September 21, 2005
Joe Conason Dissects Bush's Post-Katrina Decline, and Reveals Bush's "New" Deal as Just a "Raw Deal"
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
It was there. Everybody saw it. You couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened. ... The second piece of it was, it was a simple story, and it ended up having a very compelling symbol, which was "Brownie." "Brownie" – Michael Brown – became the symbol of this failure, the symbol of the incompetence, and the symbol of the lack of integrity of Bush’s government.
... He’s just not up to the job in a lot of ways. That’s the thing people have been forced to confront in the wake of this particular disaster, because, again, the break is so obvious. The failure is so undeniable. The fact that Bush would appoint somebody like Michael Brown and all the other people they put in FEMA who have no experience and no competence, [is] a betrayal of his office, and an unforgivable act on his part.
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Joe Conason is one of BuzzFlash's journalist heroes. He and Gene Lyons wrote the definitive book on the right wing's initial effort to overthrow a democratically elected government in The Hunting of a President. In Raw Deal, Conason reveals the fraudulent bait-and-switch gambit that Rove and Norquist (with the help of the ubiquitous GOP "framer," Frank Luntz) are trying to pull off: they'll have Bush talk of "strengthening" Social Security, while taking steps to bring about its demise. The only people that would be ensured of prosperity under Bush's plan are Wall Street brokers. Under Bush, one of America's great success stories would become one of its riskiest adventures, leaving many senior citizens destitute. Social Security accomplished the unthinkable. It turned the seniors of America, as a group, into one of the more secure populations in our country. Before Social Security, the elderly were without any guaranteed support system. Now the Busheviks want to convert social security for our seniors into social insecurity.
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BuzzFlash: You wrote an article in Salon magazine, "The Bitter Lessons of Four Years." It seems that, for the moment, at least, the mainstream press is finally being critical of Bush. In fact, there was a lacerating article in Newsweek and a critical one in Time like there just hasn’t been before. What it is about Hurricane Katrina that seemed to put some cracks in the Teflon coating that had been protecting Bush?
Joe Conason: A number of things about the Katrina disaster have harmed Bush’s reputation very badly. One is the undeniable failure of the federal government to perform its responsibilities, and the obvious suffering that that caused which one could not turn away from. It was there. Everybody saw it. You couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened.
BuzzFlash: It was on TV.
Joe Conason: It was on TV, it was on the radio, in the newspapers. And the reporters themselves were down there. I would not underestimate the effect of journalists themselves having to confront the consequences of the government’s failure.
BuzzFlash: And the federal government wasn’t down there, they were failing to be there.
Joe Conason: Right. The second piece of it was, it was a simple story, and it ended up having a very compelling symbol, which was Brownie. And "Brownie" – Michael Brown – became the symbol of this failure, the symbol of the incompetence, and the symbol of the lack of integrity of Bush’s government. So I think those two things – having to confront the reality and having a very clear and personal symbol of that reality in the form of Brownie – were two things that kind of broke through the usual Teflon that has protected Bush for so long.
BuzzFlash: The Democrats have always been horrified to criticize Bush on the credibility, character, national security leadership issues. But his reaction to this domestic tragedy was almost exactly the same as his reaction to the tsunami tragedy, where he kind of disappeared for two or three days. And suddenly people say: Well, why isn’t Bush doing anything about this? This is a worldwide tragedy. Tens of thousands of people have been killed, villages and cities and towns demolished.
Joe Conason: He’s just not up to the job in a lot of ways. That’s the thing people have been forced to confront in the wake of this particular disaster, because, again, the break is so obvious. The failure is so undeniable. The fact that Bush would appoint somebody like Michael Brown and all the other people they put in FEMA who have no experience and no competence, I think is considered even by some conservatives, as a betrayal of his office, and an unforgivable act on his part. When something like this happens on the domestic front, it makes it easier for people to criticize him without fearing that they’re going to be accused of being unpatriotic or some nonsense like that.
BuzzFlash: There was an astonishing paragraph in the Newsweek story where they said – I’m paraphrasing – that the President of the United States was less knowledgeable about what was going on in New Orleans than the average American who was watching television. And how could this happen? This is a national disgrace. I was just astonished! Why did Newsweek break out now?
Joe Conason: I think the disjunction between the reality that these journalists were seeing and the reality that the President was describing and in some ways ignoring, was so great that that the journalists were shocked. Even the most jaded people, the most jaded reporters who have absorbed the lies about Iraq and the amazing failure in 9/11, and so many other things that the President has misrepresented, or his aides have misrepresented – that this was so stark that it had that effect. I can’t tell you why so many people in the mainstream media allowed the obvious falsehoods about Iraq to pass, and that there was no accountability for that. I can’t explain that except to say that there’s a degree of laziness and cowardice in the media.
BuzzFlash: What you saw in the Newsweek and Time articles, and on television somewhat, was an insight at last into his character which was totally new for the mainstream media. The Newsweek piece was a devastating portrait of a person who was completely at odds with the spin that Bush is somehow a competent, decisive Commander-in Chief.
Joe Conason: Right. But don’t underestimate the effect that a falling popularity rating will have on the media’s estimation of any public figure. His numbers were already going down drastically before Katrina hit. The capacity of the press to perceive his shortcomings is greatly enhanced by the fact that he is now becoming very unpopular. Suddenly it’s possible for a senior writer at Newsweek or Time to notice that he isn’t the sterling character that he was once portrayed to be.
BuzzFlash: Nor the decisive character.
Joe Conason: Nor the competent.
BuzzFlash: Nor the amiable. Now he’s pretty snappish on the inside. He throws tantrums.
Joe Conason: That’s correct. All of a sudden, he’s not the nice guy anymore.
BuzzFlash: David Brooks, the conservative writer for The New York Times, has been quoted as saying that the Bush Administration widely acknowledges among themselves that their policy is to never admit a mistake. They will never say they did anything wrong. They will never apologize – this is just part of building up their image of "leadership." And yet with Katrina, for the first time, Bush, in his Presidency, said, to the extent the federal government didn’t fully do its job, I take responsibility. One could argue that, if you’re President of the United States, as Harry Truman said, the buck stops here. That’s inherent with the job. But for the Bush Administration, this was a groundbreaking statement. What happened?
Joe Conason: There were two choices. He could either deny reality and seem like he was nuts, by continuing to insist that nothing has ever gone wrong. Or he would have to make some sort of hedged and qualified confession, as he did, that, well, maybe something didn’t turn out very well. At some point, when something like 70% of the population has decided that you screwed up, standing there and denying it really doesn’t serve you very well. Again, it’s just the reality of the situation has intruded on their usual technique.
BuzzFlash: Let’s move on to your book, The Raw Deal:
How Bush Republicans Plan to Destroy Social Security and the Legacy of the New Deal. Social Security "reform"
is something Bush thought would be his great accomplishment this year for the right-wing. Your first chapter discusses how they planned to do this and why. In a nutshell, what is the right-wing beef with Social Security?
Joe Conason: The right wing dislikes Social Security for a lot of reasons. An important one is that it is an efficient, effective government program that benefits the vast majority of the people of the United States, and does so in a way that is really not open to the usual conservative attack of waste and mismanagement. It’s an entitlement program, which they also strongly dislike. And it provides a level of income security and protects people from the vicissitudes of the marketplace, which, of course, the right wing thinks we should all be at the mercy of. So it's for all of those reasons, and also because they now see in Social Security a potential bonanza for Wall Street interests by redirecting that money into private accounts. All of those things have made Social Security a target for the right.
BuzzFlash: You mentioned two sales techniques employed in the Bush Administration's war on Social Security – the "high-pressured sell" and the "new, improved model." Can you explain those a bit?
Joe Conason: As I mention in the Introduction to the book, they’ve used basically two classic sales techniques. One is what we call "new and improved,"" and the other is buy before it’s too late." And the buy before it’s too late is, of course, the technique of convincing people that Social Security is about to go bankrupt. It’s in a crisis. It’s going to fail. And therefore, we have to do something, and preferably do what they want us to do, before it’s too late. The new and improved is their description of their privatization plan, which is really not new nor improved. It’s the same kind of idea that Barry Goldwater tried to promote forty years ago. It would not improve Social Security at all.
This is a technique that Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, lays out in great detail in a memo that I quote extensively in the book. He shows Republicans that, if they can convince people that they will become rich or really prosper from privatization, then they will be able to sell this to their constituents. So it’s those two techniques combined – you have to do something about the alleged crisis; and the thing to do is to put in this new and improved system. These are really ways of deceiving people. In the same way, right after the President first took office in 2001, and named his commission to help him phase out Social Security, he called it the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security. Of course, it would have done nothing of the kind.
BuzzFlash: They also fine-tuned their language along the way. They switched from "privatization" to "personal accounts," and the mainstream press went along with this.
Joe Conason: Again, the same memo goes into great detail about how imperative it is that you can never use the word “privatization,” because it’s very unpopular. That’s a word that polls badly, whereas the word “personal” is a gentle, nice word that people like, and you can get away with that. Luntz tells the members of Congress in this memo that he fines anybody in his office who uses the word “privatize” in reference to Social Security. They have to pay him $50 every time they say that, and he urges all the members of Congress to do the same thing with their staff, so that no one will ever use that word again.
BuzzFlash: A lot of the corporate crony supporters of the Republican Party and particularly Wall Street would make out very well on this. Tell us a little about what it means economically to the supporters of the Bush party, which you detail in a chapter entitled “Wall Street’s Inevitable Trillion-Dollar Windfall.”
Joe Conason: An economist at the University of Chicago named Austan Goolsbee estimated the windfall profit that Wall Street firms would make if Social Security were partially privatized between now and, say, the next several decades. It comes to almost a trillion dollars. A trillion dollars in fees and other charges would accrue to Wall Street in profits. That is by far the greatest windfall in human financial history. It’s really hard to overestimate how much this would potentially be worth to the financial community if they could ever get it through – just an enormous amount of money. By the way, it’s money that would be directed to them in a mandatory fashion, you know. This would not be a matter of choice. Everybody would still be in this system, and the money would just be flowing to them – taken out of your paycheck. It’s, in a way, beyond their wildest dreams.
BuzzFlash: It’s a tithe for the corporate supporters, basically.
Joe Conason: That’s right.
BuzzFlash: The money belongs to the people, but here, it would be going to Wall Street. And we know with securities, there’s ongoing fees and there’s turning.
Joe Conason: Right. Some of them are going to rob you, too, as happened in England. When their Social Security in Britain was privatized twenty years ago, they ended up with tremendous frauds. Now I’m not saying that the people who are promoting Social Security now want to commit a fraud. But certainly they know that there’s a grave risk of fraud, typically against less experienced investors and people who might not know better. That doesn’t bother them. They’re willing to countenance that risk.
BuzzFlash: Are the Ken Lays among them and the Tyco heads among them?
Joe Conason: Well, American International Group, which is one of the biggest promoters of this and has given a lot of money to the Cato Institute to promote privatization, is under investigation now and the CEO was forced to resign. So, yes, that is a very live issue.
BuzzFlash: In some way, Social Security became Bush’s domestic policy version of Hurricane Katrina. The more he went out and marketed the privatization of Social Security, the lower his plan fell in the polls.
Joe Conason: That’s true.
BuzzFlash: With each trip, it just got worse. So what happened? Why did Bush run into a brick wall when it came to Social Security, when the Democrats just caved on his other initiatives?
Joe Conason: Some Democrats caved. I wouldn’t say they all did. But in this case, one of the important things that happened is that the Democrats stood fast against it. It was very hard to blur and confuse the issue on Social Security, the way they had been able to do with the tax cuts and a lot of their other policies. I think that the solidarity of the Democrats in defending Social Security has been tremendously important and frustrated Bush. And I think the Republicans understand that Social Security is a proven program that really has broad, broad benefits to society. Even people who aren’t getting Social Security benefit from it, because their parents are getting it, or some other loved one is getting it. For example, my Dad has been getting Social Security for years now. He’s in his nineties, and he would be in a lot of trouble without Social Security, and it would be a great burden on my sister and me if he did not have that support. That kind of example is prevalent across the entire society, because people understand what Social Security is. They know it works. They know it has benefited them and their families. They feel very wary of anybody would try to take it away from them or change it in ways that seem risky.
BuzzFlash: One of our contentions, Joe, is that Frank Luntz was outwitted back in the thirties when the name was selected, and that the name Social Security is a pretty hard one to run against.
Joe Conason: It’s a great name.
BuzzFlash: It’s like something Frank Luntz would think up, and then when he has to run against it, it's sort of like saying: gosh darn it, someone took that domain name already.
Joe Conason: The other thing, of course, was that the Republicans predicted from the beginning that it wouldn’t work, as I discuss in the book. In the 1936 campaign, Alf Landon basically said that Social Security was a Ponzi scheme and people would never be paid the money they had been promised. So people have heard this for many, many years. And yet it has worked for seventy years, and it has worked and served the country very well, and pulled the elderly out of poverty to a degree that I think nobody imagined at the beginning would be possible. So it is something that is quite well established and very tough to knock down.
BuzzFlash: In fact, in terms of social impoverishment it turned things topsy-turvy in the United States. With the implementation of Medicare and Social Security, seniors - who had formerly been the most impoverished - became the most secure, as compared to the young people.
Joe Conason: Correct. And that’s one of the reasons we need national health insurance.
BuzzFlash: The name of your book, The Raw Deal, is a play on the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s "The New Deal." The New Deal represented a social contract promising that America as a community would look out for its citizens, coming on the heels of the Great Depression. Isn’t it ironic that an Administration that says it doesn’t believe in evolution, but wants "intelligent design" to be taught in the schools, has political policies based on social darwinism and the survival of the fittest?
Joe Conason: I do think that’s ironic. But of course, that’s no more ironic than the fact that they claim to promote the gospels, and yet think that it’s the poor who should be suppressed and that the rich are God’s chosen. I find many ironies in their professed beliefs, compared to the social policies that they promote.
BuzzFlash: In the last chapter of The Raw Deal, you talk about strengthening Social Security. What are some ways that this can be done?
Joe Conason: The most important thing to do, both for reasons of solvency and equity, is to change the tax structure of Social Security to allow us to raise the cap on payments into the system. Right now, wages are taxed for Social Security purposes only up to $90,000. Anybody who earns more than $90,000, no matter how much they earn, does not pay more than that into Social Security. So that needs to change. That is the most popular solution to any solvency issues Social Security may have, and the results are the most equitable. That’s the issue that will have to be confronted if and when changes are going to be made to the system.
I don't think changes need to be made now anyways. But as time goes on, and there’s further discussion about how this system needs to be made more secure and its solvency assured far into the future, I think raising the cap on those taxes will be the most important step. Other steps discussed in the book that some wise economists have proposed are also worth considering. They include things like taking some portion of the trust fund and putting them in equities, which is a proposal that came up when Clinton was President. It seems to me that that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
BuzzFlash: But as an aggregate pool, not as individuals.
Joe Conason: That’s correct. It's what state pension funds do, for example. When the subject comes up, Republicans act as if we would suddenly be living in the old Soviet Union if we did that. In fact, almost every state in the country has a public employee pension fund that invests in the markets, and usually does so with considerable success for the benefit of their employees. I don’t see any reason why, if you want to increase the return on their trust funds, you would not invest some of it in equities. That’s my personal opinion. I’m not an accountant..
BuzzFlash: The bottom line in this for us is that the right-wing proposal for Social Security "reform" isn’t about security. It’s about increased risk. They are proposing to make Social Security less secure. Of course they aren’t saying that.
Joe Conason: These are the kinds of distortions and deceptions that I examine in some detail.
BuzzFlash: On a practical level, anyone who’s ever played the stock market knows that this can only lead to increased risk, and to some seniors ending up without any money whatsoever.
Joe Conason: In fact, the meaning of "privatizing" is that there will be a risk curve that will inevitably leave some people without anything. Now they claim that they want to have a proposal that would actually protect people against that in some way. But the President has never come forth with a specific detailed proposal for any of this. He has basically handed off the dirty work to Congress. There are several bills in the hopper already in the House of Representatives, but the President has never had the courage of his convictions to come forward and say here’s exactly what we want to do. So really no one knows what kind of security or insecurity they would face under a Bush plan. There is no Bush plan at this point. T here are principles that you can derive from what they’re saying, and one of them is certainly that we would abandon real security in favor of risk.
BuzzFlash: The most fundamental goal of Grover Norquist, whose ideas are behind the right wing policy agenda, is to dismantle any social service support on which the general population relies.
Joe Conason: The poorest, most vulnerable people who’ve worked very hard all their lives and still have nothing – those are the type of people that Grover Norquist’s "tender mercy" would leave destitute.
BuzzFlash: The final question is kind of a PR question about how this is being handled. A couple times, George took his mom, Barbara, out, which nowadays always seems to be a bit dangerous. But he took his Mom out and she talked about how important George’s Social Security "reform" program was for the future of their grandchildren, as if they ever will need a penny from Social Security.
Joe Conason: Isn’t it hilarious? I thought that was the funniest thing I have ever seen.
BuzzFlash: What in the world is going on there?
Joe Conason: They hold the intelligence of the American people in utter contempt. Of course, she undermined her own credibility somewhat more with her recent comments about the refugees from the storm in Houston. But for her to go out and claim that the Bush family - which has amassed tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars one way or another over the years - is worried about how Social Security is going to be there for them and their grandchildren, was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
BuzzFlash: The family is all sucking on the breast of the Carlyle Group and profiting from government contracts.
Joe Conason: Phony capitalists don’t have to worry about Social Security. They’re going to be fine as long as they are permitted to suckle themselves.
BuzzFlash: Thank you, Joe. Great book and good luck with it.
Joe Conason: Thanks a lot.
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
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RESOURCES:
The Raw Deal: How Bush Republicans Plan to Destroy Social Security and the Legacy of the New Deal -- A BuzzFlash Premium
Joe Conason biography:
http://www.creators.com/opinion...
Joe Conason Talks with BuzzFlash.com About His New Book, Republican Hypocrisy and the Sins of the Mainstream Media -- A BuzzFlash Interview, August 1, 2003
"The bitter lessons of four years," Joe Conason, Salon.com, 9/11/05
Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth, Joe Conason
The Hunting of the President : The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (Paperback), Joe Conason and Gene Lyons