P.S.

A postscript to my blog of last night: There is another possibility having to do with the question of I.O.U.’s replacing Social Security funds. I suggested merely that the so-called I.O.U.’s were supposed to be United States Treasury bonds, and that such bonds could, in a sense, be considered I.O.U.’s. But there is another, more complicated and more frightening possibility. What if, for example, the monies that were supposed to be put into Treasury bonds for the Social Security Trust Fund were not actually used for that purpose? What if they were used for other purposes? There are some who believe this may be the case, the reason Social Security may be claimed to be insolvent is because the funds were used for other purposes and replaced with (probably useless) Congressional I.O.U.’s, so the funds are in fact probably not available. I do not know if this is true, but I would not be entirely surprised if it was.

Think about it. If the money that should have been invested in secure U.S. Treasury Bonds was taken and then used for purposes other than for what was intended, it was in fact simply stolen, filched, commandeered, embezzled, or whatever, and the people responsible for the theft are criminals and should be held accountable. This should be true if indeed, the money was used for other purposes without the permission of the rightful owners. I certainly do not remember ever being asked if my Social Security payments could be used for other purposes. There are many who believe the Social Security funds were in fact used for other purposes, primarily to make it possible to hide the deficit that was inevitably increasing.

If this were shown to be true, the implications would be difficult and complicated almost beyond belief. I suppose it might be possible to trace exactly what the monies were used for, which Congresspersons were responsible for it, and when and why it happened. But could Congresspersons be held responsible and thrown into jail? That seems highly unlikely to me. Could they be held responsible for paying it back? That seems an impossibility as the sums involved are so huge. Would taxpayers be responsible for replacing the illegally used funds? That’s a good bet, even though it would be absurd that people would have to pay back money that was actually stolen from them.

I don’t know if the funds were misused, but I suspect they might well have been. Another question would obviously be, who benefitted from this illegal maneuver? I don’t know, I don’t know if it is even possible to know, but I would imagine the money went where all the rest of taxpayer money has gone in the past few years, to corporations and the wealthy, in the form of tax breaks and loopholes. If evidence could be produced to verify this, it would seem only fair that the wealthy and the corporations should have to refund it through much higher taxes, fewer loopholes, and so on. Is that likely to happen? It is probably about as likely as ordering a frozen daiquiri in hell. I suspect that a theft of this kind is likely to have happened, and I also believe that is exactly why Republicans are so desperate to do away with Social Security – they have stolen the money and don’t want to pay it back. Do I know this for certain, of course not, I don’t know much of anything for certain anymore, as the MSM and the Republican Party have made that impossible. But so far they have not yet taken away entirely my ability to think at all. Social Security is a problem, but it is not related to the deficit in any very important way, is not imminently to be insolvent, and it needs to be dealt with as an independent problem. It is far too big and independent to simply be tacked on the discussion of the deficit, treated as an “entitlement” or a form of socialism.

There is a video today of Rachel Maddow on Buzzflash that if you have not seen it, you definitely should. She has demonstrated, certainly to my satisfaction, that Herman Cain’s candidacy is really just a form of Performance Art, cleverly put together with all the clues we should have perceived but have not. I think it is a brilliant performance and I do not see how anyone can possibly take Cain seriously any longer. If Cain’s performance was not so fiendishly clever we should all be red-faced with embarrassment. I cannot wait to see what the fallout of Maddow’s claims may involve.

The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld