Uppity Wisconsin

William Greiter of The Nation has exposed yet another scam, an alarming one regarding Social Security.  Some highlights:

"Governing elites in Washington and Wall Street have devised a fiendishly clever "grand bargain" they want President Obama to embrace in the name of "fiscal responsibility." The government, they argue, having spent billions on bailing out the banks, can recover its costs by looting the Social Security system. They are also targeting Medicare and Medicaid."

".....These players are promoting a tricky way to whack Social Security benefits, but to do it behind closed doors so the public cannot see what's happening or figure out which politicians to blame. The essential transaction would amount to misappropriating the trillions in Social Security taxes that workers have paid to finance their retirement benefits. This swindle is portrayed as "fiscal reform." In fact, it's the political equivalent of bait-and-switch fraud."

(Cross-posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog. More than 96,000 people in Wisconsin receive Social Security and thousands more are nearing retirement.)

Monday’s stock market disaster, with the Dow plummeting 778 points—a larger drop than after the Sept. 11 attacks—may make Wall Street traders and billionaire hedge fund investors hyperventilate.

But imagine how much worse for the rest of us it would have been if, three years ago, President Bush and Sen. John McCain had succeeded in their efforts to privatize Social Security, gambling in the stock market funds that have been a guaranteed income for America’s retirees?

Many of our 401(k)s and pension plans took a hit yesterday—but no matter how our individual retirements fare on Wall Street, we would still have Social Security to back us up.

Not so if McCain became president.