Social Security Defaults Again on Its Promises

On October 15, the Social Security Administration announced that for the third time in six years there will be no COLA (Cost Of Living Adjustment) to beneficiaries’ checks next year. There was no COLA in 2010 or 2011, thanks to the government index used to determine whether an “adjustment” (increase) was justified, to offset inflation. This year’s culprit was the price of gasoline, which fell 23 percent, wiping out any chance for an increase in the checks going to more than 60 million recipients.

Heroic and often invisible measures have been undertaken in recent years to cover up the program’s insolvency: raising retirement ages, increasing deductibles and co-pays in Social Security’s Medicare program, and forcing recipients to make do with less.

According to the Senior Citizens League, recipients have lost nearly a fourth of their buying power over the last 15 years, thanks to the rising cost of housing and medical expenses. Since 2000, housing costs for seniors have increased by 44 percent, heating oil by 159 percent, eggs by 117 percent, and gasoline by 76 percent. Since then, however, Social Security’s COLAs have averaged just 2.2 percent per year.

In 1972, Congress modified Social Security so that it would reflect the loss of purchasing power of the dollar, resulting in the adoption of the Consumer Price Index, or CPI. At the time the index measured the price increases (as a result of the inflation caused by the Federal Reserve) of a market basket of goods and services bought by wage earners.

Then in 1987, Congress directed the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to develop an alternate CPI for the elderly, called CPI-E. The BLS has been “developing” that alternate ever since.

There are numerous problems with the system, but the primary one is the fact that it’s a government-mandated, forced extraction of monies from wages before the wage earner ever sees his paycheck. Forcing people to pay into the system is the immoral basis upon which the entire edifice stands.

By Bob Adelmann

Columbus Day Being Replaced With “Indigenous Peoples Day”

In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. In 2015 he’s thought quite mean — at least by some people. And as a result, a movement to replace his holiday with a politically correct one is picking up steam. As Fox News reported on October 12:

More cities are recognizing Native Americans on Columbus Day this year as they revive a movement to change the name of the holiday to celebrate the history and contributions of indigenous cultures around the country.

As the U.S. observes Columbus Day on Monday, it will also be Indigenous Peoples Day in at least nine cities for the first time this year, including Albuquerque; Portland, Oregon; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Olympia, Washington.

... The campaigns say the federal holiday honoring Christopher Columbus — and the parades and pageantry accompanying it — overlook a painful history of colonialism, enslavement, discrimination and land grabs that followed the Italian explorer’s 1492 arrival in the Americas.

But it’s not European history that’s “painful” — it’s man’s history that’s painful. While Columbus’ transgressions have been exaggerated, the reality is that all civilizations were born via dominance of others. Civilizations have been forged on blood.

So where does this leave us? With the fact that we have a civilization here, now, today, and the only question is: Is it worth preserving? If so, you preserve it. You don’t sit around orchestrating cultural suicide in the name of some kind of supposed karmic justice.

One complaint against Columbus Day, and so, so many other things, is that they reflect a Western perspective. But everything is a matter of perspective. The only relevant question is whether our perspective aligns with the Truth or a lie. And the truth is that we’re supposed to have a Western perspective because we’re a Western civilization — and that we should thank God, and some dead white males, that we are.

By Warren Mass

Meteorologist Persecuted for Debunking Climate Hysteria

Just months before the massive United Nations “Climate Change” summit hosted by the French government is set to take place in Paris, France’s top meteorologist, Philippe Verdier, is blowing the whistle on the hysteria surrounding alleged man-made global-warming theories. Verdier is France Télévisions’ chief of meteorology and the nation’s most famous weatherman, providing nightly forecasts to millions of viewers. In a new book released October 1, dubbed Climat Investigation, (Climate Investigation in English), Verdier lambasted the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), saying its climatologists and political backers have “taken the world hostage” with misleading or downright inaccurate data.

The revelations took France by storm, sparking furious outrage by politicians, Big Labor, climate alarmists, and establishment media outlets. Within days, the scandal went global, with the U.K. Telegraph and media outlets across Europe picking up the story. In response, his employer — essentially, the French government — promptly took the climate heretic off the air and put him on “forced holiday,” confirming a key thesis of his book.

“I received a letter telling me not to come [to work]. I’m in shock,” he told a government-controlled radio broadcaster. “This is a direct extension of what I say in my book, namely that any contrary views must be eliminated.” France Télévisions has refused to comment so far, though news reports say Big Labor is also demanding that Verdier be fired — and he may well be. “I don’t think management liked it, let’s be honest,” Verdier said. “I put myself via this investigation on the path of [UN climate summit] COP 21, which is a bulldozer, and we can see the results.”

The devastating blow dealt by Verdier to climate hysteria in France, though, may be impossible for the nation’s Socialist Party rulers and media apparatchiks to repair before the UN climate summit. And he may not be the last whistleblower waiting to expose the fraud before the Paris confab.

By Alex Newman

Muslim Refugee Warns of “Islamic Conquest of the West”

He’s a Muslim refugee living in Europe, and he has a warning: Keep the Muslim “refugees” out of Europe. He’s Dr. Mudar Zahran, a Jordanian Palestinian academic and a leader of the Jordanian Opposition Coalition who is currently living in the United Kingdom, where he sought political asylum. Describing himself as an “orthodox Muslim,” he nonetheless says there’s a “genuine problem with Muslims in Europe” and calls the current wave of migrants entering the continent “the soft Islamic conquest of the West.”

Dr. Zahran issued these and more dire warnings on an October 15 segment of The Glazov Gang. Zahran’s basic message is that the West is being manipulated, fooled, and played for suckers by migrants who by and large are not what they appear. He told show host Jamie Glazov that while most Muslim migrants claim to be Syrian so they can get refugee status, what we’re witnessing is an “influx of all kinds of refugees from the Middle East.”

What Muslims “couldn’t do in the last 20 years,” says Zahran, “now the West is doing for us for free — and even paying for it.” Moreover, Zahran had this shocking news about the “invasion”: “I have to be honest,” he said, “you read Arab magazines and Arab newspapers; they are talking about, ‘Good job! Now we’re going to conquest [sic] Europe.’ So it’s not even a secret.”

Of course, many Westerners welcome the Muslims in the name of “diversity,” but, interestingly, rich Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE don’t welcome the “diversity” of their co-religionists. Why not? Because, according to Zahran, most “Muslim states … have zero history of human respect and human rights.”

In the face of this, Dr. Zahran has a politically incorrect prescription. He said to Glazov, “We need to send those people [the Muslim migrants] home. I’m not talking only about those yet to come; I’m talking about those who are already there [in Europe] — they can always be sent home.... I am completely against making this situation permanent.”

By Selwyn Duke

Leaks on “Drone Wars” Expose Obama’s Reign of Terror

Almost 90 percent of those executed during a five-month period in the Obama administration’s mass-murder-via-drone machinations were not even specific targets selected by the White House for extrajudicial assassination, according to reports surrounding a massive leak of classified official U.S. documents unveiled October 15 by The Intercept. In fact, it appears that despite his purported concerns over the death of innocents, Obama has killed far more innocent civilians, some of them U.S. citizens, than all of the mass-shooters in the United States throughout his term in office — combined.

After the articles came out, various organizations focusing on human rights and other issues also sounded the alarm. As the scandal grows, more and more voices are calling for congressional action and even international efforts to rein in the deadly schemes and explore the implications in more depth. But other alarming potential fruits of the murderous scheming have largely been left unaddressed thus far.

But now, the American people no longer have an excuse to stand idly by while the president, using their tax money, conspires with his “advisers” to secretly assassinate people, the source told The Intercept.

“This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong,” the source was quoted as saying in one of the online journal’s reports about the leaked documents. “We’re allowing this to happen. And by ‘we,’ I mean every American citizen who has access to this information now, but continues to do nothing about it.”

The source requested anonymity because the materials were classified, and The Intercept granted the request because the Obama administration has “engaged in aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers.” And indeed, as this magazine and numerous other sources have documented, Obama’s “war on whistleblowers” has been unprecedented, with the administration even exploiting espionage laws to target and terrorize Americans who expose government crimes.

The source, echoing the content of the leaked materials, also suggested that the murder-by-drone or Special-Operations hit-squad was becoming entrenched within Washington. “The military is easily capable of adapting to change, but they don’t like to stop anything they feel is making their lives easier, or is to their benefit,” the whistleblower was quoted as saying. “And this certainly is, in their eyes, a very quick, clean way of doing things. It’s a very slick, efficient way to conduct the war, without having to have the massive ground invasion mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan. But at this point, they have become so addicted to this machine, to this way of doing business, that it seems like it’s going to become harder and harder to pull them away from it the longer they’re allowed to continue operating in this way.”

The source and the documents also shed light on what is happening to the U.S. servicemen and their sense of morality when they are lawlessly ordered to hunt down people to kill them without even a semblance of due process. Within the “special operations community,” the source told The Intercept, the targets selected for assassination are utterly dehumanized.

“They have no rights. They have no dignity. They have no humanity to themselves. They’re just a ‘selector’ to an analyst,” he was quoted as saying. “You eventually get to a point in the target’s life cycle that you are following them, you don’t even refer to them by their actual name.” The practice contributes to “dehumanizing the people before you’ve even encountered the moral question of ‘is this a legitimate kill or not?’” he added.

Oftentimes, the “intelligence” used to track and murder people is brazenly incorrect, too, the source explained. “It’s stunning the number of instances when selectors [things like phone numbers] are misattributed to certain people,” he continued. “And it isn’t until several months or years later that you all of a sudden realize that the entire time you thought you were going after this really hot target, you wind up realizing it was his mother’s phone the whole time.”

Meanwhile, the leaked documents show that the Obama administration lies to the American people about its mass-murder program. According to the White House, for example, it only murders somebody if that person poses a “continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.” The documents, however, show that somebody can be assassinated merely for allegedly posing “a threat to U.S. interest[s] or personnel.”

The Obama administration has already made abundantly clear that it considers Americans with mainstream political views — particularly conservatives, libertarians, constitutionalists, veterans, and Christians — to be the primary threat to the “Homeland.” Perhaps instead of making a spectacle and worrying about how to strip Americans of their right to keep and bear arms with more “gun control,” lawmakers in Congress can begin with some “Obama control” to rein in the deadly White House reign of terror.

By Alex Newman