The president has played a big role in this foolishness so all his promises about focusing on the “middle class” won’t mean much if he doesn’t get off the bandwagon of a policy that is our social Armaggedon. It was the president, after all, who created the debt commission, formerly known as the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform—the tale of which is part of the revised edition of the book.
Do you like sports? Most people do. So, think about this: let’s say you started a new baseball season with everyone, as usual, looking to capture the ultimate prize: winning the World Series.
You start out the season with the Commissioner of Baseball announcing the following ground rules: everything is on the table, everyone is a part of this race and every option is available to your team.
Except any team that has a stadium within 25 miles of an ocean can’t qualify for the World Series.
And every team with any hint of blue in their uniforms has to spot the other team five runs before the game starts.
And the five richest teams get to use performance-enhancing drugs while everyone else has to eat McDonald’s three times a day (yes, you could argue that eating McDonald’s is like consuming a dangerous drug but let’s save that for another day).
Of course, the outcome would be obvious—and no one would believe that the playing field was equal, or in tune with the traditional rules, or, certainly, those rules would not leave all options open to all.
The game would be fixed. Unfair. Bogus.
That’s the upshot of the game that went on with the debt Commission.
It was a fixed discussion.
The rules determined the outcome before the Commission ever met.
The rules were fixed because there was a basic agreement among virtually all the Commission members, with the possible exception of one or two people.
It wasn’t a written agreement laying out the rules.
Everyone knew the rules because they shared an unstated worldview.
That worldview was simple: there is a fiscal crisis. And that worldview clearly stated the main reason for the “crisis”: government was “spending too much”.
There would never be a report from the Commission concluding that the vast greed of a very tiny elite had, slowly but surely, butchered the country’s infrastructure—physical, social, and human.
The Commission would never describe the crisis facing the country as an utter failure of the “free market”, which had, slowly but surely, shifted huge wealth into the hands of a few, putting more of the burden on working Americans to carry the responsibility of paying for a decent society.
The outcome was pre-ordained by the president who created the Commission, a president who accepted the “crisis” rhetoric and, then, tapped two men to lead a Commission who were cut from the same ideological mold: Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles.
Erskine Bowles is a product of the world of the financial elite. He pulls in millions, partly serving as a director on various corporate boards; for his service with Morgan Stanley, one of the world’s leading financial services companies, he pocketed a nifty $345,000 in 2011, another $618,000 to serve on the Board of Facebook and a tidy $285,000 to serve on the board of Norfolk Southern Corporation.
Now, that corporate service isn’t illegal.
But, it does tell us a very important thing: Erskine Bowles is a diehard adherent to the “free market”. He would never fundamentally question the “free market” that has rewarded him so well, with influence, power and money. He would, first and foremost, find fault with government regulation and preach “fiscal prudence”.
Alan Simpson’s views on the deficit “crisis” are well-known, as is his fondness for Social Security. It isn’t just his most talked-about description of Social Security as “ a milk cow with 310 million tits.” For years, he has had a mission to turn Social Security money over to Wall Street. In 1994, as a member of Bill Clinton’s Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform (there is that word “bi-partisan” again —which was as phony then as it was now: there were not opposing world views on that Commission duking it out), he pushed for benefit cuts and partial privatization.
Aside from the two corporate-minded Commission co-chairs, Bowles and Simpson, the deck was stacked with people who shared that basic worldview.
I tortured myself and watched the video of those hearings. Honestly, it’s not worth your time. But, there was one moment of clarity courtesy of Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who was a hero on the Commission—the only person who consistently carried the banner for the people.
During the Commission’s fourth public meeting on July 28th, Schakowsky asked the inconvenient question: “To what extent do the proposals that have been made take into account the income inequality in our country?” She continued, citing a study which showed that, “.01 percent, 14,000 American families hold 22.2 percent of the wealth and that the bottom 90 percent of households, that’s over 133 million families, hold just 4 percent of the nation’s wealth…we talk about joint sacrifice but a lot of people have been sacrificing for a long time.”
That inconvenient question momentarily threw off track the witness who was testifying, Maya MacGuineas. And it’s worth pulling out the relatively short exchange—“relatively” in the vast waste of time eaten up by the Commission—because MacGuineas is the kind of Trojan horse that makes possible the annihilation of a decent society possible.
