As Enron Goes, So Goes Social Security? Rumsfeld's Omelet; Analyzing the Geezer Glaze on The Nation Cruise
Has the collapse of Enron finally pushed Social Security "reform" off the political agenda for the foreseeable future? Half the stock in Enron employees' 401(k) retirement plans was Enron paper, contributed as "a company match," for which of course Enron took tax deductions. Then, when Enron went into its final plunge its executives froze the stock in the 401(k) plans, thus denying workers any chance to salvage their retirement funds even as Enron's stock crashed through the floor. Senior executives skipped clear of the rubble with millions, as they sent in cops and "grief counselors" to subdue their furious employees.
Sept. 11 interrupted many political conspiracies in America, none more explosive than the long campaign to "reform" Social Security. And as with many other nefarious projects, Sept. 11 placed the Bush team on far more favorable ground than the mire in which he found himself at the end of the summer, unable to balance the books without a raid on Social Security's famous "lock box," said term being rhetorical shorthand for a pledge not to use the surplus in the Social Security account for other purposes. In these days of the Great War on Terror Bush hasn't had to worry about the sort of promises he was spouting on the campaign trail in 2000 when, four days before the election, he told a crowd in Saginaw that protecting the Social Security trustfund was going to be one of his top priorities. The employees' Social Security taxes, he promised, were "only going to be spent on one thing?what they're meant for?Social Security. We're not going to let Congress touch them for any other reason."
Now the fall of Enron, whose CEO Ken Lay was among President Bush's inner circle of financial backers, has once again thrown the "reform" lobby on the defensive. But for how long? Consider what a close call the system had in the Clinton era. Accounts by Clinton White House insiders this last summer have made it clear that had it not been for Monica's captivating smile and first inviting snap of that famous thong, President Bill Clinton would have consummated the politics of triangulation, heeding the counsel of a secret White House team and Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Late in 1998 or in the State of the Union message of 1999 a solemn Clinton would have told Congress and the nation that, just like welfare, Social Security was near broke, had to be reformed and its immense pool of capital tendered in part to the mutual funds industry. The itinerary mapped out for Clinton by the Democratic Leadership Committee would have been complete.
It was a desperately close-run thing. On the recent account of members of Clinton's secret White House team mandated to map out the privatization path for Social Security, they had got as far down the road as fine-tuning the account numbers for Social Security accounts now released to the captious mercies of Wall Street. But in 1998 the Lewinsky scandal burst upon the President, and as the months sped by and impeachment swelled from a remote specter to a looming reality, Clinton's polls told him that his only hope was to nourish the widespread popular dislike for the hoity-toity elites intoning Clinton's death warrant. By the end of 1998 the secret team concluded with heavy hearts that the escalating Lewinsky affair might well doom all their efforts. The President was desirous to be seen doing something dramatic for Social Security, but not anything risky. It could be controversial, but controversial in the direction of doing more for the program, not endangering it.
Clinton spun on a dime and became Social Security's mighty champion, coining the slogan "Save Social Security First." In his 1999 State of the Union address he seized the initiative from the privatizers with a bold new plan that gave substance to "Save Social Security First." He proposed that 62 percent of the budget surplus be used to build up the Social Security trustfund. He promised to veto any attempt to divert Social Security funds to other uses, and he urged that 15 percent of the trustfund be invested in the stock market, not by individuals but by the Social Security Administration.
The Clinton plan as a whole went down very well with the American people. Republicans were swiftly moved to insist that they, too, would give priority to Social Security. Pessimism about the future of the program was replaced by a growing consensus that the program must be?and could be?saved. All that was needed was the will and a determination not to squander the trustfund.
Despite the political perils, Social Security reform will always be on the agenda. The question is: On what terms? You can either hand bits of the system over to Wall Street and court the risk of Enron writ large. Or you can build on the original mandate of Social Security as a public enterprise, including one element of the original Clinton strategy, namely the idea that the trustfund should acquire its own assets. In a recession-hit economy these could include public bonds linked to investment in education or urban renewal, or they could involve injecting funds into sectors downcast by post-bubble blues. This would, it is true, be to go further than Clinton ever suggested, but it would be fully in the spirit of many proponents of the original trustfund when it was added to the program in 1939.
(A full account of Clinton's secret machinations with Social Security is given by Robin Blackburn in my and Jeffrey St. Clair's newsletter CounterPunch. Call 1-800-840-3683 for the article.)
Rumsfeld's Omelet
It's probably tasteless to bring it up, I know, but we may have reached parity in terms of lives lost in the terror attacks of Sept. 11 and civilian Afghans killed by U.S. bombs and missiles in Afghanistan. A professor by the name of Marc Herold at the University of New Hampshire has surveyed all news reports of bombing deaths and claims that 3500 civilians in Afghanistan are no longer with us by reason of having been blown to bits by high explosive delivered from high altitude. Herold is billed as a professor of Economics, International Relations and Women's Studies, which suggests either that the University of New Hampshire is in a budget squeeze or he is a man of boundless energy.
Herold says he began collecting data on Oct. 7 because "I was concerned that there would be significant civilian casualties caused by the bombing, and I was able to find some mention of casualties in the foreign press but almost nothing in the U.S. press." For each day since Oct. 7, when the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan began, he lists the number of casualties, location, type of weapon used and source(s) of information. Some examples:
? On October 11, two U.S. jets bombed the mountain village of Karam, comprised of 60 mud houses, during dinner and evening prayer time, killing 100-160 people. Sources: Dawn (English language Pakistani daily newspaper), the Guardian of London, the Independent, International Herald Tribune, the Scotsman, the London Observer and the BBC News.
? On October 13, in the early morning, an F-18 dropped 2000 lb. JDAM bombs on the Qila Meer Abas neighborhood, 2 kms. South of the Kabul airport, killing four people. Sources: Afghan Islamic Press, Los Angeles Times, Frontier Post, Pakistan Observer, the Guardian of London and the BBC News.
? On October 31, in a pre-dawn raid, an F-18 dropped a 2000 lb. JDAM bomb on a Red Crescent clinic, killing 15-25 people. Sources: Dawn, the Times of London, the Independent, the Guardian, Reuters, Associated Press and Agence France Presse.
"People have to know that there is a human cost to war, and that this is a war with thousands of casualties," Herold says. "These were poor people to begin with, and, on top of that, they had absolutely nothing to do with the events of Sept. 11."
Herold's count doesn't factor in civilian deaths caused by interrupted food convoys and so forth, and exactly how many tots and graybeards breathed their last for these reasons will never be known, which is just as well.
There's also the matter of Comparative Propriety. Is it seemly to set the death of one Afghan blown to pieces in a mud hut in the mountain village of Karam alongside that of an American office worker on the 92nd floor of Tower number one? Of course they're all God's children, but the rule of thumb observed in newsrooms down the decades has been that each offspring of the Christian or Hebrew deity is worth around 100 or maybe 1000 offspring of Allah, particularly if they are "tribesmen" as opposed to "peasants" or "farmers." "Tribesmen" can die in units of up to 30,000 from such afflictions as famine or floods without exciting undue concern in the West.
If they were honest about it, many Westerners reading of "thousands feared dead in monsoon floods" enjoy a stab of Malthusian gratification at there being that many fewer predators upon the world's dwindling resources. The Rev. Malthus, remember, recommended that the poor be settled near stagnant marshes in the expectation that pestilence would speedily carry them off to their heavenly reward.
Geezer Glaze
Having just been on a cruise down Baja way with more than 200 readers of The Nation, many of them advanced in years, I can report that old gals are in the main a lot friskier than old geezers. Sprightly of mind though the Nation-reading geezers were, they did sometimes exhibit a condition I came to think of as Geezer Glaze, meaning the slightly dropped jaw and glassy eye associated with hearing the loved one of more than half a century rattling on at dinner about distressing trends in the human condition. Old gals are better at pretending to be interested, whereas the geezers have no compunction in making it known to the table that they've checked out for a minute or two.
Mind you, I and my brother Andrew were doing this in our 20s, claiming that our ability to fall asleep over the dinner table was due not to excessive bumpers of claret but by a condition officially known as catalepsy. Our Uncle Frank, an abstemious Scottish solicitor, had it so badly that he could not be trusted to carry valuable objects or even disposable infants because of his propensity to slump to the ground in a cataleptic episode.
According to my father, one notorious victim of the cataleptic condition was a British journalist who worked for Reuters. Sometime in the 1930s he secured an interview with Stalin, entered the dictator's office, posed a question and woke up 30 minutes later to hear Stalin say through his translator, "and that concludes my review of the problems confronting the Soviet Union today."
On a luckier note, one of the cruise organizers told me that he was fresh from supervising a Caribbean jaunt of blacksingles.com. A day or two before the planned departure date a scheduled traveler called to say she had no travel documents. Why? She'd left them at work. No, she couldn't get them because her office no longer existed. Yes, she'd worked in the Towers and had been out getting a breakfast snack when her tower fell. This was one lucky black single lady. She'd won the blacksingles.com ticket in a raffle. On the cruise she won the prize bingo sweep for $1000, and then won another cruise.
The organizer was discreet, but I had the impression she'd stayed single, which was probably another stroke of luck too, considering what beasts men are.