As the new week begins, I’m still reeling from the events that transpired on Friday.
As the country was waiting anxiously to see how the budget standoff would end Friday night, I was sitting in an attorney’s office, signing away my rights to my house. The house that my father bought after my mother died, where he lived his final dozen or so years in misery as a quadriplegic, is no longer my burdon.
I bought my sister out of her share of the house after my father died … at the height of the market. The house that my dad over-paid for in the early ’80’s at $140,000 appraised for a whopping $385k when I bought it in 2007. The house in which I owed $265k for which the bank on Friday took $120,000 for it in a short sale….
I’m glad to be out from under it, but still grieving for the $120k or so I lost in the house that I considered to be a safe investment.
The day only got worse when the latest deal was announced with respect to our country’s budgetary blues. True, a shutdown was averted — but this was just the opening shot of a three-stage attack that will continue with part two on the debt ceiling and part three on the battle of the 2012 budget in which the Ryan/Boehner/Teabaggers will do their best to kill off our seniors along with Social Security and Medicare.
The mere fact that the Democrats in Congress and the White House allowed themselves to “bargain” on social programs tells you who’s winning this war. At a time when the recovery is as fragile as Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant, the GOP is controlling the debate once again. The fact that the president will today outline his “Broad plan to reduce debt” instead of pushing forward with a plan to stimulate the economy by building infrastructure and taking care of our neediest over the right wing ideology that continues to reward the richest among us for being rich and punishing the rest of us because we aren’t is a painful pill to swallow.
And as our election process is as flawed as its ever been, but the events that unfolded in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election last week was ignored by the main stream media and the Sunday talking head shows is just plain disgusting. We’re talking about it with BradBlog’s Brad Friedman on today’s show, along with Crooks and Liars’ Nicole Belle, who joins me for today’s “Fools on the Hill” segment:
As a parent, one of the most difficult—but necessary—lessons I have to teach my kids is thinking out the consequences of one’s actions. I see precious little discussion of consequences in DC and I think that the lack of it is really disinforming Americans as to the impact of Republican policies and plans. I am convinced that if the media just did their job and pointed out the consequences of this legislation being proposed to their reader/viewership, we would see the Republican influence in the marketplace of ideas dry up completely.
The discussion of near government shutdown crowded the oxygen out of the media room for any other discussions, including the election shenanigans in Wisconsin. Funny how the media likes to focus on voter fraud in the form of the debunked New Black Panther Party, but are conspicuously silent on election fraud, especially when it favors a Republican. Those are just consequences that our media just aren’t interested in telling people about.
For example, Mike Pence—who joined in the screaming of “Shut it down!” last week –is still attacking Planned Parenthood, even though the government shutdown was averted by taking defunding Planned Parenthood off the table. He tells Christiane Amanpour that he doesn’t want to fund abortion-providers even though the Hyde Amendment prevents federal dollars from being used for abortion and Planned Parenthood spends considerable more time on health issues than on abortion (which is only 3% of the organization’s work). But facts don’t bother Pence and neither does the consequences of taking away one of the few outlets the poor and uninsured have for health care. For someone who claims to be pro-life, Pence is certainly dooming families all over the country to a lot of misery.
Speaking of misery, Eric Cantor admits to Social Security and Medicare aren’t going to be there when he retires. And he’s right, if we keep giving Republicans control of Congress. But it is singularly infuriating to hear this privileged white male refer to seniors who have worked all their lives and are now in their final years as “welfare queens”. What kind of immoral and inhumane country does Cantor want when we discard people as callously as he would?
Washington’s newest It Boy Paul Ryan, whose dreamy good looks has apparently enthralled the media so much that the only adjective they can use in describing his Randian nightmare of an economic proposal is “courageous” got a surprisingly tough questions from David Gregory, although Gregory didn’t have the journalistic integrity to point out that Ryan’s responses were oddly tangential to the questions posed. When David Gregory asks if it isn’t true that the CBO calculated that seniors’ medical expenses would increase under his plan and that’s why Republicans have failed time and again to get public support for their privatization schemes, Ryan’s only response is to assure Gregory that competition will keep medical costs down.
How exactly does that work, though? Do we as consumers get the luxury to compare prices of ambulance services and ER charges? Of course not. Even medical supplies get padded hugely by companies looking to work around insurance companies’ renumerations. Or you can look at the monopoly of Big Pharma, with single pills priced at $80 or more. Tell me, how are private citizens to get that savings from competition? And this is where I get stuck with Ryan’s plan: the consequences. Seniors may be living longer, but they need medical care for those additional years. Under Ryan’s plan, the government won’t be paying it…but those costs don’t go away. Who do you think is paying for it? Seniors don’t have that additional income–especially if Ryan gets his way and dismantles Social Security to boot. So who makes up that cost?
It’s interesting to me how to a one, conservatives are repeating the same lines that the only way to deal with the rising costs of Medicare is to dismantle it. As George Will says, that’s not according to Mr. Ryan, that’s according to Mr. Arithmetic. (we used an ABC embed—the key bit is from 0:57 to 2:04) They go on and on about how Medicare is going to go bankrupt. But what is never mentioned is the actual end of that sentence “…under current spending levels.”
Let’s remember that there are two sides to that coin. One way to deal with rising costs is to drastically cut benefits. But that doesn’t reduce the existence of the need for those benefits, it simply transfers the costs to the individual. But the other way to deal with it– which is apparently unthinkable to George Will and Chrystia Freeland–is to increase revenue, in the form of tax increases. Yes, I said the dreaded phrase: tax increases. At the time that Medicare was enacted in 1965, the top marginal tax rate was 70%. Now it’s less than 40%. Of course there’s no money…we’re too busy allowing the uber-wealthy and corporations to skate on their share of the social fabric to create huge population-sized holes in the safety net.
And to end the segment on a lighter note, Howard Kurtz looks atthe very long-in-coming exit of Glenn Beck from Fox News (again, CNN embed…only the first 25 seconds are necessary). The thing that I found funny is the absolute denial of how toxic Glenn Beck is. We’ve been told over and over that liberal media simply can’t compete in the marketplace of ideas. But here we have Glenn Beck, who has lost more than a million viewers over the last year and almost 400 advertisers. It appears to me that the “free market” has spoken and Glenn’s product is appealing to an ever-dwindling number of wackaloons. But no, for Howie, Glenn Beck is simply chafing under the restrictions of Roger Ailes (you know, the guy who buys his blackboards and underwrote his 9-12 rally and provided lots of free advertising for it on other Fox shows) and the desires of the journalists at Fox News (*cough cough*) to have credibility. David Zurawik, the Baltimore Post’s fairly conservative television critic, diagnoses Beck with a messianic complex, which I think is a fair point. And that messianic complex made him unwilling to tamper down that which was losing viewers and ad dollars. And so, the free market has spoken and Beck loses his platform.