A Social Security Rally at the Old Ball Game

Any time the two Los Angeles-area major league baseball teams—the Dodgers and Angels—play, it’s a guaranteed sellout. That was true even for a preseason exhibition game in early April. So what better location—a busy intersection outside Angel Stadium in Anaheim—for a big crowd of PSRPs to draw some attention to the issue of Social Security privatization. As baseball fans were heading to the game, PSRPs attending the conference down the road from the stadium waved signs, chanted and basically had a great time.

The location was picked partly because of the busy stadium location but also because Charles Schwab, one of the large Wall Street brokers backing the Bush administration’s private accounts plan, had an office nearby. Before the activists boarded buses to the rally, U.S. Rep. Hilda Solis addressed the conference. "We are under attack, and you ain’t seen nothing yet," she said. Fortunately, she added, the more the president talks about private accounts, the less popular the idea seems to become. "Let them know you don’t want them to touch Social Security."

Likewise in California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed radically overhauling, and cutting, the pension plan of the state’s public employees, including teachers and other educators. On a positive note, just a few days after the conference, Schwarzenegger announced that he will postpone his pension proposal for at least a year.

At the rally, Anaheim city council member Richard Chavez, a longtime firefighter and union leader, said privatizing Social Security would be "worse than death" for working families. "This president doesn’t care about working families." Declaring that "we want secure pensions for everybody," California Federation of Teachers president Mary Bergan warned that plans to overhaul a massive state pension plan

like that in her state won’t be limited to California. "If we don’t stop it here, it will go on to your communities, too."