Why is it that I recall Reagan raising my retirement age to 67?

When the Supreme Court overturned the popular vote and gave us GW Bush without so much as a peep from the people, the moneyed interests knew they could shove any amount of shit down the throats of the sheeple. We are so screwed.

The French are doing exactly what we should be doing in this country, taking to the streets in large numbers, shutting down businesses, striking when ever and where ever possible and demanding accountability from our elected elite.

Getting people to work from 16 to 60 at a less than living wage is not enough for these monied monsters? They want to extract more years from us then hope the hell we die early so that we will not be a “burden” on society by extracting a pension or by being sick.

Vive la France!

Comme j’aime l’attitude francais!

Headed for Nirvana

There have been any number of ‘economics reporters’ insisting that putting off retirement so that your payments will go up is the wise approach – ignoring that the longer you keep working, most likely the earlier you will die.

ignoring that the longer you keep working, most likely the earlier you will die.

Not ignoring just not telling the public, the workers, the sufferers, the slaves.

From the BBC

The French government has used the security forces to lift blockades by strikers at three fuel depots serving the west of the country.President Nicolas Sarkozy has authorised police to break all remaining blockades at fuel depots.

Overnight, riot police lifted the blockade at three fuel depots, in Donges, La Rochelle and Le Mans. However, strikers reimposed their blockade at Donges in the early hours of the morning.

Of course in america Xe would be guarding the oil reserves.

Not just raising the retirement age from 60 to 62, but…

Yesterday was the fourth national strike and the sixth day of protest in two months against the pension bill, which raises the age for a full pension to 67 from 65. French senators will vote as soon as tomorrow on Sarkozy’s retirement plan

Good morning, pups. It’s Dowd and Friedman today. In “Making Ignorance Chic” MoDo says that in the ’50s, Marilyn made it chic to be smart. Now Sarah makes it chic to be ignorant. The Moustache of Wisdom has a question in “Just Knock It Off:” Will the Israelis and Palestinians get serious already?

Here they are.

The coffee and tea are ready, and I’ve got toasted Thomas’ English muffins with your favorite jam. Delilah is about to start typing (she’s right next to the keyboard) so I’ll post this before she starts. Have a great day.

Roger Cohen (NYT) wrote this piece in which he wrongly implied that Sarkozy’s pension grab was to move full retirement age from 60 to 62 years when really it is only the early retirement age (reduced benefits) that is being moved. Cohen’s implication about the French was that they are ’spoiled’. Pay attention to that, because that is what liberals do when they crush dissenters who represent real change or in this case real resistance. Usually they use the character assassination technique of calling those who dissent as unrealistic or as irresponsible. Instead of saying, hey, the banks got taken care of, the corporations got taken care of, the rich people got their money, so we are going to guarantee the general well-being of all those who made their wealth possible, the Sarkozys and their class, further exploit the workers they should be supporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/opinion/15iht-edcohen.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Probably true.

In case anyone thinks the media is going to tell the truth on this important issue, not gonna happen.
Pete Peterson has bought them off. The letter signed by some Dems not to cut SS, watch them fold like a house of cards when it’s time to vote. The fix has been in for months.

In case anyone has any doubts, Obama and the Democratic leadership have had everything in place since Janaury. Obama is gonna make sure it happens.

Here’s a link about the sneaky cowards hiding behind the “Catfood Commission” for a done deal. Read it and weep. So, next time the Dems threaten that electing more Republicans means cutting SS, remind them what the specific mission of the Commission was from the get go, and who is behind it.

http://unsilentgeneration.com/2010/01/20/obama-cuts-deal-that-will-reduce-social-securitymedicare-and-all-entitlements/

I applaud the French. Thanks to the coddling of out youth, the demonizing and bust up of so many unions, unions happily ensconced in Obama’s veal pen, media propaganda that demonizes any group that doesn’t support the status quo, and our pervasive corporate surveillance state, organizing a demonstration in America is a major uphill battle.
The best group to get something going are the unions, but union leaders prefer to support a party that’s poised to keep stabbing them in the back.
I just don’t get them.

A teenager interviewed in France was asked why he was demonstrating and he said it was for his future children. Think about that. A teenager already concerned about children he didn’t even have. He didn’t want them to end up with the kind of shitty benefits that people in the U.S. have. In France it’s Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. In the U.S. it’s, I’ve got mine tough shit to everyone else.

OT, re an NYT piece today entitled Clarence Thomas’s Wife Asks Anita Hill for Apology

If I were a cynic I’d suggest that this is a deliberate GOP ploy to crank up the angry white men just before the election. Oh, wait! I am a cynic.

In the U.S. it’s, I’ve got mine tough shit to everyone else.

It’s called Reaganomics.

And it’s the message the corporate media, the Republican Party and many Democrats have been promoting for the last 30 years. The U.S. public does not have the intellectual wherewithal to figure it out. A nation of intellectual morons makes it very easy for the elites to manipulate the public.

The best group to get something going are the unions, but union leaders prefer to support a party that’s poised to keep stabbing them in the back.

I’m thinking we need stronger medicine: ask the WTO protesters how to proceed or ask a few French protesters to come over and show us how it’s done. We seem to have forgotten.
I so agree with you on what we’ve instilled in our children. We’ve told them to worry, worry, worry about working within the system: going to college and getting a good-paying job. We implied that they’re not to worry their pretty little heads about how this country is supposed to work.
And before anyone says the answer lies in the ballot box, I say: you take thirty million people and have them vote to change the direction of this country. I’ll take thirty million and have them participate in targeted demonstrations. We’ll see who gets results first.
BTW, the article you linked is so disheartening.

Can’t you retire just about any time you want? There’s people in the neighborhood that are retired in their thirties, getting subsidized housing and food, driving around in decent cars and chatting away on cell phones. What’s the beef?

Still, the only major French politician supporting the strikes is Segolene Royal. Dominique Strauss Kahn is invisible for the Socialists, as is Martine Aubry. They’re Blue Dog Socialists; Royal’s the real thing.

PS Royal has already been on the teebee to say if the pension “reform” isn’t scrapped and the Socialists take the Presidency and a majority in the General Assembly in 2012, they will repeal it. Strauss Kahn, Aubry, crickets.

Just watched my neighbor leave for work while it’s not even light yet, and appreciating that I’ve been able to retire while not too old to enjoy it.

Pathetic surrender monkeys (sic) think the rich bastards should pay their fair share. No wonder the capitalist oink oinks here hate them. Can’t pull the wool over their eyes like you can with the American sheeple.

I hope the current politicians are paying attention to the anger on the streets and scrap their dishonest “pension reform,” and I do hope the Socialists take the Presidency and a majority in the General Assembly in 2012, no matter what the outcome.

I wonder if the French politicians supporting these cuts ever tried out these USA tried and true slogans:

“Buck up!”

“Stop whining!”

“Perfect is teh enemy of teh good!”

The French have a long history of fighting for their rights..we don’t. and the past decade of Shock after Shock and rendered US confused and all to ready to point the finger at the easiest targets; each other.

You should have seen the trolls posts on HP yesterday after they posted this story!!!! I swear they must be brain dead after listening to all the far right ranting day after day against their own best interests. This one guy said that the only retirement pensions that were lost in the crash were the public employee’s unions..the magic word for the fascists.

We’re the frog which was put in the cool water and the temp slowly raised; these Europeans have had this stuffed down their throats as a result of what the AMERICAN banking system did to their economies and they’re aren’t interested in “cie la vie”.

And you’ll note, Obama’s opinion ratings keep getting flushed lower and lower as well as all the Euro heads who are embracing the IMFs “austerity measures.
Merkel’s giving me the creeps she sounds so far right.

i think maybe they dose the water here with doggy downers so people are like mental jello, something not quite right

It’s the TEEVEE. they’ve been doing subliminals for years.

Amazing how Sarkozy finds the time for this, what with throwing the “undesirables” out of the country and licking the German Chancellor’s enormous balls.

Time to throw the peasants a nice real estate bubble to distract them. Send in Goldman Sachs to show ‘em how it’s done.

“A poll taken Oct. 6 and 7 shows Sarkozy’s approval rating at just 31 percent”

Obama will be there soon.

That’s why the demonstrators are going all out. The socialists are likely to come back into power in the next election, and it is certain that the old guard like Fabius will not work to overturn the new law. That’s why the Left are trying to stop it in its tracks.

As to the demonstrations themselves, they are an inheritance of a long Revolutionary history. In many ways that history is a myth, but not entirely. I saw a clip in today’s newspaper of a man demonstrating at Place d’Italie with a home-made red Phrygian bonnet. Now that’s a long historical memory.

The Republican mantra is that you should be grateful to the capitalists that you have a job. Funny how life imitates art. This is exactly what Marx claimed they would say.

True.
And if you look a little deeper, the only thing anyone under 30 has probably ever heard is trickle down economics, the rich create jobs, the global economy and free trade is good for US workers, union workers are overpaid slobs, lazy welfare queens, we’re gonna kick their asses, commie liberal Godless heathens, liberal media, homosexuals are perverts, and all the other lovely Americanisms that encompass the Reagan Presidency.

The French political system is also characterized by a wide choice of parties across the political spectrum allowing people who feel empowered, to act empowered.

Here, we have the worst and the second from worst to vote for, usually, and this makes people disempowered and they, logically, often choose to wash their hands of the charade.

The WTO protest organizers homes were raided by the FBI before hand. Their computers were confiscated and some of them were arrested. The FBI planted provocateurs and spy’s inside the groups. People that did demonstrate had their heads bashed in.

This is part of what I’m talking about in staging an effective protest in the US now. The Patriot Act allows them to arrest anyone interfering with “commerce.” Well, protesting corporate behavior is considered interfering with commerce. Plus, domestic spying gives them a heads up on all communications. So, they send in a spy who not only rats on everything, but incites the group to do acts of violence. This is standard practice of the FBI though. It’s just so much easier for them now.

Can you believe Congress voted for this shit? And Obama renews it with even further limitations on us.

I have thus far avoided the annual flu shots, myself.

Where do YOU live?
Whoever’s on the government dole these days is not living on easy street.

Comments like that are typical of the low information voter or some corporate shill who depends on the American people to rage on each other while they rip us off.

When Obama can go to last week’s MTV Forum and LIE to the country about the current state of Social Security in this country and that LIE gets no coverage that I can find on the internet, on television or in print, then I wouldn’t hold out much hope for any action individual citizens take making any difference.

Obama actually told the audience that CBO states that in 2017 (or 2018) social security will begin taking in less in taxes than it owes out in obligations and will only be able to pay about 70% of benefits. He completely ignored the fact that social security holds 2.5 trillion in government bonds. Those bonds must legally be used to fund any shortfall in social security tax receipts so that 100% of the benefits are paid. These bonds are the money that was borrowed from social security, not stolen. The full faith and credit of the US government stands behind these bonds.

In fact, Obama lied and CBO states that social security can pay 100% of it’s obligations through 2038. And, at that point, after having used up all the 2.5 trillion in bonds, will only be able to pay 70% of its obligations if no adjustments are made.

If the government thinks it can just change the rules and lower the benefits in order to avoid cashing in those bonds, then why don’t we pull the same crap with Japan and China who also hold government bonds for money we borrowed from them?

As much as this site and other progressive sites have written about the cat food commission, I’m surprised that Obama’s LIE last week has gone uncovered.

Can you get a video clip of what you wrote about and post it to firedoglake (at) gmail dot com?

I looked for his statements in transcript form and only got that he conflated SS with the federal deficit through using them in the same sentence. If you could send in a clip of what you describe, I am sure that would make an interesting post!

I have not found a video link. But, I have found a transcript here

http://ironicsurrealism.blogivists.com/2010/10/15/transcript-obama-mtv-youth-town-hall-oct-14-2010/

It’s not as clear when I read it in transcript form as it was when I heard him saying it live. He talks about the annual surplus that social security currently runs. But, he never mentions the 2.5 trillion in bonds. He claims that it will only be able to pay out 75% when he is of retirement age. He is 49 now. So, that is in 2026, 16 years from now. The 75% will not happen according to CBO until 2038. So, although the transcript isn’t as drastic as I interpreted it as he was saying it, his answer isn’t as forthcoming with the actual facts as it could have been.

Here is the exchange in transcript form:
—————————————————————————

MS. WOODARD: We have a question here. Mr. President?

Q Mr. President, my name is Joe San Georgio (ph). I’m a senior at George Washington University. And my question is about Social Security. The Congressional Budget Office projects that Social Security could go into the red as early as 2018. And it seems to me there are only three options if we want to fix it: raise the retirement age, raise payroll taxes or reduce benefits.

I know in the past you’ve said that all options are on the table, but do you have a limit for what would be acceptable changes for each of those three things?

Obama: Well, first of all, let me just say something about these projections. According to the Congressional Budget Office, what’ll happen is around 2018, we’ll start taking in less money than we’re sending out. So right now Social Security generally runs a surplus; that surplus will start getting drained around 2018.

Now, that doesn’t mean that Social Security is going bankrupt. It doesn’t mean that Social Security is going away. What it does mean is if we don’t do anything about it, right around the time — you guys are a little young for you to retire — but let’s say when I’m retired. (Laughter.) What’s going to end up happening is, is that if you expected a dollar of benefits, you’ll only get about 75 cents, so people won’t get the full bargain that they thought they were getting when they paid into Social Security.

That’s why we’ve got to strengthen it. And I have said that all options are on the table. I think we’ve got to look at how we preserve it for the next generation. I do think that the best way to do it would be to look at the fact that right now you only pay Social Security taxes up to about $106,000, and after that, you don’t pay any Social Security tax. So that means Warren Buffett, who makes more than $100,000 a year, the vast bulk of his income, he doesn’t pay Social Security taxes on it. That could be modified or changed in a way that would help extend the solvency of Social Security.

But this is an area where — I’m sorry, what was the young lady from Austin — this is where Cynthia’s point about bipartisanship is so important. I set up a bipartisan fiscal commission that is made up of Republicans and Democrats to sit and meet over the last several months to start looking at how we generally start reducing our debt and our deficit so we’re not leaving it to the next generation. They’re supposed to report back to me after the election because we specifically designed it so they wouldn’t get caught up with silly season and would be able to just focus on what makes sense.

They’re going to provide that report to us around the 1st of December, and my hope is from there that we can get a Republican-Democratic agreement on how we strengthen Social Security as well as looking at some of these other major expenditures that we have that we’ve got to deal with to make sure that we’re not just leaving you guys with a mountain of debt

Thank you. My beef with what he said was his falsely equating the independent budget and reserves of the Social SEcurity system with the Federal debt and deficit of the U.S. government, the government that is spending a trillion a year on defense. That’s a false equivalence. And in his last sentence he infers that what he has just talked about is related to “leaving you guys with a mountain of debt”. The SS system cannot legally go into debt by paying out more than what it takes in or has in bonds. By framing SS as part of the national debt he is being a willing participant in the Peter G. Peterson school of bad mouthing a decent, efficient, solvent government program. His unwillingness to be clear about not cutting benefits and not raising the retirement age, and his willingness to use the commission as his cover for any real answers as to his future actions, suggests that these are his planned actions for December and beyond. Why do I read all of this into his behavior? Because, as many have already said, reassuring those young people and future retirees would have given Democrats something to run on in this election and he refuses to do that. And, his hero, Mr. Reagan did cut benefits by raising future retirees retirement age and raising FICA contribution rates in 1983. If past is prologue, Obama will do the same.

I agree with you completely about conflating social security with the debt or deficit. It’s simply not true. And, as I understand it, the charter of the cat food commission doesn’t even direct them to look at social security.

The one and only way for social security to affect either the debt or the deficit is by forcing the government to have to borrow more money when social security is mandated to cash in their bonds to cover their obligations.

The politicians are suggesting that we modify the obligations as a way to avoid cashing in the bonds.

The government pays lenders next to nothing when they invest in Treasury Bonds. There is zero risk of inflation at this time. Dean Baker has covered the issue of bonds and costs of redeeming them. And these bonds are evidently selling like hotcakes with no let up in demand. So why target Social Security? How do the Sarkozys of the world justify balancing their short-term budgets by altering their long-term pension/Social Security promises to their citizens?

RICH PEOPLE REFUSE TO PAY THEIR FAIR SHARE OF THE TAXES NECESSARY TO KEEP OUR GOVERNMENT RUNNING.

Sorry for shouting. ” Austerity” is merely code for manipulating everyday folks to pay for the mess the rich made.

It will be 67 and is being increased each year. And 67 is not full benefits, because they come at 70.

Oilbummer’s neoliberal agenda is to make us work till we are 90. This is the agenda of the global rich. The tiny elite wants it all on the back of billions of people. Pretty fucking sick–but that’s their agenda.

USians are so lobotomized by corporate spin and a crap education and fundie religion that they will never fight this. I don’t know how we are going to stop our descent into serfdom. It freaks the shit out of me.

Here is an example of Peter G. Peterson’s Social Security Wrecking Crew at work:

He is funding this Committee that wrote this article. The committee claims it is a ‘think tank’ and generates its own biased quiz for lawmakers about budget cutting. The committee gets the Hill magazine to publish the article as if it is a press release/article from the think tank. Get it???

Pure Peterson Propaganda: http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/125079-in-search-of-fiscal-responsibility-ten-questions-to-ask-the-candidates

This is a gem! Just like Obama, Sarkozy originally promised his citizens that he would not raise the retirement age:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/20/france-protest

So the reason the French, young and old are filling the streets is that Sarkozy betrayed them. That’s why they are so angry, plus he is ignoring that 68% of the people want the strike to continue until he backs down.