Saving Social Security From Rep. Privatizing Ryan

Herbert Hoover (r) & Calvin Coolidge (center), 2 of the worst presidents in history

On Saturday, while looking at the reasons why elderly AARP delegates who continuously and vehemently booed Wall Street's vice presidential nominee, Paul Ryan, we referenced some advice from Alan Grayson on the old tropes the Republican Party has rolled out again about Social Security:

(1) Don't believe them.

(2) Defeat them.

He pointed out that his opponent, Paul Ryan wannabe Todd Long, "doesn't want to save Social Security; he wants to destroy it... He says that Social Security is unconstitutional, simply because it meets 'individual needs'... He evidently thinks that Social Security, like Medicare, is 'one generation rob[bing] from the next'." In his now infamous speech to an Ayn Rand admiration club, Ryan. winking and nodding his way through a plan to privatize Social Security to his adoring fans, called it "a collectivist system. It's a welfare transfer system." Republicans have always opposed Social Security. Since it was first proposed they called it a "Ponzi scheme," and a "slush fund" and a way of making Americans weak and dependent. They've tried to clock it, weaken it, destroy it and privatize it for a full century. And they still are. Grayson gets that better than most weak, careerist Beltway Democrats ever will. He followed up on his advice from Saturday the next day:

Yesterday, I wrote that all the crocodile tears that the Right Wing sheds for the supposed insolvency of Social Security are just a cover story for what they really want to do, i.e., destroy Social Security. My Tea Party opponent is a perfect example of this: he calls Social Security a "Ponzi scheme"; he calls Social Security and Medicare "robbery"; he calls them unconstitutional; and somehow we're supposed to believe that he's the one to save them.

So it has ever been. So it will ever be.

Germany introduced Social Security in 1889. It came to America "only" 46 years later, in 1935. When the Social Security program was introduced here, one of its most vociferous critics was former Republican President Herbert Hoover. Having led America into the Great Depression, Hoover wanted to make sure that no one led it out. (Does that ring a bell?)

According to an Associated Press report on May 6, 1935, and a New York Times report on May 22, 1938 (sorry, no NYT link), Hoover attacked Social Security in apocalyptic terms. Regarding the security for seniors that the program would provide, Hoover said that "we can find [the same economic stability] in our jails. The slaves had it [too]." Hoover said that programs like Social Security would put Americans in cages: "Our people are not ready to be turned into a national zoo."

It's odd that Sarah Palin hasn't deployed the same metaphors. Yet.

Hoover said that rather than indulging in programs like Social Security, Americans should "cling to their family life, to their homes, to their individual self-respect, to their rights, to their individual liberties." He urged that we must not shift "from the self-made man to the government-coddled man."

I know that this sounds just like Paul Ryan, but it was Herbert Hoover. Really.

Hoover added that the way to achieve genuine "social security" was not through government handouts, but by "saving pennies and producing more."

Yes, those pennies sure add up, don't they? Save five of them, and you've got a nickel. Or, in Mitt Romney's case, a quarter.

Hoover said that he believed in private charity, not government handouts. He predicted that government programs like Social Security would destroy private charity, "one of the most fundamental of inspirations in the spiritual growth of the family or individual."

Now you know from whom Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum got their ideas.

With unemployment in America approaching 25%, Hoover said that social programs like Social Security simply weren't needed to feed, house and clothe people. "We could do that by the simple methods of bread lines, barracks and dungarees." The government could do nothing to ameliorate these problems; the only answer was "courage and vision in adversity."

This sounds like something that Mitt Romney would say, right? Either that, or something equally vacuous.

Herbert Hoover led the Republican effort to strangle Social Security in its crib. And now, 77 years later, Republicans are trying to suffocate Social Security as it lies in bed.

At least they're consistent.

When a right-wing Republican talks about how to "save" Social Security, I don't know whether to laugh or (like John Boehner) cry. Republicans have as much interest in saving Social Security as they do in saving the whales. Or the rainforest. Or the Queen. Or the last dance. Meaning none.

Grayson's opponent is so embarrassingly extremist that even Paul Ryan, his idol, has asked him to stay away from campaign events. It must have broken Todd Long's tiny heart when the he was dis-invited to Ryan's big campaign event in Orlando over the weekend. Long was so excited that on Saturday he put up an announcement on his Facebook page-- all caps, of course-- "BREAKING NEWS: I WILL BE SPEAKING AT THE PAUL RYAN TOWN HALL." He didn't speak at the event and he wasn't introduced at the event and after the event, he went home, humiliated, and mournfully deleted the post. It was not unlike the message Romney/Ryan has sent to Rep. David Rivera: keep away from our campaign. Of course, Rivera's an insane criminal under investigation by the FBI and state and local authorities for an actual crime spree. Long is, as far as we know, just insane. 

Republican Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has kept its distance from the congressman. Rivera is the only one of Miami’s three Republican congressmen who has been consistently absent from Romney campaign events, such as a Univision forum in Coral Gables and a Miami rally on Thursday. Until recently Rivera had been publicly stumping for Romney, even rallying listeners on Spanish radio to join him in supporting Romney.

Romney and Ryan have enough problems of their own with albatross like David Garcia and Todd Long hung around their necks. Todd Jurkowski, spokesman for Grayson's campaign said he wasn't surprised that Ryan and other Republicans didn't want Long around. "Todd Long wants to raise the retirement age to 72, hand our Social Security over to Wall Street speculators, freeze Medicare, and then turn Medicare into 'VoucherCare'." Long may have gotten all those ideas from Ryan himself but Ryan is trying to soft-peddle them, especially in swing states like Florida. And Ryan may also be angry because Long has vowed to vote against Boehner and Cantor for House Leadership positions if he's elected. These two are Ryan's closest cronies in Congress and he isn't buying into Long's psychotic ravings that they're "too liberal." Boehner raised him up from the backbenches and made him Budget Committee Chairman and Ryan and Cantor run the Young Guns PAC together, which is seeking to remake the House caucus in their own 100% Wall Street shill image.

If saving Social Security from conservatives is what motivates you-- or even partially what motivates you-- it's important to help elect candidates who think the same way... so NO Republicans and no ConservaDems. I'd suggest that you can't go wrong by supporting progressives who are backing Jacob Hacker's Prosperity Economics thesis (and plan of action), like these 16 men and women.

Wolcott Gibbs Tonight: "Glorious Calvin (A Critical Appreciation)" -- the clown prince of screen comedy?

"The comic art of Calvin Coolidge was a thing so subtle that it almost defied analysis."

-- Gibbs, in "Glorious Calvin (A Critical Appreciation)"

by Ken

It occurs to me that the Gibbs piece we're about to read, "Glorious Calvin" -- an "appreciation" of what we might call the "comedy stylings" of Calvin Coolidge which first saw the light of print when Glorious Cal was within weeks of retiring permanently to private life -- might have been eerily on point for the nominating phase of the 2008 presidential selection process, given the wide assortment of verbally bumbling life forms then vying for the Republican nomination. Of course there's no guarantee that the 2012 field will be any wiser or more articulate, so we may well wish to refer back to "Glorious Calvin" as the lineup takes shape.



"When Coolidge left the pictures, he was succeeded by Herbert Hoover, a comedian whose work displayed certain similarities. To the critical mind, however, it was thin and derivative, a self-conscious echo of his predecessor's magnificent technique. I doubt if we shall ever see the Master's like again." (Gibbs)


TO ACQUIRE A PROPER APPRECIATION
OF GLORIOUS CALVIN, CLICK HERE


TOMORROW NIGHT (preview), SATURDAY NIGHT (preview), and SUNDAY (main post) in SUNDAY CLASSICS:
Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks and Water Music


NEXT WEEK in THURBER TONIGHT: "Gentleman from Indiana" and "Lavender with a Difference," Thurber's 1951 appreciations of his late father and still-very-much-living mother, starting Sunday night with the first part of "Gentleman," which on publication in The New Yorker caused a family furor


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY TONIGHT,
WILL CUPPY TONIGHT, and now WOLCOTT GIBBS TONIGHT):
Check out the series to date

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Is it fear of a new New Deal that has the Right feverishly rewriting the history of the old one?

Not many of us see Obama as a new FDR, but the
possibility seems to give the Far Right nightmares.

by Ken

The domestic political world has changed a lot since the Clinton administration, and even since the first term of the Bush regime. We are no longer surprised by the wholesale lies and rewriting of history, and the campaigns of manufactured smears, that Republicans, especially of the extreme right persuasion, by now do so casually. Of course over time they've become ever more brazen and utterly lacking in shame about lying all the time, but again, it's no longer a surprise.

A colleague suggested recently that the incoming administration needs to organize a response team to be as ever-ready as the campaign was during the election period, and this seems to me an excellent idea, bearing in mind how well the opposition succeeded in crippling the Clinton White House by forcing it to devote such massive resources to defending all the legal and propaganda initiatives launched against it. I really hope the Obama people aren't so deluded about the coming era of postpartisanship as to assume that anybody on the other side has signed on.

It also seems to me important to stay on top of the "story lines" being manufactured by the fantasists on the Right, and our friend David Sirota has just called attention to one that he got caught up in during a journey into the belly of the beast, aka an appearance on Fox Noise. Clearly the Righties, watching the economy sink in ways that increasngly conjure images of the Great Depression, and recognizing that this is not apt to be a happy position for them (even they seem to have grasped that it was no help, during the 2008 presidential election, having both Chimpy the Prez and Young Johnny McCranky identified with the Republican president, Herbert Hoover, whose response to the great stock-market crash of 1929 and the ensuing economic chaos and panic was to sit tight and wait for it to turn into a full-fledged depression.

Apparently the Righties have also come to recognize the danger in allowing the Democrats to be associated with the New Deal that President Franklin D. Roosevelt ushered in after voters sent President Hoover back where he came from. The solution, apparently, is to rewrite the history of the New Deal:

Fox News: "Historians Pretty Much Agree"
That FDR Prolonged the Great Depression

By David Sirota
Campaign for America's Future

I appeared on Fox News to discuss both the Blagojevich flap and the imminent economic recovery package from the Obama administration. You can watch the clip here. As you'll see, on that latter issue, Fox News is starting its campaign to stop Obama's big spending plan by stating - as assumed fact - that "historians pretty much agree" that Franklin Roosevelt prolonged the Great Depression, and that therefore, Obama shouldn't try another New Deal.

When I say Fox News' assertion about historians is patently false, they literally laugh at me as if I've said something so clearly untrue, something Americans supposedly assume is so obviously stupid, that it's worthy of ridicule.

The Depression issue was brought up by conservative pundit Monica Crowley - not surprising since this is the conservative talking point du jour ever since the "center-right nation" meme started looking idiotic and ever since fringe-right-wing bloviator Amity Shlaes published her since-discredited book claiming FDR essentially created the Great Depression. Crowley supported her the "FDR ruined the country" meme with the very authoritative-sounding statement that "based on all kinds of studies and academic work done on the great depression" she knows that the New Deal's "massive government intervention prolonged the Great Depression."

Of course, she doesn't offer up a single study or "academic work" as any kind of proof, and yet, when I say her assertion is absurd, Fox News anchor Greg Jarrett starts laughing at me - as if my assertion that FDR's New Deal helped end the Great Depression is so fantastical as to prompt guffawing. Jarrett proceeds to state that historians "pretty much agree" that FDR prolonged the Great Depression, and resorts to insisting that he knows that's true because "it's in the books" - whatever the hell that means. Indeed, Fox wants us to believe that what was only very recently the deranged propaganda of a handful of conservative political pundits is now such a consensus opinion among historians that to say otherwise is to evoke laughter.

David goes on to detail the slight evidence the R's can bring to bear, and then marshall the broad historical rejoinder.

Even I know that in the later 1930s President Roosevelt actually retreated from a lot of the New Deal policies he had instituted in his first term, and there is a lot of feeling that that did indeed prolong the depression. But far from repudiating the New Deal, that reflected a lack of will to stick to the principles that had been set out.

In particular those of you who frequently dialogue with right-leaning folk, be prepared for this wholesale rewriting of history. If you want to be ready with a response, David can guide you.


TOMORROW THROUGH SUNDAY: Noah takes a three-part look at "2008: A YEAR ON STEROIDS"

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McCain Stumbles Through Another Day, Says He'd Fire Chris Cox... But None of His Economic Advisors Have Called Him Senator Hoover Yet

The last I remember hearing about right-wing financial ideologue Chris Cox, an icon if the Greed and Selfishness wing of the Republican Party, is that he was a contender as a running mate for John McCain. The thinking was that since McCain's skin crawls when he's in the same room with so-called economics whiz Mitt Romney and since even McCain admits he's completely clueless about-- and uninterested in-- economic matters, they would find him a knowledgeable and respected right-wing economics expert. Cox had been a rubber stamp southern California congressman from 1989 til August of 2005 when he resigned to become Bush's SEC chair.

Looking to duck decades of responsibility, McCain has been running around like a chicken without a head looking for someone to blame for the Wall Street debacle. His latest victim is Chris Cox, who he knows wouldn't dare punch back.

ABC News' David Wright reports: At a joint rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa Thursday, Republican John McCain McCain slammed the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) for being "asleep at the switch" saying that if he were president, he would fire Chris Cox, the chairman of the SEC since 2005 and a former Republican congressman.

McCain said the SEC has allowed trading practices such as short selling to stay in place that turned the "markets into a casino."

"The regulators were asleep, my friends," McCain said. "The chairman of the SEC serves at the appointment of the president. And in my view has betrayed the public trust. If I were president today, I would fire him."

But while the president appoints and the Senate confirms the SEC chair, a commissioner of an independent regulatory commissions cannot be removed by the president.

Cox is far more liked, admired and respected by serious conservatives than is McCain so it should be interesting to see if they start squawking much. He did get some response from senators who know McCain well. “This is typical McCain-style politics,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “Go after the first person you can to divert attention from your failures.” Chuck Schumer was even harsher: "Instead of firing Cox, McCain should explain how his policies differ from President Bush on this issue. And if not, maybe he should ask that Bush be fired, instead of Cox.” Or maybe Bush and McCain should have a debate to see which one is more similar to Herbert Hoover.

McCain has wobbled through the last few days of economic crisis. On Monday – with the markets reeling from news that Lehman Brothers had fallen into bankruptcy the GOP presidential candidate said "the fundamentals of our economy are strong.”

In an appearance on the Today Show Tuesday, he said: “We cannot have the taxpayers bail out AIG or anybody else."

But on Wednesday, he appeared on Good Morning America and said that the government had no choice but to bail out the troubled insurance company.

"On the bailout itself, I didn't want to do that," he said. "But there were literally millions of people whose retirement, whose investments, whose insurance were at risk here, and they were going to have their lives destroyed because of the greed and excess and corruption."

In today’s Gallup Tracking Poll, McCain trails Barack Obama by four points-- a nine-point swing from the peak of his bounce after the Republican National Convention.

McCain is coming across as confused and desperate. And he's starting to turn into a national joke. "Sen. McCain bragged about how as chairman of the Commerce Committee in the Senate, he had oversight of every part of the economy. Well, all I can say to Sen. McCain is, 'Nice job. Nice job,'" Obama said at a rally at a baseball stadium in Las Vegas. "Where is he getting these lines? The lobbyists running his campaign?... I'm not making this up, you can't make this up. It's like a Saturday Night Live routine."

And speaking of Republican goofballs who McCain thought weren't as qualified as Sarah Palin to be (vice) president, take a look at Chris Matthews excoriating far right extremist Eric Cantor (R-VA) and the GOP disinformation machine:



UPDATE: OBAMA ON McCAIN'S EMPTY BLUSTERING ABOUT FIRING CHRIS COX

Obama's response was pitch-perfect:

"I think that's all fine and good but here's what I think," Obama said. "In the next 47 days you can fire the whole trickle-down, on-your-own, look-the-other way crowd in Washington who has led us down this disastrous path. Don't just get rid of one guy. Get rid of this administration. Get rid of this philosophy. Get rid of the do-nothing approach to our economic problem and put somebody in there who's going to fight for you."