By William Finucane

America has been through the life-draining process of the Great Depression.

With all the players dangling from their own privatized safety nets, the falling away of the bottom of the New York Stock Exchange was a monetary tsunami. Free enterprise took a whole generation of traders with it, straight to the bottom of a pit from which there was no escape.

Then along came Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the rich Brahmin who was soon called a "traitor to his class" by the very people who had recklessly driven Wall Street to such a bloated condition that it was bound to burst. FDR paid no heed to the blue bloods; he had already shown how different he was from the great majority of his peers by having become a Democrat early in life, which to the wealthy Republicans was a sin in itself.

Then of course he committed the unpardonable sin, he created the New Deal, and gave some hope of financial safety to everyone through the wondrous tool called the Social Security Act of 1935.

Instead of growing old and losing ones ability to earn a wage, and sometimes facing what was then a system of "poor houses," or, more euphemistically, "poor farms," the elders of the United States would now have something to fall back on.

There have been many programs from the Roosevelt years that lasted, in one form or another, into the present day, and those programs provided the impetus for still more benefits for average people through the years. President John F. Kennedy, for example, moved toward many programs that Lyndon B. Johnson and his Great Society managed to put in place.

Starting with Roosevelt, the United States tried to help its people. Social Security was just one of many federal programs aimed at lessening if not preventing the kind of financial disaster that overtook so many working class and middle-class families when the wealthy speculators overplayed their hand.

FDR even developed constructs to keep the market from collapse and guard against business failures. And if one needed medical care and could not afford it, the government had a medical program. Also, if one was out of work for a while, the government paid the individual while the person looked for work. It was Social Security.

And if there was no work to be had, Roosevelt found work to give people the sense that they were doing the government’s work. He created the Works Project Administration, which built bridges, dams, roads and buildings, as well as bringing electricity to rural parts of the nation.

When it became obvious that more people with solid educations would benefit individuals and the nation, the government developed programs that would help pay for it. Suddenly higher education wasn’t just for the privileged few, but for the many.

Roosevelt lifted America from the ashes of the nation’s financial disaster and made the downtrodden citizenry feel good about again about the nation and their working futures. Most importantly, he made people secure in knowing that no matter how things went through the years, their elder lives would have the government guaranteed money to stake them when they could no longer earn.

Some people sniffed at this bank of social help programs and said they were nearly socialist, like Russia. These people were of course often the very ones who had participated in the stock market debacle, and who still had the most wherewithal even after taking losses.

But many more Americans simply thanked Roosevelt for coming to the nation’s rescue. Decades passed with no hint of changing Social Security. Generally, politicians have a rule that says anybody who is looking to win another seat in Congress had better leave Social Security alone. Roosevelt himself was most proud of Social Security and more than once declared his belief that the program was strong enough "so no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program."*

FDR’s confidence was based on the fact that the Social Security program took a small percentage from every wage earner and guaranteed its return, which automatically gave it wide and deep support, especially during its first decades when recollections of The Great Depression were still fresh, or at least deeply embedded in the memory.

It is interesting to recall that FDR originally wanted complete "insurance" coverage for average Americans, including national health insurance, but he faced conservative, mostly Republican opposition very similar to that that leaped forward to attack Hillary Clinton on universal health care. So, FDR showed his mastery of politics and appeared to back down and compromise, but what he actually did was obtain a very powerful Social Security system. It might even be suggested that he pushed the limits of health care so that the firestorm from conservatives would be directed there, and he could consolidate and strengthen the Social Security legislation.

Through the years there has been some rumbling.

Democratic President Bill Clinton even made reference to fixing up some of the problems the huge system has developed, since it became clear in the 1990s that Social Security would need some changes.

Why?

Arithmetic: there are far more workers retiring and collecting Social Security today. It will continue that way for years. Contributions will not be able to keep up.

This is a problem; a real problem. But is it an immediate danger threatening Social Security?

No, it isn’t. Is it even a long-term danger? That too is doubtful, given that with some adjustments – and less tapping of the fund by the government to pay for other activities, such as war, that the leadership doesn’t want to increase taxes to cover – there may not be any problem. It’s important to remember that by 2042 when the so-called crisis with occur is simply when interest on the government bonds of the Social Security Trust Fund will no longer produce enough interest to cover the demands on the account, and the principal will have to be tapped.

Even then, virtually all sources indicate that at least 80% of the expenses will be able to be covered by the continuing income from contributors.

So why, given this scenario, is the system in such grave danger that a radical shift is needed?

The truth is, the system does not need a radical overhaul.

This truth is visible based on the facts at hand, except it seems invisible to conservative Republicans, who have been waiting so many decades to turn back the clock and dismantle FDR’s New Deal.

The long-term difficulty for the right-wing Republicans is that any federal dollars may go to anybody poor. Yes, there are those who see Social Security as a wrong-headed policy that ought to be done away with, often based on the macho romanticism that by providing no help to people in need they will have to become stronger and more independent. Of course, the truth that The Great Depression illustrated once and for all is that there are many occasions when no matter how honestly people struggle, sometimes there simply is no opportunity available.

But the current GOP leadership isn’t concerned with nuance, much less such proven truths. So they talk about cutting back a bit on the United States’ contributions to citizens who simply live longer, but this would not be a one-time lop that then stops. Oh no. It is just one of many such suggested cuts.

The reality is that gradually they will phase out Social Security altogether.

Seen from that vantage point, the battle is far different; it becomes a long war of the rich against the poor. Bush does not have to even intend to reach that result. All he needs to do is start cutting. That will get the conservatives started; they will do the rest .

It’s a disarming plan, particularly in its simplicity: President George W. Bush proposes that all younger workers take some of their income and buy themselves some good stocks and bonds to serve as a nice nest-egg when they retire.

When they retire, they can live on this amount, plus some smaller sum of Social Security. This is Republican thinking, pure, untarnished.

It works in economies where everything is going well and everybody has work and the people on Wall Street are trading stocks for the benefit of the whole populace.

That good old "unseen hand" of prosperity will be developing blisters from bringing about all this shared wealth.

This model would seem to work well on paper for everyone.

It will work especially well with the rich.

In real life, it is fiction.

Back in 1929, this was the way things worked.

The ‘good people’ – rich people that is – bought stocks, saved up for retirement and whooped it up nicely. Other people – poor people – barely survived, and some in the middle enjoyed a new prosperity; the approximately dozen years between the end of WWI and The Great Depression saw the growth of a grand bubble of speculative prosperity, where even middle-class people began investing in ‘the market.’

And the nightlife was wild even though conservatives and the religious right had finally orchestrated the outlawing of alcohol. Prohibition didn’t work, but it did bring organized crime to rich maturity and subsequently necessitated the creation of a national police force, the FBI.

Nobody expected a market collapse.

It was unthinkable.

It was inconceivable.

But it happened.

Ironically, many of today’s Americans cannot even conceive of the Depression; it is some sort of dusty period that ended when we went to war against Germany. But in practical terms, the Depression was a latter day Civil War. Americans needed help as a group and their government had to act for the good of everyone. It forced the government to look at itself and decide to make major changes to the nation’s way of life.

Some conservatives hated the changes.

But the majority agreed they were necessary, so they passed.

Now, with Republicans running the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate and the majority of governorships in the United States, the conservative viewpoint again shines.

It is clear that if that viewpoint wins a victory on the Social Security issue now, it will soon push to eradicate the program. Even if President Bush wants to make just a few changes, the inevitable result will be pressure from conservatives to do away with Social Security. Remember, this whole system is a voluntary thing.

That is to say, Social Security depends entirely on Congress. If it wants more money spent, it gets spent. If it wants to erase Social Security from the United States’ books, it can do so at any time by amending the Social Security Act.

It can change ages of eligibility. It can change anything. There are plenty of programs with lots of rules and regulations and people committed to making sure all rules are being followed, and therefore there is a prescribed result expected and dictated by the law. But Social Security survives solely on the will of Congress.

Bush doubtless felt that his second term of office would be the only time in years that he might get Congress to change Social Security. With House and Senate majorities and a conservative executive, all the ducks are set up to make it happen. Bush wants everybody to save a little money in a private account for retirement.

Incredibly simple, you save for your own retirement.

Why hasn’t this been thought of already?

Of course it has, it is precisely what people had to do before the Depression, sock some away for that rainy day. Business will always be robust and everybody will earn tons of dough and they can depend on the titans of Wall Street to protect their investment.

Bush would only have you put a little money aside for this privatized account, most Social Security would still come from Uncle Sam, of course. Now, however, people will need some other things they haven’t needed. An account manager: he or she would take his or her percentage whether you did well or not. An education in the art of investing: because that is what you are doing with this retirement – gambling it. This is not a play on words.

When one goes into the Stock Market, one gambles on every penny. So instead of making out wonderfully and living happily afterward, you could just as easily go flat broke and have no money in your retirement fund.

Even for a person who makes decent money and saves in his or her personalized account, and knows the market and makes all the right moves, there still can be problems.

Bush is mixing up the messages – intentionally – and talking about the bankruptcy in the Social Security system and the private retirement as if they were part of the same cloth. They are not.

Conservatives hate the term "privatized," because it strikes to close to reality. It describes exactly what they are: private retirement accounts. Avoid that argument. It is a semantic disagreement. Fact is, this is the first move of ultraconservatives to wipe Social Security from America’s landscape. It will not stop with one small savings account that good citizens lay aside to help the nation. No, it will grow, bit by bit, until there is no Social Security left.

One thing is certain, very certain: the United States will have many more rough times in the Stock Market. That’s life.

But if America ties its retirement into its Stock Market, it dooms its future. Sooner or later, the average citizens will lose, just like they did in the stock market crash of 1929 and the 10 years of the Depression that followed.

Bush is pushing America back to the 1920’s, trying to erase the one true ‘everyman’s retirement program’ that Roosevelt created. Oh Bush may not know he is doing this, or may not fathom the overall ramifications. But the brains in the GOP operation do know what to expect.

The Democrats, however, will fight over this issue. Howard Dean, just elected to head the Democratic National Committee, has wasted no time making that perfectly clear. "Social security is one of the proudest achievements of the Democratic Party, and we don’t intend to let it fall victim to a dishonest scheme that only serves to heap greater debt on America’s young people," Dean states.

This is the major social battle of Bush’s presidency.

He must lose.