Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
Today's
Stories
February 3,
2005
Dave Lindorff
The
Assault on Social Security: a New Campaign of Lies
February 2,
2005
David Domke
/ Kevin Coe
Bush's
Brand of Christianity
Noam Chomsky
Iraq
After the Elections
M. Shahid Alam
O'Reilly's
Fatwah on "Un-American" Professors: FoxNews Puts Me
in Its Crosshairs
Richard Oxman
Ringing in 1984 with Ward Churchill and Derrick Jensen
Joshua Frank
The Suckering of Howard Dean
Dave Lindorff
A History Lesson from the NYT
Nina Hartley
Feminists for Porn
Website of the Day
War is a Racket
February 1,
2005
Joshua L. Dratel
The
Torture Memos
Patrick Cockburn
New Doubts About Allawi
Robert Fisk
"The Only Decent Food We Get is at Funerals"
Uri Avnery
The Stalemate
Col. Dan Smith
"W" Stands for Withdrawal
Alison Weir
Making America as "Secure" as Israel
Alan Farago
Heaven and Hell in the Everglades
Ray Hanania
Low Voter Turnout of Iraqi Expatriates: Less Than 10% of Qualified
Voters
Paul Craig
Roberts
American
Police State
Website of the Day
Statisticians Refute Official Rationale for Exit Poll Errors
January 31,
2005
Dave Zirin
Mr.
Frank's Fatwah: New Republic Writer Calls for Death & Torture
of Arundhati Roy and Stan Goff
Robert Fisk
Amid
Tragedy, Defiance
Chyng Sun
Gonzales: Chief Prosecutor of Porn?
Greg Moses
The Real Scandals of the Texas Election
Mike Whitney
Cheney at Auschwitz
Ali Tonak
Turkey and the EU: Fantasies and Ultimatums
Patrick Cockburn
A
Victory for the Shia
Website of
the Day
Voting by the Script: Where Did the 8 Million Voter Turnout Figure
Come From?
January 29
/ 30, 2005
Manuel Yang
/ Peter Linebaugh
A
Dialogue About Murder in Toledo
Gabriel Kolko
Wilsonian
and Neoconservative Myths
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad: City of Empty Streets
Robert Fisk
This Election Will Change the World, But Not as the US Wanted
Linn Washington,
Jr.
Con Job: Bush Pledges on Racism Lack Realism
Bernard Chazelle
Why the Children of Iraq Make No Sound When They Fall
Gary Leupp
"This Kind of Subject Matter": Bush's New Ed Secretary
vs. Vermont's Lesbians
JoAnn Wypijewski
The Passion of Paul Shanley
Alexander Cockburn
The Case of Father Jerry
Ron Jacobs
Ballot of the Puppets in Iraq
Brian Cloughley
Smart Bombs; Wrong House: Iraq's Civilian Dead
Fred Gardner
Peron May Split
Sister Dianna
Ortiz
Memo to Bush from a Survivor of the Guatemalan Torturers: Stop
the Torture!
Tom Reeves
How Bush Brings Freedom to the World: the Case of Haiti
Fran Quigley
Report: Haiti Now "More Violent and More Inhuman"
Suzan Mazur
"Mr. Garsin from Kinshasa": an Old Hand Weighs In on
the Murder of Lumumba
Kurt Nimmo
Condi Rice and the Neocon Plan for the Palestinians
Lenni Brenner
Holocaust History: Beyond the UN's Rhetoric
Gilad Atzmon
The
Politics of Auschwitz
Luis Gomez
Power and Autonomy in Bolivia
Mark Gaffney
NASA Searches for a Snowball in Hell: Why Velikovsky Matters
Ben Tripp
Lament of the Mnemonopath
Richard Oxman
Meet the Fuqers
Poets' Basement
Louise, Collins, Shanahan and Albert
Website of
the Weekend
Chemical Industry: Deceit and Denial
January 28,
2005
Rachard Itani
Tsunami
Aid By the Numbers: the US Really is a Miser
Jensen / Youngblood
Iraq's
Non-Election
Patrick Cockburn / Elizabeth
Davies
Attacks on Polling Places Leave 13 Dead
Dave Zirin
The Great Donovan McNabb: Proud "Black Quarterback"
Dave Lindorff
Suicide by State Execution?
Karyn Strickler
A Corporate Death Penalty Act?
Jorge Mariscal
Fighting
the Poverty Draft
January 27,
2005
Seymour Hersh
We've
Been Taken Over By a Cult
Cockburn /
Sengupta
The
US's Bloodiest Day in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Juke Box Journalism: Shilling for Bush
Ignacio Chapela
/ John F. García
The Laws of Nature
Mike Whitney
The Widening Chasm Among Conservatives
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
Those Liberal Southern Baptists!
Ray McGovern
Reining In Cheney
Russ Wellen
Marginalizing Bin Laden
Christopher
Brauchli
The
FBI's Carnival of Errors
Website of
the Day
Informed Eating
January 26,
2005
Saree Makdisi
An
Iron Wall of Colonization: Fantasies and Realities About the
Prospects for Middle East Peace
Scott Fleming
In Good Conscience: an Interview with Concientious Objector Aidan
Delgado
Dave Lindorff
Filling Saddam's Shoes: the Puppet Regime Return's to Torture
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Salazar and Obama: Two Dismal Debuts
Toni Solo
The
US and Latin America: a Not-So-Magical Reality
William James Martin
Condoleezza Rice: Confused About the Middle East
William A.
Cook
Bush's Second Inaugural Address: the Lost Ur-Version
Eric Hobsbawm
Delusions
About Democracy
Alexander Cockburn
The CIA's New Campus Spies
January 25,
2005
Brian Cloughley
Iraq
as Disneyland
Mike Roselle
Satan is My Co-Pilot
Josh Frank
/ Merlin Chowkwanyun
The War on Civil Liberties
John Chuckman
Freedom on Steroids
Paul Craig
Roberts
A
Party Without Virtue
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
The
Intolerance of Christian Conservatives
James Petras
The
US / Colombia Plot Against Venezuela
Website of the Day
Lowbaggers for the Environment
January 24,
2005
Fred Gardner
Last
Monologue in Burbank
Lori Berenson
On the Politicization of My Case
Uri Avnery
King
George
January 22
/ 23, 2005
Jennifer Van
Bergen / Ray Del Papa
Nuclear
Incident in Montana
Alexander Cockburn
Prince
Harry's Travails
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Company That Runs the Empire: Lockheed and Loaded
Stan Goff
The Spectacle
Saul Landau
Nothing Succeeds Like Failure
Gary Leupp
Official Madness and the Coming War on Iran
Fred Gardner
Is GW Getting the Runaround?
Phil Gasper
Clemency Denied: the Politics of Death in California
Stanley Heller
A Kill-Happy Government: Connecticut Chooses Death
Greg Moses
The Heart of Texas: an Inauguration Day Betrayal on Civil Rights
Justin Taylor
The Folk-Histories of John Ross
Daniel Burton-Rose
One China; Many Problems
Elaine Cassel
Try a Little Tyranny: Questions While Watching the Inaugural
Mike Whitney
Failing Upwards: the Rise of Michael Chertoff
Mark L. Berenson
My Daughter Has Been Wrongly Imprisoned
Christopher
Brauchli
It Doesn't Compute: a $170 Million Mistake
Gilad Atzmon
Zionism and Other Marginal Thoughts
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Day of the Rats
Mark Donham
The Secret Messages of Rahm Emmanuel
Ben Tripp
Adventures in Online Dating
Walter Brasch
Hollywood's Patriots: Soulless Kooks, Mr. Bush?
Poets' Basement
Wuest, Landau, Ford, Albert & Drum
January 21,
2005
Dave Lindorff
A
Great American Journalist:
John L. Hess (1917-2005)
Sharon Smith
The
Anti-War Movement and the Iraqi Resistance
Don Santina
Baseball, Racism and Steroid Hysteria
Ron Jacobs
Locked Out and Pissed Off: Protesting the Bush Inauguration
Kurt Nimmo
The Problem with Mike Ruppert
Don Monkerud
Once They Were Cults: Bush's Faith-Based Social Services
Alan Farago
Swimming Home from the Galapagos
Derek Seidman
An
Interview with Army Medic and Anti-War Activist Patrick Resta
January 20,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Dying
for Sycophants
William Cook
The
Bush Inauguration: A Mock Epic Fertility Rite
Joshua Frank
The Democrats and Iran: Look Who's Backing Bush's Next
Eric Ruder
Why Andres Raya Snapped: Another Casualty of Bush's War
Mike Whitney
Coronation in a Garrison State
Robert Jensen
A Citizens Oath of Office
Peter Rost
Bush Report on Drug Imports: Good Data, Bad Conclusions
David Underhill
Is It Torture Yet?: the Eclectic Fool Aid Torture Test
James Reiss
Adieu, Colin Powell: Pea Soup in Foggy Bottom
CounterPunch
Staff
Voices
from Abu Ghraib: the Injured Party
January 19,
2005
Marta Russell
Social
Security Privatization & Disability: 8 Million at Risk
Mike Ferner
Marines
Stretching Movement: Protesting Urban Warfare in Toledo
Nancy Oden
The
Nuremberg Principles, Iraq and Torture
Tony Paterson
A Catalogue of British Abuses in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Divide-and-Conquer Plan to Destroy Social Security
Doug Giebel
BS and CBS: When 60 Minutes Helped Promote WMD Fantasies
Alexander Cockburn
Will
Bush Quit Iraq?
January 18,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
How
Americans Were Seduced by War: Empire and Militant Christianity
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Federal
Judge: Abu Ghraib Abuses Result of Decision to Ignore Geneva
Conventions
Douglas Lummis
It's a No Brainer; Send Graner: a Rap for Our Time
Ron Jacobs
Syria Back in the Crosshairs?
Seth DeLong
Enter the Dragon: Will Washington Tolerate a Venezuelan-Chinese
Oil Pact?
Lance Selfa
Stolen Election?: Most Democrats Didn't Even Bother to Inquire
Paul D. Johnson
Mystery Meat: a Right-to-Know About Food Origins
Elisa Salasin
An Open Letter to Jenna Bush, Future Teacher
January 17,
2005
Heather Gray
Misconceptions
About King's Methods for Social Change
Robert Fisk
Hotel Room Journalism: the US Press in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
What the NYT Death Chart Omitted: Civilians Slaughtered by US
Military
Jason Leopold
Sam Bodman's Smokestacks: Bush's Choice for Energy Czar is One
of Texas's Worst Polluters
Gary Leupp
A Message from the Iraqi Resistance
Douglas Valentine
An Act of State? the Execution of Martin Luther King
Harvey Arden
Welcome to Leavenworth: My First Encounter with Leonard Peltier
Greg Moses
King
and the Christian Left: Where Lip Service is Not an Option
January 15
/ 16, 2005
James Petras
The
Kidnapping of a Revolutionary
Robert Fisk
Flying Carpet Airlines: My Return to Baghdad
Ron Jacobs
Unfit for Military Service
Brian Cloughley
Smack Daddies of the Hindu Kush: Afghanistan's Drug Bonanza
Fred Gardner
The Allowable-Quantity Expert
Dr. Susan Block
The Counter-Inaugural Ball: Eros Day, 2005
John Ross
Zapatista Literary Llife
Suzan Mazur
Unspooking Frank Carlucci
M. Shahid Alam
America's New Civilizing Mission
Frederick B. Hudson
Jack Johnson's Real Opponent: "That I Was a Man"
Mike Whitney
Bush's Grand Plan: Incite Civil War in Iraq
Tom Crumpacker
A Constitutional Right to Travel to Cuba
Bob Burton
The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal
John Callender
La Conchita and the Indomitable 82-Year Old
Lila Rajiva
Christian Zionism
Saul Landau
An Imperial Portrait: a Visit to Hearst's Castle
Doug Soderstrom
A Touch of Evil: the Morality of Neoconservatism
Poets' Basement
Davies, Louise, Landau, Albert, Collins and Laymon
January 14,
2005
Robert Fisk
"The
Tent of Occupation"
Lee Sustar
Bush's Social Security Con Job
José
M. Tirado
The Christians I Know
Dave Zirin
The Legacy of Jack Johnson
Sheldon Rampton
Calling John Rendon: a True Tale of "Military Intelligence"
Tracy McLellan
Under the Influence
Yves Engler
The Dictatorship of Debt: the World Bank and Haiti
Tom Barry
Robert
Zoellick: a Bush Family Man
Website of
the Day
Ryan for the Nobel Prize?
January 13,
2005
Mark Chmiel
/ Andrew Wimmer
Hearts
and Minds, Revisited
Joe DeRaymond
The Salvador Option: Terror,
Elections and Democracy
Greg Moses
Every Hero a Killer?...Not
Dave Lindorff
The Great WMD Fraud: Time for an Accounting
Jorge Mariscal
Dr. Galarza v. Alberto Gonzales: Which Way for Latinos?
Christopher Brauchli
Gonzales and the Death Penalty: the Executioner Never Sleeps
Gary Leupp
"Fighting
for the Work of the Lord": Christian Fascism in America
January 12,
2005
Robert Fisk
Fear
Stalks Baghdad
Josh Frank
The
Farce of the DNC Contest
Jack Random
Casualties
of War: the Untold Stories
John Roosa
Aceh's Dual Disasters: the Tsunami and Military Rule
Carol Norris
In the Wake of the Tsunami
Mike Whitney
Pink Slips at CBS
Alan Farago
Can
the Everglades be Saved?
Paul Craig
Roberts
What's
Our Biggest Problem in Iraq...the Insurgency or Bush?
January 11,
2005
Tom Barry
The
US isn't "Stingy"; It's Strategic: Aid as a Weapon
of Foreign Policy
James Hodge
and Linda Cooper
Voice
of the Voiceless: Father Roy Bourgeois and the School of the
the Americas
Linda S. Heard
Farah Radio Break Down: Joseph Farah's Messages of Hate and Homophobia
Derrick O'Keefe
Electoral Gigolo?: Richard Gere and the Occupied Vote
Gila Svirsky
A Tale of Two Elections
Harry Browne
Irish
"Peace Process", RIP
January 10,
2005
Ramzy Baroud
Faith-Based
Disasters: Tsunami Aid and War Costs
Talli Nauman
Killing
Journalists: Mexico's War on a Free Press
Uri Avnery
Sharon's Monologue
Dave Lindorff
Tucker
Carlson's Idiot Wind
Dave Zirin
Randy
Moss's Moondance
Dave Silver
Left Illusions About the Democratic Party
Charles Demers
Plan Salvador for Iraq: Death Squads Come in Waves
William A.
Cook
Causes
and Consequences: Bush, Osama and Israel
January 8 /
9, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Say,
Waiter, Where's the Blood in My Margarita Glass?
John H. Summers
Chomsky
and Academic History
Greg Moses
Getting Real About the Draft
Walter A. Davis
Bible Says: the Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism
Victor Kattan
The EU and Middle East Peace
John Bolender
The Plight of Iraq's Mandeans
Robert Fisk
The Politics of Lebanon
Fred Gardner
Situation NORML
Joe Bageant
The Politics of the Comfort Zone
Mickey Z.
I Want My DDT: Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out
Ben Tripp
CounterClockwise Evolution
Ron Jacobs
Elvis and His Truck: Out on Highway 61
Saul Landau
Sex
and the Country
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Time to End the Blackout
Ellen Cantarow
NPR's Distortions on Palestine
Richard Oxman
Bageantry Continued
Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Landau, Albert, Collins
January 7,
2005
Omar Barghouti
Slave
Sovereignty: Elections Under Occupation
Kent Paterson
The Framing of Felipe Arreaga: Another Mexican Environmentalist
Arrested
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Old
Vijay Merchant and the Tsunami
David Krieger
Cancel the Inauguration Parties
Gideon Levy
New Year, Old Story
Dave Lindorff
Ohio Protest: First Shot Fired by Congressional Progressives
Christopher
Brauchli
Privatizing the IRS
Roger Burbach
/ Paul Cantor
Bush,
the Pentagon and the Tsunami
January 6,
2005
Brian J. Foley
Gonzales:
Supporting Torture is not His Greatest Sin
Greg Moses
Boot
Up America!: Gen. Helmly's Memo Leaks New Bush Deal
Petras / Chomsky
An
Open Letter to Hugo Chavez
Alan Maass
The Decline of the Dollar
Dave Lindorff
Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Horror
Jenna Orkin
The EPA and a Dirty Bomb: 9/11's Disastrous Precedent
P. Sainath
The
Tsunami and India's Coastal Poor
January 5,
2005
Alan Farago
2004:
An Environmental Retrospective
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Oversight
Detected?: Sen. McCain and the Boeing Tanker Scam
Jean-Guy Allard
Gary Webb: a Cuban Perspective
Fred Gardner
Strutting, Smirking, As If The Mad Plan Was Working
David Swanson
Albert Parsons on the Gallows
Richard Oxman
The Joe Bageant Interview
Bruce Jackson
Death
on the Living Room Floor
January 4,
2005
Michael Ortiz
Hill
Mainlining
Apocalypse
Elaine Cassel
They
Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial
Yoram Gat
The
Year in Torture
Martin Khor
Tragic
Tales and Urgent Tasks from the Tsunami Disaster
Gary Leupp
Death
and Life in the Andaman Islands
January 3,
2005
Ron Jacobs
The
War Hits Home
Dave Lindorff
Is
There a Single Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters?
Mike Whitney
The Guantanamo Gulag
Joshua Frank
Greens and Republicans: Strange Bedfellows
Maria Tomchick
Playing Politics with Disaster Aid
Rhoda and Mark
Berenson
Our Daughter Lori: Another Year of Grave Injustice
David Swanson
The Media and the Ohio Recount
Kathleen Christison
Patronizing
the Palestinians
January 1 /
2, 2005
Gary Leupp
Earthquakes
and End Times, Past and Present
Rev. William
E. Alberts
On "Moral Values": Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian
Tendencies
M. Shahid Alam
Testing Free Speech in America
Stan Goff
A Period for Pedagogy
Brian Cloughley
Bush and the Tsunami: the Petty and the Petulant
Sylvia Tiwon
/ Ben Terrall
The Aftermath in Aceh
Ben Tripp
Requiem for 2004
Greg Moses
A Visible Future?
Steven Sherman
The 2004 Said Awards: Books Against Empire
Sean Donahue
The Erotics of Nonviolence
James T. Phillips
The Beast's Belly
David Krieger
When Will We Ever Learn
Poets' Basement
Soderstrom, Hamod, Louise and Albert
December 23,
2004
Chad Nagle
Report
from Kiev: Yushchenko's Not Quite Ready for Sainthood
David Smith-Ferri
The
Real UN Disgrace in Iraq
Bill Quigley
Death
Watch for Human Rights in Haiti
Mickey Z.
Crumbs
from Our Table
Christopher Brauchli
Merck's Merry X-mas
Greg Moses
When
No Law Means No Law
Alan Singer
An
Encounter with Sen. Schumer: a Very Dangerous Democrat
David Price
Social
Security Pump and Dump
Website of the Day
Gabbo Gets Laid
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
February 3, 2005
A New Campaign of Lies
The
Assault on Social Security
By
DAVE LINDORFF
Social Security, the New Deal program
that has provided a basic level of economic support for the nation's
elderly, disabled and orphaned for 70 years, is in grave danger--not
from Baby Boomers, but from a campaign of lies and fear-mongering,
led by the president.
The truth? There is no Social
Security crisis. None whatsoever.
Yet, in his State of the Union
address Wednesday night, President Bush put the campaign to destroy
Social Security and its promise of old-age and disability security
front and center in his second-term agenda, claiming that the
system founded in 1935 is headed for "bankruptcy" in
2042.
Like the mythical weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq, this was a flat-out, deliberate lie.
First of all, even if the date were correct, all that would happen
in 2042 would be that the trust fund used to pay out benefits
to workers would be exhausted, but even then current workers
taxes would continue to cover 73 percent of promised benefits
to retirees. More importantly, that 2042 projection by the increasingly
politicized Social Security Administration was just a conservative
projection made a few years ago based upon unrealistically low
estimates of future economic growth. It has already been pushed
back by several years' good economic performance, and in fact,
the Congressional Budget Office and most independent economists
say that the trust fund should enable the system to cover all
benefits through at least 2052 and perhaps on out through 2080
and beyond.
Not mentioned by the president
or right-wing critics of Social Security is the fact that by
2045, the last of the Baby Boom generation will have already
shuffled off this mortal coil, taking their outsized claims for
benefits with them.
Given that there is no real
crisis, the real unasked question is why the president, right-wing
politicians and pundits, and corporate leaders and business organizations--and
the media--are all calling for "reforms" to "save"
the system.
The real reason for this urgency
is that they understand that the Baby Boom generation, which
is approaching retirement, does pose a crisis--not for Social
Security, but for them and their political agenda.
Consider this: Just as there
will be nearly twice as many elderly retirees collecting benefits
when the wave of Americans born between 1945 and 1960 hits its
retirement age peak (the first Boomers start retiring in 2011),
there will also be twice as many elderly voters. And it gets
better (or more terrifying, if you are a conservative politician
or a corporate executive): while today's seniors came of age
listening to Perry Como in the politically quiescent 1950s, tomorrow's
retirees will be people who listened to Bob Dylan and the Beatles
and cut their political teeth in the Civil Rights and Anti-War
Movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
In a few years then, we can
expect to see an unprecedentedly large senior lobby that knows
how to organize politically, that knows how to do take it to
the street, and that has demonstrated its ability to fight hard
when its own interests are at stake (remember those struggles
for the vote and against the draft and the Indochina War?). And
once they near retirement, this powerful voting bloc will be
seeing Social Security and Medicare as their number one political
issue. If Social Security is already the "third rail"
of electoral politics, not to be touched, in a few years, it
will become the Molotov cocktail, exploding the political status
quo.
Corporate America knows this.
The people in the boardrooms and the conservative think tanks
aren't worried about 2042. They don't think that long-term. (If
they did, they wouldn't be so cavalier about the destruction
of the environment and about global warming.) They're worried
about 2010, because this new senior revolution is just around
the corner.
They know that today, seniors
and people over the age of 65, as powerful an electoral block
as they are, represent only 17 percent of the voting age population
of the country, while by 2025, when the bulk of Baby Boomers
will be in the 65-80 age bracket, retirees will represent 25
percent of the voting-age population, an increase of 45 percent
in their relative voting power. If those aged 55-64 are added
in--a reasonable assumption, since people who reach 55 are starting
to think about their retirement and tend to vote more in line
with the interests of actual retirees--the elderly and near elderly
will by then represent fully 40 percent of the electorate. That's
a 40 percent increase over the 28.5 percent of the electorate
this broader group represented in 2000.
Moreover, while the Right talks
ominously of a generational conflict between older retirees collecting
pensions and younger workers paying the taxes to cover them,
in fact, those retirees are the parents of many of those workers
(not everyone has children, but everyone has parents!). And how
many people complain about the size of their parents' Social
Security checks, or would really want to have to be personally
responsible for taking care of their elderly parents' finances?
There really is considerable support even among young workers,
for a secure and generous retirement system, because people don't
just vote their own interests; they vote their parents' and grandparents'
interests, too.
That's why there is an increasingly
panicky aspect to the efforts to destroy Social Security before
the Baby Boomer population realizes where its real political
interests lie. Social Security's opponents know if the program
is effectively killed off before it becomes a core Boomer issue,
it will be much harder to re-establish it.
The Right doesn't really have
much time on this issue. It appears, to judge by the marketing
folks at the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP),
which offers memberships to everyone turning 50, that somewhere
in their mid-50s, people start to think seriously about retirement.
Today's oldest Baby Boomers are just hitting that milestone now.
When today's Boomers really
start to contemplate their retirement, the picture will not be
pleasant. Property values--where many have placed their faith
and their savings--are stagnating, not rising, and post-Enron,
those 401K pensions that the middle class was all excited about
a few years ago, have been treading water. Meanwhile companies
are whittling away pension programs as fast as they can, eliminating
"defined benefit" plans that paid benefits based upon
set formulas in favor of plans that pay depending upon what employees
contributed, and on how well the investment portfolio performed--even
as those investments that have been made with workers' contributions
have been languishing or shrinking in value (if they weren't
being pilfered, as happened at Enron).
What's left? Social Security
and Medicare. Given the sorry state of the private safety net,
it's a safe bet that it won't be long before a movement springs
up among the new elderly and near elderly not just to "rescue"
Social Security, but to radically transform it into a true retirement
program.
Tomorrow's senior lobby won't
feel constrained by current law, which makes workers foot half
the bill (we're talking about their own kids, after all!). We
can thus expect to see more of the tax burden shifted onto employers.
We can also expect to see future Congresses pressured into passing
reforms that will remove the income cap on the Social Securities
tax. (And here's something the president has not told people:
if the cap on income subject to Social Security taxation, currently
set at $90,000 in wages, were eliminated so all income was subject
to the tax, there would be no shortfall in the trust fund--not
in 2042, not in 2075, never.) We can also expect to see private
pensions made fully portable, so that employers can't pocket
years of contributions every time they let go workers before
they are "vested." As well, we can probably also expect
to see a movement to expand Medicare from a niggardly program
that only barely covers the medical care of the elderly, to a
full-fledged national healthcare program that covers everyone.
That is a scary vision for
business and the Right, and it's why Bush is pushing to wreck
the system now. If the president were to go before Congress and
announce that the banking system was in grave danger, and that
the FDIC insurance program could not really insure people's accounts,
it would spark a run on the banks and destroy the banking system
and the president would probably be impeached. And yet that is
exactly what his dire warnings of a bankruptcy of Social Security
in 2042 are trying to do-cause a political run on the system.
The president's proposed "solution"--private
accounts for younger workers--is really nothing but a classic
divide-and-conquer tactic. It doesn't solve the long-term problem,
and by most accounts would probably worsen it by removing some
contributions that would have helped build up the reserve fund.
What it would do though is leave older workers stuck with the
current system, while weaning younger workers away with a promise
of easy money and a lower tax bite. Then, with fewer people dependent
upon classic benefits, it would be politically easier for a future
Congress to slash those benefits later, since younger workers
with a private "nest egg" would be less affected.
It's time to see the president's
attack for what it is: an attempt to destroy the most enduring
legacy of the New Deal.
Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing
Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new
book of CounterPunch columns titled "This
Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage
Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff
can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com
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