I have long been wondering why such deep antagonism against Social Security exists among so many prominent
people in this country.  Under
George Bush while Medicare suffered very genuine financial perils Republican
politicians and conservative leaders never mentioned its problems all the while
whining incessantly that we should “privatize” Social Security because of it’s
quite minor financial difficulties.  If nothing changes Social Security will
be able to pay full benefits until 2039, and changes needed to sustain it
indefinitely are small. 

Now under the two-faced deceiver in
the White House we see a commission supposedly established to study our
financial problems, meeting in secret, with major participants demonstrably
both fanatically and ignorantly opposed to Social Security, and due to make its
‘report’ just after the November elections.  It’s real purpose is becoming very clear to all not blinded
by their trust.  Obama’s “eleven dimensional chess” is
played against us and not the Sauronic right.

Other than malice and evil, why this effort
to attack Social Security by so many Republican and Democratic leaders?  

The answer arises when we grasp
that America today is in increasing thrall to two nasty groups standing in
direct opposition to our founding principles: corporatists and the ‘religious’
and Tea Bagger right.  The first
dominates the Democrats and Republicans alike, but in the GOP is challenged by
the second. 

Two reasons seem likely to
me. 

First, the corporatist hacks that
dominate both parties today have a deep commitment to the mantra that government cannot do anything right for the American
people.  When in power they do what
they can to prove this argument. 
Social Security works, and so is a standing rebuttal to their
vision.  Therefore it must be
destroyed. 

If George Bush had gotten his
“privatization” passed, millions of older Americans would have been even more
devastated by the stock market crash than they were.  Significantly, this apparently does not bother these people
in the slightest.  We are seeing
the results of a quasi-religious secular fanaticism called “neoliberalism.” 

Neoliberals are practitioners of
marketolatry, a creed as simple-minded and free from evidence as any Fundamentalism.  It differs from libertarianism in that
they have no problem seeking government privileges for corporations.  In fact they rely on it. 

Neoliberalism’s roots lie in the
demise of “Great Society” liberalism under President Carter and the conclusion
by many ‘serious thinkers’ of the time that if government could not fine-tune
our lives in everything, then it could do nothing and corporations could play
that role.  Either way, governments
and markets are simply vehicles for their real goal, which is power over us all
“for our own good.”  This is also
why they generally like war so much: war is power.

Major figures
within this sect, such as Larry Summers, are beyond reach of argument or evidence.  They are far worse men than one can easily grasp, as Summers
demonstrated in 1991, while he was the World Bank’s chief economist when he argued 

The measurements
of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings
from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount
of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest
cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic
logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is
impeccable and we should face up to that.

He explained that  “I’ve always though that
under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air
quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico
City.”

Jose Lutzenburger Brazil’s Secretary of the
Environment wrote Summers 

Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane…
Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation,
reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many
conventional ‘economists’ concerning the nature of the world we live in… 

Lutzenberger was right.

Another believer, Alan Simpson
demonstrates it also helps to be beyond reason or compassion.  Long an opponent of Social Security,  Simpson has gone farther to blame veterans for our financial
difficulties, because veteran benefits are another area where government
actually works for the most part, and so must be destroyed. 

Sad to say, Barack Obama, Mr. No I
Can’t, underlines this position by refusing to fire him.  Some will say: trust Obama. The proper
answer is since when has trusting him paid off?  He has proven a better manager than Bush for serving
corporations and banks, not for serving the American people.

A Second Reason

There is a second reason for
antagonism to Social Security, one that speaks more to the heated imaginations
of the “christian” right and Tea Baggers than to the soulless manipulators of
corporate power. 

America is shifting from a white
Western European to an ethnically mixed nation.  Hawaii is more our future in this regard than is New
Hampshire.  This is part of a long
process that began when Western Europeans of many ethnicities became defined as
“Americans.”  Hardly anyone knows
that one of the wisest and most tolerant people of his time, Benjamin Franklin,
once worried that Germans were of the wrong complexion and practiced the wrong
customs to ever be fully assimilated into our culture!

But today white Europeans will soon
no longer be a majority in the US, as they are no longer a majority in several
states.  This brings out all the
poison lurking at the heart of the nativist soul, as we see in Arizona in
particular.

Social Security is blamed by some
‘conservatives’ for falling white birth rates.   The evidence does not support
this argument as the lowest birth rates in Europe are in traditional societies
such as Italy, and far higher rates, though still falling, exist in
Scandinavia. The crucial factor in maintaining birth rates is making it possible for women
to both work and have families, which requires moderating the forces of a pure
market and facilitating women’s getting good jobs.  Neither are supported by the right. Better to abolish Social
security.

The argument for abolishing social
Security from this perspective is that old people no longer need children to
keep them out of poverty, for Social Security provides the margin of safety for
many.  But if they had no margin of
safety then they would have to breed and the “white race” would receive a
demographic boost because among all Americans whites have the smallest
families. As a side effect it would supposedly strengthen “the family” by
removing other ways of taking care of oneself when old.

Of course this reasoning cannot be
discussed in public.  Deliberately
worsening the conditions of all American as they age in order to re-inflate the
“white race’ is not a message that will go over well, even among most followers
of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, let alone good Americans.