Ahhh.....Roger Ailes, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld in the basement of the Nixon WH manning the Office of Special Projects or "Dirty Tricks" as it was also known. Time to go after the Koch brothers and their operatives in the John Birch Society. Peace

Were America's Assets Looted Years Ago?

Forbes' Merrill Matthews argues that the multi-trillion dollar social security trust fund was looted years ago:

Either Obama and Geithner are lying to us now [in saying that social security checks won't go out if the debt ceiling isn't raised], or they and all defenders of the Social Security status quo have been lying to us for decades. It must be one or the other.

Here’s why: Social Security has a trust fund, and that trust fund is supposed to have $2.6 trillion in it, according to the Social Security trustees. If there are real assets in the trust fund, then Social Security can mail the checks, regardless of what Congress does about the debt limit.

***

Social Security status-quo defenders have assured us for the past 25 years that Social Security is fully funded—for the next 25 years, or 2036. So if there are real assets in the Social Security Trust Fund—$2.6 trillion allegedly—then how could failure to reach a debt-ceiling agreement possibly threaten seniors’ Social Security checks?

The federal government has borrowed all of [social security] trust fund money and spent it ... And the only way the trust fund can get some cash to pay Social Security benefits is if the federal government draws it from general revenues or borrows the money—which, of course, it can’t do because of the debt ceiling.

[T]he president is telling the truth now in the sense that he is conceding there’s no money in the trust fund to pay benefits; but he and other Social Security status-quo defenders have been deceiving the public for decades.

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/

Thom,

Which is it? Is the money there or not?

In the early nineteenth century Marie Antoinette spoke her famous words to the poor – “Let them eat cake.”In the early twenty-first century billionaire, Charles Munger, spoke his famous words to the disenfranchised of the United States – “Suck it up and cope.”On my screen number one comes up in small print. If it appears in small print, I apologize.Number 1: "Suck It Up and Cope"

"Let them eat cake" is a phrase composed of four simple, easy-to-remember words, which is probably why it became so emblematic of a larger set of ideas. "Suck it up and cope" is a phrase made up of five similarly simple and memorable words, which is why it may well replace "Let them eat cake" in the annals of history.

Yes, "Suck it up and cope" -- that is what billionaire Charlie Munger said that the unemployed, the homeless and the impoverished should do as their lives are torn apart by the recession.

Of course, had he said the same thing about bailed-out banks, his now-infamous line might have just seemed like the innocuous rant of a crotchety geezer who might be a little too zealous about old-school principles. But no, Munger made the remark during a 2010 speech to University of Michigan students in which he first lauded bankers as people who "saved your civilization" and then urged all Americans to bow down and "thank god" that the bailouts preserved the financial industry's profits.

And so we end this feature with a worthy successor to "Let them eat cake": "Suck it up and cope."

SUCK IT UP AND COPE – Charles Munger

http://www.salon.com/news/david_sirota/index.html?story=/news/david_sirota/2011/07/13/great_recession_elitism_slideshow&source=newsletter&utm_source=contactology&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Salon_Daily%20Newsletter%20%28Not%20Premium%29_7

No Super Humans

Leo Buscaglia gave a speech at a conference and someone asked him if he knew of any super human beings? Leo said that he did not know of any one whom he would consider a super human being. He went on to say that whenever some people try to consider themselves a super human being, we should picture the person(s) on a toilet and they become very human. Two billionaire dollars in salaries and/or bonuses is an obscene amount! Remember there are no super human beings.

Thom, have you hear of ALEC?

DK's Exposing ALEC & Protest ALEC efforts pay off big time this week! "I have to put that into proper context so everyone understands how important it is to abolish this cabal now that it has been exposed: 2,000 plus Legislators - fully one third of all U.S. state lawmakers - are members of ALEC. The top Republicans in our U.S. Congress are Alumni of ALEC and two of the Presidential Republican Candidates are either ALEC Alum or are closely affiliated with ALEC. To me this demonstrates that ALEC and the corporate elite see themselves on the cusp of realizing total control of the White House, U.S. Congress and control of a majority of state General Assemblies and state Governorship. This is simply too damn important to downplay or ignore and pass of as not possible, as Gingrich and Caine don't have a chance of winning. My answer to those with that attitude is that in every national election cycle the front runners going into the primaries are usually not those who come out as a clear winner. If Gingrich or Caine manage to prevail at that level...ALEC will be only one step away from realizing their dream. Just think about that for a moment as you read through the vast documents at ALEC Exposed."
www.dailykos.com/story/2011/07/16/993894/-DKs-Exposing-ALECProtest-ALEC-efforts-pay-off-big-time-this-week!?via=siderec ALEC Exposed website: www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed

If what this former Fox executive is saying is true,

and if the Obama administration will actually investigate and prosecute Murdoch

- the game is up at Fox so-called News.

The second of the three clauses is the crucial one, and is the reason the answer to your title question was, is, and always will be No.

As Mike Papantonio recently said, Eric Holder doesn't have the backbone to go after the Murdoch empire. Almost no Democrat does, and Republicans? That would be like the Communists going after Tass back in the Soviet days.

And while some Americans are interested in informing ourselves and capable of outrage over Fox "News" and what Murdoch and his ilk have done to democracy, not enough of us are. I don't think we are at or ever again will be at the critical mass that would be needed to force a change. Somewhere along the line, maybe as early as the re-election of Reagan, maybe as late as the re-selection of Bush II, we passed a tipping point. Essentially, it's over.

Michigan is giving away schools to private sector, legislation pending to SPANK teachers for striking - could lose teaching license, extreme fines.

Michigan has legislation in process to cut Welfare Benefits to LIFETIME of 48 months --- AND they plan to ENFORCE! Oct 1 about 12,600 families will be dropped! First cuts!

Thom, great show as usual.

Conspiracy update:

Nixon was not only spared investigation into Water Gate but also faced possible scrutiny in a possible further study into the Kennedy Assasination 11 years before Water Gate. That point was made in the book "Silent Coup" which offers a lot of insight into Water Gate. (Some of it wrong)

In 2003, one of the Discovery / Learning Channel programs, I forgot which one, did a week's worth of interesting digging and showed lots of historical footage for the 40 year rememberance of the assasination. One of them stood out to me as I read Silent Coup only a couple of years earlier. Nixon was in Dallas the night before Nov 22, 1963 and attended a party at an influential Dallas family. Present were among others Nixon, L.B.J. and Jay Edgar Hoover. During that party and after a private get-together among a smaller group, L.B.J. was overheard by a couple of witnesses commenting to the fact that Kennedy would never embarrasing him again. This in no way implies any complicity by the aforementioned three in what was to happen the next day in Dallas, and has probably more to do with the daily grind of politics and referred to the Bay of Pigs / Cuba crisis earlier in the term. (Think of these three; [Pres.] Nixon - Bay - of Pigs - cuban missile fiasco)

Here is my question: Did Gerald Ford take this into consideration when he granted a full pardon? After all, Congressman Gerald Ford was a member of the Warren Commision in 1964 and had more insight than most. It is mentioned in Silent Coup that a full investigation of Nixon could have gone back to 1963.

We just might unearth more in 2013, if we make it past December 21st, 2012, and I'm sure more mystery will mark the 50 years since that fateful day.

greg

It's simply time to pay the tab.... The feast is over.

Ravenkitty: the "feast" has been going on by the ravenous casino capitalist wolves...they've been eating our lunch. It certainly is time that they pay for their excesses. Hard working Americans have been contributing (making payments to) America's social safety INSURANCE programs for all their working lives. There is no excuse for our government (now run by casino capitalists) to renege on it's obligations. Tax, fine, and imprison those casino capitalist criminals who gamed the systems. We want our country back from the Ponzi schemers.

BusGreg: This story sounds very familiar...I might have read the book...many years ago. I am interested in the JFK, MLK, RFK murders and certainly don't believe that Oswald acted alone...or, perhaps, wasn't even really that involved...a patsy? Probably! I believe that there are powerful groups that look for good patsy candidates and set them up to take the fall.

I heard of another "conspiracy theory" that I found rather absurd...and there are a lot that I believe are created not only by very imaginative people looking to make a buck but also by these very powerful organizations that create the really way out conspiracy theories just to water down the validity of more believable ones. This conspiracy theory says that Jackie Kennedy offed her husband...and the proof they present are about 4 or 5 frames of the famous film of the assassination where Jackie is reaching up to Jack while a stream of blood?(something?) shoots upward. The conspiracy is that Jackie shot Jack with the killing shot. It is pretty ridiculous I believe. And other conspiracy theories about 911 was that some space based beam weapons disintegrated the WTC buildings. I don't believe that one either. I do believe that nano-thermite was planted and used in bringing down the towers because of the scientific paper of the analysis of the dust samples. OBL sure didn't do that from a cave in Afghanistan!

Anyway, thanks for that story...very, very, interesting!!!

Murdock & Co?

The story will pass, buried in more current events, money will be passed under the table, politicians will work to ease the pressure.....

In the end, nothing will change.

I'm sorry to say that I don't have much faith in Obama or his Justice department to do much more about this than they have done about so many egregious activities of the Bush administration. These are opportunites he is NOT taking to overturn the kinds of precedents set by Ford when he pardoned Nixon.

Poll: 71% shun GOP handling of debt crisis

There's the rub: "if the Obama administration will actually investigate and prosecute."

They'd rather go after baseball players and byciclists who've used steroids, e.g., Roger Clemens and Lance Armstrong, than the bankers, brokers, lobbyists and fraudsters that brought our economy to its knees. Why in the world would the Obama administration break their track record and go after media moguls like Rupert Murdoch?

We moved over and let someone else drive during the 8 years of Bush fiasco...where did that get us? Where we are now, of course. I'll agree to "move over and let someone else drive" if we are not considering yet another Republican wanna be dictator for the ruling elite or a wimpy "lets just compromise" Democrat. I agree Obama has not been very much better as he has continued Bush's idiocy in so many arenas. Yes, let's give a third party a chance for a change. Break away from the good old boy network of the two party system that are both owned by the ruling elite. I want a fire and brimstone snorting no-nonsense, no-compromise (unless it is in our favor) for a change. Not "hope you can believe in (not)" but "actions that you can see and feel" that will make life better for the masses of hard-working (or at least, once hard-working before they were fired or laid off) people.

Votes determine who represents us (barring any rigged voting machines and corrupt partisan supreme court justices) and if the public is too stupid to realize that the Republicans (and some Democrats) are working against their best interests...yet still vote for them, then they deserve what they get. If people can be bought off with all the glitz and glamor that money can buy....then they will continue to be snookered. If people vote for a third party candidate with a high turnout (how about 71%...the percentage of people polled who are not happy with the Republican handling of the debt ceiling) this will shake up the entrenched system even more than the League of Women Voters did when they got tired of representatives ignoring their letters, emails, and phone calls and took out their own commercials (ads) reviling the arrogant, ignorant politicians. It made a big difference!

Palindromedary, I guess Dickey and HALLIBURTON sure the hell pigged out at the "FEAST" !

I agree that it seems pretty ridiculous to see some "ball player" or other athlete hauled before a congressional sub-committee and take up all the attention away from more important issues...like the economy, the illegal wars and wasting of money and murdering innocent civilians in other countries.

Here's something you don't hear a lot of in our news:
"We Americans have rewritten our laws, as the Argentines did, to make criminal behavior legal. John Rizzo, the former acting general counsel for the CIA, approved drone attacks that have killed hundreds of people, many of them civilians in Pakistan, although we are not at war with Pakistan. Rizzo has admitted that he signed off on so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. He told Newsweek that the CIA operated “a hit list.” He asked in the interview: “How many law professors have signed off on a death warrant?” Rizzo, in moral terms, is no different from the deported Argentine doctor Bianco, and this is why lawyers in Britain and Pakistan are calling for his extradition to Pakistan to face charges of murder. Let us hope they succeed.

We know of at least 100 detainees who died during interrogations at our “black sites,” many of them succumbing to the blows and mistreatment of our interrogators. There are probably many, many more whose fate has never been made public. Tens of thousands of Muslim men have passed through our clandestine detention centers without due process. “We tortured people unmercifully,” admitted retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey. “We probably murdered dozens of them …, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.”

Tens of thousands of Americans are being held in super-maximum-security prisons where they are deprived of contact and psychologically destroyed. Undocumented workers are rounded up and vanish from their families for weeks or months. Militarized police units break down the doors of some 40,000 Americans a year and haul them away in the dead of night as if they were enemy combatants. Habeas corpus no longer exists. American citizens can “legally” be assassinated. Illegal abductions, known euphemistically as “extraordinary rendition,” are a staple of the war on terror. Secret evidence makes it impossible for the accused and their lawyers to see the charges against them. All this was experienced by the Argentines. Domestic violence, whether in the form of social unrest, riots or another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, would, I fear, see the brutal tools of empire cemented into place in the homeland. At that point we would embark on our own version of the Dirty War."

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/americas_disappeared_20110718/

I sincerely hope that this is our "Father Laughlin" moment, a time when the sleepy U.S. electorate comes to its senses.

Now that Sean Hoare has been found dead, the plot seems to thicken.

I can only hope that the FBI will investigate NoW reporters that have been operating here, to see if they have violated any wiretap laws In the UK, members of parliament are calling for a review of media ownership laws, Hopefully that ill carry over here as well.

Michael-Hudson to Bonnie Faulkner on July 16 Guns and Butter: “When I was in Norway one of the Norwegian politicians sat next to me at a dinner and said, “You know, there’s one good thing that President Obama has done that we never anticipated in Europe. He’s shown the Europeans that we can never depend upon America again. There’s no president, no matter how good he sounds, no matter what he promises, we’re never again going to believe the patter talk of an American President. Mr. Obama has cured us. He has turned out to be our nightmare. Our problem is what to do about the American people that don’t realize this nightmare that they’ve created, this smooth-talking American Tony Blair in the White House.”

"The Obama administration raised the financial sector’s bailout to $13 trillion. This has vastly increased the government debt. And now, Mr. Obama wants to bring it back down by cutting back Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other social spending – to transfer wealth and income to the top of the economic pyramid. At the start of his administration he appointed a Deficit Reduction Commission led by advocates of cutting back Social Security and Medicare: Republican Senator Alan Simpson (McCain’s economic advisor!) and Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles, representing the right-wing Democratic Leadership Committee cite above. The aim of this commission was to give Mr. Obama an “experts’ report” supporting the diametric opposite of the liberal constituency that voted for him."

Transcript of this show at:
http://michael-hudson.com/2011/07/the-euthanasia-of-industry/

Listen to this show at:
http://michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/audio/Hudson_July2011_Bonni...

"So Mr. Obama’s advisors have convinced him to do what European political front men also are doing. A depression is deemed necessary to cut living standards and labor by about 30 percent. Mr. Obama’s aim is to lower American wage levels.
To do this, he needs an excuse, a cover story. The reality is that a depression will make the budget deficit even larger. Just as the plans to invade Iraq were written up before 9/11 provided a crisis atmosphere that became the opportunity to introduce them, so the response to the federal budget deficit is already outlined: Social Security and other “entitlements” will be cut back, as well as revenue sharing with the states and cities. So governments at the local level will have to sell of land, roads and whatever is in the public domain. The American government will look just like Greece and Ireland – so you may want to look at them as dress rehearsals."

"...the class war is back in business. We’re going into a depression that is unnecessary – except to drive down wage levels and strip away government obligations to pay for Social Security, Medicare and other public programs. This will enable the government to get rid of what remains of progressive taxation on the higher wealth and income brackets."

Bonnie:
"Mr. Obama wants to cut $4 trillion out of the budget, while Republican leader Boehner only wants a 2.4 trillion cut over a shorter period. I’ve read that it was Obama, not the Republicans, who proposed putting Social Security cuts on the table. Why would he be proposing much larger cuts than the Republicans?"
Michael:
"The main reason is that he is in a unique position to deliver enough Democratic votes to let the sell-out (“compromise”) go through. No Republican administration could get away with cutting Social Security. This is the most basic income protection program that Americans have. But now, it’s being depicted as a welfare program that is hurting the economy. Only a Democrat posing as a left-winger could really pull off what Mr. Obama is proposing."

Michael: "Last weekend’s New York Times magazine had an interview with Sheila Bair, whose five-year term heading the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) expired last week. Now she can begin to tell what happened. She said that Mr. Obama promised her that he would try to prevent the mortgage frauds that were occurring, especially in subprime mortgages, and support better bank regulation. But then she would learn, just an hour before he gave a speech, that he would have changed the draft that she had seen, and took out what he’d promised her. The rewrites apparently were done mainly by Tim Geithner, who acts as a lobby for the big bank contributors. Instead of running the Treasury to benefit the U.S. economy, he’s benefiting his Wall Street constituency. Significantly, he was a protégé of Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who gave the name “Rubinomics” to pro-Wall Street opposition to bank regulation and a dismantling of public control over the banking system.

"Ms. Bair said that that when she opposed giveaways to banks, Obama’s officials would say that there would be a meltdown if they didn’t save Citibank, AIG and other financial institutions that had acted recklessly. She pointed out that the FDIC had successfully wound down Washington Mutual and other insolvent institutions. This was the FDIC’s business, after all. Even Citibank had enough assets to cover insured depositors. The problem was its gambles on derivatives and junk mortgages. The government could have taken it over and made normal insured depositors whole. But there weren’t enough assets in Citibank and AIG to pay the gamblers and the big players. She complained that in every case she was told the big gambling institutions – basically, the nation’s wealthiest one percent – couldn’t lose a penny.

Mr. Obama has bought this position. To save bondholders and speculators from taking losses on their bad bets, consumers and the rest of the “real economy” needs to pay. They have to pay via higher Social Security taxes and other regressive tax policies, instead of making the higher brackets pay as occurs under progressive taxation. Mr. Obama is willing to cut back Medicare. We can’t charge the pharmaceutical companies by bargaining with them for bulk discounts as Canada’s government does. We have to let them set the prices with no argument – as if this is the “free market.” So Mr. Obama has made an accommodation with the Republicans to pursue what really are Bush Administration policies, and now even Tea Party policies."

Following up on caller John's comments Friday that Social Security is insurance and an increase in premiums (like raising the cap to $3Million) is the same thing as your health or car insurance company raising premiums...

I called the White House comment line Monday morning and asked the operator to "remind President Obama that Social Security is insurance into which I have paid, NOT an entitlement. Raising premiums is exactly the same as when an insurance company raises premiums, and no one in power seems to think THAT is a bad thing."

She said, "I've never thought about it like that before..."

That's one.

If enough people call and leave a similar message, it may just penetrate the wall of inside-the-Beltway voices and actually reach President Obama.

I do enjoy playing the Medal of Honor WWII series of games, as well as the Atari Breakout at Play friv game. Especially fun to play on the Wii game system since you get to point a gun at the screen. Totally awesome, and yet I have never wanted to join the military because of these games... though I also read enough military history that I'm aware of the pain and suffering that is associated with it, enough so that I don't want any part of it. Also there is another thing that these games can make gamers aware of (because most aren't the idiots people assume they are), its nearly impossible to be on the frontlines and not get killed.