I have the good fortune of being able to afford, both in money and time, to go to Netroots Nation.

This is my third one.  I’m now in my fourth session.

I have attended one from Rich Mellman’s polling on the concern people have that we are no longer a manufacturing country, health care reform, social security, and the fights in education standards over evolution in Texas and Kansas.

The one on Social Security is the scariest.  I will talk about it below.  

The fear, the panelist reported on, is the commission that Obama put together will be reporting in December.  With such deficit hawks on the committee, the great fear is that there will be a strong move to reduce benefits for younger workers.

The coalition gearing up to fight any proposals to do that has the cry: “Strengthen Social Security, but Don’t Cut Benefits.”

The group is organizing at strengthensocialsecurity.org.

The message was clear: by changing the cap on the system will survive for 75 more years.

We have to make sure that McCaskill understands that.  

Yet think about what happened in the special session. The General Assembly funded a tax incentive program by reducing the retirement benefits for new state workers.  That shows how strong the notion is that retirees are too well-off.

More reports coming.  The fight will never end and we have to remember that.

Local conservative blogger 24th State is over on Twitter making absolutely no sense in a lament about Social Security.

Social Sec. and Medicare Boards of trustees blame “recession” on shortfalls (via @agoodeye)

9:54 AM May 13th from Tweetie

Well, yeah. A recession generally means fewer jobs and less income, which means less payroll tax going into Social Security. By the same token, when the economy improves, more jobs and more income follows, and more payroll tax receipts shore up Social Security.

But when asked about this

@erichoffpauir – I was thinking about the long term trend, where I pay. 15% for 40 years and get nothing.

about 4 hours ago from Tweetie in reply to erichoffpauir

I rarely write about national issues since this a state news site, but Alexander Cockburn’s rant in the Feb. 4th edition of The Nation deserves your attention (available in paper edition or online to subscribers).

Terrorism flourishes brazenly at Ground Zero in the new 7 World Trade Center building. Here can be found a secretive entity of fabulous wealth and power. Kingdoms and corporations alike tremble at its shadow and make haste to pay it tribute. I refer to Moody’s Investor Services, wholly owned subsidiary of Moody’s Corporation, which reported $2.03 billion in revenues in 2006.

On January 10 Moody’s, in concert with the other main bond-rating firm, Standard and Poor’s, gave the United States its top AAA credit rating. The terrorist blackmail threat came in the form of a demand by Moody’s that the US government “reform” Social Security and Medicare: “In the very long term, the rating could come under pressure if reform of Medicare and Social Security is not carried out as these two programs are the largest threats to the long-term financial health of the United States and to the government’s AAA rating.”

Translation: Privatize Social Security, or else the U.S. rating, which is the anchor of the world’s financial system, will be downgraded.

Thus does Moody’s man calmly threaten to plant the financial equivalent of a thermonuclear device under the Statue of Liberty.

Cockburn calls Moody’s financial analysis of major corporations a protection racket and supports his accusation with two examples. Moody’s only rates corporations that “voluntarily” retain its services. The German insurance corporation, Hanovers, repeatedly declined Moody’s invitations to have its credit rated. So Moody gave it an unsolicited adverse rating, then–“just like a small-time mobster after hurling a brick through the window of a liquor store”–invited it to “voluntarily” retain Moody’s services. No deal, Hanover said, so the next rating was worse. And so on, until Hanover was rubble.

Enron, on the other hand, was handled with “ermine gloves” until days before its collapse–even though Moody had access to Enron’s internal financial operations.

Cockburn asserts, furthermore, that the world’s credit system is strained to the bursting point because of financial scams from junk bonds to subprime mortgages that Moody’s and other financial rating agencies helped put together. In other words, they’re not to be trusted with Social Security trust funds.

Of course, the terrorists in Lower Manhattan want Wall Street to get its mitts on the pools of money held in the Social Security trust funds. But if Moody’s is going to present itself as a major political player presuming to dictate national policy down the barrel of a financial gun, its executives and analysts should be hauled into the star chamber. Let’s have war on terror and a rendition of these Moody’s executives before a special investigative committee of Congress with full subpoena power. Ask them to explain their own role in causing the financial upheavals afflicting the planet right now, due to the collapse of the housing bubble and its impact on the home mortgage market.

As Professor Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts remarked to me last week, “We could say the bubble and crisis occurred because outfits like Moody’s rating agency always misread the buildup of bubbles. … [They] don’t have a clue as to what they’re talking about.”

Pollin further wants to know why, if Moody’s analysts care to discuss financial laxity, they don’t take aim at what we’re spending in Iraq. The defense budget in 2006 was $617 billion. That is 4.7 percent of GDP. Before the war, the military budget was 3 percent of GDP.

Social Security and Medicare together came to $900 billion in 2006. Why should Moody’s attack our minimal welfare cushion and leave the “imperial budget” intact?

In fact, almost all of the projected rise in the costs of welfare programs is in Medicare, and the reason for those increases is that the insurance and pharmaceutical companies have such a grip on  our health system. If we converted to single-payer, including all those healthier younger adults would bring down the cost of Medicare.

Cockburn concludes:

Shift to single-payer and quit shoving money–4.7 percent of the GDP–down the imperial sinkhole, and there’s no fiscal crisis of any sort, short- or long-term, for Moody’s or anyone else to fret about. And in the even shorter term, if Moody’s sees fiscal crisis looming, why don’t its overpaid executives for once put the national interest first and call for a tax hike on the rich? Pollin tells me that just going back to Clinton, as opposed to Bush 2, on taxes for those making more than $200,000 a year would generate $60 billion a year. Do this and end the war in Iraq and you wipe out the deficit at a stroke.

Let a real war on terror commence.

I went to the public library yesterday to research the rating on a health insurance company I’m considering for supplemental coverage on my Medicare policy. The company that published the ratings wasn’t Moody’s, but still, when I saw the A+ that it gave my prospective health insurer, I felt some niggling doubt about the assessment, knowing that these rating companies aren’t the objective arbiters of financial stability that we’d like to believe they are.  

<img src="http://rawstory.com/images/new/roveboardsairforceone.jpg&quot; width="191"Karl Rove wanted power for his party, and he figured that the way to get it was to divide the nation:  to use wedge issues to weaken Democrats and to play to the Christian base.  That’s why Terry Schiavo happened.  That’s why the “faith based initiatives” were created–and flopped, because it became apparent that Rove was cynically using evangelicals. 

Bill Moyers opines that:

“Karl Rove figured out a long time ago … that the way to take an intellectually incurious, draft-averse naughty playboy in a flight jacket with chewing tobacco in his back pocket and make him governor of Texas was to sell him as God’s anointed.”

What worked in Texas applied at the national level as well, for quite awhile.  And, of course, once Bush was elected, he was granted the gift that kept on giving:  FEAR in the form of 9/11.  Unlike FDR, who thought fear was the thing to be feared, Rove/Bush never let the terror warnings drop to the green level for a single day.

And Rove told Bush to strut.  Strength, that was the ticket in dire times.  Strength.  Bring ’em on.  Never back down, even when your policies are obviously in shambles.  Always force the other guy to be the flip-flopper.

To make all these strategies work on election day–the only day that mattered, after all–required gobs of money, which was forthcoming from wealthy contributors.  In return, it might be necessary to hand corporations the keys to the national treasury and to destroy the middle class, but … trade offs are inevitable.  In this philosophy of putting our government on the auction block, Rove was joined by DeLay, Frist, Roy Blunt, and the rest of the Republicans in Congress.

Joshua Green, in his September Atlantic article, “The Rove Presidency”, compares that style of “governance” to what happened the last time there was a seismic shift in American politics (p.60):

…Roosevelt mentioned the Democratic Party by name only three times in his entire 1936 reelection campaign.  Throughout his presidency, Roosevelt had large Democratic majorities in Congress but operated in a nonpartisan fashion, as though he didn’t.  Bush, with razor-thin majorities–and for a time, a divided Congress–operated as though his margins were insurmountable, and sowed interparty divisions as an electoral strategy.”

But a style that works well for electioneering may not work so well for governing.  Not recognizing that fact, Karl Rove tripped on his own arrogance and fell into the well, taking the Bush presidency with him.

At the apogee of his power right after the 2004 election, Rove was flush with the success of having passed huge tax cuts during Bush’s first term and with the heady wine of electoral victory.  He pressed for Social Security reform, a course that someone with legislative experience would have warned him against.  Threatening the safety of this well loved program was something to be tackled only with bipartisan support. 

The last time Congress meddled with Social Security was under Reagan.  In 1981, Reagan proposed large cuts to Social Security, but the Republican Senate refused to even take them up.  The mere fact that such a course had been discussed cost the Republicans significantly in the 1982 elections. 

Joshua Green (on p.66) relates the rest:

The following year, Reagan tried again, this time cooperating with the Democratic speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill.  He now understood that the only way to attain any serious  change on such a sensitive issue was for both parties to hold hands and jump together.  To afford each side deniability if things fell apart, the two leaders negotiated by proxy.  O’Neill chose Robert Ball, a widely respected Social Security chairman under three presidents, while Reagan picked Alan Greenspan, the future chairman of the Federal Reserve. …

As Ball and Greenspan made headway, it was really O’Neill and Reagan who were agreeing.  To assure both sides political cover, it was an all-or-nothing process.  The plan that was eventually settled on addressed the solvency problem by raising the retirement age (which pleased Republicans) and taxing Social Security benefits for the first time (which pleased Democrats).  Unlike in 1981, Republicans weren’t left exposed.

Oblivious to this chapter in Congress, Rove believed that attacking Social Security, even with his razor-thin margin in Congress, would be like getting the tax cuts passed.  Hardly.  Passing tax cuts is, after all, what Republicans do.  Social Security is a different animal, and the legislature knew it even if Rove didn’t.  Besides, they didn’t like the S.O.B.

So the efforts to drum up support sounded flatter and flatter as 2005 dragged on.  Still, Rove insisted.  He couldn’t be seen to back down; that would be flip-flopping.

And then the bottom dropped out.  Hurricane Katrina hit and Rove’s sense of opportunism failed him. He sent Bush blithely flying to California to pretend to play a guitar for a photo op.  Bush finally flew over Louisiana and peered down–when he should have landed there and gone out in a rowboat himself to drag drowning folks over the hull to safety.  He praised Brownie for doing a “heckuva job” as Anderson Cooper railed on CNN every night about the administration’s incompetence.  Rove prevented Bush from getting down and dirty by landing that plane.

That was the turning point.  Social Security reform failed, immigration reform failed, Medicare reform failed, and Rove’s domestic agenda was in tatters.  What was there left for Americans to contemplate but foreign affairs, namely the debacle in Iraq (where Cheney was doing just as dismal a job as Rove was at home).

Joshua Green concludes (p.72):

The Bush administration made a virtual religion of the belief that if you act boldly, others will follow in your wake.  That certainly proved to be the case with Karl Rove, for a time. …In the end, [though], the verdict on George W. Bush may be as simple as this: he never questioned the big booming voice of Oz, so he never saw the little man behind the curtain.