Republicans Bragging About Cutting/Getting Rid of Social Security at Debate at Reagan Library! (Suicide Girls Feel NO Pain?) Do the Inhumanes Now Run America? (Why Does Wall St. Encourage Parasites To Devour Your Pension & Retirement?) Hang the Bankers? (Ay, Caramba!)

SuicideGirls is what happens when young women learn that they are only valuable when they reveal their bodies on camera (while they are still young, of course). And they may never get any other job (let alone one that pays as well).

Rubio failed to mention that the Social Security Fund is solvent, not in a deficit, according to Social Security's own website - $2.7 trillion in surplus. The money seniors have paid into the system has paid for the program.

The Republican/NeoLib big lies about Social Security have started in earnest.

Be aware who benefits from these lies.

It will bring them mucho dinero and cost you the same. (And they hate hate hate anyone who understands/speaks Spanish - including their own candidates - notice Jebbie's poll numbers? Poor Columba! Remember when they believed she was a plus? He's gonna have to run as a Dim!)

OpEdNews 9/3/2015 at 11:51:28

Presidential Candidates Will Break Reagan-O'Neill Social Security Deal Even at Upcoming Reagan Library Debate

By Robert Weiner

Originally published in "The Tallahassee Democrat"

By Robert Weiner and Eric Alves

Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and the 2016 Republican candidates are lining up for their shot to take on the "third rail" of American politics - Social Security. At stake are the well-being of the 45.9 million Americans, including over a half million Floridians, that depend on the program.

As Republicans prepare for the second debate, at the Ronald Reagan Library onSeptember 16, the continued calls to "reform" (meaning, cut) actually tarnishes the legacy of Reagan.

Reagan reached across the aisle, joining Speaker Tip O'Neill and Florida Congressman Claude Pepper, developing and signing into law the Social Security Amendments of 1983, an historic agreement, which helped the Social Security Fund to be solvent for 75 years. That will take us to 2058. During the signing ceremony, Reagan said, "This law assures the elderly that America will always keep the promises made." That deal and its law are still in place and working - but the "reformers" want to renegotiate and break it.

Last year, Marco Rubio, Senator from the state with the highest proportion of 65-year-olds and where 548,178 of Social Security recipients reside, told the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., about his plan to eliminate the 12.4% payroll tax (half paid by employers and half by employees) for workers over 65.

Rubio stated, "Eliminating the Social Security payroll tax for seniors will likely result in older Americans choosing to work longer, which in turn will lead to an increase in federal income-tax revenue. Seniors who choose to keep working will improve their personal retirement security and decrease their dependency on federal-assistance programs." However, for the Social Security Trust Fund to remain solvent, the payroll tax cannot be eliminated.

Making seniors work longer - a plan with which Jeb Bush agrees - isn't what seniors want to do when they were going to retire. "U.S. News & World Report" highlighted "lower-income people often are not able to extend their working lives." Half of Americans hold physically demanding jobs. For many, "their bodies have worn out by the time they enter their 60s."

Rubio failed to mention that the Social Security Fund is solvent, not in a deficit, according to Social Security's own website - $2.7 trillion in surplus. The money seniors have paid into the system has paid for the program.

If the economy continues to improve, the time it will remain solvent will expand. Even in the worst-case scenario, by 2035 or later, the Fund would only then be 25% short per year. To continue the commitment to seniors, it would only cost a 1/3 of what we paid annually for the Iraq War.

AARP reported last month that over half of Americans over-50 have less than $25,000 in savings and investments. Social Security is a necessary national priority.

Rubio and Bush are not alone in proposing cuts. Chris Christie in his announcement speech stated as his first order of business, "We need to fix a broken entitlement system." He repeated the assertion this Sunday. Scott Walker has said, "Washington has kicked the can down the road on entitlement programs. We need a leader who will implement true reforms."

Even leading Democrats have been willing to deal on Social Security, a development that Congressman Pepper, whose Library and Center are located at Florida State University in Tallahassee, would not have stood for. President Obama supported a revision to move to a "chain CPI" cost of living, meaning a loss of $1,000 annually in ten years by changing the categories used as markers - but only if the GOP agreed to tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans. Republicans refused the deal while selectively trying to say Obama is willing to cut Social Security. The President has now pulled changing to Chain CPI off the table.

The nation needs Pepper's courage on this issue. Following Carter Commerce Secretary Juanita Kreps' statement in 1978 suggesting increasing the retirement age to 68 for full Social Security-retirement benefits, Pepper demanded and got a meeting of Kreps with himself and House Social Security Chairman James Burke (D-MA). Pepper proclaimed that he and Burke would "fight it to our death." Kreps asked, "Even (delaying the start) to the year 2000?" Both members exclaimed, "Yes!" Kreps finally responded, "Well, I haven't made the proposal anyway."

When we hear "reforms" and "cuts" in Social Security, proponents actually mean using the money for tax breaks for the rich and commissions to Wall Street brokers for partial privatization. At the upcoming debate and beyond, listen carefully because those are giveaways that neither seniors nor the nation must endure.

(Robert Weiner is former chief of staff of the U.S. House Aging Committee under Chairman Claude Pepper and spokesman for the Clinton White House. Eric Alves is senior policy analyst at Robert Weiner Associates and Solutions for Change and former spokesman for the Massachusetts Senate Committee on Higher Education. Weiner, a national issues and public affairs strategist, has been spokesman for and directed the public affairs offices of White House Drug Czar and Four Star General Barry McCaffrey, the House Government Operations Committee and Chairman John Conyers (D-MI), Congressman Charles Rangel (D-NY) and the House Narcotics Committee, and was Chief of Staff for the House Aging Committee and Chairman Claude Pepper (D-FL). He also was Legislative Assistant to Ed Koch of New York and a political aide to Ted Kennedy (D-MA) for his Presidential and Senate races. Bob worked at the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate as youth voter registration director in 1971-1972 when the constitution was amended to allow 18-year olds the vote.
Since he left the White House in 2001, Bob heads up a public affairs and issue strategies company, Robert Weiner Associates. He is a regular political analyst on Radio America and has appeared on Bill Maher, CNN Crossfire, Today, Good Morning America, and the CBS, NBC, and ABC evening news. He is widely published in columns he writes on national issues in major papers throughout the country including recently the Washington Post, Denver Post, Miami Herald, Christian Science Monitor, New York Daily News, Baltimore Sun, Boston Globe, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Atlanta Constitution, New York Post, Washington Times, Sacramento Bee, Palm Beach Post, Salt Lake Tribune, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and Adweek. He is also regularly quoted in key media coast-to-coast, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, AP and Reuters, concerning the presidential campaign and national issues.)

Ever wonder how Obama got the idea that the President of the United States of America (he) could legally kill American citizens whom he designated "terrorists" without a trial or pending legal charges meriting detention before murder occurs?

Not too many did.

And those seeking higher office jumped on the bandwagon at the prospect!

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts enumerates the rise of this new species.

The Rise Of The Inhumanes

America's descent into totalitarian violence is accelerating. Like the Bush regime, the Obama regime has a penchant for rewarding Justice (sic) Department officials who trample all over the US Constitution. Last year America's First Black President nominated David Barron to be a judge on the First US Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.

Barron is responsible for the Justice (sic) Department memo that gave the legal OK for Obama to murder a US citizen with a missile fired from a drone. The execution took place without charges presented to a court, trial, and conviction. The target was a religious man whose sermons were believed by the paranoid Obama regime to encourage jihadism.

Apparently, it never occurred to Obama or the Justice (sic) Department that Washington's mass murder and displacement of millions of Muslims in seven countries was all that was needed to encourage jihadism. Sermons would be redundant and would comprise little else but moral outrage after years of mass murder by Washington in pursuit of hegemony in the Middle East.

Barron's confirmation ran into opposition from some Republicans, some Democrats, and the American Civil Liberties Union, but the US Senate confirmed Barron by a vote of 53-45 in May 2014. Just think, you could be judged in "freedom and democracy America" by a fiend who legalized extra-judicial murder.

While awaiting his reward, Barron had a post on the faculty of the Harvard Law School, which tells you all you need to know about law schools. His wife ran for governor of Massachusetts. Elites are busy at work replacing law with power.

America now has as an appeals court judge, no doubt being groomed for the Supreme Court, who established the precedent in US law that, the Constitution not withstanding, American citizens can be executed without a trial.

Did law school faculties object? Not Georgetown law professor David Cole, who enthusiastically endorsed the new legal principle of execution without trial. Professor Cole put himself on the DOJ's list of possible federal judicial appointees by declaring his support for Barron, whom he described as "thoughtful, considerate, open-minded, and brilliant."

Once a country descends into evil, it doesn't emerge. The precedent for Obama's appointment of Barron was George W. Bush's appointment of Jay Scott Bybee to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Bybee was John Yoo's Justice (sic) Department colleague who co-authored the "legal" memos justifying torture despite US federal statutory law and international law prohibiting torture. Everyone knew that torture was illegal, including those practicing it, but these two fiends provided a legal pass for the practitioners of torture. Not even Pinochet in Chile went this far.

Bybee and Yoo got rid of torture by calling it "enhanced interrogation techniques." As Wikipedia reports, these techniques are considered to be torture by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, medical experts who treat torture victims, intelligence officials, America's allies, and even by the Justice (sic) Department.

Others who objected to the pass given to torture by Bybee and Yoo were Secretary of State Colin Powell, US Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora, and even Philip Zelikow, who orchestrated the 9/11 Commission coverup for the Bush regime.

After five years of foot-dragging, the Justice (sic) Department's Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that Bybee and his deputy John Yoo committed "professional misconduct" by providing legal advice that was in violation of international and federal laws. The DOJ's office of Professional Responsibility recommended that Bybee and Yoo be referred to the bar associations of the states where they were licensed for further disciplinary action and possible disbarment.

But Bybee and Yoo were saved by a regime-compliant Justice (sic) Department official, David Margolis, who concluded that Bybee and Yoo had used "poor judgement" but had not provided wrong legal advice.

So, today, instead of being disbarred, Bybee sits on a federal court just below the Supreme Court. John Yoo teaches constitutional law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, Boalt Hall.

Try to imagine what has happened to America when Harvard and Berkeley law professors create legal justifications for torture and extra-judicial murder, and when US presidents engage in these heinous crimes. Clearly America is exceptional in its immorality, lack of human compassion, and disrespect for law and its founding document.

Hitler and Stalin would be astonished at the ease with which totalitarianism has marched through American institutions. Now we have a West Point professor of law teaching the US military justifications for murdering American critics of war and the police state.

William C. Bradford, the professor teaching our future military officers to regard moral Americans as threats to national security, blames Walter Cronkite for losing the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War by reporting the offensive as an American defeat. Tet was an American defeat in the sense that the offensive proved that the "defeated" enemy was capable of a massive offensive against US forces. The offensive succeeded in the sense that it demonstrated to Americans that the war was far from over. The implication of Bradford's argument is that Cronkite should have been killed for his broadcasts that added to the doubts about American success.

The professor claims to have a list of 40 people who tell the truth who must be exterminated, or our country is lost. Here we have the full confession that Washington's agenda cannot survive truth.

I am unaware of any report that the professor has been censored or fired for his disrespect for the constitutionally protected right of freedom of expression. However, I have seen reports of professors destroyed because they criticized Israel's war crimes, or used a word or term prohibited by political correctness, or were insufficiently appreciative of the privileges of "preferred minorities." What this tells us is that morality is sidetracked into self-serving agendas while evil overwhelms the morality of society.

Welcome to America today. It is a land in which facts have been redefined as enemy propaganda, a land in which legally protected whistleblowers are redefined as "fifth columns" or foreign agents subject to extermination, a land in which America is immune from criticism and all crimes are blamed on those whom Washington intends to rule.

Barron, Bybee, Yoo, and Bradford are members of a new species - the Inhumanes - that has risen from the poisonous American environment of arrogance, hubris, and paranoia.

(Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for Economic Policy in the Reagan Administration. He was associate editor and columnist with the "Wall Street Journal," columnist for "Business Week" and the Scripps Howard News Service. He is a contributing editor to Gerald Celente's "Trends Journal." He has had numerous university appointments. His book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is available here. His latest book, How America Was Lost, has just been released and can be ordered here.)


Michael Hudson:  Wall Street Parasites Have Devoured Your Retirement Plan and the U.S. Economy


Hang the Bankers!