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Wall Street Crisis Good Time to Reflect on What’s Working: Social Security |
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This past weekend, we saw Hurricane Ike spread destruction along the Gulf Coast and we witnessed the devastation along Wall Street in the wake of financial greed helped along by the bank deregulation legislation of Sen. John McCain’s economic adviser Phil Gramm (the same Gramm who said the nation is a bunch of whiners for complaining about the U.S. economic crisis).
As Harold Pollack, associate professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, writes on Huffington Post today, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the fire-sale takeover of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America—along with last week’s government bailout of private mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—provide a good time to reflect on the fiscal soundness of the nation’s Social Security system.
And a good time to see how McCain’s policies would destroy the nation’s most successful social safety net. Because while Sen. Barack Obama would strengthen Social Security, McCain wants to throw it to the private sector—where our retirement funds could easily be gambled away in a volatile stock market such as the one we’ve seen in recent months.
Writes Pollack:
Whatever you may hear, the system is in remarkably good shape these days, even as everything else in the economy seems headed to hell in a hand basket.
Social Security actuaries note that unfunded Social Security liabilities over the next 75 years amount to about 0.6 percent of GDP. Making the Bush tax cuts permanent digs a budget hole three times as large.
And making tax cuts permanent is exactly what McCain said he would do if elected. Pollack continues:
McCain says it’s a “disgrace” that younger people subsidize the retirement of preceding generations. The real disgrace is the utter mismatch between McCain’s rhetoric and his own tax plan.
McCain’s rhetoric is a stalking horse for private accounts. Many libertarians and conservatives want to replace the current Social Security system with one modeled on corporate 401(k) plans, with an ancillary welfare program tacked on.
Never mind the findings of nonpartisan experts that his tax plan leaves the great, great majority of American households worse off than the Obama plan does. Never mind the growing pile of newspaper stories noting that McCain’s been repeatedly lying about this simple fact.
If McCain is worried about the future, what on earth is he doing suggesting a tax plan that accumulates such huge deficits? By 2018, his tax plan adds more than $200 billion more than the Obama plan does to the federal deficit, every year. Given the difference in tax plans, Senator Obama could wage another Iraq war and cover about 90 percent of the projected Social Security shortfall while still running a lower deficit than Senator McCain would.
As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said today:
The events of the weekend should make clear the desperate need for a President who understands the nature of the economic crisis facing our country and has a concrete plan for rebuilding our economy that is founded on good jobs rather than financial bubbles. Again today, Sen. John McCain repeated that the “fundamentals of our economy are strong,” a statement he and President Bush have made regularly over the past nine months, as conditions deteriorated. As president, Sen. Barack Obama will lead the fundamental economic changes we so urgently need.
Our retirement security could depend upon who’s elected president this November. Take a look at the positions of McCain and Obama on Social Security and retirement.
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Paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, www.aflcio.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
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The power required to win an election is insignificant next to the ability to influence the decisions of its winner. Corporcrats and their lobbists play sides in both Parties, often pitting each against the other, always upon the foundation of selfish greed. Don’t take my word for it; I’m just a glorified delivery-boy. Take their’s:
“The colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction. The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the international bankers was the prime reason for the revolutionary war.”
-Ben Franklin
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations which grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their father conquered.”
-Thomas Jefferson
“You are a den of vipers. I intend to rout you out, and by the Eternal God I will rout you out. If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning.”
-Andrew Jackson
There followed two (unsuccessful) assassination attempts on President Jackson’s life. Jackson had told his vice president, Martin Van Buren, “The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me….”
“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
-Lincoln’s First Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861.
“Why Lincoln, that is easy; just get Congress to pass a bill authorizing the printing of full legal tender treasury notes, and pay your soldiers with them and go ahead and win your war with them also.”
-Colonel Taylor – on how to finance the Civil War
“The people or anyone else will not have any choice in the matter, if you make them full legal tender. They will have the full sanction of the government and be just as good as any money; as Congress is given that express right by the Constitution.”
-Colonel Taylor – When asked by Abe if they will accept the notes.
“The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers…The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government’s greatest creative opportunity…By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity.”
-Abraham Lincoln
“If this mischievous financial policy, which has its origin in North America, shall become endurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous without precedent in the history of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That country must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe!”
-Times of New London – Towards the Lincoln Greenbacks
“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in High Places will follow, and the Money Power of the Country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the People, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.”
-Abraham Lincoln - In a letter written to William Elkin
“The division of the United States into federations of equal force was decided long before the Civil War by the high financial powers of Europe. These bankers were afraid that the United States, if they remained as one block, and as one nation, would attain economic and financial independence, which would upset their financial domination over the world.”
-Otto Von Bismark – Chancellor of Germany
“The death of Lincoln was a disaster for Christendom. There was no man in the United States great enough to wear his boots. I fear the foreign bankers with their craftiness and tortuous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America, and use it systematically to corrupt modern civilization. They will not hesitate to plunge the whole of Christendom into wars and chaos in order that the earth should become their inheritance.”
-Otto Von Bismark
“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce. And when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.”
-James Garfield
President James Abram Garfield, our 20th President, had previously been Chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations and was an expert on fiscal matters. (Upon his election, among other things, he appointed an unpopular collector of customs at New York, whereupon the two Senators from New York–Roscoe Conkling and Thomas Platt–resigned their seats.) After only four months in office, President Garfield was shot at a railroad station on July 2, 1881.
“My agency in promoting the passage of the National Banking Act was the greatest financial mistake in my life. It has built upon a monopoly which affects every interest in the country.”
-Salmon P. Chase
“Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know there is a power so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”
-Woodrow Wilson
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
-Henry Ford
“The Aldrich bill was condemned in the platform. When Woodrow Wilson was nominated…the men who ruled the Democratic Party promised the people that if they were returned to power there would be no central bank established here while they held the reins of government. Thirteen months later that promise was broken, and the Wilson administration, under the tutelage of those sinister Wall Street figures who stood behind Colonel House, established here in our free country the worm-eaten monarchial institution of the ‘Kings Bank’ to control us from the top downward, and to shackle us from the cradle to the grave.”
-Rep. Louis McFadden (D-Pa)
“This act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the monetary power will be legalized. The people may not know it immediately; but the day of reckoning is only a few years removed. The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill.”
-Sen. Charles Lindbergh (R-Mn)
“The federal reserve act brought about a super-state controlled by international bankers and international industrialists acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure.”
-Louis McFadden (D-Pa)
“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority; but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”
-Woodrow Wilson
“In the United States today we have in effect two governments. We have the duly constituted government. Then we have an independent, uncontrolled and uncoordinated government in the Federal Reserve System, operating the money powers which are reserved to Congress by the Constitution.”
-Wright Patman (D-TX)
“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.”
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt
“The very word, secrecy, is repugnant in a free and open society, and we are as a people, inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.”
-John F. Kennedy
“We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covet means for expanding its sphere of influence; on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which as conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly-knit highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.
-John F. Kennedy
On June 4th, 1963, President Kennedy signed a presidential document, called Executive Order 11110, which further amended Executive order 10289 of September 19th, 1951. This gave Kennedy, as President of the United States, legal clearance to create his own money to run the country, money that would belong to the people, an interest and debt-free money. He had printed United States Notes, completely ignoring the Federal Reserve Notes from the private banks of the Federal Reserve. Records show that Kennedy issued $4,292,893,825 of cash money. It was perfectly obvious that Kennedy was out to undermine the Federal Reserve System of the United States.
“… there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it’s in my control.”
-John F. Kennedy
“The answer to the Kennedy assassination is with the Federal Reserve Bank. Don’t underestimate that. It’s wrong to blame it on [CIA official James] Angleton and the CIA per se only. This is only one finger of the same hand. The people who supply the money are above the CIA.”
- Marina Oswald wife of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, as told to A.J. Weberman
“Today, America would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order. Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government.”
- Henry Kissinger, Bilderberger Conference in Evians, France, 1991
“The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining super capitalism and Communism under the same tent, all under their control…. Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.”
- Congressman Larry P. McDonald, 1976, killed in the Korean Airlines 747 that was shot down by the Soviets
Senator John Heinz and former Senator John Tower had served on powerful Senate banking and finance committees and were outspoken critics of the Federal Reserve and the Eastern Establishment. On April 4, 1991, Senator John Heinz was killed in a plane crash near Philadelphia. On the next day, April 5, 1991, former Senator John Tower was also killed in a plane crash.
“Some even believe we (the Rockefeller family) are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
- David Rockefeller, Memoirs, page 405
“It is the system of nationalist individualism that has to go….We are living in the end of the sovereign states….In the great struggle to evoke a Westernized World Socialism, contemporary governments may vanish….Countless people…will hate the new world order….and will die protesting against it.” - H.G. Wells, in his book, “The New World Order”, 1940
“Bankers own the earth; take it away from them but leave them with the power to create credit; and, with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again… If you want to be slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let the bankers control money and control credit.”
- Sir Josiah Stamp, Director, Bank of England, 1940.
“We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.”
- David Rockefeller
“We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years… It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”
- David Rockefeller, Bilderberg Meeting, June 1991 Baden, Germany
“The few who understand the system, will either be so interested from it’s profits or so dependent on it’s favors, that there will be no opposition from that class.”
-Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild
“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes it’s laws.”
-Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild
“In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all.”
- Strobe Talbot, President Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State, Time Magazine, July 20th, l992
“The hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency: their sole object is gain.”
-Napoleon Bonaparte
“We can’t be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans.”
-Bill Clinton, USA Today on 3/11/93, page 2a
At first when I saw the length of your comment I almost didn’t read it. Once I started and realized it was all quotes from notable people I could not stop. One sad point is how many people don’t know of or believe the Bilderbergers even exist.
Something that came to mind was an interview I had heard on http://www.coasttocoastam.com I think it was with John Lear but I’m not sure. Anyway the person being interviewed was a close friend of one of the Rockefeller’s and was told how the Rockefeller family had financed the women’s movement.
The reason for getting women into the workplace was to increase the tax base. Why collect taxes on 50% of the workforce when you can collect on 100%. Once the women were working then the kids had to go to daycare. With the kids in daycare and away from the home then “they” could start brainwashing the kids and change their way of thinking without the influence of the parents. A brilliant plan and it has worked quite well I think looking back.
Thanks for taking the time to put that together, it should be a full page add in The Wall Street Journal
So, here we are; a nation with a “make believe president,” presiding over a corrupt, incompetent, “gimmick” based government. It’s a government that has set the example for all other segments of our society to follow. We have a military, using a “gimmick” [the Surge] trying to justify a “make believe war” started by our “make believe president.” We have a “make believe” Congress looking for “gimmicks” to answer everything from energy concerns to illegal immigration. We have “fantasy this and fantasy that” to satisfy our personal illusions and to provide distractions from everyday reality. We have a political process where candidates use “gimmicks” in pretending they’re not what they really are, selling beliefs they know our “fantasy” imbued society only wants to hear. We have a corporate media that has embraced the pretend, “gimmick” riddled, “make believe” programming of Vince McMahon’s WWE;news-entertainment. We have a foreign policy advanced by a “make believe president” that pretends the US can actually do something to contain Russian aggression, human rights abuses in China and elsewhere, and even dampen the threat of nuclear proliferation. We have a social system that our “gimmick” toting leaders want us to believe is the best in the World. And now, we clearly see the greed, corruption, and incompetence exposed within our “gimmick” inspired US financial system. Wake-up America! We can’t afford “the gimmicks” and “the make believers” anymore.
McCain wants to end social security so he resorts to name calling (’disgrace’, he says), but it really is the best thing that we have had for many years. His and Bush’s economic policies are the real disgrace. They are wealthy, and that’s all that matters to them. Sadly, McCain does not even know where to begin if he did want to try to fix things. It’s just beyond his comprehension. Palin is no better.
What troubles me the most is there have been so many opportunities in the course of history to keep this nation economically sound, but greed and the lack of common sense always seems to take over in the end.
Thanks ‘FraternalOrder’ for a remarkable timeline of quotes throughout history. This says more about how things have unfolded and the inspiration behind the actions of many events in our history. I am particularly troubled by the very last quote by Bill Clinton.
I think if the U.S. has these billions upon billions of dollars to bail out these financial institutions and AIG And to keep throwing billions to Iraq, and billions to other countries , they certainly ought to have plenty to fix Social Security, and Medicare. Oh, I forgot those things would actually help the American people. There just is never any money to be had when the American people need it. They always say that things that benefit the people is socialism, but I don’t know what they call it when they give it to financial institutions and insurance companies . Why is it they could find all this money instantaneously? I know many people have gone broke and bankrupt though no fault of their own. All it takes is a major illness, or losing a job, but they aren’t going to bail them out.
I keep hearing Sen. McCain say that he took on big oil, and took on Republicans and Wash., and reformed Wash. I s anyone asking what big oil companies he took on and what did he accomplish? What Republicans did he take on and reform Wash.? He is one of them and he always votes with them . I think he should come clean and state the facts.
Thank You