Ecological Wisdom * Social Justice * Grassroots Democracy * Non-Violence
>> Green Party of Michigan <<
http://www.migreens.org
>>> ---------------- <<<
>>> News Release <<<
>>> ---------------- <<<
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
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January 20, 2005
For More Information Contact:
----------------------------
Sylvia Inwood, Chair/Green Party of Michigan
chair@migreens.org
Arthur Myatt, Chair/Platform Committee, GPMI
almyatt@earthlink.net
>> Michigan Greens Call on Congressional Delegation to Reject <<
>> Bush Privatization Schemes That Would Destroy Social Security <<
The Green Party of Michigan (GPMI) is calling on all 17 members
of Michigan's Congressional delegation to defend Social Security
from the privatization schemes of the Bush administration which
would destroy the poverty-fighting program.
GPMI's platform opposes privatization in general. It says,
in part, that privatization "weakens democracy not just by
corrupting the political process but by removing resources from
the control of public bodies and turning them over to corporate
management."
But Bush's proposal to privatize Social Security is even worse,
declares Platform Committee Chair Arthur Myatt. "Bush is flat-out
planning to destroy Social Security under the guise of saving it,
in the same way our military has destroyed cities in Vietnam --
and Iraq -- in order to save them."
Chuck Loucks of the Huron Valley Greens says, "For the Neocon-
servatives, the problem with Social Security is not that it is
broken, but that it works too well. What Social Security does is
provide protection to working people from market forces.
"For plutocrats like Bush, paying the peasants to not work is
anathema. He and his cronies want people to work until the day
they die. Any public policy that gives the little person a leg up
has to be killed. The fact is, when people can retire from work
at a reasonable age, it puts upward pressure on wages across the
board -- and young people benefit from this."
New GPMI chair Sylvia Inwood is reminded of a time last year
when Barbara Bush was out stumping for her baby boy in Florida,
and told an audience: "Do you think we'd let our son destroy
Medicare and Social Security?" Inwood thought, "Of course!
What difference would it make to obscenely rich people like you
who don't need Medicare and Social Security benefits?"
Douglas Campbell, GPMI candidate for governor, comments,
"It's interesting how the Publican spinmeisters can take the
most successful anti-poverty program in history and assail it
for ‘failing' as a retirement investment program. You may
question their ethics, but you have to admire their effective-
ness. It's almost as though I built a better mousetrap and
people beat a path to my door to scream that it isn't a very
good vacuum cleaner."
Myatt agrees. "The Social Security system is not now and
never has been an investment fund. Nobody has ever paid in
money that is reserved for his or her own retirement. Money
paid in now goes to people who are retired now, and drawing
benefits, with any surplus used to purchase United States
Treasury Bills, as required by law."
John La Pietra of Marshall hopes new 7th District
Congressman Joe Schwarz will be less bent on privatization
than the man he replaced, Nick Smith. But it's thanks to
Smith, he adds, that he knows now why the Social Security
"crisis" keeps being put off: because the economy keeps
growing faster than the "intermediate" projection of 1.6%
a year . . . for 70 years in a row.
"Growth that slow hasn't gone on for a whole decade
since the Panic of 1917. And, if the economy were that
stagnant for 70 years, the stock market would find it hard
to grow at the ‘historical' 7% rate." La Pietra concludes,
"The SEC requires every stock-investment prospectus to
remind potential investors that past performance is not
a guarantee of future results. Maybe the same warning
should be required before every pie-in-the-sky profit
promise of the Social Security privateers."
Looking from the Green economic and political perspective,
Alan Kaufman of the West Oakland Watershed Greens also sees
"a quite remarkable disconnect" between the Bush administration's
"justification" for privatizing Social Security -- that magic
7% return workers would supposedly be sure to get if only they
could take money "out" of the SS system and invest it
themselves -- and their underlying presumption that economic
growth over the long haul will not exceed 2%.
"Perhaps the most significant ‘drain' or brake on the US
economy," Kaufman adds, "is the continued huge military budget.
Pursuing a 'peace' foreign policy should allow the economy to
grow more rapidly (and, not trivially, more ‘sustainably')
than it would grow if the huge military expense remains a
'given'."
Campbell suggests other real reforms that would be on the
table with Greens in the US Senate and House. "Let's start
with making Social Security a flat tax -- and no, it's not one
now. Right now, working people pay a FICA tax of 6.2% on their
wages -- but only on the first $90,000 of wages, for a total
of $5,520. Anybody whose wages are more than that pays *nothing*
on the higher wages. And the same 0% rate applies to unearned
income -- all of it, from the very first dollar of interest,
dividends, and so forth.
"If a flat tax is the right thing to do for income taxes,
why not for FICA? This one change would assure the solvency of
the Social Security system until the next Big Bang, and would
probably enable it to remain solvent with reduced tax rates."
Next, Campbell would add means-testing. "If you're collecting
a million-dollar pension, you shouldn't be collecting Social
Security, too." He also makes a few other points:
* A Federal Social Security program is a good thing.
-------------------------------------------------
"People need to be aware that the very reason Social
Security exists as a Federal program is that the private
investment banking/stock market system can collapse --
and did. Those still among us who remember the Great
Depression and the New Deal should remind us all of
the perils which await elderly, orphaned, and disabled
people if we allow Social Security to be pirated."
* There have always been private investment options.
-------------------------------------------------
"The reason people rely on Social Security instead of
putting their own money into their own private retirement
portfolios is simply that most of us don't have any money.
Wages in America don't permit you to both live and plan
for the future. That, and periodically seeing it wiped
out -- wasn't it only a few years ago that we were all
joking that our 401(k)s had become 104(k)s? Neglecting
to set aside some of your discretionary income for the
future is not a moral failing when you have negative
discretionary income." If that opens up the dialogue
for a Living Wage, says Campbell, so be it.
"It is not possible to set aside large amounts of cash for
the future and expect it to grow or even keep pace with inflation.
A bank or other financial institution can't pay you interest
without investing the cash in something. (If I recall correctly,
there's an ancient parable about idled talents that says the same
thing.) Likewise, you will need more than cash when you get old
and gray; you'll need water, food, clothing, shelter, medical care
and transportation, none of which will exist if we don't invest
in it now.
"Not having cash in the Social Security lockbox is a good
thing if it's appropriately invested -- say, in medical-school
tuition or keeping public water systems public. That, and it
is essential that we have an economic and monetary policy which
relies on sustainability, not growth, and keeps interest rates
down. Probably nothing else makes poor people poorer and rich
people richer than high interest rates do."
It's Not Broke -- So Don't Break It Trying to "Fix" It
======================================================
Myatt points out the fallacy on the other end of the financial
equation. "There's no other part of the Federal budget that is
guaranteed sound for at least the next decade, as the Social
Security fund is. Medicaid/Medicare is in crisis now. The
military budget is wildly out of control; so is the budget for
the Department of Homeland Insecurity and Secret Prisons.
"We spend billions for a 'missile defense' system that is not
needed and wouldn't work if it were needed, while the public
health system is losing what ability it had to protect us against
the flu and other infectious diseases."
Myatt cites a New Year's Day article in the New York _Times_
by Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winner for the 1997 book _Guns,
Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies_, for offering one
reason why some societies have failed:
A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if
the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its
actions. That's why Maya kings, Norse Greenlanders and
Easter Island chiefs made choices that eventually undermined
their societies. They themselves did not begin to feel
deprived until they had irreversibly destroyed their
landscape.
Could this happen in the United States? It's a thought
that often occurs to me here in Los Angeles, when I drive
by gated communities, guarded by private security patrols,
and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on
private pensions, and send their children to private
schools. By doing these things, they lose the motivation
to support the police force, the municipal water supply,
Social Security, and public schools.
Myatt and his fellow Michigan Greens note that the President
and Congress don't depend on the Social Security system for their
retirement. They have a parallel, more richly endowed system of
government pensions that will not be affected by Bush's privati-
zation proposals. They are personally insulated from any effects
their meddling would have on the rest of us.
"We call on the new 109th Congress to combine their retirement
pensions with Social Security, and create a common retirement system
for government officials and ordinary citizens alike, instead of
undermining our retirement security. We ask them to remember that
if any person now paying into Social Security can afford to invest
a portion of their wages into a private retirement account, they
are free to do so now. 401(k) accounts and Individual Retirement
Accounts of various types are available. If the stock market is
such a good investment, it will not need the subsidy Bush would
borrow billions to finance.
"We ask the public to understand the stupidity of the argument
that the system will fail in the future when there will not be as
many workers for each Social Security recipient. More workers were
paying into Social Security per recipient in the 1950s than today.
The average worker of today is far more productive than the average
worker of the 1950s, and workers several decades in the future can
be expected to be still more productive. The simple truth is that
we don't need as many workers today to support a recipient as we
needed in the past. And we won't need as many in the future as we
do now."
[=============================================]
Jared Diamond's New York _Times_ article is visible on line at:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010205Y.shtml
If you want to see how bad an economic slowdown it would take
to force Social Security into crisis, you can look up the 75-year
projections of the trust-fund actuaries at:
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TR/TR04/lrIndex.html
You can find out how to contact your US Senators and
Representative at University of Michigan professor Juan Cole's
"Contacting the Congress" Web page, among others:
http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/
# # #
created/distributed using donated labor
Green Party of Michigan * 548 South Main Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48104 * 734-663-3555
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GPMI was formed in 1987 to address environmental issues in Michigan
politics. Greens are organized in all 50 states and the District
of Columbia. Each state Green Party sets its own goals and creates
its own structure, but US Greens agree on Ten Key Values:
Ecological Wisdom
Grassroots Democracy
Social Justice
Non-Violence
Community Economics
Decentralization
Feminism
Respect for Diversity
Personal/Global Responsibility
Future Focus/Sustainability
[=============================================]
>> GPMI Platform: I. Grassroots Democracy / 5. Privatization <<
>> (adopted January 2004) -- excerpts <<
. . . Privateers are ever vigilant in their search for new
ways to make a profit by taking over some function or asset of
government. They buy the services of lobbyists, lawyers, and
legislators to help them do so. The Republican and Democratic
Parties long ago became servants of the corporate economy.
Privatization weakens democracy not just by corrupting the
political process but by removing resources from the control
of public bodies and turning them over to corporate management.
There, the first purpose of the resources is to turn a profit;
the public good becomes secondary at best. . . .
The Green Party is against all the forms of privatization
mentioned above, and is opposed to the corruption of democracy
that results from privatization as it is practiced today. We
believe that public resources should be used for the public good
as determined by democratic institutions. Social, natural and
physical capital now controlled by city, county, state and
federal governments should not be turned over to corporations;
those previously turned over should be taken back.
Other Contacts:
Green Party of Michigan
548 S Main St
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
734-663-3555
info@migreens.org
posted to web 22 Jan 2005