You know, I must be the dumbest SOB on Earth, cuz I keep getting surprised by things like this. What AARP (American Association of Retiree Persecutors) is doing is utterly indefensible. The SS fund is solvent and will be until 2048, there is no justification for making anybody suffer before then (or after, for that matter). There isn't a SS "crisis". It's a fraud! What's going on is class war, it's that simple. The SS account is an enormous amount of money and the ruling class is taking it away because they want it, and because they don't want us to have it. Getting us to work longer (i.e. be more productive) and claim less from the national economy means more for them, and a diminished capacity for working people to resist. It is as simple as that. And that the AARP has acquiesced (if in fact that is what they've done and it isn't something even more nefarious) is absolutely shameless. It is a betrayal. It's treachery.
Some time ago it was proposed by an economist whose name I cannot remember that if a Federal SS tax of one cent on every purchase in excess of one hundred dollars was enacted, the coming shortfall in 2048 would be averted and the problem solved. This is a tax not of one percent, but of just one cent. If it went to a national plebiscite and Americans were able to choose between paying an extra penny for every time they spent a hundred or more and saving retirees from painful cuts, or forgoing the tax in favor of the draconian reductions the Wall Street and their footmen, the Republican Party, are calling for, which do you think we'd choose? The penny tax would pass by a wide margin. The problem with this plan is that their would be no benefit in it for the big banks, consequently we will never get the chance to make the decision. They rule, and we obey or get sent to their prisons.
Why am I an anarchist? This is why. Anarchism means direct democracy (if you will pardon the redundant phrase), It means power in the hands of the people, and not this bourgeois charade known as representative government. It means government is the collective enterprise of the whole of the community at every level: local, regional, national, and international. It means having meaningful control over our economies and everything else which directly affects our lives. This is impossible when society is divided into an ownership class and a servant class. It's impossible when we elect representatives from an extremely limited menu who then go to office and make decisions with which we have to live whether we like it or not. It is time for a complete socio-economic reorganization where power is transmitted from the bottom up, where workers run the offices and factories, where teachers and students run the schools, where miners run the mines etc., where commerce isn't conducted for the enrichment of a few but for the benefit of everyone.
It's our choice, because once we decide to stop complying, once we join hands across ethnic, racial, religious, and national borders as one human family, the ruling class will rule no more. We will be free.
In the mean time, I hope you like cat food, cuz that's what you are going to be eating in your "golden" years.
http://finance.yahoo.com/focus-retirement/article/112966/seniors-association-benefits-cut-wsj?mod=fidelity-livingretirement&cat=fidelity_2010_living_in_retirement
