It May Not Matter In A GOP Primary But Can Far Right Icon Marco Rubio Really Run Against Social Security In A General Election... In Florida?

Right-wing extremist Marco Rubio roiled Florida politics yesterday by grabbing hold of a political third rail: the Republican mania to dismantle Social Security. Ignore the GOP-oriented headline about "experts" agreeing that Social Security has to be destroyed; right-wing "experts" have been screeching that at the top of their lungs since before it was ever enacted into law. Some Bush advisor saying Social Security needs to be cut-- even if corporately-funded reactionary "think tanks" back him up-- doesn't give Rubio the kind of cover he'd need to get away with that approach, especially not in Florida and especially not in a general election.

From as far back as Barry Goldwater in 1964, political candidates have risked backlash in Florida for suggesting changes to Social Security. So it was remarkable to see Marco Rubio in a national TV debate with Gov. Charlie Crist call for raising the retirement age.

Blogs and Facebook groups instantly lit up. The consensus was Rubio committed a serious gaffe. Older Americans are among the most reliable voters, and in Florida, 2.4 million of them receive Social Security... "Any expert from any political spectrum will tell you that Rubio was right," said Andrew Biggs, former No. 2 at the Social Security Administration and now with the conservative American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

Biggs is a fringe right-wing ideologue and, like his tribe tends to be, full of shit. Because the neo-fascist American Enterprise Institute and its paid hacks say something is so, it doesn't make it so. In fact, it makes it very suspect. Earlier today my friend Alex Lawson from Social Security Works (an actual expert) pointed out that "100% of Wall Street agrees that folks on Social Security need to tighten their belts to pay for the economic calamity Wall Street created. The only people who want to cut Social Security are Wall Street and their bought and paid for acolytes in DC. The author could have asked almost any expert at random from the National Academy of Social Insurance and he would have heard that most experts are not agreed that raising the retirement age is necessary." Alex is eager for more Republicans to embrace Rubio's position for their campaigns, pointing to a recent Quinnipiac poll (2 weeks ago) which asked "Do you think cutting the growth of spending on Social Security benefits should or should not be a main part of any government approach to the deficit?"

77 percent of all Americans oppose
84 percent of Democrats oppose
73 percent of Republicans oppose
57 percent of those with annual household incomes of more than $250,000 oppose

Rubio, the American Enterprise Institute, the Ayn Rand kooks and Hate Talk Radio hosts are out there alone on this one. That said, this is hardly something that hasn't been tried before. Four decades ago, in fact, there was a little experiment... in Chile. I'm not saying Nixon or even Kissinger had the elected president of Chile assassinated so they could dismantle Social Security, but it sure worked out that way. Thom Hartmann touched on it in his latest book, Threshold and mentions that the CIA plot to replace Social Democrat Salvatore Allende with full-on fascist dictator and corporate shill Augusto Pinoche was abetted by several U.S. corporations who stood to make a great deal of money from the "transition."

Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte ruled the country with an iron fist until 1990. Advised by economists from Friedman's Chicago School, he implemented "free market reforms," including the privatization of Chile's social security system. The result was a huge success for a small class of bankers and businessmen, and the economy grew, particularly in the large corporate sector. But poverty dramatically grew as well, the middle class began to evaporate, and those living on social security were devastated. Throughout the 1990s, people saw the value of their private social security accounts actually decline, in part because of the fees that bankers were skimming off the top, in part because the country's economic growth had been unspectacular.

Rubio is going to count on fear and scare and confusion to stampede ignorant, nervous voters into doing themselves in. It's worked before. And they have Fox and Hate Talk Radio to help. Wrecking Social Security may be a jewel in the right-wing crown but it isn't the whole game by any stretch of the imagination. Neither Crist nor Rubio supports-- or has ever supported-- the legitimate aspirations of American working families. They're both anti-union zealots, especially Rubio. And, back to Hartmann, once the Chicago School experimenters failed so dismally in Chile, they moved right on to the U.S. with their warped ideological "economic" theories.

Reagan and Thatcher undertook aggressive movements to destroy organized labor, with Reagan busting the powerful professional air traffic controllers' union, PATCO, while Thatcher busted the coal miners' union, that nation's most powerful. Both turned the labor-protective apparatus of government from a labor department designed to protect organized labor into bureaucracies that would assist corporations in busting unions. Additionally, both "freed" markets by starting the process of dropping tariffs and reducing regulations on business.

The result in both cases was, in retrospect, disastrous. Industry fled both countries, in the new "flat" world, to where labor was cheapest (at the moment it's China), labor unions were destroyed, and the middle class was squeezed. Well-paying jobs were replaced with "Do you want fries with that?" and social mobility dropped to levels not seen since the robber baron era a hundred years earlier.

Rubio said he agrees with Paul Ryan's widely-panned roadmap which plans to raise the age for benefits to 70. Needless to say, neither Ryan nor Rubio favors the kind of serious reform that would end the taxable income ceiling, allowing the wealthy to avoid the payroll taxes on anything over $106,800. If that were fixed, Social Security would be instantly solvent out into the direction of eternity. Ryan and Rubio are creatures of corporate power. They're not interested in finding equitable solutions; they're interested in helping their rich, powerful paymasters avoid paying their fair share of taxes.