The Stealth Attack on America's Best-Loved Program

[Hannah Bell]

Washington bipartisan elites have been working to weaken Social Security since the mid-Clinton Administration. Clinton, prodded by his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, was on the verge of cutting a deal with Newt Gingrich to partially privatize America's most successful retirement program. The intermediary was Clinton's White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles. The same Bowles is now the co-chair of Obama's fiscal commission -- which also has designs on Social Security. Corporate Democrats keep turning up, like bad pennies.

As I reported in my 2007 book, The Squandering of America, liberals can thank Monica Lewinsky for saving Social Security from that earlier bipartisan deal. Why? Because when the frisky Clinton was being impeached, and Congressional liberals were holding their noses and reluctantly saving him from ouster, they were in no mood to have him trash Social Security. New details have been reported in the recent book, The Pact, by Steven Gillon, about Clinton's dealings with Gingrich.

Social security taxes wages. Get wage growth back to historic postwar norms, and Social Security is in surplus forever. Restore the traditional fraction of wages that are taxed, so that affluent people do not get a free ride on part of their income, and the proclaimed crisis disappears. There is no need to further cut benefits, or further raise the retirement age, or raise taxes on working Americans. If only Citigroup's balance sheet were as healthy as Social Security's!

So why the continued political threat to America's best loved and most successful government program? The main reason is that Wall Street looks at all that money and imagines the fees that could be collected if it were diverted to private accounts...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-kuttner/the-stealth-attack-on-ame_b_617164.html

[donco6]

1. I guess "Thank you, Monica" is in order.

Sorta.

Hopefully, we can derail this garbage again before they really get away with it this time.

[Hannah Bell]

2. a hero of labor.

[donco6]

3. Statuary Hall, here she comes!

LOL!

[Hannah Bell]

4. :>)

[YOY]

5. Whoda think it...a blowjob that REALLY helped us all!

n.t.

[inna]

6. K&R

Here's more on this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/politics/19fiscal.html?_r=1
Bipartisan Commission Is Established to Cut Debt
Published: February 18, 2010

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday officially established a bipartisan commission to propose ways by December to rein in the growing national debt, despite reluctance in both parties to tackling the politically charged issue in a midterm election year.

Mr. Obama signed an executive order establishing the panel three weeks after the Senate rejected bipartisan legislation to create a similar panel.As he did so, he was flanked at the White House by his choices for co-chairmen, Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican Senate leader from Wyoming, and Erskine B. Bowles, a centrist Democrat from North Carolina who was President Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff.

After the defeat of the Conrad-Gregg commission, groups defending Social Security had little time to rejoice before Obama resuscitated the plan, creating the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform by executive order.

Obama's deficit commission is actually much older than Conrad-Gregg. Its history as a vehicle for reforming Social Security goes back to 1981, when it was given life under President Ronald Reagan as the Greenspan Commission (guess who chaired it). The commission's first act was to raise Social Security payroll taxes across the board and lower benefits via changes to cost of living adjustments.

Bill Clinton revived the commission many times during the '90s, each time with a slightly new name and slightly new members, always stacked to recommend partial privatization, which critics on the left mocked as "a solution in search of a problem." But Clinton thought it politically risky to proceed with its recommendations on his own, and in a little-known chapter to that story, his chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, helped negotiate a secret pact with Newt Gingrich in late 1997 to unite behind the commission's proposals to raise the Social Security retirement age and begin privatization .

The pact collapsed when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke just days before Clinton was set to announce it. George W. Bush quickly reconstituted the commission in 2001 and adopted its core proposal – Social Security privatization – as the centerpiece to his second-term agenda in 2005. The developing quagmire in Iraq and Bush’s consequent unpopularity gave Democrats, with public outcry behind them, the confidence to unite against it, even though Democratic leaders had supported similar measures in the '90s, and the plan was soon declared dead.

Obama Packs Debt Commission with Social Security Looters:
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010031329/obama-packs-debt-commission-social-security-looters

Obama Packs Debt Commission With Social Security Privatization & Benefit Cut Supporters:
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/05/10/obama-packs-debt-committee-with-supportes-of-social-security-benefit-cuts-and-privatization/

The Pact Between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich:
Two powerful foes secretly plot to reform Social Security and Medicare
http://politics.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2008/05/29/the-pact-between-bill-clinton-and-newt-gingrich_print.html

How Monica Lewinsky Saved Social Security: Clinton, Gingrich, Bowles and “The Pact”:
http://firedoglake.com/2010/05/18/how-monica-lewinsky-saved-social-security-clinton-gingrich-bowles-and-the-pact/

[nashville_brook]

7. big k & r

[Hannah Bell]

8. k

[laughingliberal]

9. Every candidate running in November needs to be grilled about their stand on this.

Their scheme to vote on it in the lame duck session means it will be decided by people whose jobs are secure for, at least, 2 more years and those who are polishing resumes for lucrative private sector jobs. We need to bring this out of the shadows now.

[Better Believe It]

10. K & R

[maryf]

11. K&R nt

[eridani]

12. What you can do about it

FIGHT BACK AGAINST THE CATFOOD COMMISSION!
Join the following organizations

Social Security Works
http://socialsecurity-works.org/

Social Security Matters
http://www.socialsecuritymatters.org/Home.html

National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare
http://www.ncpssm.org/

Fight the "deficit hawks" noise machine with facts

The Century Foundation reports on Social Security
http://www.tcf.org/list.asp?type=TP&topic=2

Behind the Myths of Social Security
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1381

Center for Economic and Policy Research reports on Social Security
http://www.cepr.net/

[Hannah Bell]

13. you should make this post an op, where it would get more attention.

people need to get on the stick NOW.

[eridani]

14. Did that last week

I'll do it again next week.

[blindpig]

15. kick n/t