Bipartisan threats against Social Security

Back in December 1982, former Lehman Brothers CEO Peter G. Peterson and Nixon administration Secretary of Commerce, wrote an article in the New York Review of Books warning about “Social Security: The Coming Crash”. It was one of the earliest calls to “reform” the system, which basically meant either slashing benefits or privatizing the system. It also introduced a theme that while being sounded on a regular basis has had very little traction among the constituency in whose name it was being advanced, namely the youth: “The only alternative to reorganizing Social Security is to sit by while the system collapses, either through an ugly revolt of young taxpaying workers against their elders or through a catastrophic flood of deficits.”

Peter G. Peterson: long-time enemy of “entitlements”

Luke A. Repici: young anti-entitlement activist

It should be mentioned that Peterson’s appearance in the once left-liberal N.Y. Review marked just one more notch in its downward spiral. The journal also provided a platform for Felix Rohatyn, the Lazard Frere CEO who also peddled his own deficit hawk solutions designed to make the poor subsidize the rich.

Twenty-six years later, Peterson is still hammering away at Social Security and other “entitlements”. In today’s N.Y. Times, there is a 2 page open letter that cost in excess of $50,000 paid for by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. You can read the ad here.

It contains all the usual alarmist nonsense about “Unsustainable Entitlement Spending,” including Medicare and Social Security that account for $41 trillion out of a total $53 trillion liability. An “out-of-control” health care system threatens American competitiveness supposedly but the open letter fails to mention the only sensible solution: single-payer. It also fails to hone in on what the Pentagon costs the taxpayer, but this is what you might expect from Peterson who wrote the following in a Sept./Oct. 2004 Foreign Affairs article:

Whatever they may feel about Iraq, most Americans seem to agree with the president’s premise that in the war on terrorism, the best defenses are a good offense and forward deployment. Along with augmenting the capabilities of its armed forces, the United States is sharing intelligence with friendly governments around the world and training and equipping their antiterrorist forces as needed. Sea-and land-based ballistic missile defenses, long under development, are now being deployed at a growing cost ($10.3 billion in the fiscal year 2005 budget).

Yes, quite the ticket. Those ballistic missile defenses are just what could have preempted civilian jetliners being flow into the WTC.

Peterson had tried to position himself as transcending party politics. This would explain the inclusion of three Democrats in the letter. Two of them are not much of a surprise. Bob Kerrey, the war criminal who is president of the New School, is co-chairman of the anti-”entitlement” Concord Coalition, along with Peterson, its founder, and Republican Party hack Warren Rudman. The other is Concord board member, the former Senator Sam Nunn who was mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate with Obama. That speaks volumes about Obama’s liberal pretensions, or perhaps more accurately the liberal illusions of his supporters. Other Concord board members of note are Robert Rubin, my old boss at Goldman-Sachs and one of Obama’s chief economic policy advisers. So is Obama supporter Steven Rattner who succeeded Felix Rohatyn at Lazard Freres.

There are a second tier of open letter signatories who by all appearances look like the kind of youngsters who watch MTV or go skateboarding when the spirit moves them:

Michael P. Davidson
CEO, Gen Next

Yoni Gruskin
Executive Director, Concerned Youth of America

Luke A. Repici
President, Association of Young Americans

Patrick Wetherille
Co-Founder, Secure our Future/Students for Saving Social Security

Peterson has had a strategy for the longest time for convincing the American people that is anxious to avoid a “revolt” of young taxpayers, who are represented in media accounts generally as Generation X’ers ready to storm the barricades against baby boomers like myself. (Strictly speaking, I am not a boomer since I was born in January 1945 when the war was still raging.)

A September 20, 1992 Boston Globe article reported on the early sightings of some of these “young taxpayers” ready to throw bombs at me:

A move that’s capturing the young;
By David Nyhan, Globe Staff

What may be the most intriguing development of the political year is percolating up from the bottom.

The media, as usual, are looking elsewhere. What else is new?

Flying below the media radar screen is a generational revolt against politics-as-usual conceived by a pair of twentysomethings. The nascent movement was hatched over coffee in a bull session between friends. The spark was a fax to Paul Tsongas [a deceased Democratic Party board member of the Concord Coalition] as he was bailing out of his presidential campaign. And it’s been fanned into flames by the reception Rob Nelson and Jon Cowan get from the MTV generation as the two of them go around the country talking up “Lead or Leave.”

Cowan and Nelson have a shoestring operation, operating on $ 55,000 they’ve raised with help from people such as Tsongas, his new sidekick, retiring Sen. Warren Rudman (R-N.H.) and former commerce secretary Pete Peterson.

Tsongas and Rudman have started something called The Concord Coalition to build support for hard choices in cutting entitlements, Social Security, Medicare. How many calls in the first two days of operation for Concord Coalition’s 1-800-231-6800 number? “Over 17,000,” beamed Tsongas.

At a Friday rally outside Faneuil Hall, where a blues band helped build a 400-person crowd, Tsongas juiced the noonday onlookers. The deficit means “we’re not going to be competitive. The pie’s going to shrink. Look at Germany and the skinheads. That’s just the beginning, when you have a shrinking pie.” Tsongas piled it on: “We’re a democracy. It’s not a spectator sport, it’s a contact sport. You have to get nasty. You have to get mean. Get angry. Get involved. Let’s put some heat on the politicians.” Whew! Paul. Chill, babes.

Even the lingo is generational: “It’s totally bogus – but it’s true . . . your share of the national debt is enough to buy a large pizza every day you’re in college . . . or take 500 friends to a U-2 concert.” Young voters eat it up.

Yes, that’s just the ticket. Throw the baby boomers to the wolves so you can take 500 friends to a U-2 concert. How emancipatory can you get.

Today’s versions of “Lead or Leave” are even more unpalatable if that could be possible.

To start with, Michael P. Davidson’s Gen Next makes no bones about its political orientation. The home page of its website states clearly that it provides a platform for “advocates who represent the right-of-center voice of the Next Generation of Americans.” Members of Gen Next must be under 50 years old and have to pony up $10,000 to become a member (by invitation only).

Moving right along, the Concerned Youth of America appears to be the youth group of the Concord Coalition for all practical purposes, stressing a bipartisan approach to “fiscal responsibility”. Gruskin is featured in a documentary funded by Peterson titled I.O.U.S.A. that will be appearing in local theaters at some point. It is, as you would gather from the title, a warning about the consequences of debt.

Luke A. Repici of The Association of Young Americans has exactly the kind of background that would prepare him for the role of deficit hawk. The organization’s website states that Repici interned with Congressman Robert L. Ehrlich, a Maryland Republican who while Governor of Maryland vetoed a bill that would require large corporations to spend 8 percent of their income on employee health care. Since Ehrlich’s official biography describes him as “unapologetically pro-business,” his veto was par for the course. Any sensible believer in fiscal responsibility understands that health care and retirement are issues that the private individual should attend to without Big Government interference, just as was true in the 1880s.

The Students for Saving Social Security website strives more than the others for an “edgy” appearance in keeping with the “Lead or Leave” fakery. Their “eye candy” page has photos of some of their members tabling at a campus somewhere, looking for all the world like SDS’ers. How daring of them to risk a billy club attack by campus cops. Patrick Wetherille, the group’s founder, has just the kind of background one might expect. In 2005, he was writing articles attacking Social Security for Human Events, which describes itself as “leading the conservative movement” since 1944. An August 8, 2005 Washington Post article on Wetherille and Jonathan Swanson, co-director of Students for Saving Social Security, fills in some background on the two “rebels”:

Swanson’s experience fits the trend. He and Wetherille joined what amounts to the Republican civil service last fall when they worked for a semester as White House interns. They were assigned to assist Bush’s Social Security guru, Charles P. Blahous. Although they hadn’t met before, by the end of their internships they were comrades in arms.

Their aspiration was to fill a strategic vacuum. Many senior citizens protested the president’s plan, but college-age people, who arguably have more at stake, were little involved in the debate.

So Swanson and Wetherille e-mailed their friends about what they saw as the benefits of private accounts and patched together the beginnings of a lobbying group. As a matter of pride, they hoped to establish themselves before Blahous and other Washingtonians noticed. Instead, the capital insiders caught wind of their recruitment e-mails and offered help within weeks.

Earlier I mentioned the two of the three signatories were Democrats but about whom there was a general understanding that they were cut from the Joe Lieberman cloth. Let me now turn to the third, one Mario Cuomo, the former Governor of New York about whom the Nation Magazine’s John Nichols wrote: “I think that I understand now why some folks that would have really made good presidents, Mario Cuomo being the best example, decided instead to take a pass.” Like Obama, Cuomo made a “great” speech to the 1984 Democratic Party convention that passed liberal litmus tests with flying colors:

We speak — We speak for young people demanding an education and a future. We speak for senior citizens. We speak for senior citizens who are terrorized by the idea that their only security, their Social Security, is being threatened. We speak for millions of reasoning people fighting to preserve our environment from greed and from stupidity. And we speak for reasonable people who are fighting to preserve our very existence from a macho intransigence that refuses to make intelligent attempts to discuss the possibility of nuclear holocaust with our enemy. They refuse. They refuse, because they believe we can pile missiles so high that they will pierce the clouds and the sight of them will frighten our enemies into submission.

As is always the case with capitalist politics, words have about the same value that they do in capitalist advertising, to gull the unsuspecting  consumer. With bipartisan support for an all-out attack on Social Security, including from Sam Nunn-a one-time possible running mate with Obama-and from liberal icon Mario Cuomo, the watchword is caveat emptor.