Truth - Al Franken [84]
Besides making direct political contributions, various financial services firms and banks have financed think tanks, research projects and public-policy forums that promote privatization. State Street, which manages $485 billion in assets, including index funds, has been the most prominent.
Financing think tanks and research projects? Franni wondered if they had anything to do with the Cato Institute, which published the Leninist essay in the first place. The answer came in the next paragraph:
State Street has been a major financial backer to the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank that has endorsed full-scale privatization of Social Security, with Cato officials even calling for a sale of federally owned parks to pay for the costs if necessary.
If the libertarian Leninists were wrong about the old people, at least they were right about the banks. And State Street wasn’t the only business interest in their “coalition.” By the spring of 2005, Karl Rove had assembled an armada of well-financed right-wing operatives to push the privatization agenda.
One star player was the United Seniors Association, a GOP astroturf4 front group, whose board has, at times, included such luminaries as “Casino Jack” Abramoff. The group, which also goes by the name “USA Next,” hired the guys who did the ads for the Swift Boat Vets to help them attack the AARP, which had called Social Security privatization “a threat to the retirement security of millions of Americans and their families.” Charles Jarvis, a former Reagan official and USA Next’s president, called the AARP “the boulder in the middle of the highway to personal savings accounts.” And Jarvis knew how to deal with boulders. “We will be the dynamite that removes them.”
Out of the gate, the dynamite took the form of an on-line ad exposing the AARP’s “real agenda”: opposing our troops and supporting gay marriage. This may have surprised some AARP members, millions of whom are veterans.
USA Next rips the lid off the secret agenda of America’s retired people.
In all, pro-privatization forces aimed to raise as much as $100 million for a scorched-earth air war to convince Americans that their safety net would be more effective if it were divided into tens of millions of little pieces. That way, every American could have his own private piece of netting.
All in all, the best explanation for Bush’s total commitment to private accounts came, oddly enough, from someone other than Bush himself.
For a decade, Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute has been an omnipresent champion of private accounts, pushing them on virtually every TV network other than the Spice Channel. When Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik interviewed him in February of 2005, Tanner was thrilled by the White House’s commitment to the fight:
I’m stunned at the level at which they’re treating this. They’re pulling out all the stops. It’s going to be virtually like a presidential campaign.
Tanner was enough of a team player to change the name of the Cato Institute’s “Project on Social Security Privatization” to the more politically palatable “Project on Social Security Choice” in 2002. Why let accurate terminology get in the way? But perhaps because of his euphoria about the impending victory, Tanner let his guard down about what this was really all about:
In the end, this isn’t a debate about the system’s solvency in 2018 or 2042. It’s about whether you think the government should be in control of your retirement or people should take ownership and responsibility. That’s why the debate is so intense—why would anyone get so excited about transition costs? This is about whether we redefine a relationship between individuals and government that we’ve had since 1935. We say that what was done was wrong then, and it’s wrong now. Our position is that people need to be responsible for their own lives.5
Bingo. Thank you, Michael. You know,