Now
Available!
Dime's
Worth of Difference:
Beyond the
Lesser of Two Evils
Order Here!
Today's
Stories
September 1,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part Two: Mark His Words
August 31,
2004
Joseph Nevins
Escapism
and Global Apartheid: The Dominican Republic & the NYTs
Matt Vidal
Beyond
Bush's Rhetoric on the Economy
Neve Gordon
Kerry and the Middle East
Dave Lindorff
Bush
the Peace Candidate?
Mike Whitney
NPR Leads the Charge for War Against Iran
Jack Random
Opening Night: Playing the War Card
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: the Life and Crimes of George W. Bush (Part One)
CounterPunch Photo of the Day
Pete Seeger in NYC
August 30,
2004
Justin Podhur
The
Disappeared Mayor
Shaun Joseph
The
Hypocrites at TheNaderbasher.com
Mike Whitney
Israeli Moles in the Pentagon: What More Could They Possibly
Want?
Ron Jacobs
Live, From New York: the Majority of Protesters Claimed No Candidate
David Lindorff
Sunday in Manhattan: the Sound of Marchin', Chargin' Feet, Boy
Dave Zirin
USA Basketball: The Team White America Loved to Hate
Sam Husseini
Israeli Spying on the US: a Long History
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
August 28 /
29, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
Patrick Cockburn
Najaf Ceasefire Good for Iraq, But Weakens Allawi and US
Ray McGovern
Blowing Smoke on Intelligence
Dr. Juan Romagoza
From El Salvador to Abu Ghraib: Reflections of Torture Survivor
Ray Hanania
An Israeli Spy in the Pentagon? Ridiculous!
Fred Gardner
Eddie Lepp Busted by DEA: Facing Life for Growing Medical Pot
Diane Christian
Big Men: the Better Leader Lets You Live
William S. Lind
The Desert Fox
Paul D'Amato
The Left Takes a Dive for Kerry
Joshua Frank
Greens at the Crossroads
Mickey Z.
Media Declares War on Anti-War Protests
Winslow T. Wheeler
Sen. McCain's Pork Chops: an Exchange
Justin E.H.
Smith
The New Age Racket and the Left
Thomas St. John
Burning Slaves at the Stake: On "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God"
Ali Tonak
Help the NYPD?
Mark Engler
New York Says "No"
Justin Felux
Haiti: the Attica of the Americas
Poets' Basement
Gelman, Albert, Ford and Hamod
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
September
1, 2004
Litmus
Test
Time
for Kerry and Democrats to Take a Stand for Our Votes and Our
Financial Security
By
DAVE LINDORFF
John Kerry's campaign managers are reportedly
in near panic mode. Their candidate, who was supposed to be pulling
ahead of Bush, is slumping in the polls even before Bush reads
the acceptance speech his own campaign hands him on Thursday
evening. And little wonder thereps panic: Kerry and his Democratic
Leadership Council minders have thus far managed to make him
the candidate of no ideas, no positions, and no spine.
On foreign policy, he offers
just a promise to do everything Bush has done, only "better"
in some vague, undefined way. Domestically, he has offered little
that would energize the traditional Democratic base.
Fortunately, this past week
he was handed a golden opportunity to finally stake out a position
that could define him as a true man of the people-one that, if
he would take it, would win him Republican votes even from religious
conservatives, while losing him almost nothing.
This gift comes courtesy of
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, who a few days
ago made the outrageous statement that politicians need to tell
the Baby Boomer generation (of which I am a charter member at
55) that we aren't going to get the benefits we were promised
and that we worked for all these past three to four decades.
He says that to "save" Social Security, our generation's
benefits need to be cut.
Now first of all, let me point
out--as Kerry and Democratic candidates everywhere should be
doing, but aren't because Greenspan is held in reverence by everyone
in Washington--that this proposal to knife Baby  Boomers
in the back is coming from a guy who is already pulling down
the maximum Social Security benefit of $1800 a month, even as
he earns $200,000 a year at his day job, and who will be collecting
an additional $10,000 every month from his federal pension when
he finally steps down and moves to a retirement villa in Palm
Springs or Beverly Hills with his TV-producer wife.
But beyond the fact that this
modern-day Marie Antoinette has been thus far been given a pass
by Kerry and the Democrats, his threat to Boomer Social Security
benefits is also based on a grotesque lie--a lie that both our
corporate media and the supposed party of working people are
seemingly afraid to challenge.
The truth: there is no Social
Security crisis.
If Kerry's timid and clueless
issue people would call the Social Security Administration and
talk to the agency's actuarial people--the civil service guys
who just work with the numbers-they'd learn that even at this
late date with the first Baby Boomers just a decade away from
retirement, all it would take to shore up the Trust Fund with
enough cash to cover the entire flood of retires would be to
eliminate the cap on income that is subject to the Social Security
tax.
Right now, that cap is set
at a little over $80,000. If someone makes $120,000--or $200,000
like Mr. Greenspan--then $40,000 (or in Greenspan's case $$120,000)
of that income is exempt from taxation for the purposes of Social
Security.
Tax that extra income of the
upper strata of society (and remember, we're not talking about
joint family incomes of $80,000 here, we're talking about individual
payroll income) at the same rate as lower incomes are taxed,
and the Social Security shortfall vanishes completely.
You'd think that this would
be a no-brainer a Democrat like John Kerry. After all, the vast
majority of those making over $80,000 a year are Republicans
anyhow, and he'd likely win a huge number of new votes from Republican
workers who earn less than $80,000 and who are worried sick about
their retirement fund.
So why isn't Kerry jumping
on this? Because it's not just the rich who'd have to pay more
Social Security taxes. It's also their employers. Remember, when
you have 7.5 percent taken off the top of your paycheck each
pay period for Social Security, so does your boss. So ending
the cap on Social Security taxes for the wealthy would also mean
a higher payroll tax bill for employers-the ones who are pumping
huge amounts of cash into Kerry's campaign warchest to ensure
that he remains a creature of the corporations.
Clearly the supposedly worker-friendly
Democrats, John Kerry included, are afraid of and beholden to
that constituency. So afraid that they're thus far unable to
take up the call for a universal Social Security tax on all income-even
though not doing so could be consigning Kerry's campaign to the
fate of Dukakis and Mondale before him.
That should tell us a lot about
the sorry state of our political system.
We Baby Boomers don't have
to take this lying down! It's clear that a second Bush administration
will see a major assault on Social Security. But it's not good
enough to hear vague platitudes from Kerry to the effect that
he "won't raise the retirement age" and "won't
cut benefits." Absent a promise to go get the money from
the rich, who've been escaping Social Security taxation for decades,
his promises don't mean squat.
We Boomers, and younger workers
too, should condemn this craven threat from Greenspan to steal
our retirement. But at the same time, we should demand that John
Kerry, and every Democrat running for Congress, take a stand
now in favor of eliminating the cap on income subject to Social
Security taxation.
If they do this, they will
have a winning campaign theme. If they won't, they don't deserve
our votes.
Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing
Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new
book of CounterPunch columns titled "This
Can't be Happening!" to be published this fall by Common
Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by
Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
Keep
CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home
/ subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|