“You’re thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money’s not here. Your money’s in Joe’s house . . .(to one of the men) . . . right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin’s house, and a hundred others. Why, you’re lending them the money to build, and then, they’re going to pay it back to you as best they can.”

Christmas season is “It’s a Wonderful Life” season, and anyone who has seen that movie — which ought to be pretty much everyone by now — will remember Jimmy Stewart’s plain-spoken explanation of banking, delivered to angry customers who have begun a run on the bank where he works.

Today it’s the Bush administration that’s started a run on the institution of Social Security. And so far no one in Washington has had the gumption or the forthrightness to get up, like Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey, and tell the American people what’s really going on.

The Democrats have long been accused of overstating the case in defense of the Social Security system and “scaring seniors” by warning them that the evil Republicans are going to cut their benefits. Seniors may not, in fact, be in too much trouble — but people in their mid-’40s like me, and anyone younger, have every reason to fear.

What am I so worked up about? This piece in yesterday’s New York Times, headlined “Bush’s Social Security Plan Is Said to Require Vast Borrowing.” Richard W. Stevenson’s article is a highly problematic example of pseudo-objective “on the one hand, on the other hand” journalism — but even through the haze of official mendacity, the message is clear.

For months — years, if you go back to the 2000 election cycle — serious economists have been saying that there is no way to pay for President Bush’s scheme to privatize part of the Social Security system without running up huge deficits. At this point in Bush history, of course, the huge deficits have arrived even without “reforming” Social Security. So the Bush line now appears to be: Hey, “vast borrowing” hasn’t hurt us yet; what’s a few huge deficits more?

As the economist Herbert Stein famously said, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

Let’s recap some of the history here: The Social Security time-bomb — a side-effect of the Baby Boom demographic bulge passing through the employment lifecycle — was evident a generation ago, certainly by the waning years of the Reagan administration. Bipartisan efforts — including the first President Bush’s acceptance of a tax increase, despite his famous “Read my lips” promise — set the nation’s finances on course again. By the late ’90s we began racking up significant budget surpluses.

These surpluses were supposed to be set aside to keep Social Security solvent for us and our children. That was the famous “lock box” that Al Gore was unfairly derided for talking about. This money wasn’t “ours,” as George Bush fatuously and insidiously told the nation in 2000, justifying his call for tax cuts. It was cash that had been raised to solve a long-term problem.

Bush and his team broke open the lock-box and handed the cash out, mostly to the wealthiest tier of Americans, and began running up deficits like there was no tomorrow. Now they want us to buy into a fraudulent scheme to hand chunks of the nation’s obligations to future retirees into 401k-like private investment accounts. But since the money today’s workers now pay in Social Security taxes actually pays today’s retirees, any cash diverted to such investment accounts will have to be made up somehow.

Bush’s answer? Charge it!

In theory, the economists who like this privatization scheme see it as a way to boost the nation’s total savings, which is a good thing for the economy and should increase long-term growth, ultimately helping put the federal budget back on track. But, er, if the feds are borrowing the money for the citizens to save, then there’s no real increase in total savings, and no long-term benefit — as Stevenson’s article lays out. All we get are bigger and bigger deficits as far as the eye can see, with the looming possibility that, sooner or later, our lenders will grow tired of the game, and we’ll face a catastrophic drop in the dollar, a skyrocketing inflation rate, and the prospect, at worst, of a Weimar-like fiscal collapse.

Meanwhile, what are we taking this huge risk for? For the sake of letting individual investors take a modest portion of their retirement money and put it into mutual funds? Of course, we’ve recently had a national refresher course in how the mutual fund industry works; even without crooked kickbacks and such, the service fees eat up a significant chunk of the ostensible advantage you get from investing long-term in stocks over more conservative choices. And those financial advisers who love to tout the long-term advantage of stock investments are rarely willing to come clean on the risk to retirees: Growing older is not a choice, and if you’re unlucky enough to need to retire during a market downswing, you will not find much consolation in knowing that your portfolio would have averaged out a winner if you’d only had another decade or two.

In the long term, stocks may be better; but as a famous economist once said, in the long term, we’re all dead, too. The long term is always iffy. That’s why the best retirement safety nets are built out of safer materials than stock-market investments — and why Social Security should be kept out of the hands of the brokers.

Consider this other piece from yesterday’s Times, in which Mary Williams Walsh explains a little-known paradox of the pension world: It seems that, despite the woes so many pension funds now face, a handful of them have managed to prosper by choosing conservative, safe long-term investments. Meanwhile, the pension funds that are in trouble are those that chose riskier stock-market portfolios. Imagine that! This, of course, is precisely the course that Bush wants to put Social Security on. In a better world, Walsh’s piece would have been put on the Times front page right next to Stevenson’s, as a cautionary counterpoint to the president’s folly.

Everyone in Washington knows we need to fix Social Security. But the Bush approach, while it could win support in the short term in a Republican-dominated Congress, is a long-term disaster. The worst scenario here is one that no one in the administration would ever admit to, but if you listen in on the loony right fringes (who are closer than ever now to the levers of power) you’ll hear it: The idea is that if we undermine Social Security enough today, when the fiscal train-wreck hits tomorrow the government won’t have any choice but to scrap the retirement system entirely — fulfilling, finally, the dreams of its original die-hard Republican opponents, who saw FDR’s pledge to America’s working families as an evil efflorescence of socialism.

The Bush economists are ready to begin the dismantling. Wall Street is teeming with brokers slavering to get the commissions on this vast new influx of accounts. And, just when we can no longer count on Social Security to cushion our retirements, the borrowing the Bush plan demands will spark inflation or undermine the dollar or both, devaluing whatever savings we may have been counting on to augment those Social Security checks.

Maybe seniors — and the rest of us — should be scared.

A little of my recent reading:

## A wonderful piece about SpaceWar, the ur-computer game, by Stewart Brand from Rolling Stone, 1972. (Yes, 1972.) Also about: that thing we would someday call the computer revolution. [Courtesy Metafilter.]

## Inspiring interview with Howard Rheingold from Business Week. I first met Howard around the time his “Virtual Communities” book came out, and he was starting a column at the S.F. Examiner, where I then worked. I interviewed him for the Examiner (you can read it here) back then, and what I said about him still, I think, applies: “His blend of enthusiasm tempered with inquisitive caution distinguishes him from both starry-eyed techno-hucksters and atavistic technophobes.” Here’s what’s on his mind today:

Take that, Francis Fukuyama!

## Having linked to Brand and Rheingold I must now complete the Whole Earth trifecta with a general bow in the direction of Kevin Kelly and his wonderful Cool Tools site, and in particular to the great compendium of documentaries, or “True Films,” that he and his contributors have compiled.

## Here’s a fun illustration of how hard it is to keep your brain’s parallel-processing working right when the verbal and visual cues are contradicting one another. Then click on the site’s comments button for an illustration of what it looks like when people’s brains aren’t working at all. [link courtesy Sam Ruby]

My musical find of the last few months, and an album whose melancholy vitality has helped me through the post-election letdown: The Long Winters‘ “When I Pretend to Fall.”

I can’t even remember how I got pointed in this band’s direction. The music at first sounds like fairly typical alt/indie fare (the album opener, “Blue Diamonds,” reminiscent of Spoon), but a couple of listens and John Roderick’s songs start to burrow into your psyche. It’s all good, but there are three gems: “Cinnamon,” whose warm luster — that’s REM’s Pete Buck on mandolin — swaddles the singer’s grief (”I clung to the stretcher, I drew them a heart”); “It’ll Be a Breeze,” a simple acoustic love song that cuts to the core, like a Dashboard Confessional ditty that’s been through something harrowing; and “New Girl,” a rollicking 1-5-4 rocker with mischievous lyrics (”Twice you burned your life’s work / Once to start a new life / And once just to start a fire”) and a bridge of escalating taunts.

Go ahead, there’s free MP3s here, though sadly not of any of those songs.

If all that weren’t enough, check out the cover’s 1970s typography and gnarly rainbow-as-Gordian-knot graphic.

I took some heat from the attendees at Supernova earlier this year for my skepticism about the whole bloggers-in-corporate-America thing. Yes, there are examples, mostly in the tech industry, of smart, energetic bloggers (and blogging execs) who have brought a human face to their companies, and who serve as corporate ambassadors to the blogosphere. Grand — it’s a smart move for both the individual bloggers and the companies. Someday, you might even see this model spread. But beyond the confines of an industry like software — in which many of the individual workers are highly skilled, highly paid, mobile and relatively confident of their own re-employability — it will happen a lot more slowly than the rhetoric at blogging conferences these days suggests.

Outside of the tech industry, and a few pockets here and there like law and medicine and library science, blogging remains an inscrutable anomaly, less likely to be seen by an employer as a PR plus than as an HR nightmare. Corporate America is still, outside of a few islands of enlightenment (and pragmatism in the face of a chaotic world), all about control — controlling the message, controlling costs, controlling the employee’s life to the extent that the company is able. (It’s the same spirit our “CEO President” is bringing to his current reorg.)

Here are two recent examples illustrating my point, from opposite ends of the power hierarchy. Mark Cuban — the wealthy dot-com mogul who now blogs and owns his own basketball team — is about as independent and autonomous as bloggers come. If anyone can blog without fear of reprisal from his industry, it’s someone like him, right? But here he is, getting fined for a blog posting. This is the appalling, outrageous post that raised the NBA’s ire. I’m a total sports ignoramus, but as far as I can tell, Cuban wasn’t supposed to raise a public complaint about his league’s idiotic decision to hold its opening day on Election Day because — well, why, exactly? Is it just, like, unsportsmanlike? Did Cuban violate the league’s omerta? In any case, so much for transparency, conversations and all the other blogosphere values.

But Cuban’s punishment is pretty trivial compared with the plight of sometime Delta flight attendant Ellen Simonetti, who got fired for posting pictures on her blog that only the Taliban could find offensive. Now, Simonetti’s case has gotten a lot of attention, and it’s certainly possible she’ll be able to turn her ex-employer’s stupidity to her advantage. But losing your job is no fun, and whatever the outcome of her saga, her company threw down a gauntlet to all her former colleagues: Blog at your own risk — we’re watching your every step.

So it’s not just newspaper workers who are being told their employment precludes them from having the right to keep an online journal. It’s people in all walks of life. And it’s not just the people at the bottom of the pyramid who meet resistance. There’s a deep and strong unwillingness in the business world to give up habits of secrecy and control. Maybe it’s just inertia. But I don’t see these walls toppling easily, or without a big fight.

So at long last we have upgraded our home phone system to a multiple-handset cordless thingie (5.8 gigahertz so it doesn’t interfere with the Wifi), and so far I’m generally pleased. Except for one annoyance.

But let me start at the beginning. I’m left-handed, so the button arrangement on my Motorola cell phone has always been a problem: the green “on” button that you have to hit to answer a call is on the right side of the phone, where a right-handed person’s thumb naturally falls; but my thumb just wants to push the red “hangup” button instead. I had to train myself when I first started using this phone to override my natural tendency — or, really, the interface design’s nudge — to hit that button and hang up on the call I was trying to answer.

Ah well — I got over it. Only now, I’m dealing with the nifty cell-phone-like handset of my new cordless phone, and, what do you know, it places its “hangup” button over on the right side of the handset — at the very spot I have forcibly trained my uncooperative left-handed thumb to hit to pick up the phone. (The “pick up the call” button is in the middle of the phone.)

All my life as a left-hander I’ve been willing to adapt. But we sinister types deserve a little consistency from the world!

## Oliver Willis (who I met last year at the first Bloggercon) is having fun dreaming up pithy ads for “Brand Democrat.”

## Merlin Mann of 43 Folders offers some good tips on breaking thru writer’s block — not my particular affliction, thankfully, but the advice is useful for all sorts of creative logjams.

## Reason #5637 to love RSS: I knew that NPR offered RSS feeds, but only recently did I realize that they’ve intelligently broken up shows like “Fresh Air” into individual segments — so that, for instance, I can listen to my friend David Edelstein’s movie reviews even when I don’t have a full hour to hear the whole show.

Earlier this year I wrote about the book project I’ve been working on. For the past six months I’ve been splitting my time between Salon and work on the book. That’s been great but, as you might imagine, at times I’ve felt my world to be a little…bifurcated. (Since I’m a father of twins, this is not an unfamiliar sensation.) And there’s no way to write a book — none that I know of, anyway — without putting your back into it, 100 percent.

So beginning this week, I’m stepping aside from my job at Salon. It’s a highly orderly transition: I’ve planned it for some time, my colleagues and friends at Salon have been great about giving me the freedom to do it, and I expect to return when I’m done — but for now, the book is my work. After nine years (I left the San Francisco Examiner for Salon at the beginning of October, 1995, and we went live on the Web on Nov. 13 of that year), I’m ready for a creative sabbatical.

This blog will continue pretty much in its current form, with the usual spasms and lapses in posting, but the mix of entries may change a bit — in this post-election period, I’ll probably be posting less on politics (hey, the War Room is still on the case!) and more on the subject of the book: the nature of computer programming and software development. Why it’s still so hard to build the stuff that runs our world. And what interesting ideas are out there to make things better.

I won’t be writing the book in public here on the blog. I’m in awe of those people who seem able to blog full-time about the subjects of their books-in-progress, and I admire experiments in wiki-style open editing like J.D. Lasica’s. But I’m still a linear sort of guy at heart; if I’m able to do what I plan on doing, this book will be something more than the sum of its parts, and I can’t imagine how to roll it out piecemeal without altering its nature. I also don’t see how I’ll ever get the writing done if I put too much of my energy into blogging about it. But I certainly expect to be opening up some of the topics as I tackle them. And I know I’m gathering for more material than I will ever be able to include in the final text.

I’m profoundly lucky to be exploring this subject at a moment in history when throngs of thoughtful programmers have adopted the Web as a public space to talk about their work. It makes my work almost too easy.

Except that some time soon I have to stop collecting great notes and URLs and interviews and start, uh, writing.

J.D. Lasica and others have begun building Ourmedia, a/k/a Open-Media.org, “an open-source initiative devoted to creating, sharing and storing works of personal media” — “a place where people can share works of personal media and have them stored forever — for free.” It’s a work in progress right now, but the basic notion of an accessible and reliable (thanks to the Internet Archive) repository for “grassroots media” — “digital stories, photo albums, video diaries, documentary journalism, home-brew political ads, music videos, children’s tales, Flash animations, student films, parodies of Hollywood films” — makes wonderful sense. There’s a wiki here for people interested in contributing.

Rebecca McKinnon, a fellow at the Berkman Center who describes herself as “a recovering TV reporter-turned-blogger,” has sparked the formation of Bloggercorps. The nonpartisan group’s mission is “Matching bloggers with activists and non-profit groups who want to blog and need help getting started.” Here’s more info.

I read this New York Times op-ed by Iranian Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi with great interest. Ebadi complains about the absurd U.S. Treasury Department rules that prevent American publishers from commissioning or editing work by people in Iran:

We encountered this ridiculous regulation here at Salon a couple of years ago in trying to pay a reporter who was spending time in Iran. Applying the rules of trade embargos to informational products is not only silly, it’s counterproductive to the United States’ larger global effort. We should be working hard to open up the flow of information into and out of these so-called axis-of-evil nations — not behaving like petty dictators eager to clamp down on the free reporting of news and expression of ideas.

Oh, wait, that is the order of the day for our new, improved, “mandate”-driven democracy. I guess it all makes sense.

Cory Doctorow’s reports for the Electronic Frontier Foundation from the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) meeting in Geneva are fascinating for what they illuminate at this bizarre crossroads of global bureaucracy and globalized corporatocracy. But most peculiar of all is his tale of how “all of the handouts set out by the ‘public interest’ groups (e.g., us, civil society coalition, IP Justice, Union for the Public Domain) were repeatedly stolen and pitched into the trashcans in the bathrooms.”

Here’s an excerpt of the full saga: