by Paul Gallagher
Lyndon LaRouche and his movement have committed themselves to crushing the attempt by the George W. Bush Administration to privatize Social Security. There can be no "negotiating" by Congressmen or organizations, on the terms on which to give up Social Security. All the terms of the privatization argument are deliberate falsehoods. Beat Bush on this, or face fascism in the United States.
Bush's Dec. 20 rant on not giving away anything about his privatization scheme—"I won't negotiate with myself!"—indicates that he needs a psychiatrist; but it also means he's coached not to say a word or admit a single specific of the White House scheme to privatize—to do so would trigger massive and angry resistance to the plan.
The President's sudden, manic drive to privatize is driven by Wall Street and Boston 'Vault' bankers who want to take into the stock and bond markets, the $500-billion-a-year flow of American employees' Social Security payments. During George W. Bush's term, the U.S. economy has come to need investment inflows from other countries of $2.5 billion a day, to cover its various huge deficits and debts. The massive flow of foreign capital is falling and no longer sufficient, and threatens to stop entirely in a crash of the dollar. So Wall Street is looking to Americans' Social Security payments, to throw them into the sinkhole of debt that is swallowing the economy.
The United States Social Security system, which now has 47 million elderly and disabled beneficiaries, and 12 million households depending on it for their livelihood, has accumulated a surplus of $2 trillion and $3 trillion in its Trust Fund, and will keep adding to that surplus for another 15 years. Governments since Ronald Reagan's have improperly borrowed most of that surplus to cover Federal budget deficits. Figure 1 shows that the Bush Administration, which has borrowed over $500 billion of that surplus in four years, has created, with its tax cuts and its destruction of jobs, a long-term revenue deficit far larger than any conceivable Social Security deficit. The White House now covertly proposes to 1) repudiate any government obligation to generate future new revenues and repay the Social Security Trust Fund; 2) throw out workers under 50 or 55 from their future entitlement to Social Security, by diverting their contributions into Wall Street-run private investment accounts; 3) borrow trillions more dollars to pay benefits to current retirees and Baby Boomers; and 4 make major cuts in the benefits of those retirees, by the simple trick of changing the cost-of-living calculation. Figure 2 shows these cuts; it's a Congressional Budget Office analysis of the President's Commission's plan, put in legislative form.
This shifts trillions in loot to the stock and corporate bond markets, from employees who become the suckers "on the way in" to the next market crash.
If Bush is not stopped, and does this to Social Security, imagine the wholesale cutting and stealing of Medicare, Medicaid, private pension insurance, wages. This goes to fascism.
"Ownership society"? Recall the "people's car" (Volkswagen) hoax of Hitler's Nazi regime. Millions of Germans made their payments into their own "private account" by which they were buying their own Volkswagen. None ever got one; their payments were simply looted.
An article in the New York Times for Dec. 20 shows clearly that Wall Street and State Street are acting through ideologues and thinktanks to lie and push for privatization. The most prominent of the ideologues out to destroy Social Security is José Piñera, the very man who, as Labor Minister of Chile, privatized social security for the fascist dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in 1980-81. Piñera's memo of that year to George Shultz, who had requested it, started the attempt to sell Social Security privatization to Ronald Reagan, and to every Administration since. Piñera (see below, "Profiles of Hit Men"), and State Street Bank Corp. executive F. Gregory Ahern, have headed up the Cato Institute's Project on Social Security Choice. Piñera and this Cato Institute operation have been the designers and promoters for the past decade, of the Social Security privatization schemes now being held close to George W. Bush's vest. Ahern is also lobbyist for the Investment Company Institute arm of mutual fund industry.
The ideological venom of Piñera against Social Security, is clear from the opening of a manifesto he wrote in 1996, still posted up front on the website of the Cato Institute:
"A specter is haunting the world. It is the specter of bankrupt state-run pension systems. The pay-as-you-go pension system ... destroys, at the individual level, the essential link between effort and reward.... The result is disaster."[1]
This Chilean fascist minister Piñera, who thinks the success of Social Security destroys the "effort" of Americans whose retirement it insures, is Bush's chief instigator in attacking Social Security!
The Cato Institute calls its blood-sucking plan "The 6.2% Solution." It diverts the employee's whole 6.2% payroll tax payment out of Social Security into a private account. After a few years' break-in, it makes this mandatory for Americans born after 1954.
José Piñera insists, "on principle," that employers—who now match their employees' payments to Social Security—shouldn't pay anything at all. That's the way it is in the "Chilean model" Bush is impressed by.
Other Wall Street groups promoting Social Security privatization are the Club for Growth—directed by Stephen Moore, former aide to former Rep. Dick Armey, and Charles Brunie, head of Oppenheimer Capital; the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, which includes the Securities Industry Association, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Charles Schwab and other brokerages; and Ahern's Investment Company Institute.
With Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, and bankers' 527 committees, these Draculas intend to spend $41 million in January on a propaganda to steal Social Security.
With this LaRouche PAC pamphlet, Democrat Lyndon LaRouche mobilizes you to stop them.
[1] "Empowering Workers: The Privatization of Social Security in Chile," Cato Foundation, Washington, D.C., January 1996.
