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[Charlie Hoyt <obrerista@rocketmail.com>]

                   A Tale of
                   Two
                   Citizens


   

  Have you ever heard of Dennis Hastert?
  How about Nancy McFadden? Probably
  not. In case you missed it, Dennis just
  managed to get himself elected to
  Speaker of the U.S. House of
  Representatives. Needless to say,
  Hastert's year is off with a bang. 

  As for Nancy, she works just a few miles
  down the road from Dennis, where she
  digs up and fixes water pipes for a living.
  She also pays her union and Labor Party
  dues. Nancy started off the year with a
  little surprise of her own. Only her
  surprise wasn't as nice as Hastert's.

  But first, let's introduce Dennis Hastert, who until this year held the
  title of Chief Deputy Republican Whip. He's a relatively unknown,
  six-term member of the House of Representatives from an Illinois
  Congressional district that takes in a good chunk of territory just
  west of Chicago. Before getting elected to Congress, Dennis spent
  six years in the Illinois State House, and before that he was a school
  teacher.

  Hastert's elevation to the coveted Speaker position was pretty
  quick. First, Newt Gingrich decided to hang it up after the
  Republican electoral flop last November. Right after that, Louisiana
  Republican Congressman Robert Livingston was ready to pick up
  the Speaker's gavel when it was disclosed that he had been quite a
  Casanova earlier in his career. Livingston quit the race, and the job
  fell into Dennis Hastert's lap. Happy New Year, Dennis!

  Since nobody ever heard of Dennis Hastert before all of this, and
  since he's now the leader of the Republican majority in Congress,
  just who is he? How does he vote? Who bankrolls his reelection
  campaigns? 

  BUSINESS LOVES DENNIS

  Here's the scoop: Hastert's election as Speaker earned him an
  article in the respected Congressional Quarterly magazine headlined,
  "Hastert wins high marks from the business community." CQ also
  says Hastert is "a solid conservative" who is "slightly to the right of
  Gingrich."

  As for his scores with groups that rate Congress, Hastert racked up
  a zero on the AFL-CIO legislative scorecard for 1997, and he's
  piled up a big 9 percent lifetime pro-worker rating from the
  federation. The United Auto Workers gave him a zilch for 1997 also.
  On the other hand, both the anti-labor U.S. Chamber of Commerce
  and the National Federation of Independent Business gave him
  perfect 100 percent ratings for 1997. 

  With a record that miserable, just who is financing this guy? You
  guessed it - big business. The Center for Responsive Politics
  reports that for the 1997–98 election cycle, Hastert raked in
  $62,200 from healthcare bosses, $59,990 from insurance kingpins,
  $48,099 from electricity moguls, $43,480 from telephone company
  bigwigs, $34,675 from greedy bankers, $28,100 from
  pharmaceutical outfits, $27,599 from entertainment operators, and
  another $78,400 from miscellaneous modern-day robber barons. 

  And in case you were wondering, Hastert managed to pick up
  $17,000 bucks in labor union PAC money, as of March 31, 1998.
  Yes, this guy gets some union money. After all, we had to buy that 9
  percent lifetime rating! (For the sake of balance, I should point out
  that Hastert's counterpart on the Democrat side, House minority
  leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri, also gets a wad of money from
  corporations - a lot more than he does from labor.)

  Hastert's new year started off with a nice fat 28 percent pay
  increase, boosting his annual salary to $171,500.

  And now, how about our other solid citizen, Nancy McFadden?
  Well, she's not so thrilled with the year so far. Like most working
  people, she's had her fill of the Lewinsky and impeachment
  craziness. What she's really worried about is Social Security and
  whether she'll be penniless in her old age. 

  The drumbeat for Social Security "reform" is getting louder and
  louder. But as you may remember, this isn't the first time Congress
  has gone after Social Security. Back in 1983, 185 Democrats and
  97 Republicans voted to approve Ronald Reagan's plan to raise the
  full Social Security retirement age from 65 to 67. Dems and
  Republicans in the Senate also went for the plan big-time. 

  As a result, Nancy McFadden now has to work until she's 67. She
  recently decided she wanted to figure out just how much that
  "reform" is going to cost her. She calculated her gross income
  through 2029, when she'll be 67, factoring in a 2.5 percent annual
  raise. (She prays that she won't be laid off, downsized, or injured.)
  And she assumed that her 6.2 percent share of the payroll tax for
  Social Security won't be going up.

  If Nancy works until age 67, she will have to pay an extra $10,352
  in Social Security taxes during those last two years. And if the
  politicians manage to jack up the retirement age to 70 - which
  many of them would like to do - she will end up working three
  additional years, paying in an additional $26,871 in Social Security
  taxes! At the age of 65, instead of collecting her hard-earned benefit
  and enjoying her retirement, she'll be out in a ditch digging up pipes.
  And still pumping major bucks into the system. But not to worry.
  She assures me that by then her boss will have found an excuse to
  replace her with what he likes to call "the young and the beautiful."

  MORE NICE NEWS FOR NANCY

  Well, Dennis and his friends in both parties are now hoping they can
  deliver some more happy news for Nancy and her retirement plans.
  Last March, Hastert voted - along with practically every Democrat
  and Republican in Congress - to create a bogus Commission that
  would "study" the nonexistent Social Security crisis. The problem
  with the Commission is that nearly every group in the study team
  favors some form of privatization. Hmm. I wonder what they're up
  to? 

  If Hastert and company can succeed in even partially privatizing
  Social Security, Nancy will have to spend the years leading up to
  retirement worrying about whether the stock market will drop and
  suck the life out of her Social Security check.

  Now you know why Dennis is smiling, and Nancy is not. In 1999, he
  gets the Speakership and a gigantic raise. She learns she may still be
  working in a ditch at the age of 70, and paying an extra $27,000 to
  do it.

  But Nancy hasn't given up yet. After all, she is a Labor Party
  member. In fact, Nancy McFadden has a message for everyone: Get
  out there and build the Labor Party's campaign to Save Social
  Security!

  Chris Townsend is Political Action Director of the United
  Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE).