Dean Baker on Social Security, Rory O’Connor on CPB
This week on CounterSpin: The debate over Social Security privatization will be heating up again now that George W. Bush is endorsing a specific proposal. Are the media sorting out the truth about Bush’s push for so-called progressive indexation? Does the math really show that Bush is, as one New York Times column put it, Robin Hood? We’ll get the details from Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Also on the show: The conservative cat seems to be further out of the bag at CPB. Now PBS president Pat Mitchell is being criticized in public by the new Republican head of the CPB, which gives PBS some $30 million a year. Ken Tomlinson says he was joking when he said public TV programming needed to reflect the Republican ‘mandate.’ Mitchell says it didn’t sound like a joke to her. We’ll hear from veteran public television producer and journalist Rory O’Connor about this ongoing story. – www.fair.org