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Thursday, March 10, 2005

"Because it's wreckable"
Posted by Jill | 8:23 AM

The second most famous line in Oliver Stone's tubthumping Screed Against Greed, Wall Street (right after "Greed is good....greed works") is "Because it's wreckable!" This line, spoken by Michael Douglas' chilling corporate raider, gave us an early prophesy of how the Bush Administration would operate.

Robert Scheer notes that George W. Bush's obsession with wrecking Social Security is PRECISELY because it works...and therefore, it's wreckable. To guys like Bush, the fictional Gordon Gecko, and the other hollow-souled greedmeisters on which the latter was fashioned, programs and laws which affect the lives of real people (as opposed to corporations) are mere tinkertoys on their playground. And to them, toys are made to be broken.

The problem with Social Security (news - web sites) is that it isn't broken, which is precisely why the President is so eager to destroy it. It is the continued success, rather than failure, of the program that irks him.

As George W. Bush continues to flail at Social Security, even in the face of increased public opposition, you have to wonder: "Why?"

The most successful safety net program in human history is currently sitting on $1.7 trillion in reserve funds and faces a possible shortfall decades from now, which minor corrections to the program could prevent. Yet our President has been running around like Chicken Little telling us the sky is falling.

[snip]

This ideological hostility to progressive taxation and income redistributions is the real issue behind the assault on Social Security, and it deserves to be debated head-on.

Knowing that the program is far too popular to be axed completely, hyper-conservatives hatched this idea of diverting its funds into the stock market. They hate the idea of all that money flowing down the food chain instead of up--lower-income workers get a higher rate of return on their Social Security taxes than those better off.

Social Security-funded private accounts, on the other hand, would not redistribute income; they simply would extend into retirement the existing decades-old pattern of the rich getting richer, the poor doing worse and the middle class eroding.

Let's be blunt: A progressive tax is a good thing for the very reason libertarian and conservative ideologues think it is bad: It redistributes income in a way that ever so slightly makes us more equal and minimally protects the weakest among us.

Anybody who wants a democratic society cannot accept excessively uneven income distribution. As Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed, the rule of the majority must be rooted in a thriving middle class.

The alternative? Class warfare and socioeconomic chaos--exactly what we faced during the Depression when Social Security was introduced to save capitalism.


I wish someone with a larger audience than mine would have the courage to articulate what the Bush agenda REALLY is: Not simply a return to the so-called "gilded age", where corporate titans lived in luxury while everyone else fought over the scraps, but a return to a feudal society, in which a few lords actually OWN everything, and the only scraps available to fight over are the ones the lords deem expendable after they finish their own gluttonous meal.
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