NEA Sheds Crocodile Tears for the Poor

President Obama has sent his budget plan to Congress, hoping to appease Republicans by slashing $400 billion from Medicare and other health programs (according to NEA Today) and cutting cost of living increases for Social Security recipients. Not surprisingly, Republicans are saying this isn’t enough and they have no intention of supporting any tax hikes, whatsoever. Some pundits are referring to the process as Obama negotiating with himself.

Needless to say, the cuts will hurt seniors and the poor the most (but on the brighter side, the wealthy will be able to continue to enjoying record low tax rates and subsidies for their businesses). These cuts could also have a trickle-down effect on schools. By stripping away some of the safety net for poor families, children will inevitably feel some of the cuts, which could lead to increases in malnutrition, untreated medical conditions, premature births, stress and elevated levels of cortisol, and other factors that can impair cognitive development, memory and learning.

National Educators Association (NEA) President Dennis Van Roekel criticized the plan, saying:

“Right now the focus should be on protecting and increasing benefits for our seniors, not pulling the rug out from under them . . . Social Security belongs to the people who have worked hard all their lives, contributed to the program, and relied on the promise that they and their family will be able to collect benefits that accurately reflect the cost of living when they retire. . . Any budget proposal must be balanced and fair by demanding more of the wealthiest and corporations while staying true to our nation’s commitment to seniors and those most in need.”

These comments are little more than crocodile tears coming from a man who earns close to $400,000 per year in salary and benefits and who will likely be set for life with a comfortable retirement, thanks to his members’ dues. While he may in fact feel sympathy for the poor and seniors, he is completely unwilling to do anything about it besides making a few impotent complaints—and certainly nothing that might jeopardize his income, status or personal freedom.

If NEA was a fighting union, if it really gave a damned about the wellbeing of America’s poor families and children (or simply wanted to see significant gains in educational outcomes), it would mobilize its hundreds of thousands of members to protest the entire budget debate vigorously, with direct action, civil disobedience and even strikes. The NEA is the largest union in the country. It has vast resources and could have significant influence on policy if it were to move away from its unreliable and weak strategy of lobbying and campaign financing and start exercising its true power: its members’ ability to withhold their labor.

One reason why the NEA will not do this is because it does not want to offend its darling in the White House. Despite the fact that Obama has done nothing to reduce the damage caused by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and actually worsened it with his Race to the Top (RttT), he continues to pay lip service to the notion of improving public education (which seems to be sufficient to mollify many on the left). In fairness, his budget proposal does include an additional $75 billion to fund pre-school for all low- to moderate-income 4-year-olds. Yet for many middle class families, the only preschool options available are expensive private schools that suck up large portions of their disposable income. Obama’s budget will provide no relief for these families. More to the point, since we know that pre-K programs have significant benefits for children’s long-term academic success, why not extend the existing free public education system to include all children, starting at the pre-K level? This would have the additional benefit of allowing many parents to get back to work without having to lose a large chunk of their income to overpriced private preschools.

Van Roekel is also probably pleased with the supposed billions of dollars that will go toward education jobs to replace those lost due to the sequester cuts. However, jobs, in and of themselves, are nothing to support, particularly if those jobs are for low pay, with poor benefits and unreasonable demands or lack security. Why not increase unemployment benefits, welfare and other safety net programs to a level that provides all Americans with material security and comfort until they get back on their feet, instead of continuing with the cynical and punitive system that provides only a fraction of what one needs to survive and only for a timeframe that is insufficient for finding another decent job?

Additionally, why strive for putting teachers back in front of 30-40 kids per classroom, which is all that will happen with Obama’s proposal? Why not demand sufficient funding to bring all high school classes in the country down to 20 students per teacher, and the lower grade levels down to 10 or 15 students per teacher? This would not only create a lot of jobs, but it would provide teachers sufficient time to attend to the individual and diverse needs of their students; identify physical, emotional or academic problems before they spiral out of control; and provide more engaging, student-centered, inquiry-based lessons and rely less on canned curriculum, bubble in tests and rote memorization.

Back to the “Golden Age” for Those in Their Golden Years?

In his quest to find a “middle ground” (read appease the ruling elite), President Obama has been meeting with Republicans behind closed doors to come up with a plan to dismantle Medicare. According to the New York Times, Obama has proposed cost savings by combining Medicare A and B, which would significantly increase seniors’ out-of-pocket expenses.

Currently, Medicare A is used for hospital visits and has a deductible of $1,184 per year, while Medicare B, which is used for out-patient services and doctors’ visits, is only $147. Patients can see their doctors as often as they need to and typically use Medicare B (the cheaper of the two programs) much more frequently. Combining the two into one program would necessarily result in higher costs for patients, as the new deductible would fall somewhere in between and, more significantly, patients would be paying the higher deductible for the more common outpatient services and doctors’ visits.

Obama has been saying for months that he is open to compromise on Medicare if that is what is necessary to get Republicans to support a tax increase. The Times suggests that the Medicare deal would likely end Republican threats to privatize Medicare and even end debate on the matter. However, Democrats and Republicans still remain far apart on “revenue increases,” the euphemism being used to indicate that the final deal might not include any tax increases at all and could even include further austerity for the middle class, like an end to the mortgage interest deduction on their income taxes. In typical Obama fashion, he started bargaining from a position of weakness and offered the store without winning anything concrete in return.

Increasing Medicare costs is a risky move politically, as seniors have among the highest rate of voter participation in the country and have almost universal support for the program. Medicare, which was implemented in 1965, along with the expansion of Social Security, contributed to a decline in poverty among seniors from 30% in 1965, to less than 10% today, the WSWS reports.

Inexpensive health care for seniors has also contributed to their increasing longevity. According to a Harvard study, 45,000 Americans die each year because they lack health coverage. The study also found that uninsured working-age Americans had a 40% higher chance of dying prematurely than their insured counterparts. Slashing Medicare benefits and making them more expensive will likely increase the death rate for seniors, too, because they will be less likely to see their doctors for routine checkups and maintenance of chronic illnesses.

Consequently, the new plan could take seniors back to a time when they were dying much sooner from treatable conditions and had a worse quality of life because of poverty.

The “debate” over Medicare has little to do with resolving any sort of budget crisis and everything to do with reducing government spending on “entitlements” that benefit the majority of Americans so that there is more tax revenue available to subsidize low taxes for the rich and to subsidize their businesses. The rich already have Cadillac insurance plans, subsidized by their employees, and not only have no need for Medicare themselves, but find it outrageous that any of their taxes should go toward keeping people alive who are no longer “productive” (read: exploitable at the workplace).

America’s Class War Against Youth

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

If the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement accomplished anything it was to focus public anger on America’s extreme and growing wealth gap, portraying it as the product of the greed and selfishness of the richest 1%.

This overly simplistic view obscures the actual socioeconomic relationships that are responsible for the transfer of wealth from the majority to the few, as well as who comprises this “few.”

The wealth gap is actually the by-product and goal of capitalism and the sociopolitical institutions that bolster it. All bosses in private businesses, regardless of how rich they may be, make their profits by paying their employees less than the value of their labor and pocketing this surplus value as profits (i.e., exploitation). The owner and employer classes transfer additional wealth to themselves through a taxation system that allows them to pay a lower effective tax rate than their employees pay, and through a legislative and legal system that facilitates their acquisition of more capital, sometimes even if it injures, sickens or kills others.

Exploitation of workers is the primary source of the wealth gap, particularly between employers and employees and the source of the so-called obscene wealth we see among the “1%.” However, wealth is also transferred from the young to the old, resulting in a growing wealth gap between older Americans and the young.

The wealth gap between younger and older Americans is currently the widest on record. In 1984 Americans who were sixty-five and over made ten times as much as those under the age of thirty-five. By 2008, older Americans were earning nearly forty-seven times as much as the younger age group. (For more, see the following articles in Esquire and Newsweek).

This wealth gap is not small, either. The median net worth of households headed by someone 65 or older has increased 42% since 1984, to a comfortable $170,494, while the median net worth for younger households has declined 68% to a desperate $3,662, according to the Pew Research Center.

The Pew study attributes some of the wealth transfer to timing: The older generation benefited from living and working in a strong economy and a long rise in housing prices. Conversely, older Americans have suffered far less under the current recession, with the median net worth of those under 35 falling 37% between 2005 and 2010, while falling only 13% for those over the age of 65. The recession has also forced many older Americans to continue working longer than they would have in the past, squeezing many younger workers out of jobs. The percentage of the workforce under the age of 25 has declined 13.2% since 2008, while rising 7.6% for those over 55.

However, the trend began decades before the current recession and has been facilitated by changes in government policy, which have been promoted by an aging politician class (today’s Congress is the oldest since World War II). For example, the federal government now spends $480 billion on Medicare, but only $68 billion on education, according to the Esquire article. As a whole, the U.S. government spends 7 times as much on its seniors as it does on its children, per capita, according to a 2009 Brookings Institution study. Mike Males writes that younger workers are currently contributing 15% of their payroll income to pay for Social Security and Medicare payments for seniors, since Congress gutted the Social Security Trust Fund (originally designed to cover future generation’s benefits) to pay for current government needs.

The transfer of wealth from young to old has been a hallmark of the Republican Party and would have been taken to new extremes under the Ryan tax plan. According to Males, younger Americans would have suffered under this plan in direct proportion to how young they are. Virtually every federal program designed to benefit the young and the poor would have been gutted or eliminated, including food stamps, Medicaid and job training. Federal spending on education would have been slashed by one-third. But Social Security and Medicare for today’s seniors would have been preserved. At the same time, median-income households headed by people 55-65 would have received tax breaks of roughly $1,200, while median-income households headed by people under 25 would have lost hundreds of dollars.

However, the Democrats have also contributed to the generational wealth transfer. Under Obama’s 2012 budget, for example, Medicare and Social Security were left alone, while the Adolescent Family Life Program and the Career Pathways Innovation Fund were ended. Likewise, the AmeriCorps program was slashed and had to turn away 75% of applicants last year, while recent changes to the Pell grant program will cost students an estimated $100 billion over the next ten years, according to the Esquire article. Similarly, Obama’s plan for avoiding the “fiscal cliff” involves raising the age of eligibility for Medicare benefits and cutting benefits for future recipients of Medicare and Social Security. In other words, the benefits of today’s seniors would be preserved and subsidized on the backs of today’s youth.

So far I have only discussed the tangible, present-day ways younger Americans have been screwed. They have also been saddled with an enormous debt they will be paying well into the future through higher taxes, reduced benefits and services, and delayed retirement (or no retirement). The per capita debt in the U.S. is now $50,000, with much of it going toward paying for the longest wars in U.S. history (i.e., Iraq and Afghanistan) and huge tax breaks for the wealthy. Yet, the average student also owes $12,700 to the credit card companies and will owe $27,000 to college loans creditors, according to the Newsweek article. And despite incurring all this debt, college graduates’ income has dropped 11% over the last decade for men and 7.6% for women.

While some of this wealth transfer has merely helped middle class baby boomers live comfortable middle class retirements, much of it is really about helping banks, Wall Street investors, and large businesses reap ever larger profits on the backs of youths. Skyrocketing student debt, for example, contributes to the poverty of younger Americans. Yet, Obama’s student debt repayment plan may actually increase debt payments for many students, while his plan to cut spending on higher education by $10 billion could increase student need for loans, thus increasing profits for lenders and the hedge funds that trade students loans.

Unions Collaborate With Obama to Squeeze American Workers

Image from Flickr, by DonkeyHotey

With the country moving ever closer to the “fiscal cliff,” the Obama Administration is doing everything it can to strike a “grand bargain” that appeases the ruling elite. The grand bargain is a euphemism for an austerity package that will maintain low taxes for the wealthy and subsidies for their business by slashing social spending and services that help keep the rest of the country from sinking further into poverty.

Union leaders met with the president on Tuesday to give their support for his plan which will include large cuts to social programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps and other welfare programs, the WSWS reported this week. Because there is broad support for most of these programs, the President is depending on the unions to help quell popular opposition and avert the kinds of protests and mass discontent seen in Greece, Spain, Portugal and the UK.

While the unions have claimed they are fighting to protect American workers from austerity, their actions indicate that their actual goal is to sell the president’s scam as a good deal for their members.  AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, for example, said his organization was committed to making sure that the middle class and workers don’t end up “paying the tab for a party that we didn’t get to,” and he asserted that the president had the same commitment. Also present at the meeting were Mary Kay Henry, head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Lee Saunders of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association (NEA). Mary Kay Henry said “We expect to have the president’s back on the agenda that the voters just declared support for. The president has always said he needs a movement behind his mandate.”

Unions Have President’s Back (As He Attacks the Middle and Working Classes)

In 2011 Obama proposed a deficit-reduction plan that would have raised the eligibility age for Medicare, cut Medicare benefits, reduced Social Security benefits, slashed Medicaid, and reduced tax deductions for the middle and working classes. According to the WSWS, William Daley (White House chief of staff when Obama first proposed this “grand bargain”) told Bloomberg News that this would be Obama’s starting point for the next round of negotiations with Republicans. To make matters worse, the extension on unemployment benefits will automatically expire on January 1, ending payments to over 2 million unemployed workers and Obama has said nothing about how (or if) he would avert this disaster.

The “bargain” in this Grand Bargain is Obama’s insistence that taxes must be raised on those earning more than $250,000 per year. However, he has indicated that he would be willing to consider other ways of increasing revenue from the wealthy, like maintaining current tax rates, but decreasing deductions. In either case, the rich earn most of their income through capital gains, which are taxed at the relatively low rate of 15%. Thus many, like Mitt Romney, end up paying a far lower effective rate than the majority of Americans (who earn most or all of their income through salaries) and will continue to do so even if Obama wins approval for tax increases on the wealthy.

Further evidence that Obama is planning austerity for the majority of Americans comes from a secret document leaked last week to Meet the Press. The document indicates that in 2011 Obama proposed over two dollars in cuts for every dollar in increased revenue ($2.8 trillion in cuts and $1.2 trillion in tax increases), setting the stage for raising the debt ceiling and the automatic spending cuts that comprise the “fiscal cliff.” The document revealed that Obama was willing to cut TRICARE (health insurance for the military and veterans) and to lower tax rates for business and for the wealthy. The document also suggested cutting Medicare by $250 billion between 2012 and 2021 and by $800 billion between 2022 and 2031. It proposed cutting Social Security payments by $112 billion over the next 10 years and cutting veterans’ disability payments by $24 billion. It also suggested slashing $11 billion from military retirement and $33 billion from benefits for retired federal employees, as well as $2 billion from nutrition assistance, $4 billion from flood insurance and $10 billion from higher education.

All this sounds exactly like an attempt to make American workers pay the tab for a party they didn’t attend. The Republicans have refused to sign off on any tax increases for the wealthy and Obama has indicated he would be willing to lower their tax liability. A few Republicans, like Mitch McConnell, have indicated they might accept a cap on deductions in exchange for cuts to entitlements (e.g., slashing Medicare and Social Security) and Obama has indicated he is open to this. In the end, the rich will sacrifice little or nothing toward closing the federal deficit, which will be subsidized almost entirely by reductions in services and programs that benefit the majority. Yet the deficit is almost entirely a byproduct of gifts to the wealthy, like subsidies to defense contractors, oil and coal companies, and big Agri-business; bailouts of banks; and tax breaks for the wealthy and their businesses.

Thanks for Your Vote, Now Prepare for Your Punishment

Obama handily won reelection yesterday, promising in his victory speech to work with both parties to slash the deficit (which means large cuts to social programs like Medicare and Social Security and generally reducing living standards for the majority of Americans).

Based on what he didn’t say during the campaign, he is unlikely to do anything different or more on climate change, which means U.S. carbon emissions will hold steady or climb and a continuation (or increase) in super storms, droughts and food insecurity.

Education policy will continue as it has for the past 12 years, with a proliferation of high stakes testing for children and accountability and punishment for teachers. We should expect more districts and states to adopt Value Added evaluation deform, merit pay, blended learning, common core and other giveaways to private education corporations.

The U.S. will continue the slaughter of civilians throughout the world by use of unmanned drones. There will be plenty of U.S. troops killing and being killed on the ground in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. The war on immigrants will carry on with mass deportations and incarceration.

And the transfer of wealth from the majority of Americans to the very rich will continue unabated.

Thanks for your vote, suckers. Enjoy the ride!

Obama Care: Let the Poor Die in the Streets

The Obama administration gave California the green light to slash hundreds of millions of dollars from Medi-Cal, the Los Angeles Times reported this week. The plan calls for cuts of 10% to providers, including physicians, dentists, clinics, pharmacies and most nursing homes. The new plan would give doctors only $11 per office visit. As a result, fewer doctors will be willing to treat the 7.6 million poor and disabled Californians served by the Medi-Cal program.

A spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told the Times that the decision gives California the flexibility necessary to address its budget shortfall. The cuts are expected to bring in an extra $623 million, out of a total $14 billion annual Medi-Cal budget.

Of course increasing taxes on the state’s 600,000 millionaires is out of the question even though a 1% tax on millionaires would bring in $6 billion per year or ten times what the cuts would save (a conservative estimate based on the assumption that all millionaires earn exactly $1 million per year).

California also wants to implement co-pays for Medi-Cal recipients and limit the number of times patients can see a doctor. Poor patients would have to cough up $5 for each doctor's visits, $50 for emergency room visits and $100 a day for hospital stays. Most would be limited to seven doctor’s visits per year. The latter limitation seems almost punitive, as the increased costs to users alone would likely limit their use of the program. More significantly, the increased cost for hospital visits will likely result in some patients foregoing emergency services for potentially life threatening conditions in hopes they can save a few bucks and ride it out at home. As a result, the number of preventable deaths in California will probably grow.

California already spends less on Medicare than any other state. It has been setting the national standard for how far states can go to gut the program and jettison their poor and indigent residents. By allowing California to further slash Medi-Cal, the federal government has set a precedent for other states to follow. With the unemployment showing no signs of abating and existing jobs continuing a downward spiral of low wages and lousy or nonexistent benefits, the number of Americans dependent of programs like Medicare will only grow.

State of the Union: Sacrifice by the Many to Create Prosperity for the Rich

Clichés and Bogus Budgeting

I Want You to Sacrifice for Capitalism (Image by Beverly & Pack)

“Every day, families sacrifice to live within their means,” said Obama in his state of the union address, tossing out a cliché in lieu of empathy for the millions Americans who are suffering from unemployment, foreclosures, and wage and benefits cuts. “They deserve a government that does the same.” Of course we don’t have a choice. We can only borrow so much before the banks come after us. The opposite is true with the feds. The banks came after them and got everything they wanted.

If Obama truly wanted the government to “live within its means” he’d have to immediately end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and take back the trillions of dollars spent to bail out Wall Street. These are the two biggest causes of the budget deficit. Instead, he offered a domestic spending freeze for the next 5 years which, with inflation and a growing population, will result in a de facto cut in spending.

Sympathy for the Devil

In typical political double speak he said, “let’s make sure that we’re not doing it [cutting spending] on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens.” In reality, his spending freeze will fall almost entirely on the most vulnerable citizens. For example, he proposed slashing Medicare and Medicaid, which would impact the poorest Americans more than anyone else, and he suggested that Social Security should be “reformed,” (code for privatized) which could result in millions losing the ability to support themselves in their old age.

“The competition for jobs is real,” he said, in reference to China and India, a statement intended to rally workers into a nationalistic frenzy, uniting them with their bosses (or former bosses) in hatred of Chinese and Indian laborers. Workers who blame each other are less able to fight their really enemy, their bosses and the ruling elite. And why should they if they believe their bosses share their concerns? Shamefully, the AFL-CIO has been complicit in this economic nationalism.

Of course the reason so much U.S. manufacturing has gone to China is precisely their low wages, which are the consequence of government suppression of all independent labor organizing, something that U.S. capitalists and politicians love and have no desire to quell. When they do mention China’s human rights record, it is both hypocritical and cynical, as it is intended only to feed U.S. nationalism and distract U.S. workers from the deplorable state of their own unions. Obama made no mention of the fact that only 11% of the U.S. workers are organized in unions, compared with over 30% in the 1950s, nor did he mention his own role in quashing the Employee Free Choice Act which might have mitigated this.

Obama’s solution was to “make America the best place on Earth to do business. We need to take responsibility for our deficit, and reform our government. That’s how our people will prosper.” In other words, it’s not about unemployment or “the people” at all; it’s about corporate profits and corporate prosperity. Making America the best place on Earth to do business means lowering corporate taxes, weakening unions and easing safety, health and environmental regulations (see Obama’s Deregulation Orgy). Taking responsibility for the deficit does not mean that corporate bailouts and wars, the real causes of the deficit, will be abandoned. Those are untouchable. Rather, average Americans will have to take responsibility through cuts to social services.

The State of Education

We Need to Respect Our Teachers, Like In Asia (Micah Sittig)

Obama had more of the same when it came to education. He blamed parents saying only they “can make sure the TV is turned off and homework gets done,” without acknowledging the incredible impact that poverty has on student achievement, something that parents have virtually no control over. Parents who are working two jobs or evening shifts are not in fact able to ensure that the TV is turned off and that homework is completed. Often, the homework is not completed because the kids themselves are working to help keep food on the table.

He also blamed schools, saying that many do not have “high expectations and high performance.” Of course he has no way of knowing how many schools lack high expectations, as this is not currently measured by NCLB or by Race to the Top (RTTT). While NCLB tests do measure student performance in math and English, they tell us very little about the performance of the school. Nevertheless, he had a solution for this problem that may or may not exist: More RTTT which, in a moment of self-aggrandizement (or acknowledgment that there has been no meaningful reform), he called “the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation.” He also called for merit pay and an end to tenure: “We want to reward good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones.”

In a truly twisted bit of double speak he suggested that the South Korean education system was superior to ours because of their great respect for teachers. “In South Korea, teachers are known as nation builders. Here in America, it’s time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect.” Aside from the fact that Obama, Duncan and all the other Ed Deformers have had plenty of time to treat us with respect and failed, this quotation is particularly eerie in its candid admission of the true role that teachers play in the capitalist economy: pumping out more workers and consumers who can enrich the bosses. This can hardly be seen as a show of respect.

So important is the role of teachers in keeping the corporate machinery running that he made a special plea to young people to go into the noble profession, appealing to their patriotism. “If you want to make a difference in the life of our nation; if you want to make a difference in the life of a child—become a teacher. Your country needs you.” Uncle Sam says, Your Country Needs You to Make a Sacrifice, a big sacrifice since that degree and teaching credential may result in a debt of $20-30,000, while teaching wages have stagnated or declined in most districts, making it all but impossible to repay that debt. Even if money is no object, there are the increasing demands of RTTT and NCLB, the pressure to make low achieving students suddenly achieve, and the increasingly vitriolic attacks by pundits. It’s hard to see even patriotism being enough to encourage someone to go into teaching under these conditions.