Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult. Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!
" Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten. " -"Double Indemnity" (1944) Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election?
Both parties are captives to corporate loot. Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail. Washington thinks entitlements are the problem. Maybe they’re the answer. Washington frets endlessly over the problems that Social Security and Medicare, both of which are projected to exhaust their trust funds in the coming decades, might cause the budget.
But two new reports underscore the serious problems they might solve for the country. Take Social Security. For years, pension experts have spoken of the “three-legged stool” of retirement savings: Social Security, employer pensions and private savings. In recent years, however, that stool has begun to wobble, and today, Social Security is basically the only leg holding it up. In 1980, about 40 percent of private-sector workers had a guaranteed pension.