Robert Reich: The Best Thing Not to Have Happened During the Bush Administration

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/29/8594/

The Best Thing Not to Have Happened During the Bush Administration
by Robert B. Reich


The best thing to not to have happen during the Bush administration is we did not privatize Social Security, as Bush wanted.

Had we done so, boomers facing retirement over the next few years would be even worse off than they are now. Now they’re struggling with pension plans worth less than they counted on, and home values that are tanking.

At least they can rely on a monthly Social Security check.

But if we had privatized, prospective retirees would be totally reliant on the stock market. And look what’s happened to the market. Comparing stock values now to what they were ten years ago adjusted for inflation, the S&P 500 has risen a little over 1 percent a year. Treasury bonds have done better. Go back nine years, and there’s been no gain at all. Go back eight years and market has been off an average of 1.4 percent a year.

Yes, I know, it’s been a rough time. First the tech bubble bursting, then 9/11, then Enron, then the housing bubble bursting, then the credit crunch. But that’s my point. We can’t necessarily rely on the stock market.

And anyone who thinks the market will shortly regain all the ground it’s lost has been drinking Wall Street cool-aid. The Fed can only do so much. It’s reluctant to cut rates much further because of inflationary forces. Meanwhile, the stimulus package is far too little. A few hundred dollars won’t cause consumers to buy more. They’re paying far more for fuel and food and health insurance, their paychecks are shrinking, they’re deep in debt, and their home values are sinking. Consumer confidence is plummeting.

So imagine if boomer retirees didn’t have Social Security.

Sure, the stock market has done well over the past half century. But there have been decades like the 1970s and this one so far, where it’s been a disaster. That’s why we have Social Security so that if your timing is bad and you get caught in a downdraft, you still have something to fall back on in retirement. If we had privatized, you’d have nothing to fall back on. You’d crash.



Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written ten books, including The Work of Nations, which has been translated into 22 languages; the best-sellers The Future of Success and Locked in the Cabinet, and his most recent book, Reason. His articles have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Mr. Reich is co-founding editor of The American Prospect magazine.

"If we had privatized, you’d have nothing to fall back on. You’d crash."

They only wanted to privatize Social Security so they could steal all our money

They spent it on the Iraq War for one thing.

to steal our money. But perhaps they remembered the time that mobs of old people were attacking their cars. One little old lady with a cane is one thing, but a few hundred of them is something else!

Oh wait. No it doesn't.

Passed down for generations from Prescott to GW:


1934: The Plot Against America
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED July 28, 2007
I’m back from the land of heather and thistles, not to mention wee drams and lukewarm ale, but on my way out a friend at the BBC alerted me to this, a not-to-miss program on the BBC this morning, accessible over the next several days by internet. It’s the story of the Plot Against America. I don’t mean the Philip Roth novel, nor even the Sinclair Lewis book, It Can’t Happen Here, but rather the historical events upon which these two works of fiction were based.

In November 1934, federal investigators uncovered an amazing plot involving some two dozen senior businessmen, a good many of them Wall Street financiers, to topple the government of the United States and install a fascist dictatorship. Roth’s novel is developed from several strands of this factual account; he assumed the plot is actually carried out, whereas in fact an alert FDR shut it down but stopped short of retaliatory measures against the plotters. A key element of the plot involved a retired prominent general who was to have raised a private army of 500,000 men from unemployed veterans and who blew the whistle when he learned more of what the plot entailed. The plot was heavily funded and well developed and had strong links with fascist forces abroad. A story in the New York Times and several other newspapers reported on it, and a special Congressional committee was created to conduct an investigation. The records of this committee were scrubbed and sealed away in the National Archives, where they have only recently been made available.

The Congressional committee kept the names of many of the participants under wraps and no criminal action was ever brought against them. But a few names have leaked out. And one is Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the incumbent president. Prescott Bush was of course deep into the business of the Hamburg-America Lines, and had tight relations throughout this period with the new Government that had come to power in Germany a year earlier under Chancellor Aldoph Hitler. It appears that Bush was to have formed a key liaison for the group with the new German government.

Prescott Bush, of course, went on to service as a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, and his son, George H.W. Bush emerged from World War II as a hero.

-snip

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000651



The Whitehouse Coup
Monday 23 July 2007



The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.

Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy.




http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/document/document_20070723.shtml

:kick:

How could anyone think the stock market will provide a safety net in case the stock market crashes?

Social Secruity should be protected and nurtured.