Much has been heard about Social Security being “in crisis.” It isn’t. Very long term, there’s a potential problem if current longevity trends continue. We are living a lot longer, and sometime around 2040 there might be more people collecting than paying in. We shouldn’t ignore it altogether. But the so-called crisis isn’t why George W. Bush wants to gradually substitute private investment accounts for part of the trust fund. Like everything else in the Karl Rove White House, it’s a smokescreen.

Bush isn’t the sharpest tack on the bulletin board, needless to say, but his Wall Street friends have surely reminded him of what is bound to happen if a flood of new money pours into mutual funds and stocks all at once. That’s right…a bull market that will make the 1990s look tame. A new generation of Gordon Gekkos will proclaim that greed is good, indeed.

And that’s the whole point. Republicans have never forgiven Bill Clinton for anything. It’s not just about Monica Lewinsky. How unjust for Bush that a bull market in stocks ended just as Clinton left office! How unfair that the budget surplus under

From the beginning of the 2004 election the constituency of Democrat voters could be described as scared optimists. We willingly gave our money, time and effort and fought hard for a cause we ultimately lost. As we watched the campaign take its course, the hypocrisy of the Bush-Rove political machine alternately left us either slack-jawed or confounded with its hypocrisy, its deceit, and its determination to rewrite our freedom! This, of course began way before 9/11! Between the corporately funded propaganda collaborating with the media’s ludicrous political judgments, we felt as Sherlock Holmes, when he said, “I wonder how a battery feels when it pours electricity into a non-conductor!”

The new year promises a rich manure of hypocrisy and bad faith. Take the current tumult here in the United States about the U.N. high command and the oil-for-food imbroglio, which right-wing columnists are gnawing on with relish. There are no good guys here, just vistas of corruption and bad faith stretching into the distance.

Certainly, weep not for Kofi Annan, whose servility toward the imperatives of Empire was comically revealed in the very same press conference where a pertinacious journalist extorted from the reluctant secretary general the grudging admission that the war on Iraq was illegal. Later on, Annan offhandedly invoked "our allies," a term that should be alien to the lips of any U.N. secretary general but that accurately reflects political realities.

The private dealings of the Annan family may well be fragrant with corruption, but it's hard to get too excited about alleged skims off the oil-for-food deals against so vivid a backdrop as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, many of them infants, being starved to death or dying for lack of suitable medicines under the U.N. sanctions commanded by the United States.

I'm writing in response to your coverage of the Congressional protest of the clearly flawed Ohio 2004 vote count to point out that in contrast to 2004, in 2000, Senator Boxer was A.W.O.L. as was the rest of her democratic Senate coleagues. Our country is now suffering terribly and needlessly because of Bush's theft of the 2000 election. What happened in Ohio in 2004 is a sad continuation of what happened in Florida in 2000. Howver, unlike Kerry in 2004, Al Gore was clearly the people's choice in 2000 since he won both the popular vote and the electoral college vote. The truth will always be that Al Gore got the most votes in Florida and that Florida law required that the uncounted votes be counted. While Al Gore fought alone to have the uncounted Florida votes counted, Senator Boxer and the rest of her democratic Senate coleagues hid in their cushy, ivory Washington towers. It must never be forgotten that when it really mattered to stand up and defend our democracy from the Bush 2000 coup as their oath of office requires, Senator Boxer and her democratic Senate coleagues were A.W.O.L.