Social Security

The Coming War On Pensions

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Sacrificed to Wall Street’s Gluttony

WallStreetPigOn the Senate’s last day in session in December, it approved the government’s $1.1 trillion budget for coming fiscal year.

Few people realize how radical the new U.S. budget law was. Budget laws are supposed to decide simply what to fund and what to cut. A budget is not supposed to make new law, or to rewrite the law. But that is what happened, and it was radical.

Wall Street’s representatives in Congress – the Democratic leadership as well as Republicans – took the opportunity to create an artificial crisis. The press called this “holding the government hostage.” The House – backed by the Senate – said that it would shut the government down at some future date if two basic laws were not changed.

Most of the attention has been paid to Elizabeth Warren’s eloquent attack on the government guaranteeing bank trades in derivatives. Written by Citigroup lobbyists, this puts taxpayer funds behind future bank bailouts if banks make more bad bets on complex financial derivatives, such as packaged junk mortgage loans.

Critics have focused on how there must be a loser for every winner in a derivatives contract. The problem is that if banks lose, the government will bail them out just as it did in 2008.

Less attention has been paid to what happens if banks win. They will win largely in making bets against pension funds. Indeed, pension funds have not been treated well by Wall Street in recent years. Continue reading →

Been Down So Long…

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Zen-Haven February 25 2013

It seems to be getting increasingly obvious on a daily basis that the western society is getting divided into:

Those who have and those who don’t.The west is rolling the time back to its feudalistic roots, where the gap between the rich and poor is widening disproportionately, something we are used to observing in developing countries or through the timeline of history.

Those who have what they need: be it work, money in the bank, food on the table, are having discussions in the media with those who are equally affluent, on how to control those less fortunateby cutting social benefits and accusing them of defrauding the social benefits or welfare program.

The politicians are merely the front line rulers, puppets and stooges for the “shadow people”: the ones we cannot see, the ones that control and dictate all the policies implemented. Poverty is very big business and so is surveillance.

9.11 being a matrix construct, and the fallout from this massive hoax has led to gross violation of privacy, mass spying and the masses conditioned into believing it’s for their own good. The state now has permission to sneak behind the trash can, take a photo and slam a single mum for benefit fraud, to surveillance of electronic activities and these are just a few of civil liberties slowly being taken away from people.

A decade or so ago, before 9.11, no able minded citizen would have put up with this.  This mass conditioning and hypnotic state is being promoted daily by the mainstream media that: We´re in a finical crisis and you are a low income fraud suspect burdening the state.

To add insult to injury, the puppets and stooges propose new taxes on those already struggling or threaten to reduce benefits. Ordinary citizens are being conditioned in to paying taxes to curb global warming, which is another matrix hoax and the proceeds collected go who knows where!

And the population in its hypnotic trance just accepts these lies.

Continue reading →

Chris Hedges ~ How Do You Take Your Poison?

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TruthDig | September 25 2012

We will all swallow our cup of corporate poison. We can take it from nurse Romney, who will tell us not to whine and play the victim, or we can take it from nurse Obama, who will assure us that this hurts him even more than it hurts us, but one way or another the corporate hemlock will be shoved down our throats. The choice before us is how it will be administered. Corporate power, no matter who is running the ward after January 2013, is poised to carry out U.S. history’s most savage assault against the poor and the working class, not to mention the Earth’s ecosystem. And no one in power, no matter what the bedside manner, has any intention or ability to stop it.

If you insist on participating in the cash-drenched charade of a two-party democratic election at least be clear about what you are doing. You are, by playing your assigned role as the Democratic or Republican voter in this political theater, giving legitimacy to a corporate agenda that means your own impoverishment and disempowerment. All the things that stand between us and utter destitution—Medicaid, food stamps, Pell grants, Head Start, Social Security, public education, federal grants-in-aid to America’s states and cities, the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program (WIC), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and home-delivered meals for seniors—are about to be shredded by the corporate state. Our corporate oligarchs are harvesting the nation, grabbing as much as they can, as fast as they can, in the inevitable descent.

We will be assaulted this January when automatic spending reductions, referred to as “the fiscal cliff,” begin to dismantle and defund some of our most important government programs. Mitt Romney will not stop it. Barack Obama will not stop it.

Continue reading →