Privatizing Social Security Again? By Helen Thomas

[Klukie]

Privatizing Social Security Again?By Helen Thomas, Reader Supported News

07 January 11



This year, 2011, marks the beginning of baby boomers receiving Social Security checks and they should be alerted of past perennial Republican attempts to partially privatize the program.

Heaven forbid that plans prevail to invest a certain amount of those checks in the stock market, as many pension plans have taken a bath in the current meltdown. While there have been past GOP plans to partially privatize the program, fortunately they have all failed. So far the Social Security trust fund remains tempting for the gamblers and other risk takers on the market.

As a Detroiter, I remember the Great Depression and the stock market crash of 1929 when some of the plutocrats on Wall Street jumped out of windows as a result of their great losses. Those were bleak days when some of the jobless workers also lost hope in the bitterly cold winter as they stood in long lines at the Ford Motor Company, many without overcoats, hoping for a job on the auto assembly lines.

The movements for socialism and communism were given some credence as a way out of their misery.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/279-82/4525-privatizing-social-security-again

[napi21]

1. They won't privatize SS if I can stop it! Invest all of your own

money that you want to in the market. Gain or lose as much as you can, and nobody will care, but keep your mitts off of SS!

[leveymg]

2. Thank heaven for someone with a real living memory, not the remanufactured kind.

No wonder they've worked so hard to pummel and silence her. The robots envy her because she's still able to think for herself.

[Daphne08]

3. This is the reason we still need people of Helen's age

to tell us the truth.

I know that Helen's piece dealing with the Great Depression and FDR's New Deal (including Social Security) is true because I'm 61, and my grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles told us about FDR and how HE and HIS programs were on their way to bringing the U.S. out of the Depression, not WWII (as so many Right-wing revisionists would like young people to believe).

Yes, WWII left us strong as a world power, but the New Deal programs saved us before the war.

FDR saved Capitalism, and I don't know why the anti-FDR Right-wing cannot comprehend that fact.

[old mark]

4. The right loved to point to Argentina, which privatized its retirement fund

decades ago, giving each person an individual "account" in ist stock market paid into using payroll deductions. It was doing great till their marked tanked, resulting in wide scale poverty and suffering by all retirees who depended on that income.

They tend to forget about that part.


mark

[mrcheerful]

5. They seem to have a knack for forgetting the down side of things they admire

[Desertrose]

6. Keep speaking up Helen...we need you!

Thank you!!!!