We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Stealing from Social Security to Pay for Wars and Bailouts

by Paul Craig Roberts from Foreign Policy Journal

This former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under the Reagan administration, as a former insider, knows of what he writes. In this piece he reports on how Social Security Trust funds have been used to finance wars and for bailouts of banksters.
Alas, Social Security is an unfunded liability, because all the money working people put into it was stolen by Republicans and Democrats in order to pay for wars and bailouts for mega-rich bankers like Goldman Sachs.
I surmise that he is an old fashioned conservative who, from having been inside the government, saw the rise of neoconservativism in the US and has been thoroughly disillusioned by it.

As I see it, the latter, as a political philosophy, is really only an intellectual cover to hide a naked class war waged by the "one percent", who own every significant economic enterprise in the US, against US workers who they no longer need--they have found much cheaper workers elsewhere.