Over the past decade fundamental changes have taken place in Southern Europe, which have broken with previous political alignments, resulting in the virtual disappearance of traditional leftist ’parties, the decline of trade unions and the emergence of ‘middle class radicalism’.
We may not be hearing much from Ted Cruz in the mainstream media lately-- not that I want to look a gift horse in the mouth-- but he and his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination are still very active on the fringes of the far right. So, for example, despite the fact that nearly 80% of likely voters support expanding Social Security benefits, he told his inbred core of crackpot true believers that Bush was right to try to privatize Social Security and give it to Wall Street. "I… think you've got to give George W.
During a presentation to the Peter J. Peterson Foundation’s, Fiscal, 2015, Summit last month, former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, was asked about the status of the Social Security Trust Fund. Here is his response, “The notion that we have a trust fund is nonsense—that trust fund has no meaning whatsoever. The trust fund is a meaningless instrument that has no function. Greenspan’s comments were first reported by Nicholas Brady in the May 30, 2015 issue of PJ Media.
New York's 24th Congressional District-- basically Syracuse plus a chunk of central New York from Oswego to the Finger Lakes to Rochester's eastern suburbs-- turned blue in the '90s. The PVI is D+1 and Obama beat McCain 56-42% and then beat Romney by an even greater margin, 57-41%. The Democratic congressman, Dan Maffei, was a wishy-washy New Dem who never embraced core progressive values and tended to vote with the GOP on crucial roll calls too frequently for grassroots Dems to countenance.
Social Security and Medicare are under attack from Wall Street, conservatives, and free market economists. The claims are that these programs are unaffordable and that the programs can be run more efficiently and at less cost if privatized.
The programs are disparaged as “entitlements.” The word has come to imply that entitled people are getting something at great cost to everyone else. Indeed, entitlements have become conflated with welfare.
The basic conservative movement has never altered its views. It has always been based on the domination of society by an aristocracy, but its approach has varied to suit the times.
Jeb Bush and the second-tier contendersRutgers released a new poll this week showing that 69% of New Jersey voters agree that their governor, Chris Christie, would make a lousy president. He's in New Hampshire, where voters are less aware of what a mess he's made out of New Jersey's economy. He's there campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination...
Thursday night-- actually Friday morning at 2:30-- Eizabeth Warren and a handful of allies managed to get an important amendment voted on in the Budget debate. Although it lost, 42 to 56,it now has almost every senator on record for wanting to either expand or cut Social Security. Politically, it was a momentous vote.
The video above, from a Democratic congressional conference introducing an expansion of Social Security, includes statements by two Maryland congressmembers who are running for the Senate: one, Donna Edwards, who you expect to see at this kind of announcement, and one, Chris Van Hollen, who was forced into coming because of earlier support for the Simpson-Bowles proposals that would have cut Social Security benefits. Van Hollen's support for cutting Social Security-- while Donna Edwards fought tooth and nail against Simpson-Bowles-- has become an issue in the Maryland Senate race.
