And there is the real story. Maybe it's true, as the craven Couric claims, that only 20% of currently working Americans believe that Social Security will be able to pay them the benefits they have earned when it's their turn to retire. But they are thinking that way for two reasons: one is people in the media like Couric, who are spreading lies and scare stories about the system on behave of their corporate sponsors, and the other is that Congress is deliberately trying to kill Social Security on behalf of the Wall Street financiers and all of corporate America which, in the first case, want to be able to get access to all that money so they can charge fees to invest it, and in the second, want to stop having to pay their share of the payroll tax. Their attitude: To hell with old people and the disabled!
What Wall Street and corporate America really fear is that as baby boomers start to become the majority of retirees, and as their children begin to enter middle age in large numbers, there will be the largest senior lobby in history, and we in that voting cohort will be able, politically, to demand that Social Security be better funded and more generous in supporting America's retired and disabled. (And don't forget, we'll also have the support of our kids, who in reality want their elders to have decent retirement funding, if only so they won't have to support them on their own!)
That too is a reality that Couric completely ignores.
DAVE LINDORFF is a 66-year-old journalist, who is fully confident that Social Security benefits he has earned will be paid in full until he dies, and that it will be there also for his kids when it's their turn. He is a member of ThisCan'tBeHappening!, the new independent, uncompromised, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper. His colleagues, JOHN GRANT, GARY LINDORFF, ALFREDO LOPEZ, LORI SPENCER, LINN WASHINGTON, JR. and the late CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net
(Article changed on August 16, 2015 at 11:15)
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
