Before us is the most serious, well financed, and determined effort to undo the Social Security Act since its inception in 1935. For Americans to make sense of the conflicting messages on this topic, we must understand who is behind the campaign to “reform” Social Security, what this campaign aims to achieve, and how it misrepresents its goals.

The Bush administration and Wall Street lobbyists are exerting their best efforts at salesmanship. They have attempted to create a sense of urgency in the American public, using traditional marketing methods to sell us another colossal lie. Taking them up on their offer would mean cheating generations out of a program that has served our country well for decades, and bestselling author Joe Conason exposes why and how this is happening.

The Raw Deal: How the Bush Republicans Plan to Destroy Social Security and the Legacy of the New Deal explains the Right’s privatization goals, Bush’s hard-fought campaign built on a stacked “study”, the corporate interests behind those efforts, the media blitz to undermine confidence in Social Security, and how we can stop the swindle.

The Raw Deal includes a preface by James Roosevelt Jr., grandson of the creator of the New Deal, and a foreword by Al Franken, New York Times bestselling author and host of Air America’s “The Al Franken Show.”

Joe Conason is the bestselling author of Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth and co-author of The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton.

National correspondent for the New York Observer and investigative editor for The American Prospect, Conason also writes a weekly column for Salon.com, and his writing and reporting have appeared in Harper’s, The Guardian, The Nation, The New Republic, and many other publications. He appears frequently as a political commentator on television and radio and can be heard every Friday on Air America’s “The Al Franken Show.” He lives and works in New York City.