Social Security Push to Tap the GOP Faithful:
President Bush plans to reactivate his reelection campaign's network of donors and activists to build pressure on lawmakers to allow workers to invest part of their Social Security taxes in the stock market, according to Republican strategists.
White House allies are launching a market-research project to figure out how to sell the plan in the most comprehensible and appealing way, and Republican marketing and public-relations gurus are building teams of consultants to promote it, the strategists said.
The campaign will use Bush's campaign-honed techniques of mass repetition, never deviating from the script and using the politics of fear to build support -- contending that a Social Security financial crisis is imminent when even Republican figures show it is decades away...
I don't think we progressives can hammer on this enough - go back and read my earlier posting on the "sales pitch" that the Bush administration is using to cast a programatic chronic malady as an acute firestorm.
What really befuddles me is that so many people, and particularly the people that will most need it in retirement, are just going to drink the koolaid that BushCo offers on Social Security. And Ma and Pa Trailerpark are gonna drink it just because it pisses off the liberal pinko anti-dubya muthafuckers. Never mind that they're cutting off their own noses to spite their face.
There is apparently no historical perspective within the administration on why FDR made the safety net of Social Security a cornerstone of the New Deal. And there will never be - simply because a Social Security check is viewed as no more than beer money to the silverspooners running the show on both Pennsylvania Avenue and Wall Street.
If you've spent any time at all in corporate 'murica, you saw this coming from a mile (or at least a decade) away. The 401K snakeoil salesmen have been stacking the deck against Social Security for the past 20 years.
And BushCo is committed to making prophets out of the snakeoil salesmen.
