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Former Obama Supporters: 'Touch Social Programs and We're Out'
Progressive Dems Threaten Obama over Inclusion of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid in Debt Talks
The liberal advocacy group Progressive Change Campaign Committee delivered 200,000 pledges to President Obama's campaign headquarters Friday, demanding he hold their line in debt ceiling negotiations or lose their support.
The PCCC wants a potential agreement to include tax increases on higher income earners instead of cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicaid, the committee's co-founder Adam Green said Friday. "Obama voters didn't come back out in 2010," Green said. "It's déjà vu all over again … every Democrat in 2012 has a right to be extremely furious with him." The group wants a potential agreement to include tax increases on higher income earners instead of cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicaid, the committee's co-founder Adam Green said Friday. Members of the group said they will not contribute to or volunteer for the president's reelection campaign unless their conditions are met.
Green said they delivered the pledges, signed by those who supported Obama's candidacy in the 2008 election, to Obama's campaign headquarters in Chicago Friday morning.
"Democrats need to support the will of the American people," Green said in a conference call with reporters. "Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid must be off the table."
"Our position is the middle class has sacrificed enough," Green added.
He said the signatories donated $17 million and 2.4 million volunteer hours to then-Sen. Obama's election effort in the 2008 election.
Cuts to entitlement programs are a sticking point in the ongoing debt ceiling negotiations as the White House and Congressional leaders attempt to reach a deal before the government potentially defaults on its obligations August. 2. Republicans reject tax increases and Democrats will only agree to reforms in entitlement programs if wealthy Americans pay more in taxes.
PCCC works to elect progressive candidates to federal offices.
During a press conference Friday, Obama said he was willing to consider changes to entitlement programs for future generations, as long as benefits for current beneficiaries remain intact.
Green said it was the first time Obama left the door open to cuts for those currently receiving benefits and the president cannot expect Democratic voter support in 2012 if he advocates for such cuts.
"Obama voters didn't come back out in 2010," Green said. "It's déjà vu all over again … every Democrat in 2012 has a right to be extremely furious with him."
Obama's campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said the president wants to "strengthen Medicare and Medicaid in the long run and supports finding a bipartisan solution to strengthen Social Security for future generations."
"Americans elected the President in 2008 to take on the big challenges facing our country, and he's engaged in an effort to do just that, promoting a balanced approach to reduce the deficit and promote economic growth that protects the middle class and seniors," LaBolt said.
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222 Comments so far
Show AllWell said.
The responsible approach would be to take the bull by the horns and admit that:
1) Wars are what is causing the deficit, not fully funded programs that the corporatocracy wants to demonize with the word "entitlement". Does that make wars of choice an "entitlement" program for the offense contractors?
2) Return to the CPI formula that Greenspan mutilated in order to impoverish pension recipients. This would require ALL pensions linked to COLA increases to be DOUBLED (at least - see Williams at Shadow Stats) NOW.
3) Eliminate capital gains as a separate income category with reduced taxation. The bullshit argument that doing that would reduce investment and jobs has been proven false over the last 20 years with the capital gains joy ride for the non-productive rich parasites living off dividends as well as hedge fund Hyenas and other assorted thieves of the commonweil.
4) Eliminate the cap on FICA and Social Security taxes.
5) Tax all income above $1,000,000 a year at 50% (or more).
6) GET REAL about the official poverty level government calculation so that poverty level people don't have to pay ANY taxes (federal, state, or county including property taxes). Again, lowballing the official poverty level was Greenspan's machiavellian manipulation at work.
I'll continue to do anything I can do to remind folks of where we are and how we got here.
This way people are better armed to fight the corporate doubletalk many of their neighbors are being brainwashed with.
Otherwise, no deal.
Right now there's no excuse at all for quicky and totally democratic internet referendoms for anything. We could each get a handle and push the vote buttons in a government site. No one votes with my handle but me because I own the password. It's NO BIG DEAL. Elections could be run that way too. They know that in congress. They just want to keep denying us our democracy in favor of the elite bastards that lobby them.
I'm sick of them.
It's the only way to successfully challenge corporate propaganda.
You've given me an idea, though. Why not start an issues based movement called MSA for Main Stream America (don't laugh or tell our secret, Buck)?
Everytime the press asks,
"Are you a political party? Are you commies? Are you a coalition of disaffected Republicans, Libertarians and Democrats with socialists in the mix?",
we''ll say, "NO, NO , NO we aren't political. We are an issues based non-lobby. We promise NOT to vote for someone if they DON'T support our stand on war, taxes, CPI calculations, etc."
It might work. At this point we don't have much left to lose and everything to gain. Kidding and jokes about hidden meanings of the MSA initials aside, we really do need to join under an issues based banner. It's hard for the Corporate beast to hit a moving target.
I agree the pentagon budget is the tape worm eating the USA alive physically AND morally.
Bankers to Obama: "Do everything we tell you---including robbing the elderly and poor--and we'll make you wealthy beyond your wildest dreams."
And the man with the narcissistic personality disorder readily agreed.
So I agree that if we could acheive a "collective spirit" pursuing "a simple life" we would find that everyone could be equally happy without distroying our environment!
Well said. Joecool is definitely uncool.
I might add that anyone that thinks SS and Medicare are programs mainly for the poor has a poor grasp of how the national economy benefits from these programs. It is an established economic fact that the middle and poor classes drive local economies with SS and Medicare. My sister, like Greenspan, is a millionaire and has never turned down the SS administration when they send her the monthly check. The difference between her and middle and poor class SS recipients is that she does NOTHING with that check to help the local economy becuase she doesn't live check to check.
Joecool doesn't seem to understand this. My sister has a similar mindset. consequently, I ceased all communication with her several years ago.
But, Liberals don't talk about those people roaming the streets with their possessions in gym bags, who go to laundromats to wash up, and ketchup packets comprise their mess kits.
Politicians are the real middle class. They stand between the princes and the paupers.
I bet that middle class was deliberate. After all, its what everyone has been conditioned to champion since birth. Those who are the poor and working poor strive to become "middle class" and the great bulk of working people consider themselves to be middle class regardless of actual income or assets.
Its why we have people making 250k-500k claiming to be middle class. This framing is constantly reinforced in the public's mind from virtually all sources. Newspapers, television news, magazines, talk radio, entertainment television, movies, and virtually every politician no matter the party - even the typical Green candidate.
For my part I'll forgive them as its a hard habit to break. I myself revert to using middle class instead of working class when talking to some people because they just can't grasp the difference. Since they're writing for a wide audience I think I'll give them a pass.
So I was just making and educated guess based on the apparent spin of the article.
Such deceitful little piggies - both sides of the aisle.
Coalition is great, but to build coalition it's necessary to have a victory at the core from which people can draw strength. The membership of the UAW shot up from 30K to 500K once they won the Flint sit-down strike of '36-'37.
You also need a legal mechanism to thwart the dupoly gatekeepers that game electoral board regulations to ensure that progressives don't get on the ballot.
And then there's the media slander and demonization to deal with.
This is why Nader, a brilliant, honest, reliable, responsible, truly decent human being is not President of the USA.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/us/politics/17donate.html?hpw
If any of these progressive groups and progressive talk show hosts (read Thom Hartman, Ed Schultz) want a true change to the left they would be working assiduously to back a worthy primary challenger to Obama instead of telling people that they don't like his policies but will still vote for him!
But as I watched those around me acquiesce to this man's depravity, refusing to utter a word of condemnation, I too became sick, sick at heart, to witness this depraved indifference to murder, torture, and the suffering of others (to borrow your passionate words), and this in people who, in their everyday lives, are intelligent and caring. For the past three years, I've felt as if I've been living in a bad zombie movie, and I can't find my way out.
For most of them, I bet, it's like tv: they watch the drama and cheer for their team without realising that the noise outside that's making them have to turn up the volume is the sound of their city being wrecked, their job being dismantled and shipped to China, their pension funds being gobbled up, their commons being enclosed.
They don't make the connection between the theater they're watching and the real damage being wreaked on them.
And if any of them does wonder what the hell all that noise is and peeks out the window, there are all sorts of people in suits saying Don't worry, nothing to see here, we're on the job, go back to the tv, don't miss Obama's new speech, he's really going to speak harshly to the GOP this time.
This is a difficult one for sure, Jill. Do you remember Milgram's series of experiments on obedience to authority?
Experienced psychologists and psychiatrists were surveyed before he started. They uniformly predicted that only the obligative-psychopathic 1 or 2% would continue the shocks into the danger zone. Everyone else, they predicted, would be so revulsed they'd refuse to continue long before they reached that point.
But the experiments proved those experienced professionals not just a little wrong, but totally wrong -- 2/3 of all subjects continued to the end. Many of them were anguished, but their will was completely in thrall to the will of the experimenter. Only a few, like "Pasquale Gino", seemed not to feel any conflict ("it [wouldn't have] bother[ed] me even to find out that he was dead. I did a job.")
Milton Mayer's book They Thought They Were Free described similar attitudes on the part of ordinary Germans who'd survived Naziism and the war. His respondents saw themselves as "kleine Leute" - "little" people - and accepted no responsibility for what the Nazis did. As far as they were concerned, the "große Leute" - "big" people - took all the decisions and the kleine Leute had no option but to go along. And they had reality on their side: those who refused to go along were sometimes punished severely.
More recently, Grace Llewellyn, a former middle-school teacher, wrote an influential book, The Teenage Liberation Handbook, for kids who are being strangled by industrialised "education". The opening sentence of Chapter 1 is "How strange and self-defeating that a supposedly free country should train its young for life in totalitarianism."
She goes on to note that "the most overwhelming reality of school is CONTROL [emph. in original]. School controls the way you spend your time (what is life made of if not time?), how you behave, what you read, and to a large extent what you think. In school you can't control your own life. ... If you look at the history of "freedom", you notice that the most frightening thing about people who are not free is that they learn to take their bondage for granted, and to believe that this bondage is "normal" and natural. They may not like it, but few question it or imagine anything different. ... [T]he people who infringe most dangerously and inescapably on your freedom are those who say they are helping you, those who are convinced you need their help...."
What all this tells me is that
- responsibility is an attitude of mind or an ascription, but not a thing-in-the-world;
- responsibility and power should always be in balance, but too often aren't;
- we are trained from the cradle to feel no sense of personal power or responsibility "except when carrying out orders", as Hitler put it;
- the disconnect between our training and our natural feelings (think of a two-year-old's tearful, red-faced, bellowed demands for autonomy) causes tension, which we partly solve by identifying with figures of power and cheering them on.
So I agree with you that people can't be given a pass on their support for the Bushes, Obamas, et all. But I also can't bring myself to treat them as though they had chosen their situation. The only people who choose evil are the psychopaths. The rest of us believe --con ourselves, maybe-- that, at worst, we're not trying to harm others.As to how to reach them? I can't recall whether you've ever mentioned your age, so I'll have to ask: were you involved in the Second Wave, 40 years ago? If you were, do you remember consciousness-raising and the "click"? That's the only method I can think of: just keep asking the unbearable questions until, one by one, they hear the click as their personal lightbulb goes on. Or they die, whichever comes first.
The other Team is automatically the bad guys because they are not your Team.
If you feel disinterested in either Team, you can call yourself an "Independent Voter" this year.
Doesn't matter because you'll have to vote for either Team Red or Blue in the end.
Citizen Duty as Consumer Choice.
This is why the sort of organizational brainstorming that was happening on the Kucinich thread yesterday is so important -even if nothing comes of it or participants in the pow wow aren't really down for Kucinich or whoever. Because it teaches us that democracy is a participatory thing, not a passive "choice" thing.
-matti.