European Union out of patience with US torture
Brussels, Nov 28 (Prensa Latina) The European Union is investigating prisoners tortured by the United States in order to put an end to systematic US human rights violations in the region.
Governments from 25 EU member countries must declare by February 21 whether or not they were aware of detainee transportation or the existence of CIA illegal prisons (under an antiterrorism pretext) in their nations.
Documents revealed by The Washington Post referred to a group of facilities where the CIA held and tortured people to discover any alleged ties to terrorism.
The EU ordered an investigation, headed by Swiss prosecutor Dick Marty and backed by satellite tracking, to detect places where the CIA may have had detainee concentration camps.
These facilities were similar to that in the US naval base in Guantanamo, eastern Cuba, which Washington occupies illegally and where it has held some 500 people for more than four years with no trial or specific charge.
In addition, European air observation agency Eurocontrol reported 31 airplanes probably used in the transportation of CIA detainees.
According to German magazine Der Spiegel, the United States probably has permanent concentration camps in Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and central Asia as well.
Alvaro-Gil Robles, EU commissioner for human rights, is investigating whether the Bondesfeel Military Base, in Kosovo, was used to hold US prisoners.
Belgium media noted that the US espionage system attempts to cover-up the use of torture of its prisoners, including waterboarding (simulated drowning).
US Hiding Conditions of Guantanamo Hunger Strikers
Havana, Sept 15 (AIN) The health conditions of up to 200 hunger striking prisoners at the US military base in Guantanamo, Cuba are being concealed, accuses says a US legal rights organization.
A press release by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a non-profit organization which has represented many of the detainees, objected to the US Defense Department's blackout of details on the health of prisoners taking part in a hunger strike, reported the Granma newspaper.
Some of the prisoners have threatened to starve themselves to death unless they are put on trial or released - after having been held without charge for more than three years. A hunger strike this past July ended when the Pentagon agreed to talk to inmates.
The Pentagon has only admitted to there being 128 striking prisoners in Guantanamo, with 18 of them having been hospitalized where they are being tube-fed.
No names have been disclosed despite the pleas of a hundred of relatives. "It doesn't serve national security interests to hide the health condition of prisoners from their relatives," said CCR lawyer Gitanjali Gutierrez.
The CCR points out that refusing this type of basic information is a flagrant violation of the ethics code set up by the World Medical Association to which the American Medical Association belongs.
According to the civil rights organization's statements to the press, military doctors attending to the strikers in Guantanamo should immediately contact the prisoners' families through the Red Cross or consulates of the detainees' respective nations.
More than 500 inmates from 40 countries are being held as "enemy combatants;" a status which the US authorities insist merits no protection by the Geneva Convention and allows them to be held indefinitely, without formal charges or a trial.
Guantanamo Hunger Strike in its Fifth Week
Washington, Sep 9 (Prensa Latina) More than 200 prisoners at the Guantanamo naval base (Cuba) entered the fifth consecutive week of a hunger strike, in protest at poor living conditions and the abuses they are submitted to by the US military.
Prison authorities are force-feeding prisoners by means of nose tubes to avoid the death of several prisoners who are protesting at their arbitrary confinement for almost four years without due process.
Lawyer Clive Stafford Smith told the press that many prisoners have been on hunger strike for four weeks, in a desperate state.
"I am very worried about the life of these prisoners, they are a very persistent group, they have decided to take this right to the end, and all this will end up taking the lives of many of them," Stafford Smith said, after alleging that the Pentagon "does not want anybody to know what is going on."
The US Army maintains only 76 prisoners are on hunger strike in Guantanamo, and that their refusal to eat is just a maneuver to generate a political scandal if one of them dies.
Another group of prisoners started a hunger strike in June, but they stopped after the authorities made them false promises and persuaded them to eat.
More than 500 people are confined in the naval base of Guantanamo, a piece of Cuban land occupied against the will of the Cuban authorities and people. Many of the prisoners were arrested during the US invasion of Afghanistan.
These prisoners are labelled "enemy combatants", a term designed by the White House to justify their exclusion from the US legal system, as these prisoners are denied the condition of prisoners of war.
Havana, Sep 2 (AIN) Led by Cindy Sheehan, who has become the antiwar symbol
in the US, a group of US activist has started a tour around the Union
to condemn the war against Iraq launched by the Bush administration.
The protesters are demanding the immediate return home of the US military
forces deployed in Iraq, the end of the occupation of Palestinian territory
by Israel as well as the end of Washington's threats against the Cuban
and Venezuelan revolutions.
Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, had camped since August 6 near
President Bush's ranch in Texas hoping to talk with him. Hundreds of people
joined her in her protest demonstration against war.
According to Sheehan some 10,000 people have visited the Casey Camp, named
after her dead son. After 26 days camping without succeeding in their
attempt, the antiwar activists have decided to make tracks and to boost
a countrywide campaign.
The caravan is made up of three buses and intends to visit 25 states of the Union concluding in Washington, where a national demonstration against war will take place on September 24.
The demonstrations are backed up by national organizations such as ANSWER Coalition, Pastors for Peace, Veterans for Peace, Grandparents for International Peace and the Muslim Students Association.
"The US people should mobilize against the militarist policy of Washington disguised as the 'war against terrorism' and 'the promotion of worldwide democracy", stated ANSWER Coalition on its webpage.
Bush
Killed my Son, Said Cindy Sheehan
Madrid, Aug 30 (Prensa Latina) "My son Casey was killed by Bush and his insane, cruel and arrogant foreign policy", denounced Cindy Sheehan, a brave mother who does not forgive The US President for causing a war based on lies.
Sheehan, a symbol of the current anti warmongering, gave a heartbreaking interview Tuesday to a journalist from the Spanish newspaper El Pais, in which she warns the president he is not listening to those opposing the war against Iraq.
The driving force behind Sheehan's tireless activity is her son Casey, killed in Iraq at the age of 24. He was part of a team in charge of finding out the existence of weapons of mass destruction that served to justify the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Cindy, as everybody calls her, assured in the interview that "The Bush Administration has undervalued our capacity to call the people, a whole movement saying what nobody dares to say: that this war was a mistake".
"I am accused of being unpatriotic because I want to bring the troops home, and I say: it is a patriotic obligation to prevent a country from its government", stated the newspaper which recalled that her son died on August 4 2004 because of a lie.
"It is been proved that this war was based on lies and betrayals. My son died because of a lie, the only one way to help our young boys is to take them out of there and bring them back home safe", the woman insisted.
She said her heartbreak and sorrow can only be lessened when she knows there will not be other women suffering as she is. Cindy considers that 1862 mothers of soldiers killed in Iraq are too many broken hearts.
"My son Casey was murdered by Bush and his insane, cruel and arrogant policy. He said he had died for a noble cause. I would really like to know what this noble cause is about, I would like him to explain that," the mother demanded.
"This is an immoral and illegal war. Our duty as human beings with morals is to fight it with all our strength. I do not want Bush to justify his death, his murder, his imperialist foreign policy with my son's blood and honor," she said.
"I want Bush to honor him by withdrawing the troops from Iraq and bringing them back home immediately", she concluded without taking a breath in her recital of her reasons.
By Nestor
Nunez
Taken from AIN
August 17, 2005
The scandal resulting from human rights violations by US prison guards at the illegally occupied US naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba reminds one of a snow ball rolling down a mountain.
The growing and non-stop denunciations of the continued torture and insults against the Muslim faith, as well as other atrocities, have shaken the international community on more than one occasion. However, some powerful nations - such those in the European Union - despite having their citizens imprisoned in the US enclave, have not had the decency to criticize their American ally.
The truth is that hundreds of alleged enemy combatants, who the White House accuse of being terrorists, are packed into the military base with heads covered, chained and caged without them being provided the most basic necessities for human existence.
The sadistic practices that were used on the prisoners were later perfected in the prisons of occupied Iraqi and in the clandestine prisons that George W. Bush maintains in various parts of the world.
The Guantanamo drama cannot continue. Recently US soldiers revealed to legal bodies the fact that the alleged legal process through which some of the prisoners are being channelled is nothing more than a joke.
These same officials, who were approached by the attorneys of various prisoners, said the so-called justice system that is applied at the US naval base against the foreign prisoners is a fraud.
All this functions within a singular system that accuses, produces evidence, judges and sentences, simply in order to ensure that the public believes the law to reign supreme.
For the Cuban people it is an insult for a portion of their territory is illegally occupied by the United States; Washington's chicken hawks have created this monument to dishonesty and violence.
The issue Guantanamo has been raised in the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva on two consecutive occasions in order to get that international body to discuss what is happening on that military enclave in Cuban territory.
Up until now, European governments have preferred to sabotage those efforts on the side of justice by refusing to support an investigation that might seriously injure their relationship with Washington. However, the facts continue to show that Havana has been right all along.
In any case, the Bush administration and its allies are sharing the weight of this disgrace.
U.S. human rights report disregards its own abuses
Taken from Aljazeera.com
3/2/2005
Turning a blind eye to detainee abuses by its own forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the United States annual report on human rights criticized Middle Eastern countries for their "poor" records in the field.
The report on human rights progress in 2004 was prepared by the State Department. It is the first issued document since the reelection of the U.S. President George W. Bush for a second term in office.
The report mainly focused on Iran and Syria, saying that Tehran’s rights performance had deteriorated and accusing Damascus of resorting to “arbitrary arrests, prolonged detention without trial and torture”.
The annual report also lashed out Saudi Arabia, saying that its “record of human rights abuses and violations ... still far exceeds the advances,”
Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Kuwait and Qatar were also criticized in the report.
Mild Criticism
But the report mildly criticized Israel over its “dealings” with the Palestinians. It also said that the Jewish state hadn’t done enough to end the discrimination against the country's Arab citizens.
It also said that Tel Aviv had arrested thousands of people without charge and recounted without judgment the dispute over building the separation barrier on Palestinian lands in the West Bank.
On the other hand, the report said that the Palestinian Authority's rights record was “poor”, citing torture, prisoner abuse, and arbitrary detention.
Its own abuses
Most of the "stress and duress" interrogation tactics criticized by the report were also used by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The U.S. report didn’t mention the shocking detainee abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan by U.S. occupation forces, and it blamed most of Iraq’s problems on the “insurgents”.
Experts and human rights activists have frequently played down the importance of the annual human rights reports by the Bush administration, saying that they are selective and used for political aims.
In June, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report, entitled “The Road To Abu Ghraib”, that detainee abuse in Iraq , Afghanistan and Guantanamo is related to the policies authorized by the U.S. President George W. Bush is his so-called “war on terror”.
The U.S. rights watchdog said in December that the Bush administration covers up killings and abuses of detainees in U.S. jails in Afghanistan.
In an attempt to explain why the U.S. doesn’t report its own human right abuses, State Department human rights official Michael Kozak said: "it wouldn't have any credibility,"
"We have problems, too, in the human rights area," he added.
Poverty,
foreign invasions affect Afghanistan: Report
Taken from Aljazeera.com
3/2/2005
A UN report on Afghanistan's social conditions illustrates the stark reality prevailing in the country in direct contrast to the U.S.' media talk of a 'new democracy' in the country and the supposedly compassionate role of the U.S. government in Afghanistan.
The survey, 'Afghanistan, National Human Development Report 2004: Security with a Human Face' asserts that the country has not seen any significant "span of stability" over the past two decades; since the U.S. intervened to support those fighting against the pro-Soviet government and when it invaded the country three years ago to overthrow the Taliban government.
"Years of conflict and neglect have taken a devastating toll, as measured by dramatic drops in human, social and economic indicators," the report's authors write.
The report summarises "Human poverty in Afghanistan is a multidimensional problem that includes inequalities in access to productive assets and social services; poor health, education and nutritional status; weak social protection systems, vulnerability to macro and micro-level risks (both natural and human-triggered); human displacement; gender inequalities and political marginalization."
But another condition that is prevalent amongst most Afghanis is mental illnesses.
The report states "Mental disorders are another of Afghanistan's war wounds, yet they have been largely ignored. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates indicate that 95 percent of the population in Afghanistan has been affected psychologically, and one in five suffers from mental health problems."
A significant factor that further adds to the populations mental health problems is the relationship between the state, the warlords and the narco-mafia bosses.
One man from Jalalabad who provides a description of the dysfunctional, US-supported government of President Hamid Karzai is quoted as saying: "It has no education policy, it has no health policy, it has no economic policy, it has no environmental policy, it has no security policy. It just takes everything by the day and many of the days are bad."
Zphirin Diabr, associated administrator of the United Nations Development Program is quoted in the New York Times as saying "the country has a long way to go just to get back to where it was 20 years ago."
The report attempts to place this disastrous state of affairs since the start of the 'Afghan conflict' in the 1970s where the predominant causes stem from "external factors such as foreign invasion and interference."
Along with the present social disaster in Afghanistan, the September 11, 2001, attacks can also be traced back to the strategy adopted by U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and actively pursued by the Reagan administration during the 1980s of manipulating religious fighters to undermine the Soviet Union.
The report states: "The Western world was more interested in curbing the expansion of the Soviet Union than in the consequences of heavily arming resistance groups. It then abandoned Afghanistan, and its people, after the pull-out of the Soviet Army."
Up to the late 1990s, the Washington had 'ignored' the regressive social policies of the Taliban, which had come to power in 1994. September 11 provided the Bush administration with the pretext to invade Afghanistan and oust the Taliban regime.
The years following the U.S. invasion witnessed "a deeply embedded war economy, which leaves the majority of Afghans living in heightened states of both fear and want." This era has seen an expansion of narco-warlordism and the opium trade. It is estimated that in 2003, Afghanistan produced three-quarters of the world illicit opium, and officials warn that the country could become "a narco-terror state in the future."
Security with a Human Face presents a frightening picture of a country whose "free election" last October was timed to provide Bush with a pre-election boost.
The prescriptions advanced by the report in its later chapters for a stable and democratic society appear absurd in light of current Afghan reality: foreign imperialist occupation, political power in the hands of mafia-like warlords and unspeakable conditions for broad masses of the population.
Why Social Security Privatization Would Hurt Women More than Men
Taken from Political Affairs.net
By
Anna Bates
Feb. 28, 2005
The Social Security Act of 1935 is arguably the most significant piece of social legislation passed by the US Congress. Largely the work of Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, Social Security has, more than any other program, kept older and widowed or disabled Americans out of poverty.
Today, Social Security faces a serious crisis. George W. Bush has launched a program to cut benefits soon, and to dismantle Social Security entirely in the future. The plan would work two ways. First, it would divert huge amounts of money from the current program to private investment companies. Second, it would change the way social security benefits are calculated. Instead of calculating benefits according to wages, it would tie the calculation of benefits to an inflation index. This would be disastrous for all Americans, especially women. This plan must be stopped.
The decision to link Social Security benefits to wages was a compromise accepted by Perkins and other supporters of the original Social Security Act in 1935. Perkins and others viewed benefits as an entitlement to all citizens. However, congressional opposition forced a compromise. To save the plan, Perkins and her supporters in Congress suggested that Social Security benefits be linked to payroll taxes paid by employers and employees. The strategy worked, and Congress passed the Social Security Act. However, the plan had built-in race and gender biases.
African American, Latino and workers who were either seasonally or marginally employed were not covered at all. Women, viewed as dependents and not permanent members of the labor force, suffered also. Historian Alice Kessler-Harris points out that this evidenced a bias against all marginally employed segments of the population.
The money diverted into private accounts would come directly from Social Security’s guaranteed benefits, cutting benefits for future retirees nearly in half.
Things have changed somewhat over the years. Women are now taken more seriously as workers. Men whose wives were the family’s primary breadwinners may now collect survivor benefits – evidencing that women are now taken more seriously as workers. Low-income benefits are now adjustable enough to increase (though not much) with inflation. And the current Social Security system, though not perfect, has enough money to pay full benefits for several more decades. The Bush Administration plan will reverse all of this progress.
The National Women’s Law Center points out that women of color, especially, will suffer under the Bush plan. African American women and Latinas have low lifetime earnings and long life spans. They draw heavily on Social Security’s benefits for disabled workers and for the families of workers who become disabled or die prematurely. Additionally, more African American women and Latinas rely solely on Social Security for their income in retirement. This is not to mention the 15 percent of African American beneficiaries who are children. The Bush plan jeopardizes Social Security benefits more for these groups than others, hence hurting most those who have least.
Bush’s plan would require deep cuts in all types of Social Security benefits, even for those who do not participate in private accounts. The money diverted into private accounts would come directly from Social Security’s guaranteed benefits, cutting benefits for future retirees nearly in half. Since Social Security comprises a larger portion of women of color’s retirement incomes, these cuts would impact them disproportionately.
Since African American women and Latinas are among the lowest paid workers, the diversion of their benefits into private accounts would not yield enough savings for them to survive in retirement. The National Women’s Law Center calculates that African American women would be able to invest less than $400 per year and Latinas less than $300. After the deduction of management fees, these low investments would not keep them out of poverty.
Furthermore, privatization would not compensate for planned cuts in disability and survivor benefits. This would impact those who die or are disabled at a young age, because there would not be enough in the private account to provide for the worker’s family.
Why does Bush want to alter Social Security? According to Kim Gandy, president
of the National Organization for Women, Bush has "a big debt to pay
to his friends on Wall Street, and he wants to do it fast so the next group
can belly up to the taxpayer trough." The math is staggering. The transition
money – estimated at 2 trillion dollars – would produce a huge
boom for mutual funds fat cats. The financial industry would gain approximately
$75 billion per year. And the money would come from American workers.
Gandy points out that women are less likely than men to have pensions, and more likely to rely solely on Social Security during their retirement years. Since women live longer than men, their savings, if they have them, run out sooner. And, the administrative costs of small private accounts consume a huge portion (as much as half) of the total contributions to the plan.
To accomplish his goal, Bush will soon launch a huge advertising campaign to publicize his program. This $40 million dollar TV ad blitz will tell Americans that our grandchildren will have no Social Security unless it is privatized.
Conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute are working together to support the campaign. Lobbying groups with progressive-sounding names are telling women that the social security system is broken, and that privatization will ensure their futures. An example is the right-wing "Women for Social Security Choice," a group led by Republican Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn (Washington). Dunn and her ilk push the idea that women are smart enough to make their own choices about their Social Security contributions. African American women and Latinas in low paying jobs might counter that their low incomes yield fewer choices for them and a smaller payoff when they retire. This is hardly progressive.
The National Council of Women’s Organizations has a much clearer picture of the impact of privatization. Attacking the Cato Institute’s claims that privatization would help women workers, the NCWO points out that women would pay more for their annuities because they live longer, that private inflation-adjusted annuities, if available at all, would be cost prohibitive to low-income women workers, and that "earnings sharing," a tenet of the Bush plan, eliminates spousal benefits entirely.
Call to Action
All working women must fight the Bush administration’s efforts to rob them of their Social Security retirement benefits. Education is one key to defeating privatization. Organizations such as the Democratic National Committee, the National Women’s Law Center, the National Organization for Women, and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research all have excellent websites with information about why the Bush plan is all wrong for women. Women should write to Congress and insist that Social Security not be raided to benefit the wealthy private sector at their expense. There is still time to fight – and fight we must. For ourselves, and for the legacy of women like Frances Perkins, who fought so hard to keep America’s working women out of poverty.
--Anna Bates is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.
By
Dave Lindorff
Taken from www.counterpunch.com
February 3, 2005
Social
Security, the New Deal program that has provided a basic level of economic
support for the nation's elderly, disabled and orphaned for 70 years, is
in grave danger--not from Baby Boomers, but from a campaign of lies and
fear-mongering, led by the president.
The truth? There is no Social Security crisis. None whatsoever.
Yet, in his State of the Union address Wednesday night, President Bush put
the campaign to destroy Social Security and its promise of old-age and disability
security front and center in his second-term agenda, claiming that the system
founded in 1935 is headed for "bankruptcy" in 2042.
Like the mythical weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, this was a flat-out,
deliberate lie. First of all, even if the date were correct, all that would
happen in 2042 would be that the trust fund used to pay out benefits to
workers would be exhausted, but even then current workers taxes would continue
to cover 73 percent of promised benefits to retirees. More importantly,
that 2042 projection by the increasingly politicized Social Security Administration
was just a conservative projection made a few years ago based upon unrealistically
low estimates of future economic growth. It has already been pushed back
by several years' good economic performance, and in fact, the Congressional
Budget Office and most independent economists say that the trust fund should
enable the system to cover all benefits through at least 2052 and perhaps
on out through 2080 and beyond.
Not mentioned by the president or right-wing critics of Social Security
is the fact that by 2045, the last of the Baby Boom generation will have
already shuffled off this mortal coil, taking their outsized claims for
benefits with them.
Given that there is no real crisis, the real unasked question is why the
president, right-wing politicians and pundits, and corporate leaders and
business organizations--and the media--are all calling for "reforms"
to "save" the system.
The real reason for this urgency is that they understand that the Baby Boom
generation, which is approaching retirement, does pose a crisis--not for
Social Security, but for them and their political agenda.
Consider this: Just as there will be nearly twice as many elderly retirees
collecting benefits when the wave of Americans born between 1945 and 1960
hits its retirement age peak (the first Boomers start retiring in 2011),
there will also be twice as many elderly voters. And it gets better (or
more terrifying, if you are a conservative politician or a corporate executive):
while today's seniors came of age listening to Perry Como in the politically
quiescent 1950s, tomorrow's retirees will be people who listened to Bob
Dylan and the Beatles and cut their political teeth in the Civil Rights
and Anti-War Movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
In a few years then, we can expect to see an unprecedentedly large senior
lobby that knows how to organize politically, that knows how to do take
it to the street, and that has demonstrated its ability to fight hard when
its own interests are at stake (remember those struggles for the vote and
against the draft and the Indochina War?). And once they near retirement,
this powerful voting bloc will be seeing Social Security and Medicare as
their number one political issue. If Social Security is already the "third
rail" of electoral politics, not to be touched, in a few years, it
will become the Molotov cocktail, exploding the political status quo.
Corporate America knows this. The people in the boardrooms and the conservative
think tanks aren't worried about 2042. They don't think that long-term.
(If they did, they wouldn't be so cavalier about the destruction of the
environment and about global warming.) They're worried about 2010, because
this new senior revolution is just around the corner.
They know that today, seniors and people over the age of 65, as powerful
an electoral block as they are, represent only 17 percent of the voting
age population of the country, while by 2025, when the bulk of Baby Boomers
will be in the 65-80 age bracket, retirees will represent 25 percent of
the voting-age population, an increase of 45 percent in their relative voting
power. If those aged 55-64 are added in--a reasonable assumption, since
people who reach 55 are starting to think about their retirement and tend
to vote more in line with the interests of actual retirees--the elderly
and near elderly will by then represent fully 40 percent of the electorate.
That's a 40 percent increase over the 28.5 percent of the electorate this
broader group represented in 2000.
Moreover, while the Right talks ominously of a generational conflict between
older retirees collecting pensions and younger workers paying the taxes
to cover them, in fact, those retirees are the parents of many of those
workers (not everyone has children, but everyone has parents!). And how
many people complain about the size of their parents' Social Security checks,
or would really want to have to be personally responsible for taking care
of their elderly parents' finances? There really is considerable support
even among young workers, for a secure and generous retirement system, because
people don't just vote their own interests; they vote their parents' and
grandparents' interests, too.
That's why there is an increasingly panicky aspect to the efforts to destroy
Social Security before the Baby Boomer population realizes where its real
political interests lie. Social Security's opponents know if the program
is effectively killed off before it becomes a core Boomer issue, it will
be much harder to re-establish it.
The Right doesn't really have much time on this issue. It appears, to judge
by the marketing folks at the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP),
which offers memberships to everyone turning 50, that somewhere in their
mid-50s, people start to think seriously about retirement. Today's oldest
Baby Boomers are just hitting that milestone now.
When today's Boomers really start to contemplate their retirement, the picture
will not be pleasant. Property values--where many have placed their faith
and their savings--are stagnating, not rising, and post-Enron, those 401K
pensions that the middle class was all excited about a few years ago, have
been treading water. Meanwhile companies are whittling away pension programs
as fast as they can, eliminating "defined benefit" plans that
paid benefits based upon set formulas in favor of plans that pay depending
upon what employees contributed, and on how well the investment portfolio
performed--even as those investments that have been made with workers' contributions
have been languishing or shrinking in value (if they weren't being pilfered,
as happened at Enron).
What's left? Social Security and Medicare. Given the sorry state of the
private safety net, it's a safe bet that it won't be long before a movement
springs up among the new elderly and near elderly not just to "rescue"
Social Security, but to radically transform it into a true retirement program.
Tomorrow's senior lobby won't feel constrained by current law, which makes
workers foot half the bill (we're talking about their own kids, after all!).
We can thus expect to see more of the tax burden shifted onto employers.
We can also expect to see future Congresses pressured into passing reforms
that will remove the income cap on the Social Securities tax. (And here's
something the president has not told people: if the cap on income subject
to Social Security taxation, currently set at $90,000 in wages, were eliminated
so all income was subject to the tax, there would be no shortfall in the
trust fund--not in 2042, not in 2075, never.) We can also expect to see
private pensions made fully portable, so that employers can't pocket years
of contributions every time they let go workers before they are "vested."
As well, we can probably also expect to see a movement to expand Medicare
from a niggardly program that only barely covers the medical care of the
elderly, to a full-fledged national healthcare program that covers everyone.
That is a scary vision for business and the Right, and it's why Bush is
pushing to wreck the system now. If the president were to go before Congress
and announce that the banking system was in grave danger, and that the FDIC
insurance program could not really insure people's accounts, it would spark
a run on the banks and destroy the banking system and the president would
probably be impeached. And yet that is exactly what his dire warnings of
a bankruptcy of Social Security in 2042 are trying to do-cause a political
run on the system.
The president's proposed "solution"--private accounts for younger
workers--is really nothing but a classic divide-and-conquer tactic. It doesn't
solve the long-term problem, and by most accounts would probably worsen
it by removing some contributions that would have helped build up the reserve
fund. What it would do though is leave older workers stuck with the current
system, while weaning younger workers away with a promise of easy money
and a lower tax bite. Then, with fewer people dependent upon classic benefits,
it would be politically easier for a future Congress to slash those benefits
later, since younger workers with a private "nest egg" would be
less affected.
It's time to see the president's attack for what it is: an attempt to destroy
the most enduring legacy of the New Deal.
