Victory Over Social Security Privatization

December 2005

Why Americans Rejected Bush's Raw Deal on Social Security

President Bush's No. 1 domestic priority, privatization of Social Security, was stopped dead in its tracks in 2005. On Friday, December 2, the Campaign for America's Future held a forum at the National Press Club to remind the media about the citizen uprising—organized by CAF and Americans United to Protect Social Security—that made democracy work and turned the public against privatization.

You can watch video and read remarks from the session that featured political commentator Joe Conason, author of The Raw Deal: How the Bush Republicans Plan to Destroy Social Security and the Legacy of the New Deal, a hot new book on privatization, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake and CAF Co-Director Roger Hickey. They briefed reporters on the fight to protect Social Security and its effects on the 2006 mid-term elections.

Joe Conason

New York Observer Columnist, political commentator and bestselling author of The Raw Deal: How the Bush Republicans Plan to Destroy Social Security and the Legacy of the New Deal.

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Celinda Lake

President, Lake Research Partners and author of What Women Really Want: How American Women Are Quietly Erasing Political, Racial, Class, and Religious Lines to Change the Way We Live.

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Roger Hickey
Co-Director, Campaign for America's Future, founding board member of Americans United to Protect Social Security, and author of the important January 2003 memo: A Battle Progressives Can Win, published in The American Prospect, February 2005 (v16, no2):

"For progressives, the battle for Social Security represents a rare opportunity to stop the newly re-elected president dead in his tracks, to demonstrate the bankruptcy of his extreme conservative agenda, and to point to a new politics of "shared security" around which we can build a new majority for change. Winning won't be easy, but a powerful combination of progressive forces—national organizations, political funders and philanthropists, policy experts, and grassroots and online networks (including veterans of the 2004 elections)—are coming together."

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