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Sanders, Warren Introduce Bill to Increase Social Security Payouts by Taxing Corporate Execs
By Peter Schroeder, "The Hill"
06 November 15
ens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) are teaming up on a bill that would hand Social Security recipients a $580 check and pay for it by trimming tax perks for corporate executives.
The progressive duo unveiled new legislation Thursday that would cut checks for millions of Americans that rely on Social Security benefits, weeks after the Obama administration announced there would be no cost-of-living increase to payments in 2016.
“At a time when senior poverty is going up and more than two-thirds of the elderly population rely on Social Security for more than half of their income, our job must be to expand, not cut, Social Security," said Sanders, who is running for president.
"At the very least, we must do everything we can to make sure that every senior citizen and disabled veteran in this country receives a fair cost-of-living adjustment to keep up with the skyrocketing cost of prescription drugs and health care."
Sanders has made expanding Social Security one of the signature issues of his presidential campaign, and has repeatedly called for taxing the wealthy to pay for an expansion of benefits.
Under his bill with Warren, Americans who receive benefits from Social Security, veterans benefits or equivalent state or local programs would receive a one-time payment. The pair noted that the check would equal 3.9 percent of existing benefits, the same percentage that CEO pay rose in 2014.
The senators want to pay for the supplemental payment by killing a tax code provision that allows companies to deduct a portion of executive salary, so long as it is “performance based.”
Under current tax law, companies can only deduct the first $1 million in executive compensation, but performance-based pay, like stock options, is exempted from that restriction. Noting that CEO pay is still on the rise while Social Security benefits are flat, Warren said it’s clear top executives could chip in.
“While Congress sits on its hands and pretends that there's nothing we can do, taxpayers will keep right on subsidizing billions of dollars' worth of bonuses for highly paid CEOs," she said. "Giving seniors a little help with their Social Security and stitching up corporate tax write-offs isn't just about economics; it's about our values.”
Democrats have targeted that part of the tax code in the past to raise revenue, and Warren’s office says repealing that language would raise more than enough to cover cutting those supplemental checks.
Repealing the tax break was also floated by former Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.), when he drafted his own tax reform proposal in 2014.
Under the Warren-Sanders bill, the rest of the revenue raised by killing that corporate tax break would go toward shoring up the Social Security and Disability trust funds, which got a much-needed cash infusion as part of the most recent budget agreement.
“Stop Fukushima Freeways” Campaign Kicks Off
The essay below contains the history behind the "truism" that we in the U.S. have been raised on: that the U.S. populace should never ever have a truly democratic one person/one vote electoral process.
What a mess that would be, right? (At least that's what we have been told again and again, Amen!)
But we would finally have the real voting results (if we could only get rid of the Die Die Diebold/ES&S/Sequoia (right-wing-paid-for) voting machines)!
Oooh. Is it still Halloween?
A History of Computer Voting “Conspiracies”
When you are lazy, ignorant and not willing to do research – accuse your more-informed opponents of being “conspiracy theorists.” A recent "Columbus Dispatch" editorial utilized this technique in its defense of Ohio’s antiquated and easily hacked voting apparatus.
"The Dispatch," with few facts or statistics, stated that, “Secretary of State Jon Husted claims ‘…Ohio’s current voting equipment should be in fine shape through the 2016 election.’” In a subhead, the "Big D" also claimed “Transparent bipartisan approach should head off conspiracy theorists.”
Here are some points to consider:
In 2005, highly-regarded scholar Tracy Campbell published Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, and American Political Tradition 1742-2004. The book makes a solid case detailing that election fraud is the norm throughout U.S. history.
Campbell echoes what Robert Goldberg wrote as a chapter in an election book by the Brookings Institute in 1987. He called his writing “Election Fraud: An American Vice.” What Goldberg noted is that in most parts of the United States there is not a genuine bipartisan presence at the polling stations. This makes election fraud easy. In rural areas there are few dedicated hardcore Democrats, and in urban areas there are few Republican partisans.
Computerized voting machines with software programmed by partisan for-profit corporations, makes election fraud even easier. We have known about this for four decades. Roy G. Saltman’s work at the National Bureau of Standards has documented the vulnerability of computer voting since the 1970s.
Saltman issued a report for the Bureau numbered NBSIR-75-687 documenting the lack of computer security in vote tallying and the potential for election tampering. He traced the use of computers to tally vote results from September 1964 through his 1975 report. He found in 1971, my junior year in high school, “an error in programming” caused a levy to pass by 1000 votes in my hometown Redford Township, Michigan, rather than failing by 100.
A follow-up report by Saltman in 1988 pointed out other problems with computer voting. In 1986 in Stark County, Ohio a recount programming error reversed the correct election results. There’s a question on whether this was a real error since a special programmer was brought in to write the code for the recount.
We live in a world where hackers can get into the Pentagon, CIA and major corporations, but we’re to believe they are stymied by antiquated, vulnerable computer voting machines programmed with secret proprietary software.
Comments:
+11 # 2015-11-07 11:56
Yes, and what they know will be used by Republicans everywhere. People have already lost control of their government but our future looks to be fully controlled by Republicans: governors, state and federal congress, president and court. As Stalin said it is those who count the votes, not the voters who control elections.
We will then have one party and be a full fascist dictatorship and police state with a feudal economy and absolutely nothing we can do about it._ _ _ _ _ _ _
US Journalists Who Instantly Exonerated Their Government of the Kunduz Hospital Attack, Declaring It an "Accident"
American Journalism is the ultimate accountability- free profession, as demonstrated by the fact that every journalist not named “Judy Miller” who uncritically regurgitated and advocated false government claims about Iraq not only paid no price but has thrived. So needless to say, none of the people who instantly acquitted the U.S. in the Kunduz hospital attack have in any way accounted for their early proclamations or attempted to reconcile them with all of this evidence.At "Vox," Max “surely-the-result-of-some-terrible-human-error” Fisher left it to his colleague Zach Beauchamp to admit that a new AP report “doesn’t prove, conclusively, that the U.S. knowingly and intentionally bombed a hospital. But it does raise some serious questions about who knew what about the Kunduz hospital” (there was, of course, no reference to Fisher’s prior verdict of innocence, nor Klein’s announcement on Twitter that this was all an “accident”). Anderson’s "New Yorker" colleague Amy Davidson had published an article asking all the right questions before he declared it “unlikely” to have been “intentionally criminal.” Meanwhile, as evidence of intentionality grew, Murphy simply abandoned his prior “trust me” decree that this was all an accident (we’d never do this on purpose) and seamlessly switched to what certainly could be read to be justification(yeah, OK, we did it and we were right to do it):
(The claim that the hospital had been taken over by Taliban fighters has been repeatedly debunked, including by MSF just yesterday; they also quite rightly pronounced themselves “disgusted” at the suggestion that even if it were true that Taliban fighters were among the patients, razing their hospital would be justified.)It is, of course, pleasing to view your own tribe as inherently superior. It feels nice to believe that your own side is so intrinsically moral, so Exceptional, that one needs no “evidence” or “investigation” to know immediately that any bad acts are unintended. It is a massive relief to know that things like “war crimes” and intentionally bombing structures protected by the Geneva Conventions can only be done by the countries declared by your government to be adversaries, but never by your own government.But as comforting, uplifting and self-affirming as that worldview is, it is literally the exact antithesis of the skepticism that the most basic precepts of journalism require. Declaring your own government innocent when it repeatedly bombs a well-known, well-established hospital filled with doctors, nurses and patients — before you have the slightest idea what actually happened, and in the face of all kinds of evidence in conflict with such assurances of innocence — is inexcusable for all sorts of obvious reasons. Very unfortunately, this sort of hyper-nationalism and reflexively tribalistic self-love is pervasive in American journalism — Americans do not do such things — which is why the U.S. government knows that it can engage in such acts without any accountability or even pressure to allow an independent investigation.Comments:# 2015-11-07 13:12"The hospital bombing was accident" Say what? During the nazi times people in Germany had to listen to foreign radio to know what was going on. the rest of the people seem to have been content with the "we are the good guys" narrative of Goebbels ministry and its coordinated news. I too have given up on the obnoxious pap and vapid fluff news here. I use international news. With a little work and a grain of salt one can sometimes triangulate a probable truth.
I remember a decade ago saying "They ALL must go."
I just had no idea that the far-right babies would be listening and heeding.
The Demise of Incumbents: Resurgence of the Far Right and the Absence of the Consequential Left
Incumbent politicians and parties, both center-left and right, have suffered serious defeats in recent elections. The principal beneficiary has been the extreme right. Nowhere did the ‘consequential left’ register a victory, although in a few instances it marginally increased its vote. The one major exception has been Turkey, where the incumbent Erdogan regime scored a ‘victory’ on November 1, 2015 by resorting to widespread violence during the general election campaign to intimidate and silence his opposition after having suffered a sharp (and surprise) defeat five months earlier in June 2015 when secular civil groups, leftists and Kurdish linked parties upset Erdogan’s parliamentary majority.During the recent campaign, Erdogan resumed bombing of Kurdish regions, both inside Turkey and across the border in Syria and Iraq. He shut down opposition newspapers and TV stations, and imprisoned hundreds of secular, leftist activists. Scores of opposition party regional offices were firebombed and wrecked. Most ominously, Erdogan and Turkish intelligence operatives have been implicated in the horrific massacre of scores of opposition peace marchers, leftists, trade unionists and Kurdish political party activists in the capital Ankara on October 10 and elsewhere. In other words, Erdogan prevented the electoral decline of his incumbent right-wing regime through terror, purges and mob violence. Washington and the EU promptly congratulated the Erdogan regime for its blood-stained ‘victory’.
This essay will address the reasons why incumbents lost worldwide.
We will examine social policies, economic crises, personalities, corruption scandals, commodity cycles and growing class inequalities – and a combination of all of the above.
Secondly, we will discuss why the alternatives oscillate between the ‘center-left’ and the hard right and not the ‘consequential left (for lack of a better term)’ – the CL.
Thirdly, we will explore the historical and external and internal contemporary factors limiting the CL’s growth, and why the Left does not attract the mass of voters as an alternative to the Right and Center-left.
And speaking of our "friends" on Wall Street who promise an alternative to creating jobs for obtaining wealth?
In December 2013, we reported on the Fed’s “Relationship Managers” who are assigned to managing the “relationships” with the banks the Fed supervises. That sounds more like a concierge job for pampered guests at a ritzy hotel rather than a tough cop overseeing serial miscreants on Wall Street.Last year we reported that even after JPMorgan Chase received two deferred felony counts for aiding and abetting the Madoff fraud, the New York Fed made it custodian of $1.7 trillion (that’s trillion with a “t”) of the Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) it had purchased under its various quantitative easing programs.Then there was the case of Carmen Segarra, a lawyer and former bank examiner at the New York Fed. Segarra charged in a lawsuit filed in October 2013 that she was told to change her negative examination of Goldman Sachs by colleagues at the New York Fed, who also obstructed and interfered with her investigation.
According to her lawsuit, when she refused to alter her findings, she was terminated in retaliation and escorted from the Fed premises. After her case was dismissed by a Judge whose husband was representing Goldman Sachs, Segarra turned over her 46 hours of secretly made tape recordings of the matter to "ProPublica"’s Jake Bernstein and public radio’s "This American Life."In May of this year we reported that as the U.S. Justice Department was preparing to accept a criminal felony plea from JPMorgan Chase for its role in rigging foreign exchange markets, the perpetually blindfolded New York Fed saw nothing wrong with keeping Troy Rohrbaugh, the head of Foreign Exchange Trading at JPMorgan Chase, as the Chair of its own Foreign Exchange Committee.
From our friends at "Wall Street On Parade" we learn the worst (maybe) about our "friends" at the Fed.
And there are absolutely no connections from the facts discussed above to those in the essay below.Fed Officials Are Attending Big Bank Board Meetings? Is This Stockholm Syndrome?
No way.
A New Biography Traces the Pathology of Allen Dulles and His Appalling Cabal
As I read The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, a new book by "Salon" founder David Talbot, I couldn’t help thinking of an obscure corner of 1970s history: the Safari Club.
Dulles — the Princeton man and white shoe corporate lawyer who served as CIA director from 1953 to 1961, still the longest tenure in agency history — died in 1969 before the Safari Club was conceived. And nothing about it appears in The Devil’s Chessboard. But to understand the Safari Club is to understand Allen Dulles and his milieu.
Any normal person would likely hear the Safari Club saga as a frightening story of totally unaccountable power. But if there’s one thing to take away from The Devil’s Chessboard, it’s this: Allen Dulles would have seen it differently — as an inspiring tale of hope and redemption.
Because what the Safari Club demonstrates is that Dulles’ entire spooky world is beyond the reach of American democracy. Even the most energetic post-World War II attempt to rein it in was in the end as effective as trying to lasso mist. And today we’ve largely returned to the balance of power Dulles set up in the 1950s. As Jay Rockefeller said in 2007 when he was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, “Don’t you understand the way intelligence works? Do you think that because I’m chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say ‘I want it, give it to me’? They control it. All of it. All of it. All the time.”
In February 2002, Saudi Prince Turki Al Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence from 1977 until September 1, 2001, traveled to Washington, D.C.
While there, Turki, who’d graduated from Georgetown University in the same class as Bill Clinton, delivered a speech at his alma mater that included an unexpected history lesson:
In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran … so, the Kingdom, with these countries, helped in some way, I believe, to keep the world safe when the United States was not able to do that. That, I think, is a secret that many of you don’t know.
Turki was not telling the whole truth. He was right that his Georgetown audience likely had never heard any of this before, but the Safari Club had been known across the Middle East for decades. After the Iranian revolution the new government gave Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, one of the most prominent journalists in the Arab world, permission to examine the Shah’s archives. There Heikal discovered the actual formal, written agreement between the members of the Safari Club, and wrote about it in a 1982 book called Iran: The Untold Story.
And the Safari Club was not simply the creation of the countries Turki mentioned — Americans were involved as well. It’s true the U.S. executive branch was somewhat hamstrung during the period between the post-Watergate investigations of the intelligence world and the end of the Carter administration. But the powerful individual Americans who felt themselves “literally tied up” by Congress — that is, unfairly restrained by the most democratic branch of the U.S. government — certainly did not consider the decisions of Congress to be the final word.
Whatever its funding sources, the evidence suggests the Safari Club was largely the initiative of these powerful Americans. According to Heikal, its real origin was when Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, “talked a number of rich Arab oil countries into bankrolling operations against growing communist influence on their doorstep” in Africa.
Alexandre de Marenches, a right-wing aristocrat who headed France’s version of the CIA, eagerly formalized the project and assumed operational leadership. But, Heikal writes, “The United States directed the whole operation,” and “giant U.S. and European corporations with vital interests in Africa” leant a hand. As John K. Cooley, the "Christian Science Monitor"’s longtime Mideast correspondent, put it, the setup strongly appealed to the U.S. executive branch: “Get others to do what you want done, while avoiding the onus or blame if the operation fails.”
This all seems like something Americans would like to know, especially since de Marenches may have extended his covert operations to the 1980 U.S. presidential election. In 1992, de Marenches’ biographer testified in a congressional investigation that the French spy told him that he had helped arrange an October 1980 meeting in Paris between William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign manager, and the new Islamic Republic of Iran.
The goal of such a meeting, of course, would have been to persuade Iran to keep its American hostages until after the next month’s election, thus denying Carter any last-minute, politically potent triumph.
De Marenches and the Safari Club certainly had a clear motive to oust Carter: They blamed him for allowing one of their charter members, the Shah, to fall from power. But whether de Marenches’ claims were true or not, we do know that history unfolded exactly as he and the Safari Club would have wished. The hostages weren’t released until Reagan was inaugurated, Reagan appointed Casey director of the CIA, and from that point forward America’s intelligence “community” was back in business.
And yet normal citizens would have a hard time just finding out the Safari Club even existed, much less the outlines of its activities. It appears to have been mentioned just once by the "New York Times," in a profile of a French spy novelist. It likewise has made only one appearance in the "Washington Post," in a 2005 online chat in which a reader asked the "Post"’s former Middle East bureau chief Thomas Lippman, “Does the Safari Club, formed in the mid-70s, still exist?” Lippman responded: “I never heard of it, so I have no idea.”
So it’s really too bad Allen Dulles didn’t live to see the Safari Club.
The fallout from Watergate initially would have horrified him, with mere elected members of Congress placing restrictions on patricians like himself..
As Talbot points out, Dulles stated his worldview publicly and explicitly in 1938 during his only run for political office: “Democracy only works if the so-called intelligent people make it work. You can’t sit back and let democracy run itself.”
Unsurprisingly, homilies like this did not carry him to victory. But so what? He went on to wield far greater power than most elected officials ever have. And while Dulles is the star of The Devil’s Chessboard, he’s surrounded by an enormous supporting cast.
As Talbot explains, “What I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the 60s.” It’s a huge, sprawling book, and an amalgam of all the appalling things Dulles and his cohort definitely did, things the evidence suggests they probably did, and speculation about things they might plausibly have done. More than a biography, it’s a exploration of well-organized pathology.
It includes detailed reexaminations of Dulles’s most notorious failures, such as the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the nightmarish mind control program MK-ULTRA, as well as his most notorious “successes,” the CIA’s overthrow of democratic governments in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954.
Talbot notes that an internal CIA account of the Iran coup fairly glowed with joy: “It was a day that never should have ended. For it carried with it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction and of jubilation that it is doubtful whether any other can come up to it.” According to a participant in an Oval Office briefing for President Eisenhower, Dulles’s brother John Foster, then secretary of state, “seemed to be purring like a giant cat.”
But by this point these events are fairly well-known. Perhaps most compelling is Talbot’s in-depth look at Dulles’s lesser-known yet still extraordinarily sordid projects. As the Swiss director of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, Dulles — whose law firm had represented German corporations and many U.S. corporations with German interests — quietly attempted to undermine Franklin D. Roosevelt’s demand that Germany surrender unconditionally, going so far as to order the rescue of an SS general surrounded by Italian partisans. Dulles also led the push to save Reinhard Gehlen, Nazi head of intelligence on the Eastern Front and a genuine monster, from any post-war justice. Dulles then made certain Gehlen and his spies received a cozy embrace from the CIA, and helped push him to the top of West Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service.
Also gruesome is the lurid story of how Jesus de Galindez, a lecturer at Columbia University, was kidnapped in Manhattan by U.S. government cutouts and delivered to Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo. Trujillo then had Galindez, whose exposés of corruption Trujillo feared, boiled alive and fed to sharks, and ordered the murder of the American pilot who’d flown Galindez there. All under the beneficent gaze of CIA Director Allen Dulles.
In a sense, however, all of The Devil’s Chessboard seems to exist to set the stage for the final chapters about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. In the first 500 pages you are convinced that Dulles would have had no moral qualms about killing any politician, including Americans. You learn Dulles had a lifetime of experience in arranging assassinations, and apparent ties to attempts to overthrow or murder French president Charles de Gaulle. And you discover the depth of his grudge against John F. Kennedy, who dismissed him and several of his key underlings after the Bay of Pigs.
But were JFK and possibly Robert Kennedy killed by conspiracies involving Dulles? That’s the conjecture of The Devil’s Chessboard. There’s no question Talbot has pulled together a lot of suggestive old information, and uncovered some that’s new.
Furthermore, he certainly proves there was a great deal of reluctance on the part of journalists and politicians at the time to pull on even the most obvious threads. But 50 years later, I don’t think there’s any way to say much for sure on this subject, except that it’s pretty interesting. (Given humanity’s history of catastrophic slapstick, I’ve always enjoyed the theory that a Secret Service agent shot Kennedy accidentally.)
In the end, whatever the reality of Talbot’s most sensational claims, he unquestionably makes the case that — unless you believe we’re governed by shape-shifting space lizards — your darkest suspicions about how the world operates are likely an underestimate.
Yes, there is an amorphous group of unelected corporate lawyers, bankers, and intelligence and military officials who form an American “deep state,” setting real limits on the rare politicians who ever try to get out of line. They do collaborate with and nurture their deep state counterparts in other countries, to whom they feel far more loyalty than their fellow citizens. The minions of the deep state hate and fear even the mildest moves towards democracy, and fight against it by any means available to them. They’re not all-powerful and don’t get exactly what they want, but on the issues that matter most they almost always win in the end. And while all this is mostly right there in the open, discernible by anyone who’s curious and has a library card, if you don’t go looking you will never hear a single word about it.
Moreover, it’s still right there in front of us today. Talbot recently argued, “The surveillance state that Snowden and others have exposed is very much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would have been delighted by how technology and other developments have allowed the American security state to go much further than he went.”
Or as a staff member of the 1970s congressional investigation of Kennedy’s murder said in an interview with Talbot: “One CIA official told me, ‘So you’re from Congress — what the hell is that to us? You’ll be packed up and gone in a couple of years, and we’ll still be here.’” According to The Devil’s Chessboard, the Safari never ends.
New York Times Discovers Courts Have Been Privatized – 20 Years Too Late
