By Phil E. Benjamin

The 39-year-old National Council of Senior Citizens (NCSC) was retired last year in favor of the Alliance for Retired Americans (ARA), an organization newly-created by the AFL-CIO. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said that the ARA will "become a strong and effective voice for older and retired workers, an organization that will speak out for progressive public policies."

Medicare and beyond

The NCSC and other senior groups have focused their firepower on protecting and expanding the federal Medicare program. This is even more important, given the desire by the Republican Party to privatize the entire Medicare program, handing it over to insurance carriers and their health maintenance organizations (HMOs).

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party, under the control of its right-of-center forces, did not disagree with that direction. They did, however, agree to relatively strict control and oversight of the federal dollars that would be given to these insurance carriers/HMOs to run portions of the Medicare program.

The Clinton administration, while encouraging privatization, did make it possible to discover widespread corruption by the insurance carriers/HMOs who were receiving tens of millions of federal dollars, as well as hospitals seeing Medicare recipients. The ARA will be working tirelessly to document the outrageous activities of the Bush White House and Republicans in Congress and their attempts to deliver Medicare to their corporate supporters.

ARA in the political arena

Retired workers will not be limiting their activities to protecting just what affects them. The stealing of the 2000 presidential election showed how an army of retirees could have guarded the ballot boxes from the Jeb Bush operatives.

We learned that it is only a portion of the struggle to register and get people to vote. The Republican Party's coup was successful because they occupied the election venues and got the votes counted their way.

Starting right now, local and state labor councils should be holding training sessions for all of its retirees on how to make sure that the election fraud of 2000 will not happen again.

The potential of retirees is limitless. Phone banks, house-to-house/apartment-to-apartment canvassing and tabling at malls - these are just a few of day-to-day activities that are possible. Let's galvanize the ARA so that the disastrous results of the 2000 presidential election will not be repeated.