Thanks, New York Times, for compromising away seniors’ Social Security income

For many American senior 

citizens, this could be the

big meal of the day, if the New

York Times and the Trump

Administration have their way.

I should have come across this sooner. Perhaps it was the Ghost of Christmas Past, trying to postpone my un-holiday-like outrage for a while, that caused me to overlook it.

I refer to a piece by the Times Editorial Board offering to bargain away part of the Social Security benefits that seniors currently receive. 

The Times began by pretending to oppose benefits cuts that Republicans are proposing to “save” Social Security. Never mind that the whole shebang can be saved for the foreseeable future simply by raising the cap on deductions.

The cap — the point at which the government stops deducting Social Security taxes from your pay check — is currently at $110,000 a year. And even the Times article agrees that “the wage cap has not kept pace with the income gains of high earners; if it had, it would be about $250,000 a year.

So just restore the wage kept to its inflation-adjusted level and everybody’s happy. Well, maybe the million-bucks-a-year corporate C-Suite inhabitant gets irked because it takes a few months longer before the withholding from his pay check is reduced. But nearly everybody lives happily ever after, right?

Not the New York Times. 

The Times instead generously offers to chip away at the already cheesy safety net, helping to lower the bar for Tom Price, the incoming head of Health and Human Services, to propose the benefit cuts he has in mind.

States the Times:

A prudent approach to reform would target the causes of the system’s shortfall with a mix of modest benefit cuts and modest tax increases. It would make sense, for instance, to trim the benefits of recipients who were high earners during their work lives, because, in general, high earners live longer than low earners and thus draw their relatively higher benefits for a longer period of time.

Price, admits the Times, “ has been a champion of cuts to all three of the nation’s large social programs — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. When discussing reforms to Social Security, he has ignored ways to bring new revenue into the system while emphasizing possible benefit cuts through means-testing, private accounts and raising the retirement age.”

There is no reason why America’s citizens — even the richest of us — should accept any of these cuts, nor the one the Times proposes. Social Security isn’t simply a program for the hard up. It’s an insurance program, a retirement annuity, into which every American who has ever worked for a living — and the companies that employed them — paid  regularly by payroll deduction.

Imagine if you had a private retirement annuity and the insurance company came to you and said, “Hey, we’ve decided that, despite what the contract we signed with you says, that we’re going to delay three years before beginning to pay you the money we owe you.”

Or imagine they came to you and said, “Hey, we've just decided that you’ve got plenty of money. So we think you don’t need the benefits you paid for. Thanks, we’ll keep ‘em instead.”

Or even, “You’ve still got some money. Only a dollar? Well, cat food’s plenty nutritious. And if that doesn’t fill you up, eat the cat.”

You’d be enraged. You’d be livid. Your head would be exploding. You’d demand the arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment of the crooks who perpetrated that ripoff. 

So start getting livid now, not only at The New York Times, but also at the mere notion of raising the retirement age again — it was 65 only a few years ago — or reducing benefits. Evidently both are on every Republican agenda, starting the millisecond Trump stumbles into the Oval Office.

As for privatization, that’s just an opportunity for the wonderful folks who brought you the Mortgage Meltdown to reach into your pocket and grab a big handful of your money for themselves.

It’s time to make an issue of this. Not a little issue. A huge, cage-rattling, booming issue. 

Seniors, sharpen your pitch forks and light your torches!

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog

“When your news hole is shrinking, waste acres of space on a table of contents.” Is this the New York Times' editorial and financial philosophy?

What is it with the New York Times?

Their finances are in such deep doo-doo that after arranging a sale-leaseback of 21 floors of their brand new Manhattan skyscraper to generate some corporate cash, they’re announcing “temporary salary cuts.”

Ad revenues are shrinking. To save revenue no longer supplied by ad dollars, they've collapsed the metro section into the main section. So you’d think there wouldn’t be a column inch in the news hole to waste on frou-frou.

Instead, each morning the Times blows two — sorry you can’t see this on the Internet, but pick up a copy of the paper newspaper and check it out yourself if you can…

What a waste!

As I was starting to say, each morning the Times blows two pages on nothing but a table of contents. Odd, because in richer days, with more revenue coming in, the Times was perfectly happy to confine the table of contents to a small box on the front page. And oh yes, even with the two-page waste of space, there’s still a partial contents listing on the front page.

Deep in the heart of my cranky soul, I suspect that whatever justification the Times offers in public, the real reason is this: Filling up two pages with news takes a lot of reporters and editors. That’s expensive. Filling up two pages with a table of contents probably doesn’t take more than one junior editorial employee. That’s cheap.

Result: less news per expensively-killed tree, less bang for the subscription buck, less or no coverage of stories that need to be covered, and less clout for the once-very-important New York Times. On the other hand, cranky readers like me do get more of something. More frustration.

Eventually, if it keeps wasting time and newsprint while revenues shrink, The New York Times will be a two-page newspaper. The first page will be a table of contents. The second page will be the contents — all the news that fits printed on one side of a page. And all the former readers will be somewhere else.

Editor Bill Keller, are you listening?

O the horror of it all! It turns out anybody – anybody at all – can unearth a news story or express a political opinion. Without a license!

You can sense, just under the surface, a growing malaise among journalists who work in traditional media – print and broadcast.

Competition from the masses

The latest press concern? That anybody with a tape recorder, or a cell phone, or even with nothing but some intellectual curiosity, can dig up and break news these days – as long as they own a computer.

Gone are the days when somebody first had to take courses from the South Podunk State University School of Journalism and Mass Communications. Or even from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Gone are the days when you had to intern – as I did – for some small town paper like The Troy (Ohio) Daily News and the now-defunct Paterson (New Jersey) Sunday Eagle before you could get launched as a cub reporter – also as I did – for The New York Post. 

At that point, you finally had a credential that enabled you to stand in the crowds during a presidential election rally phoning in “color.” Or, at 3 o'clock in the morning, you got to ring a doorbell and throw a pair of bleary-eyed parents into shock by saying, "Your son just got killed in a drunk driving automobile collision on Pitkin Avenue. What kind of a boy was he? How was he doing in school? Was he ever drunk before? Who were his friends? Did he have a driver's license. How was he doing in school? Why was he on Pitkin Avenue?"

Instead, whoever you are these days, if you see something you can say something – and potentially get worldwide exposure for it. You can even show the world a record of the event that  you shot with your cell phone.

Journalism major?
Big freaking deal.

The problem with college majors in journalism is that most of the courses are how-to lessons in journalism that you could pick up on the job.

Each hour spent in a journalism class is an hour that is not spent studying history, or government, or sociology, or science. So journalism students learn mostly technique, not perspective. You learn how to interview, how to construct a pyramid-structure story that enables editors to chop off your copy to fit from the bottom up. You learn (maybe) where and how to check public records. Okay, I’m for that part of it.

You also learn the “ethics” of making sure that if you quote one person, you also quote “the other side.” That’s called “balance.”

"What color is the sky?
Here with another point of view is..."

While the theory of “balance” is good, it doesn’t always serve the purpose for which it’s intended. If you quote some dude as saying “The sky is blue,” you then have to go out and find somebody willing to say, “No, the sky is brown with orange polka dots.”

In the name of “balance” the traditional press has given a podium to flacks, hacks and fools willing to say we’re actually “winning” the war in Iraq, or that Social Security is going down the tubes and can be saved only by “privatizing” it, or that God created dinosaurs the day before he created people, and then buried the dinosaur bones to test our faith.

All these claims are patently ridiculous, yet all get placed before news audiences as “reasonable” alternatives to what is obviously the truth.

“But we’ve always misreported
the news this way.”

People get accustomed to doing things the way they've always done them. So it’s not surprising that newspeople are so accustomed to having a lock on news that they get their bustles twisted out of shape by the “amateurs” who scoop them on every level – from national news to small town stuff (as you’ll see if you read on) involving a political candidate who failed to obtain a $100 license for a bed and breakfast.

No fair! A mere“amateur” discovers
Bill Clinton’s potty mouth.

The national story, in this case, involved Bill Clinton. Good ol' boy Bill launched a potty-mouthed denunciation of a journalist who made him look bad in Vanity Fair magazine. Reports the Los Angeles Times (with what one senses is a thinly-masked explosion of outrage):

The 61-year-old self-described "failed writer" and amateur Web journalist helped create two of the most unexpected moments in the 2008 election -- most recently on Monday, when she recorded former President Clinton's fiery denunciation ("slimy," "dishonest") of Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum. The latest incident cemented Fowler's place as the unlikely face of the new-media revolution that is remaking presidential campaigns. Online videos can dominate the evening news. Or an unpublished novelist "with absolutely no journalism training" can alter the national debate.

Well, “alter the national debate” might be going a tetch far in this case, especially since that alteration is an unsupported claim in a newspaper of national standing.

Absolution for the 

Los Angeles Times

But let’s forgive the L.A. Times. The folks in the newsroom there must be suffering the hellish agonies of the scooped. Heck, it’s a good story, and they didn’t get it. Instead, someone “with absolutely no journalism training” got the story ahead of them.

Let us instead pick up the tale in the New York Times which horrifies us – O, what horrific horror! – with this nugget:

The woman, Mayhill Fowler, who calls herself a citizen journalist, wore no credential around her neck and did not identify herself, her intentions or her affiliation as an unpaid contributor to Off the Bus, a section of The Huffington Post.

While her digital audio recorder was visible in her left hand during that encounter last Monday, she says, she did not believe Mr. Clinton saw it. “I think we can safely say he thought I was a member of the audience,” she said in a telephone interview on Friday.

Newsweek writer twists
his own bustle, too

The same Times article has Jonathan Alter, who writes for Newsweek, huffing – accidental pun – “You identify yourself when you’re interviewing somebody. It’s just a form of cheating not to.”

Wait a second, Jonathan. Just wait a second! Who’s getting cheated here? Seems to me it certainly wasn’t the readers of the Huffington Post, who were given a vivid insight into the irascible personality of a man who might have been a highlyu influential “First Hubby.”

So why the outrage? The Times quotes Jane Hamsher of the blog Firedog Lake as saying, the purpose of identify-yourself-guidelines is “to “protect this clubby group of journalists and their high-ranking political subjects, and keep access to themselves.”

Let’s look at it another way.

"Excuse me, Mr. Hitler, are the
awful rumors about you true?"

Let’s say I’m a newspaper reporter in 1941, and in the name of “balance” I identify myself to Adolph Hitler, and ask, “Are the reports true, Mr. Hitler, that you are exterminating Jews in concentration camps?”

“Of course not!” barks Hitler, “This is just vicious anti-German propaganda, nothing more.”

On the other hand, suppose I sidled up to Hitler without identifying myself and asked, “Say mein fuhrer, how many more Jews do we have to exterminate before they’re all gone?” And suppose, his guard down, he replied, “Not long. We killed a million already and we’re gassing ten thousand a week right now.”

You’re telling me that if I broadcast that quote, and revealed he admitted the horror of what he was doing to the world before another five million innocent human beings died, I’d be unethically “cheating” – right Jonathan?

America’s first blogger
used a printing press

Remember that America’s first freedom of the press case – the colonial uproar that made the First Amendment so important to the authors of the constitution, involved not a “trained journalist” but a printer who was publishing his own opinions – the 18th Century equivalent of a blogger today.

His name was John Peter Zenger, and if you missed history class because you were too busy studying journalism, you can read more about his case here.

Of course, it isn’t always bagging big game that offends the “trained” press.

Shock that a blogger unearths
a small town "scandal”

Consider exurban “Dan’s Papers,” a rich, fat weekly in New York’s most fashionable outlying vacation colony, “The Hamptons.”

Dan Rattiner, the founder, editor and former publisher is a talented writer, raconteur, and observer of the Hamptons scene. He built his journal from a simple broadsheet to a behemoth he recently sold for $19 million.

Dan was writing his paper in the style of a personal blog before the word blog was invented. I begrudge him neither his hard-earned bucks nor the bully pulpit he still retains on Dan’s Papers after the sale. But I do begrudge the tone of a recent “20-Something” column written by his son, David Lion Rattiner. Young David complains:

Thanks to "On The Beach Blog," a personal blog about Westhampton Beach, that town's Deputy Mayor, Jim Kametler, is finding himself in the middle of a scandal.

O, the scandal of it all!

Just so you are aware, in order to get a proper permit for the bed-and-breakfast, a $100 application fee is required each year, and Village Code approval must be obtained. You also need to register with the Suffolk County Treasurer's Office to get a certificate of registration. Not a whole lot of work, but needless to say, the Deputy Mayor didn't get that paperwork, and a man with a computer wasn't about to let him get away with it.

Got that little elbow in the ribs concerning “a man with a computer?”

Nevermind that Dan’s Papers, other local weeklies and the big daily Long Island Newsday missed the story until the “On The Beach Blog" uncovered it.

Axes, grinders and love

Young David’s piece goes on to imply that that the On The Beach blogger has some axes to grind with the mayor. So what? Since when is there a law that you have to really, really like and admire a guy to expose his illegal activities? And come to think of it, might Young David have an axe to grind with bloggers who scoop him?

Heck, it’s getting to the point where some kid who has a 30 column-inch sinecure because his father started a newspaper simply can’t tell where the next scoop by some untrained journalist is going to come from.

Hey, New York Times: here's what inquiring minds really want to know about the Eliot Spitzer hooker scandal

I noticed with some interest that a New York Times blog is doing a running Q&A about Eliot Spitzer, the New York Governor who just resigned after getting caught patronizing a high-priced hooker. Yes. I'm talking about the once-dignified New York Times, now evidently the scandal sheet of record. The entire op-ed page for two days in a row has been all-hooker-all-the-time. As was the lead editorial yesterday.

Anyway, I’m usually too cranky to deal with tabloid-style scandals, but this one is different. It's raising questions that are unanswered because nobody has been alert enough to ask them. Well, hardly anybody. Anyway, these five don’t appear on the Gray Lady’s blog, at least as of this posting:

1. Am I mistaken or do we have a war in Iraq, a war in Afghanistan, a nose-to-nose presidential nomination race and a national economic collapse going on that ought to be taking up most of the news these days – instead of what the now ex-governor shelled out for hookers? Oh, sorry I asked. As you were.

2. What’s with the price Spitzer is reported to have paid for sex – the $4,300? I can understand him paying four grand. I can understand him parting with $300. But $4,300? Sounds weird, unless…

3. Was the $300 a tip? If so, is Spitzer as cheap a bastard as I’m thinking? Cabbies in this town expect 15%, and please round it up to the nearest dollar. Waiters get at least 15%. In really upscale restaurants it's routinely 20% or more. Yet on a $4,000 hump, Spitzer tips the hooker seven and a half percent? Sheesh! His criminal lawyer had better demand payment in full upfront to avid getting stiffed, too..

4. The hooker in question has been reported to have two working identities with similar-but-different names. Under one name, she got $4,000 a throw. Under another, only $1,000. If this is so, may I extrapolate that the only difference between, say, a $5,000 hooker and, say, a $5 hooker is $4,995?

5. If our government is so deep in the national debt hole, and out to cut waste, how come the Feds spend their valuable time checking out governors who are into hookers instead of terrorists who are into bombs? Could it be that they only check governors who are Democrats?

Only asking.