LEST WE FORGET, CLINTON WAS ABOUT TO PRIVATIZE SOCIAL SECURITY

by Andrew Stewart
The collapse of the liberal media into a miasma of identity politics and guilt trips is fascinating to
watch. After having been laid for a killer trip for how my support for Jill Stein is going to bring about
the return of back-alley abortion, I think I have a bit of a right to just point out yet again that Hillary
Clinton, if elected, wanted to put my parents in the poorhouse by privatizing their Social Security.
The first place to look for confirmation of this was the Podesta email cache. On October 10, Wikileaks
released the infamous Wall Street speeches Clinton made behind closed doors, which said:
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, this may be borne more out of hope than experience in the last
few years. But Simpson-Bowles and I know you heard from Erskine earlier today put
forth the right framework. Namely, we have to restrain spending, we have to have adequate
revenues, and we have to incentivize growth. Its a three-part formula. The specifics can be
negotiated depending upon whether were acting in good faith or not. And what Senator
Simpson and Erskine did was to bring Republicans and Democrats alike to the table, and you
had the full range of ideological views from I think Tom Coburn to Dick Durbin. And they
reached an agreement. But what is very hard to do is to then take that agreement if you dont
believe that youre going to be able to move the other side. And where we are now is in this
gridlocked dysfunction. So youve got Democrats saying that, you know, you have to have more
revenues; thats the sine qua non of any kind of agreement. You have Republicans saying no,
no, no on revenues; you have to cut much more deeply into spending. Well, looks whats
happened. We are slowly returning to growth. Its not as much or as fast as many of us would
like to see, but, you know, were certainly better off than our European friends, and were
beginning to, I believe, kind of come out of the long aftermath of the 08 crisis. [Clinton Speech
For Morgan Stanley, 4/18/13]
Simpson-Bowles, for those of you who forgot, was part of a long line of Democratic moves over the
past 8 years that would lead the way for privatizing the fund. I previously documented this issue for
Counterpunch on September 30 (http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/30/the-democratic-plot-toprivatize-social-security/) and stand by my reporting despite claims from the pwogs that this is a
conspiracy theory.
Second of course is Robin Blackburn's classic essay How Monica Lewinsky Saved Social Security
(http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/10/30/how-monica-lewinsky-saved-social-security/), which
retrieved from the Clinton archive primary documents from the beginning of the effort dating back to
1998. Following his destruction of Welfare, Bubba had decided to set his sights on retirement
entitlements with the aid of his Robert Rubin-Larry Summers fiscal brain trust. Of course, when the
intern with that magic blue dress became a national punchline, he was forced to pivot to the left to
shore up his anti-privatization base as the GOP hounds began to circle for the kill. Nevertheless, the
effort has been simmering on the back burner for the past two decades and remains tenable. Obama has
put in place as custodian of the Social Security trust fund Charles P. Blahous III, who supported
privatizing under George W. Bush, and manipulated the chained Consumer Price Index, used to
generate yearly coast of living adjustments, so to sow enough dissent and cause people to think the
system no longer works. The blade of the guillotine only needs be released at this point, all that is
needed has been prepared.
Right now the media pundits who created this whole mess in the first place
(https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/793217446777880581?lang=en) are spewing metric tons of
nonsense about the Democrats coming to save us all from the Donald. This has an air of credibility due

to the quite obvious fact that his Rogues Gallery of staff and cabinet posts, neocons and neoConfederates to quote Jeffrey St. Clair, is obviously awful. But this whole discourse is missing a crucial
class analysis and so has all the merit of a spitball launched at the lunchroom bully. Only with a class
analysis that articulates the truth about Democratic Social Security policy do we see the real discourse
emerge.
To further cement this point, I would suggest a brief exercise that begins with two quotes.
The longest-lived effort to construct socialism was the USSR, but in this case we find the deployment of
one or both biblical narratives a betrayal or a Fall narrative to account for its failure. For
many, Stalin embodies the manifestation of that betrayal. Was he not, after all, a paranoid and
omniscient dictator, ruling by a bloodthirsty and capricious will? Caricatures aside, once one opts for
a narrative of the Fall, one is playing a theological game. By Fall narrative I mean a narrative that
is structured in terms of a fall from grace, analogous to the story in Genesis 23, in which Eve and
then Adam eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree (of the knowledge of good and evil) and are thereby
banished by God from paradise. -Roland Boer
One of the most devious traps which lurk for Marxist theorists is the search for the moment of the Fall,
when things took the wrong turn in the history of Marxism: was it already the late Engels with his more
positivist-evolutionary understanding of historical materialism? Was it the revisionism AND the
orthodoxy of the Second International? Was it Lenin? Or was it Marx himself in his late work, after he
abandoned his youthful humanism (as some "humanist Marxists" claimed decades ago)? This entire
topic has to be rejected: there is no opposition here, the Fall is to be inscribed into the very origins. (To
put it even more pointedly, such a search for the intruder who infected the original model and set in
motion its degeneration cannot but reproduce the logic of anti-Semitism.) -Slavoj Zizek
I would argue the neoliberals are not, despite pwog pleas to the contrary, the aberration within the
Democratic edifice, they are in fact the norm. I would like to try to hammer this home using a point that
is the antithesis of the one made by Boer and Zizek by explaining what happened to American
liberalism in the 1930s.
The myth that has gone on for nearly a century is that Franklin Roosevelt was the grandfatherly
Keynesian who saved the economy and American capitalism by creating the welfare state. Dr. Vijay
Prashad touched on a fact, however, that repudiated this earlier this year
(http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/31/stoking-the-fires-trump-and-his-legions/) when he wrote
Roosevelts main [1933 campaign] plank was to shrink the government and expand U.S. trade with
the world. These were policy positions much favored by the elite. During the election, there was little
sign that Roosevelt would expand the U.S. government and use state spending to enhance economic
activity.
Justin Raimondo at AntiWar.com also nears this point when he discusses his beloved Old Right, the
collection of both isolationist Democrats and Republicans who hated the New Deal. While it is true that
his Old Right did have a bit of a soft-gloves approach to European fascism, it is clear that he is not
referring to the Klan, who were the actual right wingers in America, as much as anti-Keynesian
moderates.
What I am trying to articulate here is that, if there is any tradition that deserves a Fall narrative, it is
American liberalism. Until the election of FDR, the Democrats were a liberal party in accordance with
the tenets of that philosophy. But, in the midst of a near-revolutionary moment that we call the Great

Depression and Second World War, Roosevelt changed its very character to that of a European labor
one, staving off Communists, Socialists, Trotskyists, and Musteites who were on the verge of
expropriating the expropriators. Roosevelt told the financial elites at that point refusal to allow the
creation of the welfare state was at their peril.
In this sense, the Fall narrative should be the four decades of economic development seen in America,
spanning the election of Roosevelt to the fall of Nixon, who was ousted just as much by a right wing
base enraged by his fiscal policies as by the Watergate break-in. The welfare state itself was the heresy
of the capitalist parties that would otherwise have been happy to allow further suffering of the
population just as long as they were ensconced in comfort. In this sense the Clintons are, true to their
Southern roots, like an old-time revivalist tent show, inclined to all sorts of chicanery and smoke-andmirror operations to hide from the congregation how they are robbing the people in the pews.
Mark Blyth, the Eastman Professor of Political Economy at Brown University, recently wrote in a
column titled Global Trumpism for Foreign Affairs (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-1115/global-trumpism) of how the welfare state was unsustainable:
[O]nce you target and sustain full employment over time, it basically becomes costless for
labor to move from job to job. Wages in such a world will have to continually rise to hold onto
labor, and the only way business can accommodate that is to push up prices. This mechanism,
cost-push inflation, where wages and prices chase each other up, emerged in the 1970s and
coincided with the end of the Bretton Woods regime and the subsequent oil shocks to produce
high inflation in the rich countries of the West in the 1970s. In short, the system undermined
itself
This is the nature of any heresy in the theological sense, they contain a certain element that makes them
prone to self-destruction. In America, we have just witnessed the collapse of a multi-decade Protestant
one, the Prosperity Gospel, which was embraced for decades by Evangelical Christians. These same
Evangelicals just voted in droves for a Chief Executive who embodies every anathema within that
theological matrix, a crass, crude, adulterous philandering scum bag landlord from the godless, Jewinfested Big Apple.
The reason for this collapse is related directly to the nature of liberalism as a philosophy of the
capitalist revolution that smashed the feudal system. It is a philosophy that is premised on the notion of
identity, saying that all are equal before the law, and it does not have within its logic the dimension of
class that Marx later added through the use of the Hegelian dialectic. The half-hearted efforts of the
presidents from 1933-1975 to solve this conundrum created a welfare state that infamously depended
on both imperialism and the perpetuation of an apartheid order ostracizing people of color from the
bounty. Clinton's corporatist policies, including but not limited to privatizing Social Security, were
classical liberal positions, just as Trump's are. The Libertarian Party at least is honest about these sorts
of things as the true believers in liberalism.
The rectification of this heresy within liberalism requires an embrace of a uniquely eco-communist
vision of our future politics. The notion of eco-socialism is frankly lacking because of the nature of the
crisis at hand. When Lenin renamed the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Bolshevik) the
Communist Party, that was an act reflecting how radically he wished to push things to the left in the
face of a global cataclysm that continues to impact our daily lives a century later. The European
Socialist movement, gathered around the Second International, had collapsed in the face of this
cataclysm, the First World War, and had in fact enabled a Trump-like brand of vicious racism by
espousing a Clintonite style of imperialism. By repudiating Socialism in the name of Communism, he
was directly opposing this latter brand, a polite colonialism composed of gentlemen technocrats and

efficient gendarmes.
In the present circumstances, we must not only oppose the privatizing of Social Security but promote
its expansion. Social Security itself was a first enacted by the state socialist program of Bismarck, who
effectively coopted the German Socialist program to maintain a worker class base and stave off a revolt
for a generation. In the face of the climate crisis, we cannot allow for similar coopting.
We should further begin to develop a critique of neoliberal imperialism that recognizes the disaster
capitalism discussed by Naomi Klein in her The Shock Doctrine as a weapon of imperialism, that
American government apathy in the face of climate change is in fact a barely-hidden glee at the
prospect of profits for the imperial state. The anti-colonial struggle being waged at places like Standing
Rock are therefore nothing more than auguries of a wider eco-communist struggle to come as the crisis
accelerates. The question of whether one should embrace accelerationism in this sense is simply moot
because it is actually a fact that the capitalist system is the party who selected this perspective.
Eco-communism is the only solution to what we face. Blyth gave a succinct and clear diagnosis of what
is on the horizon when he closed his recent essay by writing The era of neoliberalism is over. The era
of neonationalism has just begun.
Only an anti-colonial neo-internationalism will stand against such an onslaught.