Deception in high places

Unlike some of my fellow liberals, I do not think that George W. Bush is stupid – quite the contrary. Nor do I think that his policy objectives are necessarily indefensible. However, I do think that he has systematically misled the American people about his real objectives.

Consider the Iraq war, for example. President Bush first told us that we were invading Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from using weapons of mass destruction against us, but it turned out that Saddam had no such weapons and no capacity to develop them. Then the president told us that the purpose of the invasion was to bring democracy to the Middle East. But if that was our goal, why not start with our presumed allies in the region, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, neither of them paragons of democracy?

To many of us it seems that the real goal is to control Iraq’s oil reserves, the second largest in the world. There might be good reasons for the United States to seek control over these reserves, but by refusing to be straight with the American people about his true motives, the president has denied us the opportunity to debate the pros and cons of this issue.

And now we have the Social Security issue, and more deception from the president. He tells us we must have “reform” in order to “save Social Security,” but in fact it seems clear that his real goal is to destroy the Social Security system. He seems to imagine a scenario that will work more or less like this. Young people will take money out of the Social Security system and put it into private investment accounts, and these accounts will produce significantly higher returns than the traditional Social Security system, and therefore more and more people will shift over to the private accounts, and eventually these prosperous young folk will demand the freedom to move all of their money into such accounts, at which point the public retirement system will simply collapse.

Of course, this scenario assumes, first, that the U.S. stock market will spiral upward throughout our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children. I was born in 1936 and thus missed the worst of the Depression, but I am old enough to remember when I got one new shirt and pair of pants each year, for the opening day of school, and when we cut out pieces of cardboard to put in the bottoms of our shoes, because we couldn’t afford to get them resoled – much less buy a new pair. What goes up must come down, and that includes the stock market.

Of course, if you cash in your retirement while it’s going up, you make out like a bandit, but what if you must face the future in the wake of a great crash, as did an entire generation in the 1930s? Our parents and grandparents wanted to make sure that no one in future generations would face the prospect of starvation in old age, and that’s why they created the Social Security system. So I am a little suspicious of the vision of an eternally expanding economy that underlies the Bush plan.

But I am even more disturbed by the way George Bush’s plan seems designed to draw a sharp line between the winners and the losers in our society. If you make the right investment decisions, under his plan, you will win. If you make the wrong decisions, you will lose – and you deserve to lose. And if you end up 70 years old and destitute, so be it – that’s what you deserve.

From the president’s perspective, this is an “ownership society,” and you’d better make sure that you end as one of the “owners,” or you’re out in the cold. The Social Security system was created at a moment in American history when we could still believe, in the words of a song popular at the time, that “we’re in the same boat, brother” – that we share a common humanity and a common destiny (i.e., age, sickness and death), and that therefore we had better try to take care of one another. But in President Bush’s view of the world, if you’re not an “owner” of a house, a business, stocks, money, etc. – if, for example, you’ve spent your life working for a weekly or monthly wage and living in rental housing – you have no place in the new America.

Once again, I am not saying that George Bush’s position is indefensible. Maybe, as his policies assume, the “winners” in America really don’t owe anything to the “losers.” However, if that’s what a majority of Americans believe, then this majority opinion should prevail through an open and frank debate. But on Social Security as on the Iraq war, the president is concealing his real goals behind a smoke screen of talk about “saving Social Security,” and such dishonesty can only prevent an honest public discussion, not simply about the fiscal technicalities of Social Security, but about the ultimate values here at stake.

Burton Hatlen lives in Bangor and teaches in the Department of English at the University of Maine.