Life in the Third Layer

In an MSNBC story titled “Hand-picked crowds for Social Security show:
Bush preaches to the converted while pitching his overhaul plan” George W. Bush vows to keep saying it until we believe it:

“There is difference of opinion, and I’ve got mine,” Bush said in Memphis, Tenn. “I’m going to continue traveling our country until it becomes abundantly clear to the American people we have a problem.”

I think he is still talking about a problem with Social Security, but who knows?

Why Social Security should not be tied to the stock market may not be readily apparent to those for whom the stock market produces income. These people understand the stock market, but they generally do not understand working for wages.
By the same token, hourly wage workers do not understand the stock market. They know people make money from the stock market, but they don’t understand how that money is made.
So why not let workers make money for their retirement in the stock market? Other than the fact that the stock market doesn’t always make money, and people do in fact always get old and need money, here is a point to consider:
The stock market makes its money on the income of corporations. Corporations make their money by hiring people to work, mostly for low salaries and hourly wages. If a corporation can work people overtime without pay, assign double duties, shorten lunch hours, take away break time, avoid worker health and safety issues, work a large force of part-time people with no benefits or health insurance, etc., then the corporation can raise its profit margin. It can pay its CEO more money, and make more money for its stock holders, at least in the short run, as long as the work force doesn’t actually die. It is in the interest of corporations to keep wages and benefits low and profit margins high.
It is in the interest of the worker, of course, to receive an adequate wage and have health coverage, a safe workplace, and a retirement plan. Corporations do not provide these benefits out of their own good hearts. Corporations have no good hearts. To the extent that workers have these benefits, they are due to government regulation of corporate behavior and the few remaining areas of labor in which collective bargaining is still effective.
When George W. Bush says “ownership society,” he means that when Social Security is privatized workers will “own” a part of corporations. They will share the corporate goal — grow corporate profits. Workers (and their elected representatives) would then willingly give up lunch hours and breaks, vote for laws that permit unpaid overtime, cease clamoring for little things like medical insurance, etc., in the interest of making sure their Social Security will be there for them when they retire. It is sort of a Donner Pass thing — workers would eat themselves to keep from starving.
It is not a sustainable model, you say, but sustainable models are not the Bush long suit.

Giving the management of the safety net for our seniors over to the private (for profit) sector is of course wrong. I am disappointed also to hear Democrats suggesting raising the retirement age. We should fight raising the Social Security age. Here are some points we should be using:

• Professional people and business owners do see retirement the same as wage earners. Professional and business owners continue into retirement as well-paid consultants or simply continue to work because they set their own hours and agendas. Wage earners, who have worked their whole lives to enrich other people, cannot keep the pace of the work-day world past 55 or 60. Their ability, by any means — education, hard work, overtime — to lift their socioeconomic status or achieve any level of self-paced autonomy in their work should be looked at separately. The driving, clock-punching, answer-to-the boss, hands-on production level of work is killing to older people. When we raise the age at which we permit these people to draw Social Security, we are agreeing to keep them hard at work until death and disability relieve us of the problem.
• Improving your socio-economic status by working hard and managing well (upward mobility) in the United States, once the phenomenon of the world for it’s level of opportunity, is non-existent. We have eliminated it by several means, one of which is creating corporate dynasties that preserve the hold of a few wealthy families and another of which is installing these families as the governing class. Under the leadership of these corporate and conservative influences, we have shifted the tax burden to the poor and middle class, further protecting wealth and privilege of the few. Perhaps these are unpopular things to say, but Democrats should be looking at the real statistics on the value of work to the individual worker. It is much less than it was 50 years ago. Work builds wealth, but not the wealth of the worker. Take a look at the “L-Curve.” Google will find it for you. We can use the statistics on “how much work is worth to the worker” to mobilize our more humanitarian and populist causes. We need worker’s rights and fair wages. We can’t get people to believe this if we don’t assemble and show the evidence. The Neo-Con agenda is to promote a dream that has vanished, but every poor clock-punching worker still wants — needs — to believe the dream. That is why the Neo-Cons can make poor people vote for their wealth-building schemes even while they cut entitlements and necessary safety-net features like Medicare and Social Security.
• Working parents have working children (see 1 and 2 above). Raising the Social Security (and Medicare) age takes the support system from young families, keeping Grandma and Grandpa “gainfully employed” until they are dead or disabled, and denying them the retirement years they had hoped for to baby-sit, nurture, and enjoy grandchildren. This more than anything else has disintegrated the American family and put day care on the map of big business. All of us work till we die, and nobody has any time for family unless they are members of the wealthy class (ownership society?) and can manage their own time.
• Older workers (60+) have aging parents, but they cannot draw Social Security at a reasonable age and care for them. Instead, we send our ailing 70-80 year olds for long stays in institutions, keeping elder care firmly in the big business and for-profit sector of the economy and further eroding the family.
• Keeping older workers (60+) on the job because they have to work until they can get Social Security at 66 or 67 means that job and promotion opportunities do not open up for younger people. Entry level jobs and promotion opportunities are blocked by people who have to extend their planned work years.
• During the years from 60 onward, women in particular and a large number of men also do not have any advantage in increased earnings. Many are shuffled to lower-paid jobs, even when they stay in the organizations they have been in for years. Older workers feel the pressure of their sense of value to organizations diminishing, and many feel that they are “hanging on” when their organization really would like to see them gone.
• Perhaps, because of the rapid changes in technology, organizations would work better if workers over 60 retired. Raising the Social Security age runs counter to this idea.
• Most people save a little for retirement. They save it so they can travel, take the vacation they never had or see Europe or South America or Mexico. Raising the Social Security age keeps them until their health and ability to travel is gone, and this money goes to medical costs and nursing homes.
• Churches and charitable causes used to operate on the work of energetic senior volunteers. These people now (and more so in the future if we raise the retirement age again) are still punching a clock. By the offer of government money to faith-based initiatives for community service, and by taking retired seniors out of the available volunteer pool, the Neo-Cons are beginning the push to move this area of community, home, and family into a big-business line item where it will be theirs to manage.
• Medical advances in the past three decades have indeed increased life expectancy. However, the quality of life for seniors has diminished. More live in poverty. More live in pain. More live in nursing homes. Fewer live with their retired children as care-givers. Fewer baby-sit their grandchildren. Fewer can afford travel. Fewer are able to volunteer. Many choose between heating fuel and food. More of their resources are consumed in paying for medicines, and more of them are dying from side effects of medications. We have lost sight of the life cycle, the need for family, the meaning of what it is to age, and the function of health care. We prolong dying and call it increasing life expectancy. Then we use it as an excuse to take that precious 55 to 65 golden age of life and mine it for more production and more billing opportunities. Not only is this immoral, it is also what my mother would call “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”
  

With all the cuts in humanitarian and social programs (education, medical care, environment, etc). in the Bush 2006 budget, any senator or congressman who votes for it will certainly not be enjoying the Christmas specials for the next few years.

no_crisis

Originally uploaded by Sarah Williams.

About the Crisis in Social Security:

No “WMD,” or “shortage in flu vaccine,” or “terrorist attack on election day” either.

Social Security has financed itself and several other projects. If Social Security funds had not been used for other projects, the Baby Boomers would have paid for themselves — or in my case, ourselves.

Crisis talk is another attempt to frighten Americans into accepting autocratic rule by big business interests represented well by George W. Bush. The proposed reform will take the money of small investors out of their pockets directly to the accounts of people wealthy enough to diversify, protect investments, capture markets, and manipulate stock prices.

Is it at all possible that President Bush has not noticed that anyone who has enough money can have a private investment retirement account already?
Social Security, on the other hand, is a fail-safe for retirement, a system whereby the nation (that’s us) guarantees that we do not suffer from producing large numbers of impoverished seniors. It is security for our social system. It is not individual. That is the point. Social Security is how our social system saves for seniors. The size of the pool is its security. Think about it as something we all do that benefits all of us. Isn’t that the concept?
Also, perhaps he has forgotten that the stock market is not a guaranteed investment. In fact, investment in the stock market is much more risky for the small investor than for the wealthy investor. If you are a small investor, which most of us would be, you can lose everything.
The proposed social security reform is a white-washed method of taking from the poor and giving to the rich, the latest of many George W. Bush “reverse Robin Hood” economic initiatives. It works with his philosophy that the poor are already poor, so a little more poverty won’t make that much difference.