Screwed the Undeclared War Against the Middle Class (27 page)

These are statistics that the Republican cons and their corporate media will not be sharing with people under thirty.

Thus, as David King of Harvard's Institute of Politics told the AP's Irvine of the young vote: "I think that young people are there for the taking."

Joseph Stalin's year for the final consolidation of single-party rule in Russia was 1927, and that rule lasted more than fifty years. American cons are planning for a similar fifty-year horizon and intend to use "age warfare" as a tool to bring young people along.

Republican cons and their neurolinguistic-programming expert Frank Luntz had to figure out what issue could bring young people into the fold. Gay bashing was out, as young people are the most gay-tolerant of all demographic groups. Ditto for other "social" issues like abortion, the death penalty, and government posting of "Thou shall have no other gods before me" at taxpayer expense.

Similarly, young people weren't likely to easily fall for the cons' spin on "clear skies" efforts to increase pollution, phony "science" denying global climate change, "healthy forests" giveaways to timber company contributors, and "free-trade" policies that are hollowing out America's middle class. Cons may be able to spin these issues for the already "conservative" thirty–to–fifty-five "Reagan/Limbaugh demographic," but not for young people.

And elderly Democrats—who still clearly remember how Roosevelt's policies lifted America out of the Great Depression—are a group whose minds Republican cons won't change.

Republican strategists realized that the key to success would be to find an issue that would set the dying-off elderly Democrats against the rising numbers of voting-age youth. Social Security—which Republican cons have hated since its inception anyway—proved a perfect solution. All that Republicans had to do was claim that Social Security was a program designed to allow old Democrats to steal from the young.

So the tacticians at the Republican National Committee developed an elaborate sleight of hand. They'd use the Republican-manufactured Social Security "crisis" to convince young people of three fallacies:

Republicans want young people to get the best "return on their Social Security tax dollar investment."

Democrats don't care about the interests of young people but only want to pander to old people to get their votes.

Selfish old people, their "special interest" lobby the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), and the Democrats they "own" will prevent young people from getting the "benefits" of the "free" market.

Divide and conquer
has been the Republican cons' slogan ever since Bush Sr. first used television advertising to mentally merge Michael Dukakis with a black killer, pitting whites against blacks in America. It worked then, and Republican cons are betting that pitting young people against the elderly will work just as magically now.

You can't just throw out Social Security, however. People like it too much. So what the Republicans have done is come up with an alternative to what they call "government socialism." Their solution
to the Social Security crisis is—surprise—privatization. Turn over Americans' safety net to Wall Street, they say. "Private accounts" are the answer. Get government away from "your money." There they go again.

It's the same pattern we saw with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during the Katrina disaster and are watching in slow motion with Medicare. Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich have described it in their book,
The Fox in the Henhouse.
First break the system: get Social Security into so much debt that it looks like it can't be "fixed." Then blame the crisis on "big government" and offer private corporations as a model solution.

Specifically, the cons are suggesting that we take the current surplus in the Social Security Trust Fund—and, yes, there is a surplus at the moment—and "give it back to the people" in the form of private accounts, managed by private companies.

Private enterprise, not surprisingly, is more than willing to help out. Wall Street is salivating at the prospect of getting its hands on the trillions of dollars we've put into Social Security. Corporate cons can take fees, administrative costs, and transaction costs. They can churn accounts and make money with our money. They can make billions, and that's why they are spending millions on advertising and on lobbying con politicians on both sides of the aisle to get the message out.

The problem with this plan is that it will do nothing to enhance Social Security. It'll actually shorten the life of the trust fund because it would leave less money in the fund to provide benefits to future generations. And because the U.S. government has actually already borrowed that money, it would add more than a trillion dollars to our national debt in the first ten years.

The cons' suggestion that we privatize Social Security ignores a series of realities:

Social Security is an anti-poverty insurance program, not an investment program. One-third of its payments don't even go to retirees but instead are distributed to—literally—widows, orphans, and people so disabled they can't work. (And people who outlive actuarial averages often get back more than they paid in.)

Cons tell young people that they'll get "high returns" by investing their money in the stock market, and they have tables and charts to prove it. But the "high return" assumptions they're putting forward for private accounts assume that the U.S. economy will be growing so fast that there would be no need for any Social Security reform whatsoever.

Even if Social Security does run low on cash in 2042 or 2052 (depending on which arm of Congress you're listening to), private accounts won't add a single penny to that cash-flow problem. In fact, the borrowing necessary to fund the younger generation's private accounts will throw the system even further in the red.

The fact is that Social Security has helped more Americans than any other program in the nation's history. No matter how well our economy is doing, there are always people who simply cannot work: the old, the sick, the infirm, the disabled, and single mothers during their first year of motherhood. If this group doesn't have the means to support itself, the resulting pain is felt by all of society.

For this reason the Founders put into place the first welfare plans at the same time they were putting together the United States. As Thomas Jefferson noted in his 1787
Notes on Virginia,

The poor who have neither property, friends, nor strength to labour, are boarded in the houses of good farmers, to whom a stipulated sum is annually paid. To those who are able to help themselves a little, or have friends from whom they derive some succours, inadequate however to their full maintenance,
supplementary aids are given, which enable them to live comfortably in their own houses, or in the houses of their friends.

When Roosevelt created the Social Security program as part of his New Deal for America's working people, he extended and expanded the social safety net first put in place by George Washington (over the objection of the cons of his day). It would be tragic if the cons are successful in destroying this most important part of the fabric of American life.

One of the most pernicious claims the corporatocracy makes is that business flourishes best in a perfectly "free" market. And when business flourishes, they say, all of society does better. It's the old trickle-down philosophy that inevitably produces a nation of peons.