In Conversation with Julian Assange, Part I
When I first met Julian Assange—thanks to lawyer and Chair of the Contemporary Art Society Mark Stephens and curator/lawyer Daniel McClean, both of the law firm Finers Stephens Innocent—we discussed ideas for various interview formats. Anton Vidokle and I had discussed the idea to conduct an interview with Assange in which questions would be posed not only by me, but also by a number of artists. This seemed only natural considering the extent to which so many artists have been interested in WikiLeaks, and we then invited seven artists and collectives to ask questions over video for the second part of the interview.
My archive now contains over 2000 hours of interviews recorded in many different places, and I am constantly attempting to discover new rules of the game, new approaches to how an interview can work. For an interview with Hans-Peter Feldmann published initially in AnOther Magazine and then in book form, I emailed him one question per day, and each of Feldmann’s responses would take the form of an image. For my interview with Louise Bourgeois, I would send a question and she would email back a drawing. When Julian came to my office with Mark and Daniel for our first meeting, we discussed the idea of a different format with questions from artists, and Julian liked this a lot, suggesting that the artists send the questions as short videos so that he could see them. We set the interview for two weeks later at 10 or 11 p.m., as we discovered that we both work late at night. Traveling more than three hours from London on Sunday, February 27, I arrived at Ellingham Hall, the Georgian mansion near the Eastern coast of England that Vaughan Smith offered Julian to use as his address for bail during his UK extradition hearings. In the living room of the picturesque home he described to me as a “golden cage” we drank many cups of coffee and spoke until 3 a.m. about his life, his nomadism, his early beginnings and the invention of WikiLeaks, his time in Egypt, Kenya, Iceland, and other places, his scientific background, and the theoretical underpinnings of WikiLeaks.
The interview is divided into two parts—in the first, I was interested in tracing his work back to its beginnings. I was not interested in his court case or private life, but in his public work as the voice of WikiLeaks, and the experiences and philosophical background that informs such a monumentally polemical project. In the second part, which will be published in the following issue of e-flux journal, Assange responds to questions posed to him by artists Goldin+Senneby, Paul Chan, Metahaven (Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk), Martha Rosler, Luis Camnitzer, Superflex, Philippe Parreno, and Ai Weiwei.
Many people have contributed to making this interview possible, and I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Julian Assange, to all the artists for their questions, to Joseph Farrell, Laura Barlow, Orit Gat, Joseph Redwood-Martinez, Mariana Silva, Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Daniel McClean, Julia Peyton-Jones, Mark Stephens, Lorraine Two, and all the artists. This first part of the interview is accompanied by graphics from a pro-active series of works designed by Metahaven, an Amsterdam-based studio for design and research, who have been studying an alternative visual identity for WikiLeaks since June 2010.
—Hans Ulrich Obrist
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/232
Monday, May 9, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
A rich city tries to take over a poor city, and fails! Yeah for our constitution!
BREAKING: Benton Harbor City Comm. rules EFM takeover unconstitutional + more recalls Updated at 12:55 PM
Edited on Tue May-03-11 09:59 AM by kpete
Source: Daily Kos
BREAKING: Benton Harbor City Comm. rules EFM takeover unconstitutional + more recalls!
byEclectablog
Yesterday, by a vote of 6 to 2, the Benton Harbor City Commission and Mayor declared the appointment of Joseph Harris as the Emergency Financial Manager and his subsequent stripping of the Commission's ability to govern the City unconstitutional.
Whereas, The City of Benton Harbor declares the appointment of an Emergency Manager a violation of Article I §1, which states that all political power is inherent in the people and that government is instituted for their equal benefit, security and protection.
Whereas, The City of Benton Harbor declares the appointment of an Emergency Manager a violation of Article I §3, which allows the citizens of Benton Harbor the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
...............
Resolved, The appointment of an Emergency Manager is in direct violation of the Michigan Constitution and therefore demands the removal of said Emergency Manager immediately.
Read more: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/03/972631/-BREAKI... !
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4837267
Edited on Tue May-03-11 09:59 AM by kpete
Source: Daily Kos
BREAKING: Benton Harbor City Comm. rules EFM takeover unconstitutional + more recalls!
byEclectablog
Yesterday, by a vote of 6 to 2, the Benton Harbor City Commission and Mayor declared the appointment of Joseph Harris as the Emergency Financial Manager and his subsequent stripping of the Commission's ability to govern the City unconstitutional.
Whereas, The City of Benton Harbor declares the appointment of an Emergency Manager a violation of Article I §1, which states that all political power is inherent in the people and that government is instituted for their equal benefit, security and protection.
Whereas, The City of Benton Harbor declares the appointment of an Emergency Manager a violation of Article I §3, which allows the citizens of Benton Harbor the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
...............
Resolved, The appointment of an Emergency Manager is in direct violation of the Michigan Constitution and therefore demands the removal of said Emergency Manager immediately.
Read more: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/03/972631/-BREAKI... !
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4837267
Deutsche Bank Faces U.S. Fraud Lawsuit Over Mortgage Lending
May 03, 2011, 10:57 AM EDT
More From Businessweek
U.S. Seeks $1 Billion From Deutsche Bank in Mortgage Fraud Suit
U.S. Sues Deutsche Bank and MortgageIT Unit Over Loan Program
Rajaratnam, Barclays, JPMorgan, Citigroup in Court News
Justice Department Said to Extend Review of T-Mobile Bid by AT&T
Lehman Seeks $500 Million From Barclays in Bonus Dispute
Story Tools
e-mail this story
print this story
1digg
add to Business Exchange
By David Voreacos
(Updates with possible damages in fifth paragraph.)
May 3 (Bloomberg) -- Deutsche Bank AG, Germany’s biggest bank, was sued for more than $1 billion by the U.S. government for allegedly selecting mortgages “recklessly” for inclusion in a government insurance program.
The Frankfurt-based bank and its MortgageIT unit violated the U.S. False Claims Act by presenting fraudulent data to obtain mortgage insurance from the Federal Housing Administration of the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department, according to the complaint filed today in Manhattan federal court.
“While Deutsche Bank and MortgageIT profited from the resale of these government-insured mortgages, thousands of American homeowners have faced default and eviction, and the government has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance claims, with hundreds of millions of dollars more expected to be paid in the future,” according to the complaint.... see link above for more.
More From Businessweek
U.S. Seeks $1 Billion From Deutsche Bank in Mortgage Fraud Suit
U.S. Sues Deutsche Bank and MortgageIT Unit Over Loan Program
Rajaratnam, Barclays, JPMorgan, Citigroup in Court News
Justice Department Said to Extend Review of T-Mobile Bid by AT&T
Lehman Seeks $500 Million From Barclays in Bonus Dispute
Story Tools
e-mail this story
print this story
1digg
add to Business Exchange
By David Voreacos
(Updates with possible damages in fifth paragraph.)
May 3 (Bloomberg) -- Deutsche Bank AG, Germany’s biggest bank, was sued for more than $1 billion by the U.S. government for allegedly selecting mortgages “recklessly” for inclusion in a government insurance program.
The Frankfurt-based bank and its MortgageIT unit violated the U.S. False Claims Act by presenting fraudulent data to obtain mortgage insurance from the Federal Housing Administration of the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department, according to the complaint filed today in Manhattan federal court.
“While Deutsche Bank and MortgageIT profited from the resale of these government-insured mortgages, thousands of American homeowners have faced default and eviction, and the government has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance claims, with hundreds of millions of dollars more expected to be paid in the future,” according to the complaint.... see link above for more.
Chris Hedges Speaks on Osama Bin Laden's Death
Posted on May 1, 2011
AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
"Chris Hedges, speaking at a Truthdig fundraising event in Los Angeles on Sunday evening, made these remarks about Osama bin Laden’s death.
I know that because of this announcement, that reportedly Osama bin Laden was killed, Bob [Truthdig Editor Robert Scheer] wanted me to say a few words about it … about al-Qaida. I spent a year of my life covering al-Qaida for The New York Times. It was the work in which I, and other investigative reporters, won the Pulitzer Prize. And I spent seven years of my life in the Middle East. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I’m an Arabic speaker. And when someone came over and told ... me the news, my stomach sank. I’m not in any way naive about what al-Qaida is. It’s an organization that terrifies me. I know it intimately.
But I’m also intimately familiar with the collective humiliation that we have imposed on the Muslim world. The expansion of military occupation that took place throughout, in particular the Arab world, following 9/11—and that this presence of American imperial bases, dotted, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Doha—is one that has done more to engender hatred and acts of terror than anything ever orchestrated by Osama bin Laden. "
more at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/chris_hedges_speaks_on_osama_bin_ladens_death_20110502/
AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
"Chris Hedges, speaking at a Truthdig fundraising event in Los Angeles on Sunday evening, made these remarks about Osama bin Laden’s death.
I know that because of this announcement, that reportedly Osama bin Laden was killed, Bob [Truthdig Editor Robert Scheer] wanted me to say a few words about it … about al-Qaida. I spent a year of my life covering al-Qaida for The New York Times. It was the work in which I, and other investigative reporters, won the Pulitzer Prize. And I spent seven years of my life in the Middle East. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I’m an Arabic speaker. And when someone came over and told ... me the news, my stomach sank. I’m not in any way naive about what al-Qaida is. It’s an organization that terrifies me. I know it intimately.
But I’m also intimately familiar with the collective humiliation that we have imposed on the Muslim world. The expansion of military occupation that took place throughout, in particular the Arab world, following 9/11—and that this presence of American imperial bases, dotted, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Doha—is one that has done more to engender hatred and acts of terror than anything ever orchestrated by Osama bin Laden. "
more at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/chris_hedges_speaks_on_osama_bin_ladens_death_20110502/
Thursday, April 21, 2011
David Swanson's Journal :The Cure for Plutocracy: Strike!
How do you get politicians living off legalized bribery to criminalize bribery? How do you persuade the corporate media to report on the interests of flesh-and-blood, non-corporate people? How do you take over a political party when the only other one allowed to compete is worse? These are not koans, but actual problems with a single solution.
It might seem like there are a million solutions: pass state-level clean election laws, build independent media, build a new party, etc. But the fundamental answer is that when the deck is stacked against you, you insist on a new deck. Power, as Frederick Douglas told us, concedes nothing without a demand. We cannot legislate our way out of plutocracy. Instead, we the people must seize power.
The problem of seizing power for non-billionaires is the problem of the dying labor movement. To many, this looks like an unsolvable riddle as well. How do you pass the Employee Free Choice Act to legalize unionizing when you have no aggressive unions willing to pressure Congress to do so? And if Congress works for corporate masters, do we need to apply the pressure there instead? But making a scene in a corporate lobby doesn't hurt a corporation in an era of shamelessness, and we can't unelect CEOs.
What to do?
Joe Burns has an answer in his new book "Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America." Burns argues that for the last 30 years, since 1980, the labor movement has sought ways to succeed without employing the fundamental tool required, and that employing that tool is a choice available to the labor movement and to all workers immediately without waiting for anyone's approval.
From 1930 to 1980, unions created ever improving lives for millions of workers, improving our economy and our politics in the process. And they did it by striking. They would have found the idea of unions that did not strike unimaginable. Congress and the courts have stripped away unions' power to effectively strike, but so has corporatist ideology. When the anti-union assault intensified in the 1980s, and ever since, the labor movement has responded in a completely new and completely hopeless manner. Rather than halting production, unions set up picket lines that merely watched scabs replace union workers. And when unions are able to negotiate contracts, they no longer seek to establish standardized wages for a whole industry, but negotiate a variety of standards even at a single corporation.
To survive and succeed, Burns argues, unions must use strikes to halt production and impose their demands; and those demands must be industry-wide. Unions must use secondary or solidarity strikes and boycotts in support of other striking workers. A solidarity boycott is far more effective than the extremely difficult consumer boycotts that well-meaning atomized citizens are always dreaming about. Compelling a store to stop selling a particular product is far easier than persuading consumers to not buy that product.
The central tool that must be revived is the strike that halts production and imposes a cost on an employer. A strike is not a public relations stunt, but a tool for shifting power from a few people to a great many. The era of the death of labor, the era we have been living in, is the era of the scab or replacement worker. Scabs were uncommon in the 1950s, spotted here and there in the 1960s and 1970s, and widespread from the 1980s forward.
In the absence of understanding the need to truly strike, the labor movement has tried everything else for the past 30 years: pretend strikes for publicity, working to the rule (slowing down in every permitted way), corporate campaigns pressuring employers from various angles, social unionism and coalition building outside of the house of labor, living wage campaigns, and organizing for the sake of organizing. These approaches have all had some defensive successes, but they all appear powerless to turn the ship around.
"he idea that the labor movement can resolve its crisis simply by adding new members -- without a powerful strike in place," writes Burns, "actually constitutes one of the greatest theoretical impediments to union revival." From 1995 to 2008, with unions focused on organizing the unorganized, the U.S. labor movement shrank from 9.4 million to 8.2 million members. The Service Employee International Union (SEIU)'s famous organizing success is in large part the takeover of other unions, that is of people already unionized, and in large part the bribing of politicians (through "campaign contributions" and other pressure) to allow the organizing of public home health-care workers. What's left of the labor movement is, in fact, so concentrated in the public sphere, that unionized workers are being effectively attacked as living off the hard-earned pay of private tax-payers.
The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), so much a part of candidate Obama's campaign, and now long forgotten, might not fix anything if passed, in Burns' analysis. To succeed, the labor movement needs the sort of exponential growth it has had at certain moments in the past. Easier organizing alone would not persuade enough workers that joining a union is good for them. But persuading them that joining a union holds immediate advantages for them would revive labor with or without EFCA. And EFCA might make things worse. EFCA tries to legislate the right to quickly create new contracts, to avoid employer stalling. But it does this by subjecting workers to the decisions of arbitrators. Rather than empowering a class of arbitrators, the labor movement we had until 30 years ago would have considered the obvious solution to be empowering workers to compel the creation of contracts through the power of the production-halting strike.
Striking does not require a union or majority support but is itself a tool of organizing and radicalizing, with a minority of leaders moving others to join in what they would not choose to do alone. Solidarity is the process as well as the product of a labor movement. And it is by building strikes with the power to halt entire sectors of the economy, not through bribes and emails and marches, that ordinary people gain power over their so-called representatives in government. "Imagine telling Samuel Gompers or Mother Jones or the Reuther brothers or Jimmy Hoffa that trade unions could exist without a strike. However, in the name of pragmatism," Burns writes, "the 'progressive' trade unionists of today have fit themselves into a decaying structure. On a deeper level, they have abandoned the goal of creating the type of labor movement capable of transforming society."
To turn this around, Burns suggests, we will have to change the way we think about workplaces. According to our courts, a man or woman can work for decades in a business and nonetheless have no legal interest in it, the legal interest belonging entirely to the employer. The employer can move the business to another country without violating a labor contract. The employer can sell out to another employer and eliminate a labor contract in the process. The employer can break a strike with scabs. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 might have looked good on paper, but its interpretation by courts and restriction by other legislation -- notably the Taft Hartley Act of 1947 -- have made clear its weaknesses. Labor has no choice left, Burns argues, but to repeal the NLRA by noncompliance.
There are recent examples to build on: the 1986 United Food and Commercial Workers Local P9 strike against Hormel in Austin, Minnesota; the 1989 Pittson Strike in West Virginia, in which workers used sit-ins and road blocking, as well as vandalism, to successfully resist concession demands; the 1995 lockout of workers at A.E. Staley and Company in Decatur, Illinois; the 2000 campaign to free the Charleston 5 in which a global strike in ports was organized to successfully oppose the prosecution of five picketers in South Carolina; the 2008 takeover of Republic Windows and Doors, in which workers in Chicago compelled an employer to pay them severance; and the 2011 pushback against union busting in Madison, Wisconsin.
The specific approaches used in a newly striking and solidarity-building labor movement will be invented as needed and vary with the circumstances. Burns proposes creating new start-up unions without the financial assets that are placed at risk in this country by exercising the international and human right to strike. Strike funds could be transferred to such "new unions created to protect old unions." Employers have manipulated the law, creating new entities for ever purpose under the sun. Labor needs to become equally aggressive about finding the way to create its vision of a just society.
But one comment in Burns' book will lead away from the crucial path he has pointed out. Burns writes: "In many ways, violent resistance was the only means available to unions of the 1930s to stop production, particularly in the face of aggressive management tactics." We have 80 years of additional global experience that demonstrates the dangerous falsehood of this claim. Nonviolent tactics (which will, of course, often be met with violence from the other side) are more likely to succeed and to do so at less cost, building greater solidarity in the process.
It might seem like there are a million solutions: pass state-level clean election laws, build independent media, build a new party, etc. But the fundamental answer is that when the deck is stacked against you, you insist on a new deck. Power, as Frederick Douglas told us, concedes nothing without a demand. We cannot legislate our way out of plutocracy. Instead, we the people must seize power.
The problem of seizing power for non-billionaires is the problem of the dying labor movement. To many, this looks like an unsolvable riddle as well. How do you pass the Employee Free Choice Act to legalize unionizing when you have no aggressive unions willing to pressure Congress to do so? And if Congress works for corporate masters, do we need to apply the pressure there instead? But making a scene in a corporate lobby doesn't hurt a corporation in an era of shamelessness, and we can't unelect CEOs.
What to do?
Joe Burns has an answer in his new book "Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America." Burns argues that for the last 30 years, since 1980, the labor movement has sought ways to succeed without employing the fundamental tool required, and that employing that tool is a choice available to the labor movement and to all workers immediately without waiting for anyone's approval.
From 1930 to 1980, unions created ever improving lives for millions of workers, improving our economy and our politics in the process. And they did it by striking. They would have found the idea of unions that did not strike unimaginable. Congress and the courts have stripped away unions' power to effectively strike, but so has corporatist ideology. When the anti-union assault intensified in the 1980s, and ever since, the labor movement has responded in a completely new and completely hopeless manner. Rather than halting production, unions set up picket lines that merely watched scabs replace union workers. And when unions are able to negotiate contracts, they no longer seek to establish standardized wages for a whole industry, but negotiate a variety of standards even at a single corporation.
To survive and succeed, Burns argues, unions must use strikes to halt production and impose their demands; and those demands must be industry-wide. Unions must use secondary or solidarity strikes and boycotts in support of other striking workers. A solidarity boycott is far more effective than the extremely difficult consumer boycotts that well-meaning atomized citizens are always dreaming about. Compelling a store to stop selling a particular product is far easier than persuading consumers to not buy that product.
The central tool that must be revived is the strike that halts production and imposes a cost on an employer. A strike is not a public relations stunt, but a tool for shifting power from a few people to a great many. The era of the death of labor, the era we have been living in, is the era of the scab or replacement worker. Scabs were uncommon in the 1950s, spotted here and there in the 1960s and 1970s, and widespread from the 1980s forward.
In the absence of understanding the need to truly strike, the labor movement has tried everything else for the past 30 years: pretend strikes for publicity, working to the rule (slowing down in every permitted way), corporate campaigns pressuring employers from various angles, social unionism and coalition building outside of the house of labor, living wage campaigns, and organizing for the sake of organizing. These approaches have all had some defensive successes, but they all appear powerless to turn the ship around.
"he idea that the labor movement can resolve its crisis simply by adding new members -- without a powerful strike in place," writes Burns, "actually constitutes one of the greatest theoretical impediments to union revival." From 1995 to 2008, with unions focused on organizing the unorganized, the U.S. labor movement shrank from 9.4 million to 8.2 million members. The Service Employee International Union (SEIU)'s famous organizing success is in large part the takeover of other unions, that is of people already unionized, and in large part the bribing of politicians (through "campaign contributions" and other pressure) to allow the organizing of public home health-care workers. What's left of the labor movement is, in fact, so concentrated in the public sphere, that unionized workers are being effectively attacked as living off the hard-earned pay of private tax-payers.
The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), so much a part of candidate Obama's campaign, and now long forgotten, might not fix anything if passed, in Burns' analysis. To succeed, the labor movement needs the sort of exponential growth it has had at certain moments in the past. Easier organizing alone would not persuade enough workers that joining a union is good for them. But persuading them that joining a union holds immediate advantages for them would revive labor with or without EFCA. And EFCA might make things worse. EFCA tries to legislate the right to quickly create new contracts, to avoid employer stalling. But it does this by subjecting workers to the decisions of arbitrators. Rather than empowering a class of arbitrators, the labor movement we had until 30 years ago would have considered the obvious solution to be empowering workers to compel the creation of contracts through the power of the production-halting strike.
Striking does not require a union or majority support but is itself a tool of organizing and radicalizing, with a minority of leaders moving others to join in what they would not choose to do alone. Solidarity is the process as well as the product of a labor movement. And it is by building strikes with the power to halt entire sectors of the economy, not through bribes and emails and marches, that ordinary people gain power over their so-called representatives in government. "Imagine telling Samuel Gompers or Mother Jones or the Reuther brothers or Jimmy Hoffa that trade unions could exist without a strike. However, in the name of pragmatism," Burns writes, "the 'progressive' trade unionists of today have fit themselves into a decaying structure. On a deeper level, they have abandoned the goal of creating the type of labor movement capable of transforming society."
To turn this around, Burns suggests, we will have to change the way we think about workplaces. According to our courts, a man or woman can work for decades in a business and nonetheless have no legal interest in it, the legal interest belonging entirely to the employer. The employer can move the business to another country without violating a labor contract. The employer can sell out to another employer and eliminate a labor contract in the process. The employer can break a strike with scabs. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 might have looked good on paper, but its interpretation by courts and restriction by other legislation -- notably the Taft Hartley Act of 1947 -- have made clear its weaknesses. Labor has no choice left, Burns argues, but to repeal the NLRA by noncompliance.
There are recent examples to build on: the 1986 United Food and Commercial Workers Local P9 strike against Hormel in Austin, Minnesota; the 1989 Pittson Strike in West Virginia, in which workers used sit-ins and road blocking, as well as vandalism, to successfully resist concession demands; the 1995 lockout of workers at A.E. Staley and Company in Decatur, Illinois; the 2000 campaign to free the Charleston 5 in which a global strike in ports was organized to successfully oppose the prosecution of five picketers in South Carolina; the 2008 takeover of Republic Windows and Doors, in which workers in Chicago compelled an employer to pay them severance; and the 2011 pushback against union busting in Madison, Wisconsin.
The specific approaches used in a newly striking and solidarity-building labor movement will be invented as needed and vary with the circumstances. Burns proposes creating new start-up unions without the financial assets that are placed at risk in this country by exercising the international and human right to strike. Strike funds could be transferred to such "new unions created to protect old unions." Employers have manipulated the law, creating new entities for ever purpose under the sun. Labor needs to become equally aggressive about finding the way to create its vision of a just society.
But one comment in Burns' book will lead away from the crucial path he has pointed out. Burns writes: "In many ways, violent resistance was the only means available to unions of the 1930s to stop production, particularly in the face of aggressive management tactics." We have 80 years of additional global experience that demonstrates the dangerous falsehood of this claim. Nonviolent tactics (which will, of course, often be met with violence from the other side) are more likely to succeed and to do so at less cost, building greater solidarity in the process.
Social Security: the little secret that's fooling even most DUers.
OK, by now we all know that the Social Security Trust Fund will be depleted in 26 years, and only a portion of benefits will be paid after that.
Actually, that "known fact" is pure BS, a product of cooked numbers. What they aren't telling you is that this projection assumes that over the next 75 years, the US economy will grow at a far lower rate than it has in the past. (They weren't expecting us to check the calculations, were they?)
Since 1960, US GDP growth has averaged 3.2%. Even in the decade before the 2007 crash, which included a recession and jobless recovery, GDP growth averaged about 3.0%. However, in creating its publicized projection, the Obama administration assumes that the future US economy will grow at a rate of about 2.1%, much lower even than the 2.9% rate in 2010, which most of us would agree was a tough year for our economy. Even in this very pessimistic projection, Social Security is still able to pay more than 75% of promised benefits after 27 years. (Note that we need about 2.5% growth just to break even with our increasing population.)
And what if the economy stays the same as in 2010, and we continue to lurch forward at 2010's 2.9% growth rate? The same projection showed that at a 2.9% rate, the Trust fund would remain flush with cash as far as they projected (75 years).
So, unless the US economy is about to get even worse than today and stay that way, Social Security should pay full benefits for our lifetimes and beyond.
If you believe otherwise, then the bad guys have already won: they now have a pretext for stealing you blind in order to "save" you. Remember, Obama's commission voted for more than $50,000 in lifetime benefit cuts for the average Social Security recipient. Can you afford to give away $50,000 that's owed to you? I can't.
It would be great to raise the cap, I suppose, but it's not needed, and applauding it only gives credence to their big lie that Social Security is in trouble.
For references for all of this, and more information on the plot to steal Social Security, please see my research paper. Here is the section that deals with these projections.
I hope that you'll join me in working to stop this wholesale grab from working Americans, to fund continued historically-low taxes on the wealthiest. Please don't feed the lie that Social Security is in trouble.
Also, if you think it's useful for others at DU to see this, please kick and/or recommend to keep it visible. Even better, send a link to friends and loved ones: they need to know what's being done to them.
Thanks!http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x931203
Actually, that "known fact" is pure BS, a product of cooked numbers. What they aren't telling you is that this projection assumes that over the next 75 years, the US economy will grow at a far lower rate than it has in the past. (They weren't expecting us to check the calculations, were they?)
Since 1960, US GDP growth has averaged 3.2%. Even in the decade before the 2007 crash, which included a recession and jobless recovery, GDP growth averaged about 3.0%. However, in creating its publicized projection, the Obama administration assumes that the future US economy will grow at a rate of about 2.1%, much lower even than the 2.9% rate in 2010, which most of us would agree was a tough year for our economy. Even in this very pessimistic projection, Social Security is still able to pay more than 75% of promised benefits after 27 years. (Note that we need about 2.5% growth just to break even with our increasing population.)
And what if the economy stays the same as in 2010, and we continue to lurch forward at 2010's 2.9% growth rate? The same projection showed that at a 2.9% rate, the Trust fund would remain flush with cash as far as they projected (75 years).
So, unless the US economy is about to get even worse than today and stay that way, Social Security should pay full benefits for our lifetimes and beyond.
If you believe otherwise, then the bad guys have already won: they now have a pretext for stealing you blind in order to "save" you. Remember, Obama's commission voted for more than $50,000 in lifetime benefit cuts for the average Social Security recipient. Can you afford to give away $50,000 that's owed to you? I can't.
It would be great to raise the cap, I suppose, but it's not needed, and applauding it only gives credence to their big lie that Social Security is in trouble.
For references for all of this, and more information on the plot to steal Social Security, please see my research paper. Here is the section that deals with these projections.
I hope that you'll join me in working to stop this wholesale grab from working Americans, to fund continued historically-low taxes on the wealthiest. Please don't feed the lie that Social Security is in trouble.
Also, if you think it's useful for others at DU to see this, please kick and/or recommend to keep it visible. Even better, send a link to friends and loved ones: they need to know what's being done to them.
Thanks!http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x931203
Thursday, April 14, 2011
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