social security

It’s that Ebeneezer and Grinch time of year. Hooverville. The great American fat crocodile tear with stories of legless troops getting a bag of groceries and free big screen TV and compact car. All those bags under our collective eyes watching brute felon sports professionals (sic) run by their brutish Mafiosa coaches and owners. We are ready for that extra 15 pounds, those romps in those wonderlands of Consumopithecus Anthropocene union-busting box stores, those nanoseconds looking at the homeless, pennies for their crimes. We will feel good about Tis the Season.

There's a last minute, rush/rush-end-of-the-world vote scheduled for Thursday in the House, presumably Friday in the House of Lords, for the Frankenstein's monster of a "compromise" that Establishment shills Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Patty Murray (D-WA) reached Tuesday. The Budget Deal sucks. Can progressives stick to their values and principles and defeat it? Probably not. It's either this or the Republicans will shut down the government again.

I asked one of the sharpest minds I know on Capitol Hill if there's a single issue facing Congress right now-- just one-- that separates conservatives from progressives. He didn't miss a beat: the Social Security Enhancement and Protection Act and the Strengthening Social Security. Act. Yesterday we had a guest post from the progressive candidate for the Maine Senate seat, Shenna Bellows, on the topic.

That brand new video above is a bit of a biography of the candidate Blue America endorsed for the Maine Senate seat, Shenna Bellows. She's running against Susan Collins, a DC-oriented career-politician who is often mischaracterized by the media as a "moderate." And while she may be moderate compared to crackpots like Ted Cruz of Texas and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions of Alabama, she's pretty far right for a Maine politician. And she consistently votes with Cruz and Sessions over 90% of the time.

Of the many, many crimes for which our trusted leaders should be doing serious jail time arguably the most egregious of them all is theft – from those who trust them most. After all, it’s not as if they need the money.

Last night I was at a fundraiser for Eloise Reyes thrown by the Mexican American Bar Association PAC. It was wonderful watching the candidate speak from her heart to a roomful of successful attorneys about preserving Social Security by raising the cap and preventing any president-- be it a Republican or a Democrat-- from imposing Chained CPI.

He was born and raised in a little town just outside of Licata, Sicily. By the time he was 18, the young man was accepted into university in Tunisia, a far more scholastically advanced place than the Sicily of the early 1900s. Upon graduating, he decided to do what many young Italians chose to do, and he immigrated to the United States. He married a pretty young Neapolitan girl that he met in New York City, and they settled down to raise a family. She could only bear one child, a son, in 1915.

I am a graduate of Skidmore College. I majored in social work. I chose to major in social work because there was little else offered that I could relate to personally and politically. Most courses and majors prepared students ideologically and professionally to manage the affairs of US imperialism. By the time I had to declare a major, I was more interested in plotting and planning how to destroy this system rather then learning how to manage its affairs.

In recent days, we've been talking a lot about the push from progressives in the Senate, particularly Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to combat the never-ending conservative goal of whittling away at Social Security by actually fighting to expand it.

Medicare is a progressive Democratic Party approach to healthcare. If Obama wasn't so silly he would have ignored phony GOP blandishments towards his favorite position-- compromise-- and pushed for Medicare for all, not the conservative, pro-insurance company Frankenstein's monster that became Obamacare. Social Security is another progressive Democratic idea that Republicans have a "reform" for they're selling Obama on: Chained CPI. And he's biting again! Hopefully, this time, congressional Democrats will tell him and Boehner that they're on their own.