Bush is the perfect example of why privatizing Social Security won't work.

[KansDem]

Two examples, actually...

1) Bush failed in all his business endeavors only to be bailed out by his daddy's friends. So, who's going to bail out those of us in privatized Social Security when our business and financial ventures fail? Poppy? The Saudis?

For the answer we have to go back to the oil patch in Midland, Texas, where a failed oil man named George W. Bush kept punching dry holes in Texas while looking for oil and failing to find any. Bush Junior nearly went belly up –- until he was saved by mysterious money from the Gulf. By "mysterious," I mean there was no good business reason for investors to save his business bacon. In his first business failure -– Arbusto ("Shrub" in Spanish) Oil -- he was saved by cash from James Bath, the investment advisor to Salim bin Ladin (usually spelled, "Binladden").

His third company was saved by Sheik Abdullah Bakhsh, the Saudi billionaire, and by the Emirate of Bahrain which offered Bush's company an extraordinary off-shore oil concession. Bush's teeny-weeny Texas dry-land operation was chosen over Amoco Oil.

I'm actually writing this from Midland where George Dubya first ventured into the oil patch. The petroleum guys here laugh at the idea that Bush's company Harken got the Bahrain deal because of their skill –- it was solely the Gulf Arabs way of buying their way into the son of the President of the United States (Bush Sr. was holding office then).

Then there's Poppy Bush, in the employ of Carlyle, the arms dealer, as representative to Asia and the Saudis. Carlyle was partly backed by the Binladdins and the Saudi royal family.
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/03/05/21_palast.html

The next time someone says that privatizing SS is a good idea, remind him/her that if Bush was held to his own standards, he would be an indigent in need of assistance.

2) The one Bush "success" was his stock sale in Harken. Bush used insider information to dump his stock before Harken tanked.

"In June of 1990, Bush sold two-thirds of the Harken stock he had received in the Spectrum 7 deal--and collected $318,430 more than it was worth when he first obtained it. Get low, sell high? Anything wrong with that? The month before this sale, Harken appointed Bush to a committee to determine, as Ivins and Dubose put it, "how restructuring would affect ordinary shareholders." According to Ivins and Dubose, who note the previous reporting work of "U.S. News and World Report," when Bush served on this committee, he was privy to information indicating the company was in trouble. He then dumped his stocks before this news became public. "U.S. News" concluded that at the time of the sale there was "substantial evidence to suggest that Bush knew Harken was in dire straits.""
http://www.buzzflash.com/perspectives/bush_harken.html


The next time someone advocates Bush's plan, remind him/her that many US citizens are not privy to insider information to assure that their business and financial ventures are successes, therefore the Bush plan is inherently unfair.

It seems that without insider information and someone to bail him out, Bush would have been an abject failure in all matters of business and finance, and therefore would not have qualified for Social Security benefits since his "personal accounts" would be in the red...

On edit: I would support Bush's plan for Social Security privatization ONLY if I can get insider information into the largest US corporations AND someone to bail me out if I lose money...

Also, a golf date now and then with the movers and shakers of the world of finance would be nice too…