Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Senator Bernie Sanders Speaks at an April 9, 2013 Protest Outside the White House Over the President's Plan to Cut Social Security Benefits.
In what is likely an historical first for a Democratic President, groups that were his most loyal and hardworking supporters during last year’s campaign massed outside the White House yesterday to pronounce the President a traitor to his people and his party.
Just five months after spending millions from their campaign war chests and an equal amount of volunteer hours, the progressive groups who delivered a second term to Barack Obama feel betrayed. Using unusually harsh language and delivering 2.3 million signed petitions, the President’s base came to warn Congressional Democrats against falling in lockstep with the President.
The uproar comes over the President’s plan, to be unveiled today in his budget proposal, to cut Social Security payments by indexing benefits to a chained Consumer Price Index (CPI), a process viewed as a rigged system of reducing payments over time to the Nation’s most vulnerable seniors, veterans and disabled. Under chained CPI indexing, it is estimated that a Social Security recipient could receive $1,000 less annually after 20 years.
A group that has typically had blinders on when it came to Obama, the National Organization for Women, delivered some of the harshest words. Speaking at the protest, Now President Terry O’Neill said that under the President’s plan women would be “swindled yet again.” O’Neill characterized the President’s motive as “either a highly cynical move to bargain with right-wing legislators or a willfully misguided move to undermine our Social Security system.” The word “deceitful” was also invoked by O’Neill:
“Because of the wage gap, and time taken out of the paid workforce for caregiving, hardworking women retire with less money than men — often with no savings or investments to sustain them other than Social Security. Those who say the chained CPI won’t make much of an impact are either hopelessly dense or just plain deceitful… Let’s face it: instituting the chained CPI is like tripping someone at the end of a race after forcing them to run on the outside lane the whole way,” said O’Neill.
…
