Everything I needed to know about Social Security I learned from the Internet Movie Database

If there's one movie I got tired of pretty quickly, it's The Corporation. It could be because I work on the same University campus the authours came from, precipitating the "local prof makes good" saturation. It could be because at every union or activist event I attend, I'm exhorted to make my way to the obligatory screening and have the same revelation that the unenlightened in my circle had when the movie snuck into the neighbourhood multiplex.

It's not that I hate the movie. It's a detailed treatise on the dysfunction in making the corporation's first duty to maximize profits to its shareholders. That being said, it has the charm of a PowerPoint presentation: the lack of "characters" (like the newsroom staff in "Control Room" or the grieving mother in "Fahrenheit 9/11") make The Corporation boring, confusing, and difficult to follow, but the events on the screen are still pretty damn unsettling.

Speaking of boring, confusing, difficult to follow, and pretty damn unsettling, the Bush administration continues it's push to privatize America's Social Security system. It appears the White House is looking to wash its hands of the longstanding practice of using Social Security as a slush fund, which under Bush has equated to big slushy tax cuts for wealthy Americans and a big slushy, sandy, bloody misadventrue in Iraq. Rather than a public system with defined benefits so people can retire with some sense of certainty, the President would rather see the nation's retirement nest egg handed over with no questions asked to that well-known bedrock of certainty, the stock market.

Moving defined benefits into 401K's (RRSPs for those who speak Canadian) means that brokers and fund managers would be taking up even more seats at multinationals corporate shareholders meetings. It's not like they actually show up at the meetings to fill those seats, they actually send a proxy. However, what's written on the proxy, with apologies to Malcom X, (who more than likely would have beat the crap out of these bastards) are the words "By any means necessary."

If that isn't bad enough, let's think about what would happen if the Bush plan actually came to pass, and fund managers carried the urgent weight of America's well being in the twilight years. All the nasty stuff we saw in The Corporation: just put the movie on fast forward and play it in a continuous loop, because that's what everyday life would eventually look like for Americans, and anyone America happens to rub up against. Actually, it could also look a lot like Matewan, Wall Street, John Q or even The Day After Tomorrow.

Economists (the good ones, not the TV ones) almost unanimously regard the privatization of Social Security as something of a sick joke. To provide a comparable level of benefits, the markets would be have to be running as they were at the height of the dot-com boom for about 75 years. Of course, we all remember how the dot-com boom went. Even if this Miracle on Wall Street (not an actual movie, hence no link) were to pass, wouldn't the perpetual windfall of payroll taxes render strangling Social Security in its sleep kind of a moot point?

Americans would be likely better off betting on the Oscar Winners or the Super Bowl (and this reporter says the Eagles will cover the spread) rather than gamble their life savings on Bush's plan for their retirement. All the more reason to wonder why Bush's retirement plan didn't start during the first week of last November.