Bush Declares War on the Poor

[rodeodance]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/020305H.shtml

> Bush Declares War on the Poor
> By Jacques Coubard
> L'Humanité
>
> Thursday 03 February 2005
>
> Social Security privatization guts the ultimate social protections for the most destitute inherited from the New Deal.
>
> He promised it during his electoral campaign; he does it. Bush will launch his great social security reform, taking the system back seventy years to before President Roosevelt's 1935 establishment of social protection, "welfare," designed to curb the extreme poverty of the elderly during the Great Depression.
>
> The plan Bush and his ultraconservative advisors are promoting sends the present redistribution system down the trapdoor to progressively substitute a capitalization that forces wage-earners to dedicate a portion of their contribution to the purchase of stocks or bonds that would supposedly provide a better return. The argument the authors of this project once again use as a club is fear. Fear of an abysmal deficit that would strike at social security, about to be overwhelmed by the arrival of the new generations, the baby boomers, in 2018. The federal budget will no longer suffice to save retirements, taken here at age 65. On the other hand, they would be indexed from then on to inflation and not to salaries, which always lag behind price rises. The reduction in benefits(1)will consequently be felt immediately in a country where it is common to see men and women work past the official retirement age in order to pay their bills or quite simply in order to live with dignity while poverty continues to extend ever further in a society that enjoys one of the lowest savings rates.
>
> The consequences of the reform have provoked critical reactions even among the ranks of Republican Senators, less concerned about the workers than about the aggravation of the budget deficit the reform will provoke by depriving Social Security of contributions.......

[Spinzonner]

1. Well, he does have a pattern of attacking the defenseless

under false pretenses.

Why should he change now ?

[roenyc]

2. its a habit now, hard to break. NT

[gorbal]

3. And the media will just gloss it over...

And people won't know what's happening until inevitable the blowback of a massive crimewave hit's their area. I hate this, even some democrats I have spoken have bought the application of social darwinism to mothers with children hook line and sinker. We already have thousands of CHILDREN living on the streets, what's a few thousand more.

And any time the poor stand up for themselves in peacefull protest, people go out of their way to criticize them. Check out the video on this news brodcast-

http://deseretnews.com/oly/view/0,3949,60000094,00.html

Just about the whole video critizes the protestors for actually having the nerve to hold a protest, because I guess homeless people shouldn't hold protests anywhere because the shelters can't hold them. What kind of fucked up brand of rationality is that? The protestors get about five seconds of a say in the whole segment, and the rest is spent on a subject that doesn't even mean anything because the protestors didn't stay at the shelters to begin with.

Sorry, just had to vent.

:)D