Unreported

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Journalist Will Potter (@will_potter) joins the show to discuss ‘Ag Gag’ laws and animal activists being labeled domestic terrorists. Next, Allison and Jamie discuss President Obama OKing cuts to Social Security.

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Jamie shares tales from his Jiu-Jitsu tornament victory, Allison and Jamie discuss notable election results, and list warning signs for the Social Security battle.

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Citizen Radio is a member-supported show. Visit wearecitizenradio.com to sign up and support media that won’t lead you to war!

Listen to the new episode of Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.

Paul Ryan overkill: the media talks about Romney’s VP pick in the dumbest possible way, class war, DOJ refuses to prosecute Goldman Sachs, and Molly Knefel (@mollyknefel) talks about visiting her home town.

Also, Melissa Gira Grant (@melissagira) returns for part 2 of her visiting to Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Love” rally

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This is rich coming from a company that’s cause du jour is stealing old people’s guaranteed retirement funds.

Private equity firm Blackstone Group on Wednesday said retiring public employees shouldn’t be blamed for structural budget deficits, weighing into the debate about underfunded public pension plans….

Pension funds are major investors in Blackstone’s funds. Last year, Byron Wien, Blackstone’s economic adviser, was quoted as saying that retirement benefits for state workers are too generous.

“The retirement benefits for state workers, really not only in New York, California and New Jersey, but throughout the country, are very generous. Too generous,” Wien was quoted in June by Pensions & Investments publication as saying during a webcast.

New York City pension funds had pressed Blackstone to repudiate those comments, Bloomberg earlier reported.

In a statement on Wednesday, Blackstone said: “Working men and women should not have to worry about their retirement security after years of service to their communities.”

It continued: “We oppose scapegoating public employees by blaming them for the structural budget deficits that cities and states face. We at Blackstone are committed to helping public employees retire with confidence in the strength and reliability of their pensions.”

Mm’k. So suddenly Blackstone is the Defender Of New York State Employees simply because they’re salivating over the $109 billion in public pension plans they’ll make a pretty penny managing.

Meanwhile, the owner of Blackstone, Pete Peterson, is the cretin behind “America Speaks,” a propaganda tour designed to brainwash poor Americans into handing over their Social Security check to Peterson and his band of merry thieves.

Privatizing public services is very dangerous because it swaps historically secure nest eggs (Social Security, pension plans,) with the exotic instruments of the financial world favored by entities like Blackstone, which also led to the housing market exploding into a million fiery shards of broken dreams.

People like Peterson aren’t looking after retirement funds in the same way the state does i.e. because it’s a societal contract. Peterson and Blackstone handle these funds because they want to make money off of them, and they’ll do so by any means necessary — even if that entails making dangerous deals with Grandma’s medication money.

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President Obama has a new chief of staff named William Daley, and he and John Boehner (the new House majority leader) both have shady pasts. Also, a birther gets arrested on the first day of the Republican-controlled House, and don’t fret if you’re worried about the privatization of Social Security – you may be dead by then! Jamie shares a story about a recent audition disaster. Also, Allison and Jamie answer a bunch of your mail. Questions/comments this week concern the message board, veganism, and Julian Assange.

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Digby joins the show to discuss Democrats’ performance, Christian extremism, Wikileaks, the Catfood Commission, domestic terrorism, and why the “government is like your family” metaphor is so very stupid.

Check out Digby’s blog: http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/ and follow her on Twitter (@digby56)

Allison and Jamie discuss tax cuts for the rich, the unemployment epidemic, and banish a listener.

Also, there’s a new SUPER INTENSE Listener Mail song.

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At this point, I feel like saying “unemployment is bad” is like saying, “Jersey Shore is awful.” I know Jersey Shore is bad, you know it’s bad, and yet, when you find yourself watching the third consecutive episode of Jersey Shore*, you sort of forget how shit it is because you’ve been immersed in spray tans and Ed Hardy for so long.

Unemployment has been over 9 percent for 19 months, the longest stretch on record. Luckily, good ol’ Congress rushed to the rescue to doll out tax cuts for the rich. Also, they may not let poor people starve by extending unemployment benefits. Maybe. It depends on Mitch McConnell’s mood.

But as bad as the jobless rate is (and remember, it’s Jersey Shore-level bad,) most people still have no concept of the magnitude of destruction unemployment causes in people’s lives, and the long-term effects on their bank accounts.

SocImages links to the following graph that shows these negative effects even after individuals found employment again. The top purple line is employees who maintained their jobs through a recession. The bottom line is workers who lost their jobs in a mass layoff.

As you can see, the effects of layoffs linger for over a decade almost two decades.

…the net loss to a displaced worker with six years of job tenure is approximately $164,000, which exceeds 20 percent of the average lifetime earnings of these workers.

The long-term consequence, though less spectacular than the immediate loss of a huge number of jobs, is actually more than the losses associated with the period of unemployment itself.

There are a couple other pretty charts posted at SI that all essentially show the same trends. It’s all very depressing, but if anything, the study shows the dire need for extending unemployment benefits, and the need for stimulating job growth.

Whenever I look at these kinds of patterns, my head wants to explode when I see rich politicians and pundits demanding “shared sacrifice” from poor people, who by the way, are the only people who actually have been sacrificing anything for the past few decades. Imagine the kind of personal destruction families will have to endure as they attempt to cope with decades of struggle from the effects of this recession when politicians start cutting their aid, Social Security, and other benefits.

*Don’t write me letters. I only watched it because I was home visiting family.

Hotel workers in Chicago, Hawaii, and San Francisco are staging strikes and walk-outs to protest what they call “cheap recession contracts.” Basically, union leaders say Hilton is exploiting workers even though the company received huge taxpayer-provided bailouts.

Hilton is owned by Blackstone Group LP.

Blackstone in February cut a deal to reduce its $20 billion debt by about $4 billion. The debt was partially owned by the Federal Reserve, which had taken over the debt from lender Bear Stearns, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.

And of course, the Blackstone Group was co-founded by Social Security privatization hawk, Pete Peterson.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have written extensively about Peterson’s privatization fetish. But this hotel strike story nicely illustrates Peterson’s grand scheme: deprive people of the most basic standards of human dignity i.e. a living wage their entire adult lives, and then rob their twilight years of the same basic standards of human dignity by raiding the Social Security funds.

Quite simply, it’s the Great Heist from workplace to grave.

Someone should write down clear guidelines for what it takes to get fired from high-ranking government positions because the rules seem a bit blurry.

The Obama administration on Monday reiterated its commitment to keeping former Sen. Alan Simpson as the co-chairman of the president’s deficit commission even as the Wyoming Republican has come under heavy fire for his disparaging comments on Social Security.

You’ll remember that Simpson called Social Security – the wildly popular program millions of older Americans rely upon for survival –  ”a milk cow with 310 million tits.”

It’s strange that the administration is defending a man who seems hellbent on slashing benefits while co-chairing Obama’s Catfood Commission (this is hardly a slip of the tongue. Simpson has been bashing Social Security for quite a while.)

Furthermore, we know the administration certainly doesn’t lack the propensity to fire officials when they say something controversial, or even in the case of Shirley Sherrod, are framed in order to give the impression they said something controversial. Conman and professional loudmouth, Andrew Breitbart, altered video to make it appear as though Sherrod made a racist comment when in fact she was doing exactly the opposite by explaining how she overcame her own bias in the spirit of helping a white farmer.

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