The world is not enough
“[W]hat’s been driving income inequality in the United States – and around the world for years – is that the very rich are getting even richer, rather than the poor getting poorer,” Fatema Z. Sumar, executive director of the Center for International Development at Harvard’s Kennedy School, wrote in November.
“In every major region of the world outside of Europe, extreme wealth is becoming concentrated in just a handful of people.”
Sumar brought a visual aid (above).
Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) is famous for her visual aids. She brought one to her CNN appearance this week.
Social Security adds nothing to the national debt, Porter’s white board insisted. There is, in fact, a more than $2.9 trillion surplus on the program’s books, she said.
Why does Porter bring it up again? Because 70 percent of U.S. wealth is not enough for American oligarchs.
On Thursday night, former vice president Mike Pence proposed privatizing Social Security. Just as George W. Bush tried before him. Pence supported that effort as a member of Congress.
“I think the day could come when we could replace the New Deal with a better deal. Literally give younger Americans the ability to take a portion of their Social Security withholdings and put that into a private savings account,” Pence told the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors.
“It’s absolutely essential that we generate leadership in this country that will be straight with the American people, that will take us off this trajectory of massive debt that we’re piling on the backs of those grandchildren,” Pence said.
The Bush administration co-located Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in fraudulent rhetoric used to sell its invasion of Iraq as somehow connected to the Sept. 11 attacks. Republicans do the same with Social Security. They mean to dupe Americans into believing that the federal retirement income program is somehow linked to the national debt. Hence Porter’s white-board refutation. *
Wall Street wants its cut of the 25 percent of annual federal revenues made up of social insurance taxes. It covets the administration fees and CEO bonuses attached to seeing mandated Social Security withholdings diverted from the treasury to the financial sector. The same financial sector drove the world economy into a ditch in 2008, drove over six million families from their homes, and erased as much as $19.2 trillion in household wealth in the Great Recession. Americans lost $10.2 trillion in stock s and housing equity just last year.
The same oligarchs want custody of your retirement savings. The audacity of it and the avarice recall a scene from Dog Day Afternoon:
It is the same with investors’ attempts to privatize public schools. Why? Each year, this country collectively spends hundreds of billions on public education. It is the largest slice of the annual budget pie in all 50 states. Wherever there is a nice, near-recession-proof stream of public money, investors want their cut, if not all of it.
“In 2010, Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. has been an ALEC member, declared K-12 public education ‘a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.,” The Progressive reported in 2014. The sector is larger still today.
“It’s really the last honeypot for Wall Street,” Donald Cohen, executive director of In the Public Interest, told The Nation the same year. The think tank tracks the privatization of public assets.
Except public education is not the financial sector’s last honeypot, nor its Big Enchilada. That’s Social Security.
Republicans are not hiding their intentions. Give them credit for that. Just don’t give them your schools or retirement savings.
UPDATE: Added tweet with video.
* Social Security is not “on-budget.”