Contract With Evil

Wednesday was a busy day in political news around the country.

After winning five GOP primaries on Tuesday, Mitt Romney was already Etch A Sketch-ing his way towards positions different from those he's taken over the last year. The Republican National Committee reticently admitted Mitt is now their 2012 nominee - like it or not - and Newt Gingrich unofficially conceded to the former Massachusetts governor. Elsewhere, the conservative activist judges on the Supreme Court appeared ready to overlook judicial precedent and throw even more of their credibility out the window, by validating the racist SB1070 anti-immigrant law in Arizona.

College students in America were also protesting on Wednesday. This time, it was the fact that American student loan debt is now at the all-time, world record level of over $1 trillion dollars.

That's not a typo or an error. It's this: $1,000,000,000,000.

There was one more bit of related political theatre on Wednesday. House Republicans chose to change their previous position, follow Romney's recent flip-flop, and support extending current interest rates for student loans. Of course, in the process, the current GOP-led House did the only thing they know how to do. They took a political hostage.

The House position on allowing students to keep paying the current interest rate is that they're now in favor of keeping the rate low - so long as they can pay for it by stealing money that is supposed to be spent to implement the Affordable Care Act.

The position of the Wall Street-supported, corporatist Republicans is simple; students took out the debt, and regardless of what shackles were placed on them, or what obstacles have been put in their way, once a student has taken on that debt, the student - and their families, spouses, and even friends - should be forced to pay the debt back, no matter what. Their position matches, in a disgusting way, the methods used by the lowest drug dealers and terrorist hostage takers, and mirrors the position they put the country in on the payroll tax cut fight last year.

The banks behind the student loan monster don't even care if a student is dead. They want their money. Period. You see, to them, nothing is more sacred than a contract - so long as they are the beneficiaries.

Of course, they forget that the point of a student loan in the first place is a social contract with society.

No one, of sane mind, would go as far into debt as it takes to finish college today, without having an decent opportunity that the debt they will be incurring will result in a better life.  Frankly, we wholeheartedly agree: there is a societal cost we all must carry if we're going to make the barrier to having a decent middle class life - or better - be college or tech school, that nearly always requires taking out a student loan.

If society, through its schools, government, and student loan companies (which are really just banks by another name), doesn't do everything possible to help make the investment in our students valuable - and in fact, undermines the possibility of many of those students being able to repay the loans? Such a society - controlled far too much by the big banks - has already reneged on their part of the contract. Such a society may also have already sold part of its soul to demons and monsters.

Unfortunately for millions of Americans, that's where our society now is. The banks still want their money, whether the students are dead or alive - and our laws allow them to literally paw through the fiscal corpse of a dead person, and reach into their families' pockets.

This is what we should have expected, when we let the banks get between students and their education. That the demons are now crawling out of the small print and demanding what they think is theirs shouldn't surprise anyone.

Step Back From The Edge - Social Security Is Fine

Among the piles of oversimplifications and outright lies we observed our colleagues in the media foist upon the horse-brained masses Tuesday, one of the biggest false storylines was the whopper about Social Security and Medicare going completely bankrupt.

Whether the supposed date of Social Security and Medicare's demise was 2024, as the National Journal put it, or 2033, like ABC News had it, the fact of the matter is, both of them - and most of the major news sources - let their journalistic integrity fly off a cliff into the dump on this one.

There were a few in the media who got the stories on Social Security and Medicare generally right, including Sarah Kliff at the Washington Post Wonkblog, Travis Waldron at Think Progress, and Jon Walker at the Firedoglake blog.

The best explanation of why Social Security isn't in that much danger, though, was written by someone who isn't just a media colleague of ours. He's also a friend – and the one-time head of Marvel Productions – Rick Ungar.

Currently a freelance columnist, a regular contributor for Forbes, a radio host - and occasionally, when he gets bored, a lawyer - Rick nailed down the description of why the annual report released by the Social Security Trustees isn't the cataclysmic event that so many made it out to be. We highly recommend you read Rick's full column on the subject.

In short, what Ungar and others note is that Social Security - and in a similar way, Medicare - will not be "flat broke" around 2033, as we heard a right-wing blowhard say on the radio. In fact, if the Federal government does nothing, the U.S. Social Security system can continue to pay 100% of benefits to every potential recipient until some point around 2035. At that point, the government program will be able to pay 75% of benefits, for the foreseeable future - long after everyone reading this is dead.

As Rick Ungar specifically notes, when the bi-partisan Greenspan Commission fixed Social Security back in 1983, the intention was to keep funding the program through payroll taxes - also know as FICA taxes - that would include 90% of U.S. wage earners. The Greenspan Commission set a cap of $110,000, and everyone who earns less than that much pays 6.2% into the Social Security trust fund. After someone earns $110,000 in a single tax year, they no longer have to pay FICA taxes on the rest of their earnings.

That formula would have continued to work for America for the foreseeable future, if it weren't for the massive income disparity that's exploded in the U.S. since the early 1980s.

Admittedly, there are other factors that have weakened the health of the Social Security program, including the greater numbers of Baby Boomers retiring all at once, and a continued economic attack on better wages for workers in America. The Bush Recession also made a significant ding in the long-term solvency of the program.

The solution, though, isn't very complex. The original solution was mostly based on percentages - but where it failed was in setting a cap in actual dollars, when the rest of the formula was in percentages. If we fix the formula, and change the FICA cap to a percentage, Social Security will remain stable nearly forever. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has even had legislation pending - that has been held up by Republicans - that would raise the cap.

So faulty math pushing Social Security - and to a great degree, Medicare - off a cliff, really isn't the problem.

The real problem is that both the U.S. House and Senate would rather fight excitedly over piddling non-problems, like bratty children, hopped up on candy and soda, fighting over who's going to catch a butterfly.

If we didn't know better, we might think our media colleagues who failed on reporting this story accurately were simply practicing to join Congress someday down the road.

Dying For Sanity

As we began combing through the news for today's commentary, a news item from CBS from Monday night, floated to the top of our stack of articles. The article notes that, as of Monday evening, a ballot measure in California passed - meaning that Californians will be voting this November on whether their state wants to follow seventeen others in abolishing the death penalty.

The debate on whether or not to keep the death penalty is a debate that seems to be happening in every state from Alaska to Nebraska. Even in countries like Tunisia, people all over the world appear to be taking another look at the death penalty. Many are getting rid of it, or at the least, curbing its use.

Last Friday, in North Carolina, a fairly new law - the Racial Justice Act - was applied by Cumberland County Judge Greg Weeks, who judged that death row inmate Marcus Robinson's case was obviously skewed by racial bias. So Judge Weeks commuted Robinson's sentence from the death penalty to life in prison, as the law allows. In short, the judge thought the previous death penalty sentence was unjust.

That quest for justice is what drove a committee created by the National Research Council to study the question death penalty advocates and opponents have been arguing for years: Is the death penalty actually effective as a deterrent to further crime?

It's a question that's been asked for thousands of years.

Virtually everyone who's studied ancient history knows about the deterrent used by the ancient Roman armies. They would torture and kill criminals who were guilty of serious crimes, and hang their bodies from posts next to the road, with a label telling the world their crime. It was part of what generated the Pax Romana, the period of peace that lasted about two hundred years, when Roman citizens were amazingly safe in the ancient world.

Of course, the practices that brought about that peace were brutal - and often unjust.

Back in our own time, the NRC's Committee of Deterrence and the Death Penalty looked at many studies of the death penalty, both pro and con, from around the world. After looking at all the data, they determined that the effectiveness of the death penalty is simply unclear.

In short, it doesn't work everywhere the same, if it works at all.

The committee did seem to agree that the way most of America currently uses the death penalty, its effectiveness as a deterrent is often minimized by factors like the long, drawn out legal battles we allow. As Miriam Thimm Kelle, the sister of James Thimm, a victim of a long-standing Nebraska death row inmate said recently, the way the system is now, when an inmate is sentenced, the families of the victim are sentenced too. Every time legal proceedings come back up for the death row inmate, the emotional wounds of the families are torn open.

While we understand the emotional anger and hunger for vengeance the families and friends of some victims of serious crime have, we honestly believe there are some punishments worse than death. Those who are creative can even imagine punishments that don't violate Geneva Convention rules, but would likely make the lives of anyone sentenced an unending, living hell.

Good. If someone has done significant evil, they should have to pay the price of their actions. The rest of us - especially the friends and families of the victims - should not also have to pay that price.

We'd love to see the day when the death penalty was abolished, and the only place you might see the Grim Reaper at work is a haunted house or a cheesy movie. Maybe that will happen someday, though we doubt it will be within our lifetimes.

For now, just put our wish for the death penalty on the "Things We'd Like To See" list - right next to our request to be millionaires.