Red-spotted Purple (Limenitis arthemis astyanax)
Ice Age National Scientific Reserve Unit, Wisconsin, USA
2021-06-17 _F2A6506aaa3
“Nobody is trying to fix the problems we have in this country. Everyone is trying to make enough money so the problems don’t apply to them anymore”
“Having used FICA paycheck withholding as a ploy to cut progressive tax rates on themselves since the 1980s, the One Percent blame the indebted population for living longer and creating a “retirement problem” by collecting the Social Security and pensions.”
Excerpt From: Michael Hudson. “Killing the Host.”
Social Security
“Nobody anticipated in the 19th century that people would have to pay for their own retirement. That was viewed as an obligation of society. You had the first public pension (social security) program in Germany under Bismarck. The whole idea is that this is a public obligation. There are certain rights of citizens, and among these rights is that after your working life you deserve to live in retirement. That means that you have to be able to afford this retirement, and not have to beg in the street for money. The wool that’s been pulled over people’s eyes is to imagine that because they’re the beneficiaries of Social Security, they have to actually pay for it.
This was Alan Greenspan’s trick that he pulled in the 1980s as head of the Greenspan Commission. He said that what was needed in America was to traumatize the workers – to squeeze them so much that they won’t have the courage to strike. Not have the courage to ask for better working conditions. He recognized that the best way to really squeeze wage earners is to sharply increase their taxes. He didn’t call FICA wage withholding a tax, but of course it is. His trick was to say that it’s not really a tax, but a contribution to Social Security. And now it siphons off 15.4% of everybody’s pay check, right off the top.”
~ Michael Hudson
Naked Capitalism
“6. Pay Social Security and Medicare out of the general budget
In 1983 the Commission on Social Security Reform chaired by Alan Greenspan recommended that instead of treating Social Security and Medicare as public programs funded out of the overall budget, they should be privatized into a savings program paid for mainly by the least affluent members of society, by steadily raising the FICA payroll tax. These wage withholding taxes are now over 15 percent (including the employer’s 6.2 percent share of Social Security levies). They do not fall on high-income earners!
This regressive tax shift away the higher income brackets functions as a fiscal class war. It has cost wage earners hundreds of billions of dollars. The government has raised user-fee taxes on wage earners – up to a low cut-off point freeing earners of more than $120,000 from having to contribute. No such user fees are imposed on banks for their $4 trillion in Federal Reserve Quantitative Easing credit, the $800 billion TARP bailout and other subsidies.
Any politician who fails to explain that it is regressive income taxation to subsidize the One Percent in this way – but not Social Security – can be assumed to be in Wall Street’s pocket or the proverbial “useful idiot.” The effect of self-funding social spending is to impose austerity on the 99 Percent, “freeing” the One Percent from fiscal responsibility.”
Excerpt From
Killing the Host
Michael Hudson
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“Why is Lying OK with Today’s GOP?”
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“Polar Shift is a likely event.
The geomagnetic poles are antipodal points where the axis of a best-fitting dipole intersects the surface of Earth. This theoretical dipole is equivalent to a powerful bar magnet at the centre of Earth, and comes closer than any other model to describing the magnetic field observed at the Earth's surface.
A survey in 2007 by a Canadian–French international collaboration determined that the North Magnetic Pole was moving approximately north-northwest at 55 km per year. According to the latest IGRF, the Pole is currently moving in the same direction, but at a slightly reduced speed of about 45 km per year.”
“CIA Classified Book about the Pole Shift, Mass Extinctions and The True Adam & Eve Story
In 1966 a well-known engineer released a book with information that could impact everyone on earth. But before anyone could read it, it was classified by the CIA.
We only learned of its existence a few years ago because of a Freedom of Information request.
The CIA only released 57 pages of the original 284-page manuscript. And those pages have been, in the CIA's own words, "sanitized".
Why does the CIA think this book is so dangerous that they had to hide it from the public for 60 years; and continue to hide most of it?
It's because the man who wrote it describes the end of the world.”
“CIA Classified Book about the Pole Shift.”
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