Heroism, Viciousness and Social Security

On the one hand, you have the heroism of people like Patricia Maisch in that Arizona crowd, and you have the deranged hatred of the killer, Loughner. And yet, on a scale of viciousness, I would rate Loughner less vicious than the people, both in Congress and in finance, who want to wipe out or weaken the only economic security deprived Americans can count on--Social Security.

Who has Maisch's kind of heroism in the realm of national politics? On the one side, we appear to have the mean and meaner, and on the other, we have people who might have good instincts, but so many are corrupted by politics.

Conservatives claim that the left hates the free enterprise system, hates business and is elitist. This is ironic, since even Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who describes himself as a Socialist, works to bring business to Vermont, and speaks like the New York working class Jew his family was. Democrats do the same: they want to get re-elected.

What the elected tribunes of business claim, is that no regulation is best for business, even when the lack of it led to the crack up of 2007-8, which was surely not good for business--except, ultimately, the big banks. But that's not enough. No, Republicans want to "partially" privatize Social Security, even after the stock-market crash that wiped out so many people's retirement portfolios, and private pension funds.

What is that about? The right-wing enthusiasm for going after Social Security is driven by several different, reinforcing motives. One is simply ideological: it's a government program; it's well-run and popular, thereby giving the lie to the claim that governments can't do anything.

It is not running out of money, either. Down the line, its financing should be tweaked, but a second motive animating the right is all that money: they want to get their hands on it, just like the bailout money, just like the commodities exchanges and currency markets, just like the money of the millions of us suckers, who dabble in the market. But Social Security money would be trillions, and so many more could be sucked dry, by high finance.

But I think there's another reason, one alluded to by Helen Thomas, the recently displaced star White House reporter. She concluded that we shouldn't give the newly empowered Republicans, "the ability to wipe out or even mitigate the only economic security deprived Americans can count on."

Think about that: the only economic security deprived Americans can count on--like a number of my friends. What the movement to privatize would also do, if successful, is render the elderly a new frontier to "invest" in--even down to our last dentures. And it would make us even more vulnerable than most of us are right now.

To the vicious, that's attractive, too: the Populus can then be managed, just as they were in Rome.