Hurricane Relief

For today, how about we focus on the folks who are suffering in Kristina Katrina's wake?

If you haven't already, consider donating to the Red Cross relief fund (you can specify "Hurricane 2005 Relief" to target your donation) or to the relief organization of your choice. The Red Cross donations web page seems to be experiencing high traffic. So, if you can't get through on the web, there's always the old fashioned method: 1-800-HELP-NOW.

Here's a FEMA list of organizations needing cash in order to assist hurricane victims. Network for Good also has a comprehensive list of national, state, and local relief organizations.

As I come across more information on relief efforts today, I'll post them here.

Kemp Says "Cool it"?

Economist's View says pressure is mounting for the White House to drop Social Security reform, and points to a New York Sun column from Jack Kemp (subcription required to read full article), which seems to question the president's plan.

A couple of weeks ago, I pointed out that President Bush has a golden opportunity right after Labor Day to advance the ownership society by repealing the death tax and giving working men and women the opportunity to own personal retirement accounts, which would both get a better rate of return and be inheritable by their families. The administration's general position on both issues is well known - it supports both - but where it stands on the legislative strategy remains a mystery. That's a real challenge but a great opportunity.

It is particularly challenging where Social Security is concerned because the president's advisers have insisted that any personal-accounts bill also must guarantee permanent solvency, a simple political impossibility this year. If the president hopes for a legislative success on Social Security, it is essential for him to clear up the mystery. Now is the time to go on record enthusiastically in favor of making a down payment on solvency by stopping the raid on Social Security and devoting payroll tax surpluses to starting personal retirement accounts, an idea being promoted by the Leadership and Ways and Means Committee members in the House and introduced by Jim DeMint, R-S.C., in the Senate.

Then there's a Newsday article suggesting that, according to reports from two think tanks, the House will probably "cast aside" Bush's Social Security proposal.

Economist's View includes a number of other interesting links in his post, and commenter Bruce Webb has some pointed questions that mainly boil down to this:

The numbers don't run for lower income workers. At least no one has ever put a plan on the table that takes comparable numbers for workers making near minimum wage and showing how they would fare. From the very beginning Private Accounts have been sold on fear and the message "something is better than nothing". Well there is still quite a bit of "something" in the current system and it is incumbent on privatizers to bring their own numbers to the table.

Expain precisely how people up and down the income scale would come out on this, that is all.

Anybody care to take that on, and bring some numbers along as well?

This Just In

Remember USA Next? They're the organization that supported the Bush administrations Social Security plan the first time around. And they were also responsible for this infamous ad.













They're currently fighting a $25 million lawsuit from the couple featured (without their permission) in the ad. But today's news concerns another lawsuit in which USA Next just experienced a little bit of a setback.

In a unanimous decision yesterday a three judge panel on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia upheld a $500,000 fine against USA Next for sending misleading mailers to seniors.

The mailings considered by the court were designed to appear as urgent letters from the Social Security Administration.
They were not unlike many other disguised mailings received by senior citizens that appear to be from the government.

In a unanimous decision, yesterday, the three judges upheld a $554,196 fine against United Seniors Association Inc

The judges rejected USA's argument that laws against deceptive communications using the name of Social Security did not apply to the envelope. The court answered, "once a recipient of a misleading envelope opens the envelope and begins reading its contents, the deceptive `communication' has served its purpose."

You can read the full decision here. (PDF Format)

How's it Gonna Happen?

As we hinted yesterday, there's some blogosphere buzz about an expected fight on Social Security come fall. Well, there are some interesting ideas about how it going to happen. At least two bloggers think some sort of "stealth plan" is the likliest scenario.

Steve Soto sees it happening link this. (Suburban Guerilla picked up on it too.)

But there is talk now that the GOP will in fact take another, under-the-radar run at passing Social Security privatization this session, and they will model their approach on the approach that yielded the GOP-only, budget busting Medicare drug bill fiasco. How? Well, according to this piece from the Dallas Morning News, Rove and the GOP are planning to have each house pass a Social Security-related bill: the Senate will pass a watered-down bill that doesn’t include private accounts while DeLay will ram through Bill Thomas’s Ways and Means Committee a bill that does include private accounts. Then, following the example set by the Medicare drug bill, the GOP leadership will send both bills to a conference committee where Democrats will be largely if not totally excluded, and produce a bill that, voila, has private accounts in them.

Seesdifferent, over at DailyKos picks up on the same article and says it's likely to happen on this bill, introduced by Rep. Jim McCrery (R, LA-04). Soto then sees DeLay calling another late-night voting session, as happened with the Medicare bill in 2003. The difference being that the Democrats didn't see it coming that time. The question is, will they see it coming this time, what will they do about it? What can the Democrats do about it? According to Steve Schmitt of the Decembrist, there is at least one option.

But that's just how a few see it happening. Assuming that something is going to happen on the Social Security front this fall, how do you see it playing out?

Whatever happened to...

Social Security reform? Stephen Schlesinger, of Huffington Post, has his own ideas about why Bush wasn't able to push it through on the first try.

His problem was, though, that he was not able to "9/11" the issue as he did with the Iraqi War, the Patriot Act, the energy bill and a host of his other initiatives. The argument that privatization of Social Security benefits was necessary to defeat the terrorists somehow just could not be made -- even by this administration. So his proposal died on its merits.

Whether Bush's privatization plan "died on its merits" or not may be a subject of debate, but some of us think we're likely to see the issue roll back around sooner or later. Whether that's because Bush is truly focused on the issue or just doesn't have any other ideas probably depends on who you ask.

Heh.

See Grouchy Old Cripple for "what happens when social security goes broke."



Or, depending on your point of view, what happens when it's privatized.

Odds on Social Security

This ended up in my email inbox this weekend, and I thought I'd share. It's one of those things that circulates on email from time to time, this time attibuted to Tavis Smiley.

"Have you heard anything about Social Security numbers, African Americans and the 5th digit of your SSN? Supposedly, if you are an African American or a minority, the 5th digit in your SSN is even and odd if you are white!

It has been said if you take a poll, most African Americans will have an even 5th digit. Rumor has it; some companies are looking at potential employees SSN to discriminate. Why not send this email to every African American and Minority that you know! I am sending this to everyone I know. Mine was even, what is yours?"

A quick check of our household proved this wrong. My fifth digit is odd, and the my spouse's is even. If the above were true, this would be the other way around. Besides, it's already been debunked as urban legend. My guess, and I may get some flack for saying this, is that this kind of urban legend is kept alive by the suspicion (somewhat justified) some African Americans have towards the U.S. government, because of things like the Tuskeegee experiment.

Can we talk about African Americans and Social Security for a minute? Back when president Bush was touting his plan to privatize Social Security (whatever happened to that anyway?) he said something interesting about African Americans and Social Security. Paul Krugman referenced it in one of his columns.

This week, in a closed meeting with African-Americans, Mr. Bush asserted that Social Security was a bad deal for their race, repeating his earlier claim that "African-American males die sooner than other males do, which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people." In other words, blacks don't live long enough to collect their fair share of benefits.

Krugman's take was that Mr. Bush's argument was an old one and had already been discredited by none other than the deputy chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, who cited "major errors in the methodology" of the seven-year-old Heritage Foundation report from which Bush appears to have gotten his information.

Terry Neal also noted Bush's remark, the chilly reception his proposal received from African American audiences. He also quoted a column by Maya Rockeymoore, vice president of research and programs at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, suggesting that privitization has effects that reach far beyond retired African Americansk, and pointing out that it's far from just a retirement program.

Combined with the high risk associated with individual account investments, the outlook for African Americans, especially those on a low or fixed income, is dire.

The inheritance argument is similarly misleading. Currently, Social Security provides benefits for the surviving dependents of a worker who passes away in the prime of his or her working years. Because blacks have lower life expectancies, African American widow(er)s and young surviving children have a higher reliance on these benefits when compared to whites. Indeed, Social Security Administration figures show that 48 percent of African Americans receiving survivor benefits are children.

Nevermind that Bush failed to address the health care disparities that might affect life span among African Americans. That's another post, for another day.

The AFL-CIO has factsheets that further information on the subject.

Just looking at the retire- ment program, African American men do just as well, and probably better, than other groups. That's because African American men tend to earn lower wages on average and Social Security's progressive benefits provide higher returns for lower-income workers. And when you add in benefits for workers with disabilities and young survivors, African Americans clearly do better, on average.African Americans make up 13 percent of the working-age population, but they are 17 percent of Social Security's workers with disabilities. They make up 15 percent of the population younger than 18 but 22 percent of Social Security's surviving children beneficiaries.

Add to that the reality that some 70 percent of African American households getting Social Security have no other source of pension benefits, and that privitization could cut guaranteed benefits as much as $9,000 annually, and you get the idea that privitazation might cause a few more untimely deaths when some African Americans learn how much they're not going to be getting in benefits.

I don't know how many people received the same email that I got, but I hope that it prompts people to start thinking about Social Security again. Something tells me that, although things are quiet on that front now, sooner or later -- say in the next three years or so -- the administration is going to come back to this one.

FOX: "Kill Social Security"

It looks like some folks have already decided the debate is over. The folks at Forbes on Fox are jonesin' to pull the plug (or is it feeding tube?) on Social Security and get on with the funeral already.



Notice it's not even a question under this guy's smiling face. It's an exclamation!



And they've got the tombstone picked out and ready.

Via Media Matters.

Back to school sticker shock on texbooks

Heading back to school? Get ready to throw down a chunk of change - or more likely credit card - to cover the costs of those books. A new report by the Government Accountability Office found that prices have been rising faster and faster:

Over all, the GAO report finds that college textbook prices nearly tripled between 1986 and 2004, rising 186 percent, or an average of 6 percent a year, during that time. Tuition and fees, meanwhile, rose 7 percent a year and prices for all goods have risen an average of 3 percent a year in that span.

Check out the article and an action web site.

The New York Times reports, "Never in the field of human conflict has so much stuff been acquired by so many soldiers in so little time." A fascinating piece about life on the front lines.

The Rolling Stones are sure to provoke some debate with this one.

FAIRVOTE, also called the Center for Voting and Democracy, has just released a new study about the "shrinking battleground" in American politics, looking forward to the 2008 election. The report criticizes the Electoral College and really attacks something that many of us take for granted: the idea that a presidential election will be decided in just a small group of states.

In 2004, there were fewer than 20 states, and really about 10, that were genuinely contested. They were contested because whoever wins that state gets all the electoral college votes. Therefore, if the state isn't close, the voters don't matter and the campaigns ignore them.

Pointing out that the difference in voter turnout for young people between battleground states (64.4%) and non-battleground states (47.6%) is nearly 17 percentage points, the group makes the claim that this is on the face of it evidence that people outside of the battelground states are disenfranchised---and they know it. That's why they don't turn out to vote as much.

FAIRVOTE board member Hendrick Hertzberg, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, has said that its a miracle half of all Americans vote in non-battleground states. After all, a rational calculation in those states is that "voting doesn't matter."

Peter Jennings, ABC News Anchor, Dies at 67

Peter Jennings, along with his nightly news counterparts, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather, was the news source for the Rock the Vote generation. Before many of us could read, Mr. Jennings told us about parts of the world we’d never seen as we helped our parents make dinner every night.

The New York Times writes:

For more than two decades, the magnitude of a news event could be measured, at least in part, by whether Mr. Jennings and his counterparts on the other two networks showed up on the scene. Indeed, they logged so many miles over so many years in so many trench coats and flak jackets that they effectively acted as bookends on some of the biggest running stories of modern times.

From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the more than 60 hours he spent on air during 9/11 and the days immediately following, Jennings was there to inform and educate our generation in our most hopeful of times and in our darkest hours. He has been a fixture in our homes for most of our lives and he will be sadly missed.

A great story about how students are getting engaged in the Social Security debate. You can take action with Rock the Vote on your campus in the fall. Email us at dc(at)rockthevote.com if you want to get involved!

Judge Roberts helped a gay rights group? Washington is in a tizzy. The New York Times has reported that Roberts helped advise a gay rights group in one of their landmark cases.

The White House immediately sought to reassure Judge Roberts's conservative backers, telephoning prominent leaders, including Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, but it appeared that not all of them had been convinced.

The 1996 case, Romer v. Evans, is considered a touchstone in the culture wars, and it produced what the gay rights movement considers its most significant legal victory. By a 6-to-3 vote, the Supreme Court struck down a provision of the Colorado Constitution that nullified existing civil rights protections for gay men and lesbians and also barred the passage of new antidiscrimination laws.

From our friends at OperationTruth, a number of charities to help the troops.

Update on the Ohio race: Schmidt won by 3 points... Hackett says he plans to return to Iraq with his unit when it is ordered back. Political junkies are arguing about how to interpret the race---does a 3 point victory in a district that Bush carried with 64% of the vote mean anything? Hard to say...

In any event, we applaud Hackett for running and Schmidt on her victory. We hope more veterans will run for office---Democrat, Republican, whatever!

An Iraq War Veteran in Congress?

It’s Election Day in Ohio’s 2nd District! The contenders for the open Congressional seat: Jean Schmidt, a Republican and Paul Hackett, a Democrat. While Schmidt is heavily favored in this extremely conservative district, her opponent is giving her a real run for her money. Hackett's selling point: he is an Iraq war veteran. If elected, he would become the first former Iraq soldier to serve in Congress. Despite his appeal most do not expect Hackett to beat the numbers in the 2nd District, one of the most conservative in the country. Pundits will consider this one a victory for Hackett and the Democrats if he manages to lose by a small margin, which would be a publicity nightmare for Schmidt even if she ends up winning the election. Stayed tuned for the results later this evening!

--Posted by Nicole Brown

Rap music is playing a big role in politics in West Africa, particularly the country of Senegal. Here's an excerpt from a great story on the increasing political force---a movement, really---of the rappers there:

Rap has made inroads into a country renowned as one of the centers of West Africa's vibrant music scene, where the Mbalax style of dance music derived from traditional beats and popularized by N'Dour is a favorite genre.

In the early '90s, bands like Daara J and Positive Black Soul recorded hip-hop albums in Wolof, the most widely spoken African language in the former French colony, where many unemployed youth take to rap with dreams of hitting the big time.

Quickly becoming the voice of a generation eager for jobs and education but frustrated by corruption, inefficiency and a lack of opportunities, they built up a loyal following.

Unlike American equivalents, Senegalese rappers rarely glorify violence or the ruthless pursuit of money, tackling issues from poverty, religion and sexuality to politics.

I often wonder if the hip hop/rap artists that we listen to here will ever revive the more visible political expression that the music once had. I'm convinced that it could---it just needs a phat beat. As the bling-bling artists show, people will listen to anything that sounds good.

But if the music doesn't sound good, no amount of social or political content is going to make it appeal to the masses.