECURITY FUND

...1935 FDR signing of the Social Security Act

There’s much more at stake than the large amount of money within the Social Security Fund.

One of my regular readers recently respond to one of my older columns with a question about why the Republicans, year after year, continue to go after privatizing the nation’s Social Security Insurance Fund.

It’s a good question because it’s about much more than the fact that Wall Street continues to drool over the possibility of having direct access to all that money for investing it in their private stocks and bonds. There are even more important issues that go well beyond that giant potential pile of available US dollars.

Let’s look at what the “real” Social Security Fund issues are for the Republican Party.

The day after “Dubya Bush” won his 2nd term in office, the first thing he did was to go after privatizing Social Security. Fortunately, the people saw through his plan and he was unsuccessful.

One might ask, “Why in his final term in office, would he take on the so called “third rail of politics”? Why take that risk?”

Well, the rewards of privatizing Social Security do justify virtually any political GOP cost.

One might then ask, “Really, why is that?”

OK, first, to privatize a giant financial government operation such as Social Security would mean defunding a very popular and a very large government organization and it would totally reconfigure the way Americans interact with it.

The transition costs of doing this would be so high that if it didn’t work out, it could never be justified for reversing it back. Any scheme to privatize Social Security would cost so much that no country, including the US, could consider the cost of changing it back.

Then, once all the trillions of dollars were diverted from the US Treasury to stocks in private companies, here’s what would most likely occur.

With such a flood of money on Wall Street, it would boost the net worth of the super-wealthy and the brokerage houses and mutual fund companies too unheard of heights.

Next, the flood of money out of all of the government accounts would drive the federal deficit up into outer-space which would have the affect of defunding thousands of federal government projects including infrastructure and defense spending. ( i.e., a huge loss of government and private jobs.) This would most likely bring on an immediate national, or possibly a global recession.

The overall effect is that it would open the balance of government up to reacting to the open market place, regardless of the directions given by the president and the US Congress.

In other words, moving the massive trillions of the finances of the Social Security Fund into the private market would have the effect of taking the power away from the American people and would put it in the hands of the corporations and the super wealthy.

It would lower wages as American labor organizations would have little influence in these markets run by big money and multi-national corporations. It would also put environmental decisions in the hands of the market place. There would be no one interested in legislating for higher wages or cleaner air or safer food requirements. Social Security would no longer be the government’s “third rail of politics”, it would totally become a tool of the leaders of the financial community and Wall Street.

But let’s get back to the importance of the effects of driving up of the federal debt and deficit.

Back when Ronald Reagan ran for president, he did something that no presidential candidate had ever done. Up to this point, and especially since FDR and the New Deal, Americans usually felt that the government was probably very inefficient, but in general, it was good for them and their well being.

It was the Reagan presidential campaign that kept saying that, “The US Government couldn’t fix the nation’s problems because government WAS the problem!” (Sound familiar?) This was the beginning of the early years of the Republicans starting to preach that the US government was too big, too intrusive, and it needed to be cut and managed as a “business”. (And remember, businesses are just “mini-dictatorships” where the workers have very few rights and the workers don’t elect their leaders.)

The conservatives also learned during the Reagan era that since they had little chance of getting at the finances in the Social Security fund, (But that will never stop them from trying), they could possibly achieve the control of the country in other ways.

They learned that, as it is in other third-world countries with high debts and deficits, it’s the very wealthy and the banks and corporations that run the governments of those countries, not the country’s elected officials or the workers or the voters.

The GOP realized that if they could drive up the US federal debt by spending the nations riches without paying for them, this would force the country into having to cut the nation’s support programs or force them into the private markets. With high, unpaid federal debts and deficits, they could possibly drive programs such as Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid and even Social Security toward privatization.

When David Stockman, Reagan’s Budget Chairman realized all this, the nation’s spending began in earnest, and that spending was all put on the nation’s Credit Card, but not in the nation’s budget. When they were done, Reagan’s administration had incurred debts and deficits that were “larger than all the presidents since George Washington , combined.

What is ironic is that to this day, the Republicans refer to the other political party as the, “Tax & Spend Democrats”.

But the difference between the political parties is that the Democrats usually spend on programs and infrastructure projects for the people, and they tend to “pay-as-you-go” for them with taxes or fees. That is exactly why the deficit and debt is so high today. As he assumed his office, President Obama put the last two wars and the prescription drug program on the budget which Dubya had chosen not to do. This is the way it was done before, starting back with FDR, and it pretty much stayed that way until the 1980’s and the Reagan administration.

It’s also why there was a balanced budget and a budget surplus in the Clinton Administration.

But starting with that Reagan administration, every Republican administration since has run up the federal credit card debt without paying for any of the costs. Under “Dubya Bush” alone, there were those two unpaid for foreign wars (the most expensive wars in history) and an unpaid for prescription drug bill that was nothing more than a giant pay-back to the pharmaceutical industry.

That massive spending, combined with the Republicans tax cuts, their deregulation and DC Lobbyist driven tax-code / loop-holes are exactly what caused the market crash in 2007 and the mess we are trying to remove ourselves from today.

So the moral of the story is that the Republican conservatives are not interested in helping the average working American. They are only interested in going after the programs that support the average American and in giving those programs to the private corporations that just happen to be their largest benefactors.

This is why they will never stop trying to privatize the largest government social program, Social Security. If they ever succeed, the average working American will be doomed when it comes their time to retire.

Copyright G.Ater 2012

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