Nancy Pelosi is single handedly blocking a bill that would expand Social Security and
even protect it from being privatized in the future.
Now this is a bill that has widespread support among Democratic lawmakers,
even Biden is urging for the passage of this expansion of Social Security,
but Pelosi has decided to block it and instead the House has been focusing on,
you guessed it tax cuts for wealthy retirees.
Now, let's get to the details here.
Social Security 2100.
The first expansion to the new deal program in 50 years would
increase all checks by about 2% of the average benefit offset
through a payroll tax on wages above $400,000.
The bill, long championed by representative John Larson and
introduced with nearly 200 co-sponsors, was set for a markup by the ways and
means committee in late July before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office axed it.
I should also note that the chair for the House ways and
means committee is Richard Neal a Democrat remember that name because it's gonna come
up again in the future.
Now Wendell Primus Pelosi's brain if you wanna call it that on policy matters and
a longtime strident expansion opponent stands in the way.
Primus's philosophy is in line with an older generation's belief that
democrats should fight only to maintain the last scraps of the social
safety net rather than do anything that might broaden it.
So not only is Pelosi pretty terrible when it comes to these issues,
her top staffer this Wendell Primus figure is against the programs that
are widely popular in this country like Social Security.
And so of course he's not gonna want to beef it up,
he's not gonna want to expand and he's not gonna want to provide protections
to ensure that it isn't privatized in the future.
Now, Representative Ro Khanna was pretty furious about this.
And while he tends to be a little more friendly in his rhetoric toward corporate
democrats, he didn't hold back in this case.
He said, ''someone should tell Wendell that if he really wants to
exert this kind of leadership, he ought to try to run for
Congress or at least get elected dogcatcher first''.
So Jake, Pelosi has taken her staffers advice.
She has blocked that bill from coming to fruition,
even though it has widespread support and before we get to the tax cuts for
wealthy retirees, I wanna get your thoughts.
>> Yeah. Look guys,
that's why you gotta watch this show.
That's why you gotta read independent media like the American Prospect that
broke the story because you're never gonna get the real story out of corporate media.
This is the real story gives you a perfect juxtaposition between what
democrats say and what democrats do.
And it also shows you who's guilty and not guilty.
For example, John Larson apparently a wonderful Democrat,
probably doesn't get enough credit.
Trying to expand Social Security doesn't make sense in this day and
age to bring it up by 2%.
Well of course it does.
We have massive inflation and so
everybody's talking about inflation inflation.
So you wanna bring up social security by 2%.
Hell no.
What happened? I thought you were concerned
about inflation.
You're only concerned about it in relationship to the stock market and
how it affects rich people, not how it actually affects
American voters of course, but give larger credit, Give Ro Khanna credit.
I mean that's a hell of a quote man.
That's a one quote I underline in that piece.
That is a frontal attack on Nancy Pelosi's top staffer.
And so you have to understand when the Primus is one of the most powerful people
in all of government and a person that has almost never talked about
like corporate media will use the excuse of well, look,
nobody's interested in those little details of the staffers and stuff.
Well it depends, doesn't it?
If they're the ones making the decisions that I think people would be enormously
interested and in the case of a lot of these older politicians.
And I'm not saying this to take away any responsibility from Nancy Pelosi.
I think she herself is massively corrupt and we've talked about it many times and
that's why she surrounds herself with corrupt staffers like Wendell Primus,
but it's also true that a lot of the Democratic leaders are in their
two hundreds right there so old.
So they hand off decision making to guys like this.
And Wendell Primus runs that office.
He's also the one that meets with donors.
We've covered this in previous stories.
So if the drug lobby wants to kill a bill, they invite Wendell Primus,
he gets a bag full of checks, he goes home and then he kills the bill.
And that's how this ball game is played.
Everything else is theater and nonsense.
This is the reality.
And that's why the lobbyists went on everything and
the American people lose on everything.
>> So one other note that I should mention,
because of course corporate democrats have to provide some sort of cover story for
why they are destroying any opportunity for good legislation to pass.
And so they told Larson that, well, midterms are coming up and
some of the Democratic incumbents in these purple
districts are concerned that if we expand a very popular
retirement program, that it could hurt them.
But what's amazing is that is easily debunked because the candidates
themselves, the incumbents who are running for
re election themselves co sponsored the bill, they want the bill to pass.
So that doesn't work.
The bill already has the support of a majority of Democratic
front liners such as Sanford Bishop and
Matt Cartwright who represents a district Trump won by several points.
It is the culmination of a two decade push to move from a defensive to
offensive position on Social Security,
not only protecting the program from Republican threats of privatizing it,
but also adding to it right now, let's get to what's really going on.
Okay. What the real focus is here and
the fact of the matter is any time something comes up that would actually
help wealthy people in this case, wealthy retirees, they don't hesitate.
So what Richie Neal, who's the head of the House Ways and
Means committee is working on right now is essentially increasing
the amount that individuals can contribute to their 401k.
And that overwhelmingly benefits wealthy people because
they're the ones who have the funds to max out their 401k.
And if you have a traditional 401k,
what that ends up doing is when you're contributing to it,
the amount you contribute to it is not taxed, it could lower your tax liability
because it could even in some cases take you to a lower tax bracket, right?
So you actually end up saving money on your taxes by contributing as much as
possible to a traditional 401k.
And so Richie Neal is focusing right now on increasing the amount that rich
retirees can contribute to 401k programs.
The other thing I should mention is that
democrats have assisted republicans on a win.
They helped republicans pass a retirement related bill that's
actually very popular with labor unions.
And so I want to talk about that as Larson's bill was being sidelined another
Social Security bill sponsored by Republican Representative Rodney Davis
earned enough bipartisan support to bypass markup.
And he fast tracked for a vote.
Davis's bill, The Social Security Fairness Act would repeal the windfall elimination
provision and the government pension offset, which prevent public servants in
states with special pension plans from getting Social Security benefits.
And while labor unions are going to celebrate this and
government workers are going to celebrate it as well because they might qualify for
this for what this legislation entails.
There are substantive concerns with Davis's bill, it is not paid for.
So the addition of public sector pensioners could actually cost
the Social Security Trust Fund as much as $147 billion according to Larsson,
ironically, he said that could over time decrease benefits across the board for
Social Security recipients.
It's just infuriating.
Absolutely infuriating.
>> Yeah.
So I want to draw you, of course, what happens.
It's what we predict all the time.
If you watch this show,
isn't it amazing that what's going to happen before it happens?
Or maybe it's not amazing at all that journalism is actually super,
super simple.
Just follow the money.
The lobbyists wanted the second provision that Anna told you about the pass,
mainly not because it helps the wealthy.
Yeah, that's important.
But because it gets the people who run the mutual funds more money,
they make way more money,
including incredibly influential companies like Blackrock.
So once they send in the lobbies it's over that's gonna pass.
So that gets to the one of the first points that animation John Larson has been
told to go to mark up.
If you watched the election coverage, we had the other night,
congressman Jamaal Bowman was on and he talked about this issue.
He said whenever there's a progressive priorities, they tell you it's gotta go
through this process and it's gonna get marked up, okay?
And that's when they go through committees, they mark up the bill and
they change it and they're like, it's got there's no way around it.
It's got to go through markup and they'll sit and mark up for years and
years, right?
But whenever lobbyists want something as congressman Bowman explain,
it flies through, there's no markup.
And so when the rich wanted something fixed, the Social Security,
it flew right past markup.
Okay, why?
Because the most corrupt or the ones at the top and that's not an accident.
So remember Mo Brooks, the Republican House member explained on the campaign
trail in order to be a committee chair, like Richie Neal is in the House,
you have to get at least a million dollars and
give it to your Democratic Party committee or Republican Party committee, right?
And where do you get the million dollars Mo Brooks explained,
you get it from the industry most affected by your committee.
So the more corrupt you are to serve the corporate interests that are affected by
your committee, the more likely you are to be the leader of that committee.
Now take that and multiply it by 20 and you'll know who's the leader of the party.
So Pelosi and McConnell and Schumer are the most corrupt because they've collected
the most amount of money and they've collected it from corporate interests and
that's who they're going to represent.
So the thing that would have helped you this year, senior citizens
Pelosi made the decision to bury the thing that would help rich people.
She made the decision to elevate that and pass it.
It's not a coincidence, that's exactly what's supposed to happen.
And this is exactly how we all get robbed on a daily basis in Congress.
And the people driving the getaway car is corporate media that never lets you know
about it.