Modern Scalawags
Let's face facts. The extremely dishonest approach that the Republicans are taking to bring African Americans on board with their privatized personal retirement plan is just downright racist. I'm sure that the creationist right believes that the fact black men don't live as long as whites is God's intention but the truth is that they wouldn't die younger if it weren't for poverty, disease and crime which are immoral reasons in a rich country such as ours. It's bad enough that this is happening today, but the administration is selling the idea as something that will continue for at least the next forty years as a selling point for destroying social security. It's is another case of their outrageous pomo up-is-downism.
Farhad Manjoo has written a definitive piece on this issue for Salon (cute day pass today) in which he points out that the slack jawed media has gulped down the entire meme and is regurgitating it whole:
The idea that blacks are being cheated by Social Security could prove to be a powerful rhetorical weapon for Republicans. Already, the media is falling for the story line. CNN, for example, broadcast a heart-tugging story Thursday that focused on the plight of the dependents of African-Americans who die young. The network interviewed Barbara Haile, a black woman whose husband died of cancer in 1997. He was 50 at the time of his death; through payroll taxes, he'd been contributing to Social Security for about 30 years. But because he hadn't reached retirement age, neither he (nor his dependents) were eligible to receive any money from Social Security.
Under the Bush plan, conservatives say, Haile would have been eligible to receive the money that her husband had been collecting in his "personal account," invested in the stock market. Because blacks (especially black men) have lower average life expectancies than whites (especially white women), the current system is unfair to them, Republicans contend, and private accounts would be a boon for them. Although CNN did interview supporters of the current system, the emotional upshot of its report was clear: Social Security screws poor black people and President Bush wants to help them out.
There's another side to this,too:
Anti-Social Security agitators such as Stephen Moore, who heads the Free Enterprise Fund, have taken to calling Social Security a "massive income redistribution program" that sucks money out of African-Americans' pockets and spits it out to whites.
Agitator is the right word. The African American constituency isn't going to fall for this nonsense. They've been handed this kind of flim-flam many times before and they are much too savvy to trust rich white men who try to dazzle them with BS. This stuff goes back a long, long way. Despite the fact that the history of reconstruction has been rightly revised to show that the "scalawags" of the era were not all despicable opportunists as they had been portrayed by southern apologists, it is true that there were southerners who used the newly freed slaves for their own political and profitable enterprises. Many African Americans may have been naive enough to believe their phony pitch one hundred years ago, but they aren't naive anymore. Stephen Moore is spitting into the wind if he thinks black Americans can't see through his little shuck and jive.
And they also aren't idiots. They know that grandma needs that check:
In a Social Security briefing paper, Shelton declares that "almost 80 percent of African Americans over age 65 depend on Social Security for more than half of their income, and more than half rely on it for 90 percent or more of their income." Basically, he writes, "without the guaranteed Social Security benefits they receive today, the poverty rate among older African Americans would more than double, pushing most African American seniors into squalor and poverty during their most vulnerable years."
But the main problem with the Republicans' argument that private accounts would be better for blacks than the current system is not that it's economically wrong. It's that it's gravely pessimistic. As the president took pains to point out in his State of the Union address, Social Security reform won't affect today's generation of retirees; it will benefit today's young people, who will retire 30 or 40 years from now. By that reasoning, conservatives are conceding that blacks will die young not only now but 40 years from now. Apparently, they aren't concerned about working to ensure that young African-Americans live as long and healthy lives as today's young white people.
Of course, that's because the main purpose of this phony sales pitch isn't really to gain the support of African Americans at all. These modern scalawags hope to gain the support of a few African Americans so that they can use their image to portray their plan as helping poor people.
This is racist on a number of levels, not the least of which is that the Bush administration has made a fetish of portraying themselves as "compassionate" toward the poor with images of adorable black children and high level tokenism. They know very well that the African American community is the most reliably Democratic constituency in the nation. They are not actually making a play for their votes. Their bogus imagery is racist because it has no substance in policy terms and is actually aimed at white suburban voters who mistrust the southern red-neck edge that defines the sound of the modern GOP.
This Social Security marketing campaign, however, takes it to an unprecedented level. The Republicans are trying to convince their suburban white voters that because blacks tend to die young from social causes (which they don't intend to fix,) they will be "helping" poor blacks if they vote for a privatization scheme (that will cut their guaranteed benefits.) It just doesn't get any more cynical than using white Americans' compassion to hurt black Americans --- or perhaps using phony white compassion to excuse hurting black Americans. This is low, even for them.
Here's a little Rovian epistemic relativism for all those staunch Republican southern heritage and new confederacy types to have fun sorting out:
Today's Republicans are modern scalawags who use blacks to get rich northern white votes. And just like the bad old days, you poor white fellas are going to get screwed too. Which side are you on, boys?