'Obama will be tested': Feb. 23 "Fiscal Responsibility Summit" targets Social Security and Medicare

seafan

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Sat Feb-21-09 06:49 PM
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'Obama will be tested': Feb. 23 "Fiscal Responsibility Summit" targets Social Security and Medicare

I've been jumping up and down and yelling about this over the past few days.

Just because We The People slapped down George W. Bush when he tried this, we must NEVER let down our guard. This is a well-disguised trap for President Barack Obama, laid by those calling themselves "entitlement reformers", and we must rise up to help point out this danger.

Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake and Digby have been following this very closely, and the warnings are rising from every direction about the upcoming "Fiscal Responsibility Summit" on Monday, February 23, led by conservative advocates of "entitlement reform", wearing the cloaks of Wall Street, conservative think tanks, tax-exempt foundations and Blue Dog Democrats. To name a few: Republican financier Pete Peterson, American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation and Blue Dog Democrats led by Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee.

These people are very serious in their mission of dismantling Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not to mention employee retirement pensions.

Their mission is to coerce Barack Obama into a "Grand Bargain" of looting Social Security disguised as "fiscal responsibility". Tomorrow, paid ads from these groups will blanket the Sunday morning TV talk shows, touting "fiscal responsibility", followed by carpet bombing the NY Times, Washington Post, Politico, Roll Call, and other publications with more of this media blitz to mislead and confuse Americans.

Looting Social Security

By William Greider
February 11, 2009

Hedge fund billionaire Pete Peterson, keynote speaker at "Fiscal Responsibility Summit" February 23

Appearing in the March 2, 2009 issue of The Nation

Governing elites in Washington and Wall Street have devised a fiendishly clever "grand bargain" they want President Obama to embrace in the name of "fiscal responsibility." The government, they argue, having spent billions on bailing out the banks, can recover its costs by looting the Social Security system. They are also targeting Medicare and Medicaid. The pitch sounds preposterous to millions of ordinary working people anxious about their economic security and worried about their retirement years. But an impressive armada is lined up to push the idea--Washington's leading think tanks, the prestige media, tax-exempt foundations, skillful propagandists posing as economic experts and a self-righteous billionaire spending his fortune to save the nation from the elderly.

These players are promoting a tricky way to whack Social Security benefits, but to do it behind closed doors so the public cannot see what's happening or figure out which politicians to blame. The essential transaction would amount to misappropriating the trillions in Social Security taxes that workers have paid to finance their retirement benefits. This swindle is portrayed as "fiscal reform." In fact, it's the political equivalent of bait-and-switch fraud.

Defending Social Security sounds like yesterday's issue--the fight people won when they defeated George W. Bush's attempt to privatize the system in 2005. But the financial establishment has pushed it back on the table, claiming that the current crisis requires "responsible" leaders to take action. Will Obama take the bait? Surely not. The new president has been clear and consistent about Social Security, as a candidate and since his election. The program's financing is basically sound, he has explained, and can be assured far into the future by making only modest adjustments.

But Obama is also playing footsie with the conservative advocates of "entitlement reform" (their euphemism for cutting benefits). The president wants the corporate establishment's support on many other important matters, and he recently promised to hold a "fiscal responsibility summit" to examine the long-term costs of entitlements. That forum could set the trap for a "bipartisan compromise" that may become difficult for Obama to resist, given the burgeoning deficit. If he resists, he will be denounced as an old-fashioned free-spending liberal. The advocates are urging both parties to hold hands and take the leap together, authorizing big benefits cuts in a circuitous way that allows them to dodge the public's blame. In my new book, Come Home, America, I make the point: "When official America talks of 'bipartisan compromise,' it usually means the people are about to get screwed."

The Social Security fight could become a defining test for "new politics" in the Obama era. Will Americans at large step up and make themselves heard, not to attack Obama but to protect his presidency from the political forces aligned with Wall Street interests? This fight can be won if people everywhere raise a mighty din--hands off our Social Security money!--and do it now, before the deal gains momentum. Popular outrage can overwhelm the insiders and put members of Congress on notice: a vote to gut Social Security will kill your career. By organizing and agitating, people blocked Bush's attempt to privatize Social Security. Imagine if he had succeeded--their retirement money would have disappeared in the collapsing stock market.

To understand the mechanics of this attempted swindle, you have to roll back twenty-five years, to the time the game of bait and switch began, under Ronald Reagan.

.....

(More: This is an absolute MUST read.)

Digby reports today:

Lookie what I got today:

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation is pleased to announce that its first national television ad will run on Sunday, February 22 as part of a $1 million-plus public education campaign aimed at raising awareness of America’s fiscal challenges.

The awareness campaign was first announced at a February 5 Capitol Hill press conference by Foundation President and CEO David M. Walker, the former U.S. Comptroller General from 1998-2008, who was joined by Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and George Voinovich (R-Ohio) and Reps. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) and Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.).

The TV ad will air during Sunday morning public affairs programming in advance of President Barack Obama’s Fiscal Responsibility Summit on Monday, February 23. Additionally, as part of the awareness campaign, the Foundation will continue to advertise in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, Roll Call, and other publications.

Both the print and TV ads can be downloaded at: http://www.pgpf.org/newsroom/MainFeature/feb20/.

The text of the TV ad is below:

SMALL ICEBERG LOOMS UP, GOES PAST.

Voiceover: “Everyone’s focused on the obstacles now facing our economy.”

MUCH BIGGER ICEBERG LOOMS UP. IT IS HUGE.

“But there’s a much larger threat: $56 trillion dollars in unfunded retirement and health care obligations, and the over-reliance on foreign lenders that endanger us all.”

Screen Shot: $56 TRILLION

Screen Shot: $483,000 PER U.S. HOUSEHOLD

STEERING AWAY FROM ICEBERG.

Screen Shot: BIPARTISAN COMMISSION

“An action-oriented bipartisan commission would begin to steer us in the right direction.”

FINAL SHOT OF CLEAR SEAS, BLUE SKY AHEAD, ICEBERGS NOW IN BACKGROUND.

“America must chart a more responsible fiscal course, to navigate a brighter future for our children and grandchildren.”

Now, I know that the American people aren't entirely fools. But that message is designed to confuse and obfuscate and convince people that our current problems have been caused by "unfunded" entitlements, running as it is right alongside Peterson's convenient (and recent) emphasis on foreign investment. (You'll notice that there's no mention of the trillion dollar ongoing expenditures in the Iraq debacle.)

These people are going to be spending a lot of money to push this agenda. Maybe it will fail. I hope so. But I don't think pretending that this isn't a threat is a very smart position, nor do I think it's wise to depend on the overwhelmed, month-old Obama administration to cleverly jiu-jitsu this without the left making it quite clear that they oppose it. If he doesn't intend to barter away pieces of the safety net, it's the left's job to back him up. If he does, it's our job to register our opposition. Either way, I think liberals should make noise about it. Peterson and his pals are very powerful and it doesn't make sense to let them go unanswered out of sheer faith that the Obama administration's somewhat confusing signals mean what we think they mean. Not to mention that the politics of this, and what they portend for the future, are potentially lethal.

At the very least, this fearmongering about "entitlements" is going to make universal health care much more difficult. Which is the point. Peterson has been leading a crusade for the past 30 years that's made it impossible to necessarily expand the safety net, to the point where we now have 50 million people uninsured and many tens of millions more ready to go over the cliff. This isn't just about social security. He wants to eliminate pensions for federal workers too. And medicare and medicaid. The man's mission is to eliminate all "entitlements." He's not going to be on board any workable plan to provide health care to all Americans. It's the antithesis of what he's trying to do. (And yet, for some reason, Democrats always seem to love him. Go figure.)

You can't just let him and his acolytes run around unanswered. They've been making things worse for average Americans for decades, largely because Democrats keep validating their premises.

Ian Welsh effectively rebuts the notion that the Orszag-Diamond plan to cut social security benefits is the liberal alternative. Breaking the generational compact has always been the necessary first step for the social security destroyers, and that's what the Orszag-Diamond plan does.

More from William Greider in The Nation:

(Pete) Peterson is financing a media blitz. His tendentious documentary--I.O.U.S.A.--opened in 400 theaters and was broadcast on CNN with appropriate solemnity. Last September Peterson bought two full pages in the New York Times to urge the next president to create a "bipartisan fiscal responsibility commission" once he was in office (Peterson was for John McCain). This group of so-called experts would be authorized to design the reforms for Congress to enact. But Peterson does not want Congress to have a full, freewheeling debate on the particulars. The reform package, he suggests, should be submitted to a single "up-or-down vote by Congress, as is done with military base closings." That's one of the gimmicks intended to give politicians cover and protect them from their constituents. It is profoundly antidemocratic. But that's the idea--save the government from the unruly passions of citizens. Peterson's proposal also resembles the notorious fast-track provision, which for years enabled presidents to steamroll Congress on trade agreements, no amendments allowed.

Peterson's proposal would essentially dismantle the Social Security entitlement enacted in the New Deal, much as Bill Clinton repealed the right to welfare. Peterson has assembled influential allies for this radical step. They include a coalition of six major think tanks and four tax-exempt foundations.

Their report--Taking Back Our Fiscal Future, issued jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation--recommends that Congress put long-term budget caps on Social Security and other entitlement spending, which would automatically trigger benefits cuts if needed to stay within the prescribed limits. The same antidemocratic mechanisms--a commission of technocrats and limited Congressional discretion--would shield politicians from popular blowback.

The authors of this plan are sixteen economists from Brookings and Heritage, joined by the American Enterprise Institute, the Concord Coalition, the New America Foundation, the Progressive Policy Institute and the Urban Institute. "Our group covers the ideological spectrum," they claim. This too is a falsehood. All these organizations are corporate-friendly and dependent on big-money contributors. No liberal or labor thinkers need apply, though the group includes some formerly liberal economists like Robert Reischauer, Alice Rivlin and Isabel Sawhill.

The ugliest ploy in their campaign is the effort to provoke conflict between the generations. "The automatic funding of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid impedes explicit consideration of competing priorities and threatens to squeeze out spending for young people," these economists declared. Children, it is suggested, are being shortchanged by their grandparents. This line of argument has attracted financial support from some leading foundations usually associated with liberal social concerns--Annie E. Casey, Charles Stewart Mott, William and Flora Hewlett. Peterson has teamed up with the Pew Trust and has also created front groups of "concerned youth."

Trouble is, most young people did not buy this pitch when George W. Bush used it to sell Social Security privatization. Most kids seem to think Grandma is entitled to a decent retirement. In fact, whacking Social Security benefits, not to mention Medicaid, directly harms poor children. More poor children live in families dependent on Social Security checks than on welfare, economist Dean Baker points out. If you cut Grandma's Social Security benefits, you are directly making life worse for the poor kids who live with her.

The assault sounds outrageous and bound to fail, but the conservative interests may have Obama in a neat trap. Their fog of scary propaganda makes it easier to distort the president's position and blame him for any fiscal disorders driven by the current financial collapse. He will be urged to "do the right thing" for the country and make the hard choices, regardless of petty political grievances (words and phrases he has used himself). Obama's fate may depend on informing the public--now, not later--so that people are inoculated against these artful lies.

Hedge Fund Billionaire to keynote Obama's "Fiscal Responsibility Summit" February 23, February 19, 2009

Pete Peterson

WE must get out in front of this blitz by calling our Congress members and DEMANDING that this calculated, big money attack on Social Security be stopped in its tracks. We The People will not stand for this serial destruction of our Social Security system, nor the assault on Medicare, which is aimed at obliterating any and all future attempts for a national single payer health care system. The people pushing for these abominable tactics are truly domestic enemies of the people of the United States.

We must put unrelenting pressure on Congress and maintain it every single day.

Obama really does need our help with this. Let us all rise to this occasion.