Trump Republican thugs are now planning to perpetrate a new treacherous sneak attack on the Social Security Insurance Fund--a cultural Pearl Harbor! The current Trump outlaws are continuing the same tactics as criminal gangs under earlier administrations.

  Pretending to be cutting taxes for the middle class, the Big Money Fat Cats and their Congressional lackeys in 2010 cut payroll contributions to Social Security from 6.2% to 4.2%, representing a loss to the Social Security Insurance Fund of $140 billion the first year! So, this 2010 Obama/Republican Party payroll tax cut actually represented a 30 percent reduction of money going into Social Security.

"The billionaire fascists are coming for your Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And they're openly bragging about it. "Right after Trump's election, back in December of 2016, Newt Gingrich openly bragged at the Heritage Foundation that the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress were going to 'break out of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt model.' That 'model,' of course, created what we today refer to as 'the middle class.' "This week Mitch McConnell confirmed Gingrich's prophecy, using the huge deficits created by Trump's billionaire tax cuts as an excuse to destroy 'entitlement' programs. "'I think it would be safe to say that the single biggest disappointment of my time in Congress has been our failure to address the entitlement issue, and it's a shame, because now the Democrats are promising Medicare for All,' McConnell told Bloomberg. He added, '[W]e're talking about Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.' "These programs, along with free public education and progressive taxation, are the core drivers and maintainers of the American middle class. History shows that without a strong middle class, democracy itself collapses, and fascism is the next step down a long and terrible road." The Fascists Are Coming For Your Social Security and Medicare, 10/18/2018

  In 2011, Obama proposed--and pushed through Congress--further cuts in payroll contributions to Social Security from 4.2% to 3.1% for both employers and employees. This represents a loss of 50 percent in revenue, a loss of $480 billion in Social Security contributions in 2012 alone. Cutting any program by 50% of its revenue is a sure way to destroy it in the long run!

  Your paying payroll deductions of 6.2 percent (as in the original plan) is a way to build for your retirement--it's not a tax, as the billionaires claim. Your employer also pays 6.2 percent of your wages into the Social Security Fund. Reducing your payroll deductions by a third or a half is detrimental to YOU--endangering your retirement. Your boss is HAPPY to reduce the amount he has to pay relative to your retirement. The Democrats and Republicans who voted for the tax cut bill in 2011 believed workers are so stupid that they would think this reduction of 30 percent--which they're falsely calling a tax reduction--is a benefit to workers. In 2011, Obama and his Republican co-conspirators bet that the American public is so dumb that we'll fall for an even greater reduction in worker retirement funds.

    In 2013, the corporate capitalist Obama administration began a new frontal attack on Social Security: Chained Consumer Price Index (CPI). This is particularly vicious, because by this means the Wall Street banksters and hedge-fund hyenas loot more of a senior's Social Security allotment the older that person is.

"Perhaps the greatest irony of his 'Yes, we can' presidency was that income inequality actually increased during his terms. Obama's administration failed to send a single major Wall Street, real estate, or insurance executive to jail despite their complicity in the biggest securities fraud in history. Under pressure from the right, Obama too became a proud deficit cutter. And he submitted to his financial gurus, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, when they argued that the moral hazard of bailing out millions of desperate underwater homeowners was far too risky, even as they shrugged off the moral hazard of bailing out big banks." The New York Review of Books, November 8, 2018

  Forty-two percent of American senior citizens are kept from living in poverty by their Social Security payments. Nearly one in five Americans receives Social Security benefits and ninety-five percent of Americans have the Social Security benefit protection program. The poverty rate of the elderly was 35% as late as 1959. Now it's about 10%, because of the reliable Social Security program they have paid into.

  The capitalist cabal's tactic in attacking Social Security during the Obama years was to place a pretend-progressive in the presidency, then make it appear that he was forced to compromise with the Republican Party reactionaries in securing a necessary tax cut for rich and poor. Actually, Obama, the cabal puppet, was tasked to attack Social Security and extend the Bush II tax cuts for the super-wealthy the moment he was selected by cabal mandarins such as Zbigniew Brzezinski.

      That attack on Social Security was immediately approved by Congressional traitors (81 in the Senate and 277 in the House). The Republican Party-dominated Congress that came into power in 2011 was making sure that the payroll deductions from Social Security remain a permanent feature. Now that this sabotage tactic against Social Security has begun to affect the program's ability to pay out benefits, the capitalist cabal is using this excuse to renew its old tactics to scrap Social Security.

1. Lying that our national security requires that we cut Social Security and Medicare to decrease the deficit
   
   
2. Using the economic collapse they engineered to deceive Americans into believing that Social Security is in financial trouble--IT ISN'T!
   
   
3. Using idiots such as Republican Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin to push the idea that privatization is the only way to ensure Social Security's continuation--IT ISN'T!
   
   
4. Using flunkies such as multi-millionaire Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). to spread the lie that we need legislation to cut entitlements because Social Security is a part of the federal budget--IT ISN'T!

      All of this current deception is in addition to their continually peddling the BIG LIE that Social Security is inevitably going bust.
It is not!

      Their BIG LIE is a swindle to loot Social Security!

Answering the Big Lies

      The Social Security Administration is an independent federal agency with its own revenue stream and depository fund: IT IS NOT A PART OF THE FEDERAL BUDGET! On March 31, 1995, the Social Security Administration was officially designated as an independent agency. The Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund was established on January 1, 1940 as a separate account in the United States Treasury.

      The federal government scams workers by placing the Social Security fund within the federal budget, as if it were merely a part of the revenue stream. Social Security is not an "entitlement program" paid for by government taxes. It is a completely separate program with its own revenue stream and retiree payments. Social Security is paid for by employees and employers, as is Medicare. The benefits provided by Social Security are earned, not bestowed by the government. None of the Social Security funds can legally be "borrowed" by the federal government.

      According to the 2018 Social Security Trustees report, the Social Security Administration over the program's 83-year history has collected roughly $20.9 trillion and paid out $18.0 trillion, leaving asset reserves of $2.9 trillion at the end of 2017 in its two trust funds.

      This Social Security trust fund system is one of the few programs set up by the federal government that continues to operate successfully. To take a sample year, in 2002, the SSS received $627 billion in checks, $453.8 billion in taxes, and an additional $49 billion in interest. Instead of red ink, Social Security made almost $102 billion in profit, to add to the trillions it has in surplus from previous years.

     The impact of Social Security benefits on the lives of citizens and on local economies is incalculable.

We Must Stop the Cabal's Looting of Social Security Funds

      Since the Johnson administration, the cabal that came into power through the coup d'etat of the Kennedy assassination has been looting Social Security funds and using them to pay for their illegal operations in six theaters of war.

      Cabal puppet politicians never mention that the Social Security system has been compiling a huge surplus since it was created. Why? Because they've been illegally looting that surplus for years to hide the real size of the current federal budget deficit, allowing them to spend more and justify tax cuts for the wealthy. US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) data show that while government's reported deficit averaged about $300 billion a year from 2002 to 2006, the real current deficit was actually more than 50 per cent larger. The government just "steals" about $160-$200 billion from the Social Security Trust Fund every year--under the table. In 2007, the real deficit was $449 billion according to the OMB. However, the "official" deficit widely reported was only $257 billion, because government policy added the borrowed Social Security Trust Fund surplus ($192 billion in 2007) to revenues before calculating the "official" deficit.

      The cabal wants to pillage social security because that's where the money is--in the TRILLIONS!

     Beginning in earnest with Ronald Reagan and continuing on through Bush II--and now Trump--the cabal has looted the Social Security surplus fund by spending the money on Iran/Contra gun-running and Iraq and Afghanistan war-profiteering on weaponry manufactured by their defense industry cronies!

     In a February 2005 propaganda rally in North Carolina, Bush lied that there is no Social Security trust fund: "There are empty promises," the president said, "but there's no pile of money that you thought was there when you retired. That's not the way the system works."

     Bush's lies encouraged some to prove him false and motivated others to actually find the Social Security bonds and make their existence public. Susan Chapman, director of the Division of Federal Investments, had no difficulty in finding the Social Security bonds in a Bureau of the Public Debt safe in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Once again, Bush II was caught in a lie of major proportions.

Wall Street and Press Lies About Social Security

     Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan lied that the Social Security system was "financially threatened." Greenspan was endorsing the Bush privatization scams which would have required workers to invest their Social Security retirement payments in the stock market, resulting in billions of dollars in Wall Street fees.

     This is the same treacherous Wall Street stock market in which witless investors lost between $700 million and $1 trillion on December 6, 1996, the DAY AFTER Greenspan had admitted that the stock market was in trouble because of what he called "irrational exuberance." In other words, Greenspan himself intimated that the stock market might be in for a new speculative disaster on the order of the Great Crashes of 1929, 1987, 1998, and 2000--but that American workers should put their money in this Big Casino so Wall Street can loot their billions in retirement funds.

      If George W. Bush's scam to privatize Social Security had been passed, every American within 15 years of retirement would have lost over 50% of their retirement accounts in the last 8 years as a result of market fluctuation, malfeasance (think "subprime mortgage crisis"), and fees. As it was, many Americans put their private retirement savings in Wall Street accounts, and lost $2 trillion in retirement funds due to the 2007 collapse of the American economy.

     Every day the feeding frenzy accelerates, with President Trump, McConnell, Ryan and other hoodlums falling into step, warning us that the Social Security System is facing disaster. Fortunately, some leaders have the courage to speak the truth. Robert M. Ball, former Commissioner of Social Security from 1962-1973 and a member of the Advisory Council on Social Security, has said "there is no financial crisis in Social Security." As Ball explained, the system is today accruing substantial surpluses.

     The sky is not falling. The fact is that the Social Security System is doing fine and faces only the danger that the public might believe the big lies that the Federal Reserve, Congresspersons, the corporate capitalists, and Wall Street are mounting against it.

The Big Lie that Social Security System will run out of money by the year 2029 (or 2042) is based on projections by Wall Streeters using FAKE STATISTICS projecting U.S. growth in the next 75 years at 1.4% annually. Over the past 75 years the American economy has been growing at about 2.8% annually. Even during the worst economic times in the U.S. - during the 1930s depression - the economy grew at 1.9%. The lies of the corporate capitalists and their financier puppets are plain for anyone to see!

      Fortunately, a few honest, intelligent persons are speaking out about Social Security's solvency and warning against allowing a totally failed Wall Street to loot the Social Security system:

• Ralph Nader
  
  
• Paul Krugman
  
  

The mainstream press continually prints misinformation about Social Security. Here is a typical "news story" by an Associated Press writer containing a number of lies about Social Security--and a refutation of those lies.

The Fraud of Social Security Study Commissions

     George W. Bush's Social Security panel had eight Democrats and eight Republicans, but all of them were picked because they agreed with Dubya's social security Wall Street scam: stock market "personal retirement accounts"--privatization!

      Dubya's earlier panel was chaired by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D:NY) and AOL Time Warner's CEO, Richard Parsons. This notwithstanding AOL Time Warner's payment of $5.5 million in 2000 to settle a lawsuit alleging the company illegally denied pension and health benefits to its workers.

     Panel projections took the Social Security System trustees' worst-case scenario and claimed it to be the only realistic picture of the future for the SSS. The so-called independent studies of Social Security funding have been financed by the very Wall Street firms who want to grab the money. For example, the Cato Institute Project on Social Security Privatization was funded by American Express, the brokerage house of Alex Brown and Company, and the giant American International Group. The co-chairmen of the Cato Institute project are William Shipman, a senior officer at the Boston State Street Bank, and Jose Piñera, the man who privatized Chile's social security system, resulting in a $1.5 billion loss to Chilean citizens in 1995.

The Cato Institute reveals its extremist nature by recommending the use of the tactics of Vladimir Lenin, the creator of Russian communism. As early as 1983, a Cato Institute Journal document, "Achieving a Leninist Strategy" by Stuart Butler of Cato and Peter Germanis of the Heritage Foundation, embraced and quoted Lenin: "Lenin recognized that fundamental change is contingent upon ... its success in isolating and weakening its opponents. ... we would do well to draw a few lessons from the Leninist strategy." " construct ... a coalition that will ... reap benefits from the IRA-based private system ... but also the banks, insurance companies, and other institutions that will gain from providing such plans to the public." "The first element consists of a campaign to achieve small legislative changes that embellish the present IRA system, making it in practice a small-scale private Social Security system. "The second main element ... involves what one might crudely call guerrilla warfare against both the current Social Security system and the coalition that supports it." "The banking industry and other business groups that can benefit from expanded IRAs ..." "... the strategy must be to propose moving to a private Social Security system in such a way as to ... neutralize ... the coalition that supports the existing system." "The next Social Security crisis may be further away than many people believe. ... it could be many years before the conditions are such that a radical reform of Social Security is possible. But then, as Lenin well knew, to be a successful revolutionary, one must also be patient and consistently plan for real reform." Source

      Privatization schemes are PIRATIZATION scams. The same Wall Street firms who contribute big bucks to the campaigns of presidents and senators now want to loot the Social Security System of trillions of dollars and jeopardize the survival of millions of retired Americans.

     The Bush junta so controlled the press and Republican politicians that it forced "reporters" and Congresspersons to use the words "personal accounts" instead of "private accounts." This is because one of spinmeister Karl Rove's focus groups indicated that people, particularly older people, react negatively to any connection between Social Security and the word "private." The group liked the sound of "personal accounts" better than they did "private accounts."

     The Bush junta had earlier forbidden the use of "privatization" in any connection with Social Security private accounts. The total coercion of the press and the politicians to speak in a politically correct manner is now total (as in totalitarian).

     The corruption of Wall Street and private financial institutions is increasingly evident for everyone to see, so it would be insane for Americans to allow Wall Street brokerage firms to handle the Social Security System trust fund. One of the privatization schemes has been created by a group whose name is right out of 1984: the Quadrennial Advisory Council on Social Security. Their plan is to have individual workers put 5% of their income into a private IRA, leaving the other 1.2% for the Social Security fund. So you lose your retirement fund through your IRA gambling scheme--and who's going to take care of you when you retire?

     Wall Street is pumping millions of dollars into a small band of organizations, public relations firms and "think tanks" whose mission it is to undermine public confidence in Social Security and push for privatization.

The corporate capitalists and Wall Streeters want you to invest in a giant crap shoot that in the last ten years has seen investors losing TRILLIONS in investments.       No sane person would gamble with his retirement money in a fixed stock market.

The Piratization Plan

     Obama implemented a Social Security "piratization" plan similar to Bush II's that began by cutting 30% of today's workers' Social Security payroll contributions in 2010, 50% in 2011, and then attempting to divert all those contributions into private Wall Street accounts. Obama and his Federal Reserve and Wall Street co-conspirators tried to use the budget deficit as a pretense for destroying Social Security as quickly as possible.

     Individual stock market accounts would cost a bundle. We'd have to pay for two Social Security systems at the same time: today's program for current beneficiaries and the privatized system. To cover the price tag, we'd have to choose from various adjustments--all of which are bad choices.

      It's clear from Obama's selection of his cabinet and advisers that he intended to destroy Social Security. He created an economic advisory panel heavily weighted with mandarins who were on record that Social Security must be privatized. The advisory panel was headed by former Federal Reserve Board chief Paul Volcker and included General Electric Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt as well as James Owens; Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer and former United Mine Workers president; one-time Securities and Exchange Commission head William Donaldson; Clinton administration economic adviser Laura D'Andrea Tyson, dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley; and Martin Feldstein, President Ronald Reagan's chief economic adviser and current Harvard University economics professor.

      Symptomatic of the anti-Social Security bias of the panel, Martin Feldstein had a long record of agitating for Social Security privatization, writing numerous articles for Cato Institute publications advocating his own piratization scheme.

The Vultures Are Circling Social Security

     The Wall Street Journal let the cat out of the bag, announcing that even under moderate privatization plans, $60 billion a year would flow into mutual funds managed by Wall Street, instead of going into the Social Security Trust Funds.

      Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the notorious Cato Institute, let slip the other incriminating evidence when he admitted that along with Bank of America, Citicorp, Chase, insurance companies, the Investment Company Institute (ICI), and securities firms like Salomon Brothers, Cato's $2 million privatization project is being funded by "large employers concerned about payroll tax increases." Privatization of Social Security would mean billions of dollars for Wall Street mutual funds managers and employers. The gang that brought you the 1929, 1987, 1998, 2000, and 2007 stock market crashes--and the 2008 sub-prime mortgage economic crash--resulting in hapless investors losing trillions of dollars-- is now trying to con Americans into putting their retirement earnings into Wall Street.

     But with the trillions in profits at stake the big money people are mounting a campaign to convince Americans that Social Security is dead or dying. As usual, they suppose that if they tell a big enough lie American citizens will swallow it. The libertarian Cato Institute and the Investment Company Institute, which by the way, "donated" $245,264 to federal candidates in the 1996 election, are leading the pack. Their uninformed disciples repeat their propaganda in newspaper letters to the editor and commentaries and magazine articles.

      If you have money in U.S. Treasury bonds or other securities, you expect to get your interest and capital when you redeem them. But, mysteriously, it's claimed that Social Security funds in those same instruments can't expect a return on the investment. Why? Because the scam artists say so. In fact, following the lead of the Concord Coalition and the Cato Institute, the disciples are claiming that Social Security is a giant Ponzi scheme. THAT IS AN OUTRIGHT LIE! A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors and ultimately fails because the criminal behind it steals all the money. Social Security is NOT an investment scheme; it is a retirement fund that receives money from workers, pays out money to retired workers, and makes money from its purchase of treasury bonds. It is the farthest thing from a Ponzi scheme.

      The actual Ponzi scheme going on is the corporate capitalists continual printing unsecured currency by its privately owned and operated Federal Reserve System.

"The real problem is that both Democrats and Republicans want to fund endless wars, give endless bailouts to the too big to fail banks and corporations, and perpetuate the expensive Ponzi scheme of printing money out of thin air." Source

Privatized Retirement Systems Have Failed Wherever They've Been Tried
      Everywhere "private retirement accounts" have been tried--as in Chile, Argentina, Poland, Sweden, Britain, and Texas!--workers have lost billions of dollars and been left without funds for their retirement.

      In 1981, three counties in Texas decided to opt out of Social Security and instead provide their public employees with a system of privatized accounts. A study compared two sets of families in three different income brackets. The graph shows what happened to their retirement in 2005 under Social Security and under the Texas plan. By the time these couples reach age 80, the gap will be over $1100 per month.


Let's Eradicate The Vultures

     There is no crisis over the solvency of Social Security; it's all a political scam trying to destroy the future of a program started in 1935 that means the difference between life and death for more than 40 million elderly Americans.

     American workers must wake up to this present frenzied effort on the part of Big Money to take over the trillions in social security funds. Americans of all ages must tell our congressional representatives that we don't want the Social Security System to be piratized and that we hold them responsible for making sure it doesn't happen. We must speak out against this conspiracy wherever we can.

     Social Security was created to protect society from the social and economic burdens associated with widespread old-age poverty and misery as seen during the 1930s Depression, which was precipitated by the 1929 stock market crash.

     Americans with incomes under $25,000 a year get back more in benefits than they pay in the form of Social Security payroll taxes. Those with incomes of more than $50,000 a year get back somewhat less. The U.S. Social Security system is a somewhat progressive system--a system designed to improve the economic condition of those at the very bottom of the U.S. economic ladder and reduce economic stratification.

      One of the ways to make Social Security even more financially secure would be to tax all recipients equally. At present, the rich are taxed only on the first $117,000 of income. If this cap were removed, so the wealthy were taxed just like the less wealthy, the Social Security System could raise benefits across the board and restore cost-of-living adjustments.

      American citizens need to remember President Franklin D. Roosevelt's reply when he was asked why he had set up Social Security as a worker contribution system: "We put those contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program."

      Unfortunately, FDR never conceived that a corporate capitalist group such as is now in control of America would have the gall to DESTROY Social Security for the benefit of the ruling plutocrats.