Greedy old people

(I was recently reminded about an angry rant that I wrote many years ago when I turned sixty and decided to repeat an edited version of it for those who did not see it then. Some of the links no longer work, though.)

I recently turned 60. I don’t pay much attention to my birthdays but this one is a little special because it signifies that by almost any measure I am now officially an old person, a member of a group a subset of whom has been annoying the hell out of me for a long time: greedy old people.

Let me make it quite clear whom this rant is targeting. It is not aimed at old people who after many decades of hard work are even now struggling to make ends meet on their meager savings and social security checks, some of whom have to continue working well past normal retirement age at dead-end and physically demanding jobs which take a toll on their bodies, in order to obtain the basic necessities of life, such as food and shelter. Those people can leave the room because my words are not aimed at them.
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When the rich cry poor

For someone who has been in politics for so long and who seems to want to carefully craft her image, Hillary Clinton has shown herself to be surprisingly maladroit. She recently said that “the Bible was and remains the biggest influence on my thinking”. Does anyone really believe that bit of shameless pandering to the religious? Then after the silliness about she and her husband being ‘dead broke’ when they left the White House, she later acknowledged that they had made a lot of money since then but claimed that it was by ‘dint of hard work’.
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The war on poorer retirees

There has been a concerted effort by the wealthy class in the US to get the media to think that cutting the debt is the biggest issue facing the nation and that there is only one way to do that and that is by cutting earned benefits. Peter G. Peterson, the billionaire former commerce secretary and co-founder of the Blackstone private equity group, is one of the leaders of this movement.
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What to expect in the next few months

Now that the mid-term elections are over, what can we expect to see in the next few months? As I said in yesterday’s post, the advantage to the leadership of the two parties of so-called ‘divided’ government, where one party controls one part and the other party another part, is that they can blame lack of action on the issues their core supporters care about to this gridlock while they can be ‘bipartisan’ when it comes to serving the needs of the oligarchy.
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The state of the nation’s party politics

Now that the primary season for the 2010 mid-term elections is over, it might be good to revisit the question of where the Democratic and Republican parties are. While the basic pro-war/pro-business one-party oligarchic nature of politics is still intact, there have been some interesting developments in how the two factions have evolved.

The Democrats are still pretty much where they have always been, trying to faithfully serve the interests of the oligarchy while pretending to be concerned about the rest of us. As I warned a couple of months ago, it is the Democrats that the oligarchy use to really stick it to the poor. In this case, we see that Obama has stacked his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform with people determined to reduce social security benefits. The commission will deliver its report on December 1, conveniently after the elections. The plan seems to be that the Democrats can campaign on ‘protecting social security’ and then cut the benefits after the election is done.

Republican Party politics has been more turbulent. Immediately after the 2008 election I wrote a series of posts about what its future might look like. In December of that year, I wrote that there were four groups vying for leadership in the wake of their election debacle.
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Greedy old people

I recently turned 60. I don’t pay much attention to my birthdays but this one is a little special because it signifies that by almost any measure I am now officially an old person, a member of a group a subset of whom has been annoying the hell out of me for a long time: greedy old people.

Let me make it quite clear whom this rant is targeting. It is not aimed at old people who after many decades of hard work are even now struggling to make ends meet on their meager savings and social security checks, some of whom have to continue working well past normal retirement age at dead-end and physically demanding jobs which take a toll on their bodies, in order to obtain the basic necessities of life, such as food and shelter. Those people can leave the room because my words are not aimed at them. [Read more…]

Cooking the economic books

In yesterday’s post I discussed the different measures labeled U-1 through U-6 that are used to measure the rate of unemployment. Kevin Philips, in an interesting article titled NUMBERS RACKET: Why the economy is worse than we know in the May 2008 issue of Harper’s magazine, points out how the ‘official’ unemployment rate U-3 masks the true state of affairs.

In January 2008, the U-4 to U-6 series produced unemployment numbers ranging from 5.2 percent to 9.0 percent, all above the “official” number [U-3]. The series nearest to real world conditions is, not surprisingly, the highest: U-6, which includes part-timers looking for full-time employment as well as other members of the “marginally attached,” a new catchall meaning those not looking for a job but who say they want one. Yet this does not even include the Americans who (as Austan Goolsbee puts it) have been “bought off the unemployment rolls” by government programs such as Social Security disability, whose recipients are classified as outside the labor force.

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Spreading the wealth-5: Class warfare against the poor

Why do so many have a reflexive aversion to paying taxes and think that any adjustments in the tax system to shift the burden away from the poorer and towards the richer is somehow unfair? This is because class warfare has been consistently waged against the poor for so long by both parties that we have come to think of it as the norm. But when attempts are made to redress this balance, the rich are quick to shout ‘class warfare!’ to distract attention from the fact that they are the masters of it.
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