I just flashed on the hidden "why" of SS "reform".

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

It is clear that their every real effort is to depress the wages of the workers of America, to force capital upwards into the hands of the few, and to degrade the standard of living for the rest.

Now, if they do that, they know that Social Security will take in dramatically less per year. That is why they are so hell-bent-for-leather to get this "reform" in place. Benefit cuts and the private accounts that will fluff the numbers of that false prophet of the economy for you and me, the stock market. That is their aim. They know that social security "takes" will erode under the structure they have now. They do not have the will to increase the contributions of the wealthiest.

If they get more money into the markets, the CEOs and the large institutional investors(and their executives) will be able to pay themselves much more, due to cash flow(transactions) and market capitalizations.

It's all about the upward concentration of wealth. All of it.

2006, gang. We have to get after 2006, or all could be lost.

[Goldmund]

1. "It's all about the upward concentration of wealth. All of it."

You can say that again. Not only about SS -- but about pretty much every initiative they start. It's either to gain more wealth, or to concentrate it more upwardly, or to gain political support for one of those.

[BlueEyedSon]

2. They need a new bubble. As the real estate bubble replaced the

exploded stock market bubble, so too will it need to be replaced before long.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

4. I do not see...

A bubble possibility that could mitigate the effects of a deflation of the real estate market. That said, I do see a deflation of the real estate market as a real possibility.

[knowbody0]

3. you can bet he promised SS funds to wall street

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

5. Oh yes.

He most certainly did. Know it.

[slay]

6. They aim to make us into slave labor for the corporate elite

And some people will be glad just to have a crappy, low-paying job by that point! Hell I know some brainwashed Republican idiots who claim they are happy working long hours for low pay as long as they have a place to live and food on their table. So that's it people - that's the mentality of some of the sheep who live in this country, do as they're told, AND LIKE IT. (Saves them from having to think for themselves). GOP gives them shit and they say it smells like roses.

[leftofthedial]

7. the big picture of everything that is happening now

is a class war

and we who are not immensely wealthy are getting our asses kicked.

[whistle]

8. Looting American middle class any way these repukes can....

...that is the hidden why.

[Eloriel]

9. I heard another reason that seems to me more likely to be the #1

reason, but I think yours fits in very well as a supporting reason. The other one is that they need a huge influx of cash into the markets to help prop up this economy, which is tottering on the verge of something that would make the Great Depression look like FUN.

I can feel it, frankly. Did you ever stand at the edge of the ocean, or the Gulf, bury your feet in the sand a bit, and as the next wave crashes over your feet the sand all slips away? That's how it feels. You can't see it, but you can feel it -- that "sucking sound" of jobs leaving like even Perot probably never imagined, people in dept up to the crown of their heads, the bankruptcy bill, the erosion in services for the down and out and desperate, on and on. It's ghastly, simply ghastly. They just don't want anyone to KNOW about it all yet.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

10. I saw something a while back.

It was a long term graph of the present market, overlaid on the long term graph of the Great Depression. The similarities were striking. What they showed were two markets trading in a tight oscillatory range over a rather long period.

I think that what they have created here is a depression that is targeted to all those who ain't them. As soon as some bubbles pop, they will be sitting pretty with their capital offshore. We will bear the awful brunt.

[nikraye]

11. SS "Reform" to cover up the $1.7 trillion BushCo. has stolen from SS

The "privatization", or "reform" of social security is purely to cover up the truth about the $1.7 trillion Bush and Co. have looted from the surplus that was created specifically for the large number of baby boomers due to retire. The surplus was generated via the 1983 Social Security tax increase. The publisher's review of Allen W. Smith's book, "The Looting of Social Security":

From the Publisher:

Every cent generated by the 1983 Social Security tax increase-money ostensibly earmarked and saved for the retirement of the baby-boom generation-is gone, spent by our government. But most Americans are ignorant of the crime. The emptying of the Social Security Trust Fund is the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the American public, and acclaimed author and economist Allen W. Smith reveals how George W. Bush and Congress are pulling it off. While George W. Bush has repeatedly condemned "corporate wrongdoers," he is guilty of fiscal mismanagement and outright deception that makes Enron and WorldCom pale in comparison. Smith explains the history of Social Security from its inception in 1935 to the present, including the enactment of the 1983 Social Security tax increase. Then, step by appalling step, he details how the government's promise to the American people-a pledge to never spend the Social Security funds-was broken by every succeeding administration. Sadly, The Looting of Social Security quite simply reveals how George W. Bush and his predecessors have stolen approximately $1.5 trillion of Social Security money. President Bush has used the surplus money mostly to fund tax cuts for wealthy Americans while robbing many of their hard earned money and their rights.

For more: http://www.allenwsmith.com/id5.html

[Al-CIAda]

14. Yes sir. n/t

[a kennedy]

12. Pay off everything, car loans, houses, everything......

I'm so scared, my retirement is next May and I called my state retirement fund agency and asked if they had my money in foreign markets, they said no. ???? D*mn !!!! Shouldn't we all be in foreign currency now??? Although I did see the dollar is making a comeback. I'm so scared, scared my retirement money isn't going to be there for me. I just want to quit my job, live off our little garden, buy free range chickens and beef and just fish and bike everyday. A simple life, nothing fancy, just get up, read DU, watch C-SPAN and relax everyday. Ok volunteer at the grade school, and is that really asking to much??

[newswolf56]

13. There are at least three hidden agendas...

...in the Bush Administration social security scheme and in its broader war on the entire socioeconomic safety net. These are:

(1)-Turning social services into profit centers for the plutocracy. (Just as Bush Medicare is a huge windfall for the prescription drug lords, so would Bush Social Security be a huge windfall for the barons of Wall Street.)

(2)-Reducing impoverishment to a new depth of maximum misery, this to make poverty and the fear of poverty a vicious flail by which to beat working families into ever more fear-frenzied competition in the global Rat Race.

(3)-Restructuring American society in accordance with Dominionist doctrine: the "elect" or "saved" (who are known and characterized by the "divine reward" of their great wealth; and "sinners" or "abominations" who are known by the divine affliction of their poverty. This is precisely the theocultural fabric that has kept unionism out of the agricultural and textile-mill South -- the corporate boss as feudal lord, the company store to keep the serfs permanently in debt, and the fundamentalist preacher as the corporation political officer. Indeed the only place this system failed to deliver its intended profits was Appalachia, where the United Mine Workers under John L. Lewis organized mine after mine --in part by exposing the preachers for the company goons they so often are. (Substitute "credit-card debt" for "company store" and you have the basic ingredients of the BushCo plan for all of America.)

Reagan accelerated this worsen-poverty process during his two terms in the White House, but it was really begun by Carter, who imposed the first major welfare cuts. Then of course Clinton betrayed working Americans thrice: NAFTA, destruction of the welfare system and imposition of gun control. Which is the reason so many working people now vote Republican. Their rationale? The Democrats still talk Leftist, but in terms of policy they are nearly as right-wing as the Republicans. Better a class enemy who is out in the open than one who hides behind Left/liberal rhetoric.

To be sure, most Americans don't think that clearly, but there's no doubt they vaguely sense the extent to which we have all been betrayed by decades of DemoPublican politicians.

Want more proof of the magnitude of the betrayal? From the perspective of the poor, the Democratic bureaucracy is just harsh as the Republican oligarchy. Look at the welfare statistics in The Statistical Abstract of the United States. Between 1970 and 1990, greedy welfare bureaucrats hiked welfare administrative costs by 5,390 percent (NOT a typo) even as they slashed the value of stipends and services to the poor by nearly two-thirds. Clinton's "welfare reform" was merely the final blow, converting a huge collection of impoverished Americans into ready cheap labor -- especially well suited for strike-breaking and overall wage-depression.

When the Democratic Party (again) learns to address such outrages as these, then it will (again) be the majority party. Indeed it's the very worsening of the economy that makes these issues so important: more and more presumably "middle class" and even "upper middle class" Americans are increasingly terrorized by the awful recognition they are only one or two paychecks away from bankruptcy and homelessness.

[flpoljunkie]

15. Yes, the old "You are on your 'own'ership Society" con.

America is waking up to their Conservative con-they definitely put the "Con" in Conservative.

[kitkat65]

16. I've always called it the Wall Street Cash Grab rather than SS reform n/t

[Karenina]

17. It's that "giant sucking sound"

Ross Perot mentioned. Some of his quips were priceless. I remember someone else talking about a "lock-box..."