Monday, August 10, 2020
Trump Just Admitted on Live Television He Will 'Terminate' Social Security and Medicare If Reelected in November
One progressive critic called the president's promise "a full-on declaration of war against current and future Social Security beneficiaries."
by
Jon Queally, staff writer
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/08/trump-just-admitted-live-television-he-will-terminate-social-security-and-medicare
President Donald Trump on Saturday afternoon openly vowed to permanently "terminate" the funding mechanism for both Social Security and Medicare if reelected in November—an admission that was seized upon by defenders of the popular safety net programs who have been warning for months that the administration's threat to suspend the payroll tax in the name of economic relief during the Covid-19 pandemic was really a backdoor sabotage effort.
The Trump campaign was apparently so satisfied with the public acknowledgement of the president's promise to make the payroll tax permanent—a move that would inherently bankrupt the Social Security system—that it clipped the portion of the press conference and shared on social media immediately after it concluded. The president's critics did as well, though they carried a different message:Announcing and then signing a series of legally dubious executive orders, including an effort to slash the emergency federal unemployment boost by $200 from the $600 previously implemented by Democrats, Trump touted his order for a payroll tax "holiday"—which experts noted would later have to be paid back—but said if he won in November that such a cut would become permanent.
Defenders of the program, including the advocacy group Social Security Works, were quick to point out the implication of what the president said and condemned Trump for threatening the program that has kept countless millions of people out of poverty—during retirement years or due to disability—since it was created over 75 years ago.
"We just heard it straight from Trump's own mouth," the group responded: "If reelected, he will destroy Social Security."
Commonly known as the payroll tax, those are taxes paid both by employers and employees—as dictated by the The Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA)—that go to pay for both Social Security and Medicare.
"Trump's executive order, which seeks to defer Social Security contributions, is bad enough," said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works. "But his promise to 'terminate' FICA contributions if he is reelected is a full-on declaration of war against current and future Social Security beneficiaries."
"Social Security is the foundation of everyone's retirement security," Altman added. "At a time when pensions are vanishing and 401ks have proven inadequate, Trump's plan to eliminate Social Security's revenue stream would destroy the one source of retirement income that people can count on. Moreover, Social Security is often the only disability insurance and life insurance that working families have. If reelected, Trump plans to destroy those benefits as well."
As the Trump administration has foreshadowed this kind of move for months, economists on Friday warned again that any effort to undermine the payroll tax would do practically nothing to help struggling workers and families, but everything to sabotage two of the most popular and successful programs in the country.
"It's like borrowing money from the Social Security and Medicare trust funds to give to employers just to hold," Seth Hanlon, a tax expert and senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, explained to Business Insider. "They're just gonna hold the withheld taxes because they'd have to pay it eventually."
As Common Dreams reported earlier this week, retirees and their advocates have vowed to fight any "attempt to gut" the program.
On Saturday, Altman called on every lawmaker in Congress to denounce what she called Trump's "unconstitutional raid on Social Security." In the upcoming election, she said, "voters should treat any Senator or Representative who is silent as complicit in destroying Social Security. Furthermore, every American who cares about Social Security's future must do everything they can to ensure that Trump does not get a second term."
'This Is a Five-Alarm Fire': With 2020 Election at Stake, Call Goes Up for Mass Mobilization to Save Postal Service
"Can't stress this enough— if the USPS is sabotaged, this will amount to the greatest voter suppression campaign in history."
by
Jon Queally, staff writer
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/08/five-alarm-fire-2020-election-stake-call-goes-mass-mobilization-save-postal-service
In the wake of what was dubbed a "Friday Night Massacre" at the U.S. Postal Service—compounded by news that first-class postage rates, as opposed to cheaper bulk rates, would be charged for processing mail-in ballots in November—calls overnight and into Saturday have gone out for people across the U.S. to rise up in a coordinated fashion to end what many observers warn is a blatant effort by the Trump administration and the GOP to sabotage the federal mail delivery service ahead of this year's elections.
While Republicans in the Senate and the White House negotiating team have both refused to accept Democratic demands to include massive funding for election protections in the next round of Covid-19 relief as a way to have safe and accessible voting for all amid the pandemic, the latest news about what Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a longtime GOP donor and Trump supporter, has been doing since appointed earlier this summer is prompting outrage, accountability, and calls for immediate action.
"This is how they destroy our democracy," warned progressive activist Ady Barkan while pointing to a report by The American Prospect's David Dayen which noted the looming postage hike on mail-in absentee ballots.
According to Dayen:
The Postal Service has informed states that they'll need to pay first-class 55-cent postage to mail ballots to voters, rather than the normal 20-cent bulk rate. That nearly triples the per-ballot cost at a time when tens of millions more will be delivered. The rate change would have to go through the Postal Regulatory Commission and, undoubtedly, litigation. But the time frame for that is incredibly short, as ballots go out very soon.
A side benefit of this money grab is that states and cities may decide they don’t have the money to mail absentee ballots, and will make them harder to get. Which is exactly the worst-case scenario everyone fears.
The American Postal Workers Union (APWU), which represents over 220,000 mail carriers and retirees, on Saturday said it was necessary for all constituents worried about the attacks on the USPS or the integrity of mail-in voting this fall to immediately contact their representatives in the U.S. Senate:
Other outside defenders of the Postal Service said that while agitating members of Congress was vital, the scale of the threat calls for action beyond that.
"Grind the government to a fucking halt if we have to," declared liberal commentator Brian Tyler Cohen late Friday. "I can't stress this enough— if the USPS is sabotaged, this will amount to the greatest voter suppression campaign in history. The election will effectively become void... AND THAT IS WHAT TRUMP WANTS—THAT IS HIS POINT HERE."
As veteran consumer advocate Ralph Nader said last month, "Trump's henchman Louis DeJoy took control of USPS last month and is already slowing down first class mail service to undermine Benjamin Franklin's institution. People should hold demonstrations around their local post offices."
In a video posted to the APWU's Facebook page, a longtime USPS employee in Minneapolis identified only by his first name Kevin, called on people nationwide to "come together and save our Post Office" from the attacks coming Trump's White House and DeJoy.
With vote-by-mail so crucial for ballot access this November, outspoken defenders of the Postal Service are calling it a national "five-alarm fire" and a crisis that cannot be overstated.
"The U.S. Postal Service is facing unprecedented challenges and political threats even while it is an essential lifeline for millions of Americans, especially those isolated by the COVID-19 pandemic," the People for the American Way stated this week as they launched a new video celebrating the USPS and calling for its protection.
Susan Rice Has a Disclosure Problem
The vice-presidential hopeful has some explaining to do.
BY ALEXANDER SAMMON
AUGUST 8, 2020
https://prospect.org/politics/susan-rice-has-a-disclosure-problem/
One of these days, Joe Biden is going to announce his vice president. The latest turn of the rumor mill has Susan Rice as a favorite for the position. Whether or not she’s chosen as Biden’s second-in-command ultimately may not matter much; her mere consideration ensures that she’ll have a major role in the administration.
Rice differs from the other members of Congress and governors on the short list. For one, she’s never held elected office. Elevating her to the second-highest executive post in the country, and making her (like it or not) the most likely post-Biden presidential candidate, sends a strange message for that reason alone. If the Democratic Party is in the business of winning elections, and can pick anyone from its supposedly deep talent pool to put on the fast track, why is someone who’s never won a race its best bet?
More from Alexander Sammon
Here’s what we know about Rice: She’s the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and national security adviser under Barack Obama. In the Clinton administration, she served at the National Security Council and as the assistant secretary of state for African affairs. At 55 years old, that’s the entirety of her political career.
Her résumé from the corporate and government-adjacent world, however, is much lengthier. In the praiseworthy words of The Wall Street Journal, Rice “has more corporate experience than others on Biden running mate list.” Indeed, she currently sits on the board of directors of Netflix, where she’s racked up stock options on more than 5,200 shares of the company, currently worth $2 million alone (according to an August 5 filing, she’s divested about one-quarter of those holdings, netting some $300,000). That, along with a stint at American University as a visiting research fellow, makes up the bulk of her post-Obama professional activity.
Much less is known about her pre-Obama career, starting with her time at the infamous consultancy McKinsey & Company. After earning her doctorate at the age of 25, Rice served as a management consultant at the firm from 1990 to 1992, working out of the Toronto office. That’s the same corporate consultancy that got presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg in hot water during the primary, and his initial refusal to disclose the work he did for them helped stymie his rise. Political rival Elizabeth Warren demanded that Buttigieg provide a list of past clients and what he did for them, eventually resulting in him asking for a release from his nondisclosure agreement with the firm.
When he finally published that information, Buttigieg’s work for the Canadian supermarket chain Loblaws, which was known to be engaged in price fixing during that same time, gave way to a heated exchange with New York Times editorial board member Binyamin Appelbaum over whether or not he was involved in fixing bread prices, a viral clip that may have ultimately hastened his demise. McKinsey has been involved in a number of major scandals in recent years beyond just bread prices: helping elevate authoritarianism in places like Russia and China; advising OxyContin producer Purdue Pharma on how to “turbocharge” opioid sales; even hosting a summit in Kashgar, where thousands of Uighur minorities are currently locked up. If Buttigieg had to disclose his work at McKinsey to be considered for Democratic president, so, too, should Rice.
While Rice’s stint with McKinsey may not have been focused particularly on authoritarian governments, she’s been no stranger to strongmen at other points in her career. After her time in the Clinton White House, Rice went into private consulting, spending 2001 and 2002 as a managing director and principal at Intellibridge, a geopolitical strategy shop, which eventually became Eurasia Group. Again, we know next to nothing about who Rice was working for during that time, because she has largely concealed who her clients were. But, wrote Akbar Shahid Ahmed in HuffPost, “her closeness to one client whose identity is publicly known―Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame, the country’s president since 2000―has previously raised concerns among human rights groups and fellow officials.”
The lack of transparency in Rice’s work at Intellibridge may be standard for that particular foreign-consulting industry, but that’s not a sufficient explanation for someone striving to be vice president. And given that the one client of hers from that time that we know is someone widely referred to as a “benevolent dictator” and “darling tyrant” who’s been in power since the mid-1990s, there’s plenty of cause for alarm. If Rice was indeed trading off her proximity to policymakers after her White House stint with open opponents of democracy, that would make her an uneasy fit as a leader of the Democratic Party. It’s incumbent upon her, now, to disclose those relationships.
After Intellibridge, Rice moved on to the Brookings Institution, serving as a senior fellow, where “she focused on U.S. foreign policy, weak and failing states, the implications of global poverty, and transnational threats to security,” before moving on to the Obama White House, where she was dogged by subsequent disclosure problems, this time owing not to her work, but her finances.
The lack of transparency in Rice’s work at Intellibridge may be standard for that particular foreign-consulting industry, but that’s not a sufficient explanation for someone striving to be vice president.
At 44 years old, Rice was the wealthiest person in the entire Obama Cabinet upon her appointment in 2009. Her net worth clocked in between $23.5 million and $43.5 million, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That made her richer even than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Two years at McKinsey and two years at Intellibridge wouldn’t net that kind of cash. Rice appears to be the beneficiary of substantial family money. While her parents were scholars (her mother helped design the Pell grant system and her father was the second African American on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors), her husband Ian Cameron, a former producer for ABC’s This Week, is the scion of a Canadian lumber company.
In 2012, when Rice, then considered a rising star and Obama favorite, was up to replace Clinton as secretary of state, her personal finances proved controversial. Rice was a major stockholder in TransCanada, the company behind the recently shut down Keystone XL pipeline, which transported particularly dirty oil from tar sands in Canada to refineries in the United States. In fact, according to financial disclosures at the time, about a third of Rice’s net worth was tied up in oil producers, pipeline operators, and energy industry affiliates. She and her husband were also invested in Enbridge, the company behind the discharge of more than a million gallons of toxic tar sands oil into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River in 2010 , the largest inland oil spill in American history, and BP, of 2010’s Deepwater Horizon spill, the largest offshore oil spill in history, period.
Coziness between TransCanada and the State Department, which was elucidated in a cable obtained by WikiLeaks, and then by leaked emails, and finally by a New York Times report that revealed that the State Department contractor tasked with producing an environmental assessment of Keystone XL had close ties the pipeline’s developer, added to outrage from environmental groups. Eventually, Rice was passed over for the job, and became a national-security adviser instead.
This didn’t lead her to rethink those investment choices, however. A 2015 disclosure report obtained by TMI, our last look into even some percentage of her holdings, shows a continued stake in TransCanada of between $50,000 and $100,000, and over $1 million in Enbridge. Between $1 million and $2 million in additional investments are split between three other Canadian fossil fuel companies developing the tar sands in Alberta. Overall, the 2015 disclosure shows holdings of between $15 million and $32.5 million in investments alone. And that’s before the Netflix board seat and whatever other income has been gained in the Trump years.
Rice is almost certainly richer now than she was in 2009, though we don’t know where that wealth is coming from.
Rice is almost certainly richer now than she was in 2009, though we don’t know where that wealth is coming from. But if that money was enough to functionally disqualify her from secretary of state in 2012, it should certainly have an impact upon deciding her fitness for a higher role. Democratic voters have a right to know who’s being put on their ticket. Certainly, a lack of transparency, financial and otherwise, has been one of the most consistent indictments of Donald Trump from the Democratic side of the aisle.
The financial-disclosure issue has little to do with Rice’s record on foreign policy, which very much merits its own consideration. Rice has coasted on progressive proximity, but has been hawkish enough throughout her career—in particular her record on the wars in Iraq, Libya, and Yemen—to merit objections from the DNC Muslim Delegates and Allies and other parts of the party. Her elevation would also allow Republicans to dust off their Benghazi hysteria for the next 12 weeks.
Some detractors of Karen Bass, the California representative who was floated as a VP favorite last week, have claimed she’s too much of a liability after not having been thoroughly vetted by a national election cycle. That logic also applies to Susan Rice, who has never been vetted in any election cycle. If she’s going to be Biden’s number two, she needs to start with a transparency campaign quickly: not just her tax returns but her client list, as well.
GENERAL STRIKE: THE EVICTION CRISIS ESCALATES
By General Strike 2020.
August 8, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/general-strike-the-eviction-crisis-escalates/
With an estimated 17 to 40 million people at risk of losing their homes by the end of September, and with the failure of the federal government to pass an eviction moratorium or an unemployment benefits extension, the greatest eviction and foreclosure crisis since the Great Depression is now upon us. In some states in the Southeast, as many as 60% of renters are at risk of being evicted, and people of color are likely to be hit disproportionately hard. The Census Bureau’s Household Pulse survey in July, for example, highlighted that 42% of Black renters felt little to no confidence in their ability to pay rent this August, compared to 21% of White renters. For the percentage of renter households at risk of eviction in each state.
It is no surprise that across the country, renters being threatened with destitution are taking a stand to put a stop to this brutal display of Capitalists’s commitment to profit over people. Courthouses have been blocked by protesters in New Orleans, Kansas City, and Brooklyn, and this trend will likely grow in the coming months. Protesters in all 3 cities have been working to disrupt eviction proceedings as much as possible and to publicize the complicity of lawyers and the justice system in the perpetuation of the eviction machine.
“‘Keep trying to evict tenants, and we’ll keep showing up and shutting down your office every day,’ the group Housing Justice for All tweeted alongside a video of one of the protests. ‘Other lawyers working for landlords: watch out, we’re coming for you next.’”
While the housing crisis looms large, there have also been a number of positive developments in the news this week. The New York Attorney General is suing and seeking the dissolution of the NRA; Cori Bush, the original Justice Democrat, has won her primary against William Lacy Clay for Missouri Congressional Seat 1; and scientists have “shown that it’s possible to eliminate 70 percent to 80 percent of US carbon emissions by 2035 through rapid deployment of existing electrification technologies”, an encouraging asset in the fight to decarbonize industry and mitigate climate change.
Last but not least in the news was the establishment of a Worker Council by the city of LA this week that will monitor businesses’ pandemic responses and inform public health officials when business owners are breaking guidelines. This is a positive step forward for the city, where multiple industries’ poor working conditions were contributing to the spread of COVID-19, and it serves as an example for other communities to potentially work to take after and establish for themselves.
If you’d like to increase your involvement in direct action efforts, reach out today to see what opportunities may exist in your community to make a difference helping keep people housed, fed, and in good health.
Aggressive New Guerrilla Tactics Target America’s Eviction Machine
Renters aren’t giving up without a fight! “In a last-ditch effort to fight lockouts… activists aren’t content to go after politicians. Instead, they want to shut down the machinery of the eviction system: the nation’s housing courts and the people who make it run.”
https://popularresistance.org/general-strike-the-eviction-crisis-escalates/
With an estimated 17 to 40 million people at risk of losing their homes by the end of September, and with the failure of the federal government to pass an eviction moratorium or an unemployment benefits extension, the greatest eviction and foreclosure crisis since the Great Depression is now upon us. In some states in the Southeast, as many as 60% of renters are at risk of being evicted, and people of color are likely to be hit disproportionately hard. The Census Bureau’s Household Pulse survey in July, for example, highlighted that 42% of Black renters felt little to no confidence in their ability to pay rent this August, compared to 21% of White renters. For the percentage of renter households at risk of eviction in each state.
It is no surprise that across the country, renters being threatened with destitution are taking a stand to put a stop to this brutal display of Capitalists’s commitment to profit over people. Courthouses have been blocked by protesters in New Orleans, Kansas City, and Brooklyn, and this trend will likely grow in the coming months. Protesters in all 3 cities have been working to disrupt eviction proceedings as much as possible and to publicize the complicity of lawyers and the justice system in the perpetuation of the eviction machine.
“‘Keep trying to evict tenants, and we’ll keep showing up and shutting down your office every day,’ the group Housing Justice for All tweeted alongside a video of one of the protests. ‘Other lawyers working for landlords: watch out, we’re coming for you next.’”
While the housing crisis looms large, there have also been a number of positive developments in the news this week. The New York Attorney General is suing and seeking the dissolution of the NRA; Cori Bush, the original Justice Democrat, has won her primary against William Lacy Clay for Missouri Congressional Seat 1; and scientists have “shown that it’s possible to eliminate 70 percent to 80 percent of US carbon emissions by 2035 through rapid deployment of existing electrification technologies”, an encouraging asset in the fight to decarbonize industry and mitigate climate change.
Last but not least in the news was the establishment of a Worker Council by the city of LA this week that will monitor businesses’ pandemic responses and inform public health officials when business owners are breaking guidelines. This is a positive step forward for the city, where multiple industries’ poor working conditions were contributing to the spread of COVID-19, and it serves as an example for other communities to potentially work to take after and establish for themselves.
If you’d like to increase your involvement in direct action efforts, reach out today to see what opportunities may exist in your community to make a difference helping keep people housed, fed, and in good health.
Aggressive New Guerrilla Tactics Target America’s Eviction Machine
Renters aren’t giving up without a fight! “In a last-ditch effort to fight lockouts… activists aren’t content to go after politicians. Instead, they want to shut down the machinery of the eviction system: the nation’s housing courts and the people who make it run.”
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