I am told that the best people have begun saying / HOW, from a moral point of view, the Second World War / fell below the standard of the First. The Wehrmacht / Allegedly deplores the methods by which the SS effected / The extermination of certain peoples. The Ruhr industrialist / Are said to regret the bloody manhunts / Which filled their mines and factories with slave workers. The / intellectuals / So I heard, condemn industry’s demand for slave workers / Likewise their unfair treatment. Even the bishops / Dissociate themselves from this way of waging war; in short / the feeling / Prevails in every quarter that the Nazis did the Fatherland / A lamentably bad turn, and that war / While in itself natural and necessary, has, thanks to the / Unduly uninhibited and positively inhuman / Way in which it was conducted on this occasion, been / Discredited for some time to come.
Bertolt Brecht, WAR HAS BEEN GIVEN A BAD NAME
11 Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. 12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. 13 Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.
Ephesians 6:11-13
[Karl] Rove will realize his dream of surveying a political landscape where the Democrats are a Party in name only and the federal government renders almost no services, and is so small that, in the words of Rove confederate Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, “It can be drowned in a bathtub.”
James Moore and Wayne Slater, The Architect: Karl Rove and the master Plan for Absolute Power
STATES REPRESENTATIVES’ COMPACTS WITH GROVER NORQUIST IN HIS OWN WORDS
The Diane Rehm Show
A Conversation with Grover Norquist
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-07-14/conversation-grover-norquist
Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist explains why he's holding Republicans to his no-new-taxes pledge. He talks about his role in the GOP and the current debt ceiling battles.
Time is running out for Democrats and Republicans to negotiate to raise the federal debt ceiling. The U.S. will default on its loans in nineteen days, unless politicians reach agreement. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell warned the Republican brand could be “destroyed” if congress allows the government to default.. But many in his party have dug in against a compromise. And anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist is holding Republican lawmakers to the pledges his organization asked them to sign, opposing any tax increases. He joins Diane to discuss taxes, spending and debt negotiations.
Guests
President, Americans for Tax Reform
Increasing Medicare Age Could Lead To Higher Costs
by Julie Rovner
Congress' so-called deficit reduction "supercommittee" is down to the final weeks of deliberations in its efforts to come up with $1.2 trillion in budget savings. And one proposal that keeps cropping up is the idea of raising the eligibility age for Medicare.
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney became just the latest to propose it in his speech to the Americans for Prosperity Foundation on Friday.
"As with Social Security, the eligibility age should slowly increase to keep pace with increases in longevity," Romney said. Social Security's "normal" retirement age is gradually rising from 65 to 67 thanks to a change instituted in 1983.
Many health care providers, including major hospital groups, have also been urging members of the supercommittee — formally the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction — to consider raising Medicare's eligibility age rather than cutting their payments.
It's a proposal that makes sense, says Joseph Antos of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington, D.C., think tank. "People are just healthier when they hit 65 than they were 40 years ago," shortly after Medicare began.
"In 1965, there were a lot more jobs that required real physical effort," Antos says. "Whereas these days, for a lot of people turning 65, the physical effort is getting out of their desk chair at 5 o'clock."
Another reason raising Medicare's eligibility age has gotten more politically palatable is the passage of last year's health law. Right now, it's almost impossible for older people to buy their own health insurance due to pre-existing health conditions. And even if they can find coverage, it's usually unaffordably expensive.
But starting in 2014, assuming all goes as scheduled, all that will change.
"No matter what age you are," says Antos, "you can apply for insurance, and no matter what your physical condition is, you will be eligible" for insurance coverage.
Shifting Costs Around
So, problem solved, right?
Well, not so fast, says Tricia Neuman of the Kaiser Family Foundation. She and some colleagues did an analysis of what the change would mean earlier this year.
Neuman says if raising the eligibility age is looked at purely as a mechanism to reduce the federal deficit, then it's definitely a winner.
"This proposal will save money for the federal government and save money for Medicare," Neuman says. And the downside? "It would do so by shifting costs to other payers."
Specifically, some costs would shift to employers because they'd have to continue to cover many of those people who'd continue to work. Some costs would also shift to those 65- and 66-year-olds themselves, if they're no longer working. They'd have to pay for their own insurance.
And states might have to pay more, too. If those people have low incomes, they might end up on Medicaid, rather than Medicare.
But it's not even a dollar-for-dollar shift. It turns out that moving 65- and 66-year-olds out of Medicare would actually raise costs for the health system as a whole, according to the Kaiser analysis.
"So even though this proposal would save money for Medicare, costs overall will increase," Neuman says.
That's because taking the youngest, healthiest people out of Medicare would leave behind the sicker, older people and thus raise Medicare premiums for everyone left behind.
Meanwhile, those same people who are young by Medicare standards are old compared to the working population, so those 65- and 66-year-olds would cause overall premiums to rise by staying in that insurance pool, too.
In the end, while the federal government would save a net of about $6 billion in 2014 from such a switch, overall health spending would grow by nearly $8 billion, illustrating, yet again, that nothing in health care is ever as simple as it appears.
GROVER NORQUIST’S DREAM GOVERNMENT
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/worldbiz
GlobalBiz: Doing Business in Russia: 05 Nov 11
Sat, 5 Nov 11
Duration: 27 mins
Three businessmen tell Peter Day about doing business in Russia. William Browder was an investment fund manager in the country who campaigned, with some success, against corruption and left the country, having moved all his company’s assets out, in 2007. He tells Peter Day about his experiences. And two current directors of companies in Moscow discuss what they think they can do to improve corporate governance there. Producer: Richard Berenger Editor: Stephen Chilcott
THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT AND THE MYTHS OF BIG GOVERNMENT AND THE WELFARE STATE
Charles A. Reich
Charles A. Reich’s Opposing The System (1995) proposes that as the size and power of business enterprises increased, this great change caused the size and nature of government to increase in response. So-called big government is thus a creation of corporate power, not its antithesis. The Constituion set up a national government of carefully limited and specifically enumearated pwers, a government that would not could not interfere with a large zone of economic and personal freedom for individuals. But toward the end of the nineteenth century the growth of coporations crated problems which the government was soon called upon to solve. Small businesses and farmers were squeezed or forced out of business. Consumers found themselves confronting prices fixed by monopolies.
Workers experienced disadvantage in bargaining with their corporate employers. Workers and consumers found that corporations had little concern for their health safety. The economy was subjected to wild swings from boom to bust, causing periods of frightening insecurity, mass unemployment, and misery. Incresingly, the people turned to government for help dealing with these and other problems which even the most competent of individuals, farmers, and small businesses could not cope with by themselves.
Government was supposed to exercise its expanded powers in a way that was fair to all the factions and interest in society, including labor, farmers, and small business, as well as the corporate sector. But this position of neutrality did not survive the end of World War II.
After the war, government became more of a partner to corporate sector than a neutral. More and more of its help went to the corate sector, less and less to individuals or the economically weak. The ironic result was that government’s expanded constitional powers, meant to curb and offset corporate power, were now added to corporate power.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00ldyb3
05/11/2011
Media :
Availability: Available to listen.
Last broadcast yesterday, 14:05 on BBC World Service (see all broadcasts).
Synopsis
This week's Forum comes from the UK Parliament . Three distinguished guests and an audience probe the virtues and flaws of democracy in the Arab World and in Western parliamentary democracies.
Illustration by Emily Kasriel
AMERICA’S BODY POLITIC FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
Reich posits that today, we have forgotten the reason for the growth of government, because we deny and repress the fact of corporate governmental power. Today’s [Republican] rhetorical attacks on “big government” for interfering with business have largely succeeded in obscuring the fact that it is big business, not big government, that primarily regulates the lives of ordinary Americans. Until “big government intervened, corporations were free to exploit [what has now become the 99 per cent Occupying public spaces worldwide].
American Dream For Middle Class: Just A Dream?
November 6, 2011
A recent report by the research project found that one in three Americans raised in the middle class fall out of it as adults. Host Audie Cornish speaks with Erin Currier of the Pew Charitable Trusts' Economic Mobility Project about pressures on the American middle class.
THE DERIDED WELFARE STATE
Republican love to deride the so-called Welfare State. However, Reich states the term “welfare state” is a way of disguising the fact that the real issue is economic insecurity and poverty, attributable to the narrowing of economic opportunity and the loss of economic independence that American workers have experience as a result of corporate dominance of the labor market.
The “welfare state” was needed because of corporate-caused deprivation. On their own, individuals below the top cannot command enough for their only asset—their labor—to pay for their lifetime needs, including education, security, and the support of families.
Similar in principle is the role of government in undertaking to support public services and public goods, which individuals cannot produce on their own and for which corporations do not take responsibility—from national defense and police to national parks, airports, highways, and schools. Schools, for example, benefit individuals but also render an essential service to corporations by providing an educated workforce.
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Reich writes that regulatory agencies created to restrain corporate power were filled with appointees friendly to big business. The social programs intended to help the needy [such as AFDC, food stamps, the Great Society, Model Cities, the War on Poverty etc.] were steadily cut back [or discontinued], and hedged with restrictions while aid to corporations became more openhanded. Trillions were spent on the cold war defense buildup; much of this money went to enrich giant corporate defense contractors such as Boeing, General Dynamics, and General Electric, [Ronald Reagan’s old boss].
The tax laws became an elaborate source of favors and giveaways as, under the rubric of “tax expenditures” and “tax incentives,” tax breaks and tax subsidies for big business were written into the Internal Revenue code. Oil leases, timber sales, and other subsidized distributions of public resources flowed to corporations where once (as under the Homestead Act) public lands had been a source of support for individuals.
Reich offers an illustration on how governmental powers intended to strengthen democracy were transformed into vital supports for corporate power is the story of how radio and television licenses were distributed. All of the radio and television channels are publicly owned and remain so. The stations and networks that utilize these channels are licensees of the federal government. Originally it was intended that broadcast licenses be allocated by the Federal Communications Commission to a broad variety of community groups and interests representative of American pluralism and obligated to use their broadcasting privileges to further “the public interest.”
What has happened instead is that corporate giants, especially those already in control of other forms of mass communication such as newspapers, gathered the lion’s share of the licenses, often controlling multiple stations. In addition, the major networks and stations have been given over exclusively to commercial use, so that they are dominated by large corporate advertisers.
Despite the fact that these broadcast licenses are worth many millions of dollars to the licensees, the licensees neither share their profits with the public (as owners) nor perform any but the most token public services. As great as is this giveaway of wealth, the giveaway of power is even more significant. It means that corporate America completely dominates the public airways, and nothing that is disapproved of by corporate America is likely to be heard by the public.
Reich writes that it is in the area of control of knowledge and ideas that the merger of governmental and corporate power reaches its apex. At the same time that government began to change from a neutral protector of the public interest under the New Deal to a partner of corporate America, an elaborate program was instituted to cleanse government of anyone who still believed in the New Deal Vision.
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David Biddle
jmac1949
Snowden
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Jimmy Zuma
Salon.com
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