Don’t Blame America’s Debt Crisis on Social Security and Medicare...

Monday, May 30, 2011 by ThisCantBeHappening
...Especially on Memorial Day
by Dave Lindorff

Amid all the nonsense and gobbledegook that has been written about banking industry and about the economic slump during the last four years of the global financial crisis, New York Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson has stood out both for the clarity of her analysis, and for her willingness to go after the guilty parties in the political and especially the banking system, naming names and calling it as she sees it.

So it was kind of disappointing--even shocking--to read her latest article reporting on a new “study” by Peterson Institute for International Economics Senior Fellow Joseph Gagnon, warning about the nation’s growing debt crisis.

The Peterson Institute, founded by Wall Street tycoon Peter Peterson, has long been gunning for the Social Security and Medicare systems, which he, and the rest of the Wall Street gang, see as unfairly competing with Wall Street for the assets of the public, and as destructive of the “free market.”

Peterson’s basic schtick is that the two critical support systems for the elderly and infirm are going to bankrupt the country as they pay out benefits that exceed what retirees paid into the system, and that the solution is to cut back on those benefits, increase the taxes collected, or better, to privatize both systems.

Given Peterson’s and his institute’s long-standing agenda to gut Social Security and Medicare, it’s not surprising that Gagnon, as a fellow there, would say the solution to the nation’s growing debt is to either raise taxes or cut those two hugely successful, critically important and broadly popular social programs.

Morgenson is too smart not to know better, and yet not once in her article did she look outside of Gagnon’s narrow definition of the problem at the real cause of the national debt: the country’s outlandish military budget and a decade of unfunded wars, which have been piling up debt at a rate of some $150 billion a year (and that’s just the principal!). Repeal the Bush Tax cuts for the wealthy and prosecute corporate tax dodgers (about 80% of all US Corporations), and we could be looking at a budget surplus, all things considered.

After all, the country has been piling up this debt for several decades, and especially over the last decade, but during all this time, Social Security and Medicare have been paying out their benefits from current dedicated payroll taxes and by drawing on the trust funds that had built up because of the years that more was being collected than paid out in benefits.

Get the point? Nobody, including Gagnon, Morgenson or the Social Security and Medicare-hating members of Congress like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), will acknowledge the fact that not one dime of the huge US deficit has been caused by a benefit check paid by Social Security or Medicare.

It’s the wars, stupid! (and the tax cuts and the tax evasion)

If the US would just cut its military spending down to size, instead of spending as much as the rest of the world combined on war or preparing for war--say by 75%--it would free up more than $450 billion a year that could go towards funding things like improved education, research into alternative energy, improving health care access, and paying down the deficit, too. Toss in cuts in the outsized $40+ billion annual secret intelligence budget, in the nation’s obsolete and dangerous nuclear weapons program and other ancillary military-related expenditures, and we’re talking about saving half a trillion dollars a year!

Morgenson should be ashamed at carrying water for the likes of Peterson and Gagnon.

This being Memorial Day weekend, she could at least make an attempt to restore her once sterling but now sullied reputation as an uncompromising financial journalist by taking on the Pentagon.

Sanctifying War

Serving the Empire, Killing for Lies
By SHELDON RICHMAN

We made it through another Memorial Day. Thankfully, most people think of it as just the start of summer. They don’t seem to use it as America’s political leaders have long wanted: as a day of reverence for America’s world domination.

In his radio address this past Saturday President Obama urged all Americans to “serve” the members of the armed forces “as well as they served us.” He called on us to remember the 5,400 Americans “who laid down their lives in defense of their fellow citizens” in Iraq and Afghanistan. He assured us that “the men and women serving this country around the world have the support they need to achieve their missions and come home safely” (emphasis added). He also praised every war in American history as a hallowed effort to protect the nation.

Once again an American president lies to sanctify war.

Some questions should be obvious: how exactly are the armed forces today serving us or the country? And what are those men and women of the military doing “around the world”? Why didn’t Obama mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Afghans, and Pakistanis killed by American forces in the latest operations?

Don’t say that American forces are protecting us. Those troops may be serving the government and the “private” component of the military-industrial complex, but that has nothing to do with average Americans, who would be far safer — not to mention richer — if the trillion dollars spent every year on military-related matters were simply left in the taxpayers’ pockets.

It is way past time that the American people started seeing through the nonsense. That isn’t rocket science. Consider recent events:

Fact 1: The U.S. government is using robot Predator planes to shoot Hellfire missiles into Pakistan (and Afghanistan). Innocent men, women, and children are being killed or maimed regularly.

Fact 2: A Pakistani-American tries to blow up a car in Times Square.

How much effort does it take to connect those two dots? Can we really comfort ourselves by thinking that Faisal Shahzad was just a fanatical Muslim — counseled and trained by bad guys “over there” — bent on killing innocent Americans because he hates our way of life?

You have to be a damned fool to keep believing such balderdash.

Presidents and secretaries of State want us to believe that the U.S. government (which they conflate with “the country”) did nothing to provoke the crimes known as “terrorism,” which they then use to excuse all manner of violence and violations of liberty. (Strangely, Predator attacks don’t meet the official definition of “terrorism.”) But the facts refuting that ridiculous claim are readily available. Any curious American — an oxymoron? — can easily find out just how much U.S. regimes have done to create hostility and a desire for revenge in the hearts of Muslims. Start with the CIA operation in Iran in 1953.

The apologists for U.S. policy will say it was all done for peace, democracy, and prosperity. Then why does it always bring war, death, broken bodies, torture, misery, starvation, and disease? The war planners are not stupid. They see the results. They know what they are doing. Then they dupe others — too willing to be duped — into following orders and rationalizing their acts as necessary to national security.

Maybe this deadly con will never cease, but if it does it will be because we finally refused to pay respect to those who lead and fight the wars. We will have stopped believing that dying and killing for the empire is noble. In the movie The Americanization of Emily, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky has his protagonist say, “We shall never end wars ... by blaming it on ministers and generals or warmongering imperialists or all the other banal bogies. It’s the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers, the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widows’ weeds like nuns and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices.... May be ministers and generals who blunder us into wars, but the least the rest of us can do is to resist honoring the institution.”

Remember that next Memorial Day.