THE ASSAULT AGAINST
SOCIAL SECURITY

In the next few weeks we are going to hear George W. Bush claiming a mandate from the American voters to tear up the government’s 70-year-old contract with the American citizens, created to let them live respectably in their old age.

Bush calls it reform. If it is, it belongs in the same league with the reform job the Roman senators performed on Julius Caesar. This is the endgame Bush and his handlers are playing with Social Security. In its true colors it’s an attempted long-term strangulation of Social Security as we know it.

This is one more step in the enfolding scheme of the corporate-right wing crowd running the country, featuring George Bush in the strutting role of military savior and Texas-style economist. His most devoted multitudes increasingly believe his agendas are guided by God. This comes as a surprise both to God and admirers of Karl Rove, who thought he held the franchise. One of the primary goals of this counter-revolution by corporate America and the right wing zealots is to restore America to the orderly times of the 1920s, when nobody regulated business, and old and indigent people were shoved into poorfarms or their children’s attics.

Late this week George Bush convened a noisily ballyhooed summit gathering of economic thinkers. The idea was to promote the shining domestic agendas of his second term—privatizing Social Security; stifling class action lawsuits in order to insulate corporations from the wails of customers and clients who believe they’ve been gypped or poisoned with bad pills; and finally simplifying the tax system, which is code for sealing and enshrining Bush’s tax cuts for the rich so they will last forever.

What Bush’s summit was in reality was a political Mardi Gras. Nobody who disagreed with him was invited. The featured actors were the usual collection of toe-kissers masked as sages of public policy, some of whom seemed to be auditioning for Bush’s cabinet, where toe-kissing is a requirement. There was no serious, contested discussion of the potential catastrophe that has evolved in the four years since George Bush was shoe-horned into office by his brother’s hires in Florida and a 5-4 vote of the U.S. Supreme Court. Two years later, as you will remember, George was actually claiming that as a mandate.

The Bush objective this week was to convince the American public that Social Security is on the verge of trauma. And the best way to save it is to turn loose the energies and entrepreneurial urges of young America by springing some of the Social Security payroll tax to be used for private investment, including the stock market.

He wants to do it now. Right now. We’re in great peril, life and death peril. It’s time to act. Don’t procrastinate; legislate. He doesn’t say how the current retirees are going to keep their benefits, although it would cost $2 trillion in borrowed, deficit-deepening money to keep the current Social Security trust fund operating. He isn’t saying how until he has to. In the meantime, in the midst of this contrived hysteria about the looming bankruptcy of Social Security he is saying: “Trust me.”

Right. When was the last time you heard that kind of summons and found yourself squirming in the face of an orchestrated save-America crisis?

This is asking a manipulated public to trust a man who claimed victory in Iraq 18 months ago in the most telegenic act of political grandstanding of the era. Since that time Americans have died by the hundreds; thousands of innocent Iraqis have been slaughtered, thousands of American families have been sundered by military call-ups for a war that shows no signs of abating. Americans have been lied to about its purposes. Its promoters increasingly have to sanctify it by claiming it is being waged to protect America. How is it doing that? In the meantime the White House’s toads in cable news stoke up a new and strident American nationalism that offends and scares most of a world that could be helping us.

What all this has accomplished is to make America more vulnerable, not less, to terror attacks.

This is a White House that tells Americans the way to ultimately be good to the environment is to expose more public forest land to logging and more roads; the way to promote public health is to reduce regulated safeguards against the makers of potentially dangerous and unproven drugs. This is a government that claims the best way to work ourselves out of the energy crisis is to drill in Alaska, when the only way is to turn loose American technology to discover energy sources independent of foreign oil.

And we are asked to trust these people to preserve the health and civilized living conditions of America’s elderly, who understood the logic of that contract from the beginning: Social security isn’t free. It’s a service you and your employer pay for in your working years. But there was and is a contract, one you expect to be honored. It has worked. It has been one of the durable and essential markers of American democracy, and it is trusted.

With this crowd in Washington, trust is a stage prop.

The great majority of America’s economists agree that while Social Security has to be insulated against the coming day when its revenue from payrolls falls behind its obligations, it doesn’t have to be privatized, partially or otherwise. With the elections over, George Bush is now casting himself as a benevolent law-giver protecting the interests of the average American grunt. He may honestly be striving to do that. But there are other interests for which he is clearly striving harder.

There’s no question that the financial services industry would harvest billions of dollars from fees and other services for managing private accounts. Banks would take in more. Seniors would very likely take in less.

The mumbo-jumbo of economics talk is not easy for the average citizen to understand. What the panic buildup is all about can be explained by the writer I most respect in these matters, the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, an economist and award-winning columnist.

Very little about the privatizers’ positions, he writes, “is honest. They come to bury Social Security, not to save it. They aren’t sincerely concerned about the possibility that the system will fail; they’re disturbed by the system’s historic success.”

I grew up in the Great Depression. The so-called “poor houses” for the elderly were a reality. The stock market crash of the 1920s and the disaster that followed brought Franklin D. Roosevelt into the White House and the beginnings of what we and the rest of the world ultimately called the world’s greatest democracy. It wasn’t exactly a seamless process and it might have lasted years longer if World War II hadn’t intervened. But it also brought with it a recognition by more visionary leaders than we have now. It was an understanding that the economic and social scales were unbalanced. The government had to intervene on a self-serving, business-as-usual, profit and complacency philosophy that turned into a nightmare. What we are now seeing is a campaign to restore the old imbalance, pressed by a political juggernaut that dominates all branches of government.

Its hierarchs are now in the throes of exuberance following the election and are ready to retaliate against the old straitjacket of social and economic fairness. Somebody has to stop it. The Democrats are wounded and leaderless in Washington. Maybe the people themselves are the one best hope.

---Jim Klobuchar

Copyright (c) 2004 Jim Klobuchar