BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
Showing posts with label socialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label socialism. Show all posts
27 December 2025
YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE!!!!!
05 December 2024
Andrew Wilkes Is Convinced That the Gospel and Socialism Go Together 26NOV24
WHEN I turned 18 and registered to vote in Pennsylvania I registered as a Socialist, not just because I was against the military-industrial complex, war and American imperialism. I registered as a Socialist because of my faith. I was confirmed in the United Methodist Church and believed (and still do) in the teachings of Jesus Christ and was and am still inspired by the Beatitudes. I think the Beatitudes are the inspiration for secularism's attempts to address the inequalities in income, housing, education, health care, nutrition, child care and whatever other obstacles cause harm to others in our communities. The gop / greed over people-republican party never was and is not interested in the teachings of Jesus, and the Democratic party never agreed and will never agree to totally implementing the teachings of Jesus to guide their governing. I am still a Christian and a Socialist though I am a registered Democrat just so I can more fully participate in the democratic process of our political system. This from Sojourners......
Andrew Wilkes Is Convinced That the Gospel and Socialism Go Together
This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
26 November 2024
Back when X was called Twitter, and back when I had social media, I met Andrew Wilkes. I had read some of Wilkes’ writings on Black radicalism and capitalism, and immediately decided he was someone worth following. Not only was he writing on topics that occupied a major preoccupation of my own, but he was also a Black Christian.
While I think it is largely a myth that leftist politics is primarily a “white space” (whatever that means), I think it’s fair to say that Black Christian leftists are a rarity. So when I discovered Wilkes, I made a commitment to follow his work.
Far from being some theorist in an ebony tower, Wilkes is both a thinker and a doer. Wilkes recently completed his doctorate in political science at The City University of New York; he co-pastors the Double Love Experience Church in Brooklyn with his wife, Rev. Gabby Cudjoe-Wilkes; he has written one book with Rev. Cudjoe-Wilkes about Psalms for Black Lives; and he’s written another book about how Black radicals can help us imagine an economy outside of a scarcity mindset.
Wilkes is the co-chair of the board for the Institute for Christian Socialism, an organization committed to awakening “among followers of Jesus an awareness of and commitment to the socialism that is inherent to the Gospel.” I first heard of ICS and its publishing outlet, The Bias, after interacting with Wilkes on Twitter. In fact, I even became a dues-paying member and participated in a 2022 base society — which was ostensibly a small group dedicated to reading leftist Christian literature. However, due to a lack of transparency around organizational changes, I ended up suspending my membership. I spoke with Wilkes about this and asked what ICS has done to improve transparency with its members.
In my conversation with Wilkes, we talked about the 2024 election, the difficulties in organizing the Christian left, and his new book, Plenty Good Room.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Josiah R. Daniels, Sojourners: Who are you and what do you do?
Andrew Wilkes: I describe myself as a pastor, as a political scientist, as a writer, and as someone who tries to bring a bit of a contemplative spirit to both of those things.
And I think the hunger for love, for justice, [wondering] how else could we organize society ... is connected to the question of peace and calm in one’s interior life. And when you have regimes of austerity and injustice, it disfigures us on the inside as well as globally.
Tell me about your book, Plenty Good Room.
Plenty Good Room is grounded in the Black church tradition and a saying [that can be interpreted] in two ways: There’s “plenty of good room for all at the foot of the cross” and there’s “plenty of good room for all in God’s kin-dom.”
What I’m particularly pushing against in the book is scarcity. I’m attempting to push back against scarcity and austerity not only in our politics and economics but also within social justice communities.
I’m trying to make the case for what solidarity economics at scale looks like while being in deep conversation with the Black radical tradition.
Say a bit more about what you mean when it comes to a scarcity mindset in social justice communities.
In some social justice and “beloved community” spaces we miss that sense of having a deep emphasis on universal basic income, federal job guarantees, and public banks. These are not things that are supplemental or nice to have, they should be at the core of what we’re praying for and pushing for.
So, sometimes social justice movements simply settle for what’s possible?
I think that’s very much it. And, when we talk about a vision of public health and a “cooperative commonwealth,” as W.E.B. Du Bois called it, it points us in the direction of what’s doable and what’s desirable.
We should be pushing the horizon of what collective action is actually trying to accomplish. If you had the resources, if you had the numbers behind you, what would you do with them? I think that helps us to articulate a more compelling narrative.
[For example], if the goal is simply kinder, gentler policing and not public health, then we end up making concessions and missing the connections between the carceral impulse not only in neighborhoods but in schools and on college campuses and in foreign policy. Whereas, if something like public health or cooperative commonwealth and a robust sense of abundant life is the kind of benchmark against which we’re assessing policy and politics, I think it helps us to see what we’re after in a much more humane register.
Tell me about the Double Love Experience Church, which you co-pastor with your wife, Rev. Gabby Cudjoe-Wilkes. Why are you still committed to church?
The church is in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. [We are a part of the] Progressive National Baptist Convention — [Martin Luther King Jr.’s] denomination. So the PNBC, at its best, has this legacy of braiding social justice and the “religion of Jesus,” as Howard Thurman would put it. But the other interesting thing is that our church is housed in Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, known locally as “Restoration Plaza.” Which is, by some accounts, the nation’s first community development corporation.
[The plaza] exists because the Community Coordinating Council got together with then-Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and there was a bit of pushing and pulling, but ultimately it continues to be something that makes a huge difference in the community. [In 1966, Kennedy toured Bedford-Stuyvesant with community leaders who criticized the senator about speeches and empty promises. This inspired Kennedy to work together with activists and local politicians to launch a development plan for the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood that would combine “the best of community action with the best of the private enterprise system.”]
For instance, during the week the Brooklyn NAACP meets in the same place where we meet for worship on Sundays. The National Council of Negro Women meets in the same multipurpose room. And we’ve had the Brooklyn NAACP president join us for worship and talk about some of that work. And so the notion of weaving together all of these different organizations is what Gabby and I, along with our congregation, are really excited about trying to curate and bring forth in the world.
I think co-pastoring speaks to possibilities of interpersonal power sharing and deliberation. It’s not concentrating on any one figure. I think seeing shared stewardship of decision making points to a different way to organize church.
I think the peace traditions of the church are, for me, what makes the church radical. Not simply peace as in the absence of military violence and police violence, but peace in the sense of relations that do away with predation and allow for a kind of unusual belonging — we see this in the lion laying down with the lamb.
Predation is something we need to get beyond. We need to move toward a space of belonging and interdependence. This is a thicker vision of peace that underpins the push in our politics and economics and even intimate friendships and partner relationships. For me the urge toward peace and the end of predation is what excites me about pastoring.
What do you think about the suggestion that people voted for Trump because of economic anxieties?
I’d approach it this way: The idea that people voted for Trump because of inflation concerns — the price of milk, eggs, housing, gas — I think that’s partly right. I think the post-election call is for class plus [identity] politics and class plus faith.
Some have pushed back saying, “We need to talk about class and not identity politics,” but that misses the opportunity. Class shouldn’t be something that we separate and divorce from the rest of our lived experiences; [it is] very much at the center of the multiple dimensions that shape who we are and how we show up together and hopefully achieve something like solidarity.
Tell me about the Institute for Christian Socialism. How do you organize the Christian Left?
I think the ICS takes the connection between Jesus and Mary’s vision very seriously. Jesus tells us that the gospel is about good news to the poor and announcing the acceptable year of the Lord’s favor.
But Jesus gets this from his mother. Mary’s Magnificat talks about, “The mighty being dethroned,” “those who are made to be lowly and humble are exalted,” “the rich are sent away empty,” and “the hungry are filled with good things.”
I think those two points of inspiration are the counterpoint to racial capitalism and imperial ways of organizing society, and so I think socialism is a much better approximation of the kin-dom of God than capitalism. We are trying to put that point squarely before folks through [our online magazine] The Bias, through base societies, and small groups where people come together and explore what community, identity, and story look like beyond some of the handed-down scripts of Christianity. I think ICS, along with many other organizations that are already doing this work, are pointing to a different way of imagining Christian presence on the Left. I see folks moving beyond individual pockets of discontent and disillusionment to build something together.
But I think it’s an uphill battle in the U.S. and abroad for folks trying to organize for a more equitable, just, and inclusive way of organizing our politics and economics. How do we deal with dissent and dissonance in a way that honors people’s humanity while also trying to push the ball forward for the liberation of the world?
Full disclosure: I participated in the base societies when they first launched and then there was a bit of organizational upheaval that ensued, and I was dissatisfied with ICS’ lack of transparency. How has ICS worked to become more transparent?
We had a series of forthright conversations with folks through Discord and other means about some of the challenges that ICS was going through.
I think we’ve emerged from those challenges over the past 12-16 months. You are not the only one who has shared that concern. It took conversations with the board and members to figure out how to build deeper trust.
How can we build a deeper base of decision making together? I certainly wouldn’t suggest it’s something that has reached a perfect place, but I think we have made some strong strides and have had multiple rounds of frank conversations that were really key to repairing trust. This has been an explicit step to remove some of what may have been experienced as asymmetry or non-transparency.
What do you do with the mad you feel?
I think the arts provide a space to feel through the things that can’t be talked through. I think there’s a point in which arguments and movements, if they don’t turn to the arts, if they don’t turn to freedom dreams, then we miss the opportunity to speak to right and left brains, to the entirety of our individuality, and our fullest selves.
For me, a song that has always been embedded in my memory is a song from Solange and Lil Wayne called “Mad.” And [the interlude is] Solange’s father talking about all of the racism that he experienced early in his life and how he just was eaten up in some ways by the mad that he felt. And Solange talks about how you “have the right to be mad.”
Some of it is just knowing that someone experienced anger like I did for similar sorts of reasons. Some of it is allowing the music to soothe me, to calm me, to relax me. Some of it is I think anger — rage — is informative. Audre Lorde talks a lot about that.
But also I think anger or rage clarifies, motivates, and keeps me in touch with the very human sense of the work. The first eulogy I did was for a 20-something who passed not because the Lord called him home but because of an inequitable health care system where he couldn’t afford insurance. That made me incredibly upset. Still does. So some of the mad I feel helps to foster the push for a more beautiful, more just, more fair society.
30 September 2024
21 September 2020
SOCIALISM IS A SCAREWORD
"Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people."
- PUBLISHED 15 MARCH 2019
Claim
President Truman denounced the use of "socialism" as a "scare word ... for almost anything that helps all the people."
Rating
Correct Attribution
About this ratingOrigin
In early 2019, several progressive Democratic politicians who were frequent headline subjects — including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Sen. Bernie Senators of Vermont, and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — were often tagged by critics with the word “socialist,” used as a pejorative. At the recently concluded Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), for example, Republicans warned of “radical” Democrats “embracing socialism.” News accounts proclaimed that “Republicans are determined to paint Democrats as out-of-control, out-of-their minds socialists.”
That political climate touched off the online circulation of a memetic quote from 33rd U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who purportedly fended off similar attacks on Democrats in 1952 by declaring that “socialism” was a “scare word [Republicans] have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years”:
The circulated meme was an accurate reproduction of a portion of a campaign speech Truman delivered from the rear platform of a train in Syracuse, New York, on 10 October 1952. (Truman himself was not a candidate for re-election that year, but he stumped for the Democratic ticket, headed by Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson II). Much of Truman’s speech was a caustic rebuke of Republicans (and their presidential nominee, General Dwight D. Eisenhower), whom Truman characterized as having “opposed almost all our programs to help the economic life of the country” and “having blindly turned [their] back on the tradition of public action for the public good”:
[Republican Senator Robert] Taft explained that the great issue in this campaign is “creeping socialism.” Now that is the patented trademark of the special interest lobbies. Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.
Socialism is what they called public power.
Socialism is what they called social security.
Socialism is what they called farm price supports.
Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.
Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.
Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.
When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan “Down With Socialism” on the banner of his “great crusade,” that is really not what he means at all.
What he really means is, “Down with Progress — down with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal,” and “down with Harry Truman’s fair Deal.” That is what he means.
Truman had earlier touched on the idea of “socialism” as a Republican scare word during an address he delivered at a Better Business Bureaus dinner on 6 June 1950, leading into a sardonic joke about New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey (the unsuccessful Republican presidential nominee in the 1944 and 1948 elections):
I know that you have been hearing a lot of charges lately about Government interference with business, about the undermining of the free enterprise system, and about “creeping socialism.” In short, you have been hearing that the Government is doing everything possible to wreck every industry in the country.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The record shows that the Government action in recent years has been the salvation of private enterprise …
I know there are some people who still don’t believe that the policies of the Government have had anything to do with our present prosperity. That reminds me of a story I heard on my recent nonpolitical trip. It seems that there was a rock-ribbed old gentleman of a political persuasion, shall we say, somewhat different from mine. One of his friends asked him what man to vote for for President in 1952.
“Well,” he said, “I would like to vote for Dewey.”
“Dewey!” said the friend. “Why Dewey?”
“Well,” he said, “I voted for him the last two times, in 1944 and in 1948, and business has never been so good as it is today” …
The funny thing is that this has all been said before. The current campaign is almost exactly like the campaign of the old Liberty League, back in 1935 and 1936. I was in that campaign, too, by the way. It uses the same old slogans, the same old scarewords, and the same old falsehoods. The only difference is that it sounds even more foolish now than it did 14 years ago.
14 August 2019
05 March 2019
Centrist Democrats push back against party’s liberal surge & Barack Obama Once Proposed Cutting Social Security. Here’s What Changed His Mind. 1MAR19 & 6AUG16
I am all for the big tent policy of the Democratic Party. I do not support Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's threat to place fellow Congressional Democrats on a list of Democratic primary election targets because they voted differently than her. BUT the Democratic Party can not expect me to blindly donate my money and time to party candidates who do not share my beliefs and political views. I learned my lesson when volunteering for ( as well as donating to ) Pres Obama's re-election campaign. I was at a campaign house party watching Obama debate romney when Obama alluded to he and romney holding very similar views regarding Social Security, and shortly after that Obama announced the grand bargain ( in reality a GRAND BETRAYAL ) cutting Social Security and Medicare. spineless jellyfish democrats lead by Obama and Biden accepted massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare, programs that republicans with jellyfish democrats had been slowly killing through inadequate funding over the years. Now I support Bold Progressives like Sen Bernie Sanders I VT and Sen Elizabeth Warren D MA.
I felt so betrayed. I stopped working for the Obama-Biden campaign after that night, did not donate any more money either. I have applied that lesson to every election since. The Democratic Party needs to be aware there are millions of voters just like me who are not yellow dog Democrats, the proof is the election of ( NOT MY ) pres drumpf / trump with his republican congress. There is room in the Democratic Party big tent for all kinds of Democrats, but if the moderates turn against the social safety net and the American social contract the party will not win the presidency or control of congress in 2020. From the Washington Post and HuffPost.....
Centrist Democrats push back against party’s liberal surge
March 1
From the halls of Congress to the presidential campaign trail, Democratic moderates are beginning to push back against the wave of liberal energy and shoot-the-moon policy ideas that have captured the party’s imagination over the past two months.
They worry that the sweeping proposals and hardball tactics of liberal firebrands could alienate centrist voters in the 2020 election, even as they hold out hope that Democratic primary voters, focused on defeating President Trump, will check the party’s move to the left.
The moderates’ concerns came to a head this week when one of the newest Democratic stars appeared to threaten colleagues who would not toe the liberal line, raising the specter of a fracture in the party between moderates and purists, similar to a long-standing divide in the Republican Party.
At a closed-door meeting of House Democrats on Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said some of her colleagues could find themselves “on a list” of primary election targets, after they voted for a Republican amendment requiring that undocumented immigrants who try to buy guns be reported to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to people in the room who were not authorized to comment publicly.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), a co-chairman of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, said he has confronted party leaders about such threats, which have also come from the Justice Democrats, a liberal group that backed Ocasio-Cortez’s primary campaign.
“Being unified means ensuring that Democrats aren’t primary-ing other sitting Democrats,” Gottheimer said. “Since when is it okay to put you on a Nixonian list? We need to have a big tent in our party or we won’t keep the House or win the White House.”
Some warned that imposing purity tests could lead to a Democratic version of the conservative tea party revolt that transformed the GOP in recent years. That surge has brought Republicans new energy and new voters, but it’s also cost the GOP some congressional races and legislative victories.
Several Democratic presidential candidates, including many of the early entrants, have quickly endorsed sweeping liberal policies, including a Medicare-for-all health plan, a “Green New Deal” to combat climate change, and reparations for African Americans. Recently, however, some prospective candidates have been offering an alternative vision.
Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.), who is contemplating a presidential run, said U.S. politics needs to return to a more civil place. He referred to the House Freedom Caucus, a group of purist Republicans that often opposes legislative compromises.
“We don’t have to settle for disgraceful politics. We don’t have to settle for being as terrible as Donald Trump,” Bennet said during a visit to Iowa on Feb. 21. “We don’t have to settle for Freedom Caucus tactics — those guys are tyrants. We don’t have to accept that.”
Liberal Democrats, including many new to Capitol Hill or national politics, argue that the party has been too timid, caving to Republican pressure and failing to inspire voters with calls for sweeping change. The surge of new voters in the midterm elections, they say, shows the excitement and support generated by such proposals.
The centrists counter that liberal ideas and candidates have more power online and among the grass roots than at the ballot box and that the passions will probably fade in coming months, both in Congress and the presidential campaign.
John Anzalone, an Alabama-based Democratic pollster, said the perception that the party’s primary voters are enthusiastically liberal is not based on data.
“There is, without a doubt, a myth that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez somehow represents the narrative of Democratic primary voters in the country,” Anzalone said. “Almost half of them identify themselves as moderates or conservative.”
That appears to be at least somewhat borne out by the midterms, when less-ideological candidates often won when facing purist opponents. Thirty-three of the 40 GOP seats that Democrats picked up were won by candidates who had been endorsed by the moderate NewDem PAC.
A November Gallup poll found a pragmatic streak in the party — 54 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents wanted the party to become “more moderate,” while only 41 percent wanted it to be more liberal. That contrasted with the Republicans and their allies, 57 percent of whom wanted a more conservative party.
The centrists do not necessarily argue that the ideologues are wrong but that purity comes at the price of progress. That lesson, said Matt Bennett, a spokesman for the moderate think tank Third Way, is now on display in the House — which just this week held a blockbuster hearing featuring Trump’s former personal lawyer and passed the first significant gun-control bill in a generation.
“Without the people who flipped seats, there is no Speaker Pelosi, there is no Michael Cohen hearing, there is no background-check bill — there is only misery and Republican rule,” he said. “No one in the Democratic Party should be doing anything to jeopardize those seats. No one.”
For her part, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has been treading carefully — sidelining the most sweeping liberal proposals, playing down prospects of a Trump impeachment and scheduling weekly meetings to bring together leaders of the moderate and liberal factions.
Thursday’s meeting threatened to open a new breach. After 26 Democratic moderates joined with Republicans to pass an amendment on a key gun-control bill, Pelosi said they should show more “courage” on politically sensitive votes, according to the people in the room. That struck some as tone deaf, as did Ocasio-Cortez’s comments about primary challenges.
Ocasio-Cortez in a tweet Friday said she was not making threats but warning that the Democratic defectors “were inadvertently making a list of targets for the GOP and for progressive advocates” by voting with Republicans.
The eruption followed weeks of growing tension between wings of the party. Freshmen who were elected on platforms of cleaning up big-money politics and fixing the heath-care system have found themselves voting on, and answering for, a different set of issues, and some are feeling the heat from their constituents.
“A lot of people are complaining and expressing concerns about the Democratic Party being portrayed as socialist, or certain voices being louder than others,” said Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), who unseated a GOP incumbent in a suburban Minneapolis district.
The new liberal energy in the House is coming from candidates, including Ocasio-Cortez, who captured districts that generally favor Democrats. Some party strategists say liberal activists must recognize that their message would not work in more conservative areas.
“People would be wise to remember that, by definition, we have the House majority because people flipped seats from red to blue,” said Tyler Law, a Democratic consultant who helped direct the party’s communications efforts in 2018. “Seats that went from blue to blue did not deliver the majority.”
The Democratic presidential primary contest, meanwhile, has so far been dominated by candidates pushing sweeping liberal policies. But several prospective candidates have begun warning against an overly aggressive liberal platform.
At a house party last month in Waterloo, Iowa, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who is exploring a run for the White House, was confronted by an activist who demanded that he support Medicare-for-all, rather than his current proposal to lower the age of Medicare eligibility.
Brown said that’s not realistic. “My ideology says universal coverage today — just like yours does — but I want to make people’s lives better,” Brown responded, as he stood near the fireplace in a packed living room. “I know Congress won’t pass Medicare-for-all.”
Over the coming weeks, a second wave of candidates could adopt a line closer to Brown’s. Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, former New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe have all been preparing campaigns that would promise an ability to win over Trump voters.
Each has been crafting campaign plans based on polling that shows an enormous appetite among Democratic-leaning voters for anyone who can defeat Trump, even if they do not hew to strict liberal policies.
“You can be very progressive, liberal and left and also want to elect people to get things done,” said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who is advising Hickenlooper. “Primary voters are very comfortable holding both of those things at the same time. They don’t see it as either-or.”
In the House, moderates like Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) have been speaking up more about the merits of their approach, which tends to attract smaller audiences on Instagram and Twitter.
“There are a lot of people that suck up a lot of oxygen,” Schrader said. “And then there’s the people that do the work. . . . We’re the ones who actually govern and make things happen. And I think we’re content with that.”
Barack Obama Once Proposed Cutting Social Security. Here’s What Changed His Mind.
06/08/2016 11:15 am ET
Sometimes, activism works.
WASHINGTON — When President Barack Obama announced his support this week for expanding Social Security benefits, it was nothing less than a sea change. Progressive activists claimed credit for the move as both a clear nod to their power in the age of Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and the fruits of ambitious activism that slowly but surely moved the bounds of the mainstream political discussion.
Whether Obama’s remarks mark a shift in his policy views, a politically expedient concession to an ascendant progressive wing or something in between, it is an unmistakable indicator of the Democratic Party’s return to its New Deal roots.
But getting there required a slog through the political aftermath of the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression.
Fighting Popular Wisdom
Obama entered the White House at a time of economic crisis and rapidly increasing national debt. Virtually from the start of his presidency, Washington was seized with hysteria over the latter phenomenon.
Although a diverse array of economists believe Obama’s $800-billion stimulus package played a key role in helping the economy recover, it elicited howls from the right for contributing to the already rising debt. Much of the growth in annual budget deficits for which Obama was blamed, however, was due to the Great Recession and the Bush tax cuts — things he had no control over.
Stopping “out-of-control spending,” in the form of the president’s stimulus package and other policies, became one of the nascent tea party’s rallying cries.
Even as the country struggled to beat back double-digit unemployment, addressing the debt became among the most pressing issues in Washington. Think tanks and pundits on all sides of the spectrum lined up to warn of the dire consequences of avoiding an “adult” conversation about the unsustainable costs of Social Security and Medicare.
And the Obama administration — rather than fight the narrative of out-of-control debt tooth and nail — chose to accommodate it.
Just a year into Obama’s presidency, the White House began to pivot away from fiscal stimulus and toward austerity. The president convened a bipartisan debt reduction commission in February 2010, co-chaired by Morgan Stanley director Erskine Bowles, a Democrat, and former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wy.), and charged it with forging a fiscal “grand bargain.” That became the catchphrase of choice on the Bowles-Simpson commission — and in budget talks in subsequent years — for a compromise agreement to reduce the long-term debt, through a combination of Social Security and Medicare cuts historically anathema to Democrats and revenue increases and defense cuts hard for Republicans to swallow.
It was very lonely to be on the side that said: ‘Absolutely no cuts, under any circumstances.’Alex Lawson, Social Security Works
A small group of organizations on the progressive end of the Democratic Party arose to mobilize against the commission’s efforts with a focus on protecting Social Security.
Activists say they were emboldened by the knowledge that the Beltway elite was out of touch with how Americans felt about Social Security.
Perhaps thanks to its universal nature, even Republicans support it by wide margins. Opposition to Social Security cuts was the only policy position that supporters of all the presidential candidates agreed with in a March 31 Pew poll.
Social Security experts Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson, both veterans of the 1982 commission that orchestrated the last round of major reforms to the program, secured foundation funding for the creation of the advocacy organization Social Security Works.
Social Security Works led the Strengthen Social Security coalition, an alliance of progressive organizations, labor unions and think tanks in what was then a fight to stop cuts expected to be recommended by Obama’s fiscal commission.
The coalition members, which ranged from the National Organization for Women to MoveOn.org, rejected the policy arguments for the cuts on several grounds.
Social Security is a self-funded program that faces a modest financial shortfall and should not be cut to reduce a deficit it did not cause, they argued. And besides, the activists maintained, Social Security has only become more important as other traditional sources of retirement income declined and newer ones have failed to close the gap.
But in a political environment where austerity was all the rage, advocates like Alex Lawson, Social Security Works’ executive director, were initially at pains to find members of Congress willing to pledge not to cut the program, let alone expand its benefits.
“It was very lonely to be on the side that said: ‘Absolutely no cuts, under any circumstances,’” Lawson recalled. “There weren’t many allies.”
The tea party was more useful than Democratic leadership when it came to killing a grand bargain that would have cut Social Security benefits.Adam Green, Progressive Change Campaign Committee
Deprived of access to the closed-door commission, Lawson began live-streaming the closed door on days when the commission met.
The gimmick resulted in a bombshell conversation with commission co-chair Alan Simpson in June 2010. Simpson went on a profanity-laden rant, tearing into progressives who questioned the commission’s concern for “the lesser people” and repeating alarmist myths about Social Security’s finances.
A couple months later, Simpson wrote to the head of the Older Women’s League mocking Social Security as a “cow with 310 million tits.” The comments prompted a high-profile — albeit unsuccessful — campaign for his ouster.
“Alan Simpson was the gift that kept on giving,” Lawson said.
Thanks in no small part to Simpson, a letter started by Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) asking the commission to hold Social Security harmless gathered signatures rapidly, with 137 House Democrats eventually putting their names on it.
Their efforts did not shape the substance of the commission’s proposals, but they laid the political groundwork for a broader movement that would ultimately succeed.
Gene Sperling, who served as a White House economist during negotiations over the grand bargain that would have led to Social Security cuts, said that organized labor and Altman deserve significant credit for reshaping the conversation.
“You can argue over details and payfors, but the change in conversation from how to reduce Social Security for solvency to how to strengthen Social Security and overall retirement security for tens of millions of seniors is a very positive one,” Sperling told HuffPost. (He is now an adviser to the Hillary Clinton campaign.) “And beyond the politicians, you have to give some credit to the AFL-CIO, Nancy Altman and the Strengthen Social Security coalition for helping to change the terms of the debate.”
Obama Makes An Offer
The Bowles-Simpson commission’s final report in December of that year proposed major cuts to Social Security, including an increase in the retirement age, a lower benefit formula for above-median earners and a stingier cost-of-living adjustment. Although it maintained the pretense of bipartisan balance, 69 percent of the commission’s proposed budget savings came from spending cuts.
The proposal itself went nowhere. It became the blueprint, however, of subsequent plans to cut Social Security — especially after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2011.
With Republicans hell-bent on holding hostage every debt ceiling increase and extension of government funding to extract major policy concessions, Obama decided to put one of the commission’s proposals — the chained Consumer Price Index — on the table.
The chained CPI would change the formula used to adjust Social Security and other benefits for inflation. Although scholars debate whether it represents a more accurate price index than the one currently used, one way or another, it lowers the value of benefits over time relative to what they would be otherwise.
Obama appears to have come closest to striking a deal with the benefit cut during last-minute budget negotiations with Republicans at the end of 2012, in the lame-duck session of Congress after he won re-election. The country faced what was dubbed a “fiscal cliff” at the start of the new year as a slew of Bush-era income tax cuts were due to expire and automatic spending cuts were set to take effect.
Obama offered Republicans chained CPI in exchange for providing more tax increases. But under pressure from hardline anti-tax legislators, Republican leaders in Congress refused to compromise more.
Thank you, tea party!Adam Green, Progressive Change Campaign Committee
At one point, the White House reportedly suggested putting chained CPI back on the table after Republicans had not presented a counteroffer on taxes with the budget deadline less than 36 hours away.
Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was apparently so peeved at the idea that he threw a note with the proposal into a blazing fire in his office fireplace.
Reid ruled out reconsidering chained CPI because it seemed to him that Republicans weren’t serious about giving ground on the Bush tax cuts, according to Jim Manley, a longtime spokesman for Reid who by then had stopped working for the senator. And that was the last time Reid ever entertained the idea of messing with Social Security.
“Since then it’s been, ‘Hell no,’” Manley said.
Progressives recognize that they benefitted from hard-line conservatives’ delusion that by holding out, they could win even larger cuts.
“One of the ironies is that the tea party was more useful than Democratic leadership when it came to killing a grand bargain that would have cut Social Security benefits,” said Adam Green, co-chair of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, an online activism group at the forefront of the fight against cuts. “They were so crazy and unwilling to take ‘yes’ for an answer. That allowed us to live to fight another day.”
“Thank you, tea party!” Green added.
According to a former Obama administration official who was involved in the grand bargain negotiations, Obama and his team at the White House concluded that, in order to get tax hikes out of Republicans, they’d have to give ground on a major Democratic priority. One camp was pushing for a bump up in the Medicare eligibility age, reasoning that as long as the Affordable Care Act was in place, people between 65 and 67 would be in fine shape. In fact, they thought, low-income elderly, would do better under Obamacare than under Medicare.
But the faction pushing to put chained CPI on the table won out. Once that decision had been made, the official said, Obama rationalized his way toward believing that it was merely a modest statistical adjustment.
In his second term, Obama even appeared to embrace chained CPI as his own, including it in his annual budget proposal in April 2013, which came after a fierce internal debate, according to one participant.
The budget encountered stiff resistance from congressional Democrats and progressive activists, spurring a petition delivery and protest outside the White House where Bernie Sanders spoke.
The following year, the provision disappeared from the president’s budget.
Floor Speech on the Retirement Crisis
Going On The Offensive
By the summer of 2013, already sensing that they had prevailed in the fight against the chained CPI, progressive groups decided it was time to make a concerted push for the expansion of benefits. Activists point to a meeting at Netroots Nation, an annual progressive gathering, that took place that year in San Jose, California, as a crucial turning point.
Lawson, Green and other senior movement leaders had long believed that embracing across-the-board benefit increases was smart policy and essential politics. Once the two sides of the debate became expansion or maintaining the status quo, cuts would no longer be considered a mainstream Democratic position.
“The push to expand Social Security was the perfect example of offense being the best defense,” Green recalled. “If we could get [Democrats] to that place it would become logically absurd to go back.”
Crucially, the strategists gathered in San Jose that day agreed that they would not settle on any one expansion proposal to the exclusion of all others. They did not want turf issues to interfere with their agenda.
The groups endorsed the bills of then-Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Mark Begich (D-Alaska), which financed universal benefit increases by lifting the cap on earnings subject to Social Security taxes.
Both pieces of legislation proposed a more generous cost-of-living adjustment based on a price index tailored to the expenses of seniors rather than the population at large. Harkin’s bill also included a change in the benefit formula that disproportionately increased benefits for lower-income retirees.
The movement for benefits expansion got a big boost when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) took up the cause, delivering a passionate floor speech in favor of it in November 2013 that went viral.
Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank strongly supportive of efforts to forge a grand bargain, slammed Warren in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, calling across-the-board Social Security expansion “exhibit A of [a] populist political and economic fantasy.”
But unlike in 2010, when austerity was in vogue and groups like Third Way enjoyed greater clout in Democratic circles, this time, buoyed by Warren’s national popularity, the liberal wing of the party had its way.
Several House Democrats with close ties to Third Way publicly criticized the column. At least one member — then-Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-Pa.) — resigned her position as honorary co-chair.
From that point on, the political shift away from cuts and toward expansion accelerated more rapidly. When Warren sponsored a non-binding budget amendment in March 2015 calling for “sustainable expansion” of Social Security benefits, all but two of the Senate Democrats present voted in favor.
Now progressive groups estimate that some 95 percent of Senate Democrats and 75 percent of House Democrats are on the record as supporting expansion of Social Security benefits.
In January, the New York Times editorial board joined them, lending more mainstream credibility to an idea once relegated to the most progressive outside advocacy groups.
Timing Is Everything
Although the discourse on Social Security had been moving left for some time, it is impossible to ignore the role that the current presidential election cycle likely played in Obama’s timing.
The presidential race has been characterized by waves of economic populism in both major parties. Even presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump claims he will not cut Social Security benefits.
On the Democratic side, Sanders has made his career-long devotion to Social Security a centerpiece of his campaign. The Vermont progressive touts legislation he first introduced in March 2015 to enact an across-the-board expansion of benefits.
Hillary Clinton expressed support for targeted increases in Social Security benefits rather than across-the-board expansion. Sanders and progressive groups demanded she clarify that this included ruling out benefit cuts of any kind, since some bipartisan reform plans — including that of the Bowles-Simpson commission — couple major benefit cuts with modest increases for poor and vulnerable groups.
Responding to the pressure in February, Clinton pledged not to cut the program.
(Unlike Sanders, Clinton has not settled on a specific plan, but her website echoes Obama’s language, stating her intention to “expand Social Security for today’s beneficiaries and generations to come by asking the wealthiest to contribute more.”)
“Bernie has marshaled millions of people against cuts and for expansion and showed the power of those people in the Democratic Party,” said Neil Sroka, communications director of Democracy for America, another key progressive group in the Social Security fight.
Lately, talk has turned to ways the Democratic Party can ensure that Sanders’ supporters back the party nominee, who is almost certain to be Clinton. Obama’s move looks like a logical way to assuage progressive concerns about associating with the party.
“If it is [an attempt to cater to Sanders voters] I would say it is a smart move,” Sroka said. “I am not sure it is.”
“The timing is definitely interesting,” he added.
I don’t think there is anything new here.Gabe Horwitz, Third Way
Manley, the former Reid advisor, said he hadn’t expected Obama to come out for expanding benefits. But in the current context, it made sense.
“I was surprised when he made the comments he did, but the fact of the matter is that’s where a great majority of the party is,” Manley said.
Now that the grand bargain is firmly off the table, said the former administration official, Obama likely doesn’t want his legacy on Social Security associated with an offer made under duress to Republicans — and one that the GOP immediately and swiftly ran away from. Instead, Obama is aligning himself with the new movement to increase benefits.
Another former Obama administration official, Lawrence Summers, who served as a White House economist, said through a spokesperson that expanding Social Security could benefit the economy.
“As Keynes pointed out when he came to the USA in 1942, expanding pay-as-you-go social security promotes demand and thereby combats secular stagnation,” Summers said, referencing the legendary economist John Maynard Keynes. “There is a case now for paid for expansions in Social Security.”
It is a telling sign of how much the debate has shifted that Third Way declined to criticize Obama’s remarks, notwithstanding the praise they elicited from Sanders and his ideological allies.
Instead, Gabe Horwitz, the group’s vice president for the economic program, downplayed the significance of Obama’s announcement.
“I don’t think there is anything new here,” he said.
Obama’s remarks are vague enough to encompass Third Way’s preferred reform package, which would combine benefit increases for the most vulnerable groups, in addition to cuts for earners with higher incomes, according to Horwitz.
“Everyone knows the dog whistle on this is ‘expanding benefits for all’ like Bernie Sanders says,” Horwitz said. “That means Donald Trump gets more money, too. Obama doesn’t say that.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misstated that Warren introduced her resolution on Social Security in April; she introduced the resolution in March.
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