Pledge To Rob The Middle Class

Republican Pledge: A Rotten Egg for the Middle Class

Leo Gerard — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 10:05:51 -0400

When Herbert Hoover ran for president in 1928, the Republican party promised his victory would assure the prosperity of “a chicken in every pot.” This week, Republicans proffered a similar pledge to America.

Hoover won, and in 1929, after a decade of GOP rule in Washington, Republicans did deliver something foul to Americans. It wasn’t the much-anticipated cooking hen. It was the Great Depression.

Now in the Great Recession, also delivered during a GOP presidency, Republicans have presented a new promise. They pledged to withdraw all unspent Recovery Act money to prevent it from employing even one more worker; kill health care reform to stop 30 million Americans from getting affordable insurance; slash $100 billion from federal programs protecting the middle class; preserve tax cuts for the rich and cut government regulation -- like oversight of Gulf-oil-gusher-BP and contaminated-egg-producers Jack and Peter DeCoster.

This time, the GOP downsized the “chicken in every pot” promise. Instead they’re pledging a salmonella-poisoned egg.

In 1932, Americans wisely rejected re-electing Republican Hoover, who is regarded as one of the nation’s most inept leaders, and chose instead Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, revered as one of the best. This fall, it’s crucial that Americans choose sagely again, selecting Democrats intent on reforming Washington and protecting the nation’s middle class.

Eight years of Republican rule in Washington climaxed with the worst recession since the Great Depression. Since that downturn officially began in December of 2007, poverty, unemployment and foreclosures have risen while middle class income and health insurance coverage have fallen.

The poverty rate increased to the worst level in 16 years, with 3.7 million people slipping from the middle class to the ranks of the poor in 2009. One in seven Americans now is impoverished. More than 8 million workers have lost their jobs, and 2.3 million families have lost their homes to foreclosure. Nearly one in four mortgage holders is under water, meaning they owe more on their house than it’s worth. Also, last year, the number of uninsured Americans rose by 4.4 million to 50.7 million -- 16.7% of the population. It was the largest annual increase since the government began collecting comparable data in 1987.

By contrast, on Wall Street, where unrestrained and unregulated bankster recklessness caused the recession, happy days are here again. The banks that taxpayers bailed out have resumed paying million-dollar salaries and bonuses. The nation’s top 25 hedge-fund managers each took home an average of $1 billion (BILLION) last year. Those hedgers are among the nation’s richest 1 percent, those whose take home pay grew so fast between 1979 and the start of the recession in 2007 that nearly 39 percent of all income growth went to that tiny number of super-wealthy. Only 36 percent went to the bottom 90 percent of the nation’s population.

Democrats, keenly aware of the diverging experiences of the nation’s sucker-punched workers and its well-heeled elite, have worked to aid the beleaguered middle. They passed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated created between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs by July.

Democrats reformed health insurance so that children with pre-existing conditions can’t be denied insurance; senior citizens won’t have to pay for “donut hole” medications; young adults up to age 26 may remain on their parents’ plans, and insurance companies can no longer choose doctors or place lifetime limits on coverage or drop the sick. On top of all that, the Democrats’ reform will lower federal deficits by $138 billion.

Now, Democrats are fighting to preserve income tax cuts for the middle class while eliminating breaks for the rich. The Democrats would continue to lower by $1,132 a year the taxes of median wage earners, those with incomes of about $50,000 a year. Under the Democrats’ plan, the super rich – those taking home more than $1 million a year -- would still get a tax cut of $6,349 – six times that of the middle class. But Democrats would have the super rich pay $97,651 in taxes a year that they now pocket.

Democrats think the rich have an obligation to pay those taxes. To get where they are, in the top one percent income bracket, they’ve used tax-subsidized public services at significantly higher rates than the other 99 percent of Americans. That includes services such as roads and airports, civil courts, the U.S. patent office, the U.S. Department of Commerce and professional licensing, regulation and inspection departments.

Republicans don’t agree. They believe the middle class should pay so the rich can continue getting breaks. The GOP believes it is fine to give tax cuts to the rich that will cost nearly $1 trillion over 10 years, but not pay for them. Conversely, Republicans have refused to extend unemployment insurance for the middle class jobless unless that’s paid for. The GOP believes it’s appropriate to continue tax breaks for multi-national corporations that ship jobs overseas but it’s not to extend aid to the middle class unemployed to pay for health insurance.

In their Pledge to America, Republicans promise to take care of the rich. They said they’d change Washington by decimating the very regulation that protects middle class workers and their families and by cutting off money that is providing jobs to the unemployed. The GOP pledges to undermine middle class America.

It might be called a turkey, but even that would inflate its value. It’s a rotten egg hurled at middle America.

Progressive Breakfast: "Pledge" Fails To Add Up, Make Sense

Bill Scher — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 09:20:55 -0400

Each morning, Bill Scher and Terrance Heath serve up what progressives need to affect change on the kitchen-table issues families face: jobs, health care, green energy, financial reform, affordable education and retirement security.

Weak Roll-Out For GOP "Pledge To America"

McClatchy concludes "Pledge" will have no impact: "...unlikely to reshape this fall's congressional elections — or refurbish the nation's economy ... doesn't have much to say about some of the day's most pressing issues."

"What its new campaign blueprint shows is that if it takes control of the House, it will become 'the party of stop,'" concludes W. Post's Dan Balz.

W. Post edit board knocks "Pledge" for failing to detail spending cuts: "...it shirks the politically sensitive task of explaining where the savings would come from ... Minority Leader John Boehner crowed that the rollback would save $100 billion in the first year alone. Yes, but from where? Anyone can make that promise; tell us which NASA programs you will end, which national parks you will close ... if this is the Republican case for taking control, the national debt can rest easy."

NYT's Paul Krugman notes it's a pledge to make the deficit bigger: "The document repeatedly condemns federal debt — 16 times, by my count. But the main substantive policy proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which independent estimates say would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade — about $700 billion more than the Obama administration’s tax proposals."

OurFuture.org's Richard Eskow deem proposal "'Pledge' To Rob The Middle Class: No Jobs, No Health Care, No Security": "Off the top, their plan is a trillion-dollar giveaway to the rich - at everybody else's expense."

TNR's Jonathan Cohn says the "Pledge" fails to honestly face up to policy trade-offs: "If Republicans were serious about reducing deficits, they’d call for significantly reducing entitlement and defense spending, since that’s where the money is. Or, if they simply wanted to cut taxes without reducing the size of government, they’d quit promising to balance the budget. Either strategy would be honest and, intellectually speaking, defensible. But either would also require confronting the trade-offs in public policy and figuring out how to deal with them politically. That's what the Democrats did when they crafted health care reform. Apparently the Republicans aren't ready for that sort of thing yet."

W. Post's Eugene Robinson faults the "Pledge" on math: "... the numbers don't remotely add up. The document is such a jumble of contradictions that it's hard to imagine how it could possibly pass muster with anyone who survived eighth-grade arithmetic..."

Joseph Paduda, at Managed Health Matters, asks where the deficit hawks were when President Bush created the Medicare Part D prescription drug program: "The latest Medicare Actuary report indicates the GOP-passed Part D program has contributed $9.4 trillion to the $38 trillion Federal healthcare deficit. (page 126) The Bush-era GOP makes President Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and the rest of those spendthrift Dems look like a bunch of cheapskates; even a GOP analysis finds 'the new reform law will raise the deficit by more than $500 billion during the first ten years and by nearly $1.5 trillion in the following decade.'"

Conservatives Struggle To Defend Health Care Repeal

Time's Kate Pickert notes the "Pledge" to repeal health care reform also would increase the deficit: "They want to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but how will they pay for it? The Congressional Budget Office says the law will reduce the federal deficit by about $140 billion over ten years, so repealing the law will add to the deficit. Medical malpractice reform isn't necessarily a bad idea, but it would reduce overall health care spending by about 1%. Not exactly a silver bullet."

House GOPer has difficulty explaining how repealing health care repeals popular provisions. Wonk Room's Igor Volsky: "[Rep. Mac] Thornberry initially refused to say if he supported prohibiting insurers from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions and charging co-pays for certain preventive services, but awkwardly explained that Republicans would repeal all of them and then restore some of them."

TPMCafe's Peter Dreier finds the more people know about the health reform law, the more they support it: "According to an Associated Press survey, 'more than half of Americans mistakenly believe the overhaul will raise taxes for most people this year.' ... A whopping 81% of respondents mistakenly believe that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the legislation would increase the government's debt, when it actually found that it would reduce the federal deficit ... Among Democrats and independents, the more accurate their knowledge of the bill, the more they liked it ... there's still time for [President Obama] to go out into swing states and Congressional districts and put a human face on this breakthrough legislation."

Obama Presses China Before House Currency Vote

At UN, President Obama prods China on currency. NYT: " President Obama increased pressure on China to immediately revalue its currency on Thursday, devoting most of a two-hour meeting with China’s prime minister to the issue and sending the message, according to one of his top aides, that if 'the Chinese don’t take actions, we have other means of protecting U.S. interests.'
Related But Prime Minister Wen Jiabao barely budged beyond his familiar talking points about gradual 'reform' of China’s currency policy, leaving it unclear whether Mr. Obama’s message would change Beijing’s economic or political calculus."

House prepares to vote on China currency crackdown. Finance Markets: "The House Ways and Means Committee is today expected to vote on a bill that would allow the Commerce Department to impose tariffs on China by considering the undervalued yuan a barrier to trade. A vote in the House of Representatives could take place as early as next week."

No Tax Vote Before Election

Senate Dems decide to wait until after election to vote on Bush tax cuts. NYT: "Democrats said they would still fight to end the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans when they return for a lame-duck session. But the delay increases the likelihood of a compromise with Republicans who have insisted that the lower rates continue for everyone..."

WH puts blame on Senate GOP, will continue push to let tax cuts expire for multimillionaires after election. TPMDC quotes Axelrod: "Our goal is to get these tax cuts passed. If we can't get it done before the election we're going to insist on it after ... The Republican Party is holding hostage tax cuts for the middle class."

Senate Maj. Whip Dick Durbin addresses arguments that the tax cut fight should be had on the Senate floor. W. Post quotes: "The reality is we are not going to pass what needs to be passed to change this either in the Senate or in the House before the election ... if you bring it up and don't pass it, does that [politically] help you or hurt you? If you don't bring it up, does that help you or hurt you? You can argue it round, you can argue it square. But the reality is nothing's going to happen before the election."

Paul Krugman argues Dems are missing a political opportunity: "...given a chance to really put the GOP on the spot — the chance to force a vote on extending only the middle-class tax cuts, forcing Republicans to vote no in order to save their beloved tax cuts for the rich — Democrats will … punt. I guess the Blue Dogs really want to be in the minority."

TNR's Jonathan Chait calls it "poltiical suicide": "Moderate Democrats worry that passing a tax cut for income under $250,000 would be portrayed as a tax hike, because it allows rates to rise on income over $250,000. As I've noted several times, that could be solved by holding a separate vote. But the moderate Democrats' solution is not to hold a vote on any tax cuts."

Inching Support For Renewable Energy Bill

GOP Sen. Sam Brownback says more Republicans may back higher renewable energy production requirements. The Hill: "Amid word Thursday that Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) became the fourth Republican cosponsor of the RES bill, Brownback is optimistic he can get more backing from his party ..."

Still more GOPers will be needed to compensate for Dem defections. TNR's Brad Plumer: "For one, a bunch of Senate Democrats flatly oppose an RES, including Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln. Second, if this bill doesn't come up until the lame duck session after the midterms, there's going to be enormous pressure on Republicans from the Senate leadership not to cooperate on anything."

Signs of climate change are all around, yet fail to change political dynamic in Washington. W. Post: "Despite the political impasse in Washington, several recent readings suggest that climate change is accelerating. Combined ocean and land temperature readings for the first eight months of 2010 make it likely that this year will tie 1998 as the hottest year on record. For only the second time in history, a worldwide bleaching event has devastated coral reefs from the Maldives to the Caribbean. Arctic summer sea ice volume has steadily declined since the late 1980s, and the minimum extent it reached this month ranks as the third-lowest since satellite record-keeping began in 1979."

Oil-state Dem Sen. Mary Landrieu blocking budget director nomination until drilling moratorium lifted, reports NYT.

Whacking Wall Street Works

AP concluded Sen. Patty Murray's re-election campaign markedly improved after she tied her opponent to Wall Street: " She has gone from essentially being tied with challenger Dino Rossi to leading in the latest round of polls, proving that the 2010 Democratic campaign theme of linking the GOP to Wall Street greed can resonate with voters."

Congress approves law repealing SEC secrecy provision. WSJ: "A White House spokeswoman declined to say whether the president would sign the bill ... SEC officials said the provision merely codified existing practice and ensured proprietary data companies gave the agency during examinations wouldn't necessarily be available to competitors ... Critics said the exemption was too broad. The language was 'a recipe for more coverups at the agency that failed to catch Bernie Madoff,' said Angela Canterbury, director of public policy at the Project on Government Oversight."

Filibuster Blocks Campaign Finance Transparency

Senate GOP filibusters campaign finance transparency bill again. W. Post: "The outcome represents a major victory for Republicans and major business groups, which lobbied hard against a proposal that they said was an attempt by Democrats to silence GOP-leaning business groups ... Proponents argued that voters deserve to know the identities of donors bankrolling outside advertising that has played an increasingly pivotal role in U.S. elections."

NYT investigates front group funneling anonymous money into conservative political campaigns: "An examination of Americans for Job Security ... provides a rare look inside the opaque world of these ascendant advocacy organizations. Its deep ties to a Republican consulting operation raise questions about whether, under cover of its tax-exempt mission 'to promote a strong, job-creating economy,' the group is largely a funnel for anonymous donations. 'A lot of nonprofits game the system, but A.J.S. is unusual in that they so blatantly try to influence elections and evade disclosure,' said Taylor Lincoln, a research director at the watchdog group Public Citizen..."

Is The Base Disgruntled, Or Just Sleepy?

The Nation's Christopher Hayes challenges the media narrative of "liberal overreach": "What's insidious about this narrative is that it takes a small, ideological subcomponent of the electorate and projects its views onto the electorate as a whole. It also ignores the young, the low-income and the black voters who gave Obama his margin of victory. We've all spent so much time dwelling on the slights and accusations of the Fox News crowd, there's been shockingly little attention paid to the views, frustrations and convictions of what we might call the forgotten electorate, otherwise known as Obama's base."

TNR's Ed Kilgore argues it is less about enthusiasm than the inconsistent voting patterns of younger voters: "Keep in mind that part of this has little to do with feelings about Obama, but instead reflects a completely normal gap in midterm turnout patterns, particularly in terms of voter age. In other words, Dems are paying a price for the heavy dependence on younger voters in 2008 which is so promising in the long run."

Breakfast Sides

Stimulus program directly subsidizing private-sector job creation may expire this month. Time: "Barring a Senate vote to extend funding for another year, programs will expire across the country on Sept. 30, leaving tens of thousands out of work once more ... In May, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Emergency Contingency Fund ... was the first to be singled out for elimination by voters on House minority whip Eric Cantor's YouCut website ... [San Francisco Mayor Gavin] Newsom has tried to dispel the suspicions shrouding stimulus-subsidized programs like Jobs Now by noting that participants earn roughly the same salary they would collect in unemployment benefits and accumulate valuable experience."

Small biz lending bill clears House, heads to President's desk. AP: "The $40 billion-plus bill is the last vestige of the heralded jobs agenda that Obama and Democrats promoted early this year. They ended up delivering only a fraction of what they promised after Senate Republicans blocked most of the agenda ... Community bankers enthusiastically support the bill, but it has only tepid support from GOP-leaning small-business groups more focused on expiring tax cuts."

Joshua Holland, at AlterNet writes that Social Security's opponents are lying about it's strongest arm: "...consider that the trust fund, created by a bipartisan act of good governance that’s almost inconceivable today, is doing exactly what it was designed to do, and more so. It is nonetheless cited by 'entitlement' fearmongers as evidence that the program is unsustainable ... In 1983 ... Democrats and Republicans got together to address a very modest shortfall in funding for the Social Security system. But they went a step further ... raised payroll taxes and in doing so created the Social Security Trust Fund, a surplus that could be drawn down as the baby-boomers reached retirement age. Today, with $2.5 trillion worth of assets, the fund is so fat it’s projected to continue growing on just its own interest decades into the future."

Student John Connelly writes of being a victim of conservative NJ Gov. Chris Christie's budget cuts, in The Nation: "Yesterday, I was informed that my academic funding has been cut, and it is now uncertain whether I will still be able to attend Rutgers University in the autumn. The regrettable thing is that my own academic uncertainty has become the norm in the Garden State, as a newly elected Republican governor goes about undoing decades worth of educational growth, possibly dooming an entire generation of bright, hardworking New Jersey students in the process."

GOP's "Pledge" to Rob the Middle Class: No Jobs, No Health Care, No Security

Richard Eskow — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 15:18:43 -0400

Congressional Republicans released their "Pledge for America" today with a press event at a Virginia hardware store, and a hardware store was definitely the right choice: If these policies ever take effect you're going to get screwed.

It was slightly amusing to see these wealthy tribunes in their pricey business-casual clothing, dressed to look the way they must imagine "real people" do. But other than providing some revenue for Dockers pants and Johnston & Murphy shoes, what were the economic implications of the GOP's Pledge?

Once you strip away the rhetoric, the answer is simple: Off the top, their plan is a trillion-dollar giveaway to the rich - at everybody else's expense. Their "pledge" would slash needed spending, kill jobs and end any hope of growing the economy. It declares open season on the public's health and safety with a deregulation agenda that would unleash BP, Goldman Sachs, and every other corporation whose risky behavior endangers us. It would lead to even more financial crashes and environmental disasters. Firefighters, cops,and teachers would be laid off in droves. The deficit would soar. We'd face a permanently stagnating economy. The middle class would wither away.

That's the future they're offering. It's Bush on steroids, fattened up and ready to feast on ... you. If you like today's economy, you'll love the one these guys are cooking up.

If this document wasn't written by lobbyists then it was certainly submitted for their review and approval. And there's a lot for them to love. Here's what the Republicans propose.

The $4 trillion hole

First and foremost, they would make the Bush tax cuts permanent - not just for the middle class, as the Democrats propose, but for the wealthiest Americans, too. The total ten-year cost of their tax proposal alone is $4 trillion, of which $1 trillion would go to this high-earning, Republican demographic. What will they do to offset this giveaway for the rich? They say they'll "roll back government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels, saving us at least $100 billion in the first year alone."

So, let's see: $100 billion in supposed savings in that first year, versus $400 billion in tax cuts. In the fuzzy math of the GOP, that's called deficit reduction. Their policies would benefit the wealthiest households in the country, with special attention lavished on inherited wealth (call it the "Paris Hilton handout") and hedge fund managers (the "hedge fund handout"). Consider this: The 25 top hedge fund managers earn at least $1 billion a year, and are taxed at 15% (those soon-to-be-unemployed police officers and teachers pay more). By extending those cuts, the GOP plan would cost the rest of us at least $62 billion over ten years, putting it in the billionaires' pockets instead.

The Pledge quotes the adage, "to whom much is given, much is expected." But since they're giving even more to those to whom much has been given, the "much is expected" part must be an unsubtle hint to the ultra-rich to keep those contributions coming.

Where would they cut, exactly? They don't say. David Frum, a former speechwriter for George Bush, explains why: "Here is the GOP cruising to a handsome election victory. Did you seriously imagine that they would jeopardize the prospect of victory and chairmanships by issuing big, bold promises to do deadly unpopular things?"

Deadly unpopular things. At least Frum is honest enough to say out loud what other Republicans won't: They're going to subsidize their tax breaks for the wealthy by doing things the American people will hate. They won't just cut the everyday functions of government that make our lives better. Returning government spending to "pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels" also means ending the repair work that's currently being done to fix what their policies have broken. That includes getting people back to work, providing loans for small businesses, and cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico.

Fire a cop, buy a banker

But even though they slither past the specifics, the GOP leaders left some broad hints about their defunding priorities. In a graph that lists government spending, for example, the categories aren't listed by size, or alphabetically. The ones at the top are the targets, and which figure prominently? The Departments of Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Education, Justice ... you see where this is going, don't you? (Yes, the Justice Department's on the list. Law enforcement isn't always a convenient thing in their America.)

Their list of 2,050 different assistance programs singles out Federal funding to the states—states that are in desperate need of federal support to keep people working in the fiscal aftermath of GOP policies. They need Federal aid to avoid the kind of cuts they'll be forced to make otherwise: laying off cops and teachers, slashing Medicaid, letting roads crumble, and shutting down emergency services, just to name a few.

Why not rename this pledge the "fire a cop, buy a banker his own private island plan"?

This proposal adds to the clamor of Washington voices calling to slash Social Security. In order to pay for their tax break—a giant handout to the wealthiest among us—they'll need to welsh on the loan the American middle class gave to the government through its payments to the Social Security Trust Fund. That lack of specifics is probably why Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who wrote a much more specific plan, was notably absent from today's event. Ryan's plan included deep cuts in Social Security benefits and a privatization plan that puts Wall Street gamble with our retirement security.

Ryan also provided the specifics on health care that these guys won't: He wants to convert Medicare into a voucher system, leaving individual seniors to cope with buying health insurance. He'd raise the eligibility age for Medicare, as well as for Social Security, and would raise premiums while cutting benefits. The Ryan plan would eventually cut Medicare by 76%. The GOP would roll back the new coverage provided by this year's health law while adding many seniors to the ranks of the uninsured. And some estimates suggest that half of all seniors would live in poverty under the Ryan plan.

Ryan, like Frum, committed the crime of honesty. Remember: Deadly unpopular things. Ryan's presence would have reminded the public of what they actually intend to do, instead of hiding behind Pledge's weasel words: "We will (require) a full accounting of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid ... preventing the expansion of unfunded liabilities ..."

But wait, as the old commercials used to say. There's more.

Not-so-small business

The Pledge also promises to give "small businesses" a tax deduction equal to "20 percent of their business income" - but, as Rachel Maddow and others have observed, their definition of "small business" includes giant corporations like Bechtel and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. That would mean another multibillion-dollar tax break for the wealthiest among us.

This "deficit-conscious" plan wants to expand the "military/industrial welfare state," too. "We are a nation at war," it says, calling to "fully fund" a missile defense system that's already plagued with persistent test failures, laden with cost overruns, and which most experts don't think is needed or can ever wok. What it can do, however, is transfer a lot of middle-class income to Boeing and Northrop Grumman. We've already spent more than $60 billion on the "Star Wars" missile program in the last eight years, in fact. Why, that's nearly as much as the GOP intends to give to the top 25 billion-dollar-a-year hedge fund managers!

They dress their plan up with the usual mumbo-jumbo about government spending that's "crowding out the private economy." That may sound good, Tea Partiers, but think about: How does it do that, exactly? Every government employee buys things from private companies—from supermarkets, pharmacies, auto dealers, and yes, hardware stores. Makes no sense when you think about it.

And while their rhetoric's pretty polished, they tried a little too hard to channel the Founding Fathers with lines like this one: "Whenever the agenda of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to institute a new governing agenda and set a different course." (Note for whichever lobbyist wrote that: "Agenda" is a business word, not an inspirational one. It doesn't fit. It's like writing "When in the course of human events we are called upon to write a Mission Statement ...")

Here's the bottom line: They'll raid your money to make their rich patrons even richer. The middle class will continue to wither away, and those manage to hold on will be worse off than ever. More and more people will slip into permanent unemployment, poverty, and penurious old age. More roads will crumble. More aging pipelines will explode in towns like San Bruno, Calif. This "pledge" is the oldest kind of promise in the world: the promise than con men make to their victims.

Remember, the Republicans made a lot of promises the last time they took control of the Congress. They promised to create more jobs, and their policies led to record unemployment. They promised to limit their own terms, then settled in for a long comfy stay in Washington. They promised that businesses would regulate themselves, and both the Gulf Coast and the Main Street economy were ruined.

It brings to mind the words of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce: "They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one: they promised to take our land and they took it." Substitute "our wallets" for "our land," and that's what we'll get with the Pledge to America. What they're really promising is this: No jobs, no health care, no security, no future.

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This post was produced as part of the Curbing Wall Street and Strengthen Social Security projects.