BY MAURICE WILLIAMS

As the U.S. rulers probe to deepen their assault on entitlements, the big-business news media floated three plans to privatize Social Security benefits. The plans had been debated by a bipartisan Advisory Council on Social Security appointed by Donna Shalala, secretary of Health and Human Services, in 1994, to study ways to gut Social Security benefits. The advisory council is supposed to present its official report later in December. All three schemes it suggests include cutting retirement payments and investing some portion of Social Security funds in stocks and equities.

The plans were publicized less than one week after a Congress-appointed commission issued a December 4 report claiming the government's consumer price index (CPI) has overstated inflation by 1.1 percent for at least a decade. Several of Clinton administration officials have already declared their support for making a corresponding "adjustment" lowering cost-of-living raises in Social Security and other entitlements.

The Social Security Act of 1935 codified gains won by the labor movement as it pressed for social guarantees offering some measure of lifelong protection to the working class as a whole. These gains were extended through the continued labor struggles in the 1930s, and the civil rights battles of the 1950s and '60s. Social Security includes pensions for those over 65, as well as benefits for disabled workers and their dependents.

While the 13 members of the Advisory Committee on Social Security expressed differences, the majority agreed that retirees pay should pay taxes on Social Security benefits and the annual cost-of-living adjustment in the benefits should be reduced to reflect any "corrections" made to the CPI by the Labor Department.

Five members of the panel, led by Sylvester Schieber, vice president of the benefits consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide, are pressing for the deepest assault to Social Security entitlements. Their plan calls for a two- tier system that would privatize a large portion of the system. Under this scheme guaranteed benefits would drop to $410 a month for all retirees, from a current average of $724. Each worker would be required to take 40 percent of their current Social Security payroll taxes to invest in "private retirement accounts." These retirement accounts would supposedly replace the balance of Social Security benefits, with each worker's future individually tied to the fluctuations of the stock and bond markets.

Advisory council chairman Robert Gramlich and one other council member are advocating a plan that would establish mandatory individual savings accounts. Gramlich, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, called for imposing an additional 1.6 percent tax on workers' wages, which would be invested in mutual funds and other private retirement plans, administered by the government.

Six members of Clinton's advisory council are presenting a third scheme. Their proposal involves cutting benefits by 3 percent, increase income tax on the benefits workers receive when they retire, and allowing Washington to invest up to 40 percent of the Social Security trust fund in stocks.

Panel members backing this plan include George Kourpias, president of the International Association of Machinists; Gerald Shea, assistant to the president of the AFL-CIO; and Gloria Johnson, director of social action for the International Union of Electrical Workers.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who supports proposals to cut Social Security and raise the retirement age, expressed reservations at the idea of sinking Social Security funds into private stocks. Putting these funds in the stock market may not "increase the rate of return on Social Security trust fund assets," Greenspan said in a December 8 speech, "and to whatever extent it does, would likely be mirrored by a comparable decline in the incomes of private pensions and retirement funds." Greenspan chaired a bipartisan congressional panel in 1983 that proposed taxing Social Security payments and increasing Social Security deductions from workers' wages, measures that President Ronald Reagan later signed into law. The federal reserve chair stated his approval of the CPI commission report. Clinton officials endorse rigging CPI
The consumer price index is used to calculate increases in federal pensions for veterans and civil service employees, Social Security benefits, alimony and child support payments, standard deductions for income tax, and cost of living adjustments for many union contracts. The railroad retirement program, with some 800,000 beneficiaries, is also pegged to the consumer price index.

Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and other Clinton administration officials endorsed the CPI commission report. "We have to do exactly what Michael Boskin in his report said," said Rubin on the December 8 NBC television program "Meet the Press." He was responding to a question from the program host about the recommendations led by commission chair Michael Boskin, a former Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers under President George Bush.

Another White House official, budget director Franklin Raines, said the administration would work with Congress to study the Boskin commission's report in an "expeditious way," the Washington Post reported.

Rubin, who is also the chairman of the Medicare trust fund, commented on other attacks on entitlements. He stated the Clinton administration had proposed "a much more limited set of Medicare cuts" than the Republicans. Clinton called for chopping $124 billion from the Medicare budget between 1995 and 2002, while Congress pressed for a $158 billion cut. "The Medicare trust fund," Rubin asserted, "has an exhaustion date that is now estimated to be 2001." Under Boskin's proposals Washington would supposedly save some $1 trillion over the next 12 years through smaller cost-of-living increases to Social Security recipients and higher taxes. The government would pay lower benefits to nearly 45 million beneficiaries receiving Social Security and 6.5 million elderly recipients of Supplemental Security Income. The commission's recommendations would also lower funds for the 26 million people receiving food stamps and the 25 million children participating in subsidized nutrition programs, while some 5 million students would receive less money from federal student grants.

Clinton continues to lead the charge against the social wage won from decades of struggles by working people. He recently bragged about the 15 percent drop in the welfare rolls since his election in 1992. Some 121 million people have stopped receiving welfare payments since January 1993. "That is the biggest drop in the welfare rolls in history," Clinton declared in a radio address December 7. "Our strategy has worked," he crowed.

A November 30 article in the New York Times reported that 10 million poor children account for two-thirds of the beneficiaries of welfare checks, and 5 million more receive other forms of aid, such as hearing aids and school breakfasts. Some 20 percent of the children in the United States live below the poverty line, which the U.S. government set at $15,771 for a family of four in 1995. Six million of these children are considered extremely poor, existing on less than half that income. Maintaining bipartisan foreign policy
Meanwhile, Clinton's recent cabinet appointments reflect a decision to maintain the same bipartisan course on foreign policy of using more military intervention abroad. On December 5, the president announced his choice for secretary of state, Madeline Albright. As the chief U.S. delegate to the United Nations, she has been in the forefront of Washington's attacks on the Cuban revolution.

Albright has been a stronger proponent than most White House officials in arguing for using military force in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Haiti, and elsewhere around the globe. "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" she reportedly chided former Gen. Colin Powell during a discussion on Bosnia.

Clinton also selected William Cohen, a former Republican senator, as his defense secretary and Samuel Berger for his national security adviser. Berger called for expanding NATO and using Washington's military might in "Bosnia, the Middle East or elsewhere."

Reflecting an increasing willingness in the Clinton administration to use U.S. troops abroad, Gen. John Shalikashvili, who will remain Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Financial Times of London on December 10, "In today's world we need to consider the use of military forces when America's other interests are threatened." Shalikashvili emphasized the U.S. rulers would "pay any price" when their vital interests were at stake.  
 
 
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