Both the Washington Post and the New York Times are looking for readers to help them comb through every jot and tittle of Sarah Palin's official gubernnatorial e-mail correspondence. I guess that's a few more jobs the Obama administration can claim credit for, especially since it indirectly amounts to free oppo research for the 2012 Obama campaign.
Continue reading …Syrian refugees in Turkey: ‘People see the regime is lying. It is falling apart’
June 9, 2011 No Comment
Bloodied but defiant, those who have fled the besieged town of Jisr al-Shughour damn the rule of Bashar al-Assad As the blood from a gunshot wound oozed down his right thigh, Abu Majid shook his fist: “You know what dictatorships are like in the Middle East,” he said. “Syria was the strongest of them all, like an iron ball. Well it isn’t any more.” The 39-year-old elder from the besieged Syrian town of Jisr al-Shughour fled with his wife and children to southern Turkey after he says he was shot last Saturday in a battle – the fiercest yet during the three-month uprising. Since fleeing, he has kept in contact with men who stayed in Syria, and others among the several thousand who have crossed the border as government forces prepare for what many fear will be a full-scale assault on a largely abandoned town that was, until Saturday, home to 41,000 people. After five days away from his homeland, Abu Majid is convinced that the four decades of unshakable autocracy he left behind are now steadily unravelling. He is sure that the government’s claim that armed locals killed 120 government forces through ambushes and assaults in Jisr al-Shughour over the weekend will soon be proved wrong. He is sure, too, that those who oppose the rule of President Bashar al-Assad now outnumber his supporters. But he says Assad’s government is stirring sectarian chaos as it tries to claw back the legitimacy it lost during street demonstrations across the country, which it regularly crushed through violence. “We never thought in sectarian ways before all this happened,” he said. “And now people are talking about Sunnis, Alawites, Shias, Christians. You can say many things about us, but you can’t say that Syria was ever like Iraq or Lebanon. This is leading the country into the unknown.” Officials in southern Turkey said that about 2,500 Syrians, many from Jisr al-Shughour, had crossed the border. Despite being told by their hosts not to speak publicly about the uprising, refugees are still willing to talk about the events of last weekend, which Damascus has tried to cast as an armed rebellion that it had no choice but to put down. “There was a desertion,” said Abu Majid. “I saw it with my own eyes. There were a large number of strangers in town on Saturday. I don’t know who they were, they were big men, many of them bearded and most in civilian clothes. They started shooting at the people and some of the security forces tried to join us. They were killed – there were many of them killed.” In beds alongside him in Antakiya’s government hospital, three other Syrians, also nursing wounds, chimed in. They had all been shot in earlier clashes on 20 May at a village 10 miles south of Jisr al-Shughour. “Assad has never liked our area,” said one of the men. “He tried to get us then and they were the first moments of what eventually happened on the weekend.” A second man, whose three-week-old groin wound seeped a tangerine slime, said that Jisr al-Shughour and the Sunni Arab area that surrounds it has long been considered by the Assad regime, which is made up of a clan all from a minority Alawite Muslim sect, to be potentially disloyal. “When they decided to turn this into a sectarian problem, it was easy to attack our area and them blame us for attacking them. They are liars and they are starting to pay for their lies.” Syrians learned almost 30 years ago what to expect when the army descends en masse on a village. In 1982, between 10,000 and 40,000 people were killed by the military of Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, in the wake of an Islamic uprising. The UN has cautioned against anything like a repeat. Navi Pillay, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, accused Syrian leaders of trying to “bludgeon its population into submission”. Turkey said on Thursday that it would not close its border to refugees fleeing Syria, and by nightfall the flow of people crossing the border that snakes between the two countries appeared to have increased. In the village of Guvecci in the deep south, minivans were shuttling along a bitumen road between the countries, disgorging dozens of men, women and children who then made their way along dirt roads that wove between olive groves. Along the highway south to Turkey’s southernmost extremities and north to Antakiya, police and military officers were stationed by mid-morning in an attempt to make sure that all refugees were ushered into makeshift camps – and away from waiting press. Hundreds of white tents had been erected in the town of Yayladagi and mattresses were piled in the back of lorries in anticipation of a further influx. Several hundred people remained in a no-man’s land near Guvecci on Thursday, apparently unsure whether to proceed to Turkey or to go back to their villages. Locals told the Guardian that up to 200 refugees had returned to Turkey on Thursday, in fear of ramifications from their exit. “They wouldn’t say whether they had been threatened,” said one man, Ibrahim Kerdje. On the road north, ambulances regularly passed by, taking casualties to hospitals in Antakiya, where the Turkish government has promised to treat wounded refugees free of charge. Allowing Syrians to cross the border, but not to speak, appears to be an extension of a delicate balancing act as Ankara tries to please the west by discharging its humanitarian obligations, while appeasing Damascus by trying to prevent the scrutiny it fears. On Wednesday, the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said: “We hope that Syria softens its stance towards civilians as soon as possible and makes the steps it is taking for reforms more convincing for civilians, for a transformation.” The wounded in the hospital ward were not convinced. “It won’t always be closed like it has been,” said Abu Majid as he leaned against a walking frame. “People now are clearly seeing the lies of the government. Every house in Syria has someone connected to the military of the intelligence service. That is how they have stayed so strong. “So people can see that the government is lying to them when they say that people in a place like Jisr al-Shughour have the ability to attack an army and kill so many people. It is impossible. For this to happen the regime has to be falling apart. Assad has to go, 100%. There is no returning to the time before 15 March.” Syria Turkey Refugees Middle East Arab and Middle East unrest Martin Chulov guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …After a review of petition signatures, the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board has approved recall elections for three Democrats. Via ThinkProgress : The Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, which oversees elections in the state, has now green-lit three recalls targeting Democratic state Sens. Dave Hansen, Jim Holperin and Robert Wirch — but it was a close call, as the board grappled all through the day with a topic that isn’t discussed too much in the media: Alleged election fraud that is perpetrated by Republicans . It’s nice to see a focus on the GOP brand of election fraud, particularly in the form of paid petition gatherers, a topic I’ve written about before after seeing what they’ve done here in California. JSOnline: Memos to the board lay out the specific challenges to petition signatures enumerated in the three senators’ challenges to the petitions, and they do make recommendations on how to dispose with those challenges. Bottom line: These individual challenges leave enough valid signatures in each recall effort to force an election. That would be 15,636 valid signatures against Hansen (compared with 13,852 needed to force an election); 19,446 for Holperin (compared with 15,960 needed); and 17,139 for Wirch (13,537 needed). But there’s a separate memo that deals at length with the Democrats’ allegations that there was substantial fraud employed in collecting signatures against the senators. Among the claims: Circulators misstated their addresses on the petitions, misled some of the signers, and illegally certified petitions that had been collected by others. The board’s staff leaves open several options for the board: To follow a rule that only individual signatures could be thrown out, and not whole pages of signatures (this was a rule argued for by Republicans replying to the Democratic challenges); to throw out those pages of signatures collected by certain circulators alleged to have committed fraud; or to throw out the entire petitions because the whole process was tainted by fraud. Here’s a textbook description of how those professional gatherers operate: Democrats had used their ten-day response period, after Republican activists had submitted the completed petitions, to conduct extensive phone surveys of the people whose names were on the forms. Along the way, they produced affidavits from people alleging various dirty tricks, ranging from claims that they were misled into signing — being told that it was to support the legislator in question, or to recall Walker, etc — to claims from some individuals that they did not sign their names at all, but were forged as having done so (possibly by getting their names from the phonebook). Most notoriously, the Dems found the purported signature of a man who had been dead for 20 years, but whose name was still in the phonebook (by peculiar circumstance, he was the father of a very liberal current Democratic state representative). In addition, they found a married couple for whom the signatures were clearly written in the same hand — but both people have signed affidavits that neither of them actually did sign. Bottom line: Even if the pages were tossed which had fraudently obtained signatures, there would be enough signatures for the recall. The Republican State Senators’ recall election will be held July 12, and the Democrats’ recall election will be held July 19.
Continue reading …After a review of petition signatures, the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board has approved recall elections for three Democrats. Via ThinkProgress : The Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, which oversees elections in the state, has now green-lit three recalls targeting Democratic state Sens. Dave Hansen, Jim Holperin and Robert Wirch — but it was a close call, as the board grappled all through the day with a topic that isn’t discussed too much in the media: Alleged election fraud that is perpetrated by Republicans . It’s nice to see a focus on the GOP brand of election fraud, particularly in the form of paid petition gatherers, a topic I’ve written about before after seeing what they’ve done here in California. JSOnline: Memos to the board lay out the specific challenges to petition signatures enumerated in the three senators’ challenges to the petitions, and they do make recommendations on how to dispose with those challenges. Bottom line: These individual challenges leave enough valid signatures in each recall effort to force an election. That would be 15,636 valid signatures against Hansen (compared with 13,852 needed to force an election); 19,446 for Holperin (compared with 15,960 needed); and 17,139 for Wirch (13,537 needed). But there’s a separate memo that deals at length with the Democrats’ allegations that there was substantial fraud employed in collecting signatures against the senators. Among the claims: Circulators misstated their addresses on the petitions, misled some of the signers, and illegally certified petitions that had been collected by others. The board’s staff leaves open several options for the board: To follow a rule that only individual signatures could be thrown out, and not whole pages of signatures (this was a rule argued for by Republicans replying to the Democratic challenges); to throw out those pages of signatures collected by certain circulators alleged to have committed fraud; or to throw out the entire petitions because the whole process was tainted by fraud. Here’s a textbook description of how those professional gatherers operate: Democrats had used their ten-day response period, after Republican activists had submitted the completed petitions, to conduct extensive phone surveys of the people whose names were on the forms. Along the way, they produced affidavits from people alleging various dirty tricks, ranging from claims that they were misled into signing — being told that it was to support the legislator in question, or to recall Walker, etc — to claims from some individuals that they did not sign their names at all, but were forged as having done so (possibly by getting their names from the phonebook). Most notoriously, the Dems found the purported signature of a man who had been dead for 20 years, but whose name was still in the phonebook (by peculiar circumstance, he was the father of a very liberal current Democratic state representative). In addition, they found a married couple for whom the signatures were clearly written in the same hand — but both people have signed affidavits that neither of them actually did sign. Bottom line: Even if the pages were tossed which had fraudently obtained signatures, there would be enough signatures for the recall. The Republican State Senators’ recall election will be held July 12, and the Democrats’ recall election will be held July 19.
Continue reading …This morning marked Ann Curry's first day as the new co-anchor for the Today show and perhaps as a way of moving on, the longtime newsreader is owning some of her worst gaffes and had this bit of advice for aspiring journalists: “never Google drunk.” Curry relayed those words of wisdom in the June 13 issue of Newsweek, where she tallied some of her most embarrassing moments, including the one time she mixed up Wheaton Colleges. As previously documented by Newsbusters , during a commencement address to students at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, Curry mistakenly listed famous graduates of Wheaton College in Illinois. Curry, as seen in the following excerpt, revealed the reason for the error was she was a little bit too tipsy when she prepared her remarks. Probably my favorite mistake was not on television. Last year I gave a commencement address at Wheaton College. I prepared this strong speech that I thought would be compelling to the graduates. At the last moment, after dinner with my family, I decided to include a mention of all the great people who graduated from the school. I went to the computer and added the names: Dennis Hastert, Billy Graham, Wes Craven. It was only later that I discovered that none of those people had gone to Wheaton College in Norton, Mass. They had graduated from Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill. I didn’t find out about my mistake until after I walked off in my cap and gown. I think mor-tified is the best way to describe how I felt. I wrote a letter of apology to the school. I owned the mistake. I just wanted to make sure the students felt taken care of. In the speech, I tried to tell them something that would be useful. I didn’t want anything to take away from that. And I learned a valuable lesson: never Google drunk.
Continue reading …NYT’s Seelye Again Flubs John Edwards’s Dem ID; Zeleny Calls Indictment a ‘Tragedy All the Way Around’
June 9, 2011 No Comment
Another day, another New York Times story by Katharine Seelye story on liberal Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards that completely leaves out the words “liberal” and “Democrat” — an admiring profile of Edwards’s loyal daughter, ” For Edwards’s Adult Daughter, A Recurring Role: Family Glue ,” which led Thursday's National section. Seelye’s initial online story on Edwards’s indictment last Friday also left out the disgraced politician’s party affiliation, though it was added in by the time the story appeared in print Saturday. From Thursday's piece: At the courthouse, Ms. Edwards, a graduate of Harvard Law School, appeared composed. She has come by her strength the hard way, having coped with more than her share of pain, much of it on the public stage. Fifteen years ago, when she was barely a teenager, her 16-year-old brother, Wade, was thrown from a car and killed on his way to the family beach house. For two years, her mother later wrote, Cate slept on two chairs pushed together in her parents’ room, but she emerged as the glue that would hold the family together. Last week, reporter Jeff Zeleny (pictured) had sounded almost regretful about the Edwards prosecution in a very brief segment on the June 3 Washington Week in Review. Zeleny: “It was pretty unbelievable. Four years ago, right now, he was in Iowa. He was in New Hampshire. And it just goes to show that we never exactly know what is going on in a campaign. So a lot of voters had their eyes on Senator Edwards and thought that he was the strongest nominee possible. I remember back to 2003, at this period, the people inside the Bush White House thought that he was the guy who could beat George W. Bush. And of course, it's not ended very well for him and it's a tragedy all the way around. We can argue the merits of, if this is a rightful prosecution or not, the — a jury will decide that in North Carolina — but it just goes to show that flash and appearance is not you know perhaps the most important thing in a candidate. He had a lot of that. And he had substance as well, but–” Host Gwen Ifill: “And even if the government can't prove its case here, he's still — the things he's admitted to are still things people find pretty objectionable.” Zeleny: “Right.” Ifill: “Yes. Well, we’ll talk some more about him during the webcast…” “Tragedy” is certainly not how the Times treated the indictment of another politico, Dick Cheney's aide Lewis Libby (who also had a supportive family)
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Known as incredibly competent and intensely private, Huma Abedin, 34, was one of the most well-regarded players in the Democratic Party long before she married Representative Anthony Weiner in 2010. See photos of a woman now caught in her husband’s scandal.
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Country recovering from collapse of its banks and government is using social media to get citizens to share their ideas It is not the way the scribes of yore would have done it but Iceland is tearing up the rulebook by drawing up its new constitution through crowdsourcing. As the country recovers from the financial crisis that saw the collapse of its banks and government, it is using social media to get its citizens to share their ideas as to what the new document should contain. “I believe this is the first time a constitution is being drafted basically on the internet,” said Thorvaldur Gylfason, member of Iceland’s constitutional council. “The public sees the constitution come into being before their eyes … This is very different from old times where constitution makers sometimes found it better to find themselves a remote spot out of sight, out of touch.” Iceland’s existing constitution dates back to when it gained independence from Denmark in 1944. It simply took the Danish constitution and made a few minor adjustments, such as substituting the word “president” for “king”. In creating the new document, the council has been posting draft clauses on its website every week since the project launched in April. The public can comment underneath or join a discussion on the council’s Facebook page . The council also has a Twitter account , a YouTube page where interviews with its members are regularly posted, and a Flickr account containing pictures of the 25 members at work, all intended to maximise interaction with citizens. Meetings of the council are open to the public and streamed live on to the website and Facebook page. The latter has more than 1,300 likes in a country of 320,000 people. The crowdsourcing follows a national forum last year where 950 randomly selected people spent a day discussing the constitution. If the committee has its way the draft bill, due to be ready at the end of July, will be put to a referendum without any changes imposed by parliament – so it will genuinely be a document by the people, for the people. Given that it was intended to go to a referendum, Gylfason said, the idea was that the public should be involved from the start of the process and not just at the end. Social media is seen as a way of making that happen with Iceland’s population among the world’s most computer-literate. Two-thirds of its people are on Facebook. Gylfason said he had been pleasantly surprised by the level of discussion. “There’s been a lot of goodwill for what we are trying to do. The public have added much to our debate. Their comments have been quite helpful and they have had a positive effect on the outcome.” Gylfason, an economics professor at the University of Iceland, said the draft bill would include checks and responsibilities for parliament and provisions for separation of powers intended to prevent a repeat of the financial crisis. It would also contain significant changes in the way MPs are elected and judges appointed. Iceland Europe Internet Financial crisis Global recession Social media Crowdsourcing Facebook Social networking YouTube Flickr Haroon Siddique guardian.co.uk
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Hospitals and primary care trusts alerted to security breach, but no patient’s medical records accessed during incident The NHS has been warned to beware of computer hackers after it was targeted by the same group that conducted cyber assaults on Sony and Nintendo. Hospital trusts and primary care trusts (PCTs) across England have been alerted to the security breach by Connecting for Health, the Department of Health’s IT branch, after one PCT was hacked. The perpetrators were self-styled international “pirate-ninja” hackers LulzSec, who describe themselves as “the world’s leaders in high-quality entertainment at your expense”. They gained attention recently when they penetrated the security of entertainment corporations. No patient’s medical records were accessed during the incident, the department stressed. It described it as “a local issue” and “quite a low-level” lapse in IT security which only affected part of the website of an unnamed NHS organisation – one of England’s 150 or so PCTs. “This is a local issue affecting a very small number of website administrators. No patient information has been compromised. No national NHS information systems have been affected. The Department has issued guidance about how to protect and secure all information assets,” a departmental spokeswoman said. “We are confident that there was no damage done and no harm done in terms of patient information or anything else.” The breach was uncovered by the magazine Health Service Journal. LulzSecclaimed to have obtained the passwords “months ago”. Earlier this month, LulzSec hacked in to the website of Sony Pictures Entertainment and exposed information from 37,000 users, including names, passwords, birthdates and email addresses. It also hacked into a webserver belonging to Nintendo in the US. The group claims it contacted the NHS on Wednesday to alert them to its breach of IT security. A version of LulzSec’s message with details of the passwords blanked out, and posted on Twitter, said that it said: “Greetings… we’re a somewhat known band of pirate-ninjas that go by LulzSec. Some time ago, we were traversing the internet for signs of enemy fleets. While you aren’t considered an enemy – your work is of course brilliant – we did stumble upon several of your admin passwords. We mean you no harm and only want to help you fix your tech issues.” In other tweets it added that “we never planned to exploit those passwords. We sit on admin passwords for many things” and that they “Blacked out some important areas until they fix the problem.” NHS Health Hacking Data and computer security Data protection Denis Campbell guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Good grief, this nonsense is just exhausting. Nothing is ever settled with these people, they have been coming after Social Security for 75 years, and they just don’t quit, no matter how many times they get chased down with walkers and eaten alive by gray panthers . It’s like they are programmed or genetically manipulated, like one of those creepy super-soldiers from science fiction that can’t stop fighting after the war is over, even though they recognize the reality. Nah, I give them too much credit in that scenario. They are just zombie-nihilists and Social Security is the brain they are driven to eat. To prove the charges I just filed against them, I offer into evidence Rep. Pete Sessions, of Texas. House Republicans on Friday introduced legislation that would allow workers to partially opt out of Social Security immediately, and fully opt out after 15 years. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, and several other Republicans introduced the Savings Account for Every American (SAFE) Act. Under the bill, workers would immediately have 6.2 percent of their wages sent to a “SAFE” account each year. That would take the place of the 6.2 percent the workers now contributed to Social Security. Another 6.2% is sent to Social Security by employers. Under the Sessions bill, employers would continue to make this matching contribution to Social Security, but after 15 years, employers could also send that amount to the employee’s SAFE account. Sessions said this transition to a private retirement savings option is needed because Social Security last year began paying out more money than it took in. “Our nation’s Social Security Trust Fund is depleting at an alarming rate, and failure to implement immediate reforms endangers the ability of Americans to plan for their retirement with the options and certainty they deserve,” Sessions said. “To simply maintain the status quo would weaken American competitiveness by adding more unsustainable debt and insolvent entitlements to our economy when we can least afford it.” Sigh. They just keep telling the zombie-lie about the trust fund. Okay, let’s do this once more, this time with feeling: There is no Social Security crisis . The trust fund he is pretending to be panicked about was established to deal with the baby boom generation that started retiring and coming into the system this year. It was built up over the last three decades for this very purpose. And Sessions knows this full well. When one tells an untruth that doesn’t square with reality and one knows one is telling an untruth, that is a lie and the person doing the lying is what is known, in the common vernacular, as a liar . Pete Sessions is, therefore, a liar. This is now an established fact, verified by empirical evidence. The legislation is couched in inoccuous, friendly even, terms like “employee choice” but the part that they don’t mention and the press hasn’t bothered to report is what would happen if legislation like this were to pass…it would collapse the system. Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system. If large numbers of people “opted out” then it would collapse — which is really what the privatizers want, they just can’t come right out and say that. Now let’s be realistic. This legislation is not going anywhere so long as Democrats control one chamber of Congress and the Presidency. Privatizing Ryan left Social Security out of his crosshairs because even he knows that Social Security privatization is a non-starter. It’s only been six years since Bush floated his privatization scheme, and he never recovered politically from the attempt. The bill has only attracted a handful of co-sponsors and they could all be accurately described as “the epitome of wingnuttery.” There is no rush to bring it to the floor for a vote, and I seriously doubt John Boehner lets one take place, not with the Medicare fiasco still nipping at his heels and threatening the republican majority in the House. But that hasn’t stopped the Democrats from making hay out of it anyway. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel (N.Y.) on Tuesday predicted that House Republican plans to let workers opt out of Social Security would fail as voters realize how it will threaten their retirement. “Seniors who have paid into Social Security through a lifetime of hard work shouldn’t end up in a risky privatization scheme to gamble their retirement on Wall Street,” Israel said. “The public has rejected this kind of Social Security privatization in the past and will again.” Israel accused Republicans of looking to resolve the government’s fiscal crisis by scaling back Medicare and Social Security while ignoring higher corporate taxes. “Everyone agrees we need to tighten our belt, but why do out-of-touch Republicans insist on tightening it around our retirees without asking Big Oil companies for one dime of sacrifice?” he asked. That’s all well and good, and Israel is correct in leveling the charge. But there is another angle I would like to see the Democrats pursuing here, and that is how privatizing the programs that we have established for retirees is of a piece with the GOP’s war on women , because any privatization scheme would hit women especially hard. Social Security is the single most effective program to keep women out of poverty in their retirement years that the nation has ever created. Here are some facts about women and Social Security that you may not know, but should. 26% of women aged 65-69 are reliant upon Social Security for virtually all of their income (90% or more) and that number climbs as women age. Although women are more reliant on Social Security to provide their basic needs in retirement, men receive benefits that are about 25% more than those of women. The average benefit for a woman is around $12,000 per year, while for men it is about $16,000 per year. This is especially important for women, because far more American women than men — 11% versus 7% — lived in poverty in 2009 (the last year for which complete numbers are available.) It becomes even more important for people who live alone. When older people live alone, the likelihood that they live in poverty jumps dramatically, to 17% for women and to 12% for men. Minority women are hit especially hard, with more than 20% of African-American, Hispanic and Native American women 65 and over living in poverty. The poverty rate is 8% for non-Hispanic white females in this age group, and 15% for Asian women. Without Social Security, one half of all women over 65 and two-thirds of women over 65 who live alone would live in poverty. 3.1. million children received Social Security survivors benefits after losing the support of a parent to death or disability, and those benefits lifted 1.1 million of those children out of poverty. Since Social Security became the law of the land in 1935, it has proven extremely effective at standing between women and the proverbial poor house, and that is not a pattern that shows any signs of changing any time soon. While it is true that the gender-iniquities that were part of the program at it’s inception have been righted, women are still playing catch-up. Much of the labor performed by women is uncompensated, and therefore doesn’t pay anything in to the program for her to draw on later. Women still sacrifice large amounts of their prime earning time to provide care for young children, aging parents and eventually young grandchildren. This negatively impacts the amount of monthly benefit they receive in retirement — and if republican efforts to gut Medicare and Medicaid see the light of day, the amount of uncompensated work women do will increase dramatically. What do the privatizers think will happen to women who could not simultaneously care for their families and pay into the system? They certainly aren’t going to deliver us delayed compensation by paying in for us what would be paid in if our labor was compensated. I sincerely believe that they are intentionally coming after us uppity sluts between 45 and 55. We didn’t burn our bras. We burned the hand of anyone who touched us in an inappropriate way. They’ve been wanting to put us back in our place since high school, and they see this as the best chance they’ve had since the days when Scott Brown was a Cosmo centerfold. The returns on private accounts would depend on volatile markets and would not have COLAs built in to safeguard against inflation, nor would they provide spousal and dependent benefits. And that uncompensated labor that already impacts women’s benefits in the current system? Privatization schemes would devastate any hope for economic security in retirement, because without the shared risk pool that Social Security represents, many women — especially those who took a time out of the work force to raise families and take care of aged or ailing family members — would quickly outlive their assets and be destitute. We are not worthless, nor is our labor, and as I have said before, the older I get, the crankier I get about the fact that women are discounted, dismissed and disrespected with distressing frequency, and the sudden flurry of legislation that is aimed at putting all of us, regardless of age or fertility status, back in our place is methodical and intentional and something we have to stop now, before The Handmaid’s Tale comes to read like current events. * * * * * This post originally appeared at Show Me Progress and is part of a series I am writing as a blogging fellow for the Strengthen Social Security Campaign , a coalition of more than 270 national and state organizations dedicated to preserving and strengthening Social Security.
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