Greedy billionaire blows chance to cut Social Security

Loony billionaire Pete Peterson is probably furious that cuts to Social Security are becoming less of a possibility every day.  For years he's wanted to eliminate Social Security and Medicare and slash government spending. To that end, he created an astroturf group called Fix the Debt.

Fortunately, Peterson's  incompetent lieutenants made sure the Fix the Debt campaign backfired -- badly.

Real people fought back against the Fix the Debt billionaires, and they're winning: Congress raised the debt ceiling without a whimper recently. President Obama last week submitted a budget that keeps Social Security benefits at their current levels. A Gallup poll released a week ago shows American voters continue to view debt and the deficit as low priorities, despite the $40 million Fix the Debt spent to convince them otherwise.

Americans want jobs, and cutting government spending is exactly the wrong way to create them.

Fortunately for America's middle class, Fix the Debt was headed by two incompetents: corporate looter Erskine Bowles and crazy old coot Alan Simpson.

Bowles never understood that fixing the debt begins at home. He served as director of two corporations that required massive government bailouts --  Morgan Stanley and General Motors -- thus adding to U.S. government debt. Bowles was paid handsomely for looking the other way.He plundered corporations of $3.3 million for some very light duty, a few board meetings a year)

All you need to know about Alan Simpson is he actually compared Social Security to 'a milk cow with 310 million teats.'

Fix the Debt's comical attempts to persuade Americans they need to make do with less are recounted by the peerless Mary Bottari at the Center for Media and Democracy.

Bottari tells us Fix the Debt thought it would be a good idea to round up 100 CEOs to lecture Americans on how we need to expect less. Writes Bottari,

Grassroots groups were in no mood for advice from Fix the Debt CEOs, like Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein, who somberly explained to CBS News in November 2012 that Americans had to “lower their expectations.”

A worse spokesman could not have been found. Blankfein, after all, is CEO of the bailed-out investment bank also known as a 'great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.'

Sen. Bernie Sanders hit the roof and took to the floor of the Senate to denounce Blankfein's unbelievable arrogance.

Things got even tenser, as someone from the right-wing Heritage Foundation slugged a protester:

...protesters descended upon a Fix the Debt event for the first time, chanting loudly and rattling a senior presenter from the Heritage Foundation. Burke Stansbury from the Campaign for Community Change took a punch from the Heritage hysteric, and the throwdown was on.

Dozens of groups jumped into the fray, disclosing the conflicts of interest behind Fix the Debt's leadership council. State leaders, under pressure from community groups, were forced to resign. Bottari tells us they included  In Iowa, co-chair Dr. Andrea McGuire, former Congressman Dave Nagel, and State Rep. Bruce Hunter all resigned under pressure from the community group Iowa CCI. Michigan also lost its co-chair Jocelyn Benson. Virginia State Senator Ken Plum chose to pull his name, along with Juan Cotto of Washington State.

Some more entertaining lowlights:

• A group called Social Security Works entered a film in a contest sponsored by Pete Peterson and won.
• Economists at U-Mass Amherst made headlines around the world by uncovering mistakes in a study that supported Fix the Debt's argument that budget cuts create economic growth. 
• The Institute for Policy Studies released another damning report showing that Fix the Debt firms could gain as much as $173 billion if Congress adopted their proposed tax system, which would increase the debt. 
• Fix the Debt affiliate The Can Kicks Back launched a bus tour of college campuses with a German-made BMW. As part of the tour they collected cans -- all 800 of them, at a cost of $3,000 a can. 
• They were caught ghostwriting bogus op-eds for students in newspapers.

Their campaign backfired so badly that now Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tom Harkin sponsored a bill to increase Social Security benefits.

And on Feb. 12, Politico reported that The Can Kicks Back was ... wait for it ... in debt.

Moral of the story: When real people fight back, they win.

Another sociopathic billionaire runs his yap

Sam Zell, the sociopathic billionaire who singlehandedly bankrupted the Chicago Tribune in one year, feels rich people are being treated unfairly for no good reason.

Really.

Yesterday he sat down with a reporter from Bloomberg TV and said:

The quote one percent are being pummeled because it’s politically convenient to do so. The problem is that the world and this country should not talk about envy of the one percent, it should talk about emulating the one percent. The one percent work harder, the one percent are much bigger factors in all forms of our society…The politics of envy, the politics of class warfare are what have separated America from the rest of the world.

We're wondering what he means by 'it should talk about emulating the one percent'? Should the country be emulating Sam Zell by bankrupting businesses through greed and incompetence? Or by threatening the global financial system with reckless banking practices like Jamie Dimon? Or by impoverishing the middle class like the Waltons?

Wonkette explains that Zell was defending Tom Perkins, another sociopathic billionaire who compared the persecution of people with wealth to the persecution of Jews in Germany in the 1930s.

...we remembered that Sam Zell is a capitalistic sociopath who colluded with noted cowlick Rod Blagojevich to get the state of Illinois to help him out of financial difficulties by buying Wrigley Field, and who took over our beloved Los Angeles Times a few years back and told it to go %#@& itself, and why the hell are we listening to him anyway?

Exactly. It's not that we envy Sam Zell. It's that we oppose the use of vast wealth to manipulate the political and economic structures of our country.

The End.

Today's Koch news: More handouts, bigger Kochtopus

The Benedict Arnold Koch brothers get government handouts from the Farm Bill, which cuts $8 billion in food stamps.

And a secret document exposes the Koch brothers' plans to plunder the taxpayer even more.

The Farm bill made its way through Congress and is expected to reach President Obama's desk soon.  Lee Fang at The Nation reports the $8 billion cuts to food stamps are,

... a key demand made by Americans for Prosperity, which aired advertisements and organized opposition to the initial Farm Bill because of the supposed waste of providing food assistance to needy families. Americans for Prosperity is controlled by the billionaire Koch brothers and their cohort.  

Hypocrisy, thy name is Koch. They actually accuse hungry American families of being a 'special interest.' Meanwhile, the Kochs successfully lobbied for continued spending --- $881 million -- on biomass energy, a program that pays the Kochs' Georgia-Pacific facilities in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Oregon and Florida.

That sounds like a special interest to us. (And no, it doesn't sound like a 'conservative' or 'libertarian' group that's trying to shrink government. It sounds like corporate predation on the middle class. But we digress.)

The Kochs' got another big slice of corporate largesse from the Farm Bill: An exemption for Georgia-Pacific and other timber companies from the Clean Water Act. That exemption allows the Kochs' timber operations to let pesticides and chemicals run off into rivers and streams.

Hungry families don't have the money to purchase lobby members of Congress the way the Kochs do. The Kochs want to keep it that way. But Mother Jones obtained a secret document from a Koch meeting with donors at a posh resort last week . It lists the names of the sociopathic billionaires hedge fund billionaires, top corporate executives and real estate moguls wooed by the Kochs to help win elections in November.

The Koch donor network is a force to be feared. Mother Jones reports it raised more than the entire Republican National Committee. Its subsidiary, Americans for Prosperity, has spent more than $20 million beating up on congressional Democrats. Reports Mother Jones:

The meeting list illustrates the interwoven nature of the Koch brothers' corporate, political, and philanthropic activities. The donor meetings featured various senior Koch Industries executives, including the company's chief financial officer, Steve Feilmeier. ... 

At least half of the one-on-one sessions involved representatives of Americans for Prosperity, the political advocacy group founded by the Koch brothers and their top political adviser and strategist, Richard Fink, a Koch Industries executive vice president and board member. ... 

In the past, Koch Industries has distanced itself from AFP and its political activities. The company has said the group is just one of "hundreds of organizations" that receive funding from the Kochs and that it operates "independently" of Koch Industries. But the document suggests a close collaboration between officials of Koch Industries, AFP, and Freedom Partners, whose staff and board are stacked with numerous current and former Koch Industries employees.

Here's something to worry about: The Kochs scheduled special time to talk with Americans for Prosperity chapters in four states where anti-worker governors face re-election: Michigan (Rick Snyder); Wisconsin (job-killer Scott Walker); Pennsylvania (Tom Corbett) and Florida (Rick Scott).

Greedy tea party millionaire owns company that turns away cancer patients

Remember Richard Stephenson, the greedy billionaire who allegedly laundered $12 million to FreedomWorks, the phony tea party group spawned by the Benedict Arnold Koch brothers? 

Stephenson made his money by founding a for-profit cancer treatment company, Cancer Treatment Centers of America. The company boasts of a better-than-average cure rate. 

Today, Reuters issued a special report exposing just how CTCA manages to have such a successful track record: It turns away patients it can't cure. Reports Reuters:

What sets CTCA apart is that rejecting certain patients and, even more, culling some of its patients from its survival data lets the company tout in ads and post on its website patient outcomes that look dramatically better than they would if the company treated all comers. 

CTCA cherry picks its patients. It turns away older, uninsured cancer patients (which of course makes health care more expensive for the rest of us). Again, Reuters reports:

It has relatively few elderly patients, even though cancer is a disease of the aged. It has almost none who are uninsured or covered by Medicaid - patients who tend to die sooner if they develop cancer and who are comparatively numerous in national statistics. 

Carolyn Holmes, a former CTCA oncology information specialist in Tulsa, Oklahoma, said she and others routinely tried to turn away people who "were the wrong demographic" because they were less likely to have an insurance policy that CTCA preferred. Holmes said she would try to "let those people down easy." 

Equally significant, CTCA includes in its outcomes data only those patients "who received treatment at CTCA for the duration of their illness" - patients who have the ability to travel to CTCA locations from the get-go, without seeking local treatment first. That means excluding, for example, those who have exhausted treatment options closer to home and arrive at a CTCA facility with advanced disease. 

CTCA treats far fewer Medicare patients than the nation's cancer treatment facilities as a whole -- 14 percent vs. 53 percent. And it treats almost no Medicaid patients. (Read the whole report here.)

Stephenson is said to be reclusive. We understand why.