VOICE OF THE MAJORITY

Dear Progressive Friends,
This is my response to an excellent editorial published today in the St Louis Post-Dispatch about Bush's lack of understanding about what "paper money" is or the meaning of "full faith and credit" of government bonds. The column that I am commenting on is called: SOCIAL SECURITY: Does the president even know how the system works? By DEAN BAKER -- which you can read online at the newspaper's website.

Dear Mr. Baker,
Thank you for making excellent points about Bush's apparent lack of understanding of what "full faith and credit" in government bonds actually means for Social Security. But, I think that in arguing the details you are missing the true Bush strategy. The more confused the President is, the more confused the public is, which creates exactly what conservatives want - insecurity and fear. And if there is one thing this President knows how to exploit, it is FEAR.Why is Bush calling government bonds IOUs as if they were scraps of paper in a shoe box? Why is Bush "implying" that our government will default on those bonds, one of the most secure investments in the world? Remember what happened when Bush "implied" that Iraq had WMD? It doesn¹t matter that Iraq never had WMD, Bush still got his war. Similarly, it is near impossible that our government will default on Social Security, but that doesn¹t matter as long as Bush can create enough confusion, insecurity and fear to get what he wants privatization of public money and the end of the "social safety net." Isn¹t it ironic that those who question the wisdom of American foreign policy are ridiculed as unpatriotic and weak. But the President of the United States can repeatedly question the very solvency of the United States government and yet, no one points out how irresponsible and unpatriotic he is or how he is weakening American economic power. How can Bush get away with preaching that the United States is all powerful in foreign affairs, but too weak to pay for our elderly and infirm?Those "IOUs" Bush loves to talk about, are the ones HE WROTE, with our credit, for his rich friends when he handed them tax cuts that threw this country from a surplus into a deficit. Oh yeh, and what about the IOUs Bush wrote for the unnecessary war that is seizing trillions from our treasury for Bush¹s war profiteering friends. Is Bush saying that the IOUs he is responsible for are no good? Working people pay Social Security tax and working people deserve Social Security benefits.What angers me most, is the false perception that ultra-conservatives successfully promote patronizing social security as an undeserved government "hand out", like some kind of moral disease that must be purged for our fiscal salvation. This kind of moral manipulation of fiscal reality is not only wrong, it is EVIL. The moral disease this country needs to purge are the disciples of Grover Norquist and the "culture of GREED." Republican fiscal conservatives are a joke. Alan Greenspan is a joke. And the biggest joke of all is President Bush.I am a fiscal conservative who used to be Republican because the GOP preached so well, in the past, about sound fiscal policy. Now I call myself a "Recovering Republican" and I vote for Democrats like the real fiscal conservative, Howard Dean.
Wendy Foster Dickson
Manchester, MO
www.CommonSenseMom.com

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Friday, April 08, 2005