March 14, 2025 (EIRNS)—BlackRock, the world’s largest “asset manager” which sits at the center of Wall Street’s “military-industrial-financial complex,” organized a “Retirement Seminar” in Washington, D.C. on March 12, together with the Bipartisan Policy Center and the “news” agency, Semafor. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink launched his public drive for the privatization of Social Security at this “summit … of policymakers and leading Wall Street executives, including JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon,” as Semafor described it.
Social Security has been “politicized,” the Fink complained. People are afraid to talk about its “reform”; but not he. He called U.S. Social Security an inferior retirement model to the so-called “Australian model,” which he proposes U.S. lawmakers adopt. That is a system where compulsory “contributions” paid into private investment accounts labeled “retirement funds” (superannuation funds) by both employers and workers have created a slush fund currently estimated to be worth $2.6 trillion for global financier vultures to play with on the international markets. The speculators rake in the profits; the retirees eat any losses.
Fink objected to someone calling this “privatization,” on the grounds that the word makes the subject “toxic” to discuss. Social Security funds today are invested in very long-term U.S. Treasury bonds. Fink seems to think Americans are so stupid as to “feel that (they) have ownership” in the country. Things would be so much better if those funds instead went into the pockets of BlackRock and its cronies!
Not surprisingly, Pensions & Investments, the self-described “international newspaper of money management,” has published Bloomberg’s report that Alastair King, Lord Mayor of the City of London, announced in February that the City of London, too, is interested in adopting the Australian model.
There will be more to this story, including its links to Elon Musk’s DOGE drive to sink its budget-cutting claws into entitlements, including Medicare and Medicaid. EIR has begun assembling the files required to stop this drive cold, both first-hand reports from Australia and its own knowledge of such frauds going back to the LaRouche movement’s successful stopping of George Bush, Jr.’s attempt to adopt a similar scheme modeled on General Pinochet’s murderous Chilean Social Security privatization.