Former Senator Alan Simpson - Co-Chair of the Commission on Fiscal Responsibility & Reform

It is my fervid hope that President Obama will keep Alan Simpson on as a co-chair of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, otherwise known as the “whack the elderly commission.”  Former Senator Simpson has given a tremendous boost to the Older Women’s League, the AARP, the Gray Panthers, NOW and progressive groups everywhere.  Furthermore, he has exposed the nature of an illegimate and phony process that has been passed off on the media and the public as a serious, deliberative effort to reduce the budge deficit.

Mr. Simpson has also questioned the loyalty of Vietnam veterans who are asking for some compensation for illnesses due to agent orange exposure during the Vietnam War.  He thinks that by expecting their country to take care of them for injuries and illnesses suffered in service to their country, these people, who risked their lives for their country, are being selfish and unpatriotic.

The former Senator, who has a fantastic pension from the U.S. government, has been one of the leading cheerleaders for a Wall Street cabal, e.g. Peter G. Petersen and David Rubenstein, that would like to pay even lower taxes than the compariatively low taxes they pay now.  One way to do that would be to help the government escape its 2.5 to 3.0 trillion dollar liability to the Social Security Trust Fund.  They can accomplish that by reducing Social Security benefits.

So, in his typical crude, rude manner Alan Simpson insulted the executive director of the Older Women’s League by telling her to get a real job.  Apparently working for social justice for women in poverty is not a real job.  A real job is helping Wall Street billionaires escape their fair share of taxes by taking it out of safety net programs for the elderly.  You’re doing a heck of a job Alan!

In addition to insulting the nature and mission of OWL and calling ill Vietnam veterans unpatriotic, the former Senator came up with a metaphor for the U.S. government on which we all depend for our safety, security, and basic needs:  “A milk cow with 310 million udders.”  He did not say udder.  He used a word that many people consider crude, so I won’t use it in this blog. 

The cow that Mr Simpson is talking about actually has hundreds of millions of udders, which are so small they can’t be seen with the naked eye.  But it does have a few, gigantic udders.  There is, for instance, the medical-industrial complex udder, the wall street udder, the military-industrial complex udder, the upper-two-percent-income  udder, and retired senator udder.  This cow is fed mostly by the middle and low income classes who are receiving far less nourishment than the few upper class people suckling on the big udders.

Alan Simpson helps clarify all of this.  His words, his attitude, in fact his entire history is illustrative of an illigitimate commission stacked with anti-Social Security conservatives.  President Obama, please don’t dump him!