Open Letter to the Editors
Tom Honig and Don Miller
Santa Cruz (Calif) Sentinel
Originally published, Santa Cruz Indy Media Sun 19 Dec 2004

Editors --

I've just completed reading your Scharf's column, "Everybody's Business", for 19 Dec 2004, titled, "Stock market unlikely to bail out Social Security". You and Scharf are in large company on Social Security, of course. We the people have not been hit with this big a blizzard of BS from The Lying Bush, his lying surrogates, the class-race elite's top one percent, fascist corporatism's propagandists, and the money-power parasitic media mouthpieces since the invasion of Iraq.

The mighty blizzard has achieved simple on-message unity of crisis and doom on all fronts of the class war against the contemptible little people.

I'm a former field rep for Social Security Administration. I've watched Congress wreck Social Security, session-by-session, as much as they dare, for thirty years.

They've made the Social Security Number a de facto national ID number, giving easy access to those most private of records to any criminal who wants to take the time. The criminals include the banks, corporate predators, and financial services predators who have, in the past decade, ripped hundreds of billions of dollars out of civil society with a wide spectrum of frauds and near-zero accountability.

Bush's drive to privatize Social Security, to give those same criminal financial corporations access to Social Security's money, is a smash-mouth insult to even sub-normal intelligence. It doesn't take a mental giant to understand the basic lawlessness of the financial services industry.

There are many other piles of SSA wreckage outside Congress' door. But the biggest and the ugliest are the many stacks of General Funds expenditures for which the dual-party predator majority in Congress has embezzled Social Security tax monies.

Contrary to Scharf's intellectually dishonest opinion, the only thing wrong with Social Security is that nearly 50 years of surplus Social Security taxes have been taken away by Congress' predators for everything, including corporate welfare. If we already had sovereign citizen lawmaking at the national level, I would have already filed a constitutional amendment initiative making it a felony for Congress to spend one penny of Social Security taxes on anything other than SSA programs.

Let's put SSA reform on hold and bar Congress from spending any Social Security tax monies outside the SSA programs for just five years -- and then take another look at the need for reform.

Scharf's column is filled with intellectual dishonesties. Social Security is nothing more than a pyramid scheme, because some beneficiaries collect more than they paid in? What a howler. That would make every insurance program in the country nothing more than a pyramid scheme. Scharf needs to be reminded that we do not call Social Security a pension plan. We call it social insurance. Millions of people who pay into Social Security their entire working lives are dead before they can collect a penny.

Editorial displays of publishing anti-people, class-warfare, intellectually dishonest pieces, such as this one from Scharf, anger me. Was raised up in a small-town newspaper family. Back in the day, no editor worth his salt would have allowed the Scharf drivel into print. Now, again, the damage is done. The emotional propaganda triggers that keep many people from examining the evidence concerning Social Security have been reinforced. Way to go, editors.

Stephen Neitzke
Direct Democracy League
http://ddleague-usa.net

P.S. -- For similar views on Bush tactics and Congressional embezzlement of SSA tax monies from a main-stream commentator, see Tom Oliphant, "The deceptions add up on Social Security", Boston Globe, Sun 19 Dec 2004.