The Raw Deal: Social Security Privatization

Joe Conason, columnist, political commentator James Roosevelt Jr., FDR's grandson Bush and the GOP will soon resume their campaign to reform social security. Best-selling author and New York Observer, columnist Joe Conason considers the new social security proposal as the latest attack in a seventy-year campaign to destroy the advances of the New Deal. In The Raw Deal: How the Bush Republicans Plan to Destroy Social Security and the Legacy of the New Deal, with a foreword by Al Franken, Conason explains the workings of the think tanks, front organizations, town hall meetings, and the public fronts for conservative ideologues and financial institutions that he feels are intent on destroying the most successful federal program in history. The conservative campaign against social security dates back to 1936, when Kansas Republican Alf Landon ran against FDR denouncing the program as a 'hoax.' The Republican platform that year predicted that the fund would be able to pay retirement benefits to only one third of the elderly, dismissing the entire program as containing 'nothing but the government's promise to pay.' Conason claims that while the Bush administration insists they are trying to 'save' social security, their doomsday prophecies for the program's funding date back to the earliest corporate detractor. He details how privatization would create a bonanza for the financial industry, with as many as 130 million new investment accounts that would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Investment firms could expect to reap nearly a trillion dollars in profit from privatized social security accounts over the next several decades. The prospect of siphoning enormous fees and commissions from social security revenue explains why Wall Street firms, investment banks, insurance companies, and stock brokerages have invested millions in the privatization campaign.

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