End Is Near For Social Security

News Flash! ‘Social Security’ is running out of money. A better example of an oxymoron cannot be made when it comes to ‘Social Security.’ And Wall Street is not to blame. The blame lies in the robber barons on Capitol Hill.

For years, the Social Security trust fund has taken in more than it spent on benefits, resulting in a cushion of billions of dollars that the government could spend on other programs while giving the trust fund an IOU.

Emphasis added. Notice the assumption that spending money from your retirement fund is OK because, hey, you’re not retired yet. You don’t need it now. In the private sector, its called a felony. Now the biggest Ponzi scheme in the world is about to collapse. The fact that the Johnson administration was taking retirement money from individual citizens didn’t seem to bother anyone.

It was in the Johnson administration in the 60’s that politicians thought it was a shame that they couldn’t use that money for things like his ‘Great Society.’ And the Great Society got us Medicare, Medicaid, and the War (without an exit plan) on Poverty.  Since then, politicians in both parties became drunk on spending from this big pot of gold which is now almost empty. It provided the seed money to greatly expand government programs and entitlement programs to levels that would, long term, be unsustainable on their own.

Warnings that this time would come have been sounded by economists and The elephant in the room.conservatives for years. Efforts to reform Social Security, to reverse the trend  to insolvency, fell on deaf ears during the 16 years of Clinton and Bush. The spineless in Washington lack the will to fix it as it was originally intended to be.

But have no fear. The good news is President Obama doesn’t think it is a problem. Have you heard him or his teleprompter say that the Social Security system needs fixing yet? In fact, the bad news coming out today about Social Security is playing right into his hands.

There is no need to try to save Social Security. Individualism, the very concept of saving for your own future, is so last century. President Obama’s fix for Social Security is to simply continue nationalizing those industries that the country depends on. Soon, the news of collapse will be so intense that America will look to him to save us from peril. Enter Barack Obama and his teleprompter, and Americans will succumb to Obama’s new and improved socialist America. Of course he won’t call it that. But that’s what we’ll get.

Trying to save the Constitution and this country as we know it is just too much work when half the population, Washington, and the media no longer take it seriously.  That’s the way it seems after continuing barrages of bad economic news.  It is Rahm Emanual’s ‘rule one‘ on steroids. Taking advantage of a crisis is one thing. Prolonging chaos to keep the crisis going to advance an agenda is quite another.

link: Annual report due for Social Security and Medicare

Democrat Leaders On Waterboarding, Is It Enough?

More specifically, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va) were briefed on the extreme interrogation technique. Back then, it was fine. In fact, they wanted to know if there was anything more they could do to break the terrorists to give up information. Today it’s a different story. Today it is torture. Something we need to investigate.

For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

“The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough,” said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

Now, the Obama administration is in a quandary. Their far left base is still calling for the heads of Bush and Cheney.  How to investigate the Bush administration over waterboarding at GITMO without including leaders of his own party?

The media didn’t make much of it then either.

Chicago Politics Spreads To Washington

President of the United States Barack Obama, is engineering his fix for Chrysler, another ‘private’ corporation. The ‘fix’ is giving a 55% majority ownership of the company to the United Auto Workers union by putting the labor union AHEAD of secured creditors in a ‘White House’ recovery plan. Secured creditors are people and companies who invested in Chrysler, and likely part of someone’s 401k. Under bankruptcy, the secured creditors are always FIRST on the list to recover what they can.

But that is not what happened.  What happened is Obama publicly chastised the few creditors that did not want to go along, and used his Chicago-style political tactics on them to play along with his bankruptcy plan.

A leading bankruptcy attorney representing hedge funds and money managers told ABC News Saturday that Steve Rattner, the leader of the Obama administration’s Auto Industry Task Force, threatened one of the firms, an investment bank, that if it continued to oppose the administration’s Chrysler bankruptcy plan, the White House would use the White House press corps to destroy its reputation.

Obama did prevail, ending up with them settling for 29 cents on the dollar out of $6.8 billion owned by Chrysler. The labor union that invested zero dollars into the company gets 55% ownership, and the investors get 29%.

Returning the nation’s wealth to its rightful owners. It is what he campaigned on.

Update 5/7/09: I’m just dying to call this The Lunch Counter effect, but I won’t. Rush’s podcast from yesterday echos the point.

related links:

Media Doesn't Care About The Constitution Either

I had a discussion with a local columnist, Reginald T. Dogan, over my amazement at the silence from the media in how our President is running roughshod over the U.S. Constitution.

Here’s the premise. The election is over, and what we are seeing is the fastest slide from freedom and free-market capitalism in history. Through legislation, this administration has trashed the very documents it is sworn to protect and defend. In less than 100 days, President Obama (the Constitutional lawyer) has managed to re-write the Constitution without laying a pen on it.

My question to him was simple. How can the administration be doing all of this with NOT ONE question from the media as to whether it is constitutional?

His answer was just as simple. He said, ‘nobody cares about the Constitution.’ To which I said, EXACTLY. After 233 years of constitutional government, this shift to expand government control by this administration isn’t news?

Surely the media sees this, likes it, and thinks nothing else of it. It’s Journalistic malpractice to watch this happen while half the country is either unaware or does not care. Whether they’re all idiots doesn’t matter. What should matter to the media, which has special protection under the Constitution, is to inform the people what this administration is doing, and to put it in the context of the last 233 years of our history. Not the last 100 days. Unfortunately for America, this shift to socialism isn’t Obama’s fix for our economic troubles. It is his plan.

Since ‘nobody cares about the Constitution’ any more, do you think the media would mind losing the constitutional protections given it?

related links: Obama’s First 100 Days | No Conflict Of Interest For Obama

NewsBusted TV, 5/01/09

NewsBusted is a comedy webcast about the news of the day.

Topics in today’s show:

  • — The public reacts to President Obama releasing CIA memos on interrogation
  • — John Kerry wants to bailout newspapers
  • — Scientists now claim that fat people are a cause of global warming
  • — Susan Boyle receives praise far and wide

Starring: Jodi Miller
Director: Bruce Roundtower
Executive Producer: Matthew Sheffield