Open Letter to the Editors
Tom Honig and Don Miller
Santa Cruz Sentinel
Sun 19 Dec 2004
Editors --
I've just completed reading your Scharf's column, "Everybody's Business", for 19 Dec 2004, titled, "Stock market unlikely to bail out Social Security". You and Scharf are in large company on Social Security, of course. We the people have not been hit with this big a blizzard of BS from The Lying Bush, his lying surrogates, the class-race elite's top one percent, fascist corporatism's propagandists, and the money-power parasitic media mouthpieces since the invasion of Iraq.
The mighty blizzard has achieved simple on-message unity of crisis and doom on all fronts of the class war against the contemptible little people.
I'm a former field rep for Social Security Administration. I've watched Congress wreck Social Security, session-by-session, as much as they dare, for thirty years.
They've made the Social Security Number a de facto national ID number, giving easy access to those most private of records to any criminal who wants to take the time. The criminals include the banks, corporate predators, and financial services predators who have, in the past decade, ripped hundreds of billions of dollars out of civil society with a wide spectrum of frauds and near-zero accountability.
Bush's drive to privatize Social Security, to give those same criminal financial corporations access to Social Security's money, is a smash-mouth insult to even sub-normal intelligence. It doesn't take a mental giant to understand the basic lawlessness of the financial services industry.
There are many other piles of SSA wreckage outside Congress' door. But the biggest and the ugliest are the many stacks of General Funds expenditures for which the dual-party predator majority in Congress has embezzled Social Security tax monies.
Contrary to Scharf's intellectually dishonest opinion, the only thing wrong with Social Security is that about 68 years of surplus Social Security tax monies have been taken away by Congress' predators for everything, including corporate welfare. What is left behind is a budgetary line item for "Trust Fund", no money, and strange IOU notes that cost taxpayers extra money to redeem. Trillions of dollars are locked up in those IOUs.
This routine looting of SSA program monies is reason enough, on its own, for us to reduce Congress from its corrupt bicameral to a nonpartisan unicameral on the successful Nebraska model, adding in new clean-money campaign financing rules. There are many, many other good reasons, as well.
With 4 Senators per state and the people's protected, national-level citizen lawmaking acting as a second legislative house when needed, we would have two-thirds fewer potential Congressional criminals hatching anti-people, anti-rights, anti-democracy schemes. We would trim costs, increase transparency, minimize corruption, have no "conference committee" undoing the hard work of both houses, and get increased efficiency in lawmaking. The Nebraska experience since 1937 tells us so.
This is no pie in the sky. It is do-able. A "3 Crucibles Program" of citizen action gets us the political sophistication for staging and controlling the 2nd NCC (National Constitutional Convention), while an "A-B-C Campaign" gives we the people an in-depth offense/defense. There's no help coming, but we've been on our own before.
The people made a lot of progress with the first Reform Era, but failed to defend against predator elitist take-back. This time, we've the lessons of the past to draw on. This time we can take it to a 2nd NCC and snuff the systemic problems where they live.
If we already had sovereign citizen lawmaking at the national level, I would have already filed a constitutional amendment initiative making it a felony for Congress to spend one penny of Social Security tax monies on anything other than SSA programs.
Let's get the cowards in Congress to put SSA reform on hold. If we get it right, if we make them see The Fear, they'll bar themselves from spending any Social Security tax monies outside the SSA programs for the next five years. And then we can all take another look at whether reform is needed.
Scharf's column is filled with intellectual dishonesties. Social Security is nothing more than a pyramid scheme? Because some beneficiaries collect more than they paid in? What a howler. That would make every insurance program in the country nothing more than a pyramid scheme. Scharf needs to be reminded that we do not call Social Security a pension plan. We call it social insurance. Millions of people who pay into Social Security their entire working lives are dead before they can collect a penny.
Editorial displays of publishing anti-people, class-warfare, intellectually dishonest pieces, such as this one from Scharf, anger me. Was raised up in a small-town newspaper family. Back in the day, no editor worth his salt would have allowed the Scharf drivel into print. Now, again, the damage is done. The emotional propaganda triggers that keep many people from examining the evidence concerning Social Security have been reinforced. Way to go, editors.
Stephen Neitzke
Direct Democracy League
http://ddleague-usa.net
P.S. -- For similar views on Bush tactics and Congressional embezzlement of SSA tax monies from a mainstream commentator, see Tom Oliphant, "The deceptions add up on Social Security", Boston Globe, Sun 19 Dec 2004.
God rest ye merry predators,
Let nothing you dismay.
Remember Bush is goosestepping
Across the USA,
To kill the rights of all mankind,
And get you extra pay.
Oh, Republicrats for havoc and coin,
Havoc and coin,
Oh, Republicrats for havoc and coin.
This work is in the public domain.
