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	Alarm as Republicans seek to cut disability benefits for millions of people by 20 percent by Richard Eskow, Leo Gerard Our Future, agencies USA   The Right Tries (and Fails) to Justify Its Assault on Social Security.   How does the Republican right justify the kind of action Congress took this week, when it moved to cut disability benefits for millions of people by 20 percent? Answer #1: With buzzwords and rhetorical dodges. Answer #2: Not very well.   For details on the House’s action, we pointed yesterday to a number of well-informed analyses – by Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson, Kathy Ruffing, Alan Pyke, Dean Baker, and Michael Hiltzik. Republicans moved to cut Social Security disability benefits by blocking a routine reallocation of funds. That’s bad enough, but their end game is even worse: broad Social Security cuts and the privatization of the entire program.   That would be bad for most Americans, but great for the people who finance the Republican Party – and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. There would be less pressure to increase taxes on billionaires. Wall Street would have more money under its control. And the far right’s antigovernment ideology would have claimed another scalp.   Heritage’s defense of the House is a good example of the right’s time-worn strategies for concealing – perhaps, at times, even from itself – the moral and human implications of its actions. It’s written by Romina Boccia, the “Grover M. Hermann fellow in federal budgetary affairs in the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation” – (now there’s a title!) – and is called “The House Just Made It Harder for Politicians to Steal From Social Security Retirement Fund.”   See what they did there, before we’ve even read the text? They changed the subject from “disabled Americans” to “politicians.” (People hate “politicians,” right?) But the money wouldn’t go to “politicians,” who have generous retirement and disability plans. It would go to the disabled. And it wouldn’t be “stolen.” It would be borrowed – from the same payroll tax which funds retirement benefits.   The Heritage piece is a compendium of right-wing Social Security feints, many brewed up in the manifold organizations funded by anti-government hedge fund billionaire Pete Peterson. We’re told, for example, that the House’s parliamentary move “set the stage for long-overdue Social Security reforms to protect disabled Americans and seniors from indiscriminate benefit cuts” – (As opposed to ‘discriminate’ benefit cuts?) – and that it “strengthens the integrity of Social Security’s separate trust funds” by “prevent(ing) lawmakers from raiding retirement funds to shore up the bleeding disability trust fund.” (Emphases mine.)   “Strengthen.” “Integrity.” Raiding.” “Bleeding.” These are code words designed to fire neurons in the lizard brain. Take them away and what’s left? The distasteful sight of prosperous Republican House members cutting disabled people’s already meager benefits.   As for the transfer of funds, Ms. Boccia doesn’t mention that Congress has made this very minor adjustment 11 times in the past. She makes it sound as if President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew are proposing something novel, strange – even dangerous. She even throws in a scare paragraph from a fellow Heritage employee suggesting that the entire program is in danger and warning of the “destitution” that might ensue. Then she tips her organization’s hand:   “This change,” Ms. Boccia writes of the House’s move, “sets the stage for comprehensive Social Security reform in the 114th Congress.”   Well, of course it does. Disability benefits are just the prelude. They’re after bigger game. The right wants what it has wanted ever since Social Security was first created: its dismantlement.   Merriam-Webster tell us that to “reform” something is “to improve (it) by removing or correcting faults, problems, etc.” It does not mean “to shrink, truncate, terminate, slash, or cut.” But then, that’s how the right creates buzzwords: by hijacking real words and giving them new, zombified meanings.   Congress must “act responsibly,” we’re told. It must attack “fraud and mismanagement” (although there is no evidence that either is a significant problem in the disability program). We’re left with another invocation of “indiscriminate” cuts and a call for responsible “stewardship” of tax dollars.   Some of Ms. Boccia’s commenters have a predictable field day. “There is no trust fund,” writes a commenter. “There is just a bunch of IOUs.” That’s another conservative canard – unless you think that all those Treasury bonds held by JPMorgan Chase are “just IOUs” too. (Besides, don’t conservatives pay their IOUs?)   Other commenters regale their readers with anecdotes about twenty-somethings who are “not disabled” and are “mooching off the system.”   Know what isn’t mentioned, either by Ms. Boccia or her commenters? Tax increases on the wealthy and corporations. Actual corporate tax rates – the amount they actually pay – are at 60-year lows. Billionaires pay less than half the tax rate they paid in the 1950s. Likely voters - including three-quarters of registered Republicans and an equal number of independents – want to increase Social Security benefits and pay for it by having millionaires pay into the program at the same rate as everyone else (“lifting the cap”). They forgot to mention that.   The GOP is trying to take Health Care away from Millions of Americans, by Leo Gerard.   America just celebrated the season of giving with Christmas presents, year-end charity donations and soup kitchen volunteering. It is a time when Americans demonstrate the generosity, caring and kindness that define them as a people.   Now, however, Americans may suffer the season of GOP taking. Republicans already insisted on taking away a key protection in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Now they’re intent on taking health insurance from millions of Americans who got it under the Affordable Care Act.   The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a manifestation of Americans’ concern for each other’s welfare. Americans felt it was intolerable for so many of their friends, neighbors and relatives to be uninsured in the richest country in the world, to be bankrupted by medical bills, to die for lack of medical care. So they found a way to do something about it. That is the ACA. Among other benefits, it extends Medicaid and provides subsidies enabling the working poor to afford insurance.   But the GOP is all against it. Republicans tried to repeal the law, appealed to courts to overturn it and refused its expansion of Medicaid. As they become the majority party in both houses of Congress this month, Republicans will intensify their campaign to take health insurance from millions who got it through the ACA.   Just as the employer mandate requiring large businesses to offer health insurance finally goes into effect, Republicans will try to eliminate insurance for those newly-covered workers.   They’ve promised to vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act—again. None of their previous 50 votes to do that succeeded. Failure is likely again, too, since they won’t get 60 ayes in the Senate and President Obama won’t sign a repeal. So they’ve said they’ll next try killing the law piece by piece.   Unlike their congressional votes, Republicans have been tragically successful with lawsuits in denying Americans health insurance. The first of those suits that went to the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t kill the law outright but empowered Republican governors to prevent poor constituents from getting health insurance through the law’s Medicaid expansion. Millions are suffering as a result.   New statistics show that if the Supreme Court had not made expansion of Medicaid optional, more than 3 million people would have gained health insurance in the 24 states where Republicans refused the program. These 3 million are working Americans struggling on the financial edge, people whose income is less than $16,105 a year.   A new Republican-pushed lawsuit could take insurance from 5 million more. These are residents of states that decided to use the federal health insurance exchange instead of creating marketplaces of their own. People who now buy insurance on an exchange, state or federal, may receive subsidies to help them afford it if their income is up to four times the federal poverty level.   In the lawsuit, King v. Burwell, Republicans argue that language in the Affordable Care Act means that only people who buy their insurance on a state-run exchange qualify for the subsidies. The GOP wants to discriminate against people who get their insurance through the federal marketplace. They want to deny the ACA’s financial help to the working poor in 36 states without their own exchanges.   New federal information shows that 87 percent of those who buy their insurance on the exchanges receive subsidies. And a review by the private consulting firm Avalere Health showed that, on average, the subsidies paid for three-quarters of the purchaser’s insurance premium.   If the Supreme Court hands Republicans a win in this case, millions will lose their insurance because they can no longer afford it. These are people who got insured with the help of the ACA, and who will lose it on the demand of the GOP.   In another lawsuit, 36 Republicans in Arizona are trying to take Medicaid away from poor residents who got coverage in the expansion pushed through by Gov. Jan Brewer—yes, a Republican. Like several other Republican governors who accepted the expansion, Brewer was swayed by doctors and hospitals that prefer to treat insured patients rather than deny care or provide it for free.   But the three dozen Arizona Republicans, represented by the conservative Goldwater Institute, contend the expansion is illegal because it will be partially paid for by a levy on hospitals. Last week, the state Supreme Court said the case could proceed. If the GOP wins, it will take insurance from a quarter million Arizonians.   Maine is just the opposite. There, low income people never benefitted from Medicaid expansion because Republican Gov. Paul LePage vetoed it. Five times.   The most recent Congressional session was the second least productive in the modern era—exceeding the previous poor record by one piece of legislation. Now, however, with Republicans in control of both houses of Congress, a new low is promised.   Instead of passing positive or helpful or useful legislation, the GOP has pledged to take from the American people. It vows to take away a basic necessity—health care, to ensure the uninsured suffer.   That’s a promise that Americans must ensure is broken. For their own health. For their neighbors’ well-being. And for preservation of Americans’ self-image as caring and kind people. Visit the related web page
	Human Rights and the 2022 Olympics by Minky Worden Human Rights Watch   The Olympic spirit has come to this: Two authoritarian countries are vying to host the 2022 Winter Games, competing to endure a huge financial strain for the benefit of burnishing their public image. The withdrawal of Oslo in October left Beijing, China’s capital, and Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, as the contenders. They formally submitted their bids to the International Olympic Committee this month.   That helps explain why the president of the International Olympic Committee, the German lawyer Thomas Bach, pushed through landmark human rights reforms at a big Olympic summit meeting in Monaco last month.   For the first time, host countries must sign a contract that requires protections for human rights, labor and the environment. These “international agreements and protocols” are meant to protect against abuses such as Russia’s anti-gay law, passed ahead of last year’s Winter Games in Sochi, and the labor and human rights abuses before and during the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. These reforms are about to get a rigorous test in the global spotlight — whether the 2022 Games are in China, which welcomed journalists to Beijing in 2008 with a censored Internet, or Kazakhstan, which locks up critics and closes down newspapers.   Over the past decade, Human Rights Watch has documented how major sporting events are also accompanied by human rights violations when games are awarded to serial human rights abusers. Repressive countries promised to respect media and other rights to secure the events, then reneged and relied on international sporting bodies to stay silent.   As these countries prepare for events, forced evictions without fair compensation free up space for the massive new infrastructure construction that Olympics require. Migrant workers are cheated and labor under long hours and sometimes deadly working conditions. Construction leads to environmental and other complaints. Activists who object are silenced or jailed. Beijing locked up critics of the Olympics. In Russia, an environmentalist drew a three-year prison sentence, and members of the feminist band Pussy Riot were beaten and detained, for their protests of the Sochi Games. Given the abuses, is there any hope for change?   If there is the political will to implement them, the contract reforms could improve conditions in countries that host big sporting events. Autocrats are increasingly turning to international sporting events to boost their global standing, so the regulations adopted by their governing bodies might be the only way to make human rights advances in some of the most abusive places.   At Sochi last year, for example, the I.O.C. pressured the Russian government to take action against the theft of wages from workers who helped build Olympic venues and infrastructure. Some 500 companies were investigated, and inspectors found that thousands of workers had been cheated out of more than $8 million in wages. The general director of a top construction company was arrested on suspicion of withholding wages. This action resulted from a specific reform from the 2009 Olympic Congress: a promise that the I.O.C. would intervene in the event of “serious abuses,” including abuses of migrant workers.   In Iran, hard-liners and reformists alike cheer the country’s volleyball successes. A law student, Ghoncheh Ghavami, was jailed in Iran’s notorious Evin prison last year after she protested a ban on women entering a stadium to watch an International Federation of Volleyball World League match. In November, the federation (known as FIVB, the acronym in French) called on the Iranian government to release Ms. Ghavami, and affirmed its commitment to “inclusivity and the right of women to participate in sport on an equal basis.” The federation warned that Iran’s policy could limit its ability to host international tournaments in the future. Ms. Ghavami was released on bail shortly thereafter, but not before a revolutionary court convicted her of “propaganda against the state” and sentenced her to one year in prison. She is appealing.   In 2012, Saudi Arabia allowed two women, at the last moment, to compete at the London Summer Games. But it still forbids sports for all girls in state schools and has no women’s sports federations. The Saudis should win a gold medal in brazenness for sending a 199-member men-only team to last fall’s Asian Games, claiming, “Technically, we weren’t ready to introduce any ladies.”   Human rights and sports crises are not limited to the Olympics. Russia, despite its record of worker abuse, was awarded the 2018 World Cup. This summer, authoritarian Azerbaijan will roll out the welcome mat for the first European Games in Baku, despite escalating repression, including the December arrest of a top investigative journalist.   As Qatar builds an estimated $200 billion of infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup, hundreds of South Asian migrant workers have died working on construction projects. FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, is ripe for institutional reform. In May, it will hold a once-in-a-generation presidential election, in which the current president, Sepp Blatter of Switzerland, will seek a fifth term against stiff competition, including Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan, who has championed reforms to advance women’s participation. Those candidates should back human-rights-based reforms to the FIFA Charter and set out their position on the human rights, discrimination, corruption and labor crises that have dogged the body.   The Olympic reforms passed in December mean that if future host countries fail in their duty to uphold rights, the I.O.C. is now obliged to enforce the terms of the hosting agreement — including the ultimate sanction of withdrawing the Olympics. And for those who break rules like nondiscrimination, the punishment should be a ban on playing and hosting, as the I.O.C. imposed on apartheid South Africa from 1964 to 1992 and Taliban-run Afghanistan from 1999 to 2002.   Mr. Bach has started the ball rolling, but with abuses mounting around global sporting events, it’s time for other sporting federations like FIFA to begin reforms. Fans, corporate sponsors and the general public are increasingly turned off by human rights violations. The I.O.C. reforms aren’t a panacea, but they represent an important step forward.   * Minky Worden, is director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch: http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2015 Visit the related web page
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