The simple fact is that Social Security won’t go broke.  So for those who may be frightened by all the talk of ‘fixing’ social security, here’s the truth.  From Bruce Webb over at the Angry Bear blog.  Of course Bruce has a big advantage over political conservatives.  He knows the math.

“A couple of further notes. If retirement benefits are projected to increase in real terms by close to 100% over the next 75 years, then a projected cut of 20-25% on Trust Fund exhaustion would STILL see those future workers with larger baskets of goods than similarly situated retirees (this is what we call ‘Rosser’s Equation’).

But this real term increase doesn’t come at the expense of younger workers still in the work force, at least not without some forced special pleading. The goal clearly shown in Fig 2 is to keep overall replacement values steady with each future generation just able to hold onto its share of the overall societal increase. This seems fair to me.

There are some that insist that if you ‘really’ look at the numbers you will see that Social Security was simply too generous to earlier generations. How you reconcile this with these graphs showing that each generation will be able to afford a bigger basket of goods than their predessessor would seem difficult. Because arguments from ROI (but I could have had EVEN MORE, and screw Grandma) seem pretty hard-hearted and selfish. But perhaps someone can make the moral case in comments.”

Beezer here.  So if even the math challenged can understand that Social Security isn’t going to go broke, what the heck is going on?  Webb has an idea.

“Nope in my opinion the fundamental motive for opposing Social Security is not driven by greed as such but instead an ideology that depends crucially on the perception that Big Government is always and everywhere a failure, and that the bigger the counter-example the higher the risk to that overall paradigm. If Social Security was just headed for the cliff, its enemies would just stand back and watch it go, arguably this is where they were at in 1993. It is only when they see the coach driver beginning to get the team under control and steer it away from the cliff that they have to jump in and try to spook the horses again.

Which is why people asking why the actions of Social Security opponents don’t seem to be particularly helpful in guiding the stage coach away from the cliff are asking the wrong question, looked at in that way their actions don’t make sense at all. On the other hand if you flip it around a lot of things become clear, there being more than one definition of ‘fixing’.”

Beezer again.  There it is, that damn ideology again.  No matter the evidence.  No matter the math.  No matter the real historical record.  Republicans have so bought into the myth that the government can do no good, only harm, that such a large success like Social Security cannot be let stand.  So spook the horses and drive the program off the cliff.  That’s the only ‘fix’ the Republicans have in mind.

Beware America.  You are being sold down the proverbial river of misplaced ideology.

The underlying issue embroiling America today is the public’s growing frustration over an inability to improve their lives.  The Health Care Reform imbroglio is simply one of several areas where this frustration is, and will continue to be, expressed.  This frustration may be inchoate and unfocused right now, but going forward it will sharpen.

Consider our economic landscape right now.  We’re in the deepest recession since that of the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Collectively, the American public lost as much as 25% of its wealth over the past two years.  We’ve lost 8 million jobs, and the ranks of Americans without insurance swells daily, exceeding 40 million people to date.   Yet Wall Street, a primary cause of this financial collapse, remains unbridled by anyone and its members enjoy billions in bonuses only a few months after taxpayers shelled out hundreds of billions of dollars to keep Wall Street afloat.

Over the past 30 years 80% of the working public worked harder and longer just to make ends meet.  Statistics show that most made no real, net, gain in income for a generation.  In contrast, the top 20%  fared well over the same period.  The top 1% have seen their wealth, and their power over our public institutions, soar.  Meanwhile, 40% of working Americans can’t make enough at their jobs to pay, net, any income taxes.  One family, the Waltons of Wal Mart, are worth more than the bottom 30% of households combined.

The quality of our food has decreased in proportion to its increase in quantity.  This deterioration of our food system quality has resulted in organic foods becoming the fastest growing segment of our food system,  reaching more than $11 billion in sales the past year.  Despite this, the industrial agriculture model chugs along unaffected, enjoying $4 billion in subsidies paid for by taxpayers.  Meanwhile the public sees itself becoming fat and unhealthy–to the point where obesity has been declared an official epidemic.

Given all this, Americans did what they should do in a Democracy:  They elected Barack Obama President because he promised “change.”  Just to be sure, the public also gave the President’s party, the Democrat party, control over both houses of Congress. 

For many solid reasons, Obama selected reform of our dysfunctional health care delivery system as his first, main “reform.”  But as Americans watched in near horror, this reform melted into confusion and division from the beginning.

Critics blame Obama for selecting health care as his first priority for change.  But it didn’t matter, really, what he selected.  It could have been energy reformation.  Or the rebuilding of the nation’s transportation system.  Or a massive jobs program.  Or a serious review of our industrial food system.  Or a tax system that favors the top 20% over everyone else.

The reality is that any effort aimed at changing a system which favors a small minority–the wealthiest among us–in virtually any area of endeavor was going to run into serious difficulties.  A system based upon such widespread inequalities is, at bottom, not Democratic.  Nor is it truly competitive.

Real change will happen only after the public realizes the underlying cause of our nation’s malaise:  The long development of an economy that’s fundamentally unfair.  An economy dominated by an ideology that the public’s government cannot do anything right.  It cannot right wrongs.  It cannot be a force for good.

Only the private economy, this ideology maintains, can create jobs and increase incomes. 

That 30 years of experience shows this ideology to be seriously wrong for 80% of Americans, will be ignored by a powerful minority because for them it favored income growth magnificantly.  That much of America’s history of growth came about precisely because of government involvement is ignored as well:  Buried under an avalanche of money spent telling the American people not too worry, eventually the unfettered private markets will deliver.

It will not be so.  Once the public realizes this promise is unbalanced to the point of being false, their frustration will not be so poorly focused, so inchoate.

At that point, change will be forced upon the minority.  The majority will once again have the government our Constitution promised. 

A government that does protect us from the bad, and does promote good.

Don’t you just love conservative ideology on steroids?

While the US Senate Republicans block needed health care and financial industry reform efforts, over at our highest court a conservative majority are unwinding the protections of the EPA and have unleashed the money hungry dogs of commerce on our political system.

The “dogs of commerce” rule overturned a century of legislation and Supreme Court rulings.  This court has ruled that corporations, just like real humans, can spend as much as they like on whatever they like and whenever they like–most particularly on elections–which before this ruling had some sensible limitations.

Now the largest corporate welfare Queens, like those on Wall Street or in Industrial Ag., can bury any political campaign with snarky advertising.  Want to clean up Industrial Ag so our food is healthier?  Forget it buddy.  No way you can come close to matching what Archer Daniel Midland or Cargill can spend with the stroke of a corporate treasurer’s pen.

We’re already witness to what big oligopolies can do, particularly to the US Senate Republicans, even without an election underway.  They crippled the legislation, through their Republican Senate operatives, the old fashioned way:  Buying their votes with lobbying favors and campaign funding promises.  Now they can buy election directly. 

So with freedom of speech so cleverly neutered (your and my freedom of speech, not that of rich corporations) it now comes out the Supreme Court has moved on to another big government fish:  Pollution control, particularly that regarding our water.

This from the New York Times:

“Thousands of the nation’s largest water polluters are outside the Clean Water Act’s reach because the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by that law, according to interviews with regulators.

As a result, some businesses are declaring that the law no longer applies to them. And pollution rates are rising.

Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years.

“We are, in essence, shutting down our Clean Water programs in some states,” said Douglas F. Mundrick, an E.P.A. lawyer in Atlanta. “This is a huge step backward. When companies figure out the cops can’t operate, they start remembering how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek.”

“This is a huge deal,” James M. Tierney, the New York State assistant commissioner for water resources, said of the new constraints. “There are whole watersheds that feed into New York’s drinking water supply that are, as of now, unprotected.”

The court rulings causing these problems focused on language in the Clean Water Act that limited it to “the discharge of pollutants into the navigable waters” of the United States. For decades, “navigable waters” was broadly interpreted by regulators to include many large wetlands and streams that connected to major rivers.

But the two decisions suggested that waterways that are entirely within one state, creeks that sometimes go dry, and lakes unconnected to larger water systems may not be “navigable waters” and are therefore not covered by the act — even though pollution from such waterways can make its way into sources of drinking water.

Some argue that such decisions help limit overreaching regulatory efforts.

“There is no doubt in my mind that when Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972 they intended it to have broad regulatory reach, but they did not intend it to be unlimited,” said Don Parrish, the American Farm Bureau Federation’s senior director of regulatory relations, who has lobbied on Clean Water issues.

But for E.P.A. and state regulators, the decisions have created widespread uncertainty. The court did not define which waterways are regulated, and judicial districts have interpreted the court’s decisions differently. As regulators have struggled to guess how various courts will rule, some E.P.A. lawyers have established unwritten internal guidelines to avoid cases in which proving jurisdiction is too difficult, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former E.P.A. officials.

The decisions “reduce E.P.A.’s ability to do what the law intends — to protect water quality, the environment and public health,” wrote Peter S. Silva, the E.P.A.’s assistant administrator for the Office of Water, in response to questions.

About 117 million Americans get their drinking water from sources fed by waters that are vulnerable to exclusion from the Clean Water Act, according to E.P.A. reports.

The E.P.A. said in a statement that it did not automatically concede that any significant water body was outside the authority of the Clean Water Act. “Jurisdictional determinations must be made on a case-by-case basis,” the agency wrote. Officials added that they believed that even many streams that go dry for long periods were within the act’s jurisdiction.

But midlevel E.P.A. officials said that internal studies indicated that as many as 45 percent of major polluters might be either outside regulatory reach or in areas where proving jurisdiction is overwhelmingly difficult. ing every major polluter. But today, regulators may be unable to prosecute as many as half of the nation’s largest known polluters because officials lack jurisdiction or because proving jurisdiction would be overwhelmingly difficult or time consuming, according to midlevel officials.

And even in situations in which regulators believe they still have jurisdiction, companies have delayed cases for years by arguing that the ambiguity precludes prosecution. In some instances, regulators have simply dropped enforcement actions.

In the last two years, some members of Congress have tried to limit the impact of the court decisions by introducing legislation known as the Clean Water Restoration Act. It has been approved by a Senate committee but not yet introduced this session in the House. The legislation tries to resolve these problems by, in part, removing the word “navigable” from the law and restoring regulators’ authority over all waters that were regulated before the Supreme Court decisions.

But a broad coalition of industries has often successfully lobbied to prevent the full Congress from voting on such proposals by telling farmers and small-business owners that the new legislation would permit the government to regulate rain puddles and small ponds and layer new regulations on how they dispose of waste.

“The game plan is to emphasize the scary possibilities,” said one member of the Waters Advocacy Coalition, which has fought the legislation and is supported by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Association of Home Builders and other groups representing industries affected by the Clean Water Act.

“If you can get Glenn Beck to say that government storm troopers are going to invade your property, farmers in the Midwest will light up their congressmen’s switchboards,” said the coalition member, who asked not to be identified because he thought his descriptions would anger other coalition participants. Mr. Beck, a conservative commentator on Fox News, spoke at length against the Clean Water Restoration Act in December.

The American Land Rights Association, another organization opposed to legislation, wrote last June that people should “Deluge your senators with calls, faxes and e-mails.” A news release the same month from the American Farm Bureau Federation warned that “even rainwater would be regulated.”

“If you erase the word ‘navigable’ from the law, it erases any limitation on the federal government’s reach,” said Mr. Parrish of the American Farm Bureau Federation. “It could be a gutter, a roadside ditch or a rain puddle. But under the new law, the government gets control over it.”

Legislators say these statements are misleading and intended to create panic.

“These claims just aren’t true,” said Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland. He helped push the bill through the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “This bill,” he said, “is solely aimed at restoring the law to what it covered before the Supreme Court decisions.”

The consequences of the Supreme Court decisions are stark. In drier states, some polluters say the act no longer applies to them and are therefore refusing to renew or apply for permits, making it impossible to monitor what they are dumping, say officials.

Cannon Air Force Base near Clovis, N.M., for instance, recently informed E.P.A. officials that it no longer considered itself subject to the act. It dumps wastewater — containing bacteria and human sewage — into a lake on the base.

More than 200 oil spill cases were delayed as of 2008, according to a memorandum written by an E.P.A. official and collected by Congressional investigators. And even as the number of facilities violating the Clean Water Act has steadily increased each year, E.P.A. judicial actions against major polluters have fallen by almost half since the Supreme Court rulings, according to an analysis of E.P.A. data by The New York Times.

The Clean Water Act does not directly deal with drinking water. Rather, it was meant to regulate the polluters that contaminated the waterways that supplied many towns and cities with tap water.

The two Supreme Court decisions at issue — Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. United States Army Corps of Engineers in 2001 and Rapanos v. United States in 2006 — focused on the federal government’s jurisdiction over various wetlands. In both cases, dissenting justices warned that limiting the power of the federal government would weaken its ability to combat water pollution.

“Cases now are lost because the company is discharging into a stream that flows into a river, rather than the river itself,” said David M. Uhlmann, a law professor at the University of Michigan who led the environmental crimes section of the Justice Department during the last administration.

In 2007, for instance, after a pipe manufacturer in Alabama, a division of McWane Inc., was convicted and fined millions of dollars for dumping oil, lead, zinc and other chemicals into a large creek, an appellate court overturned that conviction and fine, ruling that the Supreme Court precedent exempted the waterway from the Clean Water Act. The company eventually settled by agreeing to pay a smaller amount and submit to probation.

Some E.P.A. officials say solutions beyond the Clean Water Restoration Act are available. They argue that the agency’s chief, Lisa P. Jackson, could issue regulations that seek to clarify jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act.

Mrs. Jackson has urged Congress to resolve these issues. But she has not issued new regulations.

“E.P.A., with our federal partners, emphasized to Congress in a May 2009 letter that legislation is the best way to restore the Clean Water Act’s effectiveness,” wrote Mr. Silva in a statement to The Times. “E.P.A. and the Army Corps of Engineers will continue to implement our water programs to protect the nation’s waters and the environment as effectively as possible, including consideration of administrative actions to restore the scope of waters protected under the Clean Water Act.”

In the meantime, both state and federal regulators say they are prevented from protecting important waterways.

“We need something to fix these gaps,” said Mr. Tierney, the New York official. “The Clean Water Act worked for over 30 years, and we’re at risk of losing that if we can’t get a new law.”

Beezer back again.  It’s now certifiable.  The conservative ideology has gone stark raving mad.  Unfortunately, the ideology has a majority on our highest court, and completely controls the Republican Party.