Social Security is 75...and still under assault!

When President Franklin Roosevelt signed the new
Social Security Act into law on August 14, l935---seventy five
years ago this week---its benefits to the elderly and disabled
already faced a vociferous army of enemies.  Social Security, the
enemy argued, would bankrupt America, ruin the work ethic,
weaken our characters, and put us on the road to socialism.
Their arguments proved false then, but are still alive and
flourishing today.  And with the current electioneering
and fear mongering about the monster DEFICIT, we will
be hammered with the same old lies, ad nauseam.

Just five years ago, shortly after his election to a second
term, President George W. Bush addressed a folksy audience
 regarding the "precarious state" of America's retirement
system. "If you're twenty years old," he announced, "or in your mid-
twenties and you're beginning to work, I want you to think about
a Social Security system that will be flat bust---bankrupt, unless
the U.S. Congress has got the willingness to act now. And that's
what we're here to talk about: a system that will be bankrupt."*

And how must Congress solve this "crisis", according to
Bush? By privatizing part of your payroll taxes and investing them in
stocks or individual retirement accounts.  This has been the
holy grail of the insurance corporations and Wall Street brokers
since the beginning of Social Security in the Great Depression...
the stock brokers can visualize the fees those trillions promise.
Fortunately, Congress did not take Bush's advice, because
less than four years after that address, the U.S. stock market
imploded and the Great Recession of 2008 rolled into high gear.
Millions of Americans lost a third or fourth of their investments,
and millions of others lost their jobs.

The enemies of Social Security use many devices for attacking it.
How about deliberately confusing Social Security
in the public mind with the financial crisis its resulting budget
deficit?  Only this past Sunday Rep. John Boehner, Republican House
Minority Leader, proposed raising the retirement age to 70 years!
And how would this improve the budget deficit today or
ten years from now? Not by a single nickel or dime. Nada.
Nor is Social Security in any immediate crisis needing urgent
changes, especially cutting benefits to retirees. Boehner is
creating an issue to befog voters in the upcoming elections.

Here's one fact we should all clearly understand: your payroll
tax, (Old Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance)
serves a completely different function from the income tax; they
are entirely separate tax programs.  No changes in Social Security can
affect the deficit we fear so much today (but feared so little
when Republicans were the majority party in Congress).

We've been hearing for twenty years that Social Security has
gone broke, or is going bankrupt, or is only a pile of IOU's; that
the surplus has been frittered away by Congress on pork projects.
Yet, this past week the trustees of the Social Security Trust Fund reported
a $2.5 trillion surplus, surviving the worst economic downturn in the
program's  history. The Great Recession and loss of payroll taxes will
require timely adjustments to Social Security, but the 75-year
projection of its fiscal future indicates it will survive going forward.

And that brings up another fact that must be perfectly understood.
The question is often jokingly raised: if the trust surplus isn't a pile
of IOU's, is it several tons of gold bullion? or millions of $100 bills?
The answer is No, of course; it's an accumulation of U.S. Treasury bonds.
Nearly all loans to the U.S.are transacted as bond purchases, (the
smart set calls this "buying U.S. debt"). Whether owned by China,
Japan, millions of private investors, or the Social Security Trust Fund,
U.S. bonds are gilt-edged, and guaranteed.

No politician would dare imply that the United States might default
on loans China made to the U.S. through the purchase of U.S.
Treasury Bonds, prized as the most secure investment on earth.
So why would the same politician declare that the U.S. will default
on treasury bonds held by the Social Security Trust Fund, a
retirement fund workers have paid into all of  their working lives?
The answer is obviously "the politics of fear":  to scare the hell
out of the voters, and make the friends of Social Security look like
political frauds. We can rest assured the Chinese government
knows that politicians and "experts" who say the trust fund is empty
are either joking or lying!

Who are the most vocal enemies of Social Security? Today they
are the libertarians of movement conservatism. Libertarian rage
against all "big government" programs is not so much
financial as ideological. They would return us to the Gilded Age of
William McKinley, before the personal income tax, before the Federal
Reserve, before Theodore Roosevelt broke up the
great monopolies of the robber barons. And especially before
the economic theories of the Keynesians and New Dealers
who advocated and launched the stimulus to fight recessions.

You'll get the libertarians' drift on any of the many blogs
of the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the National
Tax Payers Union, the American Enterprise Institute, Freedom
Works, Fox Cable "News", and dozens of other right wing
foundations, institutes, pundits, classical economists,
and talk-radio demagogues Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin,
Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, et al.

Here are some other facts you should bear in mind during the 
continuing war against Social Security:

1) By 2023, Social Security will have a $4.6 trillion surplus. It can pay
out all scheduled benefits for the next quarter-century with no
changes whatsoever.  After 2037,  it will still be able to pay out
75%  of scheduled benefits, and that's without any changes.

2) When changes are needed to "fix" Social Security, conservatives
will insist upon cutting retiree benefits, like the 70-year retirement
age suggested by Boehner above.  It's good to remember that
money from the Social Security Trust Fund cushioned the $700 billion
Bush tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. (Our grand kids will be paying
off that debt!)  "Fixing" Social Security should come at the expense of
those who most benefited from the $106,000 taxable maximum. An
increase in that maximum could make Social Security sustainable for
decades to come.

3) Remember: the Social Security fund is separate from the budget;
it pays its own way.  It can never add a penny to the deficit.  Don't
let the wizards behind the right-wing fog machine confuse you during this
election campaign season.
 *Read a detailed analysis of the Social Security program in the 
excellent book "The Plot Against Social Security" by Pulitzer
Prize winning financial journalist Michael K. Hiltzik of the LA Times.

The Magazine Streetcar

I was eleven the first time I rode the Magazine Streetcar without being held in tow by an adult or older sister. On many Saturday mornings that year, 1935, I would take one of my three younger brothers, Don, Bob, or Tom to a movie downtown, usually at the Orpheum, the most ornate of a half dozen theaters on Canal Street in the Thirties. Of course, as was customary, we dressed up for the occasion, sporting ties, white shirts, and patent leather Sunday go-to-church shoes. This was long before jeans and tank tops; Canal Street was our Fifth Avenue, a never ending fashion show.

I funded this extravagance by dint of diligence: For eighteen months to the end of grade school, I worked 25 hours at a drugstore as a delivery boy and soda fountain clerk for $2.50 per week. The $2.00 went to my mother to supplement the family food budget. The 50 cents I splurged on movies complete with 5 cent Milky Ways and Butterfinger bars.

The movies were selected from The New Orleans Times Picayune (my parents always subscribed to two daily newspapers: the Picayune and the afternoon New Orleans Item). Sometimes I'd make a poor choice, like the Saturday with my youngest brother Tom I sat clueless through two hours of Shakespeare's “A Midsummer Night's Dream”.

“What was that all about?” Tom asked me outside.

“It was about a dream somebody had one summer.” I said. “Didn't you understand it?”

“Sure,” Tom said. “That was great.”

”Man, really great.” I said. “Especially Mickey Rooney.” I was eleven; Tom was six. Back then great movie critics weren't made; we were natural born.

Sometimes, being exposed to all the glitter and temptations of Canal Street, I got careless with the funds, and we might end up short on carfare to get back home. In these emergencies we had three options: beg from other passengers; sneak aboard if the boarding crowd was large enough to provide cover; or walk home. I walked the 45 or 50 odd blocks home many times later on, but not at age eleven, and certainly not with an even younger brother in my charge. Begging was the safest, but I dreaded it. On one of the few occasions when it became necessary my brother Bob was with me and volunteered, with no objections from me, to panhandle for the 10 cents shortage.There was usually a sizable group waiting at Canal Street, so choosing a mark was no problem. We started with the more prosperous and worked down through the seersucker suites to the weary longshoremen.

“We're orphans,” Bob told our would-be donor when he'd hesitated to fork over the dime. “Our daddy was killed in the war.”

“Sorry to hear that,” our target-man said. I could see that Bob's approach did not impress him and he countered with something to the effect: “Where's your mother, son. Does she know you're out here on Canal Street mooching carfare?”

“She's in the hospital having a baby,” said Bob, who had a way in these situations of going for the juggler. Bob had the big brown eyes at age eight that could make believers of born-again cynics. We all knew, even then, that he would go far. The man demurred, smiling; I smiled in gratitude, and he gave up the dime and patted Bob the head in a manner that somehow conveyed admiration.

Watching the Magazine Streetcar approaching from a distance, you noticed the slight waddle of its hunter green coat, a cartoon image that made it appear endearingly tipsy but forever reliable. The car picked up its first load of passengers at Canal and Camp Streets. The 7-cent fare was collected in the rear of the car; the passengers advancing toward the front. I always liked standing at the front window with the conductor and entertaining him with the latest trivia from the world of sports...like how the Pelicans, our New Orleans miner league baseball team, should have won Friday's game against the Birmingham Barons.

Straining on its steel tracks, the car executed a U-turn from Camp to Canal to Magazine Street. It then followed the river bend---just blocks away---on its four to five mile trip uptown. Much of the old architecture near the downtown area housed the urban working class in block after block of quaint two-story shotgun houses. Community life thrived on the banisters and porch swings both upstairs and down. The heart of the trolley route was the Irish Channel that teemed with churches and bars, not to mention pretty girls and tough looking kids (wearing home made crew cuts) who would give you the finger if you stared too long at their sidewalk clowning.

We lived on the fringe past the Channel heading to the park.  As the car would stop every block or so to let passengers on or off, you might nod to a neighbor you knew, or come face to face suddenly with a former “uncle” who'd deserted your mother's pregnant sister two years before. Everything and everyone seemed to converge or disperse from the Magazine Streetcar until it arrived at its uptown destination: Audubon Park. There the conductor would reposition himself at the other end of the car---both ends being identical including the trolley contacts with the overhead electric cable---then guide it back to Canal Street, a routine he would repeat a half-dozen or more times on his eight hour shift.

And so, from 1925 to the end of World War II, the Magazine Streetcar---of the world class New Orleans public transit system---was our primary means of transportation and the one public, egalitarian service that united thousands of families living along the deep crescent curve of the Mississippi. Then suddenly the streetcars disappeared, replaced by buses and the ubiquitous, horn-blowing motor cars (also known as automobiles). And somehow, indefinably, life never seemed the same.

The Magazine Streetcar: Blackberry summers

We were living in Metairie in 1924 when Metairie was still partly farm country, partly a wilderness constrained only by a loose-hanging barbed-wire fence out back of our house. Out front was a white gravel trail called a “road”--- cut through swamp, lagoons, vines and shrubs as tall as a man---and named Papworth, a long dusty drive to the promise land of Lake Pontchartrain.

Somewhere around Old Metairie, there were rental farms, because Metairie is a French word derived from another French word meaning “rental farm”, on which sharecroppers eeked out an existence of sorts. But in 1924, the year I was born, the area bounded by Papworth that intersected with a railroad track near Frisco, was dense woods, snakes, thorns, mosquitoes, and technicolor spiders, as big as my hand, hanging between the trees.

As the first boy born in our family after three daughters,---- Carmel, Lorraine, and Leila---everyone doted on me like they've never seen a boy before. But it turns out my birth was an omen of the tribulation ahead because during the following five years three more boys came out of the chute like tommy gun shots:::bang, bang, bang, three dangerous characters named Donald, Bobby, and Tommy...So that's seven kids in ten years. Imagine our mother: she was hanging washboard-scrubbed diapers on the line rain or shine, seven days a week for twelve years...(She was Catholic, of course. And I've always contended Pope Pius XI should have come to Metairie to confer upon her the Catholic Legion of Honor. That he didn't was the second biggest dereliction of the Church since the Inquisition and arrest of Galileo.)

I guess I was eight or nine months old---it's hard to remember now (we're talking like 1925)---someone (probably one of my dozen aunts) took this picture of me in a baby swing that hung permanently from a chain on the front porch. And my mom and grandmother are in the picture cooing this baby-talk like I'm two years old when, in fact, I'm nine months or so and bored to tears, which I shed often in those days in protest, because even then I was yearning to be free.

About every five minutes from the swing I watched a model A or T full of revelers chugging past on their way to the new wonderland on the seashore, leaving us on the porch behind in their dust. Few events have the memory-impact of that porch-swing snapshot. Otherwise, as evolution goes, life on all fours was a brief era, a montage featuring a chipped chalk horse, pots and pans,dead dragon flies that we smashed with the usual wooden rattles we linoleum rats banged around in the mid Twenties...and oh yes, blissful hours doing push-ups on the foot pedal of a hand- me-down Singer sewing machine...

But memories really spring alive when my sisters introduced me to Louisiana snakes...king snakes, garden snakes, moccasins, bushmasters, anacondas. Lorraine, or maybe Carmel, would tote me under her arm like a sack of flour, inching my nose (as close as my parents would permit) toward a cobra balanced by Leila on sticks. I am not exaggerating. Each near-death experience was legitimized as part of my education in biology. Naturally, I was too young to fear snakes and always reach happily for their pretty fanged heads. I'm alive today only because my guardian angel hovered over me always, praying on her rosary...

But of all the memories of Metairie that I still see in dreams none are as vivid as the blackberry hunts in the woods. My sisters and I would sneak out gingerly through the barbed-wire fence. I earned a scar or two from that fence at age four---my red badges of courage---but the blackberries were worth the cost: Only the brave deserve the fair, as the Greek poet said. The blackberry bushes were abundant; the further into the woods we ventured the more we found, and the more incriminating evidence stained our faces, hands and clothes. Of course, I'd rather not dwell upon the other price we had to pay when we returned home.

Our blackberry hunts ended abruptly from the day that Carmel, age 7, and Lorraine, barely 6, ventured too far and became lost in the woods. As dusk approached the neighbors became alerted and a search began. Neighbors fanned out through the darkening trees and along the train tracks where the girls were found walking hand in hand, wisely staying out of the forest without a clue in what direction to move. They had apparently wandered further and further into the wider wedge of the angle-shaped woods bounded by the train tracks and Papworth.

Our parents had a car then, a Studebaker convertible, the color of which I vaguely recall as yellow, but not likely; most cars in the mid-Twenties were still black. The one event of note, I'm told, is that Lorraine fell out of the car and was not missed for several blocks before Dad turned around to retrieve her.

Other scenes in the montage include our next door neighbor holding up a snake, an eel as tall as himself that he'd killed with a shotgun in his backyard pond...And myself, I've been told, on the very day we packed up to move from Papworth, refusing to go, and walking away from the movers until I was missed and my uncles had to drive up the road to find me.

But mostly I remember the Metairie sky when the moon was down and the country nights were black as pitch, except for the millions of stars. Laying in my Dads arms secure in the talk and laughter, I marveled at the stars beyond stars layered by more stars beyond stars diminishing into infinity; a free God-given spectacle I was privileged to see only during my brief time alive before the blessing of incandescent city lights dimmed the stars forever after.

Just how free is our media? Take a test!

We always assume that ours is the freest media  and that we are the most informed people in the world.  A short test of those assumptions may be  found in answers to a few questions, answers basic to our well being, let’s say, on health care… especially since Republicans are already filing suits to repeal the health care program recently passed by Congress and signed by Pres. Obama.


1.Which of the following countries first administered a universal health insurance plan?
a. Canada   b. England   c. Germany  d. United States.


2. Which of the following countries do not allow for-profit  universal health insurance programs:
a. Japan   b. Germany  c. France  d. Italy


3. If you had a history of cancer and no health insurance, in what country would your situation be so similar, you’d feel right at home:
 a. Taiwan  b. Spain   c. Zimbabwe  d. Austria


4. The World Health Organization rates France #1 for best “health care system“, followed by Italy #2, and… Japan #10.   In tiers composed of  ten countries (the countries named above are in the first tier), the United States is placed in which tier of ten countries:
a. First ten   b. Second ten  c. Third ten  d. Fourth ten.


5. Of the top 45 countries in the industrial world, every one provides health coverage for every man, woman and child, rich or poor, young or old--- except the United States, where 22,000 people are allowed to die every year for want of health insurance.  This difference can be attributed to:
a. Price of democracy    b. Too many illegals
c. High cost of technology  d. for-profit health insurance system.


Here are the answers:


1. C…Germany.  If you’ve always assumed that universal health care was some radical new give-away program contrived by left-wingers, consider this: Otto Von Bismarck, introduced universal health insurance in the newly unified German states in 1873.  He mandated that everyone be included, and that costs be shared by both employers and workers, a system still practiced around the world. 


2.  All of the above!  The United States is the only industrialized country that allows health care to flourish as a profit-making, Wall Street industry.  That’s the reason we have the most expensive system in the world, yet we tolerate over 30 million people living without any form of insurance.


3.  C…Zimbabwe, of course.  Or the Sudan…If you have no money and no insurance, whether you live in Bangladesh or the United States won’t matter.  You’ll die sans care in either country.


4.  D…The fourth tier:  at #37...There aren’t many more countries in the industrial world that are lower. The poor rating is primarily for the number of people not covered by insurance despite the high costs of health care in America.  We are, after all, the only wealthy nation that does not regard health care as a moral right, but as an earned privilege, resulting in a kind of social Darwinism.


5. The answer is D…for-profit health insurance.


This test is not designed to test your IQ for trivia, but to show how well  our media keep you informed.  If any of the answers above are first time revelations to you, consider that you have never in your life heard some of  these facts discussed in the media; not even during the recent great debate on the subject of health care.


American media is controlled by a taboo system: if you value your job as a journalist or politician or even as a professional, there are some subjects that are closed to discussion or debate, off the table, axiomatic, a priori.


Most of the facts in this blog entry are taken from the excellent book  by T.R Reid, “The Healing of America”, The Penguin Press, New York, 2009

In the time of your life.

In the time of your life, live-so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness
or death for yourself or for any life your life touches.

Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.

Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are the things that hold death and must pass away.

Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption.

Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow
by the shame and terror of the world.

Ignore the obvious, for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart.

Be the inferior of no man, nor of any man be the superior.

Remember that every man is a variation of yourself.

No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart.

Despise evil and un godliness but not men of un godliness or evil.

Have no shame in being kindly or gentle.

In the time of your life, live....
so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world,
but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.
     From "The Time of Your Life" by William Saroyan, a play in five acts..1939