Regarding Social Security and Medicare - 1.18.2024
- charitycolleencrouse
- Jan 19, 2024
- 11 min read
Note: At the time this was being written the following:
was on and I was listening to it. I stopped listening to it at the point indicated.
Last evening I spent about an hour and a half commenting. I had also spent two hours or more the evening before commenting on "mental healthcare" and the political implications of "forgeries" of official records and the Constitutional implications. These forgeries include legislation already passed and implemented within the United States for more than 25 years.
The Dallas Public Library had a book of correspondences between who became Justice Felix Frankfurter and Louis Brandeis. In this book was a section that discussed the two and their understanding of the effort to pass and implement the Social Security Act. The original act was passed with the promise of implementing the program for a certain amount of time at a certain level. Yearly appropriations from the federal government into the initial program were to occur for ten years. The Act was approved, however, in the course of the floor debates on the appropriations in the same session for the program, a congressman was on the floor and was quoted in the newspaper remonstrating that the Congress was intent on passing appropriations that funded the bill for sixty percent of the time originally promised (six years and not ten) and at an amount that was less than originally proposed. In the context of the article it was recounted that the amounts provided the equivalent of a 25 percent under of the originally promised amount. I contend that the manner in which Frankfurter and Brandeis reacted (which was a sort of “silence” at the point of being so informed) demonstrated two major things:
That they were aware of the implications of three of the first five Presidents and the correlations of their deaths with the “three-fifths compromise;” and
The original discussions, including Thomas Jefferson’s writings, on coinage and what the “25%” meant in terms of “inheritance.”
At this time, Dwight D. Eisenhower was active duty in the military. At this time, also, Bob Dole and Richard Nixon – among others – were in the process of growing up and becoming who would – after military service during World War II – become members of Congress and the Senate, including ones who ran for President. In Richard Nixon’s Six Crises, I contend that Nixon reveals that he understood during his service on the House Unamerican Activities Committee what was portending of the time as relative to, among other things, “social security” as well as “pensions” and other “retirement” implications regarding end-of-life care and the context within which elders and seniors in society were to be brought to bear.
In Six Crisis, Nixon also recounts his experiences with his effort to create an account in the form of a trust to seek election for the Presidency. While as it turned out he was not the only person who did such a thing – including in that season – he was subject to public scrutiny, including and especially after he was asked by Eisenhower to serve with him as the Vice-President. I contend that Eisenhower knew about the “trust” and that as he was made aware he engaged his campaign and early administration planning with Nixon’s responses in mind. During the period of public scrutiny of Nixon’s presidential trust two major things were revealed:
That Richard Nixon was the recipient of a military pension – or at least was to be availed of the benefits at a later time when he was of age – and was the holder of a war bond while Eisenhower himself had requested that his military pension be canceled before he announced his run for President (see the “White House Years by Eisenhower); and
…
It is important that at this point, there is something that is missing and will come up later.
As the Hiss-Chamber case revealed, the U.S. was in a very important point at the point that Nixon joined the committee as a Freshman. For one thing, the committee had many members who were “senior” Congresspeople and the debate had been engaged as to whether or not the committee was to maintain the activities AS THE COMMITTEE or turn over the investigations at hand to the Department of Justice. It was on Nixon’s personal initiative that it was determined to maintain the activities of the committee AS THE CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE and in manners that required Nixon personally to invest his political capital into the committee activities, including in his testimony before grand jury and in the context of interviewing Chambers and Hiss. The impact of the case also provided a consideration of WHO it was that the Soviets were after, as an emblematic of what was the sort of “American” most at “threat” by the efforts of the Communist Party, specific to its relationship with the Soviet Union. Hiss, who was college educated, on the boards of major corporate philanthropic foundations, was also an employee of the State Department making an official government salary and qualifying for an official government pension. Hiss, on the other hand, was not a college graduate and was a journalist, but had no official government job and, until as a result of his efforts to extricate himself from his party activities, was not in a position to earn “pension benefits” directly and consistently; when he was it was as employed in the private sector as an editor at a publication that was respected and often cited as an official source when it came to historical and political matters.
In the course of this, and in the course of what was ongoing during the election efforts of the 1950s, I contend that Nixon KNEW that a crisis regarding “Social Security” and “medicare” was looming for the nation based upon the history of the onset of the program and the apparent speculation that Congress was willing to permit when it came to providing the official appropriations as were originally promised. I also contend that he had structured the aims of his administration with his eventual retirement in mind. I contend that he intended to be a “senior” at a time when more persons were of “retirement age” and would be so with a large number of military veterans. In so being, he intended to spend his “senior years” exposing corruption and engaging with OTHER seniors in efforts to expose corruption and compel action on it.
I contend the Democratic Party knew this and instead wanted for what would otherwise be the context of considering “corruption” relative to the government NOT living up to its commitments and not providing what it had promised that they wanted to “divert” the scandal into election campaigning. This created not only a different context for investment in the system, but also considerations of what the system “owed” to people in the course of their lives. It is not a coincidence that we have NOT been able to successfully address “campaign finance reform” since then and that most of the “election scandals” focus on the sorts of allegations they do. There is a scandal EVERY election, and yet we do NOT get to the point of the major impacts of what would otherwise impact someone’s capacity to participate in the institutions of government – whether it is diverting resources to investigations, or prosecutions of cases – that impacts our access to all three branches. It also “stacks the deck” when it comes to political movement building and the investment of our movements in political processes that are NOT primarily identifiable with a specific candidate via their “election campaign.”
Currently, a member of Congress has to serve three years (meaning at least one and a half terms) and a Senator for five years (meaning one year short of a full term) in order to begin qualifying for Congressional pension benefits. Members of Congress and the Senate are also apportioned benefits for a certain number of staff. For several years, there has been a “freeze” on cost of living adjustments to Congressional pension benefits. While on one hand, this may appear to be “capping costs” to the people in the context of Congressional “salaries” it actually does not. I contend it is akin to the contentions that came up in 2012 and 2013 regarding the debt ceiling and its impact on military pension benefits. What the context of pension benefits for members of the government of federal agencies means for the rest of the country is no small matter. They also qualify for Medicare and Social Security BEFORE THEY ARE ELECTED in wherever they are employed.
Since 1984 Congress and the Senate knew that the status of their pension benefits was at stake relative to the United States military. A report that was published in 1984 after the passage of changes to the military pension system identified that the military pension system was authorized for forty years but the process of defining its implementation only accounted for 35 years of revenue, meaning that there was going to have to be a revisitation of the military pension system BEFORE the final five-year pension came. We are NOW in the last years of that legislated outlay. This has been known for DECADES. The year that “COVID-19” was “identified” as originating was what would have been the first of the final five years of that forty year process. NO ONE said anything about it. No one also said anything about the fact that the legislation that was authorizing federal employees benefits was set to expire in 2018. When the budget imbroglio broke out in July of 2018, did Congress have another bill – or did it reauthorize the existing bill – when it came to federal workers? I have no evidence that either action was taken legislatively and I have no record of anyone aside from myself pushing the point.
The context of the passage and implementation of the Affordable Care Act brings this into another focus. In the 1960s a movement of labor and faith organizations working with the A. Philip Randolph Institute proposed what they called a “Freedom Budget.” The basic point of the Freedom Budget was to request a temporary 10-year period of “opening up” of Medicare and Social Security in order to invest in housing initiatives and job training for blacks and others who were impoverished. This effort was in the context of the announcement of the “War on Poverty” and action taken by The Kennedy Administration while Nixon was preparing to run again and get elected. The Freedom Budget at the time was NOT passed, but actions taken by the Ford Administration demonstrate that it was NOT beyond the hearing range of the federal government. This includes the fact that as Ford implemented “reform” for Medicare, President and First Lady Truman “signed up for Medicare” as a demonstration of “seniors” receiving their social security and Medicare benefits.
This shows a specific trajectory that had already been set in motion at the time of its passage had profound implications on what was possible as a processes of accounting for federal obligations and their constitutionality, as well as the functional means by which to fulfill constitutional obligations. The determinations of what political course to take also have to do with what oversight comes into assuring that the government pays for what it promises to pay for. While, for instance, the Freedom Budget was not implemented, I have to ask if the Affordable Care Act and the movement to implement the Affordable Care Act “borrowed” on the political capital of that movement for its passage and implementation and did NOT pay it back?
In 2011, I was told that I was being “awarded” a two-year “back pay” of Social Security Disability Insurance because it had been determined that I had been “medically unqualified” to work for the previous two years. I was, however, not determined at that time to be eligible for monthly assistance or future SSDI benefits, and that my “Medicare” access was limited to paying for my “medical treatment.” Despite what contestation I may have with the legitimacy of the diagnosis itself – which I had at all stages and have maintained until now – there is the fact that the years that “SSDI” covered would have been years that I would have been working as a Congressional staff member for someone I later understood actually OWN his election but was subjected to deceit in the recounting of the election results to make it appear as if he did not. That also means that WE did not get the chance to “work” for the people as part of his Congressional term. Those two years of “SSDI” were not supposed to be “SSDI.” I – and others, including the Congressman – were supposed to be making salaries with benefits that included health care, as well as accrual of qualification for federal pension benefits. What would our “social security” and “medicare” payments have been if the corruption of that election was revealed? On another level, those “two years” were the two years that the Freedom Budget recommended for “job training” in order to assist people with getting out of poverty and obtaining a job that was meant to provide for the rest of their lives in one manner or another, including in providing them with pension and retirement benefits, as well as health care benefits.
The President of the United Auto Workers for 63 years not only had to testify before the House Unamerican Activities Committee, but also spent most of his term trying to get comprehensive health care benefits for working people. What happened to that “health care policy?” We have heard much from members of Congress and the Senate for some time, and that is important, but the status of workers rights and organized labor is not adequately addressed in this process. Pensions funds keep track of the lifetime work input of millions of people. The federal government can only do so much outside of compelled nationalization of industry. Medicare and Social Security were NOT meant to replace workers rights which provide pensions in accordance with the investment our work has provided to the institutions we access – or that access us. How many “pension funds” were opened up in my name at “jobs” that I had to work for a certain time to “qualify” but did NOT qualify for under the terms of that job? How many people – including young people but also middle aged people not yet eligible for Medicare – have been able to maintain a job long enough to get the time on the clock to meet the eligibility requirements of the pension fund but are STILL IN THE PENSION fund system?
Medicare “aggregates” for the individual, but we do not take our “pension funds” from “job to job.” What we are really missing here is an expose of the manners in which the Affordable Care Act committed CRIMES that have manipulated people’s health care access as a substitute for appropriate policy with regards to getting our material needs met, but also being able to be acknowledged for the actual value we contributed to society, including through our “jobs” but also the investment we make and that were made with our lives into institutions and systems throughout the nation and the world. This is necessary in order to understand the CRIMES that have occurred in connection with the “payment” for treatment” for COVID-19, including insofar as it intercesses through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In 2020, I kept track of the manners in which states throughout the U.S. attempted to acquire “waivers” on mandatory documentation provisions to CMS in accordance with their state’s relationship to the federal trust allegedly due to COVID-19. I contend they were NOT ALLOWED to have those requirements waived for “COVID-19.” We were not allowed to cover up for intentional misdiagnosis of alleged medical ailments under the implementation of the Affordable Care Act by conflating what are actual medical problems otherwise diagnosable into “COVID-19.” I contend that is WHAT that was and still is. In 2017, the CMS announced that it had a three-year backlog on responding to reports of “fraud” involving Medicare. The problem is that BY LAW the CMS is required to respond to a report on “fraud” WITHIN THREE YEARS. There was NO hearing on that. That means that if the claim took three years from 2017 to even be CONSIDERED what happened to it by the time “Covid-19” came along? How many “pre-existing conditions” – including reports of “fraud” – were supposed to be “waived” when it came to investigation of claims until such time as it could be re-diagnosed as symptomatic of some “strain” of “COVID-19?”
No, I cannot pay for what Hassan did to the children. Is “long COVID” the people who are supposed to be “sold” to pay for the “short COVID” people who buy them?
The “cost” of “prescription drugs?”
Was this discussed in the investigations performed by Nixon’s commission on Telecommunications Deregulation? Is there anyone from that commission today who could speak to that?
…
5:49 pm CST
Jan. 18, 2024
Co-President Charity Colleen “Lovejoy” Crouse
“HELP” … line…59:33 at 2:44:15
published at 11:05 am CST on Jan. 19, 2024.
Co-President Charity Colleen "Lovejoy" Crouse
Comentarios