Doing handstands on the political third rail

[unixronin]

It seems it's a day for revelations in Washington.  Expect howls of outrage any time now.

The walking on the third rail starts out with the House having, apparently, just killed the plan to close Guantanamo.  (Hey, wasn't that a campaign promise?  Oh, right, that's right, it was a campaign promise.  Well, there you go.)

And on the heels of that comes rumor of the real political handstands-on-the-third-rail act:  It's alleged that President Obama is cutting a deficit-reduction deal in which Republicans agree to tax increases, while Democrats agree to sweeping cuts in future Social Security benefits and Medicare.  William Greider, writing in The Nation, apparently had this to say:

Targeting Social Security is a smokescreen designed to reassure foreign creditors and avoid confronting the true sources of US indebtedness.  The politicians might instead address the cost of fighting two wars on borrowed money or the tax cuts for the rich and corporations or the deregulation that led to the recent financial catastrophe and destroyed vast wealth.  But those and other sources of deficits involve very powerful interests.  Instead of taking them on, the thinking in Washington goes, let’s whack the old folks while they’re not watching.

(Disclaimer:  I have not read the Greider article.  I don't subscribe to The Nation, and therefore don't have access to it.)

I'm not sure I really have a clear position on either of these.  While I suspect that most of the people being held at Guantanamo are being held there for no sufficiently good reason and that most — if not all — of the "intelligence" being "developed" from them is all but worthless, I also can't help but believe that relocating the entire operation to Illinois and calling that "closing" it would be at least an equally bad idea.  Transferring just the people whom we have actual substantive reason to believe are dangerous, and sending the rest home, I could see.  Intelligence from those to be sent home?  Pshaw, get real.  If you haven't gotten it out of them by now, you aren't going to.

Likewise, this is a terrible time to make deep cuts in Social Security and Medicare, when huge amounts of wealth have just vanished like a pricked soap bubble and even many prudent, thrifty people who prepared carefully for their own retirements — my own parents among them — have seen their carefully managed savings and investments all but wiped out.  Far too many people approaching retirement age in the US now don't have anything else to fall back on.

Yet at the same time, all the realistic numbers say that Social Security as it now exists is already doomed, and deep cuts in entitlements may be the only way to stop entitlements from devouring the US economy from the inside.  Last year, Social Security and Medicare between them accounted for 39% of the total Federal budget.  GAO figures from 2007 project that sometime between 2030 and 2040, Federal mandatory spending — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and debt interest — will exceed total government revenues, and those figures were drawn up before the staggering deficits of 2009.  The status quo is clearly unsustainable.

I think I can safely say this much, though:  If these are true, there's shortly going to be a lot more very angry people out there, and this administration and this Congress don't have a whole lot of approval left in the bank to spend.

Comments

[ithildae]

The problem is that this administration and this congress have shown that they no longer care what the public (that they represent) really want. They are collectively, willful enough to cram through their pet projects and spending just to "Leave A Legacy".

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

So, do we abandon habeas corpus completely? Because none of the prisoners in Guantanamo have been arraigned and indicted. I can't see any reason not to transfer them to a mainland prison. There are, after all, already very dangerous people in the US prison system. Many of the prisoners in Guantanamo have been tortured, they cannot give good evidence, or intelligence information. I say, indict who you can, let the rest go. And then there's Bagram (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/05/inside-the-secret-interrogation-facility-at-bagram/56678/), which I also want to see closed.

Social Security is not a budget problem (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/15/opinion/15krugman.html) (article, ironically, from the last conservative attempt to raid Social Security, still valid), despite all claims--very slight changes will keep it going indefinitely. Medicare is a problem...and its costs have been rising more slowly than that of the private health care system or (probably) the proposed national insurance system. There's a substantial conservative faction which just wishes Social Security would go away, apparently because they hate people who aren't rich. If they can't make it go away, they want people mandated to invest Social Security money in securities which they sell. Even now, after they've shown they can't make money.

Can we have the Revolution already?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Because none of the prisoners in Guantanamo have been arraigned and indicted. I can't see any reason not to transfer them to a mainland prison.

My principal objection to relocating the whole shebang to Illinois is that I think it sets a dangerous precedent. Bad enough we're incarcerating people indefinitely without habeas corpus or due process on a base on a Caribbean island. Much worse that we establish a precedent that it's OK to do so in the US proper.

Remember, mission creep is eternal. If it's here in the mainland US, it will be used, and sooner or later they'll find a reason to expand the class of people it's OK to use it on. And then they'll expand it again, and again...

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

They have already tried to expand the class once, and succeeded in doing so temporarily. I'm referring to the fact that for a while after 9/11 the FBI was authorized to go into any library in the US and demand a list of people who had checked out certain (unspecified) books, and if the librarian wouldn't (or couldn't) produce such a list they could be carted off and held incommunicado indefinitely. It's my understanding that this was removed when the US Patriot Act was reauthorized, but it was on the books for a while.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yes, that was ... disturbing, to say the least.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Sorry--I misunderstood you. I agree completely. It's a horrible precedent added to a horrible precedent. But it's what conservatives want, and conservatives dominate the Senate and the President.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Remember, too, that a large number of the people held there are in the strange doublethink state of being supposedly too dangerous to go free, yet so innocent of wrongdoing that we haven't found anything we can actually charge them with. As long as Guantanamo remains open, it remains a public embarrassment that every administration has to field. If we transfer those guilty-yet-innocent people to some hidden prison somewhere in Illinois, will they just ... disappear?

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

The House has tried to put the kibosh on this: http://washingtonindependent.com/85355/house-panel-deals-gitmo-closure-a-major-setback, but there are still problems. I wish the Administration would just go ahead and put the prisoners into the civilian court system so that their cases can be resolved. If Congress objects, Obama could wrap himself in the Constitution. But that would, I suppose, make too much sense.

The places where prisoners do disappear is the CIA's black prison network. Many of them seem to have been closed--we hope!--but there is a new one in Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan: http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/05/14/dods-latest-black-site/.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Right. And we don't need the Guantanamo "detainees" swept under the rug into yet another black prison, which is what I'm concerned would happen with the Illinois plan.

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

"There's a substantial conservative faction which just wishes Social Security would go away, apparently because they hate people who aren't rich."

I am very, very, very not-rich.

I grudgingly accept paying Federal income tax. Yes, a huge percentage of it is wasted and I'd be tremendously happy if I could pay less. I do benefit from some of it, the country in general benefits from some of it, and I acknowledge a responsibility to pay my share.

I bitterly #%#$ing resent every last #$%$ing dime that I am forced under threat of prison to pay into the absurd Ponzi scheme that is Social Security.

I do not know a single person my age - and I know *more* liberals than conservatives; I was born in 1980, by the way - who thinks that there is a real chance SS will be around by the time any of us will be eligible for it.

Believe me, it's not just rich-hating types *or* conservatives who want to see that #%#$ing scam go away.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

They've been saying that for 70 years, you know, and it is still paying. It's not a Ponzi scheme at all--it's an intergenerational transfer payment system, something quite different. If it doesn't come through for you, it will be because it has been cut.

And most of the people your age will end up poor old men.

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

With people living longer with each successive generation.

Me, I'm taking my own precautions for retirement. Buying diversified index funds, spreading my assets as widely as possible. This is financial literacy 101.

And y'know, I'd really *love* to have 14.3% more of my own money with which to *do* that.

I have no objection to other people choosing to invest their money with the government, if they so decide. I don't understand why people such as yourself consider it appropriate to decide *for* me, against my will.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

& look how many people have been wiped out in the current collapse! If transfer payment systems collapse, most people's savings have already been wiped out. Wasn't that why Social Security was created in the first place, after all? Right now, the people who have looted the banking system are turning to the transfer payment systems. I see no reason to participate.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

It's not a Ponzi scheme at all -- it's an intergenerational transfer payment system, something quite different.

With people living longer and longer, the only way to make it continue to work at all will be to push forward the retirement age. Otherwise, what happens when the majority of the population is composed of people over 65?

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

So, do we abandon habeas corpus completely? Because none of the prisoners in Guantanamo have been arraigned and indicted.

No more than we have ever "arraigned and indicted" enemies made prisoner in war. Oddly enough, this doesn't seem to have killed habeas corpus in any of the other wars we fought, starting with the American Revolution.