Tag: america’s future

This essay got not nearly enough attention.  Do you agree with me?  It practically says it all:

A Recipe for Fascism

By Chris Hedges

American politics, as the midterm elections demonstrated, have descended into the irrational. On one side stands a corrupt liberal class, bereft of ideas and unable to respond coherently to the collapse of the global economy, the dismantling of our manufacturing sector and the deadly assault on the ecosystem. On the other side stands a mass of increasingly bitter people whose alienation, desperation and rage fuel emotionally driven and incoherent political agendas. It is a recipe for fascism.

More than half of those identified in a poll by the Republican-leaning Rasmussen Reports as “mainstream Americans” now view the tea party favorably. The other half, still grounded in a reality-based world, is passive and apathetic. The liberal class wastes its energy imploring Barack Obama and the Democrats to promote sane measures including job creation programs, regulation as well as criminal proceedings against the financial industry, and an end to our permanent war economy. Those who view the tea party favorably want to tear the governmental edifice down, with the odd exception of the military and the security state, accelerating our plunge into a nation of masters and serfs. The corporate state, unchallenged, continues to turn everything, including human beings and the natural world, into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse.

All sides of the political equation are lackeys for Wall Street. They sanction, through continued deregulation, massive corporate profits and the obscene compensation and bonuses for corporate managers. Most of that money-hundreds of billions of dollars-is funneled upward from the U.S. Treasury. The Sarah Palins and the Glenn Becks use hatred as a mobilizing passion to get the masses, fearful and angry, to call for their own enslavement as well as to deny uncomfortable truths, including global warming. Our dispossessed working class and beleaguered middle class are vulnerable to this manipulation because they can no longer bear the chaos and uncertainty that come with impoverishment, hopelessness and loss of control. They have retreated into a world of illusion, one peddled by right-wing demagogues, which offers a reassuring emotional consistency. This consistency appears to protect them from the turmoil in which they have been forced to live. The propaganda of a Palin or a Beck may insult common sense, but, for a growing number of Americans, common sense has lost its validity.

The liberal class, which remains rooted in a world of fact, rationalizes placating corporate power as the only practical response. It understands the systems of corporate power. It knows the limitations and parameters. And it works within them. The result, however, is the same. The entire spectrum of the political landscape collaborates in the strangulation of our disenfranchised working class, the eroding of state power, the criminal activity of the financial class and the paralysis of our political process.

Commerce cannot be the sole guide of human behavior. This utopian fantasy, embraced by the tea party as well as the liberal elite, defies 3,000 years of economic history. It is a chimera. This ideology has been used to justify the disempowerment of the working class, destroy our manufacturing capacity, and ruthlessly gut social programs that once protected and educated the working and middle class. It has obliterated the traditional liberal notion that societies should be configured around the common good. All social and cultural values are now sacrificed before the altar of the marketplace.

This is the third installment in our Social Security Works series. So far, we have seen how Social Security works for America, how Social Security works for women, and today we will show how Social Security works for people of color.

Social Security is neutral with respect to race and ethnicity; the benefits it pays are a function of a worker’s earnings history and family situation.

People of color face numerous structural inequities throughout their lives that Social Security, because of its progressive benefit structure, helps to alleviate.  

Communities of color receive higher average returns on what they have paid into the system than do other workers. Latinos and African Americans also rely on Social Security for a greater share of their income in retirement.

This is the second installment in our Social Security Works series. The first post focused on how Social Security works for America, and today we will show how Social Security works for women.

Since January 31, 1940, when Ida May Fuller was issued the first monthly retirement check  in the amount of $22.54, Social Security has worked for women.

Social Security is neutral with respect to gender – individuals with identical earnings histories are treated the same in terms of benefits.  But, with longer life expectancies than men, elderly women tend to live more years in retirement and have a greater chance of exhausting other sources of income.

• Women represent 57 percent of all Social Security beneficiaries age 62 and older and approximately 69 percent of beneficiaries age 85 and older

• Women reaching age 65 in 2007 are expected to live, on average, an additional 19.8 years compared with 17.5 years for men

In 2008, Social Security provided benefits to 31.3 million women. Women are:

• Over two-fifths of the beneficiaries of disabled worker benefits

• 99 percent of the spouses receiving Social Security benefits

• 99 percent of the nondisabled surviving beneficiaries

• 98 percent of the dually entitled, that is, persons entitled to benefits as retired workers and as spouses

Women are more likely than men to be out of the work force, or to have breaks in employment. Even with the narrowing gender gap in the rates of labor force participation, women often leave temporarily or permanently for pregnancy, child care, and other family care responsibilities.

As an insurance protection for older women, Social Security provides a modest benefit. Old-age insurance in 2006 supplied such a measure for women through an average monthly benefit of $904.

This bare-bones floor of protection provides elderly women, in Roosevelt’s words, “security against the inevitable hazards and vicissitudes of life.”

The poverty rate for women would be significantly higher without Social Security, increasing from 12.4 percent to over 50 percent.

• In 2007, Social Security kept 39.5 percent of women out of poverty

• In 2005, 42 percent of women over age 62 relied on Social Security for 90 percent or more of their income, compared to 28 percent of men

• In 2007, for unmarried women – including widows – age 65 and older, Social Security comprises 48 percent of their total income. In contrast, Social Security benefits comprise only 37 percent of unmarried elderly men’s income and only 30 percent of elderly couples’ income

Social Security works for women; Social Security works for America.

This blog series is a joint project of America’s Future and Social Security Works.

Also posted at OurFuture.org and The Seminal