The nation’s debt is a good deal for Alan Simp­son and Ersk­ine Bowles, the lead­ers of the failed deficit com­mis­sion. The two are prof­it­ing per­son­al­ly by urg­ing fat cats and CEOs to sup­port their two-year-old, already-interred deficit reduc­tion plan.

For Simpson's 18 years in the Senate, U.S. taxpayers are giving him a pension of between $41,000 and $55,000 a year, which is two to three times more generous than a middle-class person would get in the private sector, if the worker were lucky enough to receive that now-rare benefit.

Simp­son, a for­mer Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor, and Bowles, a Mor­gan Stan­ley direc­tor, charge $40,000 a pop to pro­mote their reject­ed scheme to fix the debt by slash­ing Social Secu­ri­ty, Medicare and oth­er pro­grams for the mid­dle class. That means every time they speak, Simp­son and Bowles each pock­et more than 2.5 times the $15,000 that a typ­i­cal senior cit­i­zen gets from Social Secu­ri­ty in an entire year.

The Simp­son-Bowles per­son­al prof­it tour reveals that for them, for their cre­ation–the spe­cious­ly labeled Cam­paign to Fix the Debt–and for the CEOs, right-wing groups and Repub­li­cans ral­ly­ing round them, the effort has noth­ing to do with deficits or fix­ing any­thing. For them, it’s all about per­son­al prof­it. And if their per­son­al gain costs the vast mid­dle class any sense of retire­ment secu­ri­ty after a life­time of pay­ing into these earned ben­e­fit pro­grams, well Simp­son-Bowles & Co. are just fine with that.

Simp­son is the avatar for those wail­ing, ​“fix the debt,” while demand­ing spe­cial deals for them­selves. In 1996 as a Sen­a­tor need­ing sup­port from senior cit­i­zens, Simp­son offered an amend­ment not­ing that 60 per­cent of them depend­ed on Social Secu­ri­ty for at least half of their income. It specified:

Social Secu­ri­ty ben­e­fi­cia­ries through­out the nation deserve to be reas­sured that their ben­e­fits will not be sub­ject to cuts and their Social Secu­ri­ty pay­roll tax­es will not be increased as a result of leg­is­la­tion to imple­ment a bal­anced bud­get amendment.

Now, when he’s a shill bag­ging $40,000 a speech from busi­ness groups and CEOs, he calls Social Secu­ri­ty recip­i­ents ​“greedy geezers,” and scorns the pro­gram cher­ished by the mid­dle class, call­ing it ​“a milk cow with 310 mil­lion tits.”

Easy for Simp­son to say. For his 18 years in the Sen­ate, U.S. tax­pay­ers are giv­ing him a pen­sion of between $41,000 and $55,000 a year, which is two to three times more gen­er­ous than a mid­dle-class per­son would get in the pri­vate sec­tor, if the work­er were lucky enough to receive that now-rare benefit.

The CEOs Simp­son and Bowles lined up to front their bogus Cam­paign to Fix the Debt exhib­it the same behav­ior. An exam­i­na­tion by the Insti­tute for Pol­i­cy Stud­ies found that the 71 CEOs of pub­lic com­pa­nies endors­ing the cam­paign have set aside for them­selves an aver­age of $9 mil­lion in retire­ment funds from their cor­po­ra­tions. That would pay each $110,000 a month for life after age 65.

These CEOs are care­less, how­ev­er, about their work­ers’ retire­ments. Forty-one promise pen­sions to work­ers, but only two cor­po­ra­tions have suf­fi­cient assets to meet those oblig­a­tions. The remain­ing 39 car­ry a com­bined pen­sion deficit of $103 billion.

These CEOs, the very ones who’ve accu­mu­lat­ed those mas­sive deficits, are telling the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment how to solve its bud­get prob­lems. Right.

These CEOs take care of their own retire­ments, short­change their work­ers’ pen­sions, then demand that the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment cut Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare, the only oth­er retire­ment pro­grams for the mid­dle class. These earned ben­e­fit pro­grams are life­savers to the 27 per­cent of Amer­i­cans have no pen­sion and no retire­ment sav­ings at all.

But that’s not all, folks! These CEOs want their Bush tax cuts for the rich pre­served as well as new breaks for their cor­po­ra­tions. In an ear­li­er study of the Fix-the-Debt cor­po­ra­tions, the Insti­tute for Pol­i­cy Stud­ies found the pub­licly held com­pa­nies – at that time 63 – stood to gain $134 bil­lion if Con­gress approved their demand for a ter­ri­to­r­i­al tax sys­tem exempt­ing off­shore prof­its from Amer­i­can taxes.

Pro­long­ing tax cuts for the rich and cre­at­ing a new tax loop­hole for cor­po­ra­tions that off­shore jobs would, of course, increase the debt.

Gold­man Sachs, whose CEO Lloyd Blank­fein is a plat­inum card mem­ber of the bogus Fix the Debt group, would pock­et $3.3 bil­lion under a ter­ri­to­r­i­al tax sys­tem. Yeah, Lloyd’s for that. Mean­while, he insists Amer­i­ca ​“low­er people’s expec­ta­tions” about their social safe­ty net programs.

Blank­fein joined Simp­son and Bowles last week in blitz­ing the media with demands that the mid­dle class suf­fer so the rich and cor­po­ra­tions can keep – and enhance – their spe­cial deals. This CEO whose Wall Street Bank helped crash the econ­o­my and cost tax­pay­ers bil­lions in bailouts, said in a Nov. 19 inter­view on CBS News:

The retire­ment age has to be changed. Maybe some of the ben­e­fits have to be affect­ed. Maybe some of the infla­tion adjust­ments have to be revised. But in gen­er­al, enti­tle­ments have to be slowed down and contained.

That is the pre­scrip­tion for the mid­dle class, earn­ing a medi­an $50,000 a year, from a man who pulled down $16.1 mil­lion last year and whose bank con­tributed mas­sive­ly to the fed­er­al deficits with its reck­less finan­cial gambling.

For him, for Simp­son and Bowles, for the CEOs who have ponied up $60 mil­lion to bankroll the bogus Cam­paign to Fix the Debt, the bot­tom line is per­son­al prof­it. They don’t give a damn about the debt. They don’t give a damn about the Unit­ed States. They real­ly don’t give a damn about the mid­dle class. It’s not the Simp­son-Bowles Cam­paign to Fix the Debt; it’s the Simp­son-Bowles & Co. Cam­paign to Rig the Debt for the rich. And those slick huck­sters Simp­son and Bowles will make a buck on it win or lose.

Full dis­clo­sure: The Unit­ed Steel­work­ers union is a spon­sor of In These Times.