Optimistic Thought for the New Year (A Battle over SS)

[mother earth]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/01/01/optimistic-thought-for-the-new-year-2/

The desperation that the enemies of Social Security are showing lately is because they realize that the tidal wave of Baby Boom retirees has already started to hit the beach, and will soon wash them away like the flotsam of Fukushima. They had hoped to already have buried Social Security by now, but it’s too late. Already we are witnessing a growing number of elected officials like Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren calling for expanding Social Security. Already a significant caucus in both Houses, their numbers will only grow.

Inevitably, Americans will start to look abroad and discover [2] that in European countries, employers are paying into those nations’ social security schemes taxes equal to 17-30% of payroll, compared to the measly 6.2% FICA tax paid by US employers. They will also see that in European countries, public social security typically is the only retirement funding people have, and that it doesn’t leave them in or on the edge of poverty, but rather allows them to continue their pre-retirement standard of living. They will also notice that this is being accomplished without making these countries “uncompetitive in world markets” — the common cautionary cry of the corporate leadership in America.

The battle to defend and to expand Social Security and to put an end to the fraud of 401(k) do-it-yourself retirement is at hand, and it will surely be bitter, but the working and retiring public has the upper hand. The more the politicians and their corporate paymasters seek to attack Social Security, the broader and more powerful the progressive defenders will become, for this is a battle that affects every worker in America.

In fact, I see the looming struggle for real social security as the key to the birth of a new American progressive movement — one that can finally erase all the artificial divisions of religion, sex, sexual orientation, race, region and class that have been used over the past few decades by the ruling classes to defeat progressive change. And as those artificial divisions fall away, there will inevitably be an opening to introduce other progressive issues that also concern most people — the need for Medicare for all, for quality education for all, for an end to tax breaks for corporations and the rich, for dramatic cuts in the military budget and for an end to US Empire, to militarized police and to the National Security State, and finally, the need for real action to combat that terrible threat to our children and children’s children: catastrophic climate change.

A battle over Social Security? Bring it on!

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[LiberalEsto]

1. K&R! nt

[daleanime]

2. K&R....

[mother earth]

3. It's the proverbial silver lining. nt