The Poison Pill: Social Security Reform

The eyes glaze over at first sight of charts purporting to reveal projected revenues, deficits, balance sheets or accumulated debt. There is no quicker or surer way to activate millions of remote control channel switchers than to host a panel of economists from self-promoting institutes to discuss budgetary issues, including Social Security and Medicare.

When you hear these numbers tossed around like illicit goods in a game of Sting, remember that these are the same folks that brought you Enron-Anderson accounting. All their numbers have turned out to be phantoms like the infamous "slam dunk" weapons of mass destruction, geared to the media fed short attention span of Joe America.

If you believe that something must be done now to balance a debt forty or fifty years down the road, ask yourself if a time of war and record deficits is the appropriate time for remedy. If your answer is still yes, consider what America was like forty or fifty years ago. The Soviet Union was a dominant world power, television was in its infancy, and personal computers were the dream of a few bespectacled dreamers.

We have no concept what that future world will demand of our social programs but we can be relatively certain that it will bear no resemblance to the vision of the backward-looking inhabitants of the current White House.

What is required now in the heated debate over the future of Social Security in America is less economic speculation and more common sense. If you want peace and democracy in the oil rich nations of the Middle East, you do not assign foreign policy to oil barons and ideologues bent on global domination; if you want a strong military, you do not place defense appropriations in the hands of anti-imperialist pacifists; and if you want to protect Social Security, you do not entrust reform to ultra rightwing conservatives whose fondest wet dream is the evisceration of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Tragically, Americans no longer seem to remember the Great Depression or the bold progressive program that saved the nation with a strong dose of socialist economics. Despite the acknowledged disgrace of the McCarthy era (immortalized in the Arthur Miller play The Crucible), America is the only democratic nation on earth where socialism remains a nasty word.

After the 2004 election, a British newspaper famously wondered: How can fifty seven million people be so dumb? As an American, who is both proud and ashamed of that designation, I protest that we are not dumb. We are only ignorant. Blame it on the most dedicated and successful indoctrination campaign in the media age. Blame it on our programmed, pathologically short, fifteen-second attention spans.

We admired Ronald Reagan because of his boyish smile and Hollywood swagger. He was the Gipper. He was the man who overcame his youthful idealism and signed on wholeheartedly to the ultra conservative ideal. The objective from the very beginning was deceptively simple and stunningly effective: Infuse the general public with fear, commit all available resources to military spending, and undermine social programs to the maximum degree possible.

Of course, we Americans also despised the Gipper (hate is far too harsh a word) for the destruction his policies brought to the world at large and the damage they wrought at home to the most unfortunate of our citizens. We remember his closing of the state mental institutions, creating a generation of mentally deranged and deficient homelessness. We remember his tax breaks for the ultra wealthy and the trickle down that never did. We remember his runaway covert operations, betraying democracy in Latin America and throughout the world. We remember Iran-Contra, a flagrant contravention of the rule of law, and his laughable excuse: My heart still tells me I’m right but the facts tell me I’m wrong. How tragically ironic that it was probably true.

Even Reagan, however, never took aim at Social Security.

Even Reagan dismissed the policy of preemptive strike.

Even Reagan pulled out of Lebanon when the prospect of a Middle East quagmire presented itself.

When the Bush cartel tried so hard to compare their man to Reagan, there was more substance to the analogy than any of us cared to admit. Reagan was the prototype for what would become George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Bush cabal is now basking in the glow of a made-for-media election in which only five of over five thousand polling places were allowed to be filmed. Karl Rove is closer to the president than ever and the people seem satisfied: We are not occupiers after all; we are liberators. We are Americans and our reality is defined by what we see on television.

As for Social Security, private retirement accounts, by any other name, is the poison pill designed to ultimately destroy one of the greatest civilizing forces in modern American history. As evidence of the mounting crisis, the president cites the declining ratio of payers to beneficiaries. Ask yourselves how the one to one ratio of individual retirement accounts improves the equation. It simply does not. It takes money away from society and those who need it most, the people who have worked all their lives and never managed to accumulate wealth, who never rose above the level of working class poor (whose numbers are increasing daily) and gives it to those who will need it least. It is the cause of the one against the welfare of the whole.

If they were not replacing contributions to Social Security, individual retirement accounts would be called compulsory investments. As it is, they remove the social from Social Security and leave the aged poor to fend for themselves. But don’t worry; the damage will be done when most of us are dead.

Jazz.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). SEE WWW.JACKRANDOM.COM.

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